| Sumario: | In 2003 the local council of Hume initiated a community art project, The Weaving Lands, a sculpture woven from native and exotic grasses by a multi-ethnic group of weavers from and beyond the ethnically diverse, historically stigmatised neighbourhood of Broadmeadows, Victoria. The sculpture depicts a tree, 'The Galgi-gnarrak Yirranboi Tree' or, the Backbone of Tomorrow, named by Norm Hunter, a Wurundjeri elder. It is currently located in the foyer of Broadmeadow's Global Learning Centre, a public library and information hub, intended to revitalise this marginal locality. Beyond its local articulation of people to place, The Weaving Lands can be interpreted within a national register, as one amongst many cultural forms which perform national belonging. In shifting the interpretative framework of the project between local and national registers, this article considers the complex lived and symbolic experiences of belonging mobilised through the local address of community art. I am interested in the way community art's vernacular expressions of place relate to dominant conceptions of the nation, offering alternate imaginings of what it means to feel at home in the nation.
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