Possum Dreaming: An Autoethnography of a Spectral Geography Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Benjamin Likely London Metropolitan University | UK Possum Dreaming centres on Castle Hill, or Cudtheringa, in Townsville, North Queensland: a landscape in which personal tragedy and deep collective histories converge.The project follows the author’s return three years after his brother fell to his death from the hill in 2022. Through autoethnography, it examines how a single site can hold private grief alongside the lingering traces of colonisation, two world wars, and the cyclones that have repeatedly reshaped the city.From the summit, the family home comes into view: a timber Queenslander raised on brick stumps, its rooms marked by former inhabitants, a father’s psychiatric practice, and a family learning to live with loss.Structured through three ascents of the hill and three interwoven concepts — accretion, encounter, and return — the thesis is written as autofiction. Its narrative moves between the voice of the hill itself and a third-person account of the author and his family. Archival research, family interviews, historical images, and walking photographs combine to construct a haunted textual geography.What emerges is a site where geological time, colonial memory, and personal mourning coexist. By giving voice to the landscape, its inhabitants, and its ghosts, Possum Dreaming reframes how sites of memory might be written: not as places of recovery, but as places of continued relation with what has been lost. Tutor(s) Edwina Attlee