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Mythology of Place 1993 to 1994 ebook
Lloyd Godman and Lawrence Jones were neighbors and friends who had lived for years at Brighton, New Zealand. Both lived very close to where James K Baxter had lived and were familiar with his work. Jones was writing a paper on Baxter and asked Godman to consider contributing some photographs of the places Baxter wrote about.
During 1993 to 1994 Lawrence Jones and Lloyd Godman worked collaboratively on the Mythology of Place. They retraced the words of one of New Zealand's most acknowledged poets, James K Baxter, searching for artifacts that referenced real places of his mythology. Places where the youthful Baxter's naked feet once trod, places that remained with him until the bare foot days before his death. This project was about the uneathing of three worlds of James K Baxter and though the critical text of Jones and the photographs of Godman a poignant focus of Baxter's work emerged.
ISBN: 978-1-923026-04-9
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The power of place is such that it can centre our world. It can become a force that confines, restricts and binds, but the same inexplicable force can also become a different power; a centre from which a vortex of perceptive experiences grow.
Brighton is a small seaside township near Dunedin, it is a place where James K Baxter lived and grew up as a boy, a place that inspired Baxter, a place that became the centre of his perceptive world, a place that was important in his writing until his death. A place of lasting impressions, a place of personal discovery and experience. Professor Lawrence Jones and myself have also lived in Brighton since the 1970s, in fact, close to the Bedford Parade house that Baxter grew up in. While there are differences in our
experiences, between us we have walked the same beaches as Baxter, paused on the very same headlands to watch the same ocean swirl the long thick leathers of kelp amid a frenzy of wave-churned spray. We have smelt the same dense vapours of fresh salt air as the mist curtains drift off the ocean, climbed over the very same sand enshrined rocks and fished in the same crystal clear pools. We have swum in the same
cool embracing sea water, paddled in the same mysteriously black river and hid in the hollows of the same caves. We have heard the same haunting cry of the gulls amid the rustle of flax and hebe bushes, and witnessed the same razored gales that cut incessantly at any obstacle. In essence breathed the same unique airs.
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