As an artist and musician, ‘place’ has always been entwined in my creative
work and thinking. This arts-based autoethnography (Manovski, 2014), and
music-based research (Leavy, 2015) draws deep connections between being an
artist, researcher and educator in relation to the conceptual and physical local
landscapes I move through. Situated in local places this research explores the
dynamic overlaps (Yunkaporta, 2009) found across cultures, places, time and
space. In response to this sense of place this thesis presents an intertextual
artistic and scholarly celebration of this Wurundjeri landscape—this southern
place—while critically gazing at myself in relation to land, people, climates, skies,
waterways, and animals as I co-create with, and in ‘the south’ (Connell, 2007b).
A complex polyphonic layering and re-presentation is thus expressed through
the arts-based knowledge and narratives created as part of this artful inquiry. In
this way a multimodal engagement with place, autoethnography and arts-based
narratives is established.