For Somnambulists

THANKS SO MUCH FOR BEING INVOLVED

ALBERT REX . s3602426 . Studio 8 .

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Albert Rex RMIT Design Hub Building 100, Victoria Street Carlton Vic, 3000 Christina Stead

October 27, 2032

Chairperson of The Melbourne Somnambulists’ Club Shed 2 North Wharf Road Docklands Vic, 3008

Dear Chairperson, I’m writing to you today to express my thanks for your club’s enthusiastic support of and involvement in the Ballara to the Beach project over the last 12 odd years.

I trust you are aware that I remain in absolute awe of the wholesale disinterest and sneering disdain your membership continues to express for the vast majority of work undertaken during the day.

I hope however that our working together over the last 12 years has proven to your club that a narrow path can indeed be charted which draws your membership into the excitement, collaboration and vividness of the concrete world without any need for compromise on those core values that make your members who they are.

The project, I’m absolutely confident in saying, would never have been able to deliver the bold outcomes it has without the club’s unique and significant dreaming up of modifications and side-tracks that never would have occurred to anyone with a world-view centred around actually getting things done.

As such I take great please today in sharing with you this scrap-book I made a point of building up over the delivery of the project.

I gift it to the club in the hope that if any Somnambulists again feel a desire to go against their better judgment and venture out into the light of day - they’ll be able to do so with the confidence that there indeed does exist a path to do so in a manner that benefits the Somnambulist as much as it does the broader community - while also compromising the principles of neither.

Thanks so much again to all at the club who were involved and I look forward with great anticipation to sharing with you how the numerous attempts to replicate the invigorating snowballing collaborations of our project come along.

All the best and hoping to be in touch again soon,

Albert Rex.

October 27, 2032.

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‘How do you tell finished from unfinished work in writing marked by fractures, gaps, detritus, and inconsistencies, where the hallmark of style is refusal to apply “the final polish,” and even the apparently willful excoriation of a surface that risks finishing up polished?’

Kiernan S, ‘Ugly by Design’ : The fiction of Christina Stead, 1988.

‘Who knows when the intellectual praxoysms and wild excess cerebrations called philosophy...will be turned over into the budget of some new budget of paradoxes?

I prefer to be a Somnambulist, I walk on the edge of the precipices safely.

Awake, I tremble and run back to the skylight, enter the little attic room, never accomplish the journey, remain all day crouched over the books.

At nigh one rambles...

Have you ever seen a city asleep? If you took of the roofs of the city, what do you think you would see? Logs, stones congelations, corpses?

No, you see fits and starts and groans and convulsions, grimaces and clutches, twitchings and hoppings, staring eyes and working throats, rolling eyeballs, murmuring mouths. That is what we call sleep!

Now we Somnambulists deny this horrible sleep.

We sleep in the daytime: At night we live under the guidance of the soul, which is always trying to break the bonds of those hag-ridden slumberers!

With the Somnambulists you will see men really awake - or lunatics!’

Stead C, The Beauties and Furies, 1936.

Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make believe If you believed in me Yes, it’s only a canvas sky Hanging over a muslin tree But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me Harburg Y, Rose B, It’s Only A Paper Moon, 1933.

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CONTENTS Of a document that celebrates through cataloging - the invaluable contribution to the Point Lonsdale Heritage Dredging Scheme made by the Melbourne Somnambulists’ Club.

01. THE PROJECT

• STAGE 01

• STAGE 02

• STAGE 03

• STAGE 04

02. THE LETTERS 03. THE SITE 04. THE AGENT 05. THE SOUP

APPENDICES 01. SOURCES 02. SOURCE MATERIAL 03. THE LETTERS IN FULL

Alfred Deakin at the Beach.

Deakin University Library

04. WORKING DRAWINGS 05. UNCUT PRESENTATION TRPANSCRIPT

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STAGE 01 2020 - 2021

This first stage of the project helped acclimatise local residents to the idea of change along Cheshunt street as well as starting to draw together some of the key stakeholders who were essential to propelling the project forward as it gained momentum.

A somnambulist cut a channel half way through the asphalt down the centre of Cheshunt St, (400m) the removed asphalt was collected and stored for later use.

CHESHUNT STREET

A somnambulist dug a channels down each side of Cheshunt St, scratching the road up out off of the ground plane.

A somnambulist was given the opportunity to carry out the works required for the first stage. Their rambling incoherence was channeled in a way that made it of genuine use to the broader community.

CHESHUNT STREET

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CHESHUNT STREET

Cut taken from the edges of Cheshunt Street was mounded in strips to the outer edges of adjacent nature strips, contributing to the creation of a distinctive seam or demarcation between Cheshunt street and it’s surrounds.

