This extraordinary book explores the feelings of non-Aboriginal Australians as they articulate their sense of belonging to the land. Peter Read asks the pivotal questions: What is the meaning of places important to non-Aboriginal Australians from which the Indigenous people have already been dispossessed? How are contemporary Australians thinking through the problem of knowing that their places of attachment are also the places that Aboriginals loved--and lost? And are the sites of all our deep affections to be contested, articulated, shared, foregone or possessed absolutely?

This book examines what it means to lose a place forever and why we return, and keep on returning, to these places so large in our memories. It considers many lost towns, suburbs and homes: Darwin after Cyclone Tracy, the flooding of the town of Adaminaby in NSW, the inundation of Lake Pedder in Tasmania, bushfire at Macedon in Victoria, migration from other countries, the clearing of neighborhoods for freeways and the everyday circumstances that force people from their land. It establishes how important the places we live in are, and how much we grieve when we lose them.