ABSTRACT
Places are experienced in states of distraction. We read them and act within
them while pursuing the agendas of everyday life. To ‘understand’ places one
must ‘stand under’ them. This requires an attention to how we each construct
places through action and in memory. This chapter, then, is a turn from theory
towards the personal – how might theories of power and built form change the
ways we understand and ‘excavate’ places in our own lives? It is a rather per-
sonal account of Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, Western Australia. And it
is a turn towards questions of liberation, exploring the ironies of a place of incar-
ceration becoming a place of emancipation and then exclusion. Rottnest is a
place of semantic inversions, haunted by intangible and buried meanings. The
tactics for excavating and articulating them are necessarily oblique.
