Architect Victoria_Summer_2020

Re-valuing Heritage

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Contents —

Architect Victoria summer 2020 04 06 07 08 10 14 16 20 22 28 32 36 38 40 42 46

With thanks to our Gold Patron

Carey Lyon

President’s message Chapter news Acknowledgements Editorial Reclamation and repair Rueben Berg on understandings of heritage This is not my Country Practice of reconciliation Symbol as strategy Sacred patterns Revealing cultural landscapes Working on Country Office of the Victorian Government Architect Slice Profile Notable

Australian Institute of Architects

Managing Editor Michael Linke

Victorian Chapter Level 1, 41 Exhibition St Melbourne, VIC 3000 ABN 72 000 023 012

Editorial Director Emma Adams

Become a Patron vic@architecture.com.au 03 8620 3866 Advertise with Us vic@architecture.com.au 03 8620 3866 Subscriptions Five print issues per year (AUD) $80 Australia/NZ $120 Overseas

Guest Editors Jack Mitchell Sarah Lynn Rees Editorial Committee James Staughton (Chair) Elizabeth Campbell Laura Held Yvonne Meng John Mercuri Justin Noxon Sarah Lynn Rees Keith Westbrook

On the Cover Based on maps of Indigenous languages groups, which left some areas blank as they were when published, Artwork by Sarah Lynn Rees. Cover design by Eloyse McCall. Refer to the full illustrated map by Sarah Lynn Rees on page 7 Art Direction Annie Luo Graphics Coordinator Eloyse McCall Printing Printgraphics Acknowledgement of Country The Victorian Chapter and Editorial Committee respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work and pay respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.

This Publication is Copyright No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the Australian Institiute of Architects Victorian Chapter.

Disclaimer Readers are advised that opinions expressed in articles and in editorial content are those of their authors, not of the Australian Institute of Architects represented by its Victorian Chapter. Similarly, the Australian Institute of Architects makes no representation about the accuracy of statements or about the suitability or quality of goods and services advertised.

President’s message —

Collective heritage

Victorian Chapter President Amy Muir

Re-valuing heritage. Engaging in collaborative processes to embed shared experiences in architecture and throughout the built environment is incredibly important. I am optimistic that real change is occuring based on the collective stance, and a groundswell of acknowledgement, that it is no longer acceptable to deny this country's cultural heritage. We all need to listen and to learn and to understand.

This denial has not only significantly impacted the lives of so many people who innocently were part of a constructed regime that produced devastating results but it has also denied our country’s ability to develop a rich, sophisticated and integrated approach to cultural heritage more broadly than currently defined. Listening and learning could have allowed us to develop a unique and culturally rich understanding of sustainability. Now is the time to act so that we can embrace and grow.

This issue of Architect Victoria, guest edited by Jack Mitchell and Sarah Lynn Rees, focuses on re-valuing heritage. This is a very important issue that navigates the various conditions that define our engagement with this topic.

This year's National Architecture Conference in Melbourne curated by Stephen Choi and Monique Woodward considered architecture's relationship to Indigenous knowledge, and protocols for engagement with Traditional Owners that indicate respect and acknowledgement.

In 2019, it was agreed by National Council that the Australian Institute of Architects would proceed with establishing a national Reconciliation Action Plan. It was noted that significant work had been undertaken

by our members to point us in the right direction and that action urgently needed to be taken.

Through consultation with Indigenous members, the Victorian Awards Committee has been actively pushing for the introduction of Acknowledgement of Country within the online entry forms for the state and national awards. The National Awards Working Group are currently looking to implement this in conjunction with the introduction of an Indigenous award. These items will be put to the First Nations Advisory Group for review and implementation.

The Expression Of Interest for the establishment of this advisory group saw 30 submissions from a range of national members.

The recent national awards saw the Acknowledgement of Country included on all awarded projects within Architecture Australia. The 2020 Venice Biennale creative directors Jefa Greenaway and Tristan Wong will see an active intent to acknowledge and bridge cultural nuances with their project In | between.

These are all incredibly important steps. Heritage may once have been defined by selective amnesia, but this can no longer be the case. A far more sophisticated and robust definition is required for moving forward collectively.

I would like to thank Sarah and Jack for their thoughtful and considered engagement with this topic. This is a conversation the Victorian Chapter is pleased to help facilitate and one we look forward to collaborating on in 2020 and beyond.

I would also like to thank the Editorial Committee and the many contributors.

2020 Awards Entries Now Open Victorian Architecture Awards —2020

Chapter news —

From the Victorian Chapter Michael Linke

The Victorian Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Countries we work on as we continue to focus on passionately advocating for architects across Victoria, raising design standards and positively shaping the places where we live, work and meet across the state. With the Institute supporting the Shergold Weir report, we have advocated for some time for changes to the building regulatory environment regarding enforcement

and compliance with the National Construction Code, particularly with regard to compliance failures such as non-conforming building products and fire safety.

With such a focus at the present time, our Chapter's CPD program is aimed at ensuring our members are equipped with the most up-to-date education on various critical elements of the National Construction Code and other relevant standards. These sessions have proved extremely popular to date and will continue through into 2021.

Topics have been covered so far this year include a focus on fire safety and façade cladding products.

Our valued Victorian members continue to shine. Aside from the privilege of appointing a number of members to Life Fellow this year, we are proud to announce that two Victorian members are

→ Right Jefa Greenaway and Tristan Wong,

Creative Directors for the Australian Pavilion in 2020

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Re-valuing Heritage

to represent Australia at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. Leading Indigenous architect and academic Jefa Greenaway of Greenaway Architects has been selected alongside SJB Architects director Tristan Wong as creative directors for the Australian Pavilion in 2020. For the first time, the pavilion will bring Australia’s Pacific neighbours into the fold and explore the unparalleled architectural and cultural diversity of the Australasian region. The project, In | between, is a collaboration between the two Melbournebased architects and architectural anthropologist Elizabeth Grant, writer/ producer Tim Ross, designer Aaron Puls and graduate of architecture Jordyn Milliken. We look forward to supporting them as they showcase Australia to a global audience.

Wishing you all the best for the festive season.

Heritage Committee Louise Honman and Vicki McLean

The biggest event in Australia’s cultural heritage this year has been the inscription on the World Heritage List of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in south-west Victoria. Budj Bim joins one other Victorian site, the colonialera Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens.

Located in the traditional Country of the Gunditjmara people Budj Bim is listed solely for its Indigenous cultural values and consists of three serial components containing one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems. The ongoing relationship of Gunditjmara and their Country is carried by knowledge systems retained through oral transmission and continuity of cultural practice.

For Gunditjmara Budj Bim Cultural

Student Organised Network for Architecture Chris Filippidis

This semester has been yet another exciting time for SONA. Portfolio Night held at Hames Sharley in October was a great success as students had an opportunity to acquire valuable feedback on their portfolios from industry professionals. We have been working on the event A Conversation Without Architects, a Q&A session for SONA members to learn about how a master builder, a heritage consultant, a sustainability consultant, an urban

Landscape represents a settled life managing the natural resources of the area for over six millennia.

Next year in October the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) General Assembly comes to Sydney under the theme of Shared Cultures – Shared Heritage – Shared Responsibility. The General Assembly will include over 1,500 First Nations people, Traditional Owners and heritage professionals from across the globe representing heritage management, anthropology, archaeology, history, urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture and academia. The assembly and its many side events are expected to deliver a boost to ‘grass roots’ interest in cultural heritage and conservation work throughout Australia.

Heritage sites also offer immense richness to our cities and towns, building up layers of history and contributing to our collective memory. A CPD event organised by the Institute’s Victorian Heritage Committee, navigated heritage architectural opportunities and statutory pathways showing how

heritage is an opportunity rather than a constraint. It aimed to assist contemporary practitioners and to educate and encourage awareness around the role of heritage within the built environment. Many thanks to Ariani Anwar from the Heritage Committee for assisting with this event.

The Heritage Committee is fortunate to have Peter Johnson who has been active for many years in assisting the State Library with architectural drawing collections and representing the Institute on the State Library User Organisations Council. Some recent projects he has been involved with are conservation and digitisation of the Robyn Boyd collection, and the donation of the Edward Fielder Billson archive (1892–1986) to the State Library. The work of conservation and digitisation of architectural practice archives is important work for the State Library and Peter provides architectural expertise in this area.

planner and a structural engineer work with architects. Thanks to Brickworks for sponsoring the event.

At a local university level, SONA has been liaising with the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne and Melbourne School of Design (MSD) students. SONA has been representing the architecture student community at the forum hosted by Professor Alan Pert, and has contributed to the establishment of the MSD Studio Culture Agreement.

These actions have made student voices better heard by the faculty and fostered an improved learning environment.

Furthermore, the Discussion Board we operate has grown exponentially since the beginning of the year and has become a communication platform for over 500

MSD students. We share information regarding events, meet-ups, faculty updates and more. It has created a positive attitude towards the relationship between the students and with the faculty.

As we celebrate the end of the year, we would like to congratulate all the design and architecture students for getting through the university coursework. SONA thrives to be the community for students and our involvement in R U OK Day in September is just one of the supports we have provided this year. Thank you to all of our members, architects and Institute staff for engaging with our events and for your continuous support.

Architect Victoria

Education Committee Dominik Holzer

How do we advance continuous learning in practice and what role does the Victorian Education Committee play in assisting the Institute in realising their various efforts in this space? The months leading into Spring have seen solid discussions around this topic, not only from a programming perspective, but also in regard to positioning the work jointly undertaken by academics and practitioners within the committee and its sub-committees. Changes to the management of Institute committees are imminent. This is due

Emerging Architects and Graduates Network Camilla Tierney The first season of Hearing Architecture is now complete, and quickly rose on the charts becoming number three in the Australian Design Podcasts. It has been an incredible effort from the EmAGN National team, led by Daniel Moore, with all states contributing to the content. We are now looking forward to putting

Sustainable Architecture Forum Nadine Samaha

In September, Anna Ridgway shared with forum members how Abbotsford Riverbankers community group is transforming their degraded riverbeds into a beautiful bush corridor.

‘Our community is the custodian of the skills, resources and commitment we need to care for our environment. We achieve our

to the natural evolution of purpose, goals, and desired output of these committees, both at a chapter, as well as a national level. As committee members, we see it as an essential aspect of our work to continue our strong involvement in programming the focused (and highly successful) CPD program that was recently started, and to become more involved in discussions surrounding research in practice and its interfaces with tertiary education.

The Victorian Education Committee has been fortunate to welcome Krista Weymouth and Adam Toma as guest ARBV representatives to converse about the architect accreditation requirements in general, and the aftermath of the Shergold

Weir Report more specifically. Here, our dialogue centred around a possible expansion of the mandated competencies of architects regarding the knowledge and application of legislated code requirements.

Debate in this space is bound to continue over the coming months and years. In particular about finding a balance between responsibilities within academia to prepare students, opportunities within practice to advance knowledge of recent graduates (and senior staff), the mission of the Institute to assist continuous learning through CPD, EmAGN and other means, and the clarity of the legislative framework developed by the ARBV.

together season two, and continuing the important discussions around architecture.

on your own is never easy, Alex Lake and Claire Scorpo generously shared their learnings from starting their own successful practices.

We hope to have a new EmAGN website up and running soon, so keep an eye out for a new look, new content and helpful information for all emerging architects and graduates of architecture.

Finally, after being the EmAGN Co-Chair for the past two years, it is a pleasure to pass on the reigns. I know the committee is in safe hands, and am proud by all the content and initiatives that EmAGN is a part of and created.

Our September CPD discussed Value Management in today’s architectural process. An engaging topic, which was resented by Fieldwork and Milieu and their collaboration on the North Fitzroy Apartments. It highlighted the importance of good working relationships, clearly defined briefs and budgets.

October hosted a forum ‘What I wish I knew before I became my own boss’. Acknowledging that going out

goals by leveraging this community strength wherever our community is – among residents, visitors, workers…even friends we’ve never met. We do this through flexible planning and activities, around a strong core of committed volunteers and in partnership with supporting groups and organisations.’

The 2020 Sustainability Living Festival's theme is Building Australia's response to the Climate Emergency.

The summit dates are 14—15 February followed by Climate Week from 16—23 February. Caroline Pidcock is confirmed to speak at the Town

Re-valuing Heritage

Hall about Architects Declare. CPD seminars will run at 41X organised by the CPD committee We are planning another 'Ask an Architect' session and two forum members will present their sustainable project in response to the Climate Emergency. Also being prepared, is a workshop: Tools for empowering humans to fight climate change.

The Indigenous ecosystem corridors and nodes proposal drafted

by Jane toner and Max Leegel Wight has been submitted to the Victorian Chapter President for discussion at a national level.

