Creating a sense of place

We live in a beautiful part of the world. It is a place that effortlessly invokes a response termed 'topophilia', that is, an affective bond between people, place and setting. 'Topophilia' is a two-way relationship between humans and the environment; creating a space for the inhabitants that is worth loving and
defending.1 The coastline, exposed to the Southern Ocean, demands respect. A complete explanation of how human society developed here would require an encyclopaedic rendering encouraged by Fernand Braudel's 'la tres longue duree' (the very long term). To attempt such a render would require beginning with the underlying geological and geographical constraints that regulate every activity, whether climatic, seasonal or conventional - including of course social customs - a whole raft of complications, along with chance, accident and the fates that constitute life. Then we would need to consider how human society changed at different rates through time, and include interactions between locals, eighbours, visitors and seafarers from further afield. Braudel begins his sweeping story 'Memory and the Mediterranean' with the sea.