Introduction to Special Issue: Being here matters

“Out here nothing changes, not in a hurry anyway, you can feel the endlessness with the coming of the light of day.” So wrote the singer songwriter Shane Howard who in the early 1980s had come to Uluru in central Australia and camped with Pitjantjatjara people in the hope he would discover himself and the continent that he called home. By the closing decades of the 20th century, the search for new and deeper meanings of both self and place that had brought Howard to the Centre reflected a kind of pilgrimage, a right-of-passage that had become a well-worn path for those seeking entrée to the authenticity of a place, a space, a landscape, and an imagining, that had come to define what many claimed to be the “real” and “true” Australia. In this way, the Centre has been transformed into a significant cultural landscape for settler–colonial society and narratives that invent, imagine and define the Australian nation.