First Knowledges Design

Building on Country

Alison Page, Paul Memmott, Margo Neale

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781760761851
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion.Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated function, sustainability and storytelling, refined over many millennia, are now being applied to contemporary practices. Design: Building on Country issues a challenge for a new Australian design ethos, one that truly responds to the essence of Country and its people.About the series: Each book is a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and editors; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.Other titles in the series include: Songlines by Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly (2020); Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Plants by Zena Cumpston, Michael Fletcher & Lesley Head (2022); Astronomy (2022); Innovation (2023).

 1 

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES

ALISON PAGE

Hedonism was all the rage in 1996 when I was a third-year design student. Sustainability and socially responsible principles were a mere whisper on campus. The idea that meaningful stories would drive design decisions was dismissed. Everything was form and aesthetic, and it was all rather depressing.

My major assignment was yet another restaurant design, and I wondered how long it would last if it were ever built. The refitting of spaces for retail and hospitality was only ever supposed to have a life cycle of seven years, after which the materials were destined for landfill. I felt I had made a dreadful mistake signing up to be an interior designer in an increasingly wasteful and materialistic world.

I wasn’t alone. Years before, architect Robin Boyd had called the Australian identity ‘second-hand American’ and described our obsession with pasting imported woods over native boards a scourge of ‘featurism’.¹ Featurism epitomised the Australian disconnection from nature, whether it was the cutting-down of trees to install a drain or the adoption of materials with no regard to the landscape or climate. The materials in high rotation when I was studying were far worse than the veneers that Boyd spoke of: medium-density fibreboard, for example, was a composite board that was banned in most countries because of its heavy levels of cancerous formaldehyde and lots and lots of plastic.

I felt a widening tension between the socially conscious Indigenous woman that I was becoming and my work as a designer of decorated spaces for eating and drinking. This changed when one of my lecturers, George Verghese, asked whether I had heard of ‘Aboriginal architecture’. He was referring to his homeland of Canada, where architects such as Douglas Cardinal were bringing their Indigenous storytelling and values to the built environment and creating deeply meaningful places. When I heard those two words, ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘architecture’, put together for the first time, the universe expanded in an instant. Nothing would be the same for me again, thankfully.

As soon as I graduated, I forced my way into a job at the New South Wales Government Architect’s office, which in 1995 had established Australia’s first Aboriginal architecture group, Merrima Design. I had met Indigenous architects Dillon Kombumerri, a descendant of the Yugambeh people of the Gold Coast, and Kevin O’Brien, a descendant of the Kaurareg and Meriam people of north-eastern Australia, a year before and I was desperate to join them.

I first encountered Kevin and Dillon when they were outspoken audience members at an engineering forum. During a presentation about Aboriginal housing in the Western Desert, Kevin stood up and yelled that he would rather live in a gunya (traditional house) any day. His point was that the problems of Aboriginal housing had been getting worse year after year, and that Indigenous people often erected traditional structures outside contemporary houses and had extension cords running inside, reducing the ‘normal house’ to a large power box. I had seen excellent examples of tarted-up gunyas at Oak Valley, near Maralinga, with stereos, lounges, fridges and televisions stuffed into these ephemeral structures, which were much better designed to withstand the extreme temperature fluctuations in the Great Victoria Desert than government housing was.

It was refreshing to see Indigenous architects commenting on what they thought was culturally appropriate: at the time, it was revolutionary. So as soon as I graduated, I walked into the office of the Government Architect and demanded a job, arguing that in order to deliver appropriate design services to communities, they needed a woman on their team.

Luckily for me, I was hired. The years that followed were probably some of the most fertile of my career in terms of forming and developing an approach to contemporary design. With mentors like my co-author of this book, Paul Memmott, and Rick Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt, I spent many hours pondering how the built environment could be an extension of Country. Seeds that were sown all those years ago are now taking root and have become foundational to the way that all of us practise design.

In 1999, the three of us from Merrima travelled to the Hawkesbury River for an architecture-student camp to demonstrate what Sydney would have been like before colonisation. It was there that we started talking about how the layers of the built environment could build either ‘on country’ or ‘on Country’. This distinction encapsulates my journey into Indigenous knowledges. I gleaned information from books in the library, pieced things together from conversations with elders and mentors, and learnt from making many mistakes and from hours and hours of reflecting.

