Australian Geographer

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Some literary examples of humanistic descriptions

of place

D. N. Jeans

To cite this article: D. N. Jeans (1979) Some literary examples of humanistic descriptions of
place, Australian Geographer, 14:4, 207-214, DOI: 10.1080/00049187908702764

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 AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHER
Volume 14, No. 4 November 1979

Some Literary Examples of Humanistic Descriptions of Place

D. N. JEANS*

Summary: Describing places and regions is a longstanding geographical activity which largely
continues today in the form of regional texts. Geographers have always scorned 'mere'
description of appearances, here called visual descriptions, and have evolved technical
descriptions illuminated by the principles of systematic geography. C. O. Sauer and J. Leighley in
particular have acknowledged a further, higher, type of description which may be referred to as
humanistic description and which sets out to discover the wider meanings places carry in
experience and the wider setting of culture and society. The nature of humanistic description is
explored, with examples.

The description of regions and places has been a major
geographical activity since the foundations of the discipline
by the ancient Greeks, and even since the academic
refoundation of the nineteenth century. In the past, the
careers of many distinguished geographers were crowned
by the production of a major regional geography, and it is
in this way, in the humbler writing of pedagogical regional
texts, that geographical description survives.
Some of the twentieth-century masters of Geography
have written treatises on the subject. W. M. Davis
advocated geographical description based on analysis and
systematic study of earth elements, notably his own genetic
geomorphology.i H. C. Darby, an historical geographer,
also outlined a genetic approach, this one concentrating on
the cultural landscape, defining Geography as 'the
explanatory description of landscape'.2 John Leighley
placed original description first among the geographical
methods he surveyed in 1937,3 while Carl 0. Sauer had
earlier suggested the man-land relationship as the binding
tie of a geographical description of place.4 At least in the
form of regional texts, geographers continue to produce
place descriptions.
Descriptions of regions and places may be categorized as
visual, technical or humanistic. Visual descriptions, which
may deserve the common approbrium of 'mere'
description, give an account of the appearance of a place as
it might be in substitution for a landscape painting or a
photograph. Few geographers have attempted this limited
aim, and most have written descriptions informed by the
theory of geography, regional or systematic. Such
descriptions, depending on the current state of
* Dr D. N. Jeans is a senior lecturer in Geography at the University of
Sydney.
geographical knowledge, whether geomorphological as
with W. M. Davis or cultural, as with H.' C. Darby, can be
called 'technical' descriptions. Technical descriptions have
been structured by some well-defined frameworks derived
from an empirical approach to geography. Since Alexander
von Humboldt, much attention has been given to
landscapes described as types within the general field of
comparative regional geography, and the elaboration of
systematic geography has multiplied the range of types to
be described. The problem has always been to integrate the
complex interrelationship of phenomena which forms the
character of a placed One way of doing this has been to
adopt the familiar heirarchy of categories, beginning with
such physical components as climate and hydrology, and
ending with more 'dependent' human categories such as
political geography and recreation. Such an approach relied
strongly on an inbuilt environmental determinism, and the
alternative method of adopting unifying themes, physical,
human, or implying some environmental relationship, has
more recently been adopted.6
In this way, geographical descriptions have come to
depend on the systematic point of view from which they
are written, employing the findings of systematic
geography. Each kind of geography has in fact produced its
own type of technical geographical description.
The rise of 'humanistic geography' therefore leads to
expectations of it being accompanied by a new kind of
geographical description focused on man's experience,
awareness and knowledge as it is emphasized in the
literature of this field.7 The aim of humanistic geography is
to raise our awareness of how people live in the world and
structure it so as to impart meaning on their lives and the
institutions they have founded to cope with the world. The
central concept is 'meaning', and indeed 'place' may be
207
208 Australian Geographer
redefined as coming into existence through men according
meaning to locations. Given man's exuberant dynamism
in structuring his world of meanings, personal and
institutional, the opportunities for humanistic exploration
of a multiplicity of places are indeed numerous.
With the rise of humanistic geography, geographical
descriptions have the potential to be visual, technical or
humanistic. The first consists of a word-picture, the second
is a working-through of systematic theory in terms of a
particular place, while the third seeks for central meanings,
cultural and personal, in the experience of place.
Visual description
The rejection of description as a geographical method
arises from a belief that 'mere' description is not
intellectually satisfying, and provides little new
understanding of the complex nature of the earth's surface.
We may investigate the limitations of such descriptions in
the light of an account of Australia published by T.
Edgeworth David as a preface to a major survey of the
geological structure of the continent.
An observer taking a birds-eye view of Australia and
Tasmania would see the great island continent carpeted
near the coast with strips of dark-green gum forest on
