Eavesdropping

Sitting in a broch: 

the provocation of 

the overheard conversation

 

I admit it. I like listening in on other people’s conversations. Not the deeply personal, requiring-the-release-of-eavesdropping-mice, tucked-away-in-a-corner exchanges but those brash, loud and quite-possibly-intended-to-be-heard-by-strangers ones. And given that I am not all that inconspicuous, being some 190cm tall, extensively tattooed (if not always obvious), and excessively hairy (in some judgements), I seem to be quite good at being overlooked*.

In visiting a place, be it historic monument, ancient site, city park, formal gardens, rock on a beach or occasional tree, I like to just sit. To sit and soak up the atmosphere, to sit and feel the place around me, to sit and simply enjoy the moment. And eavesdrop.

The Broch of Gurness is a favourite loitering place for me when I’m on Orkney. 1000 years of settlement in layers and structures and precisely stacked stones, mortar free houses and wheel-houses and twin-walled towers of rock.

I watched. I listened. Standing in the centre of this dramatic site, this set of visitors could only talk about other places. Yes, I concede, without question, that the ancient tombs of Malta are wonderful but you’re not on Malta, you are here. Have you come to these islands on the edge of the world to stand in the midde of this broch and burble about somewhere else. And no. You’re not burbling about somewhere else. You are burbling about yourself in that other place. Is that the key? You can visit marvellous places as long as everyone knows it is you (or, in Scots, “yous” as in you plural) who is visiting. You are the centre of this story - the “you” in this instance being 4 people. I was there. I listened for all of the 15 minutes they were in the Broch. Not long, but quite long enough for uninterrupted monologue, and no-one seemed to even notice me (suprising, see parag 1 above, and add barefoot and crosslegged on the grass….ok, maybe “carefully not noticing wierdo in corner” counts as a survival strategy). But in that time, there was no reference to here, to looking at, enjoying, appreciating this place - or even comparing it to the Tombs on Malta. It was enough that here in this place everyone knew that yous had been Somewhere Else (within a genre)as well. Is a visit to a site like that just to provide a setting for broadcasting of your own experience?
O, it was dull. But intriguing in a dismal sort of way, so I waited and watched and listened and wondered if we would ever get to any perception of here. We didn’t.

This wasn’t a random monologue directed at the rocks, the winds and the wierdie in the corner. It could have been a closed conversation among the visitors concerned, but they seemed to have cornered a young man who I took to be the curator/guide/warden of the Broch (there had been a little notice in the window of the gatehouse: “warden on site”), but no, the young man being so informed and instructed was just another visitor. Maybe the warden had already escaped or was spreadeagled out of sight just over the cliff-edge waiting for the terns to scream an all-clear. I met the victim/subject later and we shared a quite, stone-filled moment of empathy.






 They left. I sighed. I think the Broch sighed, too. It’s seen worse after all. They left, with Birsay and Skara Brae and the Tomb of the Eagles to do as their declared targets in the next 2 hours. This would make for an interesting whirlwind tour of Mainland and South Ronaldsay especially as the tide was high and Birsay would be out of reach

Birsay causeway at high tide

This is a bit of a rant. Not really an angry one but more a recognition of a challenge. For those of us who try to educate and work face-to-face - but more for those of us whose interpretation has to do its job in our absence, there is a question renewed for me about what can we do to encourage people to stop. To simply stop, to shut up, and appreciate a place for what it is: not for its connections, its similarities to 6 other places I’ve been to and which might have been better, not for its amazing this or appalling that, not even for its story but just for its own sake.

Can we build a philosophy of observation into our work?

And I still wanted to slap those people with a bit of wet kelp.

And the great mountain
Is unconquered, when
It remains the victor
By not noticing the men

Nicholas Stuart Grey

* There is an activity I sue withg roups that amkes the point that being invisible isn’t about being able to hide, it is about beign able to become inconspicuous, see Celebrating Nature

Being provoked

On reflection, this piece is full of the things I've been saying and trying to do for most of my working life, but it was good to feel them coming back to be as it were like a boomerang out of the interviews recorded with contemporary people

In Melbourne Museum

This is not a dead place. It is full of the dead but it feels like a celebration of life. From geology and fossils to invasions and the stilted culture of Victorian settlements, this is celebration. The museum is full of active, vibrant voices and the heart of the buildings is alive: a living, growing, wriggling and swimming forest. "Museum" - a house for the muses

Bunjalika , a native Australian gallery, has caught me most. There are familiar cases of less familiar objects: lives and fragments in glass boxes. There are big photos and tall carvings. Relationships with the invading/colonising Europeans have their bones laid bare, too: a grim litany of deceit, betrayal and dismissal. But, there are first person panels and films of activity: contemporary people practising or learning older skills. "I" and "we", and the text wakes up, the commentary lives, reminding us that these are not the artefacts and traditions of a lost people. There is also a great generosity in aboriginehood (? aboriginality?) that welcomes newcomers if only one grandparent, or maybe even great grandparent, came from the tribe. That is enough for you to be welcomed back in.

Voices
Most intriguing of all was a wall of faces. Almost life-size, presenting an absorbing sequence of monologues: living voices talking about culture, connection and landscape. Here, home, people and place were all woven together so that the personal, communal and political are all inevitably connected through a relationship to place. Individuals and the human communities they belong to are recognised as growing out of, being dependant upon and in turn supporting the land where they live. And out of those relationships comes the identification of issues and the need and the will to act.