The channel dug down the centre of Cheshunt street immediately began serving as a traffic calming device, familiarised residents with change and would go on to serve a significantly expanded role in subsequent stages.

CHESHUNT STREET

CUT

FILL

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STAGE 02 2021-2022

The second stage of the project involved seeking out the support of the Deakin family (who still own and use Ballara) to fund a second phase of the project which consolidated existing interventions and added a number of significant new ones that really established the project as one that genuinely started to engage with the cultural heritage of site.

The second stage of the project will involved a Somnambulist sinking a bore and constructing a well at the Ballara property boundary. The water drawn up from this well flowed into the channel cut into Glaneuse Road and Cheshunt Street during stage 1 and spilled out over Point Lonsdale Road and down into the bay.

GLANEUSE ROAD

The second stage of the project quite remarkably involved the establishment of a site office on the grounds at Ballara.

From here the Somnambulist worked up the broader and bolder range of interventions carried out over the course of this stage.

The Somnambulist also constructed a gate in the fence around Ballara for independent entry and exit to the property as well as bluestone path between this gate, the bore font and the site office.

Water began to pool in the channels carved down the side of Cheshunt Street.

This stimulated the growth of lush, dense vegetation in these channels.

CHESHUNT STREET

Residents were thrilled by the changes made along the Cheshunt Street nature strips. These residents were encouraged by the Somnambulist’s example to inhabit the nature strips as a social setting more confidently.

The Somnambulist installed road dividers along the border of the newly created artificial stream to prevent cars from dropping a wheel in and to invert a hierarchy in a way that prioritised pedestrians.

Some residents were unhappy with the changes to nature strips. By way of compensation the Somnambulist built intricately detailed timber fencing between the nature strip and these reisdents’ properties.

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The Somnambulist also built a number of small (DDA Compliant) pedestrian crossings and bridges across the bore stream and marshy channels to cement the subjugation of vehicular traffic to pedestrian movement as well as shore up the good will of residents by ensuring the street remains basically functional.

CHESHUNT STREET

CHESHUNT STREET

POINT LONSDALE ROAD

The Somnambulist used Asphalt recovered from the centre of Cheshunt Street (along with a bit of fresh tar) formalise with stepping stones some of the paths and goat tracks that developed across the nature strips as interventions increasingly drew the attention of residents and visitors.

Water from the bore, after trickling through the channel dug over summer 2020-2021, spills out over Point Lonsdale Road.

This, paired with a new (traction paint) pedestrian crossing installed by the Somnambulist flipped another hierarchy, subjugating the motorists driving along Point Lonsdale Road to the ramblers and meanderers following the water down Cheshunt Street.

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STAGE 03 2026

The third stage of the project took place 5 years following the second. It involved working with the City of Greater Geelong to protect properties along Cheshunt Street from storm surges up to 2030.

It pivoted the framing of the project to allow it to take advantage of significant new pools of funding made available at this time by government to respond to increasingly regular and ferocious storm surges.

CHESHUNT STREET

Erosion at the intersection of Cheshunt Street and Point Lonsdale road caused by water running down from Cheshunt Street was compounded through manual deepening works.

Molded Zebra crossing concrete blocks were installed at this intersection to serve as ramps for vehicles to cross this sunken waterway.

This paired with water pooling here contributed to a flipping of hierarchies - pedestrians crossing between Cheshunt Street and the beach by this point had clear right of way over vehicles moving along Point Lonsdale Road.

A recycled asphalt slide was installed to negotiate sharp variation in grade between a concrete promenade and the beach.

A Somnambulist used asphalt collected during previous stages of this project to build an ocean pool wrapping in a quarter-moon arc between the beach an existing rocky breakwater.

This structure continues to serve the dual purposes of accentuating the end point of our artificial stream’s journey and contributing additional breakwater and surge protection infrastructure to the area.

The existing rocky breakwater

We were remarkably successful in achieving community support for relatively significant changes to community space.

This is because we ensured that changes always benefited (or at least don’t get in the way of) those using the spaces every day.

Here we can see how our proposed Breakwater/ ocean pool has been experienced by a user jumping from it into the ocean.

CHESHUNT STREET

The new, recycled Asphalt Breakwater

Which someone has just made use of to jump into the ocean

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Channels to each side of Cheshunt Street are widened and deepened to help them better accommodate storm surges. Community resistance to this will be limited given both that they already exist and the trust our organisation already enjoys with residents along Cheshunt Street.

