listening to professor paul gough speak was a wonderful thing to witness. it’s so captivating to listen to someone who is so fluent in their field of work. he knew exactly what he was talking about and some of the points he brought up, some of his opinions were so well thought out and constructed and it was, overall, a very, very interesting thing to be able to experience, especially in such an intimate setting. he was very relaxed, sitting in a chair, there’s only like 10 of us and we don’t speak so it was a very enlightening hour or so. this in association with the reading we completed prior to this guest lecturer by shelley hornstein (which took me so much longer to read than i care to admit. it was very dense and complex), was a great lesson in the meaning of place and also quite an insight into emotional connection and memorialisation of place.

paul put forth the idea of “at what point does space become a place?” and continued to discuss how it usually occurs when a space is endowed with human presence and memory, and how, even as a supposed ‘young country’, we have immense layers and history. and this, straight away, reminded me of my high school in heidelberg, which is on the land of the wurundjeri tribe, and how, at every assembly and mass we would give thanks and recognition to the “original custodians of the land”. i found that interesting as it’s curious how, despite there being no shrines or memorials erected in the space where this tribe used to reside, it is still now a “place”. we memorialise it every time we give thanks to the wurundjeri people and i think it’s one of our more curious and honourable forms of memorialisation. it’s not gaudy and attention seeking; it’s fact and it’s respectful.

this is quite irrelevant to the idea of space and place, but paul mentioned how “peace is seen as absence of war rather than state of being” (when talking about the never again mentality), and i completely agree with it, but i have never thought about it that way. i mean, in some way, i guess the two do go hand in hand but it was very thought provoking none the less.

memorials were discussed in great detail between the reading and professor gough, and it really got me thinking about all the different memorials i have been to in my life – official and not. these include sveti mihovil in croatia, the catacombs under the sistine chapel in rome, the catacombs under sacre cour in france to name a few. though, one stood out in my mind. and that was the holocaust museum. i know some people are divided about the methods that they use to get their point across and display this horrific evidence, but i can remember as a 16 year old going to this museum and understanding the gravity of it; the importance of it. i have always been fascinated (for lack of better word coming to me right now) with the holocaust, and i think part of that fascination stemmed from not actually understanding how people could be so hateful and so cruel as to viciously exterminate 6 million people. and i remember, being in the holocaust museum and the first thing we did was listen to the story of one of the survivors. i’m not even sure when i started crying during it, but it was the most heartbreaking story, bittersweet ending and terrible but it was just such a display of strength and bravery, and i wondered ‘how can these people bare to talk about this day in, day out’ and i think in some ways, it’s their way of memorialising what they endured. after that, walking through the rest of the museum…. i had a lot of feelings, and i just remember thinking how i knew nothing before i went in, i couldn’t have imagined some of the stories that were told, some of the photos shown. and that was a deeply saddening moment for me, that what i believed to be one of the most horrific acts ever put upon this earth, just intensified by so many levels. and it was then that i understand what a memorial was for, why people memorialise things, even – and in some cases especially – when they’re such horrid events.