Social theorising as emplacement: Encounters with Antipodean sociology and place materialities

Abstract

In this article, I consider the idea of academic work as ‘emplaced’ activity. I contextualise myself as social theorist and sociologist by considering two parallel processes: my responses over time to Antipodean sociology, and my evolving relationship to landscape, geology and place. I offer exegeses of Beilharz's Imagining the Antipodes, Thinking the Antipodes, and the textbook Sociology: Place, Time and Division; as well as the writings of novelist Tim Winton and landscape scholar George Seddon. My reading emphasises the importance of personal experience, landscape sensory experience, and place as relational, in such writings. My own complex and uneven relationship to Antipodean sociology is used to reflect on overcoming my own placeless-ness in modes of theorising; and why the landscapes I migrated to decades ago, and the local geology, proved decisive in my grasping the significance of place experiences, memories and materialities within scholarly thinking and writing.

In The Art of Social Theory, Richard Swedberg (2014: 19) points out that, in the modern social sciences, we tend to prioritise theory as ‘abstract’ ideas over theorising as ‘practical activity’. This is ironic because initially the emphasis was the other way around: ‘as developed by Greek thinkers of the fourth century BCE … theorizing is practical in nature. To theorize … meant to see, to observe, and to contemplate’. The etymological roots of the word theory serves to further make the point. Theory comes from the Greek word theoria, and was used to characterise diviners who consulted ‘an oracle’, as well as ambassadors who ‘attend[ed] the sacral festivals and games of another city-state’ (Lyman and Scott, 1975: 1). The latter, were like modern ethnologists, describing exotic practices and trying to understand their meaning’ (Lyman and Scott, 1975: 2). In its original meaning, then, ‘To theorize meant … to see the world, to report on the world’, and to ‘elucidate’ on either unknown or ‘unnoticed features of the world’ (Lyman and Scott, 1975: 2). While sociologists have often left it to archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to study the exotic objects and practices of other times and other places, something of theoria's original impulse survives in the framing of sociology as an activity seeking to make the commonplace strange and the familiar unfamiliar.

However, theorising-as-practical activity and the defamiliarisation of the familiar raises the question: what modes of knowing, documenting and representing enhance the quality of our encounters with the world? Swedberg (2014: 214) proposes that social theorising turns to tools often shunned by scientism: ‘using metaphors and analogies, intuitive as well as logical thinking, speculation, free association, guessing, reverie and more’. The latter includes learning how to ‘access your subconscious’; and perhaps most controversially for scholars committed to the notion of a social science: ‘introspection should be an option for the theorizer’ (Swedberg, 2014: 47, 214). In this article, I dabble in all of these ‘dark arts’ (see also de la Fuente, 2025). However, whether it is free association, reverie or introspection, the referent or framing device will be place and place qualities. I have entitled these reflections ‘Social theory as emplacement’ to reflect the mix of sensory and conceptual, embodied and cognitive dimensions involved in locating oneself in the world.

But emplacement is no straightforward matter. Place experience is both ubiquitous and hard to get at. As Tasmanian philosopher Jeff Malpas (2015: 1) proposes, ‘one need not be a reductive materialist’ to suggest that what thinking ‘addresses is essentially given to us in and through the places in which we find ourselves' (emphasis in the original). Yet the same philosopher proposes we should not think of place as ‘some sort of enclosed container that holds us within, but rather … as that which, through the manner in which it holds us … allows us access to that which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Malpas, 2015: 7). Additionally, as suggested by the poet Mark Tredinnick (2009: 255), who has written on the regional landscape we will be discussing later, there is an essential ‘porosity’ to place: ‘a place is all the interconnected stories, relationships, energies and flows of life at play in it, including one's being there, the memories, dreams and desires’ (Tredinnick, 2009: 255). Interestingly, given the original meanings of the word theoria and Swedberg's emphasis on guessing and reverie, Tredinnick (2009: 266) also describes one of his landscape writing projects as a ‘kind of divination, an experiment in seeing and listening … an act of wondering and guesswork about the life of a piece of country’. Poets are not social theorists; but social theorists can learn from them and from novelists, journalists, photographers, and place biographers – to name just a few.

The subtitle to my article indicates how I propose to ‘emplace’ myself. The first thread – namely, ‘Antipodean sociology’ – is an interwoven set of ideas and practices that draws on sociology and social theory alongside art history, literature and landscape writing. Two of its leading authors describe the framework as a set of ‘[p]erspectives, ways of seeing, feeling, thinking’, rather than a systemic or abstract set of ideas we may term ‘Antipodean theory’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2022: 186). This eschewing of cognitive abstractions is evident in their claim that what is ‘in your head’ is often ‘getting in the way of what was in front of your senses’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2022: 182). Antipodean sociology is also fundamentally interested in the importance of place, and, in the context of the Australian continent, this implies ‘spirit of place is local, and different, in Broome and Brisbane, Fremantle and Fitzroy, Woolamai and Wollongong’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006: xix). But, as with Malpas's idea that places should not be thought of as ‘containers’, the Antipodean framework insists ‘the Antipodes must be understood as a relation’ (Beilharz, 1997: xii). Central to this is the idea of a fragmented geographical and cultural identity: ‘Being antipodean literally means having the feet elsewhere; coming from the other side of the earth … [it] meant carrying a kind of dual passport’ (Beilharz, 2015: xvii). Arguably, having ‘feet elsewhere’ is not just about global or imperial notions of centres and peripheries; there is also a sense in which the Antipodes have their own internal peripheries. Here, I will trace those junctures where my own thinking and writing have either intersected or diverged, drawn inspiration from or resisted, the ethos of the Antipodean approach. The latter is predicated on the idea that one can honour intellectual approaches through admitting to difficulty in absorbing its central messages; slow and to an extent resistant appropriation of thought rather than hagiography or the perkiness of LinkedIn posts.

With respect to the second major thread – namely, ‘place materialities’ – there have been multiple materialities that have come to the fore in my work recently. However, for biographical reasons I explore later, the place materialities of the Greater Sydney Region have played a central role. I migrated to this region from the South American country of Uruguay at the age of seven in 1974; and, although I do not live in the Sydney region presently, it continues to serve as a ‘home’ of sorts (i.e. the place one goes to ‘lick wounds’ after a setback or to mark important occasions). In recent times, biography and landscape memory have further converged in my academic work as I began an empirical project on Sydney sandstone. This, in turn, has suggested new ways of thinking, researching and writing (i.e. learning to write more ‘personally’). I will suggest that, in my case, one of the benefits of emplacement has been the possibility of arriving at what Friedrich Nietzsche (1974: 34) terms the ‘sunny places of thought’ (emphasis in the original). But there is no straight line nor teleology propelling anybody towards such sunny places. As Nietzsche (1974: 34; emphasis in the original) warns, there are likely to be ‘involuntary detours, side lanes, [and] resting places’, along the way; and overcoming such detours and dead-ends requires us to act as ‘philosophical physicians’ with a keen eye for the health and vitality of thought (on Nietzsche as embodied thinker see Chamberlain, 1988; Kaag, 2018).