CHESHUNT STREET

MORNINGTON PENINSULA Swale and wetland plants will be introduced to micro ephemeral wetland areas and residents will be encouraged to inhabit these increasingly garden-like spaces by being offered grants to have any pergola or outdoor seating area they would like to install in front of their property funded in a way that ensures it is built above the storm surge line This way again, you are investing in both surge protection infrastructure and public-private overlap amenity.

The grade of the channels along the edge of Cheshunt Street is softened and the berms to the outside of the nature strip raised (using cut from above) to help both transform Cheshunt Street into a piece of flood infrastructure with a useful capacity and protect residences from flooding.

The new asphalt breakwater will tie in coherently with th existing water-line running down to the beach.

BELLARINE PENINSULA

Our hydrological modeling of Port Phillip bay indicates these cheap ‘Sponge Infrastructure’ modifications to our interventions will protect properties along Cheshunt street up until at least 2030 and could serve as a productive model for similar interventions around Port Phillip Bay.

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CHESHUNT STREET REGULAR

STORM SURGE

Set against this existing rockwork breakwater this element of the intervention resulted in an ocean pool lined up with Cheshunt Street, the way Alfred Deakin would likely have made his way down to the beach and where he would likely have swum.

EXISTING BREAKWATER

PROPOSED BREAKWATER

The new proposed asphalt breakwater was fitted with timber steps down to the water to complete the picture of inviting visitors and locals to engage with the bay in the same productive way that Alfred Deakin did more than a century earlier.

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STAGE 04 2031

The 4th stage of the project took place another 5 years following the completion of the third. It involved collaborating with the RMIT College of Design and Social Context to develop another round of interventions along Cheshunt street. Significant among these was the introduction of a series of large concrete piers that would literally lift Cheshunt Street up out of the earth over time.

The key intervention for this stage - and the most ambitious and costly intervention of the entire project was the installation of a series of reinforcing and grade raising piers which levered from down below Cheshunt Street - wrapping around its sides.

These piers both protected Cheshunt Street from water-logging induced disintegration and raised the road up above the storm surge water line so that it could continue to function into the future.

CHESHUNT STREET

CHESHUNT STREET

The piers raised the road to a height, allowing, even during storm surges, enough roadway to be above the waterline to permit small vehicles to continue to use Cheshunt Street.

This safe-guarding of activity essential to the daily life local residents contributed broadly to good-will and faith around the net benefit of climate resilience programs being introduced in communities around the bay.

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The piers were clearly sculptural - evoking something similar to a large mammal -like a whale’s - rib cage when viewed together. They contributed to the celebration of the importance of this throughline in a more significant way than we could every have anticipated at the beginning of this project.

They psychologically (in terms of this throughline’s importance)locked in the cultural heritage dredging we’d undertaken over the last 5 years and catalysed an even broader based interest in taking advantage of some of the most useful elements of what it’s pretty safe to same was in some respects an absolutely awe-inspiring and consequential life (Deakin’s).

The piers raised the road to a height which meant that even during a high - water storm surge enough roadway remained above water to allow small vehicles to continue to use Cheshunt Street.

This safe-guarding of activity essential to the daily life local residents contributed broadly to good-will and faith around the net benefit of climate resilience programs being introduced in communities around the bay.

CHESHUNT STREET CHESHUNT STREET

Our organisation set up professional support for residentdriven DIY expansions to above-water line timber nature strip structures. These accumulatively ensured free pedestrian navigation of the street was maintained and contributed to a collective but intimate sense of authorship over the space.

The application of tar snakes to Cheshunt Street asphalt continued to ensure that the asphalt areas that makes up the street continued to hold together in a manner smooth enough for a normal small car to be able to drive along it.

This ongoing maintenance process was more important than ever following the literal upheaval caused by the introduction of the piers.

CHESHUNT STREET

CHESHUNT STREET

Both Cheshunt Street and local properties were protected from inundation without the need for a sea-wall.

The sea has been accommodated by our through line, this is a project of snowballing accommodations.

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Weighting to rear of piers ensured that they slowly kept the height of the road in line with the high water line over time.

They also braced the road against the destabilisation that they themselves (along with water-logging) caused and contributed aesthetically to flagging the importance of this throughline.

CHESHUNT STREET

As time passed, Cheshunt Street slid down into the bracing of the piers. This prevented a total disintegration of the road.

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THE FIRST LETTER 2020

This letter was sent to your club. It was this letter that sparked our ongoing collaboration and indeed this whole project - hopefully it examples the potential and value in reaching out and offering someone with something contribute the opportunity to be involved in a project.