Acknowledgements —

we understand a Welcome to that the curation and editing of this Acknowledgement IfCountry as an invitation, bound in a issue has taken place across Boon question of purpose and intent, then Wurrung and Wurundjeri Countries of Country we can consider an Acknowledgement where we live and work. We aspire Sarah Lynn Rees

as an answer to this question. This is what makes an acknowledgement meaningful. Our intent for guest editing this issue of Architect Victoria is part of a larger purpose to continue Indigenising the built environment by sharing the experiences of those who have been engaging in conversation and action. Each contributor speaks to their own experiences based in the contextual reality of the variety of Countries they come from and work with. As guest editors we thank every contributor for sharing their stories and acknowledge the communities and Countries they represent or have worked with. We further acknowledge

→ Based on maps of Indigenous languages groups,

which left some areas blank as they were when published, Artwork by Sarah Lynn Rees

06—07

Architect Victoria

to align with the values of these communities out of respect for their custodianship and acknowledge their Countries, Elders and the wider Indigenous community.

We would also like to acknowledge Emma Adams, Editorial Director of Architect Victoria, who has tirelessly and respectfully listened to and actioned our perspectives on how this issue should be brought to life. The guidance and support of both Emma and the Editorial Committee allowed us to explore this edition through a process which was culturally safe and encouraging.

Editorial —

Re-valuing heritage Words by Jack Mitchell

Recently, the Djab Wurrung Embassy reached a compromise with the Victorian state government to protect a series of ancient, sacred trees from the Western Highway expansion.

Confusion surrounding which trees will be destroyed and protected is ultimately extraneous to the real issue.

These trees are so valuable to the Djab Wurrung people that they are willing to die to protect them, yet they lack any official form of heritage protection at either a state or federal level. Nayuka Gorrie writes: ‘The inability to see these sites as worthy of being protected or that they are significant is fundamentally racist. It is white selectivity that deems sacred trees unworthy of protection. This white selectivity spans across all elements of our life – what is taught in schools, who is worthy of justice – but plays out particularly in the public imagination surrounding what sites are important and for what reason.’1 Her assertion is hard to protest when juxtaposed to the fact that the Victorian government was actively seeking heritage protection for parts of the Eastern Freeway2, which is only fifty years old and carries its own

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history of trauma for the Wurundjeri people. It is doubtful any member of the public is willing to die to protect it, which begs the question as to who heritage protection truly serves.

As we recognise heritage as belonging more to people than to buildings and developing from culture and relationships, how does Australia’s cultural and architectural heritage look from an Indigenous perspective? Or perhaps more importantly, how does it feel?

This edition of Architect Victoria seeks to address heritage from varying perspectives. For this issue, the choice of language will be autonomous for the authors when referring to Indigenous Australians, depending on the Country they are on, from, or referring to.

We consider the perceived ideological gap between the market paradigm that contemporary Western culture functions under and the traditional cultural paradigm that preceded it, referred to often as the Dreaming, and how the protection of both the tangible and intangible aspects of heritage occurs in this shifting context.

An excerpt from Repair by Paul Memmot paints a picture of how life may have been, and how it has

Re-valuing Heritage

changed for Indigenous Australians, establishing the connection between the intangible and tangible aspects of cultural heritage. An interview with Rueben Berg aims to establish the forms of heritage protection for and by Indigenous Australians.

Following on from the Australian Institute of Architects National Architecture Conference in Melboune, Sarah Lynn Rees addresses cultural protocols and patterns of engagement that indicate respect and acknowledgement as a form of intangible cultural heritage protection that can be enacted within all facets of architectural practice.

Andrew Broffman writes about transforming a natural landscape into a curated place and how the literal covering of Little Bay fifty years ago in La Perouse may have more powerfully revealed the metaphorical covering of its earliest occupants’ culture and history.

Sophia Mitchell’s article looks at symbolism and representation, including the fundamental ways in which individuals engage with and make meaning of place, and ancestral knowledge of Country. Francoise Lane engages with how practice and experience can provide a different perspective of the built environment to create a sense of place, foster connection to Country and build community.

Maddison Miller and Andy Fergus explore the flows of a cultural landscape where topography and waterways dictated more directly the pattern of development in cities such as Sydney and Hobart. Comparatively, the imposition of Hoddle’s Grid in Melbourne with its disregard for a network of creeks and the dramatic reshaping of the Yarra River changed the role of the river from the centre of cultural life to a utilitarian drain.

Architecture is about place and therefore more uniquely sited than most to celebrate our Indigenous culture because Indigenous cultural heritage is so deeply tied to place.

Australian culture is an amorphous and troublesome beast, still in its relative infancy and still perhaps tantruming over the exposure of its dark history and destruction of much of its foundational mythology.

Hopefully our heritage practice can help embed Indigenous culture in the wider cultural landscape in a more habitual and intuitive way.

Jack Mitchell is is a designer, artist and writer with Noongar heritage currently working as an architectural assistant and Indigenous Design Consultant at Jackson Clements Burrows, cultural research organisation Black White and Bluespace and is a co-producer with Resistance Transmission. Jack is cocurating the third Blakitecture lecture series at MPavilion with Sarah Lynn Rees and is a member of Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria. Jack has a Bachelor of Applied Science (architectural science) and was a recipient of the 2018 Creators Fund for Black White and Bluespace.

Architect Victoria

Sarah Lynn Rees is a Palawa woman descending from the Plangermaireener and Trawlwoolway people of northeast Tasmania. A graduate of architecture and Indigenous Advisory lead at Jackson Clements Burrows, she also manages the MPavilion Blakitecture series, now in its third iteration. She holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge and sits on the Victorian Chapter’s Editorial Committee and Emerging Architects Graduate Network. In partnership with JCB, Sarah is currently working with Monash University Department of Architecture on an open resource platform with the aim of continuing to build and share these protocols and resources with every project undertaken and from the lessons shared by Indigenous communities and peers.

Notes Nayuka Gorrie in www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/apr/12/the-government-wants-tobulldoze-my-inheritance-800-year-old-sacred-trees 2 Libby Porter et al. in www.theconversation.com/whatkind-of-state-values-a-freeways-heritage-above-theheritage-of-our-oldest-living-culture-122195 1

Article —

Reclamation and repair Words by Paul Memmott

The symbolic content of the Repair exhibit at the 16th International Venice Architecture Biennale reflected a developing architectural practice of integrating built and natural systems to repair the environment and a contemporary re-valuing of heritage.

The following narrative draws from early ethnographic descriptions of the temperate grasslands in what is now Victoria, south-eastern Australia, 1835 and moves to nineteenth-century contact history.

Dooti awoke at the pre-dawn to the sound of the song-man’s boomerangs clapping. She emerged from her domed wuurn (house) to blow the fire coals and raise flames for warmth. The winter rains had departed a month before and the bone moon was hovering low in the sky to the west with the Morning Star. There was not a breath of wind, giving perfect conditions to make the great smoke signal to invite the surrounding tribespeople to gather at Mirraywuyay for the annual assembly of the grassland tribespeoples. More and more boomerang percussionists joined the distant singing as the local clansmen began their ceremony for the invitation smoke. As the sun

lipped above the horizon, all of the camp had to be at the side of the big swamp a kilometre away.

The local Bunjil (Eaglehawk) Dreaming clansmen emerged in full-body paint in a single line to commence their Kangaroo fertility dance. The Waa (Crow) Dreaming men from the neighbouring clan stood ready with their green boughs ready to manage the fire. When the dance reached its crescendo, the senior clan Elder, Jagajaga took the burning firestick to the swamp edge and lit the tall fringing grass.

Flames leapt high as there was much dry dead grass interspersed with green on the swamp’s edges.

It was the role of the Waa men to control the fire so that it burnt in a narrow band from north to east (clockwise) around the periphery of the 500-metre circular swamp. As the song men raised their pitch, the great spiral white smoke began its ascent into the still morning sky. If it remained calm, the spiral would reach the height necessary to be seen for a radius of 250 kilometres covering the territories of the seven tribes of the Plains Nation.

Later in the middle of the day, Dooti was on the basalt-strewn

Re-valuing Heritage

plains with her clanswomen’s group, digging root foods (tubers, rhizomes, corms, bulbs). They were accompanied by some of the younger women from the neighbouring clan who were also Bunjil, having married in to the Waa clan. The women had spent most of the morning targeting murnong tubers (daisy roots) whose presence across the plain was conspicuous by their bright yellow flowers. But they supplemented these with other species of orchids that had shot up after the good winter rain. Their metre-long digging sticks, water coolamon and reed baskets were placed to one side together with tied bundles of grass for thatching the domed roofs in the camp. The women were taking a break in the shade of a small patch of shrubs on the otherwise open plain, and lightly roasting a small portion of their foodstuffs for a midday snack. The gossip was about the eligibility of particular young women from other tribal groups as wives to be promised for the young boys who would undergo the ‘makingmen’ ceremony at the forthcoming assembly. Margurah, a visiting senior woman was praising the virtues as well as promoting the economic preference for the daughters of the Stone-Dreaming people to the west, who controlled rituals and rights over the greenstone axe and obsidian knife quarries.

Some weeks later, when the moon had grown full: The great assembly was now well underway. All of those invited had arrived, according to the clan messengers who had travelled with the invitation ochre and feathers a moon before. The square-up rituals had been completed to equalise emotions – resolve grievances by

→ Right John Skinner Prout, Melbourne

from Collingwood, 1847, with swamp ecology destroyed, State Library of Victoria Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Countries

duel fighting and perform mourning obligations for the deceased. The Tanderrum ceremonies had then followed over six days to ritually smoke all of the visitors, cleansing them of any malignant spirits that may have entered upon their wellbeing, and then to bestow them with rights to join in the local collection of food and material resources.

And then the hundreds of visitors (perhaps almost 2000) had to be all carefully allocated their camping places between the foothills of the woody uplands and the fast-running stream on the edge of the plain, with an allocated defecation area at the rear. They all needed access to ample firewood and freshwater, but the camping pattern was according to locational positioning and had to be preserved: each party had to be camping in the direction of

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their homeland. All those from one language group had to be together and broken down into clusters according to their constituent clans, which could be either Waa or Bunjil Dreaming. Public dancing corroborees had commenced in the evenings with each language group vying to be the most polished performers and at times, humorous dancers. This pattern would only be broken on the three nights of the man-making ceremony when everyone would camp around the ceremony ground in two large groups, either Waa or Bunjil group, to represent the two inter-marrying halves of the regional bloc of the plains tribespeople. These two categories of people would also be expressed during the ceremony in both sitting and dancing groups as well as styles of body paint-up →

and dress apparel. Husbands had to split from wives and adult children went with their father’s clan. All young children were separated under a chaperone, well away from the ceremony ground. These were the socio-spatial customs of the grassland peoples.

The hunting drive begins: Jemba, the husband of Dooti was in charge of the right flank of the great kangaroo and emu drive which would supply the camp with fresh meat for the duration of the ceremonies. Patchwork mosaic burning had been carried out before the wet season in the drive area, and now these patches contained succulent grass shoots from the ample winter rainfall. It was these shoots that drew in the feeding kangaroos. The drive was happening on day 4, after the visitor’s offerings of smoked eels and fish as well as their vegetable baskets had been enjoyed by all. The weather was favourable with a prevailing wind from the north arising in the mid-morning. The strategy was to throw an arc of people, men, women and children, across a distance of 20 or so kilometres and gradually move south over a whole day towards a V-junction between two running streams, making as much noise as possible with the aid of barking hunting dogs, and by igniting selected patches of unburnt grass to make smoky fires. As they walked, the lead beaters from the local clan would sing the songs of the ancestral beings, the two Black Snake Cousins, the Long-tail one and the Short-tail one, who created the sacred stone weir sites in these streams. According to this sacred history, the two Cousins travelled to meet up and dance together at the junction site called Bukadi, before travelling seaward to create the site of Limbilimbi, the sacred rocks off-shore that stopped the sea from advancing landwards.

This great drive would concentrate large mobs of kangaroos, flocks of emus and other

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animals into the stream junction at Bukadi where long net traps were slung between poles and spearsmen were waiting. The right flank was led by the Bunjil men and the left by the Waa men. Once the kangaroo and emu meat was all consumed, the camp would fall back to the reed-plaited eel and fish traps set in the rock weirs left by the Snake Cousins in the Dreamtime along the two streams. This system of stonewall traps would yield the camp’s sustenance during the final days of completing the ceremonies.

Colonial impacts The narrative returns. The year is 1881 and the scene is a rural roadway leading into Melbourne: Dooti is now a very old woman, but still strong and animated, riding on the tray of a horse-drawn wagon with some younger Aboriginal women and children, and led by their men-folk who are walking in front. She is ‘calling the country’; calling out the Kulin Nation’s names of each hill, creek, and waterhole that they pass as they travel, occasionally weeping, singing to the country, then reminiscing about her experiences and memories in each place during her younger years when people were under the old Law, and before the great disease-time which came with the white men and killed four-fifths of their plains-people.