Landforms, plants and rocks: Doing sociology differently

Sociology has often been reluctant to engage with place let alone landscape, botany and geology. Until recently, one would have to go all the way back to the turn and early decades of the last century to locate sociological writings on such topics. I am thinking of Georg Simmel's (2020a, 2020b) essays on ‘On the Aesthetics of the Alps’ (originally published in 1911) and ‘Philosophy of Landscape’ (originally published in 1913); as well as Park and Burgess’s (1922) textbook Introduction to the Science of Sociology, which included chapters on plants, ants, geology, biology, maritime contact and land. Connoisseurs of the history of sociology might be interested in a curious parallel between Chicago sociology and the Antipodean approach: Beilharz and Hogan's (2006) Sociology: Place, Time and Division is also a textbook. And while it does not broach ants, the latter does consider suburbs, regions, wilderness, sea-lanes, mining, grazing, islands, front gardens and backyards. Like the Chicago School, Antipodean sociology has also drawn on novelists, journalists and creatives in expanding the sociological imagination (Cappetti, 1993). ¹ The latter is quite innovative by the standards of mainstream sociology. Beilharz and Hogan (2022: 186) wrote of their textbook that it drew on the ‘interpolated photos of Richard Woldendorp, Tracey Moffatt and others as visual media for thinking with and against the grain’. The textbook's literary style entailed a relaxation of what C. Wright Mills (1959: 219, emphasis in the original) termed the ‘academic pose’. Interestingly, the ‘Prelude’ to Sociology: Place, Time and Division is an excerpt from novelist Tim Winton (2006). The text could be described as an embodied, thick-description of place:

On a low tide Monday afternoon just short of my thirty-third birthday, the winter sun finally comes out to burn the sky clear of cloud and the kids and I gallop onto the beach to play … Under the sun the water shows its mottling of deeps and shallows, black and turquoise, reef and sand, dark and light, its coming and going … Two days off the plane, I am finally home … The sand is cold beneath our bare feet … The sun slants finely on our necks … There is nowhere else I’d rather be … I am the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings. (Winton, 2006: 6)

Not the standard opening contribution to a sociology textbook. But as someone who migrated to Australia's east coast during their childhood, Winton's reference to ‘looking west, … as the sun tracks down to the sea’ is meaningful precisely because, in the region where I spent my formative years and to which I feel a lasting bond, the sun rises over the Pacific Ocean in the east and sets over the hazy outline of the Blue Mountains in the west. The inverse of what Winton is describing.

Winton's writings speak powerfully to the shaping power of place and are based on a specific genre for documenting person–place entanglements: namely, the notion of landscape memoir. Tredinnick (2009: 267) suggests the latter is useful because it ‘gets at the porosity between place and person, landscape and language, biology and biography’. Porosity also implies mutual constitution of self and landscape: ‘through living in it, the landscape becomes part of us, just as we are part of it’ (Ingold cited in Wylie, 2007: 161). In Island Home, Winton (2015: 144) suggests his view of the physical environment is closer to the ‘animated landscape of Aboriginal Australians’ rather than Western notions of nature as something external and knowable (i.e. as something measurable and open to mechanistic manipulation). The author adds ‘[l]andforms, plants and bodies of water possess [a] power that's palpable to even an heir of industrialized scientism like myself’; and that it takes a ‘certain determination to ignore the ardour and livid energy at work in nature’ (Winton, 2015: 144–145).

The reason inattentiveness to place and its physical qualities matters is it makes it more difficult to dwell-in-place meaningfully or skilfully (i.e. to engage with the possibilities and limitations present in each environment). Indeed, the application of faulty semiotic and aesthetic frames has been central to the colonial encounter with the land (Carter, 1987); and arguably continues to shape land–people relations (Probert, 2021). Beilharz and Hogan (2006: xix) note, ‘After 200 years of migration and exploration, of exporting and importing cultures and goods, of encounters between settlers and indigenous people, of settling, extracting, and planting, and of city-building, we are only just beginning to appreciate the great diversity and complexity of places and regions’. For such reasons Antipodean sociology has turned to the writings of landscape scholar George Seddon. In The Old Country, the latter explains:

People have come … to a continent … with a physical history that is nothing like that of any of their homelands … We live in old landscapes with limited water and soils of low fertility, yet with a rich flora that is adapted to these conditions, as we are not. There is much to learn from it, but we have been slow learners … awareness of this flora and its history can help us all to become better Australians. (Seddon, 2005: xv)

In a world of finite resources, species extinction and the challenges associated with climate change, ‘better Australians’ also equals better citizens of Planet Earth. As a scholar who combined an interest in the ‘academic task of epistemologies, semantics and theories’ alongside what today would be called by university management-speak as knowledge transfers and engaged research, Seddon is remembered not only for his scholarly books but also ‘for his cookbook, heritage walks, restoration of colonial homes, WA's first hose-less garden … [as well as] public lectures, consultancies and reports’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2022: 183). The list of activities suggests a diverse set of engagements that would put most advocates of ‘public sociology’ to shame. However, Seddon was not untouched by academic social theory. The doyen of Australian landscape studies claimed encountering Antipodean sociology led him to read Zygmunt Bauman. From Bauman, Seddon (2005: 5, 7) took the idea that gardens or cultivated nature reflected the human ‘will to global domination of nature’; whereas weeds involved a type of nature-based ‘xenophobia’ where ‘[h]undreds of species of animals, plants and fungi’ are considered ‘invasive’ aliens. A rare moment in which sociology and social theory have impacted landscape scholarship and debates in land/environmental management in this country.

Seddon's work also challenges what we understand as the histories and temporalities of nation and place. Beilharz (2015: 263) says in an essay comparing Marx and Seddon that one of the things we learn from the latter is, ‘if Australian civilization is different to European and American, then this has something to do with the Pleistocene, and not just with the laconic tradition of popular culture’. The Pleistocene marks the last significant melting of the polar caps around 20,000 years ago (a key event in the shaping of Sydney Harbour; Gibson, 2023). As with many geological events the Pleistocene is a reminder that nonhuman processes work to their own timetable; and that things like landscape, topography, and the shape of coastlines, are the product of dynamic processes. Antipodean sociology also gleans from Seddon's writings the idea that so-called new world settler societies like Australia ‘are not yet post-colonial in their social imaginaries’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2022: 183). Not yet post-colonial because the task of defining what is old and what is new is constantly changing.