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THE SECOND LETTER 2021

This letter was sent the Deakin family following their expression of interest in being involved in the project going forward from the completion of the first stage.

It seizes on that enthusiasm and suggests that they could fund and make space for a significant expansion or second stage of the project - in doing so ensure Alfred Deakin’s legacy continued to flourish well into the 21st century.

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THE THIRD LETTER 2026

The third letter was one addressed to the City of Greater Geelong Department of Building and Planning Green Infrastructure Rapid Deployment Centre. It was sent 5 years after the second a new stage of the project by pitching the stages completed so far as a greater opportunity for investment in local-scale stormsurge protection infrastructure.

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THE FOURTH LETTER 2031

The fourth letter was one sent only a couple of years ago and proposed to the RMIT College of Design and Social Context that recent research funding they had received might be well spent on a significant 4th stage of the project.

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THE SITE This section sets out some of those most influential iterative design work taken gotten into before I got in touch with the Somnambulists Club. It starts to work up what a productive intervention on site might actually look like.

1. Entry to Ballara

2. NE. Down Glaneuse Rd.

3. Turning SE. into Cheshunt St.

4. SE. down Cheshunt St.

5. Continuing SE. down Cheshunt St.

6. Ocean comes into view

The investigation of this loosely traced line highlighted a walk down to the beach from Ballara along Cheshunt Street as the most productive point for a dredging up of this history.

7. Ocean

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Swan Bay Setout

Negotiating a path down to the beach

A new entryway to Ballara

Long -scaled - transect from Ballara down to the beach

Intervention along Cheshunt Street

Site office on the Ballara grounds

Tar modifications to Cheshunt Street road surface

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FROM BALLARA TO THE BEACH What it Needs to Feel Like

They are those wide residential streets close to the beach where the asphalt doesn’t discreetly cut away when it comes up alongside a kerb (there is no kerb) but rather crumbles up amongst a wide grassy strip.

But because we are walking barefoot from Ballara down to the beach, because we are not from here and because the grass is prickly and harsh under foot we walk down the middle of the road, walk really comfortably down to the beach, barefoot, across the asphalt.

Its important that we’re walking down, there’s an incredibly pleasing weighty gravity to a downward walk that we draw great enjoyment from by relinquishing – to a certain extent – control over the leg and letting it thud – In a pleasant, jarring way – onto the asphalt.

And sometimes you come across those incredibly soft, smooth snakes of tar that cover a crack in the asphalt, and that’s especially exciting because while the asphalt is comfortable compared to the grass, these snakes – in their hot, polished, worn down smoothness – feel so good under foot that you’ll more often than not find yourself spinning on the spot, exposing the vulnerable under-arch of your foot to the hot, smooth surface.

And the knowledge that this surface is for rubber, that it was designed with tires and the occasional shoe in mind, contributes to the sense that we are stepping out of the way in which we by default interact with the things around us, and taking great joy in that stepping out.

BALLARA

CH

ES HU

NT

ST R

EE T

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And there is a gardener, who lives on the grounds at Ballara, and the garden this gardener looks over is the asphalt along Cheshunt Street. They maintain the road, are payed a living wage to do so, and work 6 hours a day (in 2 shifts with a 2 hour break in the middle of the day) to maintain the road, to keep it clean and clear as a celebrated conduit from Ballara to the beach.

The gardener: · Sweeps the road of small stones, burs, thorns and other debris to ensure a visitor can always walk down it with confidence ·

Tars cracks in the asphalt as they emerge

·

Stabilises the ‘bank’ of the asphalt, formalising it’s relationship with the adjacent strips of lawn.

·

Knows the residents along the road and (with those who are interested)

co-manages the sections of lawn out front of their houses ·

Builds up cross-cutting strips of soft lush grass to make crossing between the road and the footpath easier

·

Has a passion for the history of the place and shares this passion with residents and visitors.

·

Is broadly dedicated to the maintenance and celebration of this (not discrete) piece of cultural heritage

POINT LONSDALE ROAD

And I guess I’m designing the starting point for the gardener, and having a guess at what they might do with the place over time.

THE BEACH

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This and the following drawing show different parts of the same first draft proposal intervention.

This is a set of steps and tiered cascading ocean pools that I guess could be best described as a glorified goat-track tracing the path Deakin took down to the water as a part of a ritual that supported him in the balancing of his public and private lives.

This intervention traces Deakin’s steps in a way that hopes to give us today access to that same resource that he made such productive use of.

