The Merewether Baths Will Never Look The Same Again

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of literary texts on our understandings of place and the impact of VRML technologies on the interpretation of the real place and the virtual place made available through a text The Australian author, Marion Halligan, frequently locates her work in the real world of Newcastle. In the case of her work, Lovers' Knots, the public ocean baths at Merewether, Newcastle, feature. The impact of the creative writer's imaginative account of this space suggests the possibilities of complementing the textual account through VRML techniques, and constructing further virtual VRML texts that offer to structure the real and virtual in a tension. The real baths are positive (filled up with reality), the textual baths are negative (inherently abstract waiting for imaginative filling), and the VRML baths are somewhere between or in tension between the real and the imaginary. Through the construction of a VRML account of the Merewether baths it is anticipated that traditional and new textual possibilities will be made evident.