Rees Quilford

Trails in the Ground: Speculating on the Intimate Histories of the Bunurong Coast

Introduction

Trails in the ground: speculating on the intimate histories of the bunurong coast. Speculate on the intimate histories of Victoria's Bunurong Coast through its entangled tracks. This essay blends archives, photography, and oral history, revealing deep intergenerational connections to place.

Abstract

This paper undertakes a speculative exploration of the idiosyncratic agency of the entangled tracks encrypted throughout the region known as the Bunurong Coast in Victoria's southeast. It is a rambling yarn that creatively explores how those marks - and the past happenings and traversings they embody - influence both perceptions and interactions with other Australian regions we inhabit. Referencing archival, literary and photographic amalgams created to document and respond to the tracks and trails that crisscross the lands, waterways and skies, this piece engages with the complexities, violent silences and intrigue of intergenerational connections to a specific place. It attempts to disentangle and survey the sometimes thorny, often uncomfortable, and occasionally joyous layered meanings and knowledges embodied in the byways and trails of the Bunurong Coast. In doing so, it explores the enigmatic and subjective connection to place that can be deciphered through research, careful observation, and speculative fusions of Polaroid photography, prose and oral history. This intimate and subjective essay aims to make a personal contribution to the rich and textured body of knowledge of the Bunurong Coast. In doing so, I also hope it provides a novel contribution to the personal essay form, an addition that might also provide a model for other practitioners adopting non-traditional approaches to historically informed place-based storytelling.

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