How's it going? / How did you get here?

Recently I was studying in up-state New York, and as I bumped into people on campus I would say, as you do 'How's it going?' And they would stare uncomprehendingly back at me. At first I assumed it was the way my accent slouched the "o's" – 'how's it goin' – but it turned out that the phrase itself was causing the problem. Their vernacular greeting was 'How ya doing?' and so the phrase 'How's it going?' was interpreted as an eccentric way of inquiring about their travel plans. In defence of my own idiom I aruged that going was superior to doing because it implied a direction you were going because you wanted to, rather than a thing that you may or may not want to be doing. It must be noted that this argument was not universally accepted by up-state New Yorkers, who pointed out that what you could be doing was going somewhere that you didn't want to go.

I thought of this misunderstandings when Illawarra historian Michael Organ was talking to us on Saturday afternoon about the misunderstanding of indigenous words. Bundanon, or Bundang, is, we think, the Wodi-Wodi word for deep gullies. It's not clear whether the Wodi-Wodi referred specifically to this place as Bundang or if they even had any need to give specific names to places within their country. Perhaps the need to give a place a name is a habit particular to whitefellas, a cognitive structure ingrained by our modes of settlement, inhabitation and movements in the environment we occupy. But if this place (now called Bundanon) is a one part of a song cycle, one place along the path of many places, and you know the places along the path by the song and by your movement along it, then what sense would it make to give that place a name? In which case, if a whitefella stands and points at something and asks 'what do you call this?' then a Wodi-Wodi may well – and with good reason – respond 'bundang / this is the deep gully path.'

In the 16th century the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún asked an Aztec for a definition of the Aztec word for cave, he replied:

"It becomes long, deep; it widens, extends, narrows. It is a constricted place, a narrowed place, one of hollowed-out places. There are roughened places, asperous places. It is frightening, a fearful place, a place of death. It is called a place of death because there is dying. It is a place of darkness; it darkens; it stands ever dark. It stands wide-mouthed, it is wide-mouthed; it is narrow-mouthed. It has mouths which pass through. I place myself in the cave. I enter the cave."

The Aztec assumed – once again, with good reason – that if the Franciscan friar knew his language well enough to ask him about it, then he must want to know about his experience of a cave. Now I assume that the magnitude of misunderstanding between myself and the up-state New Yorkers was a lower order misunderstanding than between the whitefella and the Wodi-Wodi and the Franciscan friar and the Aztec. The former is an easily explained difference of vernacular while the latter is a significantly different way of understanding the world and how to apply language to it. In any case, what appeals to me about these three things – How's it going/doing?, Bundang/deep gullies and the Aztec's cave – is that they are all united in a sense of travel, of moving through a landscape and the way you move through it.

The way you move through the world says a great deal about your relationship to it, in fact, it structures that relationship. I drove to Bundanon from Sydney in my car, and even if I wasn't in a rush to get here on time, my relationship to the land I went through is defined by the speed by which I left it behind. I drove alone, listening to my iPod, appreciating the vistas and stopping only for bad fast food. It was a pleasant and easy experience, and I don't regret it (except the rushing part) but it's a mode of travel that should not go unquestioned. In fact, since the vast majority of the world has been re-ordered by the possibilities and limitations afforded by the road and the car, it's a mode of travel most in need of questioning. While I was driving to Bundanon with a belly full of unhealthy food I starting thinking about which route I would have come if I had decided to walk to Bundanon. I guess that the coast would be the only sure way to go without constantly running into that obstacle of obstacles, private property. What an effort it would have been to walk, the physical toil would have made the journey in parts difficult and unappealing. Much easier to just drive. But that's the problem with this concept of it being easy: the physical effort of moving your body 160km by car is only easier for me , and the physical effort required does not vanish, but is only displaced onto the engine. And the engine (let alone the rest of the car or the roads it uses) requires an massive global apparatus to construct it, fuel it and maintain it. And if the physical cost required to walk is only displaced when I drive, then the ecological cost is magnified significantly, especially given that my car is one of more than 750 million cars out there.

But it's not just about the negative environmental effects of gratuitous car-use, it's also about the positive effect of walking. If I had walked to Bundanon I would have had to tune myself to the lay of the land, to the climatic conditions and to the temporality of moving on foot. I would have had to be in accordance with the rhythms and scope of the outdoors. And as the French philosopher Michel Serres says in his book, The Natural Contract:

"because we don't live out in the weather, we've unlearned how to think in accordance with its rhythms and its scope... [powerful decision making takes] place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things... those who used to live out in the weather's rain and wind, whose habitual acts brought forth long-lasting cultures out of local experience... have had no say for a long time now, if they ever had it."

I don't mean this as a romantic fetish for walking, or a (self-)hatred of the motor, but just to draw attention to how the mode of travel structures one's relationship to the world. It's for this reason that since coming to Bundanon I've taken every possible opportunity to get in the boat and move up and down the river. I'm trying to learn to think in accordance with it's rhythms and scope.

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