At the very beginning of The Old Country, Seddon (2005: xi) writes: ‘“The old country” for my mother, Australian born, was Britain, as for most of her generation, although she had never set foot on its sacred soil’. By contrast, for his ‘generation, Australia is the old country’ as the continent ‘has rocks of all ages from … almost the beginning of time of earth-time’ to more recent geological activity (Seddon, 2005: xi). The point is not so much whether places are old or new in some definitive sense. Rather we need to understand terms such as old or new in relational terms; and be mindful of how the temporalities of nonhuman things operate according to timescales vastly different to human ones. Seddon (2005: xiii) highlights that, in the East Pilbara region of Western Australia, there are fossils sitting within the Earth's eroded surface that are ‘among the oldest known evidence of living organisms’; and the ‘eroded rocks’, in which these fossils lie, have been ‘dated to 3.515 billion years’ ago. The author wryly adds: ‘Now that's old’ (Seddon, xiii; emphasis in original). From this perspective, Australia is not so young.

Narrating particularity: Antipodean sociology and personal experience

When Seddon is discussing the prehistoric fossils of the East Pilbara in The Old Country, there is a striking photo of the long extinct organisms discussed above and the rocky orange soil that surrounds them. Just within frame there is also the bottom of the author's trousers and what appear to be either Blundstone or R.M. Williams boots. One could be forgiven for asking: why has Seddon allowed himself to intrude into a photo depicting fossils dating from over 3.5 billion years ago? Was it simply a case of clumsy camera work – like when an unintended finger appears in a selfie? In Thinking the Antipodes, Beilharz (2015: 264) writes poignantly about how often, in ‘the production of video-documentaries, … the hand which holds the camera magically retains its invisibility’. The Antipodean framework could be said to be aiming for the opposite of making bodies and sensibilities invisible. Beilharz (2015: 264) says of the photographer who has collaborated with Winton and whose photography graces the pages of Sociology: Place, Time and Division: ‘It is this, incidentally, which makes the western [A]ntipodean images of Richard Woldendorp so powerful: you cannot help but see his hand in the photographs’. Placing the ‘I’ within the frame challenges the dominant tendency in academic research to render the observer and his or her modes of perception irrelevant. In ‘Places We Been’, Beilharz and Hogan (2022) detail their own path towards an Antipodean sensibility and the journal that provided a platform for its cultivation:

How did we get to this place? Our journey with Thesis Eleven has gone in many directions: sideways and up, over, under sideways down. Peter came from the far south-east suburb of Melbourne and knew something about the local, the world system and Marcuse. Trevor came from the west coast and knew a few things about Anglophone colonialism, provincialism, and suburbia. Together at Thesis Eleven we recast our southern bearings – geographical, cultural and historical – by taking different approaches to the north – what Bernard Smith called our own [A]ntipodes. (Beilharz and Hogan, 2022: 182)

The work that could be said to have initiated the Antipodean sociological project, Beilharz's (1997) Imagining the Antipodes, also notes the very roundabout way in which the author discovered the writings of the art historian Bernard Smith:

In the autumn of 1992, I visited a friend of mine, Peter Garthcole, in Cambridge. I was bleary; a car alarm had been triggered in the middle of the night … We had met in 1990 in Brisbane at a conference on the work of Australian Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, and hit it off immediately … Peter had been taught by Gordon Childe … [and had had] his own acquaintance with Bernard Smith over the years. At 4pm Peter took a nap, leaving me sitting at his desk downstairs with various copies of Smith's books that Bernard had given him over the years. It dawned on me … I must write about Bernard Smith. (Beilharz, 1997: vii)

If only more sociologists and social theorists narrated the circumstances in which they discovered an intellectual figure or an important concept. This kind of documenting of the role of serendipity in academic work provides insights into the process of intellectual breakthroughs. As a more general rule, Beilharz and Hogan (2006: xix) suggest narrating the particularity of experience is important because ‘telling the stories of particular places is to reveal little snapshots of the world as a whole’. The sociological value of personal experience hinges on an interesting paradox: namely, that there is something ‘ineluctable … inescapable, real, essential, true’ about unique human experiences; but, at the same time, ‘as a human being’, the I is also ‘representative of humankind’ (Wolff, 1976: 24).

Seddon's landscape books are saturated with biographical information. In Landprints, the author writes that his ‘father was a country bank manager in Victoria’ and his childhood and youth entailed a peripatetic life (Seddon, 1997: 137). In fact, Seddon (1997: 137–138) credits his peripatetic youth and ‘nomadic academic life’ with cultivating an appreciation of differences in material landscapes. This included a better understanding of Australian landscapes forged through time spent in foreign places:

I find the surface of the globe endlessly fascinating, and no longer find any part wholly dull, although of course I like some places more than others … Places are easy to get on with if you meet them on their own terms … Western Australia taught me the importance of scale of attention, since so much of interest here is the fine detail … That balance of foreground, middle and background … that make up our inherited sense of the picturesque hardly work in banksia woodland or jarrah forest or indeed in much of Australia … I began to grow a fierce love of this dry land: when I flew in from the east after a conference, I used to look out at the salt lakes below, and the desolate, scabby wheatbelt, and say to myself: ‘This is my country, these are my people’ … Other learning came from travel outside Australia … China helped me to learn about focus: Chinese books and landscape paintings are in scrolls, unrolled to be read … [Similarly,] Australian landscapes are seamless. They rarely compose so neatly into identifiable ‘scenes’. (Seddon, 1997: 137–138)

Despite his emphasis on personal experience, Seddon understood the rules of scholarly work and exercised a knowing attitude to different styles of writing. As such, he confessed to being ‘torn’ by two very different sensibilities: ‘One is the academic culture, which is international, the enemy of the parochial; its habitual mode is ironic detachment. But … I am also prone to bouts of passionate commitment [to place]’ (Seddon, 1997: 137). His solution was to move between the two registers as needed: ‘When my academic voice takes over from my personal one, I reflect that “sense of place” is, in general terms, a part of the vocabulary of romanticism, in so far as the classicists value generality, and the romantics, specificity’ (Seddon, 1997: 139). He also suggested the ‘preference’ for either romanticism or classicism ‘in a given culture depend[ed] on the mood of that culture at a particular time’ (Seddon, 1997: 139). Strong echoes here of the American post-war sociologist Alvin Gouldner. The latter argued in For Sociology that neither ‘Romanticism or Classicism is, by itself, a sufficient infrastructure for a valid social theory. Both … are necessary’ (Gouldner, 1973: 360). Universality without particularity can make for an unlively social science; but celebrating distinctiveness without a feel for comparison and connection could lead to social theorists producing either fragmented or parochial insights. When it comes to the topologies of social theory, we neither want to be ‘unaware of centres, or else obsessed with them, waiting for Derrida to sneeze’ (Beilharz, 2015: 183).

