It is only then, in her last year at high school, that Jones read her first novel. Six years later, the family moved to the city of Perth. However, after three years in the Kimberleys, Jones moved to Kalgoorlie, where her father took on a job as an electrician in the goldmines. Thus it is as early as from this period of her life, between the age of seven and ten, that she developed an inclination for narrative. B-grade movies furnished an interest in melodrama and character, and inducted me into a sense that the pleasure of any narrative is in part based on a choice of images – that there is a kind of visual order of knowing by which the ordinary becomes iconic or symbolic, or by which one is riveted by something beyond the narrative drive, but utterly and wonderfully redolent, nevertheless. My narrative interest as a child was based in cinema, not in reading, nor was there, then or later, any moment of realizing vocation. For Jones, this was a time of immense freedom, of sensory emancipation, and imaginative excursions, for while there was no library or bookshop, nor any television or radio reception in the Kimberleys, the family drove into town each Saturday night to catch the double feature at the Sun Picture, the outdoor cinema in Broome that screened mostly B-graded movies (Westerns as well as mystery or sword-and-sandal epics). It was large and isolated, and, most importantly, situated by the ocean. Their house, a former hospital on a quarantine station, was based on the outskirts of the Kimberley town of Broome. Of these three places, it is the one in the far north-west that has impressed her most. Child-knowing keeps safe images and experiences of place in highly particular ways, and I believe that the landscapes of childhood have particular relevance to artistry.
I have inhabited, therefore, a series of landscapes, each with its own claims of beauty and specialness. I spent my childhood in several areas in rural Western Australia, in a remote region by the ocean in the far north west, in the goldmining district of the desert in the centre, and in dairy farming land near the south west coast.
0 kommentar(er)