Dooti is talking to her grandchildren and her great granddaughter Bulthuku (also called Jane), in particular, lamenting the loss of the food resource places and the destruction of sacred sites. She is encouraging Bulthuku, but with a chastising tone as if she will not take notice, to remember that her cultural identity is based on the Dreaming in their country. The wagon enters and moves through the growing suburbs of Melbourne with sprawling estates and industrial coal and steampowered factories. The travelling group who are all extended family, lament on the impact and loss of the cultural landscape... Dooti is calling the names of sacred sites and of her

Re-valuing Heritage

ancestors whose spirits she believes are still at those sites; all being subsumed by the fast-expanding urban development.

Once the steam engine-driven industrial era reached Australia in the late 1800s, the colonial conversion of the continent for economic purposes irreversibly damaged the ecology and habitats, either by urban expansion, pastoralism, mining, farming, logging, over-fishing, draining and damming waterways, and feral animal and plant introductions, all bringing the onset of the Anthropocene in the Southern Hemisphere. The differential spread of the frontier over 180 years had variable impacts in different ecological systems.

The party of Dooti and her relatives is travelling in protest, along the 65 kilometres journey south from their Aboriginal farm station of Coranderrk to Melbourne.

They intend to petition the Colonial Parliament against the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board which has been trying to sell their Coranderrk farm station, and which through imposed management conditions has undermined the initiatives of the Kulin plainspeople to be economically selfsufficient. This is despite their earlier successes at self-governance, farming, house-building and commercial hopprocessing, from when they voluntarily took up residence there in the 1860s with the help of Protector Thomas and Missionary John Green, after a time of starvation and land loss.

Worse still, the Board wants to force tribespeople who have some white (Anglo-Celtic) blood to leave their old people at Coranderrk and live in cities and work for white people, and assimilate. The group of protesters is led by the last strong clan spokesmen who are grounded in the old Law, the Ngurangaeta leaders, William Barak of the Woiwurrung and Thomas Banfield of the Taungurung. Dooti is from the older generation again and a reference point of wisdom for the whole protest group. This is the tenth protest march which the group have made to the government in Melbourne since 1863,

when they had delivered gifts to be sent for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in return for their granted land rights. Unfortunately, the Queen did not hear. Bulthuku (Jane) was left angered and bitter.

In Aboriginal belief, the first travellers across the Australian continent were the ancestral heroes of the Dreamtime who created numerous sites as they travelled in which they deposited their sacred energies, perpetually left behind. In classical Aboriginal societies (before the colonial invasion), these creative acts were re-enacted and celebrated in ceremonies, as in the case of the Black Snake Cousins who travelled through the grassland country creating the weirs. Today the popular term ‘Song-lines’ is often used to describe these lines of travel and the creation sites at which songs, sacred histories and ceremonies and sometimes sacred objects were left behind. However, travel routes of cultural significance to Aboriginal people have also been generated during the colonial era, as was the case with the protest marches from Coranderrk to Melbourne.

There was a tendency in both colonial and post-colonial thought and writing to create and perpetuate a dichotomy between the city and the bush, the settled cities and farms of the east-coast versus the interior and northern wildernesses. However, the artificial colonial landscape versus the natural wild landscape myth has been gradually deconstructed in the late twentieth century with improved ethnographic models and understandings of ancient Aboriginal land management practices, as well as ecological understandings of how European land practices brought irreversible damage.

A different way of thinking then, is that all ecosystems both in urban, rural and remote areas have been undergoing successive transformations over centuries and millennia as a result of human interventions, starting with Aboriginal pre-colonial era, then followed in the colonial era by impacts such as pastoral grazing, farming, timber-

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getting, land clearing, feral plant and animal introduction, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution culminating in the emerging Anthropocene with the likelihood of severe climate change. The proposition of restoring a landscape to some pristine imaginary model of an earlier non-human ecosystem becomes questionable if not impossible to model let alone achieve.

But is there something that we can call partial repair around which one can identify some sound ecological planning principles that mitigate against loss of species and support a healthy reproductive ecosystem? Ongoing interrogation is needed around this question. Situating projects within Aboriginal landscapes, a challenge then for contemporary architects is how to relate a project with some moral integrity, to a changed cultural landscape, often an irreversibly changed landscape.

Paul Memmott is an anthropologist and architect and is the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre at the University of Queensland. He has 45 years of professional life working for and being taught by Indigenous clients. He was part of the team supporting the Repair Creative Directors, Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright of Baracco+Wright Architects, with Linda Tegg, Australian Institute of Architects.

This is an excerpt from the essay ‘Repair and Aboriginal Architecture’

by Paul Memmott, published in Repair (2018) by the Australian Institute of Architects, edited by Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright

Interview —

Rueben Berg on understandings of heritage

•

• Interview by Jack Mitchell •

endangered aspects of Victoria’s cultural history; Importance in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period; Strong or special association with a particular present-day community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons; and Special association with the life or works of a person, or group of persons, of importance in Victoria’s history.

Can you explain the different types of heritage?

A proud Gunditjmara man, in 2018 Rueben Berg was appointed a member of the Heritage Council of Victoria, in a new role that was specifically created for an Aboriginal person who has relevant experience and/ or knowledge of cultural heritage. He also holds two other appointments, one as Commissioner for the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, and the other as a Director at Westernport Water. He was a founder and former Executive Officer of Indigenous Architecture Design Victoria, a notfor-profit organisation that aims to strengthen culture and design in the built environment.

Can you tell us a bit about your role with the Heritage Council of Victoria?

In my role with the Heritage Council I am involved in decisions to add places and objects, which are of cultural heritage significance to the State of Victoria, to the Victorian Heritage Register. This can include places and objects that are of significance to the Victorian Aboriginal community, but not if they are of cultural heritage significance only on the grounds of their association with Aboriginal tradition (those objects and places can be included on the Victorian Aboriginal

Heritage Register as governed by the Aboriginal Heritage Act). Places that have been placed on the register that have strong significance for the Aboriginal community include Nerre Nerre Warren (Dandenong Police Paddocks), which was the site selected in 1837 for the headquarters of the first Native Police Corps in Victoria; Tyntyndyer (Tyntynder) Homestead, which is a place of early interaction between Aboriginal people and European settlers in Victoria and demonstrates the shared histories of these communities and the Former Aboriginal Church of Christ, which was the Aboriginal Church established

by Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls in Gore Street Fitzroy.

What is heritage? Can you explain the processes of assessing importance of place?

Heritage can take many different forms and can be important for a variety of reasons. In recognition of this, the Heritage Council use a variety of criteria to determine the importance of a place or object, including: • The Importance to the course, or pattern, of Victoria’s cultural history; • Possession of uncommon, rare or

Re-valuing Heritage

I think it’s important to be able to recognise that there are also different forms of heritage, including tangible heritage, and intangible heritage.

Intangible heritage is generally seen to include oral traditions, performing arts, stories, rituals, festivals, social practices, craft, visual arts, and environmental and ecological knowledge.

How does this impact our ability to maintain these notions of Indigenous heritage from a cultural perspective?

The Aboriginal Heritage Act here in Victoria was amended in 2016 to provide greater clarity around intangible heritage and how Aboriginal intangible heritage can be better protected and managed. I see this as a powerful and important thing because due to the impacts of colonisation, many of our tangible Aboriginal heritage sites have sadly been destroyed, and therefore in some places only the intangible heritage remains.

→ Right Aboriginal Church of Christ, circa

1957, established by Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls, Gore Street Fitzroy. Photo by Colin Caldwell, State Library of Victoria. Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Countries

How can the built environment respond to Indigenous understandings of heritage in a meaningful/positive/ contributory way?

From my perspective having Aboriginal people as key decision makers, in regard to the protection and management of heritage, is critical.

This is of primary importance when dealing with heritage, which is of specific significance to the Aboriginal community, as is covered by the Aboriginal Heritage Act, and managed by the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and by the Registered Aboriginal Parties they appoint. But I also think this is important for all forms of heritage, which is why I am proud to be a part of the Heritage Council of Victoria.

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Through my role I am able to provide insights about heritage from an Aboriginal perspective. This can include raising awareness of the need to ensure that the recognition of nonIndigenous heritage does not belittle or exclude recognition of Aboriginal connections to places, advocating for the continued inclusion of places with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal significance on the Victorian Heritage Register, and bringing a sensitivity about the significance of place, stories, and intangible heritage to conversations and decisions about heritage.

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This is not my Country Words by Sarah Lynn Rees

This is not my Country, and because it’s not my Country, I cannot speak on its behalf. This statement is true for me, and almost every built environment professional in Australia, so how can we work on and with the Countries that we are responsible for fundamentally modifying? Almost every piece of literature I have read on this topic, across a broad range of professions, makes the key and crucial point that relationship building is at the centre of working with Indigenous Australians, their cultural materials and the Countries they are custodians of. The challenge of course, is that we live in a country with many histories that haven’t been told and many of the associated protocols and customs of cultures that haven’t become ingrained in our collective understanding of the places we live. Consequentially, we don’t know what is appropriate and we don’t know our own heritage.

This is slowly changing, and so too is the attitude towards how we commonly define heritage. Indigenous peoples don’t memorialise history in the same way as Western books and museums. Our histories are living, they are continuous, and they are always with us. They are kept alive by rituals, ethics and behaviours that ensure continuance and respect. I

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define these behaviours as protocols.

Protocols in this sense are a code of behaviour embedded with actions, ethics and nuanced socio-political understanding. The protocols of interaction with people and place vary greatly across Australia and the world; however, they are central to building relationships across cultures.

They aren’t new, they are part of our heritage and they are constantly remapped and adapted in response to change. The remapping of protocols has been manifested in many papers, guidelines and policies, each of which tackle either the outcomes or processes for specific professions. So, the question becomes, how do these protocols relate to architecture and the built environment? What are the protocols we can follow when working on someone else’s Country?

I presented some of the protocols we follow at the 2019 Australian Institute of Architects National Architecture Conference in Melbourne. Some of these protocols are inherited, some are learned and some reference protocols from other professions that are relevant to our own. This isn’t a definitive list, nor is it necessarily relevant for every project or everywhere in Australia.

The intention of sharing these at the

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conference and again in this article is to touch on some points that may help navigate a way through built environment processes that respects and honours Indigenous Australian communities and their Countries.

The following protocols are mapped to the stages of architecture. This article will draw together learnings from a selection of protocols within the internal, procurement and design stages.

Australia is a conglomerate of hundreds of different language groups, otherwise known as Countries.

Traditional Owners have inherited the rights and the knowledge of their Country and therefore are the only people who hold the cultural authority to speak on its behalf. It is important to know the Country you and/or your project are on, so that you can engage with the right communities.

In Victoria, a starting point for understanding which Country you are on is the Registered Aboriginal Parties map on the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council website.

This is not a complete list as many communities may be in the process of or are yet to register. Also note that Country is not just land. In fact, it’s not just land, water and sky either; it is every element of nature including their associated and interconnected systems. This includes humans.

We can’t separate ourselves from the system, we can only work with it or against it. Understanding this ethic and the systems and stories of Country is Indigenous Knowledge.

In a Western education system you have a right to knowledge.

Almost everything you want to know is accessible to you. In an Indigenous context, you earn knowledge over your lifetime when you have proven you will be responsible with its legacy and →

→ Right Protocols mapped to the stages or

architecture by Sarah Lynn Rees, presented at Collective Agency, Australian Institute of Architects 2019 National Architecture Conference in Melbourne

PR

LS

I

NT

ERNAL PROTOCO

LS O C UR E O C O MENT PROT DES S IGN PROC ESS PROTOCOL CONSTRUCTI ON PROTOCOLS POST OCCUPATION PROTOCOLS

OLS AWARDS AN D MEDIA PROTOC

INTERNAL PROTOCOLS Know who you are and where you come from. Know whose country you are on. Educate yourself with Indigenous perspectives. Understand the way knowledge works. Be introspective: motivation and intent. Be fearless.

Eliminate elitism, expectation and egotism PROCUREMENT PROTOCOLS Indigenous-led. Co-design engagement. Make it offcial. Facilitate empowerment. Facilitate relationships. DESIGN PROCESS PROTOCOLS Build in a feedback loop. Listen frst. Creative sugestions: ask, don’t tell. Layer cultural representation. CONSTRUCTION PROTOCOLS Breaking ground. Bring the community with you. POST OCCUPATION PROTOCOLS Ask for feedback and share what you’ve learned. Update your protocol list and encourage post-occupancy evaluation AWARDS AND MEDIA PROTOCOLS Measuring good Indigenous design. Be accountable

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its continuation. Or when it is deemed you need to know something. As such, don’t expect Traditional Owners to hand over knowledge, no matter what project you are undertaking or the status of your relationship with a Traditional Owner. At the start of any new project you will likely be greeted with skepticism, you will be tested and your motivations questioned.

This is due to both the responsibility inherent in holding and transferring knowledge, and the negative legacy of appropriation and disenfranchisement many communities have experienced (and continue to experience) for the last 200-plus years. Before embarking on working with Traditional Owners, go through a process of self-education to supplement any teaching you may or may not have received.

