ABSTRACT
Social disorder in place can be achieved without physical acts of violence. The frontier upon which this violence and its wounding effects march is an ideological one. While not necessarily divorced from attempts at physical destruction and designification, social disorder achieves chaos in the hearts and minds of those who identify with and often cling to place as a presence of importance. So too it causes the substantive rearrangement of place character. Such experiences and outcomes of violence are tracked through the culturally constructed visions and wounding ideologies that lay claim to determining what a place is or is not. Through disordering events, a place can be transformed from a home, and meaningful co-presence in life, to a non-place left blank for the destructive acts of forced removal, nuclear testing or open-cut mining. It can be renamed, partitioned, its story erased and its elements destroyed.1 Culturally constructed visions of place can come to compete in the place world. In these instances, existing place knowledge and character, as it is intimately linked to and known by specific ethnic groups, is challenged and new determinations are made as to what place should be and how its constituent parts might be arranged in the form of where people and their cultures belong. The disordering of place is achieved through the disregard of existing place identity and failure to recognise place worth. This can extend to how non-human species are arranged, the ontological order of place and its axiological merit.
