How we're travelling

It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.