Regional, migrant and global affinities to place in 'Seeds: A Permaculture Travel Memoir'

Authors

  • Nina Gartrell University of the Sunshine Coast

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.35

Keywords:

transnational travel memoir, regional identity, affinities to place, local/global binary

Abstract

This article explores the traces of an author’s regional identity in a transnational travel memoir in which affinities to place are portrayed as pluralistic and fluid. It does so in order to explore the tenuous balance between ecocentric understanding of self within a community of ‘earth others’ on the one hand and fidelity to a regionally precise ‘home’ on the other. This constitutes an open-ended
encounter with regionalism and ‘site-fidelity’ to destabilise the local/global binary. New understandings of foreign landscapes, places and cultures can be brokered upon a dialogue between those newly encountered landscape places, and the more intimately known regions from an individual’s past.

Author Biography

  • Nina Gartrell, University of the Sunshine Coast

    Nina Gartrell is a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast. In 2012–13, she travelled overland (without flying!) from England to Australia. Hers was an experiment in ecological ‘permatravel’ (permaculture travel). Her doctoral thesis, ‘Seeds: A Permaculture Travel Memoir’, is inspired by her permatravels and conveys her dual love for literature and gardening, nature and culture, roaming and homing. It is her attempt to reconcile the two impulses that have shaped her adult life: biophilia and wanderlust.

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This name has been changed to protect the identity of the individual.

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Published

2017-12-01

Issue

Section

Literary Landscapes of the Sunshine Coast

How to Cite

Gartrell, N. (2017). Regional, migrant and global affinities to place in ’Seeds: A Permaculture Travel Memoir’. Queensland Review, 24(2), 253-270. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.35