The long and circuitous road to emplacement: My own academic journey

For a very long time, the present author was one of those sociologists who waited for metropole social theorists to ‘sneeze’. And I still suffer from a tendency to feel like I am missing out if I am unfamiliar with some new theoretical ‘ism’ other people are talking about. Such foibles have led to an uneven and staggered reception of Antipodean sociology. Let me begin with my initial (and largely favourable) impressions of Antipodean sociology and the very prosaic circumstances in which it occurred. In the early 2000s, I bought Beilharz's (1997) Imagining the Antipodes at Berkelouw bookstore on Oxford Street, Paddington, in Sydney's inner city; but I did not open the book until a cold and foggy weekend away in the Blue Mountains township of Leura. Why are the memories of when I first read Imagining the Antipodes so detailed and so vivid? For one, the Blue Mountains had unexpected connections with Antipodean sociology which I did not know about at the time. ² For another, there seemed to be some prophetic inkling that one day I would be linking social theory and landscape, and writing about the Blue Mountains themselves (de la Fuente, 2019a, 2020a). When I returned to the office a few days later, I wrote the author an email about how much I had enjoyed the book and how reading it in the place ambience of the Upper Blue Mountains somehow seemed apt (Figure 1). The latter probably made me a wayward reader of Imagining the Antipodes as the book insists, ‘Neither Australia, nor Argentina, nor New Zealand constitute essentialist places where the Antipodes is found in the soil or inscribed into the landscape’ (Beilharz, 1997: xiv).

Figure 1.

The Upper Blue Mountains where the author first read Imagining the Antipodes. Photo credit: author.

However, what probably impressed me the most was that Imagining the Antipodes sought to unify the two major fields in which I then worked – social theory and the sociology of art. Indeed, at the time, I was teaching an undergraduate subject that sought to contextualise ‘theory’ by examining the artistic and cultural milieux surrounding key sociological thinkers (e.g. connections between Max Weber and Thomas Mann, or the synergies between the former and the counter-culturalists of the mountain village of Ascona; see Goldman, 1988; Whimster, 1999). The social theory–sociology of art nexus had also been important to my PhD and first monograph linking musical modernism and post-modernism to cognate debates about modernity and late- or post-modernity in sociology (2011). Given my inclinations at the time, one can imagine why I was struck, for example, by Beilharz's (1997: xii) claim in Imagining the Antipodes: ‘Bernard Smith's work is perhaps the most significant social theory yet generated by an Australian’. The claim was based on Beilharz's exegesis of key art historical texts by Smith (1977, 1979, 1989) such as Place, Taste and Tradition; European Vision and the South Pacific; and the Antipodean Manifesto, with its analysis of figurative and abstract tendencies in modern Australian painting as reflective of centre–periphery dynamics. The latter was also a way of framing what was distinctive to Australian modernity, namely, a culture spawned by British/European and then American ‘metropole’ modernism but marked by the geographical reality that Melbourne was neither London nor Paris and Sydney was not New York. The author's hermeneutic and sociological chutzpah was evident in seeing in debates about modern Australian painting and its centre–periphery dynamics, a homology for problems in theorising within sociology:

To speak of Imagining the Antipodes … is to evoke not fantasy but the anticipation of activity and its mental shadowing, for as we are, so do we imagine … We create, but not ex nihilo, not exactly as we please. We work in and through a plurality of traditions, and … the quality of the results of these processes depends upon the consciousness we have of these flows and not only upon our talent … For as we interpret, so do we use what is given us, so does our work return into the streams of history which make us. (Beilharz, 1997: xv).

‘We create, but … not exactly as we please’ – a wonderful formulation that could apply to visual artists or to social theorists. And one of the factors that shapes how we create is where we are located within the geographies of modernity (and subsequently post-modernity). Yet Beilharz's locating of painting and social theory via the writings of Bernard Smith also bore the stamp of optimism and egalitarianism. What may seem like a disadvantage (i.e. being placed at the margins of cultural or intellectual production) can also be an advantage. It is possible for peripheries to speak back to centres, and to assert themselves creatively when metropole experience does not accord with periphery everyday realities. This extended to the mundane realities of academic life. Beilharz (2015: 302–307) published an essay in The American Sociologist on the distinctiveness of sociology in Australia and New Zealand. There he attempts to explain, to his North American readers, the benefits of thinking and writing from far:

First, in a small population like Australia or New Zealand with a less developed intellectual division of labour than the USA, we do well to learn from others who are not sociologists or do not look like sociologists … Second, therefore, those who are interested in the history of culture need to be open to the fields of history and cultural studies … a kind of natural antidote to the temptation to generality and abstraction in mainstream sociology. Grand claims can be usefully qualified by the outsider's question of ‘so wot?’ or the complaint, ‘not where I come from!’. Third, [living in the Antipodes emphasises] social life is deeply performative … and to use the voices of others … can achieve a sense of profundity … The mask and the voice are powerful. (Beilharz, 2015: 307; brackets added)

While we may question whether some of the advantages attributed to being Antipodean have been eroded, due to the globalisation of higher education or the onset of a research audit culture, there is value in being reminded of such spatialised differences. When grand claims are made, the geographical and academic ‘outsider’ feels they can say ‘so wot?’ or ‘not where I come from!’. Additionally, Antipodeans are skilled in practising the art of a ‘knowing’ ventriloquism. As Beilharz's essay points out via a discussion of the Australian movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert and the penchant for The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the part of New Zealanders, there is something essentially ‘camp’ or hyper-performative about Antipodeans adopting other people's voices and masks (Beilharz, 2015: 303–304). These types of performances lay bare hidden assumptions and disrupt supposed hierarchies between centre and periphery.

