Mapping Machans Beach : meandering in place (a beginning)

This chapter demonstrates my own idiosyncratic response to the call to engage with my particular place and space, through my particular preferred medium of language. It is also informed by Massey's understanding of space as ‘a plurality of trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far’, each told from a particular and only ever momentary angle of vision (2005: 12). Part of this chapter presents my own text of place, from a particular angle of vision, my own slow meander around memories of place, but I also want to make an argument for opening modes of academic response in social ecology to encompass poetic texts. In the first section of this chapter, my poem takes a walk through a coastal town in the northern tropics, while the second section sketches out a poetic method that might be taken up to craft responses in social ecology inquiry. The poem in this chapter forms a material space where soils, vegetation, birds, animals, light, landscape, people and their habitats coexist on the same plane of being. This intimate landscape is thickened by memory. The poem begins with a topographical sketch, then sets off on a morning walk around the block. With each step the poet takes - along the water, around comers and past houses - details are documented and stories of that place arise, intersect and fall away to be replaced by other unresolvable stories. Each step in the present opens steps into the past. Throughout the poem, the conventions of narrative genre are undone as temporality is disjointed and events and people are elusive and impressionistic. This poetic map of memory trails towards an end that is only ever a beginning, again and again. With a beginning, an end, a series of events in time and place, and a cast of characters - human and non-human - the poem can be understood as a sort of narrative told through the prism provided by the voice of the narrator-poet. However, rather than a tidy seamlessness, this is a narrative produced by (and producing) ‘multiple, disunified subjectivities’ rather than ‘singular agentic storytellers’ (Squire, Andrews and Tamboukou 2008:3). Through this poem, the particular neighbourhood that is mapped, step by step, becomes a central protagonist of this complex narrative of place.