The limitations of our education are not our individual faults, we didn’t design the curriculums we grew up in; however, it is now your responsibility to seek out this learning. The key to this approach is to ensure you are learning from the right people. Look for resources that have been delivered, authored, designed or co-designed with Traditional Owners of the relevant Country. Start conversations with Traditional Owners during the procurement stage so that there is time to embed the values of Country and community into your project. Understand, however, that this self-education will never make you an expert.

At university, a lecturer defined architects as master builders, taught to speak as if we are experts and explain our buildings as if there are no flaws in the process or the outcome – to give the illusion we know everything so that clients have confidence in our ability to tackle a variety of constraints and aspirations. Approaching working with Traditional Owners with the elitism, expectation and egotism anticipated by my university lecturer is not going to get you very far. It’s difficult to feel respected if you get the sense you are being considered lesser, your knowledge isn’t valued or its understanding is being limited,

simplified or romanticised, or you are being talked over or not listened to. As an industry, we need to value Indigenous knowledge, because it can only improve what we create through design, sustainability, caring for Country and for humanity.

A number of tools exist to facilitate respect for Traditional Owners and knowledge of Country.

One of these is the International Indigenous Design Charter. A term popularised by the charter and now used quite frequently is the term ‘Indigenous led’. Professor Brian Martin, a co-author of the charter recently described Indigenous led as leading with Indigenous voices, which means when the project is being dreamed up or a brief is being developed, Traditional Owner voices are embedded from the start. The charter is freely available online and includes a series of ten protocols.

Ultimately, the best way to find out what works best for a community is to ask the community.

In my experience for example, some Traditional Owners will want a senior elder to represent them, some will want a cross-section of the community to be present, some have multiple family or clan groups within a single language group and for the process to be robust and meaningful there needs to be representatives from each group.

As mentioned earlier, the relationship between designer and Traditional Owner is important, especially as we are being entrusted to translate knowledge, cultural representation, social dynamic or politic that has been shared with us into a built environment. However, if the Traditional Owner is not the client then the most important relationship that needs to develop over the course of the project is that of the end-user and Traditional Owner. Once we put down our pens (or mouse), and the builders down tools, we are no longer an everyday part of the project.

Therefore, the site-based ongoing relationship is between the end-user and the Traditional Owners. For that to be meaningful, where possible start in procurement and continue throughout

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the entire project in perpetuity regardless of the project type.

Projects exist on a spectrum or matrix: at one end being Traditional Owner client, Traditional Owner stakeholders and Traditional Owner end-users. At the other end, nonIndigenous client, non-Indigenous stakeholders and non-Indigenous end users. Each possible combination possesses a unique capacity to engage and facilitate community empowerment. Nightingale’s incorporation of the Pay the Rent scheme is one example of a project where the there is no guarantee that the clients, stakeholders or end-users will be Indigenous; however, reciprocity in the form of financial empowerment for Traditional Owners are embedded into the multi-residential housing model in an ongoing capacity, regardless of its makeup.

It is important to clarify that the kind of empowerment and engagement we are talking about here is not cultural heritage management plans, triggered by development overlays and subsequent archaeological processes. These processes are incredibly important, but every kind of project has the potential to engage at a level that is not just looking backwards but also looking forwards, or rather, closes the loop. This could mean developing a memorandum or statement of understanding that articulates your reciprocal responsibilities and the process for engagement with a particular language group.

Governments, developers and peak industry bodies could undertake this in an open and ongoing capacity with inbuilt mechanisms to review on a regular basis. The example of a benefit with this approach is that expectations can be worked out with communities from the beginning and appropriate time can be built into the process for internal community review and approval processes. A great reference for legal frameworks and approaches is the work of Terri Janke, an Indigenous solicitor, specialising in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property.

Whether or not you have a formal engagement plan, build in a feedback loop. This process at a minimum involves multiple face-toface engagements. It is integral that where knowledge has been shared and translated into design there is an ongoing engagement to ensure what the designer has heard, and subsequently translated into the design, is appropriate to its cultural and geographic context.

Cultural representation in design needs to be layered and operating on many levels. The common narrative is that we’ve moved on from no representation to sticking a dotpainting on the wall, to embedding a motif into a textile or surface and now perhaps, working towards a spatial response to protocols. What we need is greater understanding of the potential Indigenous knowledge and cultural practice can bring to design. If we presume it can only be a painting or a textile pattern response, for example, then we are automatically limiting what we could achieve together. Sometimes, however, that could be the best response. There are so many ways we could shift how we think about design to open up new opportunities. For example, what if landscape designs were undertaken from the lens of habitat rather than ornament? What if we could facilitate cultural practices such as weaving by ensuring the correct plant species are incorporated into the design and rights to their cultivation agreed with Traditional Owners? What if we designed for other than human?

What if we recognise the significance of a moiety or totem of a local area by designing a built environment that encourages their return to that environment, rather than an abstract interpretation of said moiety or totem, or perhaps both? What if we used materials that are contextual to Country, for example bluestone is prevalent in western Victoria but what would an appropriate material response be for the CBD? What if we could tell the history of a place without plaques or western memorials? How can the design and construction of built environments encourage young Indigenous people

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into design? What if we employed a hierarchy of local, regional, national, international into our material and supply decision making? What if we considered Indigenous cultural representation as an opportunity for joy and celebration? What if the built environment we create is a place where elders can bring their young people to learn about Country within the city?

The list of opportunities is endless. The point being, there is a place for all forms of cultural representation in design.

Different people from community will see themselves reflected in different aspects of the design.

Overwhelmingly, at the moment we are progressively designing cities and buildings that look like they could be anywhere. Indigenous knowledge in design is an opportunity to create environments that couldn’t be from anywhere else because they embrace and celebrate the unique identity that exists in every Country across Australia. These identities of place hold the shared cultures and protocols of both our heritage and our future. Our responsibility is to act in alignment with these protocols to ensure our heritage continues living throughout the environment we shape.

Sarah Lynn Rees is a Palawa woman descending from the Plangermaireener and Trawlwoolway people of north-east Tasmania. A graduate of architecture and Indigenous Advisory lead at Jackson Clements Burrows, she also manages the MPavilion Blakitecture series, now in its third iteration. She holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge and sits on the Victorian Chapter’s Emerging Architects Graduate Network and Editorial Committee. In partnership with JCB, Sarah is currently working with Monash University Department of Architecture on an open resource platform with the aim of continuing to build and share these protocols and resources with every project undertaken and from the lessons shared by Indigenous communities and peers.

Article —

Practice of reconciliation Words by Andrew Broffman

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the land artists Christo and JeanneClaude’s wrapping of the coastal edge of Little Bay, just north of La Perouse in Sydney (1968/9). Their installation arguably marked the beginning in Australia of large-scale public art commissions by internationally recognised artists. Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet was dramatic and controversial, covering the coastal sandstone with vast areas of white polypropylene fabric and rope, revealing the contours of the land and the vagaries of the wind, while provoking debates about what constitutes public art.

Wrapped Coast was an ephemeral site-specific work, transforming a natural landscape into a curated place that unsettled notions of scale and appropriateness.

Yet for this major work on Country, the voices of the local Bidjigal and Gadigal custodians of coastal Sydney were unmarked. One could argue that the absence 50 years ago of a representative organisation of the La Perouse Aboriginal community made conversations with traditional custodians difficult. More likely, the disregard for Indigenous interests was typical of a general ignorance of the land claims of First Nations peoples.

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As with examples of more permanent architecture, one could say: we can’t really blame the artists/ architects; they didn’t know these things at the time. But we can still wonder how much richer and resonant Wrapped Coast might have been had those conversations taken place.

What could we have learned of the pre-contact history of Gooriwal (La Perouse) and of the original inhabitants, the Kameygal people?

What might have been revealed of the missionary history, the establishment of Indigenous camps and reserves in the area, and of the resistance by the local people to the constant attempts by governments to move them on? With the benefit of this knowledge, Wrapped Coast may not have presented any differently, but the literal covering of Little Bay may have more powerfully revealed the metaphorical covering of its earliest occupants’ culture and history.

The slow recognition of Indigenous cultural heritage in Australia – whether in public art, architecture or other realms of the built environment – is a problem that finds its foundations in a history of racism in Australia: the White Australia Policy, the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal Deaths in

Re-valuing Heritage

Custody, and more recently publicised examples of racial invective in sport.

The harm that racism causes to individual human dignity and social relations requires a civil society to be vigilant (in contemporary parlance, woke) in the fight against its destructive insidiousness. In this struggle, architecture too bears its share of responsibility to continually challenge racism in the built environment, and to promote more inclusive, equitable and safe spaces to live, work and play. How can architecture do this?

Like Wrapped Coast, architecture finds expression through site intervention, and it is at the intersections of the built form and a deeper understanding of Country as understood by Aboriginal people that architecture’s transformative potential may lie.

More than simply its built manifestation, architecture in a reframing of the discipline from an emphasis on a product to one of a process, can instead offer insights into what phenomenologists call the ‘lived experience’ of others. By delving deeper into the layered elements of an architectural methodology – rather than simply reviewing its by-products (buildings) – we can begin to identify moments within architectural practice and discourse that can promote cultural understandings both within the discipline and beyond.

Viewed as a process, architecture becomes a means of interrogating the world that may lead, incidentally, to the creation of built work, but more significantly to deeper and lasting social connections.

The architectural method with its consideration of site, function, history, culture, form, beauty and tectonics may also be scalable to other forms of social enquiry. Seen this way, architecture can be a practice of reconciliation.

Clues to a more generalised architectural practice can be found where architectural work occurs in a cross-cultural context, with a non-Indigenous architect and an Indigenous client for example. Here

language and cultural differences between client and architect require all assumptions to be suspended, opening the possibilities for a heightened awareness of the architectural process. This is a lesson that can be carried across to all architectural projects, asking the architect to mine the possibilities of sociality and reconciliation by posing a fundamental question of all sites and all interventions on Country; specifically, who lived here before us?

For any architectural project, a design response can take many forms. Though the built form should not be arbitrary, the relationship between that form and the client’s brief can often be oblique. Buildings may tell us more about required floorspace ratios, boundary setbacks and solar orientation than they do of the intricacies of the site’s social history.

Each architect will respond differently to these conditions, so the design itself may leave few traces of the social contingencies that should frame all projects.

However, in working crossculturally, the building form is often put aside. Instead, it is the integrity of a process that privileges the building of social relationships through design (through consultation or engagement) that endures. This is not to minimise, in projects with Indigenous clients, the importance of the client brief and the quality of design. Rather it is to highlight the primacy of the social contract within the architectural work.

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Architecture makes a physical mark upon the landscape, and in so doing lays claim to Country, making manifest the cultural layers of a place.

At its best, architecture can contribute to making inclusive and equitable places that reflect the history of the site and the cultural imperatives of its original occupants.

Viewed only as an object, architecture may stand in the way of its own transformative potential. But in a broader discussion about place, Country, cultural agency, racism and reconciliation, architecture may have a better role to play, one that can be found within its very processes.

Here the practice of architecture, as a discipline, as a way of being and thinking about the world and one’s place in it, may be an answer.

Andrew Broffman is an architect and former managing director of Tangentyere Design, an Aboriginalowned architectural practice based in Alice Springs. He is currently an independent director on the Board of Directors of the Australian Institute of Architects.

Article —

Symbol as strategy

Words by Sophia Mitchell

Australia's history of dispossession produces an ever-present tension in contemporary Australian design between the act of symbolic representation and genuine contribution. Projects that engage Indigenous imagery teeter on the edge of (or tip right over into) appropriation without considered community involvement and collaboration. Rather than attempting to grasp the vast and differing ways of being in the world, our occularcentric culture too readily absorbs the visual and reframes it as an act of decolonisation or reconciliation. The architectural community has become increasingly aware of this problematic history; however, ‘collaboration is frequently conflated with consultation, which takes place largely in non-Indigenous terms, using verbal discourse as the primary medium rather than visual communication or participatory place-making from which architects might draw and respond to community-generated art works, stories or poetic histories’.1 As an industry we also contend with the tradition of the architect in the market as expert or overseer, a role which renders the architectural work

a pristine object. These cultural tendencies limit the possibility of making space for Indigenous agency in the process of procurement and consultation, further complicated by the inevitable politics and competing stakeholders that come into play. In this context, the symbolic is an easily injected, spatially reductive entity commandeered and used for political gain. This inclination is particularly prevalent in the contemporary global city where cities attempt to attract investment and as Jane M Jacobs notes, vie for status as the most liveable, the most creative – to ‘brand themselves as distinctive’ on the global stage.2 A distinctive form of symbolism suits the market.

Western culture and Aboriginal culture have fundamentally different ways of relating to material culture and ideology and recognition of these differences is crucial to creating meaning. In Indigenous culture, art and symbolism are not metaphorical or representational but based in reality. Artefacts of material culture such as sculpture, painting, prints and patterning that are used in a symbolic manner are evolving forms of communication and translators of deep ancestral knowledge of Country – a tangible form of cultural memory.

