Memoryscope experiments on the Bunurong Coast

This essay performs that restless search, undertaken in countless iterations across the globe, for meaning in the places that are important to us. By engaging with the everyday historical forces and currents that shape localities, it examines the intimate associations and connections that exist between people and the places they inhabit. Experimenting with the use of Ross Gibson’s notion of the memoryscope – an aesthetic form created to ‘contain, focus and direct the forces of the past’ (Gibson 2015b: vi) – as a framework to inform place-based historically informed storytelling, it offers a series of speculations on an unruly strip of the southern Australian bush, the Bunurong Coast. In doing so, the paper explores how disparate echoes of the past plucked from various sources – the archives, memories, reflections, and the landscape itself – might be cajoled to form coherent reflections on personal connections to a specific place. Speculating on local stories, objects and experiences, it examines how an aesthetic and forensic creative practice might be used to develop intimate narratives about our complex associations to places and their past.