As a ‘concrete Koori’, I am a typical urban Aboriginal who has not had the privilege of sitting under a tree with my aunties to learn the ways of my people via the oral traditions for which our culture is renowned. My people are from La Perouse at Captain Cook’s landing place in south-east Sydney: ground zero for the colonial destruction of our Indigenous cultures. My family were blue-collar workers on the wharves, in chemical plants and in trades. Through design, I have discovered my own identity as well as our traditional knowledges, which are an endless puzzle for me. I have only started making connections, but with more collaborations – including on this book with Paul – I will discover a few more pieces; and with age, I just might start designing my own puzzle pieces to fill the gaps.

PAUL MEMMOTT

My journey has to start with acknowledging the many Aboriginal Old People who taught me, passed on their knowledge and encouraged me to use it appropriately in my teaching. It is of high priority for me now to find ways to pass this on again to young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. I try in this book to respectfully share a little about the most influential of my old teachers – in particular, my Lardil and Kaiadilt mentors from the Wellesley Islands, and Alyawarr elders from Central Australia – who lived a traditional lifestyle in the early decades of the 20th century. I’ve tried to understand the significance of the teachings of these elders throughout my life, but any deficiencies are my own fault.

I have had an unusual intertwined career as an anthropologist, architect and university researcher. As an anthropologist I was led into Aboriginal ethnography, material culture, social organisation, kinship and land tenure, and then into consultancy on land claims in the Northern Territory in the 1980s and native title claims in a number of states during the 1990s. This extended to a range of pressing social issues and associated teaching and consultancy challenges, such as historical transparency, deaths in custody, family violence, intergenerational trauma, homelessness and identity erosion. I have aimed to apply my understanding of these problems in the workshops I’ve been invited to run by the Myuma Group at the Dugalunji Camp in Camooweal in outback Queensland over the past fourteen years. Young Aboriginal adults (and Torres Strait Islanders at times, too) undertake pre-vocational training in these workshops to understand their family and tribal histories and strengthen their self-confidence about who they are and where they come from, as they step into employment.

The parallel strand of architecture led me into Western design disciplines, and then into Aboriginal housing in the early 1970s and culturally appropriate housing design. By the 1990s, I was working on the challenging problem of how to reform institutional architecture – prisons, courthouses, mental health facilities, schools, hospitals, clinics and aged care homes – in a culturally appropriate way for Aboriginal people. How to make safe places!

Today there is an increasingly loud call for culturally appropriate environments for Indigenous people, but little tried and proven knowledge about how to achieve them. This enormous task falls to the lot of younger designers as the values of Australian society gradually change. When I was an undergraduate, there was minimal recognition of Aboriginal architecture or design apart from some rock art and Albert Namatjira’s paintings. Today, some of the biggest design firms in Australia request consultancy advice on how to incorporate references to local Aboriginal cultures into their work.

Part of my role in the 1990s was to teach and nurture the first generation of Aboriginal architects with my soulmate and colleague, the late Col James from the University of Sydney. Australia was a generation behind New Zealand, the USA and Canada in pushing for Indigenous inclusivity in design professionalism. One of the most rewarding experiences of my later career has been to see the forging of an international network of Indigenous designers and architects.

Likewise, writing this book has involved a thoroughly enjoyable partnership with my co-author, Alison Page – bonding and stimulating and building off one another – and an appreciated opportunity for team creativity. Importantly, it has enabled me to pass on the knowledge I received from the Old People of this ancient continent to a younger generation of Aboriginal designers and authors. The result has strengthened our combined contribution to Design: Building on Country for the next generations.

Bara, bulub, bokman: Looking for ‘design’

When we started this book, I brainstormed the idea of having an Aboriginal word meaning ‘design’ as the title. This raised a number of problems. The first was finding such a word. The second was choosing which language: although most of the original 360 or so Aboriginal languages, many with different dialects, have sadly ceased to be spoken, there are still several hundred wordlists and dictionaries.² The third problem was how to create a broad book on Aboriginal design with examples covering a range of language groups but a title in only one language. I’d tried to resolve this issue before with my Aboriginal architecture book titled Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley.³

I contacted a linguist colleague, Dr Erich Round, who serendipitously informed me that he was developing a tool for exploring a large number of written Aboriginal-language dictionaries, to locate words with similar meanings. He sent me an index of English translations that took over an hour to peruse, as there were about 4000 of them. The list certainly didn’t contain the word ‘design’: clearly it didn’t easily translate, on a word-to-word basis, into any Aboriginal language. From the list, however, I selected a set of keywords comprising the closest synonyms I could find: become, bring forth, compose, decorate, imagine, integrate, intuit, make, manufacture, originate, put together, shape up.