Please refer video for a full outline: https://rmit-arc.instructuremedia.com/embed/458ed6b8-e18d-47179bcf-5c75ccaa4b32

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THE AGENT The site being worked on above was selected as a particularly pertinent part of a journey taken regularly by former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin between Federal Parliament in Melbourne and his home - Ballara - at Point Lonsdale.

This work is motivated by the broad contention that any earnest exploration of how we engage with cultural heritage in the set out of public space – no matter the blandness of the piece of cultural heritage itself – is healthy for a community which -I’m sure we can all agree - clearly struggles to effectively process much of it’s own history.

1. Melbourne CBD, parliament house on a hot December evening.

Alfred Deakin wraps up his work for the year and steps out of the oppressive heat of parliament into the oppressive street of the city and makes his way down Bourke Street to the then Spencer Street Railway Station.

1.

2.

2. An express to Geelong leaves at 10ish.

The wind changes to a cool southerly that sweeps in across the bay, bringing with it that incredible relief familiar to all Melbournians.

3.

3. A bus from Geelong gets Alfred to his second home Ballara at Point Lonsdale before 1am. The change has brought a storm with it which Alfred gets to check out from the bus.

4.

4. There’s a violent summer storm through

the night but by the time Alfred gets up at 5 (without really having slept) its calmed into a drizzle with an ice cold wind.

5. It’s about 8 degrees by 6am but Alfred makes his way down to the beach and goes for an early morning ocean bath.

6. Alfred has finished.

5.

6.

The project centres around the material tracing, celebration and re-establishment -dredging up - of a pattern of movement undertaken by Alfred Deakin on his frequent back and forth travels between Melbourne and Point Lonsdale.

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‘There are many roads so situate in the neighbourhood of Swan Bay, and from the want of traffic on them, and through the wattle seeds blowing from adjoining padocks. these roads in many places resemble a wattle plantation or a scrub rather than a public highway.’

Ballara - Alfred and Pattie Deakin’s Point Lonsdale home in the Federation Bungalow style.

1893 - Victorian State Library Archive

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Paddle Steamer Ozone

Paddle Steamer Ozone and Wreck

Kelp stretching more than 20m up ot of wreck

A section drawn together from historical accounts.

Mysterious ship-wreck is a super rich habitat

The idea of a paddle steamer chugging away 50m above a mysterious wreck with kelp, anchored in the wreck, streaming up over 25m conjurs up an incredible image the might prove a useful organising structure going forward.

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Drawing together & consolidating elements drawn out in the process so far.

P.S. OZONE

BALARA

WATTLE SCRUB

ALFRED DEAKIN

SWAN BAY

P.P. BAY

P.S. OZONE

This drawing attempts to reconcile a heap of otherwise disparate elements, to bring them together in a coherent way.

Here we can see a paddle steamer steaming past Swan Bay while Alfred Deakin stands on the beach below his summer house Balara which he is separated from by a dense wattle scrub.

Eastern Fiddler Rays swim around amongst the Benthic zone below.

What does drawing these elements together offer us? What could we change in this set of related things to draw out something productive?

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This spread represents an attempt to geographically trace out the journey of interest undertaken by our agent.

1.

2. An express to Geelong leaves at 10ish. The wind changes to a cool southerly that sweeps in across the bay, bringing with it that incredible relief familiar to all Melbournians.

1.

2.

2.

2.

1. Melbourne CBD, parliament house on a hot December evening.

Alfred Deakin wraps up his work for the year and steps out of the oppressive heat of parliament into the oppressive street of the city and makes his way down Bourke Street to the then Spencer Street Railway Station.

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4.

6.

3.

4.

5.

6.

3. A bus from Geelong gets Alfred to his second home Balara at Point Lonsdale before 1am. The change has brought a storm with it which Alfred gets to check out from the bus.

5. Alfred has finished.

4.

5. It’s about 8 degrees by 6am but Alfred makes his way down to the beach and goes for an early morning ocean bath.

6.

4. There’s a violent summer storm through the night but by the time Alfred gets up at 5 (without really having slept) its calmed into a drizzle with an ice cold wind.

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THE SOUP This section sets out early analysis drawings that define the larger scale framing for the project.

What - for this project - constitutes Port Phillip Bay? In what space will our interventions and reactions to those play out?

Infralittoral Rock Biogenic sublitoral Reefs

Seaweed Coastal Saltmarsh

Seagrass Beds

Southern Central Muds

Corio Bay Silty Mud

Seagrass Beds Canyons Sand

The Benthic zone is an ecological area that forms up around the lowest possible level of a body of water. In Port Phillip Bay the Benthic zone is on and around the sea-floor.

The Southern Fiddler Ray is found to a depth of 120m. This encompasses the whole of Port Phillip Bay. They eat shellfish, crabs and worms which they crush between their jaws.

