Cape Willoughby was about place in Heidegger's sense of a presencing of being , or happening of a world. What that means is hard to articulate, and I lose my way.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, rock face, Cape Willoughby, 2007

Place is often understood as a function of human responsiveness or conduct, as a social or cultural “construction, ora sort of neutral “site” (a more or less arbitrary region of physical space) that draws any qualities it might have from that which is located within it, such as the cottages, lighthouse and National Park rangers.

What was significant about Cape Willoughby was not the human construction in that space but the wildness. It was grounded in itself. To put it in Heidegger's terms for somethingto be what it is, is for the thing to stand forth in a certain fashion— to stand forth so that its own being is disclosed.

It is at this point that things get difficult. We usually understand being in thesense of 'to stand forth' in terms of a certain mode of temporality, namely the present. So we understood the being of things in terms of the “presence” or “presencing” of things in the present—in terms of the way they “stand fast” here and now. If being and presence go together for Heidegger, then the conventional understanding of being as presence in the present (.e., being in relation to temporality) is what is being displaced in favour of being as presence as disclosedness.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, colours, Cape Willoughby, 2007

This is never a matter simply of the coming to presence of a single being —as if presence was something that could attach to a single self-sufficient entity such as rocks. The presencing or disclosedness of a being is always
a matter of its coming to presence in relation to other beings----earth, sky, sea--- and so, for Heidegger, presencing or disclosedness is inseparable from the happening of a world. The happening of presence or disclosedness is the “happening” of the very things that we encounter in our concrete and immediate experience of the world.

This happening of presence or disclosedness is always the happening of a certain open realm in which, not only things but we ourselves are disclosed and come to presence—in which we are gathered together with the things around us.