The Culture of Place

IT SEEMS TO ME in tracking my own relationship with this place — a lost and found story — I come near to tracking a story that is common to most Newfoundlanders of my generation. The Australian writer David Malouf in his book The Great World suggests that our perception of the world is shaped by our childhood home. The houses in which we live as children, he says, are our initiation into reality, “not just through the shape of it, the architecture of it, but through the objects that were in it, the kind of mythology and history it contained.” I was born into a small, enclosed world, an outport world transported into St. John’s, which itself was a small town, although it seemed large to me — as it did to my parents who had moved here from Cape Island in Bonavista North, and from Random Island in Trinity Bay.