ABSTRACT
Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia have taught me to consider country to be a conscious entity. Place is one kind of embodiment of being, and the encounters of living things are recorded there. Signs are memories; they may become obscured, but not, perhaps, lost. We human beings construct the passages of our lives through our cultures and our actions. Different cultures, different actions: different traces. Contrasts between the concreteness of place and the elusive duality of the signatures of our lives are nowhere more vivid than on the frontiers where intercultural encounters produce dense and provocative material and imaginative traces.