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Port Melbourne Williamstown

Werribee

St Kilda

Brighton Sandringham

Mordialloc Dredged Shipping Lanes

Chelsea

No Netting Area

Port Arlington Geelong

Frankston

St Leonards Marine Protection Areas

Mornington

Queenscliff

Sorrento

Dromana Port Philip Bay - Benthic Habitats This second iteration of the map of benthic zones incorporates reported sightings of fiddler rays in red.

Mud

This was undertaken with the hope of testing the data compiled so far - to see if sightings lined up with favourable benthic zones.

Sand

Regrettably however the siting seem to have more to do with the location of particularly popular beaches - giving a sense of density of people rather than fish.

Sea Weed Sea Grass Reef Rock Canyon

Fiddler Ray Sighting

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PORT PHILLIP BAY Benthic Habitats

This map takes the benthic zone map worked up previously as a base to start to map out how fiddler rays might most likely move around site.

As we can see here are 3 chunks of space where the map suggests the rays might move most freely. These are divided up by the large sandy areas to the centre of the bay as well as dredging channels.

Its an assumption that the rays don’t directly cross dredging channels, more info on this could be useful.

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PORT PHILLIP BAY Inferred Fiddler Ray population density and areas of relatively high levels of interaction with people.

A clear visulasiation sitting likely density of rays against where they are most likely to come into contact with people.

Reconciling the two sets of information: Where the fish like to go and where (excepting fishing boats) the fish are most likely to come into contact with people.

Many Fiddler Rays Fewer Fiddler Rays Few Fiddler Rays

Concentrations of Fiddler Ray Sightings

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THE HEADS

Wreck of the PS Ozone

Under water sand bars and channels lifted from aerial.

Portarlington

Indented Head Swan Island

Swan Island

BALLARA

Point Lonsdale

Point Napean Portsea

A beginning of a focusing in on Swan Bay. A high density of rays can likely be found here and it is also the site of ‘Balara’, Alfred Deakin’s holiday house.

The project now moves in to starting to look at how Alfred and how he might have engaged with the rays and their habitat over his life.

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THIS FISH HAS A BEAUTIFUL PATTERN! Drawing and photo of an Eastern Fiddler Ray. There are a lot of these little units in the bay, they’re not endangered, not dangerous to people and not particularly sort after by people.

They’re small and have incredible camouflage colouring that I’ve tried to draw out in this drawing.

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MODEL 01 Topography & Material Recipe

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

This first model did a couple of things.

First it helped get a better sense of the topography of the space particularly the under-water topography of the benthic zone which is often reduced down to just ‘flat’ water in plan.

Second, it was a go at a ‘recipe’ for the building up of material intervention. It was meant to be a diy Plaster of Paris that involved the cooking of flour, water and a huge amount of salt. It got a bit messy in the cooking though and got super lumpy/ never really set.

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MODEL 02 Topography & Intervention

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

This second model was also in the main about getting a sense of the topography of the entry to the bay.

The egg that can been seen is a test at a bit of an intervention over the top with the rough idea being getting a sense of what closing off or introducing a blockage at the heads might look like.

This model did certainly help with getting a sense of the topography but was less useful in terms of what an intervention might look like.

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MODEL 03 Egg

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

This one more or less speaks for it self read with the diagram to the right.

I haven’t gotten too much into it, especially in terms of the direction this project has gone subsequently but I’ll flag here I think that the way an egg is put together might serve as a really useful circuit breaker in terms of an intervention’s materiality going forward.

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SITE

MELB

GEELONG COCOROC

CORIO BAY

INDENTED HEAD

POINT LONSDALE

SWAN BAY FRANKSTON

POINT NEPEAN

THE NINCH

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EXPERIMENT

1.

7.

2.

3.

8.

I made a go of running water through my first topographic model to see how it responded.

While it was super reassuring that the water did fill up in a way that more or less revealed the real above and below water topography of the bay I regrettably haven’t found a way to incorporate this into the work going forward as yet.

I’m not sure I set up in the simulation in a way that really let it show me something new.

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4.

5.

6.

9.

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END

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APPENDIX 01 SOURCES • THE ENIGMATIC MR DEAKIN - Judith Brett Brett J, 2017, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, Text Publishing, Melbourne.

The Source from which this project draws its geographic bounds as well as it’s unrelentingly optimistic spirit about Australia becoming a better place.

• BECOMING JOHN CURTIN AND JAMES SCULLIN - Liam Byrne Byrne L, 2020, Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin, Melbourn University Press, Melbourne.

