Paper short abstract:

Hearing stories of memories and expectations of home despite their experience of trauma (siddique, 2012). This presentation will examine the narrative construction of the individual experience and how events inform cultural fictions which can transform the sense of home and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

A range of traumatic texts are considered in relation to Baum's (1999) text from which the title of this presentation is taken; the Wizard of Oz is a parable of events following a tornado/cyclone reaching Kansas,USA.The disrupted and fragmented voice(s) in the traumatic texts have a "compulsion to repeat"(Freud, 1989) which on the surface appear senseless, disordered and can shatter the sense of identity which one imagines can only lead to incoherence of meaning.They can be seen as the relation between the geographical territory of the place and the representation (Korzybski, 1933) that the object as home and a sense of belonging which Magritte (cited in Torczyner,1977) "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves" By blending of fact and fiction we can make our own maps to find buried treasure or hidden adventure.