The Anxiety of Place: Peter Read. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003 [Review essay]

The work of historian Peter Read has, for the last ten years, focused largely on the question of non-indigenous "place belonging" in Australia. Over three critical texts, Returning to Nothing (1996), Belonging (2000), and the recent Haunted Earth (2003), he explores the attachments to specific sites that non-indigenous Australians feel and articulate. Informed by a postcolonial politics that admits the illegitimacy of European invasion and the devastations caused to indigenous culture and country over two centuries, Read is concerned with restoring some legitimacy to settler Australian presence, attainable, his books propose, through meaningful engagements with the land over time.