The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002. This was a curious way to hold a discussion with a writer so interested in questions of embodiment and relationship to place. Without the nuances of faces and bodies to embody and represent writing/thoughts, the potential for missing meanings was heightened somewhat; over email, a 'huh?' could possibly last for days rather than seconds. But the mode of this exchange is significant in also illustrating the role of imagination and play in questions of embodiment and place. Both of these elements feature in Somerville's work Body/Landscape Journals (1999), a ficto-critical text which seeks to investigate what she calls a 'postcolonial practice of writing'; writing which both seeks and questions an embodied settler belonging in a (post)colonised landscape. B/L J follows two previously published collaborative texts, The Sun Dancin' (1994) with Marie Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson and Maureen Sulter, and Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (1990) with Patsy Cohen, both collaborations (1) having had profound effects on the ways in which Somerville now chooses to write. In the discussion that follows, Somerville elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape.

This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for researching the lived body are suggested and the problems of phenomenological research identified. The theoretical conditions, methodological gestures, and analytical strategies for researching the body in body/place relations are explored in relation to the author's own work in Body/landscape journals (Somerville, 1999 ) and the work of other Australian researchers. These are brought together in relation to a small sample of the author's current research into safe bodies in the mining industry.

This research explores the implementation of an external quality assurance process with the people of Kulai Aboriginal Preschool. A participatory action research approach was used to examine the process. The impact of this quality assurance process on learning and change in the workplace was the focus of the study. Putting Children First: Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (NCAC 1993) was the initial impetus for organisational change at the preschool, however establishing trust and engaged relationships emerged as critical to meaning making and to changing workplace practices. Metaphors aided communication by bridging cultural boundaries and enacting transformations in thinking. Metaphor and quality assurance were seen as fluid terms, generating energy by moving between possible understandings. Meaning making comes about as a consequence of this movement. Data was collected through participant observations and interviews. This information was recorded using written and visual narrative forms. Maps enabled a macro and micro-analysis of participation in meaning making and organisational change in the context of this Aboriginal early childhood centre. This analysis brought alive the space-in-between, also known as the third space or m-i-n-d field where meaning making was found to occur. Maps enabled the visualisation of meaning making to occur as a consequence of shared action. Analysis of these maps illuminated the complexity of participation in the quality assurance process.

This article is based on research into the practical problem of masculinity and learning and practising safety in the mining industry. The research began with a post-structural analysis of gendered subjectivity in miners' yarns but argues that a concept of 'culture' is needed to elucidate a middle-level relationship between individual workers and the organisation. Concepts of 'culture', however, are problematic in this context because they have been used uncritically in organisational literature. The author explores the enactment of a concept of 'culture' through an ethnographic study of mine workers. It was found that workplace cultures are characterised by violence and aggression, risk taking, and competitiveness, which impact on learning and practising safety. In emergent understandings of culture in this study the author suggests that 'culture' can be reconceptualised in order to involve workers in their own cultural analysis and to articulate the relationship between the complex, collective, and contested nature of contemporary workplaces and the learning that takes place there. Such a cultural analysis enables the possibility of identifying sites of change and 'culture' as a concept that can be mobilised as a technology for workers to intervene in their own workplace practices.

The title of the conference suggested to me questions of (auto)biography, questions about the power of telling of our lives in relation to our research in adult learning and teaching. In this paper I will reflect on my own stories, and the stories of participants in two research projects, about transformations, to explore how we might re-generate research in adult learning and teaching. I will self consciously adopt a storytelling methodology for writing and presenting this paper as a potential (re)generative strategy. I will begin the paper with some memory work (Haug, 1987; Davies et al, forthcoming) of my own relationship to the field of adult learning and teaching and to the exclusionary practices of the discipline.

This paper arises from a research study that I have recently conducted into workplace learning in aged care workplaces in partnership with an organisation that manages a number of aged care facilities in rural and regional Australia. Twenty aged care workers were interviewed using semi-structured, conversational style interviews about how they learned to do their work. This included trainee entry level care workers who were also researched using discussion/focus groups and conversational interviews about the process of their workplace learning, tracking their learning experiences after one week, three months and eight months of full time work. This paper focuses on the findings from these trainee care workers. The study found that these trainee workers learned in the usual ways that have been documented in the workplace learning literature. The most powerful and resilient learning however, was learning the body, a process which could only occur during the process of doing their work in a community of practice. The paper will explore this body learning, its embedded nature, and how new learning is contested within this community of practice.

This paper looks at how learning is opened up when it occurs in a loving and living space. Working together in a small cottage in a university campus has brought unexpected rewards to the theoretical learning of each of the inhabitants. The history of the women who have passed through this place resonates in the conversations. The place itself provides the conditions for sewing the frayed fabric of creative learning. In the hollow of this lies the shared meaning making that seeps across boundaries. There is a sense of the hidden, subversive unnamed and uncontested which gathers us into the living experience of learning. Here we celebrate the [in]competent, maverick and illegitimate. And here the questions are revealed as seeds for challenging theories of knowledge. We ask, if learning is fundamental to life then what happens when we celebrate the living? We are not attempting to arrive at definitive answers but to open up a conversation with multiple voices.

Little research has been done on how places with shared Indigenous and colonial pasts are communicated to tourists. One problem is that many tourists lack an understanding of Indigenous cultural landscapes and have stereotyped views of Indigenous peoples and places. In order to address this problem we argue that an embodied presence in the landscape, focusing on knowledge by the body as well as knowledge by the mind, is essential to understanding Indigenous place stories, and for seeing the landscape in new ways. On the mid-north coast of New South Wales, where ecotourism is increasingly important,we are carrying out a collaborative research project to develop interpretive materials with the Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation. In the Yarrawarra Place Stories project (1997–2000) we have carried out oral history and archaeological research, and through a series of five books based on individual places, we attempt to convey Aboriginal places in complex and layered ways which focus on an embodied presence in the landscape, and explore how tourists may construct places visited in new ways. In this article we provide a reading of an example of the place representations from this project (Yarrawarra Place Stories Books 1–5) to make evident the embodied nature of local place stories in this interdisciplinary research project.

In this thesis I explored the question of how we can put ourselves in the picture of place. I have identified an absence of the body in discourses available to women to represent themselves and this is particularly so for rural women working in traditional visual arts. I developed and examined ways in which rural women, including those coming to artwork for the first time, retrieved and named their embodied experiences of place and put them to work critically and aesthetically as artworks in the public domain. Research methods included a series of workshops, a performance and an exhibition, in all of which a group of sixteen rural women explored collaborative ways of developing and presenting their individual expressions. This involved working with voice, body and the materials of place (which included domestic and environmental materials and objects). Data collection came from documentation of the community arts project Expressions of Place which formed the main study of my thesis. It also included autobiographical material relating to practices of place, practices of making and learning experiences. Material from the project took many different forms - documentation that was visual and conversational: that came from group and individual scrapbooks and journals, workshops exercises, works in process, performance script and audio/visual recordings, visitors books, photographs and exhibition artworks. Our findings were expressed as the development of a grounded pedagogy of body and place. This was elaborated using the layered metaphors of bridging, voicing, gathering, stretching and performing that structured the process of the workshops and their representations. Although these findings are specific to this group of women it is likely that the conclusions of the process could be applied to similar groups, and more broadly to women's artmaking and representational practices.