ABSTRACT
Finding the Fish, a work in seven parts, is a richly embroidered meditation on memory, history and on the links between self, place, identity, and belonging in post-colonial Australia. This chapter, which is part a personal reflection and part a contribution to theory builds on Amanda's previously published work which has explored and theorised the foundational relationship between self and place thought about through the experience of migration and displacement. Here she brings a post-Jungian perspective to thinking about the origins of our cultural identity and the collective resistance to remembering our history which is suggestive of the development of a cultural complex.
Implicit in Amanda's thesis is that relationship to place and relationship to “other” are co-incident; the one always intimately involves and “calls up” the other. In Australia this has a very particular meaning with respect to the foundations of our cultural identity and hence the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and between the many groups who have claimed or who are trying to claim place here. What is revealed in this chapter is a pattern that repeats—it affects all who live here because we are all vulnerable to anxieties about our “place” here and about what it means both internally and externally.
