Advancing Tools and Materials
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The The mo mo steel steel user user cc to to acc acc when when ii The most interesting technology as architecture in remote areas was the freight container. Inside the heavy exterior of the steel clad and insulation, the interior, with the help of the air conditioner, creates a comforting micro-climate where a user can communicate with the rest of the world. Communicating in remote territories requires a step by step ritual in order to access the web but with a cost. The process is much longer compared to connecting to the web in an urban environment when it could be done with an iphone nearly anywhere.
Flawed Aboriginal archiving system: detaching the user from the context of site.
“To wound the earth,” he answered earnestly, “is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.” 1
In 48,000 BC2, the first groups of Aborigines landed in Bandaiyan3, having migrated from the African continent after approximately 20,000 years of habitation en route. In 1788 AD, the first fleet of ships landed in Botany Bay, Australia. This was to be the initial colonisation of Great Britain, relocating convicts to establish the new settlement before the French or Spanish had a chance. The land however, had already been established as the spiritual landscape of the Australian Aboriginal, the custodians of the oldest living culture on earth. However the Aboriginal emergence within the Australian landscape led to their severe maltreatment by the colonists. Aboriginals were used as guides, locating water holes in the outback, and were displaced from their lands to be relocated to alien landscapes. The most fundamental issue that still underlies the Aboriginal community today is the displacement of tribes from their defined territories, resulting in the near extinction of their culture and history. The main culprits were the Woomera test launches and drought. In 1946, British colonists had set up their missile base in Woomera; an area the Australian Government claimed was a testing corridor, considered large enough for tests, yet containing minimal population. The test spaces also included a satellite range towards eighty miles of beach in Western Australia. This Australian-Anglo project would test missiles in
1. Chatwin, Bruce, The Songlines (London: Picador, 1988), 11. 2. This is an approximation. Some experts even predict Singing Landscapes
an area which covered approximately 270,000 square kilometres at its peak.4 However, this region was the home of the entire indigenous population. The bombardment on the landscape was permanently destroying segments of their home with no remorse. Whilst it would be easy to point the finger directly at the military, J. B. Jackson, in “The Landscape as Seen by the Military” describes how the military understand landscape: We did not speculate about the environment and its psychological impact nor about the relationship between the environment and man…. We came to think of the environment as a kind of setting or empty stage upon which certain alarming and unpredictable decisions and actions took place… the stage continues to be vacant and uninteresting except when some military action was taking place.5
Little did the military know, a vast piece of landscape in the satellite region was home to the Martu Aborigines whose history dated back over 20,000 years. Because the Aboriginal culture is defined by its oral traditions, the knowledge that had been built up over the thousands of years in this landscape, was and still is on the verge of extinction; as they had been displaced from their homeland into neighbouring cattle ranches and mission settlements located in other tribal lands. The Aboriginal people of Australia believe in the Dreamtime, ‘a metaphysical now, a mystical time outside of time, a spiritual yet nonetheless real dimension of time and space
the year to go back as far as 125,000 BC. 3. The Australian Aboriginal word for ‘Australia’. 4. http://www.defence.gov.au/news/raafnews/ Orfali
editions/4702/features/feature02.htm 5. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 133.