Re-valuing Heritage

The symbol then, is a direct referent to lived experience and is inextricably linked to the land.3 Country is a living, subjective entity and the Western ontological split between subject and object is not applicable. The Ngurrara Canvas II, collaboratively painted by the traditional owners of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala and Juwaliny people in the Western Desert to demonstrate their Country and knowledge to prove Native Title in 1997, is an example of this alive, productive space where the seemingly representational (the visual markers expressed by paint on canvas) is a direct referent to the real. Internationally exhibited and a phenomenal visual document, it is in fact a direct document of Country that shows the spiritual and physical relationship between different elements and where communal bodies meet to create living knowledge.

This relationship becomes a framework to rethink the role of architecture as it relates to Aboriginal culture in civic space. The ideological and cultural tension could be seen as a potentially generative space, crucial to intercultural understanding.

Similarly, the complexities in the interactive architectural process of consultation have the ability to confront and move through uncomfortable realities of our contemporary situation, and open space for true collaboration and intercultural communication. After all, what is a city without tension and difference? It is what makes them so productive. The space of the city is itself of symbolism and storytelling – a layered socio-spatial construction imbued with memories, values, rituals and conflicts.

Visual expressions of culture are just one way of attaching meaning to place; however, they can be easily mistaken as making up for →

→ Right Yagan Square, Perth. Architecture by

Lyons in collaboration with Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects and landscape architects Aspect Studios. Photo by Peter Bennetts.

Whadjuk–Noongar Country

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Article Article — —

structural or haptic markers of placestructural or haptic markers of place-by making and belonging, particularly making and belonging, particularly by new developments that wish to quickly new developments that a wish to quickly impose and construct sense of impose and construct a sense of genuine urban belonging. genuine urban belonging.

Portrait, the William Portrait,inthe William by Barak building Melbourne Barak in Melbourne by ARMbuilding Architecture, raises many ARM Architecture, raises many of questions about the complexity questions about the complexity of memorialisation and the potential memorialisation thepossibilities potential of failings as well and as the failings as well as the possibilities of the symbol used publicly.

The shifting the symbol used publicly.

The shifting perspective of the balcony forms, which come as forms, Barak’s perspective of into the focus balcony portrait on into a single viewing axis, can which come focus as Barak’s be seen holdingviewing its ownaxis, symbolism portrait onas a single can both as of positional be–seen holding itsambivalence own symbolism and the ethical cloudiness of the – both of positional ambivalence gesture.

Writing in Un magazine and the ethical cloudiness of the Tristen Harwood and Lauren Burrow dismiss gesture.

Writing in Un magazine Tristen Potrait as a strategy which Harwood and Lauren Burrowutilises dismiss the symbolism and which representation Potrait as a strategy utilises of Aboriginal culture to create a the symbolism and representation of reconciliation. them,a the ofveil Aboriginal culture toTo create veil of reconciliation. To them, the

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architecture ‘sensationalises Barak’s architecture ‘sensationalises Barak’s image, in order to distort ethical image, in order to distort ethical or aesthetic accountability’ and ‘is ordevised aesthetic accountability’ and ‘is to make people “innocent devised make people “innocent of their to complicity” in colonising 4 ofprocesses’. their complicity” It lendsinacolonising social sheen 4 processes’.

It lends a social sheen to the building without a committed topublic the building without a committed statement. public statement.

While static and yes, While static yes, (architecturally) skin and deep, Portrait (architecturally) deep, Portrait does articulate skin alternative memories does memories that articulate have beenalternative excluded from the that have been excluded from the Australian psyche and erased from our sharedpsyche historyand in public Australian erasedspace. from However, physical our sharedwithout history making in public space. space forwithout the community whether it be However, making physical housing, civiccommunity and community spaces, space for the whether it be symbols and representation remain housing, civic and community spaces, just thatand andrepresentation can feel like ghostly symbols remain relics – contradicting Shaneen Fantin's just that and can feel like ghostly distilling statement: ‘Identity through relics – contradicting Shaneen Fantin's occupation first, representation later’.5 distilling statement: ‘Identity through Ultimately, the building remains as 5 occupation first, representation later’. object not subject.

A surface finish Ultimately, the building remains as object not subject. A surface finish Re-valuing Heritage

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that while powerful and emotive, that while powerful and emotive, remains largely inaccessible to remains largely inaccessible Indigenous people in the city.to Indigenous people inisthe city.

While there something is something powerfulWhile aboutthere the co-option of powerful about the co-option of the colonial form (such as a posed the colonial or form (such as a posed photograph classical statue) that photograph or classical statue) that seems to subvert the other statues seems subvert thearound other statues of whitetomen dotted the of white around city and men dwarfdotted them in scale the (a city and dwarf themitinremains scale (awithin symbolism in itself) symbolism in itself) it remains the dominant language.

In this within case, the dominant language. In this case,

Above Nicole Ma: Spider Snell and his grandson Sylvester at Balgo, on the section Above Nicole Ma: Spider Snell and his of the canvas depicting the sacred waterhole grandson Sylvester at Balgo, on the section Kurtal. Archival images documenting the of the canvas depicting the sacred waterhole painting of the Ngurrara Canvas at Prinini.

Kurtal. Archival images documenting the Photographic still from Putuparri and the painting of the Ngurrara Canvas at Prinini.

Rainmakers, Footage JILA Rebel Film, David Photographic still from Putuparri and the Batty Rainmakers, Footage JILA Rebel Film, David Batty →

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the use of the staged portrait, a black-and-white photograph from the nineteenth century, speaks to an archive of imagery of dispossessed and colonised peoples. It is an image taken by the dominant culture and reproduced by the dominant culture. This form of representation, so intrinsic to Western culture is antithetical to a traditional Aboriginal way of remembering. Despite this, Portrait strives to reconsider representation in architecture in a unique way, embedding it within the structure of the building and presenting itself as a kind of Trojan Horse within the commercial property market.

Yagan Square by Lyons in collaboration with Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects and landscape architects Aspect Studios is a connective, civic space that feels representative of the city centre in Perth, so its claiming of an Aboriginal identity and place feels particularly poignant. The site is a present-day urban interchange (connecting the north and south of the city, including Perth’s central train station), as well as the site of a traditional Noongar gathering space. Its name is after the Noongar leader and warrior Yagan, who was killed in 1833 and his decapitated head taken to England for display and study at the Liverpool Museum.

The Noongar word for spirit ‘Wirin’ is represented figuratively by an elongated nine-metre-high statue by the Noongar artist Tjyllyungoo (Lance Chadd). Similarly to Barak, the work depicts a figure defiant, standing looking out over the city. For much of the Perth public, the name and symbolism of the civic space and the statue have become conflated with the figure taking on the identity of Yagan.

However, Wirin is more symbolic in its identity, embodying the spirit and values of Yagan and representing ‘the eternal sacred force of creative power that connects all life of boodja (mother earth).’7 Yagan has been memorialised publicly in Perth previously. In 1984 a life-size bronze of Yagan was erected

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on Heirisson Island (Matagrarup) by the state government, at the urging of the local Noongar community.

Three days after Yagan’s decapitated head was returned from England, brought back by Noongar elders in 1997 to be ceremonially buried after a long struggle, the statue itself was beheaded (twice, both times the head was reattached).

Yagan Square’s symbolic depiction of a Noongar spirituality is integrated into a diverse program that makes space for people to meet and gather. It consists of a public square, ‘performance venue, a flora reserve, a fresh-food market, public realm art destination, a watercourse play-scape, a digital animation venue and an Indigenous education/ visitor information centre’.6 Yagan Square creates a dynamic space that utilises contrasting spatial and visual methodologies but is also conscious of its role as an inclusive civic space that must address urban experiences and plurality. It also avoids conflating Aboriginal identity or fixing what this might look like by engaging multiple strategies, some more directly representative of an Indigenous history and identity, such as the statue, and some looser and more interpretative.

The digital tower, a radial form composed of 14 reeds representing the 14 Noongar language groups, features a changing program of community artwork (many commissioned by local Indigenous artists) and community content. A number of other public artworks to tell multiple stories using diverse material processes are woven through the site, such as digital projection, lightworks, visual imagery, cast topologies and text.

Symbolic references to the land and native flora and fauna are integrated into the space and are a reminder of our shared environment. As Lyons describe on their website, the project’s concepts ‘are representative of convergence; of geologies, tracks, narratives, Indigenous and nonIndigenous people and culture’.8 →

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Re-valuing Heritage

Aesthetically it does seem to overreach, feeling like a cacophony of intersecting viewpoints and forms which dislocates itself from its surroundings; however, its multilayered remakings and representations moves closer to the idea of intraactivity and communal meaningmaking that is not fixed or reliant on one symbolic form, but is embedded in and through the project.9 This interconnected, performative space could be expanded to include, not only the end result of creation, but the design process itself as a live mode of participatory engagement. Ultimately, the difference in whether a symbol remains superficial lies in the intent, and symbolism in architecture is no exception to this. The process of following cultural protocols and engaging in collaborative processes with Aboriginal communities is what imbues any cultural representation with authenticity and meaning, particularly because the forms of symbols and artefacts that might be engaged are cosmologies, forms of embedded knowledge. The way in which we use this knowledge can itself be seen as a symbolic, ceremonial act because that’s where respect and learning is found. Rather than a box-ticking exercise, it is one of the ways in which current architectural practice can embody the concept of living culture through a process of constant exchange. While imperfect, Portrait is valuable because it followed cultural protocols, engaged the wider community and is an avenue to the next point of discussion.

→ Left The William Barak Building in

Melbourne. Representing an elder of the Woi Wurrung language group. Architecture by ARM. Howard Raggatt's essay documents the rationale for this project in Charles Jencks (2015) Mongrel Rapture: the Architecture of Ashton Raggatt McDougall Photo by John Gollings

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There is no architectural gesture or form that can make up for hundreds of years of dispossession and destruction, but there is potential for the built environment to hold meaning, for people to see their stories in their cities, to show intent and care, to construct place for multiple voices. Without seeing ourselves in our environment, without our stories, we vanish. As architects and designers, the way we practice and think of creativity is important. Symbolism is not an end-game but an opportunity for communication and meaningmaking. Maintaining these cultural practices is how we demonstrate to each other, to our community, what we value and what we are committed to as a society. This is the foundation of heritage.

Sophia Mitchell is an interior and lighting designer with Noongar heritage, originally from Perth she works at Durbach Block Jagger Architects in Sydney. Sophia holds an MA in Interior Architecture and Lighting Design from the New School, New York City.

Notes Emily Potter (2012) Introduction: making Indigenous place in the Australian city, Postcolonial Studies, 15:2, pp 131-142 2 Jane m Jacobs (2012) Commentary: Property and propriety: (re)making the space of indigeneity in Australian cities, Postcolonial Studies, 15:2, pp 143-147 3 Brian Martin (2013) Immaterial Land and Indigenous Ideology: Refiguring Australian Art and Culture Brian Martin’s use of the concept of ‘methexis’ (a Pythagorean term from the Ancient Greek where the audience gives meaning to a performance through their interaction and participation) is a way to think about this interplay of bodies in built space and a means of creating a productive space out of this tension implicit in the ‘super-diversity’ of the contemporary Australian city.

4 Tristen Harwood and Lauren Burrow (2018), Un magazine, Issue 12.1 5 Shaneen Fantin (2003), ‘Aboriginal identities in architecture’, Architecture Australia.

6 Yagan Square / Lyons + Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects + ASPECT Studios. accessed July 04, 2018. archdaily.com 7 www.mra.wa.gov.au/see-and-do/yagan-square/ attractions/wirin 8 Lyons www.lyons.com 9 Karen Barad Interactivity ‘being internally determined’ while intra-activity as ‘being external between two separate bodies’ in Brian Martin (2013) Immaterial Land and Indigenous Ideology: Refiguring Australian Art and Culture 1

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Sacred patterns

Words by Jack Mitchell

Translational accuracy aside, the Dreaming for the majority of people is an elusive, nebulous mystery; a metaphysic that has lost too much in translation to be understood. This same sentiment applies to the market, which dominates global culture with a quasi-spiritual fervour yet remains impenetrable for the majority of participants. Story, song and dance are far more familiar ways to navigate reality than the ASX 200.

Anthropologist William Stanner implied an incompatibility between these two worldviews, a perception seeped into collective acceptance, helping to exclude Indigenous participation in the new dominant cultural and economic paradigm.1 The only form of invitation to participate was through assimilation, which required cultural abandonment. This left Aboriginal people in social and cultural purgatory; unable to live according to traditional Culture and Law, yet not welcome to participate fully in colonial/settler systems. Paul Hasluck, the minister behind Menzies' assimilation policy, asked: ‘Are aborigines to be living museum pieces? Or a sort of fringe community whose quaint

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customs are stared at by tourists?

Will the drone of the didgeridoo, the clicking of the boomerangs and the stomping in the red dust in the red centre of Australia still be the sufficient employment for the grandchildren of the people of Uluru? Will the separate development that is being pursued with a beneficent purpose today have the result that after two or three generations persons of Aboriginal descent find that they are shut out from participation in most of what is happening in the continent and are behind glass in a vast museum, or are in a sort of open-range zoo?’2 Both of these perceptions have changed, and we find ourselves, as Stan Grant describes it, existing between the Australian Dreaming and the Australian Dream.3 The tension that exists between these two worlds will not be unknotted overnight, but there certainly feels to be a more widespread sense of mutual celebration of Aboriginal culture and recognition of its strength and adaptability.

