THE OFFICIAL Volume 8, July 2025

LOCALITY


Kim Lehman: Conceptualising the Role of the Land in Television Advertising: Symbols and Meaning

Keywords: Marketing, advertising, land, symbol, narrative

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The aim of this paper is to propose a typology of roles to illustrate how the ‘land’ as a physical entity is used by marketers to convey meaning to the prospective consumer via the mass media channel of television. The paper concentrates on the visual depiction of the land in the form of landscape, cityscape, seascape, etc. In theory, as part of the communication process marketing communications uses symbols to create messages and convey meanings. A symbol is something physical and perceivable by our senses that represents something to somebody in a certain context. In a marketing context these symbols then elicit meaning for the receiver, an internal response to a perceived external stimulus. The aim of marketing communications is to use symbols that will evoke the intended meaning in prospective buyers, who transfer that meaning to products. The paper provides an overview of the theory noted above and uses the idea of symbols and meaning in marketing messages to illustrate how the concept of ’land’ is used to market products, be they physical good, services, experiences, or places. Then, through an analysis of various marketing communication messages, it discusses the responses that the marketing managers may be attempting to elicit by their use of the land as a symbol.


Rod Giblett: Wetland Cultures

Keywords: Wetlands, sacred places, place, ecosystem, climate

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Wetlands are vital for life on earth. They are among the world’s most productive environments. They punch way above their weight as they cover about 6% of the surface of the earth. Traditional cultures have a long and vital association with wetlands going back to ancient times and coming forward to contemporary times. Their peoples regard wetlands as sacred places imbued with spiritual and ceremonial significance. They also provide physical sustenance and are sources of materials.  These values are expressed in their artworks, artefacts, dance, song, and story. Their artefacts, such as baskets, canoes and spears, were, and still are, created from wetlands and used in wetlands to hunt and gather the food they cultivate there. Traditional wetland cultures include wetland Aboriginals, Marsh Arabs, Fen Britons, bog Irish and marais Acadians in Canada. By contrast, ancient Greek and Roman cultures denigrated (literally and figuratively ‘blackened’) wetlands as places of disease, terror, horror, the hellish, and the monstrous. Wetlands are an oppressed minority and a marginalized community of plants and animals (humans and more-than-humans). Wetlands are non-binary and queer bodies of water. Writing a word for wetlands is speaking on behalf of marginalized communities and oppressed minorities in wetland literature.


Jeff Shantz: Commonism: Returning Land Back to the Heart of Communism

Keywords: Land, communism, communism, land back, place

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An original, if forgotten, emphasis of communism was the land—more specifically struggles over commons based in land but encompassing so much more than that. Proto-communist movements that inspired early communism were movements for commons, for shared land, and sustenance. They were, in their way, movements that called for land back (to commoners). The centrality of commons eventually gave way and the establishment of national states under communist banners further shifted focus of communism to the conquest of state power and social management through the state. Struggles over commons took a back seat or were considered “dealt with” through state ownership. Recently movements for commons have stirred new thinking and acting about communism—what some have called commonism to distinguish it from its statist and authoritarian forms. These return land to the centre of analysis and action. At the same time, parallel struggles of Indigenous people calling for land back have also centred fundamentally land and commons in struggles against capitalist expansion and extraction. While these movements are usually discussed as separates, I want to focus on some intersections, even conscious, interlinking them. This article examines the landscape/contours of commonist ideas and practice (commoning) as anti-capitalist politics. It develops points of intersection between commonism and Indigenous land back movements and struggles. Having argued for the significance of commonism, it examines real world connections forged in action and solidarity between urban commonist activism and Indigenous land back struggles in the specific context of so-called Metro Vancouver.


Jo Coghlan: Dead and Dying Land: the Tragedy of Australia's Regional Commons

Keywords:  Land, Australia, place, green bans, development, regional

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The article considers the nature of, and discourses, that have saved land in Australia from unfettered property capitalism in the 1970s. It does so to demonstrate that mostly it has been urban land which has been the focus of land protection regimes in Australia. Early Green Bans were successful in protecting important areas of green space in our cities as well as ensuring the survival of heritage buildings and colonial architecture, but Green Bans were less successful in regional locations, Yallourn in Victoria for example. Rural and regional lands, just as urban spaces and places similarly faced threats from unfettered development, greed, and poor environmental practices. However, in the case of rural and regional lands, ideas of what was of national importance, or of intrinsic value to national identity was valued very differently, hence shaping discourses and practices around land protection. Non-urban lands were often lost because they are seen as ‘unnatural’ places of colonisation, dispossession, militarization, and contamination. While these discourses shaped how rural and regional land was protected or not, the places lost were lands and homes which shaped residents’ notions of identity and community and even if framed as ‘unnatural’ land they still had emotional, spiritual, cultural and social value to those who once called some of Australia’s dead and dying land home.


Shaun Wilson: The Sublime Horizon in Maritime Landscape art: from Romanticism to Metamodernism

Keywords: Maritime landscape, art, sublime, romanticism, Kant

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Maritime art has a long standing tradition within and among the sublime. Examples of practice have prompted visual enquiry of such as a continuum which has over the past several centuries moved the sublime through depictions of maritime landscapes, whether this be seascapes, open ocean, and rivers and lakes. Romanticism, from Friedrich to Turner, posited the sublime as maritime vistas in as much as other notable examples from 17th Century Dutch Golden Age painting traditions, 19th Century Symbolism painting, French impressionism, late post-impressionism (especially Gauguin, and also the Camden Town Art Group for example), Modernist painting, late postmodern art, and environmental and eco crisis art. Yet how are these traditions posited in metamodernism and how has the sublime survived into the 21st century from canvas to digital media and moving image?