With jovial anticipation, I invite you to Less Than An Hour With The Place, an oral storytelling piece exploring ancestral mythology curated as my dissertation sharing for the Poetics of Imagination MA at Dartington Arts School.

My journey began at my uncle’s house in Fife, Scotland, with a notebook and a backpack. From there, the hospitality of known and rediscovered family and acquaintances wrapped me up. Beds for the night, food for the belly, the next contact to seek, and most importantly, the stories. Faces lit up as stories were shared around kitchen tables, in pubs, over dinner, in the farmyard and the old work pickup, the joy of sharing stories highlighted in their aliveness.

Indigenous cultures consider language to be the felt vibration of the earth, and thus stories come from place and reciprocity with the more than human. Living for twelve years in Western Australia, I found that Westernised culture lives in proximity to Aboriginal culture yet remains distant regarding how life is lived, and how culture is shared. This separation left me longing to experience stories and cultural grounding for myself.

Discovering this sense of absence, I felt I had no choice but to explore the web of stories that make up the fabric of my ancestry and cultural roots. I became concerned with how this web is cast over place and which, if any, threads of indigeneity remain. Is it possible to re-story myself by finding the threads that make up the poetic map of my life?

If language is the vibration of the earth, then a story becomes a picture, and a myth becomes a map. Stories help us navigate the world, providing gateways to the mythical past, holding the complexities of life in the entangled web of memories, imagination, and confabulations.

Please join me on this journey through the stories I discovered in their wild, imaginal, and mythic ways as we look under the cultural, historical, and nostalgic time-accrued dust. Listen for the echoes of indigeneity and how relationship to place reveals the previously unseen map that can alter our lenses of perception.