Memories and Idylls: Urban reflections on lost places and inner landscapes

Abstract

This paper considers two ways in which urban-based Australians (re)create personal connections with rural and ‘natural’ landscapes: Mulcock’s material on the alternative health and spirituality movement in Australia, and Toussaint’s research with urban conservationists involved in restorative tree-planting projects in rural Western Australia provide the context for this exploration . Through the adoption of everyday rituals, city-based supporters of the Landcare movement and participants in the alternative health and spirituality movement attempt to preserve sacred spaces in their daily lives. These spaces symbolise a metaphorical and ongoing flight from the city, a desire for emotional, rather than physical, distance from urban lifestyles. We argue that these contemporary Australian engagements with ‘nature’ and the ‘rural’ perpetuate an Arcadian vision, a longing to recover a personal, national, and mythic Golden Age, interwoven with a desire for the ‘lost places’, remembered and imagined, that lie beyond the city ‘walls’.