To surmise my reaction to Antipodean sociology: initially, I was impressed with its key ideas and sensibility, and elements of that appreciation lasted throughout my academic career. However, for a long time, I was also not quite sure how to incorporate it into my own work. I suspect it had something to do with my construal of the academic persona and with how I imagined the academic habitus and its implicit geographies. As a migrant, working-class youth from Sydney's southwestern suburbs, attending Sydney University was both transformative and dislocating. Even today, the suburb I lived in when I started university only has 4% of high-school-leavers attending university. I also arrived at this ‘sandstone university’ (yes, sandstone!), not knowing anything about the social sciences let alone philosophy or social theory. Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I was lucky enough to encounter some very good social and political theorists, including Carole Pateman, Alastair Davidson, John Lechte and Ephraim Nimni (a student of Ernesto Laclau). As I have recounted in another essay (de la Fuente, 2024), it was a great time to study social theory because, although many of the theorists I read around this time were proponents of what Mills (1959) terms ‘Grand Theory’, the tail end of my undergraduate studies coincided with contextual factors such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left reassessing what it meant to be radical, and the growing sense that culture and the symbolic were as important to politics as power and material interests.

But the process of falling in love with social theory came with a downside: I formed the impression that social theory was something practised by foreigners and ‘black-clad’ Melbournites. And that proving my academic bona fides meant I had to sound like the people I was reading. This coloured my initial responses to Antipodean sociology. Although, I was immediately drawn to the Antipodean approach, I lacked sufficient confidence in my own voice or my everyday experiences to cultivate an emplaced approach to sociology. Furthermore, because I assumed Melbourne academics were the closest thing Australia had to ‘real’ European social theorists, I struggled to understand how academics interested in Habermas or Castoriadis could also be interested in the suburban nature strips or rock scenes of their youth (Hogan, 2003; Beilharz, 2023). What as a Sydneysider I possibly underappreciated was that in addition to journals like Critical Horizons and Thesis Eleven, and entities like Agnes Heller, Johann Arnason and David Roberts, Melbourne was a city that also had a knack for insight into the vernacular via the paintings of John Brack and Howard Arkley, and the absurdist comedy of Dame Edna (on the mutual projections of Sydneysiders and Melbourneans regarding each other's cultural life, see Seddon, 1997: 131). I had to re-evaluate my own assumptions before more fully engaging with Antipodean sociology.

Locating what is interesting within: My path to place materialities

For the first two decades of my academic career, my intellectual work remained essentially placeless. Or better still ‘un-placed’. If places appeared in my work, these places were either geographically distant or free-floating and unready to land. This tendency started early. My doctoral research and early publications (including a monograph and journal articles) dealt with the musical cultures of Europe and North America (de la Fuente, 2011). Paradoxically, halfway through my doctoral research, which was largely theoretical and cultural historical, I felt a sudden desperate urge to see, smell and hear the musical cultures I was writing about. I gathered every penny I had and accompanied with my then partner, visited as many ‘sacred sites’ as possible that were mentioned in historical accounts of modern and post-modern music. In New York, I made sure to attend concerts at premiere venues for both the ‘uptown’ academic school and the ‘downtown’ experimental scene; in Paris, I visited the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées where Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring had famously caused a riot in 1913, as well as IRCAM, an institute devoted to the promotion of avant-garde and electronic music that forms part of the Pompidou complex. I was more tourist than ethnographer during this trip; often, rather than consulting libraries and archives, I ended up in bookshops and specialist record stores harvesting any artefact I could find. You could say I was hoping these metropole places and the universities I attended seminars at (e.g. the New School for Social Research), would somehow ‘rub off’ on me. I like to think that the experience and what ensued (i.e. the first decade and a half of my academic career), were necessary ‘detours’ or ‘side lanes’, as Nietzsche describes them. I felt I needed capital ‘M’ metropole cultural and intellectual capital. So, I wrote about art forms and sociological figures far from home. Indeed, had I wanted to engage with subject matter with more phenomenological-cum-material immediacy I would not have known how to go about it. I had to both find the right topics to make the transition and ditch (or at the very least relax) my ‘hang ups’ concerning the academic persona.

When it finally occurred, becoming more emplaced did not happen all at once. Place materialities started bubbling to the surface, and sometimes this occurred by happenstance or via some of the processes highlighted by Swedberg (e.g. speculation, reverie, guessing or turning to the unconscious). The period in question could also be described as eventful, if not chaotic. I had three different academic positions in the space of 7 years and ended up without a full-time position (on how this can positively impact your scholarly work see Probert, 2021: 172); I became a father, experienced a relationship breakdown, and my parents, siblings and I celebrated 50 years of having arrived in Australia. Clearly some biographical factors may have carried more weight in the shift in my work (for example, the mixture of feelings associated with the golden anniversary of migrating to Sydney was probably more important than a relationship breakdown that could have happened anywhere). However, to the extent losing a job or getting over a breakup may result in craving a familiar or comforting physical habitat, I guess we cannot discount the importance of place-attachments based on negotiating tricky emotional situations.

In fact, when I took a ‘Golden handshake’ from my last full-time academic position, I not only told my partner and son I wanted to return to the Sydney region – something that prompted new research case studies (de la Fuente, 2019a; 2020a) – I also said to them, in a very nonchalant way, that I was hoping we could rent an apartment with a ‘sandstone ambience’. To this day I have no idea what I meant beyond some mental image of an apartment block in close proximity to a sandstone wall/cliff, water dripping from the rock and the presence of some lush vegetation. As fate would have it, we succeeded in moving into the apartment depicted in Figure 2; and had the sandstone steps depicted in Figure 3 some 150 m from said apartment.

Figure 2.

Sandstone retaining wall outside author's apartment 2017–2018; photo credit: author.

Figure 3.

Marathon Steps linking Darling Point and Double Bay, New South Wales. Photo credit: author.

The sandstone habitat I had desired for therapeutic reasons unexpectedly became entangled with my intellectual work. The period coincided with a new theme in my sociological thinking: the idea of a ‘textural sociology’ (de la Fuente, 2019b; 2020b). As things worked out, I wrote and revised my first major publication on the topic of textures, entitled ‘After the Cultural Turn: For a Textural Sociology’ (de la Fuente, 2019b), at a desk placed next to the apartment window in Figure 2, which as the reader can see looked out over a sandstone retaining wall. Additionally, while working on the article, I often went for afternoon walks before picking up my son from childcare. One such walk took me to the Marathon Steps linking Double Bay and Darling Point (Figure 3). I have strong memories of reaching down and touching the sandstone balustrade. As my hand touched the cold grainy textures of the stone, my mind rushed to thoughts, such as, ‘How great that this piece of sandstone infrastructure is still standing when so many sandstone colonial buildings and other structures have been demolished’. In other words, although I was still preoccupied with theoretical exegeses and conceptual development in my publications, I had suddenly started noticing the place materialities around me.

