ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two public art projects (Passenger, Yagan Square, Perth, Western Australia, and Tjunta Trail, Scarborough Beach, Western Australia) that have emerged from that partnership in the context of their implications for theories and practices of cultural mapping. In a place-making context, the act of stitching together episodes to form a new locally-applicable narrative not only applies to the story: it implies the patchworking of country, which, as a technique of assembly, manages to preserve in the very act of joining certain irreconcilable differences. In terms of dissolving the distinction between art and heritage, the circumstances in which the Tjunta Trail has emerged, indeed, are telling. They suggest the importance of creative mapping when the affective power, atmosphere or sense of place is felt as an absence, or unspoken haunting presence. Relating as storytelling and relating as a mode of mapping passage in a way that expresses rhythmic geography as rhythm come together.