Architecture and urbanism are not immune to this state of cultural flux, with heritage architecture

Re-valuing Heritage

particularly exposed due to it being a reflection of what we collectively protect and value about our cultural history, or perhaps just as importantly, what we don't protect. As heritage discussions begin to examine the difference between the static and the dynamic, or the tangible and intangible, there is, hopefully, an accompanying recognition of our unwilling participation in the obsolescence of Indigenous culture.

The treatment of our Indigenous cultural heritage has the potential to reinforce the misconception that it belongs in a glass box or buried in the desert, either way not here, not present, not alive. Heritage protection has the potential to continue the colonial project, rather than actively celebrate and engage in the practices that make this country unique.

Architectural theorist Christopher Alexander discusses the idea of living people, living spaces and living cities by pointing to the relationships between their constituent elements as opposed to the elements themselves. The word living here means more than simply existing; it refers to the dynamic and vital sense of being alive, wherein a person, a space, a building or a city acts according to its natural forces.4 The pattern language he describes has great similarities to traditional Indigenous thinking, wherein the observation of patterns and systems allows for a meta-understanding of the whole, in contrast to the reductive, decontextualised approach of Western rationalism. The protection of the intangible elements of heritage can be seen as a method of protecting the pattern, as opposed to the protection of a de-contextualised, or rather recontextualised, element. For example, in the film Charlie's Country, David Gulpilil’s protagonist has his spear confiscated for being a weapon, → Above Glass Plate negative of Brewarrina

Fish Traps 1880—1900. State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection. The heritagelisted fish traps are extremely old but are no longer used to trap fish. They have been out of use for only a brief part of their lifetime.

Ngemba, Muruwai, Weilwan, Yualwarri Country

despite his protestations that it is a hunting spear and that he only wants to live out his days on Country, hunting his own food. The confiscation of his weapon not only removes a usable tool that would have supplied Charlie with sustenance and autonomy, but also positions him as a dangerous criminal.

His cultural pattern of hunting, what Alexander might call a natural force, is inhibited and Charlie’s vitality and health suffers because of it. The spear, which once had value as a usable tool that would supply Charlie with a means to sustain his own life as well as a connection to his cultural history, is now a worthless object in a police lock-up, false evidence of the potentiality of violence. This separation of the elements in a dynamic system is seen at the micro and macro level; whether it is the repositioning of a tool to an artefact or the separation of a person from

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their Country or a people from their songlines. The dynamic relationships that exist between person, object and landscape is what allows cultural practice to exist, and the separation of these elements is an active process in cultural destruction.

This is most palatable when passed off as an inadvertent clash of cultures and metaphysics, a simple misunderstanding, an incompatibility.

However, this sweeping under the rug, the great Australian silence, is ‘inattention on such a scale that cannot possibly be explained by absent mindedness ... Simple forgetting of other possible views turned habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’.5 The necessity of remembering carries a sense of paradox, of inescapable tragedy and mistake,

an anxiety that produces a deep social inertia due primarily to our collective inability to address our national emotional baggage. Like the process of memorialisation, whereby acknowledging past tragedies we simultaneously position Aboriginal culture as belonging to the past; a tragedy that happened before, that we must feel sorry for, but ultimately move on from. It is more important that we move through, allowing ourselves to feel the sorrow, the sadness and guilt while actively and proudly engaging in contemporary Indigenous culture, no matter your heritage. Of course, we cannot go back, nor can we presume that everybody wants to; however, when we acknowledge the importance of a celebratory, forward-looking approach it is equally important to acknowledge that we shouldn't discount elements of the past from becoming a part of the future.

The 2019 Open House Melbourne program at Melbourne Design Week, Waterfront: Reconnecting with Birrarung, focused heavily on the idea of cleaning and re-wilding rivers and restoring buried waterways, a form of repair to the damage our shared environmental heritage has sustained due to bad agricultural and urban development practices. However, every step forward seems to uncover new disturbing dynamics that require further attention and careful consideration, and so many of us are put off by this reality.

This is because, like the culture that we are trying to protect and continue, it is a practice not a place. It is a dynamic learning process that we are all involved in. We’re not going to get there, as there is no there, no temporal junction where we achieve what we set out to achieve, but a practice that will continue in flux, so it is the practice that is important, and the practice where we find the most value.

These supposedly intangible patterns, relationships and cultural protocols, are not so intangible for Indigenous Australians, but are viscerally felt and are possibly more tangible than the objects in glass boxes, abstracted by their

re-contextualisation. For a culture that is orally passed down, where the cultural values and knowledge are learned through story, dance and song, the value of the intangible is immeasurable.

Language itself is the keystone to all of this; in Indigenous culture it's sound first, aesthetics second. Aesthetic objects and styles do not have value in and of themselves, for they are methods of embedding knowledge. The interconnectedness of all of this, the hyper-contextual nature of Indigenous culture, is difficult to mesh with a Western post-Enlightenment empiricism. This is not to diminish the value of objects, artefacts or buildings, but to recognise their role in a dynamic system where they are simply more replaceable than the pattern itself. If you don’t have a fishing rod, it doesn't mean you can’t catch fish, it's just much harder, but it is the catching of the fish that keeps you alive, not the fishing rod.

In Jungian psychology, the evolution of the psyche occurs in similar terms to the evolution of the body, where our psychological dynamics are built over time in relation to land, stories and the sacred through ceremony and ritual practice. The energy of your psyche has its own volition, its own momentum, and helps create the ‘natural forces’ that Alexander refers to and is inherited from millennia of human action. For most of the world, dispossession and conquest is woven into history.

The colonisers of this land have a deeply traumatic history of violence and conquest at the hands of the Vikings, the Normans and the Romans to name a few, while orchestrating violent oppression against the Scots and the Irish, who formed a large proportion of the convict population in Australia. While Indigenous Australia certainly has warfare and violence, there is little evidence of conquest and dispossession, with most violence being ritualistic combat to settle disputes and maintain law, with the mutual aim of caring for and protecting Country. This process of mutual care,

Re-valuing Heritage

considered akin to the relationship between mother and child, occurred without interruption for thousands and thousands of years. Surely it is not difficult to imagine the type of sacred bonds that would be forged between people and landscape, and the strength of the cultural patterns that enabled them.

We live in a confusing time when it comes to the sacred, with scientific rationalism, existential nihilism and an almost cultish level of self-obsession blending with a hitherto unseen global migration and displacement. The disconnection between us and the sacred is understandable for those of us deeply entrenched in this disassociated technocracy. When people decided to climb Uluru, before it closed, many called them despicable, but it is not so difficult to understand why anyone would think it is within their right to climb a mountain in the desert. People climb Kosciuszko, so why not this particular geological formation? Because it is sacred to Aboriginal people? Why would that matter to me if I am a rationalist and a libertarian? Surely a sense of what is sacred is not so alien to us that we can't respect what is sacred to others.

The kind of emotional attachment we get to our hometown, family home, or even a childhood connection to a hand-me-down or particular object, is just an inkling of the kind of emotional connection that Indigneous Australians have to land and culture.

To even draw these comparisons does a disservice to the depth of this connection but it is important to try and understand it.

Nayuka Gorrie writes: ‘there is no word for this feeling ... the Anglo settler doesn’t get to experience this and cannot possibly know this feeling. This was long traded by their ancestors. They can’t understand what it means to be able to connect the blood → Above Members from Jackson Clements

Burrows, Architects without Frontiers and MAGIC Aboriginal Corporation engaging in traditional cultural practices near Lake Mungo.

Photo by Jon Clements. Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi, Ngyiampaa Country

coursing through your body to ancestors blood soaked in ancient soil and ancient trees.’5 If you have ever seen your family home rented to strangers, it can feel like an intrusion, and you feel very protective of it in the face of strangers living in their particular ways in the place that nurtured your life, despite having only spent half of one lifetime there. If they were to trash the place, it would feel like they were desecrating something sacred. Imagine if you had been born in that very house, and your parents too. Now imagine how that would feel if 10,000 people in your extended family had been born there over 800 years, and it hadn't been rented but people had just moved in uninvited and now decided they wanted to bulldoze it. Maybe we can begin to understand why people are willing to die to protect their Country.

Recently, Zellanach Djab Mara, the Gunditjmara man who founded the Djab Wurrung Embassy, said ‘we’ve waited 240 years to invite you into our Dreaming.’6 This process of exchange is a practice, not a place, and hopefully our heritage practice can value the people, cultures and

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landscapes that make this country unique.

Jack Mitchell is is a designer, artist and writer with Noongar heritage currently working as an architectural assistant and Indigenous Design Consultant at Jackson Clements Burrows, cultural research organisation Black White and Bluespace and is a co-producer with Resistance Transmission. Jack is cocurating the third Blakitecture lecture series at MPavilion with Sarah Lynn Rees and is a member of Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria. Jack has a Bachelor of Applied Science (architectural science) and was a recipient of the 2018 Creators Fund for Black White and Bluespace.

Notes William Stanner (1968), Boyer Lectures Paul Hasluck, Shade of Darkness, 3 William Stanner 4 Carl G Jung (1968), Man and his Symbols, 5 Nayuka Gorrie (2019) The Government wants to Bulldoze My Inheritance in www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/apr/12/the-government-wants-tobulldoze-my-inheritance-800-year-old-sacred-trees 6 Zellanach Djab Mara, protest, 10 September 2019 1

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Revealing cultural landscapes Words by Maddison Miller and Andy Fergus

The rich cultural landscapes of the oldest continuous culture on the planet remain for the most part invisible within contemporary Australian cities. As the engines of the economy, these hotly contested property markets have been built many times over, ensuring an almost total erasure within a relatively short period of time. However, the traces of ceremonial sites, life-giving waterways and millenia-old trade routes remain alive in cultural memory, buried just beneath the surface. To reveal and give life to these stories, we must question the current approaches of planning and heritage processes, and the reductive tactics of glass cabinets and murals. Only through the integration of storytelling, archaeological and urban design practices can we make cultural landscapes a visible and dynamic force in shaping new development.

It comes as no surprise that the resource-rich areas with plentiful water chosen by colonists for the villages that became our cities were and remain critical to the cultural life of Aboriginal people. As of the 2016 census, 37 per cent of Aboriginal people call major cities their home.

So why then is this living culture only finding expression infrequently and in ad hoc ways within our contemporary cities?

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Understanding the cultural landscape prior to colonial occupation might be more straightforward in a city like Hobart or Sydney where topography and waterways dictated more directly the pattern of development. However, in Melbourne this appears on the surface to be more difficult.

The imposition of Hoddle’s Grid with its disregard for a network of creeks and the dramatic reshaping of the Yarra River over the course of two generations changed the role of the river from the centre of cultural life to a utilitarian drain. Creeks and swamps were infilled to facilitate development and manage flood, waterfalls were dynamited, hills were levelled and forests were cleared. As the city grew and remade itself over 190 years, the landscape from which it was surveyed has been increasingly concealed from view.

The impact of colonial settlement on patterns of cultural land use is revealed through the stories of Whadjuk Noongar—elder Fanny Balbuk, who witnessed the conversion of her ancestral landscape into central Perth. As an act of indignation, Balbuk insisted on moving in the traditional way across the land despite the gridded construct of fenced private property. Daisy Bates Re-valuing Heritage

recalled ‘Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms’. The image of Fanny marching defiantly through a house with her digging stick evokes the image of a watercourse, attempting to move freely through a landscape, before being contained, redirected and obscured from view.

Through the incorporation of Aboriginal cultural stories and deep place-based knowledge into archaeological practice, we are able to better understand and appreciate the ancient landscapes under our cities.

Excavate just a short distance beneath the concrete and traces of the past reveal themselves. Radiocarbon and other forms of dating hint at time depth, the limits of which still remain unknown to science but are known to all Aboriginal people as always was, always will be. The use of geological analysis reveals pollens from staple foods and medicines, contains traces of fire stick farming, and reveals the location of watercourses.

However, the richness of these physical findings can only truly emerge when the evidence is overlaid with living stories of cultural practice, passed down from time immemorial.

These stories reveal places of ceremony, the significance of local plant communities, and provide context through creation stories which draw together the physical and spiritual world. The evocative cultural landscapes revealed through this process offer immense and exciting opportunity for how we might see Australian cities with fresh eyes. Yet as our methods of understanding these vivid scenes becomes more sophisticated, our methods of conservation through heritage and planning practice lag behind.

Heritage practitioners draw lines in the sand, and planning practitioners condense richness to lines of abstracted policy aimed → → Tank Stream, Pitt Street Mall, Sydney

Architecture by Tony Caro Architecture 2012.

