Regional Stories
An Encounter with the Aviation Alphabet Susanna Castleden
Alfa
Alfa is for atmosphere, and air.
Bravo Bravo is for brush strokes and oil paint. A series of small paintings of clouds, skies and planes spotted above the artist’s studio in Mandurah. The anthropologist Tim Ingold, who will make several appearances in this alphabetical encounter, draws parallels between writing and flying, linking the movement of a quill or a calligrapher’s brush to the flight of birds, their feathers, and the wispiness of clouds (Ingold 2021, 69). Charlie Charlie is for contrails. Rarely seen in the skies over Mandurah, these vapour trails signify the vertical height and horizontal distance of international air travel. These straight lines temporarily mark the sky, making air routes momentarily visible. Delta
Delta is for variant. The skies are empty of planes.
Echo Here I’m going to link echo to shadow. Ingold (2021) reflects on a shadow cast on the ground by a wire in a fence line running parallel to a meandering path. The path, made on and of the earth through the movement of feet, he observes, is not ‘laid over the ground surface, but rather emerges as a differential within it’. Whereas he notes the shadow cares nothing for the ground below, and is ‘indifferent to its variations […] it somehow blends with the surface without apparently touching it at all’ (Ingold 2021, 176). 63