the east, south-east and north, and again in the south-
west of Western Australia, with an outlying strip upon
the Flinders Range, of South Australia. The remainder
would present a curious patchwork, partly of the dull
green sage bush, salt bush, and other salsolaceous herbs
of the steppes, the grasses of the savannahs, and the
dark-green mulga scrubs partly of patches of red and
brown sands of desert areas dotted with oases which
fringe the worn-down stumps of ancient inland
mountains.
White specks in numbers would be conspicuous in
this patchwork of green and red and brown wherever
the saline surfaces of dead lakes, or 'playas', reflect the
sunlight, or where the highlands of New South Wales
and Victoria are white with snow; except in late
summer. To the south-east the emerald isle of
Tasmania, the south coast of South Australia, the south-
east coast of Victoria, and in places the inland uplands of
tropical Queensland would appear jewelled with lime
lakes.**
The effect is to emphasize the variety and colour of the
Australian landscape, and the passage, by an expatriate
Welshman, stands in marked contrast to the 'brown
monotony' described by so many earlier visitors to
Australia. But there is no systematic analysis of the
underlying elements which explain these prominent visual
features, notably climate and structure. Highly successful
in provoking an immediate visual image, the passage lacks
the explanatory power which should be looked for in a
geographical description.
Technical description
Geographers have differed on the question of supplying
appearances, and it is clear that merely providing a vivid
Vol. 14/1979
account of the appearance of a place is not considered to be
adequate. Some indeed have not thought it important, and
this has been particularly so in recent regional
geographies,9 though the lack is often made up by
photographs.
Whatever awareness of literary standards may have
influenced geographers, good geographical description has
always required the inclusion of explanation derived from
current geographical theory. Carl Sauer provided a model
for geographical description in his essay 'The Morphology
of Landscape' published in 1925.
The sky is dull, ordinarily partly overcast, the horizon is
indistinct and rarely more than half-a-dozen miles
distant, though seen from a height. The upland is gently
and irregularly rolling and descends to broad flat basins.
There are no long slopes and no symmetrical patterns of
surface form. Watercourses are short, with clear
brownish water, and perennial. The brooks end in
irregular swamps with indistinct borders. Coarse grasses
and rushes form marginal strips along the water bodies.
The upland is covered with heather, furze and bracken.
Clumps of juniper abound, especially on the steeper
drier slopes. Cart traces lie along the longer ridges,
exposing loose sand in the wheel tracks, and here and
there a rusty, cemented base shows beneath the sand.
Small flocks of sheep are scattered widely over the land.
The almost complete absence of the works of man is
notable. There are no fields or other enclosed tracts. The
only buildings are sheep sheds, situated usually at a
distance of several miles from one another, at
convenient intersections of cart traces.10
This passage fulfils most of the requirements of good
technical geographical description. It expresses clearly the
appearance of the countryside, to the point of arousing
nostalgia in one conversant with the European heathlands.
The passage is explanatory in relating man and landscape
the area is expressed with all its limitations as a habitat.
Landform is clearly described, and one can deduce from
the 'rusty cemented base' showing beneath the sand in the
cart traces that we are faced with a podsolic soil. Climate is
indicated by the cloud cover and the perennial nature of
the streams. A good geographer has clearly chosen those
aspects of the area that will serve as a guide to his fellows in
interpreting the scene, while at the same time conveying its
colour and atmosphere to the general reader.
For description must be attuned to its audience, and not
all good technical description will suit the uninformed.
Mark Twain demonstrated this when he wrote of a sunset
scene on the Mississippi River, first using his skills as a
literary gentleman thoroughly immersed in the florid skills
of the nineteenth-century romantic novelist, and secondly
as a trained riverboat pilot. The novelist wrote:
A broad expanse of river was turned to blood; in the
middle distance the red hue brightened into gold,
through which a solitary log came floating black and
conspicuous; in one place a long slanting mark lay
sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was
broken by boiling tumbling rings that were as many-
tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest was
 Jeans: Some Literary Examples of Humanistic Descriptions of Place
a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and
radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on
our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow
that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a
long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above
the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single
leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed
splendour that was flowing from the sun. There were
graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft
distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the
dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every
passing moment with new marvels of colouring."
This is pure visual description, and goes well beyond the
soberly realistic to employ a heightened sense of colour and
dramatic effect. We would find such passages odd in our
geographical texts, even though one geographer, Vaughan
Cornish, has considered the aesthetic effects of
meteorological conditions,'? Francis Younghusband
emphasized the importance of the aesthetic in geography,13
and Ewald Banse tried to found a new geography upon the
spiritual experience of the beauty of regions.14 The river
