Conclusion: Haunted Pasts and Methektic Futures

Abstract

I began this book with a brief description of the painting that collocates many of Sir John Soane’s architectural achievements in one room. I introduced this painting to highlight that the relocation of spaces (and places and landscapes) onto the stage has the potential to comment on the meanings of space that are produced in a particular culture. Unsettling Space has assembled a broad range of spaces — from specific geographical places to less-conventionally staged psychic spaces — in order to read them with and against each other. While Gandy depicted many of Soane’s creations in one painting (Figure 1), my collection of space(s) accounts for only selected examples of theatre and some larger aspects of spatiality in Australia. I have focused on three topoi — monuments, contamination, and the borders of identity — to illustrate the ways in which the anxiety surrounding spatiality is expressed on the Australian stage. I hope that my approach will facilitate the interpretation of other spatial contexts that make meaning on the Australian stage, in Australian culture, and beyond.¹ Two factors have emerged from the analysis of spatiality and anxiety in Australian cultural identity: the haunting by ghosts of various types, and the desire to rethink a better future.

In the final analysis, our conception of ourselves is indelibly linked to our conception of space.

(Wertheim, 1999: 308)

Every time we have thought that we’ve defined the boundaries of space, we find another.

(Balodis, in Kelly, 1990: 35)