The cities – Perth, Australia, and Aberdeen, Scotland – have received relatively little attention as specific geographical-cultural locales.

Often perceived as industrial, isolated and lacking romantic association, they nevertheless have rich historical, narrative and creative traditions that characterise interactions between humans and place, particularly along the length of the four rivers. Anyone who heard the cities Perth and Aberdeen mentioned in the same sentence would likely assume the subject was fossil fuel mining and refining, or perhaps to do with migration and the ongoing nature of the Scottish diaspora.

Millions of years after the gas seam or oil deposit was formed the land continues to shape the ways we reside and our relationship to the land and water.

As is sometimes the way of things, an embodied connection to place, especially out-of-the-way ones, gives rise to lively subcultures that resist the capitalist and expansionist imperatives that seem to define the history of a location. This volume arose from the cross-pollination of the intellectual and the aesthetic. The contributions of this book are woven together through strands of deep mapping and ideas of place, history and inhabitation.

Countercultures seem to return to specific place knowledge that predates industrialisation, whether in the traditional shapes of the Nyoongar knowledge of the Derbarl Yarrigan (Swan River) and Beeliar (Canning River) or the traditions and ancient patterns of Aberdeenshire: we come back to these profound knowledge systems that, in fact, never went away.