Photo by Brett Boardman. Gadigal Country

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to steer the market. These processes inevitably dissect cultural heritage until all that remains are places and things, often divorced from their cultural lineage. In order for these places and things to have value and be conserved through the process of urban development they must be tangible or remain physically evident. This tag-and-bag approach runs the risk of perpetuating what anthropologist William Stanner described in his Boyer Lectures as the cult of forgetfulness, concealing findings from the everyday experience of the public, and limiting them to a professional curiosity. Perhaps the remnant imprints of the wall in Berlin, the roses of Sarajevo, or the fireline of Rotterdam offer a hint into an alternative approach. While these examples each memorialise rather than express a living culture, they suggest a methodology for enabling the experience of a place of cultural significance in a more dynamic way.

As an element that correlates so strongly with cultural life on our ancient, dry continent; water has emerged in the past decade as a focus of experimentation in revealing pre-contact landscapes. Recent experiments in a succession of City of Sydney projects including Pitt Street Mall and Green Square Urban Renewal Area offer examples worth reflecting upon, along with the more recent temporary Living Pavillion at Melbourne University. While tentative examples, they offer provocations for a more holistic program of indigenising urban places.

The Tank Stream is a site of immense Gadigal significance as a reliable source of freshwater, connected to the ancient trade route from the southern sandstone escarpments down to the Harbour.

However, since shortly after colonisation, it has been trapped within a drain under Central Sydney.

A redevelopment of the pedestrian mall along Pitt Street in 2012 offered an opportunity to make visible the buried stream within a contemporary pedestrian mall. While the project was principally concerned with the

pragmatic upgrade of the public environment, the Tank Stream was recalled through the arrangement of paving, and a decorative central drainage channel and brass inlay decals which invite the curiosity of pedestrians. While the opportunity to highlight the significance of the Tank Stream to the Gadigal community was missed, revealing a forgotten natural feature within an urban design project provokes reflection on how such a heritage and urban design tactic might provoke reflection and conversation.

The Lachlan Precinct within Sydney’s Green Square Renewal Area occupies the northern edge of the former Waterloo Swamp. An everchanging freshwater marsh draining to Botany Bay, the swamp was an important locus for Gadigal life, both before and after European settlement.

The edges of the swamp were ideal for seasonal bird hunting, collecting of plentiful shellfish and collecting of rushes and reeds for traps and vessels.

Long since drained and occupied by industrial development, the swamp edge was given new life through integration with a public domain strategy by the City of Sydney. Using the now invisible swamp edge that was last surveyed in 1886, an interpretative strategy evolved through naming of places and the design of public parks.

These include Wulaba Park whose name recalls the rock wallaby and Dyuralya Square named for the brolga which frequented the swamp.

While the swamp interpretation line makes static the boundary of a landscape that would have changed seasonally over tens of thousands of years, this simplistic line on a page encourages a new dialogue through design. The potential potency of the swamp line unfortunately was not realised through private development parcels or in parks that had already been designed prior to the public domain masterplan, yet it was marked clearly in the design of Dyuralya Square. Perhaps more for its promise than the outcome, the line highlights how a simple regulatory prompt could facilitate a richer connection between the culturally

Re-valuing Heritage

significant landscape and design outcomes. The marking of a former watercourse could trigger a co-design process with the Gadigal community, leading to opportunities for expression of culture through both the public and private realm.

The Living Pavilion was a temporary installation on the grounds of the University of Melbourne. A key component of the installation was a reimagining of the former Bouverie Creek running through the precinct.

Tens of thousands of plants that would have once inhabited this landscape were brought in, all carefully chosen and curated by Barkindji woman Zena Cumpston. Cumpston used this space as a portal for expressing Indigneous Knowledge Systems, responding to Indigenous ideas of spatial organisation, highlighted important plant and animal species, and became a space for creation and learning.

Attention was drawn to the ability through grates to glimpse eels in the drain below, continuing their ancient journey through the recently obscured waterways.

The project centred around an urban space where staple foods, medicine, and utilitarian plants were present. From under the Lily Pily Tree, with its generous supply of fruits, songs sung in Woi Wurrung gently recalled to us the language of this landscape. The Living Pavilion was a temporary example of what could eventuate if places meaningfully responded to their history. This project offers us an example of how a public space could behave and feel if we made the leap from memorialisation, to supporting cultural continuity.

While the space was only temporary, and the creek remains trapped under the pavement, it demonstrates an approach that can and should directly inform a future permanent project.

Through this small but growing body of projects alongside ambitious programs such as the mapping of Songlines on urban environments, there is a momentum → Right Melbourne from the Yarra Yarra, 1838 Clarence Woodhouse, State Library of Victoria.

Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Countries

and excitement around a more visible presence of cultural landscapes within Australian cities. When Traditional Owners and their stories are centered in urban design practice,and are supported by good archaeological practice and landscape analysis, there arises an opportunity to reassert cities as part of a living and vibrant culture, rather than static memory. Simple regulatory tactics such as a line on a map or the outline of a waterbody are just a hint of how cultural landscapes could be embedded in regulatory and design practice in collaboration with communities.

From Cultural Heritage Management Plans that gather dust on shelves, perhaps we can shift towards living cultural design strategies, which enable a richer translation between conservation practice and design experimentation. Through greater representation of Indigenous cultural landscapes in urban environments we can both increase cultural literacy in the non-Indigenous population, while providing new places for Aboriginal people to reconnect to the spiritual and physical aspects of Country.

While there is undoubtedly a need for policy makers to provide leadership, there is a significant opportunity for

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the design industry to take charge in experimenting with an Indigenised urbanity.

Maddison Miller is a Darug woman and archaeologist at Heritage Victoria. Maddi advocates for broader acceptance and incorporation of Aboriginal knowledge systems in design, urban research and architecture. Maddi is the co-chair of the Indigenous Advisory Group to the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub of the National Environmental Science Program. She was an inaugural participant in the Joan Kirner Young and Emerging Women Leaders Program. In 2019 she was the first Indigenous delegate for Australia at the UNESCO World Heritage Meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Andy Fergus is an urban design critic, commentator and practitioner. He is an urban designer at the City of Melbourne, co-director of Melbourne Architours and studio lead at Melbourne School of Design. Through these roles Andy engages with the community, government, design industry, and students to advocate for more inclusive, ethical and highquality environments.

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Working on Country

Words by Francoise Lane

On a track barely visible to the eye, Andrew Lane and I walked single file through dense rainforest following the footsteps of Yalanji clan leaders (people of the World Heritage—listed Daintree Rainforest). 'Aye look out them one, ee sting you real bad stinging tree,' we were cautioned. We had walked from the beach, across a shallow saltwater creek crossing into what became a dense rainforest path. The clan have walked this path countless times since being youngsters living with their parents in the rainforest. 'This is where Dad camped. We cooked dinner here' we were told.

We were brought to a number of different sites within the rainforest, titled as Aboriginal Freehold Land.

One of the sites belonged to a young family. Following lore they consulted their ancestors and obtained the blessing of their elders to clear a handful of trees to build their camp site. With limited income they were building their camp to get back on Country, back in connection with their ancestors, and teach their children how to care for Country and live in respect to the land.

Yalanji protocols were followed to have Andrew and I on

Country. Elders granted us permission to enter after letting their ancestors know they were bringing visitors. We were invited onto Country to help the clan. They had been issued a show cause letter from the local council for clearing trees without following legislative processes. Indij Design’s role was to assist the clan to find a solution to what was for the local council illegal tree clearing and provide a masterplan as part of a broader Development Management Plan for submission to council.

Our involvement came about and is an example of where Aboriginal lore and local government development processes clash.

Aboriginal Freehold Land does not mean it is to follow your customs on land. There are statutory processes to be followed including red zone development considerations. As Andrew and I talked with the clan it became apparent that this was not understood. It became apparent that current leaders believed past clan leaders agreed to the restrictions on development of their land without understanding the full implications of their decisions on generations to come. The current leaders of this clan are regrouping. They will meet with the wider nation and surrounding nation

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leaders about how they get back on Country.

Ironically, less than one kilometre away from where we walked with the Yalanji, there are mass cleared freehold properties.

Cleared last century without Yalanji permission, without the blessing of ancestors, without respect to Country.

The land was bought under freehold titles and the owners did as they pleased.

Indij Architecture and Design is a diverse practice. Our projects can take us from walking single file through the Daintree Rainforest to curated art projects, designing buildings to textile design, and integrating applied art to the built environment. Our practice and experience gives a different perspective to how the built environment can create a sense of place, foster connection to Country and build community.

AFL Cape York House for Girls is purpose built catering for up to 48 female students in Years 7—12 accessing education in Cairns from Cape York, Gulf and the Torres Strait Islands. It was completed in 2019 as a Design and Construct by HPS Builders. Indij Design provided cultural design review at a conceptual design phase, identified opportunities to incorporate indigenous themes in the built environment, and the curation of artwork.

Students will spend approximately 40 weeks of the year living at the house. They are immersed in a different culture and environment to their life in community. For example, students go from being surrounded by a majority of Indigenous students in the classroom, to being a minority.

When reviewing, I considered commonly held cultural beliefs and behaviours from the intake areas, and how the conceptual design could respond to or change to contribute to a ‘safe, comfortable and welcoming’ experience for the students at the house; for example, space on the floor in a single or double room for a single mattress. This is so a cousin or sister can bunk down on the floor if a

relative is experiencing homesickness or is lonely. Another example was the relocation of the mirror on the external facing robe door in rooms to the internal side, as it is a common belief that spirits can be viewed in reflections. This could make the difference in a good night’s sleep and not feeling afraid, as the mirror was in view from the bed.

The methodology of the artwork curation was a collaborative effort between AFL Cape York House for Girls and Indij Design. Artworks were sourced from as many of the student-intake communities as possible around themes relating to women, their stories, or women’s business. The majority of the artworks were by female artists and sourced directly from Indigenous art centres, the artist or gifted by the young women’s families. It was our hope that the young women at the house feel connected to their homelands, sea and families when they view the artwork, while living in their home-away-fromhome.

One of the opportunities identified to incorporate Indigenous artwork into the built form was at the main entry. The Dillybag entry wall showcases an object of importance for Indigenous women that spans generations and time. Dillybags have been made and used by clan and nation groups across the top end of Australia. They are a multipurpose item, used to carry bush tucker or provide shade to babies, for example.

The Shields Street Heart revitalisation project in Cairns is a good example of a Council engaging with the Traditional Owners and broader indigenous peoples of Cairns to have an urban design and street scape responsive to the content gleaned from engagement process. Indij Design facilitated the engagement with the traditional owners and broader Indigenous community of Cairns in 2015.

Traditional Owners were paid sitting fees in recognition of their knowledge and time. Via the Engagement Report, Indij Design advocated opportunities for applied art by Indigenous artists and a

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Architect Victoria

considered approach to procurement that respected the artist's moral rights.

Six of our seven recommendations were accepted.

Working alongside Jez Clark, Cairns Regional Council Senior Landscape Architect at that time engagement outcomes were translated and applied to the urban design.

Cairns Regional Council Cultural Services officers joined the project as it progressed grabbing a hold of the concepts to bring the project to reality.

Pathways referenced the meandering waterways of the Trinity Inlet collecting the freshwater running through the Country of many clans and nations of the Cairns region. A connection to the earth was incorporated with grassy mounds and compacted earth integrated into rest areas.

The project was delivered in two stages: the first comprised of Grafton to Lake streets, and the second stretched from Lake to Abbott streets. The integration of public art includes a substantial Indigenous art component showcasing the creativity of local and regional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.

Artworks include glass mosaics; galvanised-steel sculptural forms; gobo light projections and etched-granite tiles designed from original lino-cut designs. Project costs across the two stages of the initiative comprised: artist fees, installation, materials, manufacturing, creative projection, consultation and project management.

Francoise Lane is a Torres Strait Islander woman and identifies as both Meriam and Kaurareg. Together with Andrew Lane they are Indij Design; an Indigenous-owned, award-winning architectural and design practice based in Cairns and operating since 2011. An interior designer and artist, her art is inspired by her family, Kerriri and the reef and rainforest of Tropical Queensland. With an interest in supporting Indigenous arts and community she curated the Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival’s Cape York Acquisitive Art Award 2017 and UMI Arts at Cairns Indigenous Art Fair 2018.

Office of the Victorian Government Architect —

Connection to place

Words by Sophie Patitsas

The Office of the Victorian Government Architect acknowledges the Traditional Aboriginal Owners of Country throughout Victoria. We deeply respect their continuing connection and custodianship of Country and undertake to act with similar regard for place.

Having grown and matured as an office over the last few years the Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA) has been reviewing and refining the way we work as we seek to fulfil our mandate of improving the quality of the built environment for all Victorians. In thinking through our strategic plan over the next few years, promoting an increased awareness of the protocols of working with First Nations peoples is a priority for our team.

Having been awarded the Premier’s Design Award in 2018, the International Indigenous Design Charter which outlines best practice protocols for sharing Indigenous knowledge in design practice is a document that we have been increasingly sharing with project partners across government and design teams wherever possible.