I am not claiming a direct causal relationship between my new theoretical interest in textures and my noticing specific materialities. However, the coincidence seems too strong to ignore. Indeed, as I seek to develop the idea of a textural sociology into a scholarly monograph, the thought has crossed my mind: ‘Should I include Sydney sandstone in the Acknowledgements?’. In the ‘Preface and Acknowledgements’ to Being Alive, anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011: xii) similarly reflects: ‘Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources not the ground we walk, the ever-changing skies, mountains, rivers and rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit … [and other] innumerable companions … with which and with whom we share our lives?’. He adds: ‘They are constantly inspiring us, challenging us, telling us things’ (Ingold, 2011: xii). I was pleased he mentioned ‘rocks’; however, as Ingold (2011: xii) also states, there is no point in rocks telling us things, if we are not ready ‘to be responsive to what the world has to offer’. In this respect, I was fortunate to discover the sociological writings of Kurt H. Wolff as I was making my textural sociological–place materiality ‘turn’. Like many other scholars, I had known him for his translations of European social theory ‘classics’ such as Georg Simmel and Karl Mannheim (Wolff, 1950; 1971). But Wolff (1976) also developed his own unique sociology that speaks to the issue of being attentive to what the world wants to tell us. He described the required attitude as involving a ‘surrender experience’ – where surrendering involves both total involvement and seeing something completely afresh. The experience is comparable to ‘what happens when we see a street for the first time, when we meet a new person, see a new part of the city, enter a house not entered before?’ (Wolff, 1976: 13). For the present author, it was a case of, ‘what happens when you finally start noticing a rock that has accompanied you for five decades?’. One that dates from the Triassic period.

Performing Antipodean sociology: What I am learning from sandstone

In the space of a few short years, I found myself exploring a series of place materialities connected to different biographical moments or phases: the wet and dry tropics; concrete and the post-war, Brutalist campus (de la Fuente, 2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2023); mountainous peri-urban locations (de la Fuente, 2019a; 2020a); and then Sydney sandstone (de la Fuente, 2024; 2025 and this article). My first forays were often tentative and clumsy; some topics only lasted as long as the particular life-phase or the publication opportunities that arose. While other topics – either due to the encouragement of others or the personal existential significance they acquired – stuck. They felt like long-term scholarly investments. Sydney sandstone fell into this category. Furthermore, when I began seriously considering researching Sydney sandstone, Beilharz and Hogan's (2006: xix) instructions to the contributors to Sociology: Place, Time and Division often echoed in my deliberations: ‘We … asked our writers … to tell stories about places or institutions they know. The prompt [wa]s intended to be personal’. I quickly realised the stone was something I knew more about than I had realised. Not technical or scholarly knowledge – rather what Michael Polanyi (1974) had termed ‘tacit’ knowledge. The latter gets at the kinds of cues we pick up from environments and with varying degrees of consciousness.

Early on in my thinking and writing about Sydney sandstone I recorded a research note based on an adult experience. It related to palpable feelings of landscape familiarity and the unleashing of associated memories, while approaching Sydney in a motor vehicle:

I am an adult in my forties. I am living in the Dandenong Ranges and working at Monash University but driving ‘home’ to Sydney for Christmas. I am hurtling along the Hume Highway, and some 90-minutes out from Sydney, I sense that the landscape has somehow changed. At first, this sensation is nothing more than something registering in my peripheral vision. I am after all driving and focusing on the road. But the pleasant associations and the heightened awareness of landscape are palpable and force me to look sideways (i.e., out the driver's window). I immediately realise I am driving through a sandstone cutting in the vicinity of the Nattai River in the Southern Highlands. I have entered Sydney's scenic sandstone rim. There is a strong sense of déjà vu and of having arrived. My mind instantaneously conjures up primal scenes, from decades earlier, where I am also in a car and there is sandstone ‘outside’ (I put outside in quotation marks because the stone is obviously also ‘inside’ of me). My imagination also triggers quickfire comparisons: the colour of the sandstone which I am presently driving through is predominantly dark grey and some of it looks like dirty fabric that requires washing. Whereas, when our family used to head north, to visit friends who lived in Terrigal [on the NSW Central Coast], I remember oranges with splashes of purple and red. Much more evocative of sunsets. (Author's personal files dated 20 January 2023)

The research note was written a decade and a half after the actual experience. Yet it is a moment that I can recall with ease, and I trust with a degree of vividness. What is also interesting is the layering of memory from various past-presents from childhood through to that vivid moment as an adult. None of the information recorded in my research note would have come as a surprise to the materialist phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1994; 2000), who was very interested in the links between matter, reverie and poetic imagination. In Poetics of Space, the author writes: ‘the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain is us for all time’ (Bachelard, 1969: 6, emphasis in the original). Bachelard is writing specifically about former houses we have lived in rather than familiar landscapes. But what Bachelard says about houses arguably extends to other types of dwelling-places, including a sandstone physical environment glimpsed through the windscreen and driver's side-window of a moving car. He writes: ‘if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’ (Bachelard, 1969: 6). I would contend that this is precisely the role familiar landscapes are able to play – sheltering us so we may daydream.

Furthermore, in my case, the car–sandstone-reverie nexus is grounded in a very specific set of familial everyday rituals from the past. When we arrived in Australia, like many other working-class migrants, we settled in the non-sandstone topography of Greater Western Sydney. However, much of our leisure time took place in Sydney's sandstone country. This was in no small part because, a year after arriving, my father landed an infrastructure job in Sydney's sandstone scenic rim. In fact, he joined the project close to where I experienced my motor vehicle ‘sandstone epiphany’ all those decades later. Due to my father's connection to the high-altitude sandstone country (he took me to work once when I was eight and I can still remember some of the precipitous terrain!) my family spent much of its leisure time either in sandstone locations or driving along sandstone-framed roads. In recent years my mother has made me the custodian of family snapshots from these early years in Australia, and sandstone is often our companion. In one such photo, my mother, siblings and I are posing at Fitzroy Falls, in Sydney's Southern Highlands. Behind us is a vertical cliff and a waterfall plunging some 100 m to a lush rainforest below – all common landscape features in the sandstone country (see Figure 4). We look relaxed and ‘at home’. Indeed, we had so many picnics at Fitzroy Falls over the years, either by ourselves or with family friends/members of my parents’ congregation, that the spot – which was around 100 km from our actual home – acquired the sense of being a ‘second home’. Fitzroy Falls became a de facto backyard for family barbecues, an open-air rumpus room to stage family events.

Figure 4.

Author with brothers and mother at Fiztroy Falls in the Southern Highlands. Photo credit: Daniel de la Fuente (author's father).