Conjures up a cultural landscape of the post-federation era that I am drawing on through this project.

• MADAME ZILENSKY AND THE KING OF FINLAND - Carson McCullers McCullers C, 1951, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland, Penguin Random House, USA. All about how very able we are to change how we look at things when needed.

• THE ARABIAN NIGHTS Lang A, 2012, The Arabian Nights, TransAtlantic Press, UK. Archetypal example of stories flowing into stories resulting in material, practical changes.

• PAPER MOON - Peter Bogdanovich Bogdanovich P, 1973, Paper Moon, The Directors Company, USA. A movie about how you keep things chugging along by drawing people into a story.

• NATIONALISM, BRITISHNESS AND THE ‘SOURING’ OF AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL ART - Jim Berryman Berrymn J, 2016, Nationalism, Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, UK. Really explicitly sets out the relationship between the Heidelberg school and big federation era ideas about what Australia could be.

Goes into super interesting detail about nationalism, how that isn’t necessarily incongruous with empire and how it soured into a really ugly nationalism following the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

• EAT THE STREET - Juliette Anich Anich J, 2018, Eat the Street, in KERB 26 - Homelands, Australia.

A really satisfying take-down of community gardens.

A great parallel i think to the souring of federation-era visions for the future and degeneration into a mean-spirited setting out and claiming of exclusive territory • FOR LOVE ALONE - Christina Stead Stead C, 1945, For Love Alone, Angus and Robertson, Australia.

A really incredible novels about what it means to be Australian. Engages with that need many Australians seem to develop to kind of get out.

Really gets into what being a colonial outpost does to the psychology of a group of people.

• THE TRISKELION - Christina Stead Stead C, 1934, The Triskelion, in The Salzburg Tales, Miegunyah Modern Library, Australia, pp. 218-19 Super useful story with parallels to Paper Moon in that its all about the power of stories of their ability to draw you in and make real material change.

• “A NATION FOR CONTINENT”: AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINARY OF THE FEDERATION ERA - Robert Dixon Dixon R, 2014, “A Nation for a Continent”: Australian Literature and the Cartographic Imaginary o the Federation Era, Antipodes, Wayne State University Press, USA. • BRITISHNESS AND ASUTRALIAN IDENTITY: THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY- Neville Meaney Meaney N, 2008, Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography, Australian Historical Studies, Australia.

• THE BEAUTIES AND FURIES - Christina Stead Stead C, 1936, The Beauties and Furies, Text Publishing, Australia.

My ‘Somnambulists’ are lifted in full from this book. They were such a captivating idea that they kind of recentered the project following mid semester around the question ‘What happens when people with next to know connection to the real world start to design? and how would you even convince them to do so?

• “UGLY BY DESIGN”: THE FICTION OF CHRISTINA STEAD - Suzanne Kiernan Kiernan S, 1988, “Ugly by Design”: The Fiction of Christina Stead, MFS Moder Fiction Studes, Volume 34, Number 2, pp. 185-202.

An analysis of Christina Stead’s unusual narrative structure.

It is from this that I determined that it would be interesting to have the design driven by ‘Scenes’ - which later became the letters of the final drawing set.

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APPENDIX 02 SOURCE MATERIAL

State Library of Victoria All Point Lonsdale

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State Library of Victoria Clockwise from top: Swan Bay, Train Bridge between Melbourne and Geelong, Swan Bay, Constitutional Convention

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State Library of Victoria Swan Bay

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State Library of Victoria Clockwise from centre top: Geelong Eastern Beach (my image), St Kilda, Geelong Eastern Beach, St Kilda, Geeolong Eastern Beach, St Kilda Pier.

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The Heidelberg School

Tom Roberts, Slumbering Sea, Mentone

Tom Roberts, Boat on Beach, Queenscliff

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The Heidelberg School

Arthur Streeton, Ocean Blue, Lorne

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APPENDIX 03 THE LETTER IN FULL

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APPENDIX 04 WORKING DRAWINGS (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

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APPENDIX 05 UNCUT PRESENTATION TRANSCRIPT Intro The project I’m going to share with you today is one in which I’ve made an attempt to design a negotiated delivery of a project as much as much as the real material set out of an intervention.

In doing so, I’ve kind of traded off my all encompassing clarity of intention for the project in exchange for an opportunity to explore and plan for productive collaborations that I have mapped out as being potentially catalytic to the snowballing growth and productive derailment of the project over the next 12 years.

I’ve tried to represent this approach here by structuring this presentation through 4 letters sent to a range of collaborators as the project unfolds.