pilot in Twain saw the scene quite differently, and
provided a technical description.
if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have
looked upon it without rapture, and should have
commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: 'This
sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow:
that floating log means that the river is rising, small
thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a
bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat
one of these nights . . . ; those tumbling "boils" show a
dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines
and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning
that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously;
that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the break
from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very
best place he could have found to fish for steamboats
. . .'1S
Here the scene is interpreted in the light of the technical
knowledge of the observer, providing a valid alternative to
the purely visual description given first.
Twain's pair of descriptions draws our attention to the
potential existence of multiple descriptions of the same
scene. Thus, the account of a beach given by a coastal
geomorphologist would not be identical with that of a life-
guard, especially in relation to terminology, even though
both would note features to be explained in the same way.
The beach-geography of an infant paddler is not the same
as that of a teenage surfer. So we recognize that each scene
has 'a unity of presentations',16 and this clears the way
towards a more humanistic and phenomenological
geomorphology.
A full geographical description of a place would then be
an anthology of as many accounts as could be gathered,
both from many technical and cultural points of view.
Among these many views which make up the full
description of a place there may be some stereotype views,
and all views would be informed by the cultural
209
background of the observer, giving further scope for
analysis.
Quite clearly there are parallel skills among geographers,
which require different descriptions employing advanced
technical knowledge even of the same scene. Sauer
proposed that plain language was best for geographical
description, but given the great increase in expertise
requiring technical terminology, we can no longer impose
that dictum on the contemporary geographer, though
geographers might do well to remember the existence of a
non-technical audience and their duty to reach that
audience.17 Such advice is too easily dismissed as a demand
for 'popularizing' geography to the detriment of scientific
purity, and that dismissal would be justified if no more was
meant than writing purely visual accounts such as those
already demonstrated by Edgeworth David and Mark
Twain.
But Geography has yet to capture that wide intellectual
audience that History has so long enjoyed because of its
concern with questions of meaning in human life.
Curiosity about other places seems as strong as curiosity
about past times, and there may well be scope for humanist
geographers to reach this wider audience by writing
accounts of places that deal with the central concerns of
cultural life rather than with the narrower technical
concerns of systematic geography.
Examples of the alternative, however, are now best
found in literature, and it should be an aim of the humanist
geographer to provide those insights into the meaning of
landscapes which have hitherto been left to the poet and
the novelist. It is in poetry and the novel that a humanist
geographer finds his models for a new kind of geographical
description.
Humanist description
To make a place is to surround a locality with human
meanings. To understand a place is to become mentally
absorbed in its 'atmosphere', its significance, and to realize
the meanings it has for other people, past and present. The
ambience of a place is not merely present at its locality, but
much more widespread as the place is known to many
people by experience and repute. A humanist account of a
place is not therefore simply a picture in words, but an
attempt to show forth its nature as deriving from
absorption into mind.
The task of the humanistic geographer was defined by
Sauer in 1925, when, after setting out the requirements of
technical description he went on to emphasize another
dimension not yet tapped by geographers. Thus he wrote
'The best geography has never disregarded the aesthetic
qualities of landscape to which we know no other approach
than that of the subjective', and he goes on to cite the work
of von Humboldt, Banse,i8 Volz and Gradman. When all
the technical knowledge has been applied 'there yet
remains a quality of understanding at a higher plane that
may not be reduced to formal process'.1' It is the task of
humanist geography to investigate this higher level of
understanding.
Sauer's conclusion was reinforced by John Leighley in
210 Australian Geographer
1937, when he concluded that 'the artist i s . . . the only one
who can join intellectual incommensurables to form a
comprehensive and satisfying conceptual work'.zo The
scientific geographer is bound to meanings drawn from his
systematic specialism, while the 'highest synthesis of
discrete facts concerning regions is artistic'.?' If the
synthesis can only be achieved by abandoning the strictly
scientific approach, then the humanist geographer is willing
to take this step.
Sauer's insight was openly taken up by one poet, Charles
Olson, who has tried to incorporate a geographical plane
into his work. In his Maximus Poems Olson gives a picture
of seaport Gloucester in New England, drawing an
historical view of the place through the people who have
lived in it, and basing his reconstruction of Gloucester's
past on serious research in documents and plans. For
Olson, the 'best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or
man until you yourself know more about it than is possible
to any other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed
Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa'.22 Olson makes it
clear that reading Sauer produced in him this poetic
attachment to place and the meaning he finds in its history.
For example Olson took up Sauer's evolutionary argument
for the priority of seafaring fishing communities in the rise
of civilized life, and his poetic history of Gloucester thus
assumes an archetypal character.
The process by which the description of a place rises to a
higher level of meaning can be demonstrated by two
passages from Emil Zola's Germinal. In the first, Etienne
arrives in a coal mining district of the Department of Nord
hitherto strange to him. The description is strongly visual,
and reminiscent of an Impressionist Landscape painting in
its serial flow and attention to colour. Zola was well
acquainted with Pissaro and Sisley, a number of whose
paintings might be described in this way. It is appropriate
that the style of the most realist school of painting with
respect to landscape is chosen to 'distance' the scene from
the observer.
While he was turning all this over in his mind, his eyes
wandered out over the wide plain and gradually took in
what they saw. And it surprised him, for he had not
imagined that the horizon was like this, when old
Bonnemort had pointed it out in the darkness with a
wave of the hand. True, he recognized Le Voreux in
front of him, lying in a hollow with its timber and brick
buildings, the tarred screening shed, the sladed
headgear, the winding-house and the tall, pale red
chimney. There it all was, squat and evil-looming. But
the yards round the buildings were much more
extensive than he had imagined, like a lake of ink with
heaps of coal for waves, bristling with high trestles
supporting the rails of the elevated tracks, cluttered up at
one end with the stock of timber, looking like a forest
that had been mown down and gathered in. The view to
the right was blocked by the slag-heap rising colossal like
a giant's earthwork; it was already grass-covered on its
older parts, but at the other end it was being consumed
by an inner fire, which had been burning for a year with
dense smoke, and as it burned had left long trails of
Vol. 14/1979
bloody rust on the surface of dull grey shale and
sandstone. Further away stretched fields, endless fields
of corn and beet, all bare at this time of the year,
marshes with coarse vegetation and here and there a
stunted willow, distant meadows cut up by slender rows
of poplar. In the far distance, towns showed like small
white patches Marchiennes to the north Montsou to
the south whilst eastwards the forest of Vandame,
with itsleafless trees, made a purplish line on the
horizon. And on this dull winter afternoon, beneath the
colourless sky, it seemed as if all the blackness of Le
Voreus and all the flying coal-dust had settled on the
plain, powdering the trees, sanding the roads, sowing
seed in the ground 23
As in an Impressionist painting, the eye is not led
immediately to the horizon, but wanders from the
foreground, through features distinguished by their
contribution to colour, to the 'purplish line on the horizon'
in a slow revelation of a landscape. Zola has allowed
himself to excoriate the mine Le Voreux as 'squat and evil-
looming' and so anticipate his major theme, but no more
than that in an otherwise neutral presentation of a scene.
The novel subsequently tells of the miseries, hardships
and comradery of a great miners' strike attended by
considerable violence. Etienne is absorbed into the place
and its community, which becomes his own until he is
driven out when the workers lose the battle. He pauses or.
the road to exile, and the scene is now described as having
a meaning that it could not have for the newcomer. Zola
has demonstrated that experience imposes an intense
feeling of place hardly shared by the outsider. The scene
reminds Etienne of traumatic events in his own life, but
also of the quality of the lives that he has shared in that
place, and a future that is embodied in the localized
strivings of the present.
Etienne turned to the left along the Joiseul road, where
he remembered having prevented the mob from
storming Gaston-Marie. In the bright sunshine he could
see the distant headgears of many pits. Mirou to the
right, Madeleine and Crevecoeur side by side. From all
quarters came the hum of work; and the tapping of picks
that he had thought he could hear deep down in the
earth could now be heard from end to end of the plain.
Under these fields and roads and villages now smiling in
the sunshine, one blow, then another, then blow after
blow were being struck as the work went on in the black
prisons so deep down beneath the rocks that you had to
know what was going on down there before your ear
was attuned to its heavy sigh of pain. And now he began
to wonder whether violence really helped things on at
all. Cut cables, tornup rails, broken lamps how futile!
Rushing about, three thousand strong, in an orgy of
destruction what a waste of energy! It was dawning
on him that some day legal methods would be much
more terrible, for now that his blind hatreds had had
their fling his intelligence was coming of age. Yes,
Maheude was right when she said in her sensible way
that that would be the big day, when they could legally
band together, know what they were doing and work
 Jeans: Some Literary Examples of Humanistic Descriptions of Place
through their unions. Then, one morning, confident in
their solidarity, millions of workers against a few
thousand idlers, they would take over power and be tfie
masters. Ah, then indeed truth and justice would awake!
Then that crouching, sated god, that monstrous idol
hidden away in his secret tabernacle, gorged with the
flesh of poor creatures who never even saw him, would
instantly perish.^
Elements of the scene are reminders of the events which
have seared Etienne's recent life, but the whole is
emblematic not only of the miners' intimate association
with their landscape, in depth as well as horizon, but of the
struggle for social justice. Le Voreux is represented in the