I started to feel that such moments of insight and recollection were valuable; and they, in turn, cemented the idea of self-landscape porosity (e.g. the sensation that a familiar landscape was both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ me). Introspection was paying off. I am not alone in this respect. Some of the best place-writing about the sandstone country is happy to narrate experiences in terms of personal experience. Thus, Eugene Stockton (2013: np), a Catholic priest with a keen interest in the landscapes of the Blue Mountains and the sacred places underpinning both Aboriginal and European spirituality therein (Emilsen and Stockton, 2021), in one of his many reflections on the sandstone country recollects ‘rock-hopping around the harbour foreshores, clambering over rock faces, picking our way through the ridge-top heathland or viewing far vistas from cliff-tops’. Sandstone seems to generate very visceral and embodied personal memories. Likewise, novelist and creative writing academic Delia Falconer (2010: 4) writes of childhood memories of ‘the dark layer of black pollution and mould soaked into the sandstone fronts of Sydney's grand buildings, and the green trails of water leaking from the cliffs and high walls of The Rocks’ (see Figure 5 for a comparable example from the Potts Point–Elizabeth Bay area of Sydney). Sydney sandstone writing often makes you think you are reading the work of a ‘new materialist’ philosopher or the writings of a psychogeographer (Bennett, 2010; Coverley, 2010). As such, we find playwright turned place ‘biographer’ ³ Louis Nowra (1999: 73) documenting how a stroll down the road separating working-class Woolloomooloo from the more bohemian and gentrifying Kings Cross is ‘further reinforced’ by a ‘massive sandstone cliff face, a cutting that rises sharply for thirty metres or so, dramatically isolating the flaneur from the peninsula of the Cross’. This is empirical knowledge that could only be gleaned by walking. Nowra (2022: 206) offers another vivid description of sandstone's urban impacts when he writes lyrically about how ‘[a]t times it is as if [the stone] is a living creature as water seeps from its pores, and the stone hosts lichens, mosses creepers, ferns … and can live in a symbiotic relationship with the exposed roots of fig trees’ (also see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Sandstone wall and cliff separating Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay in Sydney's inner east with vegetation, plant roots and discoloration on the rocky surfaces. Photo credit: author.

By now, there might be hints as to why the growing interest in place materialities reconnected me with Antipodean sociology. The Sydney place authors I have mentioned, and my own writings, were performing precisely the type of place writing Antipodean sociology advocated: ‘telling stories of particular places’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006: xix). Indeed, the Antipodean approach represents something of a bridge between the social sciences and various forms of local place writing. ⁴ Seddon (1997: 113) even discusses sandstone, in a section of Landprints, entitled ‘Learning from the Geology’, where he says: ‘The gold of Hawkesbury sandstone … is everywhere in cliffs, cuttings and buildings’. ⁵ Furthermore, if Antipodean sociology urges us to think in terms of the triad of ‘place, time and division’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006), in the case of Sydney sandstone it is interesting how entangled place and division are. Greater Western Sydney and all its perceived ‘lacks’ (e.g. lower educational attainment, greater use of automobiles to get around and higher consumption of ‘fast food’), map onto the geographical and topographical zone known as the Cumberland Plain, which is flat and where the sandstone lies buried beneath hundreds of metres of clay. Wealthy Sydney, glamorous Sydney, ‘leafy’ Sydney, and university-educated Sydney, tends to be concentrated in the dramatic sandstone topography of the Eastern Suburbs, Coastal Sydney and the North Shore. As a signifier of Sydney's socio-spatial divisions, sandstone-Sydney and non-sandstone-Sydney probably makes as much sense as ‘milky espresso coffee-Sydney’ and ‘fast-food fried chicken-Sydney’ (i.e. the so-called Latte and Red Rooster lines that are sometimes used to divide Sydney into socioeconomic halves via a cleavage running from the city's northwest to southeast).

Similarly, when it comes to what Beilharz and Hogan (2006: xxi) describe as ‘cultural traffic’ (although, in the case of Sydney sandstone, it would be ‘geological’ or ‘place materiality’ traffic), there is the fact that the sand particles migrated to their current location and continue to move about due to the impacts of various human and nonhuman forces. In fact, sandstone is a great example of what Doreen Massey (2006: 34) terms an ‘immigrant rock’: a representative of ‘tectonic wanderings’ that requires us to think of landscape and geology as embodiments, not of fixity and primeval connections to place, but rather of fluidity and a ‘global sense of place’. The stone's formation involved a process where each sand grain, no ‘more than a few millimetres in diameter’, was deposited in the Sydney area as the surging waters of a prehistoric river the size of the Ganges became ‘too feeble to transport them further’ (Flannery, 1999: 9). Given the emphasis Antipodean sociology places on ‘time’, and in history as a natural ally of sociology (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006: xviii-xix), it is worth remembering that Sydney sandstone has its own history; and the stone's history, in turn, is entangled with other histories. The stone indexes geological processes that took millions of years (Jones, 2013) – and Sydney's pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial histories (Falconer, 2010, Flannery, 1999). A stone that speaks to Ingold's (2011: 31) proposition: ‘Stones, too, have histories, forged in ongoing relations with surroundings that may or may not include human beings and much else besides’.

Sydney sandstone also speaks to the kind of geographical and cultural marginality that initially drove the project of Antipodean sociology. How so? At the time of the colonial encounter, the sandstone country – with its vertiginous terrain and sandy or infertile soils – came to be perceived as a ‘wasteland’ (Jones, 2013). Another key trope was the site of the Sydney colony part constituted The World Upside Down (Favelle, 2000). Even as sandstone was quarried on an industrial scale, and the stone moved from being associated with the natural environment to the built one, did such stigmas ensue. In the twentieth century, the stone was spurned and cast aside as architects and designers sought to introduce metropole styles such as Art Deco and International Modernism to the city. The building boom that, in the 1930s and ’40s, led to a spate of Art Deco apartment towers in Sydney's harbourside neighbourhoods occurred on ‘sites created by the demolition of colonial and Victorian terraces and mansions, or by subdivisions of their grounds’ (Butler-Bowden and Pickett, 2007: 58). A case of urban modernity and architectural fashion at war with Sydney's primal rock. These ‘taste wars’ continued into the 1960s and ’70s with the shift towards International Modernism. One Sydney newspaper ran an editorial in 1962 that celebrated the replacement of ‘New Stone for Old’: ‘The wreckers of buildings have carried off many a sombre sandstone structure … the older sandstone … buildings … are giving way to new buildings of lighter—and brighter—structural materials such as steel, aluminium and glass’ (cited in Spearritt, 2000: 253).

