Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Middle Ground

Middle Ground 155 Perhapsthequestionofthemeetingplacehasbeenwronglyframed.Instead of bringing things together, perhaps it is an art of arrangement or redistribution . Take Leibniz’s thought experiment, according to which the order of events is as follows: a random distribution of points exists, and an equation is found, an algorithm, that joins them into a single line. This twostep process implies a third: the elimination of the need for points. In the future, the instantaneously produced, self-consistent line neutralizes time and space. Leibniz’s calculus seems to make it possible to draw together the most unlike positions: it resolves stars into galaxies, leaves into trees, disclosing structural analogies between fern fronds and cloud formations, vibrations on a lake and overtones in the ear. But perhaps, as regards meeting , it is the other way around: the goal of analogy is not to bring things into a state of uniformity. Instead of patterning the world, its object may be to stage the suspension of such intellectualist reductions, to keep open the middleground,tomaterializethewritingoftheline.Inthiscase,itiswrongheaded to imagine the meeting place as a clearing, whether this is the limitless commons or a postenclosure village green. The meeting place that secures the possibility of encounter will factor diffusion into the design. Instead of linking up people and places, it would interest itself in the legislation of the middle ground and cultivate techniques for its sustainable choreography and reproduction. This conclusion recalls the earlier formulation of erotic zones, but here the emphasis is on the law, because if a theory of sociable places is to step out of the specialist realms of historical precedent and mythopoetic reverie, it has to be enshrined in binding social and environmental practices . To achieve this kind of breakthrough would require a collective will 156 middle ground and reorientation of property interests that I do not discern. However, by pointing to alternative legislations of the ground in Indigenous Australia, and by contrasting these with colonialist understandings of place making, the issues at stake emerge. These in turn point us to alternative legal traditions within the western tradition. Finally, both of these paths of enquiry converge on the mythopoetically powerful figure of Apollo—who, as the god presiding over the eloquence of the agora and the domination of the savageinstinctsintheinterestsofcivilizationandharmony,hasupuntilnow been unjustifiably neglected. Out of this comes surprising confirmation of the significance of the etymology that links the forum to the forest. We can begin with an instructive contrast. First, here is the surprised observation of the First Fleet diarist, William Bradley: “The Natives were well pleas’d with us, until we began Clearing the Land.”1 Obviously, anyone would be displeased if they found trees being removed illegally from their land, and even without invoking a special relation with the natural world, the Indigenous reaction is quite understandable. But on both sides there was far more at stake than illegal trespass and damage to property. The paradox at the heart of the orgy of felling is captured in Bradley’s telling word clearing: the object of removing the bush was not simply to remedy a shortterm lack of fuel or building materials, but to lay the foundations of civility, which, in the white settler community, were inseparable from the “undeniable equity” invested in being able to dig, plow, plant, and dwell upon the land (even it was enclosed rather than being held in common). It is hard to see how this vision of sociability—even it had taken the form of a sustainable form of permaculture—could ever be squared with an Indigenous respect for the prior organization of the natural world. In the Eora case, there is plentiful circumstantial evidence to show that the displeasure was also culturally nuanced. However, in the present context , rather than try to piece together the 1788 situation, it is more useful toillustrateenvironmentalattitudesfromacontemporarysource,especially as it also throws further light on the situation in Alice Springs, where, it will be remembered, an invitation was extended a few years ago to shape a meeting place. There one of the key topics was trees. Indigenous and nonIndigenous residents alike fondly remembered playing under the red river gums in the Todd River riverbed when they were children. In this memory the trees were associated with an age of innocence when the inculcation of racist attitudes lay in the future. However, the possibility of reviving that happy age was fatally compromised, not simply because of entrenched middle ground...