Drawing spatial memories to life: mapping a Queensland heritage-listed woollen mill

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores research methods around the generative process of remembering spaces. It discusses a participant’s extraordinary lists and drawings, ‘maps’ of factory layouts, created from memory, of an industrial heritage site, a woollen mill closed in 1971, situated in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. These methods investigate the conditions, and entanglements across time, that enable detailed recall. The paper considers both, methods in the present that create an affective resonance with the past; and types of experiences in the past creating detailed memories in the present. The findings offer a combination of ethnographic methods for accessing those memories by being in-situ with participants through interviews, drawings, site walkthroughs, photo-elicitation and a perspective of wayfaring. Thus, the article contributes to geographical methods research exploring the generative, iterative and affective productions of memory and place.