Of course, I don't know if what I read, watched and heard here is representative (I would hope for it and, at the same time, be surprised if it was). It might just be Melbourne, or the state of Victoria or even just the curators of this display but these were not the voices of a defeated people or a dwindling culture. These were people advocating a different perspective on self, community and how we live within a landscape and for me they raised challenging and exciting questions about identity, especially in reflection of UK debates about regional and national identities. There is an immediate, active and graceful sense of mission here, recognising the huge length of history behind the indigenous people of this land, but moving forward, to learn and be inspired by but not to be trapped by the past.

Identity
Thinking about "being British", or Scottish, or Welsh or from Yorkshire, we often seem to talk about what we were and what we did, or who we are not (not English, not from Lancashire) while what we are seems to dissolve into a sea of generality. Maybe "being British" is to be generally vague without any vibrant distinctiveness. Are we becoming essentially bland? I can't pin this down to my satisfaction. To be "distinctive" isn't really the issue but it might be a symptom. I think I am looking for a sense of self that is rooted in celebration of ourselves: not in opposition to other people but a pride in being "of here" or "of there".

This isn't about nationalism or regional identity in overt political terms. Reading and listening to voices here, I hear a people who many counted all but dead and gone, just getting on with being, with becoming who they need to be, where that "who we need to be" is governed by their principles of people, land and culture as much as by the interaction with a wider culture and the loss of personal or community identity in the swamping presence of that other socety. Here, and I'm seeing this again with Maori principles in New Zealand, culture is seen as growing from the fusion of individual, community and place: we are who we are because of how we interact with each other and our land. I think that "land" bit is crucial( the despairing cry of environmental educators and interpreters for so many years, myself included). How we live in a place and with a place is as important to who we are as what we say and do to and with each other. Culture grows from the inspiration of place. And out of that thought comes the challenge: to find ways of reconnecting culture, people and place

Belonging
To work on a sense of place - not just to talk about it in exhibitions, books and blogs but to encourage people to find their own sense of place in where they are now. We can remember where we once were (the lost home we would return to?), and reflect on where we might be (the dream home we might never see), but most of all we need to explore the place where we are now. To map it: physically, emotionally, creatively; to find ways for people to express how they feel about "home". We need to find ways to appreciate it, to work with it, to grow into the hills and moors and streets and buildings that surround us now. To find the songs, stories and practices that express those feelings. There may be old traditions to draw upon, to reawaken or reinvent or that fusion of people, place and culture might offer new seeds for new traditions.

Challenge
We could learn from the example of the oldest human culture around today and remember that we are part of the earth we live on, we are bound to it and all that we are comes from the world around us. Connection is never broken, just sometimes forgotten. Environmental education (and interpretation?) is not a stand-alone discipline. Effective env ed will also see the individuals involved learn, grow and develop and education about environmental issues overlaps with community education, and environmental action also becomes community action and vice versa. Education to promote a sense of place then always (almost?) draws personal and community action into the same eddy. Like a spiral pattern in Maori or Celtic art, everything moves. To touch one piece of a pattern is to be drawn into the whole. To separate one section is to break the pattern

We can shake ourselves a bit, waking up again, and stand and breathe. We don't need to wait for official approval or even grant support (although that would be nice). We can just get on with becoming who we need to be to live gracefully, richly, creatively with the land we walk upon. We don't need to permission to appreciate a sense of home, to explore the fusion of "people, land and culture". We just need to do it.

Book of the moment: Counter-tourism, the handbook

Counter-tourism, the Handbook, Crab Man, Triarchy Press, 2012

ISBN 978-1-908009-86-9

www.countertourism.net

Here is a treat for anyone who has wandered round a historic site, bored by the expected and provided routes and interpretations. Counter-tourism is a challenge, an invitation and a license for the gentle naughtiness of doing the unexpected thing. Walking through the rooms of some stately home at your own unpredictable speeds, seeing how much dust you can collect, wandering round the outside of a property....the principles embedded here are about independence, imagination and personal experience. A lot of these activities remind me of how young children get to know a place. They wander. They run or walk or just stop and look under beds and wonder about secrets, treasures and horrible hidden stories 

There is an underlying cynicism about the heritage industry: 

“Visitor centres are machines for the contraction, disguise, obscuring 

and hollowing out of the places they propose themselves as portals to”. 

Maybe not entirely fair - we all know of effective interpretation that invites us in and welcomes us to a place without controlling too much and limiting our experience too much (or I hope we do!). And that perspective may upset some professionals, seeing themselves as skilled interpreters of a place, the people who know best.  But the theme here (that I endorse fully) is that visitors deserve the freedom to take what they will from a place, echoing arguments that people learn what they want to learn and learn best when they are choosing their own learning styles – and also that every site offers far more to experience than we offer in our planned interpretive and educational experiences. (And if that ruffles a few interpretive feathers, they probably needed the ruffling!)

People explore places in their own ways and these books champion that independence. Counter-tourism offers visitors some sneaky alternatives to the often controlled and sanitised experiences we are offered at sites, inviting us to find our own ways of getting to know a place. And for all those professionals who reckon they've got their interpretation processes sussed, these books challenge us to explore sites in new ways, offering activities to shake conceptions a bit. 

So have a read, have a think, wander, try and do, use these activities or just relax into some new ones of your own – as an interpreter, as a visitor or simply as someone out to get to know this world we walk on.

Counter-Tourism, the Handbook, Crab Man, Triarchy Press, 2012, 

ISBN 978-1-908009-86-9

Counter-Tourism, A Pocketbook – 50 odd things to do in a heritage site, Triarchy Press, 2012, ISBN978-1-908009-67-8

Tactics for Counter-Tourism – 31 short films by Crab Man and Siobhan McKeown: www.countertourism.net