110 words 0:40

Letter 01 My first letter is to the Melbourne Somnambulists’ Club.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Somnambulists are a group of commendably cynical individuals who – according their website - ‘sleep in the daytime’ and ‘at night…live under the guidance of the soul’ Um, you know, so they’re eccentrics – but I’m convinced that their particular brand of eccentricity places them uniquely to ensure that this project brings about something new.

The letter broadly sets out to the club that I’ve made use of historical accounts to trace the movement of former Prime Minster Alfred Deakin as he commuted around Port Phillip Bay between Federal Parliament in Melbourne and his home - Ballara - at Point Lonsdale.

It then focuses particularly in on a walk Alfred was known to regularly make from Ballara down to the beach.

This is put forward as a proposed site of intervention based on the contention that any earnest exploration of how we engage with cultural heritage in the set out of public space – no matter the blandness of the piece of cultural heritage itself – is healthy for a community which -I’m sure we can all agree - clearly struggles to effectively process much of it’s own history.

And so my proposal to Somnambulists is quite simply an offer to employ someone among them to dig channels down each side of Cheshunt Street - the street that connects Alfred’s house to the beach, to mound that cut up at the edges of nature strips, and to cut a quarter depth channel down the centre of the street itself.

This first stage will help acclimatise local residents to the idea of change along Cheshunt street as well as start to draw together some of the key stakeholders who will be essential to propelling the project as it gains momentum.

294 words 1:30, 2:10

Letter 02 The second letter is to The Deakin Family who still own and often stay at Ballara and who will have gotten in touch following the first stage of the project to express their support.

Seizing on this, I here have written to them offering a chance to be involved in a second stage of the project.

This involves the Deakin family agreeing to the Somnambulist establishing a site office on their property and digging a bore at the property boundary which will allow water to trickle from a well down the channel carved along the centre of Cheshunt street in the first stage of the project.

Additionally - this stage will involve the construction of a pedestrian crossing at the intersection of Cheshunt street and Point Lonsdale road.

This will prioritise water and pedestrians, trickling down from Cheshunt street to the beach over motorists moving along Point Lonsdale road.

This flipping of user hierarchies, paired with the establishment of a literal flow of material between the house and the beach will draw visitors and residents alike in - to start to interrogate what is going on here and why.

189 50, 3:00

Letter 03 This third letter is sent 5 years after the second to the City of Greater Geelong.

It highlights the success of the first phases of the project and points out that the project could be a prefect spot to trial small scale ‘sponge city’ storm surge protection infrastructure for which the council has recently received more funding than they know what to do with It suggests that asphalt extracted during the first stage of the project could be used to construct a half-moon breakwater that creates an ocean pool at the point where the water from the bore enters the ocean – both reducing the ferocity of storm surges and providing a coherent end point for the walk down to the beach.

Secondly, the letter points out that with just a little deepening and widening, the channels dug in the first stage of the project could serve as levies that could protect properties along Cheshunt street from storm surges.

Stage 3 reframes our project as one of climate resilience, opening it up to significant pools of funding that allow both it’s interventions and legitimacy to be shored up in the eyes of government, visitors and locals.

196 words 0:55, 3:55

Letter 04 The 4th letter is spaced another 5 years from the third and is to the RMIT college of Design and Social Context.

The letter proposes an ambitious final stage for the project which involves the installation of large concrete piers that brace the road against disintegration resulting from inundation but also -because of the way they are weighted - lift the road up out of the earth over time.

This means that even at times of storm surge the throughline between Ballara and the beach will remain open and protected from inundation.

The snowballing coalition that the project has built up over the previous 10 years means that these upgrades will be able to be so significant that they will psychologically cements our intervention than ever pose the questions what’s going on here and what comes next?

138 words 0:45, 4:40

Conc I’ve aimed here to communicate a new model for how our cultural heritage could be incorporated productively into public space.

I hope it is clear that my ambition has been as much the development of a plan that helps the project snowball as it has been the development of the initial intervention itself.

53 words 0:15, 4:55

Question And so that’s the presentation but I do have one particular question that Im finding super vexing as I start to think about major project.

• I get great joy out of these projects that are kind of very introspective and centre on a very individual or personal experiences and drawing style but I can’t help but feel though that there’s a tension emerging between the individuality and introspecitvenss of my work and my passion for compromise, collaboration, deliverable outcomes and a broadly ‘radical centre’ bent.

As I move toward major project I’m increasing unsure of whether its worth trying reconcile these strands and would really appreciate any advice on how achievable you guys think that might be.

90 words 0:35, 5:30

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ALBERT REX . s3602426 . Studio 8 .

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