Eating place : postcolonial explorations of embodiment and place

In this paper we explore 'living off the land' at Red Rock in coastal NSW in conversation with local Indigenous people. We document our research through journal writing, photographs, recorded conversations, memory work and self-reflexivity in relation to the various performances of this script. Within a feminist poststructural framework we take up the postcolonial challenge that 'Colonisation is primarily a spatial conquest and postcolonial transformations require new ways of understanding and representing ourselves in space' (Ferrier, E., 1990, Mapping the space of the other: transformations of space in postcolonial fiction and postmodern theory, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Queensland). We work with feminist theorists of the body to put the body at the centre of our theorising and to extend Liz Grosz's ideas about the body, to place as body and embodied spatial practice. In this way we develop the idea of 'eating place' and open up the possibilities of different ways of understanding ourselves in place.