The Meaning of Place

A few years ago, I took a trip to the Western Australian wheat belt for work. I was in social services at the time helping to run a residential facility, housing people for whom the world had not been kind.

I was born in the wheatbelt and that day we were driving a resident who had been in our care for two years back to the place she had also grown up. She had spent almost twenty years locked inside a psychiatric unit before being passed around from place to place until she landed in our care; a small set of units in a quaint but bustling costal town.

She longed for the wheat belt.

The way the morning and afternoon sun set aglow the never-ending fields of wheat, or the community of such a small town, where neighbours still spoke and the Australian tradition of having a small lunch bar named and run by a family who had been there for generations sat strong in the place of chain food stores.

She belonged here, despite spending far more time locked away, this was her place and as we drove further away from the coast and the scenery around us changed, I watched her light up. We had spent countless nights talking about her childhood here, her pets, her friends, the feeling of camping out beneath the stars.

For her this place was freedom.

I will never forget the privilege of being able to return her to her place but when I found out she had passed a few months later I felt a call for change. She taught me the meaning of place, and while I had spent my whole life in Western Australia, I had also learnt from her that the meaning of a place was not in how long you had been there but in what it meant to you so I quit my job, sold all my things, bought a caravan and drove across the country in search of my own place.

I had always loved waterfalls and after reading about some of the spectacular falls within the Victorian Otway National Park I set out to find some. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was walking to when I pulled up to a small car park with one winding muddy path leading to a downward spiral of steps made only of dirt and wood. It had been raining heavily, the ground was slippery, and I found myself falling into the mud more times than I could count. It got colder with each step down and the air was changing too. It was fresh and crisp but somehow harder for my lungs to take in. My legs were burning, and I thought about turning around many times.

But then I heard it, the sound of flowing water.

At the bottom of the falls, after an hour’s hike, I took this photograph. I didn’t want to edit the photo too much, rather just enough to represent the vibrance and beauty of the place through my eyes. It was edited originally on my mobile phone as I was on the road and then adjusted in Lightroom more recently to make the colours more true to life.

I had left in search of a place unknown and here, in the middle of a state I’d never been before, I found what will be one of many of my own places.

Those places that mean more than just a pretty picture. The places that serve as metaphors running parallel to our lives.

The falls that represented the leap I’d made into the unknown.

The slippery, muddy path, I considered turning back on more than once on the way down.

And then the calm, as I sat below and watched the water cascade down.

Place can be man-made or natural but from what I learnt for most people it is the same. The places that touch us the most are often outside. They are the places that remind us of who we really are as humans; not as dominators of, but as just another humble part of nature.