novel as a gorging monster squatting evilly upon the rural
landscape, the symbol of money which oppresses the
miner. Zola's work, imbued with naturalism and social
criticism, inspired Frank Norris to write in a similar way of
the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad in his book The
Octopus." In the 'naturalist' novels of Europe and North
America, landscape is intensely symbolical of the capitalist
system.
This immersion in the meaning of place, for oneself or
for others, is the key to the geographical descriptions to be
aimed at in humanist geography. The difference between
visual description and humanist description can be
illustrated over and over again, as by these examples from
poetry.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have born
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, swelt upon the scene.
Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned
The distant plough slow moving and beside
His lab'ring team, that swerved not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminish'd to a boy!
Here Ouse, slow winding through a plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled oer,
Conducts the eye along its sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlook'd, our fav'rite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond and overthwart the stream
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds;
Displaying on its varied side the grace
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tow'r,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear,
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote.
Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily view'd,
Please daily.
Wm. Cowper, The Task, I, 154-78
It is difficult to characterize this as 'mere' description, since
we may not only participate in the scene in an imaginary
visual way, but also derive a sense of fitness and harmony
from it. Much more powerful, however, is this extract
from the poetry of Wordsworth which searches for
meaning in the felt experience of landscape, and
211
demonstrates that meaning may be transcendental as well
as humanistic:
How vast the compass of this theatre,
Yet nothing to be seen but lovely pomp
And silent majesty: the birch-tree woods
Are hung with thousand thousand diamond drops
Of melted hoar-frost, every tiny knot
In the bare twigs, each little budding place
Cased with its several bead, what myriads these,
Upon one tree, while all the distant grove
That rises to the summit of the steep
Shows like a mountain built of silver light.
See yonder the same pageant, and again
Behold the universal imagery
Inverted, all its sun-bright features touched
As with the varnish, and the gloss of dreams;
Dreamlike the blending also of the whole
Harmonious landscape; all along the shore
The boundary lost, the line invisible
That part the image from reality;
And the clear hills as they ascend
Heavenward, so piercing deep the lake beneath.
W. Wordsworth, The Recluse, I, 560-78
In the first we might be standing before a Rubens land-
scape, dwelling lovingly on the individual features. Indeed,
though we need not depend too much on being told that
we are pleased and delighted, there is certainly a Dutch
painterly air of well-being about these lines which deserve
more than the label of'mere description'. But Wordsworth
builds his tiny scene into a delight that we need not be told
to share, linking beads of melted hoar-frost into a vast
cosmogony and a metaphysical speculation. The humanist
geographer need not expect to rival Wordsworth, but he
should be alive to the existence of this kind of feeling about
landscape and its importance in understanding how man
lives in the world. Alexander von Humboldt led the way to
this kind of geography in the mid-nineteenth century,
emphasizing the place of art and religion in expressing and
influencing man's relationship with his environment.
Humanist descriptions of places should thus express the
atmosphere of the place, which in the end can only be a
personal response, though as literature has shown, that
response can be communicated. Here we part company
with those who insist that a geographical description should
be replicable ab initio by a second geographer. Humanist
geography requires only that a geographer's experience of
place should be communicated to other geographers, who
may meanwhile collect and collate other descriptions of the
same place. Here we insist on the value of individual
experience in enriching the available world-view, rather
than the reduction of all knowledge to a minimal replicable
sensation. In humanist geography, replication depends on
sensitive empathy for others' experience of places.
This communicating the meaning and experience of a
place in a way that can be shared is demonstrated by James
Baldwin's account of a day at Chartres. His description is
given at the scale of local landscape, and for example
complements that which might be given by a medievalist
who might hasten immediately to the cathedral and its
212 Australian Geographer
unrivalled stock of Gothic carvings and glass. The town of
Chartres is described by Baldwin in a way that will evoke
recognition by many who have visited the small cathedral-
cities of Europe, their crooked and narrow streets winding
in the shadows of the great sacred and ancient hulks raised
above them.
That day in Chartres they had passed through the town,
and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water,
pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had
watched them for a long time. They had wandered up
and down the old crooked streets in the hot sun; Eric
remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and
everywhere the cathedral purused them. It is impossible
to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those
great towers; impossible to be on those plains and not be
troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan,
presence. The town was full of tourists, with their
cameras and their three-quarter coats, bright-flowered
dresses and shirts, their children, college insigniz,
Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles
crawling like gleaming bugs on the laming, cobblestoned
streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Germany,
from Denmark, stood in the square before the cathedral.
Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks,
wearing khaki-coloured shorts, with heavy buttocks and
thighs, wandered dully through the town. American
soldiers, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges,
entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled
displays of coloured postcards, and picked up
meretricious momentoes, of a sacred character. All of
the beauty of the town, all Ithe energy of the plains, and
all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have
been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as
though the cathedral demanded, and received, a
perpetual living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more
like an affliction than a blessing, and.made everything
seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and
makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived
did not suggest shelter or safety. The great shadow
which lay over them revealed them as mere bits of wood
and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which,
presently, would blow them into eternity. And this
shadow lay heavily on the people to . . . the saints and
martyrs trapped in stone.^
Here is a juxtaposition of past and present in which we are
first confronted with the anachronism of laundry women
at the water's edge followed by the polyglot mob of modern
tourists which fills the foreground, only to be dwarfed by
the mighty evidence of medieval faith in the great
threatening bulk of the cathedral and its towers. The
medievalist would see this cathedral quite differently as
the supreme expression in stone of medieval humanism. A
sense of time is one major source of the meanings we find
in landscapes, and encompasses both interpretations of the
meaning of the cathedral in its landscape.
No sober textbook account of Chartres could contain so
much insight into the nature of the town, and even its
economy, nor could it so convincingly call up the sense of
shared experience that this passage communicates. Yet this
Vol. 14/1979
is precisely the kind of description that the humanist
geographer should aim at; by doing so he will make a new
contribution to the geographical picture of the world.
It is possible to go even further, and make the place a
sign or symbol of the human condition. For Wordsworth
the place was a sign of his theology, his belief in the
existence of a glimpsed world lying behind the beauty of
the experienced world. For Camus, Oran lying in desert
North Africa is a sign of a bitter desolation in the heart of
man, just as Florence and Athens are signs of the glorious
cultural past of Western Europe in the mind of Western
man. To take up this theme is to join Camus to others who
have seen the desert as refuge, destiny, temptation, symbol
of purity, or as enemy. The desert is not just a place, or
even many places, but a condition which man has turned
to meaning in countless ways in art, literature and religion.
If the desert can be defined as a soulless place where the
sky alone is king, then Oran is waiting for her prophets.
All around and above the city, the brutal nature of
Africa is indeed clad in her burning charms. She bursts
the unfortunate stage-setting with which she is covered;
she shrieks forth between all the houses and over all of
the roofs. If one climbs one of the roads up the mountain
of Santa-Cruz, the first thing to be visible is the scattered
orange cubes of Oran. But a little higher and already the
jagged cliffs that surround the plateau crouch in the sea
like red beasts. Still a little higher and a great vortex of
sun and wind sweeps over, airs out, and obscures the
untidy city scattered in disorder all over a rock
landscape. The opposition here is between magnificent
human anarchy and the permanence of an unchanging
sea. This is enough to make a staggering scent of life rise
toward the mountain road.
There is something implacable about the desert. The
mineral sky of Oran, her streets and trees in their
coating of dust everything contributes to creating this
dense and impassible universe in which the heart and
mind are never distracted from themselves, nor from
their sole object which is man. I am speaking here of
difficult places of retreat. Books are written on Florence
or Athens. Those cities have formed so many European
minds that they must have a meaning. They have the
means of moving to tears or of uplifting. They quiet a
certain spiritual hunger whose bread is memory. But can
one be moved by a city where nothing attracts the mind,
where the very ugliness is anonymous, where the past is
reduced to nothing? Emptiness, boredom, an indifferent
sky, what are the charms of such places? Doubtless
solitude and, perhaps, the human creature. For a certain
race of men, wherever the human creature is beautiful is
a bitter native land. Oran is one of its thousand capitals.27
In this passage it is crucial that Camus conveys to us the
visual appearance of Oran and its surroundings, the
dominant element being red rock and dust, but the whole
seen landscape is a vehicle for a statement about the
human condition. Oran is man's temporary encampment
in the merciless desert which stands as a reminder to the
existentialist of the chaos which threatens, and which can
be repelled only by the exercise of will. There is no doubt
 Jeans: Some Literary Examples of Humanistic Descriptions of Place
that this is a geographical contribution that profoundly
increases our understanding of ourselves and our relation
to the world in a non-trivial way.
Novelists and poets spell out an approach to the earth's
landscape which has been sensed already by some
geographers. Keith Buchanan long ago saw the possibilities
of humanistic geography, and a passage from his work may
stand as a model for those who seek insights beyond those
of technical geography. Just as Camus used Oran as a