More recently, the semiotic and material associations between modernity, urbanity and fashion as enemies of Sydney's primeval rock have morphed into sandstone as the basis of restraint and existential soul-searching. In short, recently sandstone has been conscripted into a kind of twenty-first century reckoning with place. Tim Flannery (1999: 8) claims the stone has ‘shaped [Sydney's] economy, guided its spread and protected its natural jewels – the rainforest gullies, coves and beaches made inaccessible to builders by its steep bluffs’. Elsewhere, in a piece on the recent Barangaroo redevelopment, the same author suggests a new fondness for sandstone in urban and landscape design serves an act of ‘reparation’ atoning for the damage inflicted by colonialism and urbanisation (Flannery, 2017). Falconer (2010: 1–2), for her part, uses sandstone to puncture the city's reputation as a ‘glamorous’, ‘luminous’ and ‘insubstantial’ place. As against the ‘Deco lightness’ of Sydney – ‘its Bridge, its Luna Park, its mission-style mansions’ – sandstone provides ‘a kind of base note, an ever-present reminder of its Georgian beginnings and more ancient past’ (Falconer, 2010: 3). She also suggests the region's material and elemental qualities make for a specific form of metaphysics:

Think in Sydney and you can be no cold metaphysician. The material constantly intrudes … Even a walk up the street is often literally ‘up’, as the city climbs to precipitous cliffs at its sea edge, in contrast to a metropolis like Manhattan where every rise has been razed. Yet this constant awareness of the material, which goes back to our Georgian past and its interest in the body's humours … is quite different from shallow materialism. In fact, paying close attention to the city's tides and sunlight can even constitute an antidote to [a] city's pretensions to glamour. (Falconer, 2010: 5–6)

Whether place turns us into distinct types of philosophers or social theorists is something the humanities and social sciences might want to consider further (see Malpas, 2015). Landscape and place qualities have not received the same attention as say nationality, cities or globality in the shaping of social science. However, if Falconer is right in seeing a connection between place material consciousness and the type of metaphysician one becomes then the secret may lie in landscape processes-cum-ontologies. I read the kind of landscape memoir offered by Tredinnick as operating in this register. He notes that the sandstone country was formed by ‘[f]ifty million years [of] rivers … carrying the country in; and fifty million years … spent carrying the country out again … in between the [sandstone country] lay down and slept’ (Tredinnick, 2009: 4). In addition to these temporalities, the landscape offers us a meditation on what is permanent and what can suddenly change (e.g. sandstone cliffs are constantly collapsing due to interactions between rock and the elements). When we look at the landscape, we are, in a sense, contemplating what is left behind. Tredinnick sees the sandstone country as a powerful metaphor for existential and creative processes:

I am made of pieces and of the spaces between them where other pieces used to be … Most of me is the memory of where else, and who else, and with whom, I have been and no longer am … And, so it is with the [sandstone country] … We are not – none of us, not I and not this place – ever whole; we are never of a piece … The real book is the one you do not write, the one that orders the pieces that remain; and the real [sandstone country] is the work to which all the pieces almost amount, the order they all imply … All we can ever know is some of the parts … each an allusion to the same kind of truth. (Tredinnick, 2009: 5–6)

Beautifully put: both the world and our sense of self are composed of and from fragments. However, when we examine the fragments, we find all matter of human and nonhuman connections. I think Antipodean sociology shares this sense that looking at things from different perspectives, even if slightly dizzying, is the best we can do. Reflecting on his varied intellectual interests, which have spanned Marxism, labour politics, Bernard Smith's art histories, Zygmunt Bauman's sociology, and whether there is something distinctive about Australian or American civilisation, Beilharz (2015: xvii) writes: ‘I have spent my life changing feet, sometimes feeling giddy in the process, often weary’. Despite these challenges, what keeps us going is the possibility of locating ‘a portal into what we are, where we have come from. Where are we going? Read on; write on’ (Beilharz, 2015: xxvii).

Concluding remarks: On reaching Nietzschean ‘sunny places’

In this article, I have attempted to give Antipodean sociology its dues by attempting to document what this genre of social and cultural reflection offers us with respect to topics like landscape and the physical environments of this continent. I have also covered why Antipodean sociology thinks place matters and the documenting of place experience, through the prism of biography, is valuable. In my case, becoming more attentive to place involved a dual process: moving beyond certain attitudes to ‘theory’ and theorising; and starting to recognise the materialities of the places in which I was dwelling or had dwelled. The specific qualities of places might be seen as a ‘gift’ that, for a long time, I was unable to receive and to fully appreciate. My Nietzschean ‘sunny place’ could not be reached until I began questioning my own assumptions about what it means to be an academic social theorist. The explicitly topological idea of ‘sunny place’ appeals to me of course because landscape and place have been so central to my own journey. ⁶

However, sunny places are not literal points on the map that we simply arrive at by heading in the right direction. Nietzsche (1974: 35, emphasis in the original), who identified as ‘philosophical physician’ of the human soul, suggests intellectual dead-ends often stem from fundamental ‘misunderstandings of the body’. As a corrective, he recommends thinkers become better at gauging not the ‘truth’ of thought; but rather ‘let us say, [its] health, future, growth, power, life’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 35). This includes being attentive to those moments where thought senses its own ‘frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions of the end’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 35). Arguably, the need to understand levels of vitality extends to academic disciplines. Interestingly, Sociology: Place, Time and Division begins with the following observation: ‘If sociology would speak, it would say “I am tired”. Sociology needs renewal and refreshment; it needs its youth and energy, as well as the sobriety of middle age’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006: xv). Reflecting on the health of our thinking is partly about recognising the challenges involved and re-orientating our energies accordingly: ‘In the study of sociology, our object always eludes us. The social is always ahead of us; it moves … Our task, or responsibility, is to pick up on this vitality, novelty, freshness of insight … to work the senses’ (Beilharz and Hogan, 2006: xxii).

Echoing the ethos of Antipodean sociology, in this article I have turned to the idea of emplacement to preserve the vitality, novelty and freshness of insight of my own social theorising. I drew on tools Swedberg recommends for stimulating the sociological imagination including introspective methods. I would like to conclude by reinforcing that, although emplacement suggests the need to locate oneself in the world, place does not refer to empirical or geographical places alone. One could place oneself in the world via class or gender experience, family or social history (for a multifaceted sociological memoir see Wolff, 2017). In my own case, whether due to personal proclivity or the migrant experience and a peripatetic life, landscapes and places have served as useful diagnostic tools and intellectual tonics. And a given stone – one that had been quietly accompanying me for five decades – played a significant role in my fusing social theorising with personal experience.