Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region

Australia’s evocative Mallee region is rich with histories, impressions and geographical complexities. It is also a microcosm of a world in turmoil. Ground Truthing allows the Mallee to speak: to show its nurturing and renewable self. In searching for the creative principles that bring the Mallee into being, Carter digs, plots and weaves a poetic passage. A Wotjobaluk man, ‘Jowley’, the poet John Shaw Neilson and pastoralist William Stanbridge are among characters that give creative access to the region. Their voices mingle with those of vanished peoples and an ecological future crying out for renegotiation. Through this spatial history of the Mallee, we see that regions contain ‘the region of regions’ that is the creative key to the production and sustenance of all places.