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Places are unique. The influence of the earth’s rocks, the shape of the land. What grows, what gains nourishment from the land, what plants and animals it supports. How the wind blows and where the rain falls or the snow descends. How the tide runs and the seas surge. All these combine to make anywhere at all, somewhere here, somewhere now; somebody’s somewhere. A place precious and personal to those born and raised there. A place beyond compare, because it is personal. Somewhere, where people can see themselves, and others, living in the same, shared space.

The rocks remain. Geological time is slow. The river’s beat is more rapid; systole and diastole (Gunn, N 1991). Populations of trees and herbs flourish and diminish. Springs dry. The river overruns its banks. What was once eroded accumulates. Birds and beasts settle or migrate as their favoured abodes survive or shift elsewhere. But places are not places if they do not embody the activities of our lives. For the Foi people of Papua New Guinea, locations acquire significance only if they are ‘quickened by the concernful acts of people’ (Weiner 1991, 183). A place ‘crystallise[s] out of a qualityless environment’ (ibid) because we remember and appreciate what has happened there. We come to know a place because we come to know its stories (Potteiger & Purinton 1998). But this memorable top layer of placemaking is also its most transient. Song, poem and the tale, and once-upon-a-time played out over the land, can become just that. It is the human element that vainly accrues, and can as quickly wither, leaving no name. It is the human element that erodes the most swiftly, without trace and beyond reach of memory. Humanised space dies without human concern (Weiner 1991).