Importantly, the charter clarifies that it should not be viewed ‘as the definitive answer or a ‘how-to’ guide

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for creating Indigenous designs but instead a guide to develop open, and respectful cross-cultural engagement and exchange.’1 This understanding of the charter and the best practice protocols that are outlined within it – Indigenous-led, self-determined, community specific, deep listening, shared knowledge and impact of design – is critical as we move forward in this area. Never has listening and learning before intervening been more important.

This discovery phase of the design process – engaging, listening, learning and then embedding the very essence of a place and its people into a narrative and vision that inspires – is at the very heart of good design.

Getting to good design takes time and emerges at the intersection of three critical commitments: • Design principles – Good design is inspiring, contextual, functional, sustainable, enjoyable and enduring.

• Design skills – The quality of the design team is critical. The best projects emerge out of a truly collaborative cross-disciplinary approach to a project solution.

• Design review – This refers to the embedded process of skilled, expert evaluation of design at key

Re-valuing Heritage

points during project progress. This encourages real commitment to long term legacy.

The best practice protocols that have been developed for working with First Nations peoples can be integrated across all these commitments to get to good design and a built form legacy that is credible and relevant. The protocols stress that ‘Indigenous participants are not simply to be referenced but are active participants in the (design) process.’ In keeping with this principle of active participation, the OVGA has enhanced the skills of the Victorian Design Review Panel with the addition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander panel members with expertise in Aboriginal Cultural Heritage as champions in this area.

This can only enrich the design review process – cultivating an ethos of deep listening, knowledge sharing, cultural competency and sensitivity early in the design process to support wellinformed decision making.

As an office we have been actively seeking out opportunities to engage with Indigenous design practitioners, elders and organisations such as Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria to listen and learn more about Victoria’s Indigenous history in relation to the projects with which we are actively involved. A highlight for our office was engaging with Regional Development Victoria on their projects and learning about the Masterplan for Budj Bim. This engagement connected us with the Gunditjmara people and the unique Budj Bim landscape which demonstrates how Gunditjmara people worked with the natural resources and environment of the Victorian southwest region to establish a permanent place of human society over the past 30,000 years and beyond.

→ Right The unique Budj Bim landscape.

Dry-stone wall built for colonial settlers using local volcanic rock. Photo courtesy of the OVGA. Gunditjmara Country

We know we have only scratched the surface, but we also know how important it is to listen and learn to get to good design.

Challenging business-as-usual and engaging with different ways of seeing are both critical as we work across government to ensure that quality and best practice design principles and processes are embedded in the delivery of all projects. It’s an absolute necessity if Victoria is to maintain its global reputation for design excellence.

‘The people who know the history of their country are going to make vastly different decisions… And I say to them: approach it with joy. Here’s an opportunity to learn the real history and learn your country, learn what makes your country tick.’2

Architect Victoria

Sophie Patitsas is Principal Adviser, Urban Design and Architecture with the Office of the Victorian Government Architect.

Notes Russell Kennedy, Meghan Kelly, Jefa Greenaway, and Brian Martin, International Indigenous Design Charter: Protocols for sharing Indigenous knowledge in professional design practice, Deakin University, Geelong, 2017, pp. 6—7 2 Bruce Pascoe in 'Dark Emu's infinite potential: Our kids have grown up in a fog about the history of the land', the Guardian, 24 May 2019 1

Slice —

New projects Assembled by Elizabeth Campbell

Project 1 BKK Architects

Project 2 Hayball

Swan Street Bridge, Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Countries

303 Royal Parade, Parkville, Woi Wurrung Country

The adaptive reuse of the existing bridge (1952) added a new 4-metre wide, cantilevered shared user path to either side. Spanning Melbourne’s sporting, entertainment and Botanical Gardens precincts, the upgrade provides significant functional improvements as well as increased capacity for day-to-day use and events.

Given its prominent location, the upgraded bridge was conceived as a place in its own right, a vital new piece of the city connecting surrounding networks and providing new experiences of the River. Drawing upon the rich history of innovative public buildings and structures, the project employs a dynamic, prefabricated structural steel design that provides a highly contextual response to the existing bridge’s geometry.

The fin arrangement supporting the new deck evokes the dynamism of rowers upon the river, presenting a solid, sculptural form from oblique viewpoints that dematerialises from positions along the Yarra River alignment and from the bridge itself.

The University of Melbourne Royal Parade Student Accommodation project involved the adaptive reuse of an existing Salvation Army Training facility via an extensive internal refurbishment, rear extension and facade rejuvenation, all within walking distance of the university’s Parkville campus.

To help foster a collegial and supportive atmosphere, Hayball have incorporated a series of spacious indoor and outdoor communal areas, including dedicated study spaces, a music rehearsal studio, games room and sporting facilities as well as a scenic roof terrace overlooking the surrounding parklands.

The rear of the site includes construction of a new six-storey addition draped in a striking perforated metal screen, a modern semitransparent geometric form presenting a bold contrast to the brutalist concrete architecture of the 1960s-era Zebra Motel facade.

Photographer John Gollings

Photographer Dianna Snape

Re-valuing Heritage

Project 3 Julie Firkin Architects

Project 4 De Arch

Barton House, Reservoir, Woi Wurrung Country

Ashburton Townhouses, Ashburton, Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Countries

The original house is an unassuming brick veneer, one of many in a street of postwar homes of the type made famous by Australian artist Howard Arkley. To maintain the suburban landscape, the front of the house has been kept intact and is entered via the original brick porch.

The new addition at the back of the house opens out with a shift in scale, views and natural light. the new living areas are zoned but interconnected embracing the mid-century aesthetic and postwar improvements in convenience and liveability.

Designed to endure as the family grows, the house utilises tough materials like Australian hardwood and the structural concrete floor slab is exposed. The spatial arrangement within a chamfered and facetted envelope, uses minimal ornamentation to achieve uncluttered spaces with clear geometric forms.

This pair of contemporary side-by-side townhouses were designed to incorporate environmentally conscious design principles including optimising solar orientation to benefit both dwellings despite unfavourable site orientation.

Strategically placed customised skylights help encourage direct and indirect daylight to infiltrate deep into the plan while the lofty double height living spaces with clerestory automated operable windows promote good natural ventilation and facilitate the removal of trapped warm air via a passive chimney effect.

The internal floor plan layouts allow for flexibility and accessibility to cater to changing household needs and future proofing the houses for multi generational living arrangements by offering a master bedroom, walk in robe and ensuite arrangement on the ground floor as well as the first floor.

Photographer Peter Bennetts

Photographer Tatjana Plitt

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Architect Victoria

Profile —

Joseph Lovell Stephanie Burton of Lovell Burton

The studio is flexible in terms of process and often new methods of procurement are development within the office to support the resolution of a projects manifesto.

Most of your work is residential. Do you have any aspirations to move into different sectors?

Interview by Elizabeth Campbell

We do enjoy residential work and the intimacy of the relationships with the client, but we are interested in testing our ideas across various typologies and scales. The public realm is an engaging space to work within whether it be strategic planning, public buildings, or single dwellings.

Do you try to explore any themes or ideas in your work?

Can we start with a little bit of background, where you studied, where you did your first years of work in the industry and how/why you and Stephanie started Lovell Burton?

We both studied at Deakin University, Steph also studying in Sweden. After going our separate ways following graduation, we again worked together for several years at Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, where we were involved in a broad range of building typologies and scales.

Lovell Burton grew organically from a conversation over many years.

We share a common endeavour to shape the built environment with a social, environmental and fiscal approach.

How did you procure your first project?

Like many architects, our first commission came via a family member.

It began as a conversation about a tool shed in the Dandenong Ranges and resulted in a small bath house with the tools stored beneath it. We were fortunate to work with a wonderful craftsman, who we continue to procure projects with.

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What design principles do you live/ work by?

Our workplace is both flexible and collaborative. Projects are regularly pinned up and critiqued together and sometimes we invite external guests to be part of the conversation. We encourage other influences into the office, whether it be through university engagement, Steph’s pottery, mornings at the NGV, or collaborations with artists and makers throughout the design process.

What is the process of a project from concept to completion?

We invest a lot of time understanding the clients and the site. As our projects are scattered throughout Victoria, sometimes this involves spending the weekend on site to better understand its behaviours. We ask a lot of questions of our clients, searching for the root purpose or ambition of the project rather than just the material aspiration.

This process leads to a small manifesto that becomes a reference point for the duration of the project.

This helps to distil the intuitive response to the brief and site with some of the broader ideas within the office.

Re-valuing Heritage

The broad themes and ideas in the studio are generally consistent from project to project. We have always been fascinated with the topographical nature of buildings and the dialogue between building, earth and terrain.

In the studio we talk in terms of the elemental functions of a building: shelter, water, fire, that collectively creates an experience. Or put another way, to make a place for people to feel at home in the world.

This way of thinking does not really change whether it be a single home, or a large public project.

These conversations inevitably lead to how people feel within a space. We try to attribute a feeling or experience to space that supports its function. Barwon Heads House is an example of this where the living space has different characteristics, through light, volume, aspect, materiality to the dining space and so on. Our projects are usually designed from the inside out. We are interested in the visceral experience of space and materiality and tend to avoid intellectual abstraction, or merchandising architecture.

Another idea that pervades our work is efficient use of materials.

Whether it be a structural, logical or the use of off-the-shelf materials. → → Springhill House, Macedon Ranges Architecture by Lovell Burton. Photo by Ben Hosking. Dja Dja Wurrung Country

Architect Victoria

Springhill House is an example of this where the proportions of the dwelling where based on thr standard sizes of flat metal and plywood sheets.

Who are your mentors? Idols?

References?

From early in our education we have always looked to the Victorian Modernists, people like Robin Boyd and Roy Grounds, for their firm belief in the architect's social responsibility and the clarity of their work from this standpoint. Peter Zumthor is someone we admire for his approach of making architecture, rather than theorising the design process.

We are fortunate to have several mentors both in and out of the architectural profession. Both Steph and I have worked closely with Graham Burrows over several years. His optimism and invention are aspects of working in architecture we both

admire and have tried to bring into our own practice. Des Smith provides a wonderful sounding board for ideas and pushes us to continually question, research and develop our language.

How conscious are you of Indigenous culture in your work?

I remember as a child waking on a mattress and breaking the frost from the sleeping bag as first light cracked over Uluru. It is hard not to listen, even as a child. At that stage my Mum (Meme McDonald) was part of the community theatre group, West.

It wasn’t long after this that Meme began to write fictional/ biographical novels and became more involved with people from the Birri-gubba (in Queensland) and Wurundjeri (in Victoria) communities. Travelling to these places, what became evident to me, was the power of storytelling and myth.

Re-valuing Heritage

The direct influence of Indigenous culture is not something we are particularly conscious of when approaching a project. However, there is always a narrative for each of our projects that relates the client to the building and the building to the place.

For us this delineates architecture from building.

In 2009 we assisted Des Smith on the Bunuba Fish project (unrealised) for the Bunuba community (in Western Australia). This project focused on the process of making to design, rather than a prescribed outcome, as a way of fostering ownership of the project by the community. This project was a light bulb moment, where we understood how to make architecture that wasn’t limited to the material sum of its parts. → Barwon Heads House Architecture by Lovell Burton. Photos by Rory Gardiner.

Wathaurung Country

Architect Victoria

Notable —

Vale David Yencken AO (1931-2019) Words by Professor Alan Pert, Director, Melbourne School of Design, reprinted with kind permission

Inspirational in every sense of the word, Melbourne has lost a true visionary. The passing of David Yencken leaves an incredible legacy but also a bewildering vacuum - for over 50 years he championed the Australian environment, the nation’s heritage and excellence in design.

Working in industry, politics and academia, he was a staunch advocate and activist, promoting better outcomes for strategic policy, innovation in implementation, design and practice across our cities and landscapes. He was a tireless advocate for good design, maintaining a focus on the power of design to shape our lives. He brought out the best in all who knew him and had a way of making people believe things were possible and that obstacles could and should be overcome. He did everything with integrity and sincerity and with a genuine willingness to help. His energy, his insight and his friendship will be hugely missed, but importantly, he will be remembered for anchoring design as a significant contributor to our cultural wellbeing.

David co-founded Merchant Builders in 1965, but before this he had already run his own gallery in Melbourne devoted to Australian painting (1956-57) as well as building

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and running one of the first motels in Australia, the Mitchell Valley Motel in Bairnsdale (1957-60). He also commissioned Robin Boyd to design the architecturally significant Black Dolphin Motel in Merimbula, NSW (1960-65). From 1982-87 he was secretary (Chief Executive) of the Ministry for Planning and Environment for the Victorian Government as well as the inaugural Chairman of the Australian Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. He represented Australia twice as a joint leader of the Australian Delegation to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in 1980 and 81.

He also participated in numerous government bodies, including as Chairman of the Interim Committee on the National Estate (Commonwealth Government) in 1974-75. He was an author of the seminal Report on the National Estate (1974), which led to the establishment of the Australian Heritage Commission, which he chaired from 1975-81.

Architect Victoria

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