First of all, for the best short essay I've ever encountered on the definition of "travel" as distinguished from tourism, and a very fun read, see:

Dessaix, Robert. "Travelling in Hope", in (and so forth), Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1998.

Place-theory is everywhere these days, and I've largely worked independently of it. However, I do feel a strong convergence with Tony Hiss's graceful meditation on places:

Hiss, Tony. The Experience of Place. New York, Knopf, 1990.

For a fiery but well-researched jeremiad on the need for a new consciousness of placehood and home, see:

Kunstler, James Howard. Home from Nowhere. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

For a view of a calmer, pre-Olympic Sydney by a much more forgiving traveller, I defer to the tireless Jan Morris. Probably the most celebrated travel writer of her generation, Morris has been everywhere, met everyone, and has tried to find the good side of everything:

Morris, Jan. Sydney. London: Viking, 1992.

For the big picture on the founding of Australia, including a painfully thorough treatment of Tasmania, see:

Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. New York: Random, 1986.

Having lived in California for 14 years, I've made little recourse to sources in constructing my various Californias. Los Angeles, however, is a topic of vast and fascinating theoretical ferment, the best of which includes:

Theroux, Peter. Translating LA. New York: Norton, 1994.

Rieff, David. Los Angeles: the Capital of the Third World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Davis, Mike. The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Holt, 1998.

Davis's book has been challenged on several factual grounds, but is still profoundly true in the novelistic sense. Read it as a novel.

Any websearch on my name will turn up a 19th century Southern gentleman with an outrageous number of relatives, along with a golf star and someone involved in auto racing. I deny being, or ever having been, any of these persons.

A search may also turn up a transportation planner, book reviewer, editor, and Shakespeare scholar. These people, by some caprice of nature, ARE the same person as the author of this site. [Theorists of personal identity who wish to question the sameness of persons over time are invited to probe elsewhere; I've been there, done that, and am not going back.] Anyone interested in exploring these other dimensions are invited to peruse the following:

RE my work in public transportation planning and policy, see http://www.nelsonnygaard.com.

RE my work as a performance theorist and Shakespeare scholar, the most prominent iceberg-tip can be found in the Summer 1992 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly. If you're logged on at a participating academic institution or have a JSTOR account, see http://www.jstor.org/journals/00373222.html.

RE my fiction editing experience, and therefore of some of my tastes in fiction, see http://www.blithe.com/bhq3.3/.

RE my book reviewing, see any number of "customer reviews" by me on Amazon.com, most of which will turn up under a websearch of my name by HotBot. I've done brief Amazon reviews on several of the books listed above.

Finally, to contact me, e-mail to walkerjar@aol.com.