vehicle for a meaning, so Buchanan used his first
experience of the New Zealand landscape:
I came to an almost empty land, a land seemingly little
loved by those who dwelled therein, a land scarred by
the gashes of new roads, disfigured by suburbs strewn
like confetti across the swelling slopes of the green and
gorse-gold hillsides, a land where the intimacy and
tenderness of the association between men and the earth
which feeds them and at the end receives them
was lost in a money-oriented exploitation. And at times
it has seemed to me that this rawness and this want of
tenderness in man's relationship with his landscape is
mirrored in the relationship of man to man and man to
woman; transients all, not greatly concerned with
permanence but greatly concerned with material gain,
we build our relationships as we build our suburbs as
temporary staging posts in life's journey, as investments,
as something which will not tie us overmuch and from
which we can eventually pull out with more than we put
in. The land is to be exploited why not the emotions
of our fellow-men and women (and let us beware of
gentleness and tenderness lest that too be exploited) ?28
In seeing man's careless treatment of his landscape as a
metaphor for man's heedless dealing with his fellow man
and woman, Buchanan has characterized Western man in
his new worlds in New Zealand and beyond, achieving in a
brief passage an insight into the nature of a whole society.
Humanist geography should seek to contribute to the
critical analysis of society and the need for ecological and
aesthetic conservation, not least for the well-being of man's
own nature. Keith Buchanan, in his writings on Asia as
well as New Zealand, has seen his duty as a geographer to
contribute to* a whole understanding of man, society and
landscape in a way rivalled by few other geographers and
in a way now suggested by humanist geography.
Humanist geography therefore requires its own forms of
geographical description that relate the place to experience
and meaning. This means in part exploring the present life-
experience of men in place as it relates to their values and
activities, including economic activities, and their
attachment to particular places in an emotional way. It also
means studying the symbolic accretions that are attached
to places largely through historical associations, but are also
imposed by the application of general ideas such as the old
aesthetic categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the
picturesque. Beyond that, it requires the geographer to be
aware of the meanings the place has for himself, partly as a
technical geographer of some kind, but also as an
individual participant of a wider cultural setting. In adding
general meanings to technical meanings in his work, the
213
humanist geographer makes one important contribution to
our understanding how man lives in the world.
Much work is to be done by the humanistic geographer
in exploring the way in which creative writers have
surrounded places with meaning in their own lives and the
lives of their characters. A systematic study of this creative
activity has begun in humanistic geography. But the
example of Keith Buchanan is a reminder that geographers
themselves might set out to provide such descriptions of
place, and that an attention to literary skills and the
imagination might not in future be out of place in the
education of the complete geographer.
References
1. W. M. Davis: The principles of geographical description. Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 5, 1915, pp. 61-105.
2. H. C. Darby: The problem of geographical description. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 1962, pp. 1-14.
3. John Leighley: Some comments on contemporary geographic
method. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 27,
1937, pp. 125-41.
4. C. O. Sauer: The morphology of landscape. In J. Leighley (ed.): Land
and Life. University of California Press, Berkeley 1967, pp. 315-50.
First published as University of California Publ. in Geography, 2, No.
2, 1925, pp. 19-54.
5. Preston E. James in P. E. James (ed.): American Geography,
Inventory and Prospect. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse 1954,
p. 6.
6. E.g., J. H. Paterson: North America. Oxford University Press,
London 1975, pp. 204-6. A description of Chicago based on its
transportation geography.
7. Yi-Fu Tuan: Humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 66, 1976, pp. 266-76; and Robin Hall:
Teaching humanistic geography. Austr. Geogr. 14, 1978, pp. 7-14.
8. T. Edgeworth David: In British Association for the Advancement of
Science, Federal Handbook. Melbourne 1914, p. 241. Reproduced by
kind permission of the Association.
9. E.g., compare Paterson: op.cit., with J. Partsch: Central Europe.
Heinemann, London 1906, pp. 31-2.
10. Sauer: op.cit., pp. 323-4.
11. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens): Life on the Mississippi. Osgood,
Boston 1883, p. 119.
12. Vaughan Cornish: The Beauty of Scenery. A Geographical Survey.
Miller, London 1944.
13. Francis Younghusband: Natural beauty and geographical science.
Geogr. Journal, 16, 1920, pp. 1-13.
14. Eric Fischer: A Question of Place: the development of geographic
thought. Beatty, Arlington, Va. 1969, pp. 172-3.
15. Twain: op.cit., p. 120.
16. E. Husserl: The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970,
p. 158.
17. A. J. Conacher: Some thoughts about future developments/directions
in environmental studies in Australia. Austr. Geogr. 14, 1978, p. 69.
18. Fischer: op.cit.
19. Sauer: op. cit., pp. 344-5.
20. Leighley: op. cit., 1937, p. 131.
21. Ibid., p. 140.
22. Charles Olson: Additional Prose, A Bibliography on American
Proprioception, and other notes and essays. Four Seasons, Bolinas
1974, pp. 5, 11.
23. Emil Zola (trans. L. Tancock): Germinal. Penguin Classics, 1954,
pp. 78-80. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
24. Ibid., pp. 497-8.
25. Frank Norris: The Octopus. A Story of California. Doubleday, Page
and Co., New York 1904.
214 Australian Geographer Vol. 14/1979

