Spatial Illusion

Stasia Skonberg

Cultural Geography: Dr. Richard Simpson

2/7/21

Response Paper 4

Spatial Illusion

         In Paul Carter’s chapters “Spatial History and Naming Places”, we are brought through the history of place naming in Australia and how Imperial history has reduced its spaces to a stage in which focuses on “…events unfolding in time alone”(Carter,p 375). Carters most specific  claim in his spatial history chapter is how the primary ways of telling history are surrounded by this illusion of an “all seeing spectator” leaving the historian to be seen as just a bystander. By doing this, historians reduced space to a stage in which history can play out on in a logical and linear way. Instead of thinking of a place for its cultural inhabitants or specific specialties of the land, we think of these places in relation to other places that we know.

         Real, true history is the history of roads, footprints, and trails of dust, according to Carter. Not the physical, written histories that we can see but the living, breathing, human nature of a space. Space should be defined through which a culture declares its presence and not what the “founder” can compare what they see it to in order to better navigate the land. Carter's main argument is that our life spatially is dynamic, and material that is invisible. By destroying the understanding that conquerors of those lands are heroes attempting to fulfill a higher destiny, as imperial history implies, we are brought to the reality of space.

The reality of space is that it is a vast and open concept that we as humans need, but we as humans also control and enforce our own ideals and comparisons onto. Space is confusing and twisted, not linear and logical and it is not meant to be understood as a stage in which things just occur. We are directly impacting our space and other peoples spaces, and as soon as we as humans can accept that, then we can begin to reclaim cultural space.