Pinning poetry to place: Making sense of place in the Pilbara

This chapters presents the findings of fieldwork undertaken by the two authors. It documents the process of writing undertaken when a community chooses sites for inclusion in the Pilbara Writers poetry map. Here, the broader context is presented so as to situate the Pilbara ethnographic project. The authors received an invitation from the Pilbara Writers group to create poetry maps of sites in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, exploring perceptions of place for the online "Poetry 4 U" web-site. The "Poetry 4 U" project brings poetry into geographical places while at the same time occupying the floating world of social media. It embraces the rapid uptake on contemporary location-based social media services as suggested by the popular applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook. This in turn, allows the re-imagining of place and identity and so reinvigorates our sense of place.