26. James Baldwin: Another Country. Michael Joseph, London 1963, 28. K. M. Buchanan: Out of Asia. Sydney University Press, Sydney
pp. 211-12. By kind permission of the publisher. 1968, p. 153. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
27. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus. Hamish Hamilton, London
1955, pp. 131-2. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.

The Structure and Spatial Diversification of the Australian Fruit and

Vegetable Processing Industry

I. MACKENZIE*

Summary: The Australian fruit and vegetable processing industry has always been characterized
by its rural-urban location dichotomy and its economic structure. The industry's history shows
that it has continually undergone restructuring yet contemporary critics consider that this has not
been taken far enough. The 'market forces' have been impeded by governments' intervening with
location assistance, loans, devaluation compensation and import tariffs. Yet the industry is still
beset with problems. Some of these stem from the location of factories, sources of inputs and
markets, and some from the actual structure of the industry. This paper discusses these two
characteristics, spatial diversification and industry structure, in the light of the industry's recent
performance.

A SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE OF A DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRY
In 1975 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed
that the Australian fruit and vegetable processing industry
comprised 140 enterprises operating 180 establishments.
As indicated in Figure 1 the industry straddles several
manufacturing classes but the two main ones are canned
and preserved fruit products (ASIC class 2131) and
preserved, quick frozen, dehydrated and canned vegetable
products (ASIC class 2132). Some firms also manufacture
soft drinks and cordials (ASIC class 2191) as well as
alcoholic beverages (ASIC class 2194).
This diversity of production is paralleled by a diversity
of location. An analysis of location by state (the smallest
accounting unit) shows the industry diffused throughout
Australia (Table 1) with Victoria and New South Wales
having 61 per cent of all establishments and the remainder
almost equally divided between the other four states. In
terms of per capita distribution, Tasmania has a
disproportionately large number of establishments and
Queensland a disproportionately small number.
Financial turnover, however, shows quite a different
situation. Victorian firms had a larger turnover than those
in New South Wales, 53 per cent of the total compared
with 22 per cent. Of the other states only Queensland had a
greater percentage turnover than indicated by its share of
establishments.
Another element of the industry's structure is the degree
of concentration. In 1972-3 the top twenty firms (or 14 per
Dr Mackenzie is a Research Fellow with the North Australia Research
Unit, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University.
cent of enterprises) controlled 81 per cent of turnover and
employed 78 per cent of the workforce (Table 2). This
high degree of concentration within the processing
industry is exceeded by only ten other industry groups in
all Australian manufacturing.1
Because of shortcomings in the ABS data, no attempt is
made to explain industry structure within the Bureau of
Statistics' framework. An enterprise processing both fruit
and vegetables at a single location with an annual turnover
from each class exceeding $1.8 million is counted as two
establishments. It is possible, therefore, for one multi-
product factory to be counted in each of the five ASIC
classes shown in Figure 1.2 For these and other reasons, a
field survey of the industry was undertaken in 1975.
A list of processors was derived from Brotherson,
Isaacson and assorted press and radio reports.3 Forty firms
were contacted and thirty-one indicated interest in co-
operating in the survey. Four firms were subsequently
excluded from further analysis; one had been taken over,
two had ceased processing activity and the fourth
principally wholesaled fresh produce. Interest centres on
explaining the collective spatial structure of the twenty-
seven firms listed in Figure 2 in terms of the industry's
history, the location of buyers and sellers and in the basic
conditions of supply and demand.
History of the industry
The location of the twenty-seven firms in 1975 shown in
Figure 3 highlights the rural-metropolitan dichotomy
which stems from the initial location of orchards. At the
beginning of this century Australian horticultural activity
was located close to the coastal cities the principal