The thesis contains two components, providing both a creative and critical exploration of the relationship between the subject and place. The creative work, Reaction Time explores how its characters seek particular settings that will affect their sense of place and belonging in certain ways. The critical essay, “Wide Open Roads: Landscape, Environment and Belonging in Twentieth Century Outback Narratives”, explores how the knowledge of the political and cultural conditions of place are produced as affecting the subject’s personal relationship to place in late twentieth century outback narratives. / The creative piece, Reaction Time, tells the story of Joel who is returning to Australia after the death of her mother. Joel and her sister have never been able to reconcile their fierce, academic mother of the past with the trivial, domestic self she became in the years after her sudden retirement to her rural Tasmanian home. Throughout the story Joel finds she is trying to realise the grief of losing of a mother she never completely understood, while also dealing with her feelings of alienation both in her mother’s home in Tasmania, and in Melbourne, where the spectre of old relationships she left behind long ago maintains her sense of unease in a place she once thought of as home. / The essay, Wide Open Roads analyses three novels published toward the end of the twentieth century to examine the way the characters’ relationships to place and landscape are constructed. It argues that the outback, couched in its newfound cultural role as an untouched, pristine pilgrimage point for spiritual journeys, has come to be considered a ‘sacred’ space for all Australians. Using ecocriticism and postcolonial theory as a theoretical framework, the essay discusses how, while late twentieth century outback narratives constructed characters whose desire to traverse the outback, or sense of attachment to it, was deep, the convergent social influences of environmentalism and Indigenous land rights and a growing postcolonial consciousness have propelled writers to depict more problematic and complex relationships with place than were evident in past outback narratives.