ABSTRACT
Places are experienced in states of distraction. We read them and act within them while pursuing the agendas of everyday life. To ‘understand’ places one must ‘stand under’ them. This requires an attention to how we each construct places through action and in memory. This chapter, then, is a turn from theory towards the personal-how might theories of power and built form change the ways we understand and ‘excavate’ places in our own lives? It is a rather personal account of Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, Western Australia. And it is a turn towards questions of liberation, exploring the ironies of a place of incarceration becoming a place of emancipation and then exclusion. Rottnest is a place of semantic inversions, haunted by intangible and buried meanings. The tactics for excavating and articulating them are necessarily oblique.
