Introduction

Abstract

We have been talking together about concepts of place for many years, and both jointly and separately we have come up against many horrific facts of damage, trauma, loss and irretrievable devastation. Debbie encountered this first and foremost in her work with Aboriginal Australians: What happens when sacred sites are destroyed? What are the effects of being dispossessed and having one’s own existence denied? What are the consequences of extinction when the extinct ones are kin—members of the one totemic family? Debbie’s engagements with ecological loss pressed her to consider extinctions and then to think of life itself in the context of desecration. Pete encountered these facts in his wide-ranging work with loss of place: What is the impact of destroyed homes and lost country? How do people engage with deliberate erasure of the sacred in recent war zones, with the vandalised cemeteries in Havana, or with a church in New South Wales where a black mass was conducted?