These words were fed back into the program and about 320 words were identified in numerous Aboriginal languages from all over Australia. Most were verbs indicating some active process. Although some were generic, others were tied to particular products or outcomes – for example, an object chiselled from timber, or making a sound like thunder. ‘Make’ was the most common correlation with ‘design’, but many senses of ‘make’ seemed to mean ‘the manufacturing of a regularly made object using a longstanding known tradition of process and product’ and few could be interpreted as making a new or novel design. However, a number prescribed mixing ingredients in particular ways to create something that could be either new or according to a recipe, as in cooking creations. Three words initially jumped out for possible combination to encompass this range: bara, bulub and bokman, drawn from the Gangulu, Bilinarra and Djambarrpuyngu languages respectively. If we had gone ahead with these words as a book title, the next step would have been to understand them in more detail and get permission from the language groups to use their words in this way.

In the end, we decided upon ‘Design’ (in English) as the title for the book. An English dictionary would typically define ‘design’ as a plan for making an object or system, or for carrying out a specific activity as a process, and this definition would include the types of meanings I have listed that cover Aboriginal designing. However, there is more to Aboriginal design than this, in that certain designs have come from the Dreaming and are founded on a profound understanding of ‘being on Country’.

2

OBJECTS AND SPIRITUALITY: BUILDING ON COUNTRY

ALISON PAGE

Bennelong Point, the site of Australia’s most recognisable building, the Sydney Opera House, was known by the traditional owners of the land as Tu-bow-gule, meaning ‘where the knowledge waters meet’. What was the knowledge held here at the confluence of the saltwater and freshwater where the Tank Stream meets the ocean?

The site was home to extensive middens, said to be up to 12 metres high, which is testament to the abundance and variety of seafood in the area. After the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, this place was taken over for cattle and renamed Cattle Point. Then, as construction started on the buildings on Macquarie Street, the middens were repurposed into a lime slurry to form the buildings’ foundations and the place was again renamed, this time as Limeburners’ Point.

The knowledge about how to crush the shells and release the lime to bind stone and bricks for building was something that my people practised. I would regularly camp on the south coast with my extended family over weeks in the summer, and one year all it did was rain, day after day, reducing our camp site to mud and water. My aunties collected shells in buckets and crushed the shells, adding spit and water until they made a rudimentary concrete that they laid underneath our tents so we could stay on longer that year.

The value of this shell resource was not lost on the colonists, who used it to build the very foundations of the colony. They were building modern Australia from countless stories, camp fires and meals shared over 65,000 years. This is building on country as a usurper, not a collaborator. The colonists came and appropriated a site and its contents for their own purposes: to re-create the buildings, farms and landscapes of their British homeland on an ancient site that had nourished the Cadigal people physically and spiritually for millennia. The purpose of the new buildings was to honour the memories of other places far away, with a different climate and different plant and animal species. The places were renamed, which meant that the knowledge and meanings encrypted in the First Nations’ language of places was overlaid, often with simplistic descriptions of a site’s function, as in Cattle Point; such a practice completely changed and confused the identity of the locations. Even the renaming of Tu-bow-gule to Bennelong Point in the early 1790s, after the senior Eora man who became an interlocutor between the natives and British, has done little to show the true meaning of the place ‘where the knowledge waters meet’.

For many years, building practices in Australia have overlaid international styles on this land, but there is now a growing movement to understand the stories and original names. In Australia, the term ‘Country’ has recently been capitalised in many written sources, in an attempt to carve out a different way of engaging with place. There is genuine interest in diving deep into the rich and complex culture of Indigenous people, especially their ecological relationship to the land.

In the Indigenous worldview, Country means a way of seeing the world. Everything is living. There is no separation between people and nature. It is multidimensional and extends beyond ‘the ground’. There is sea, land and sky Country. As anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose wrote, ‘People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country.’¹ Country has Dreaming, origins and a future. The term attempts to encapsulate a sophisticated spiritual connection that Indigenous people have with the land that extends beyond ecology and includes songs, stories and kinship relationships. Paul writes more about this later in the chapter.

So what does it mean to build ‘on Country’?

We realise now how the British colonists blanketed Indigenous lands with their values, placed layers of concrete, steel and glass over the earth with little understanding of its need for care, and believed in the dominance of humans over nature in their approach to architecture and planning. It can be seen in the grid layouts of townships all across Australia, the streetscapes and human-made parks, with buildings turning their backs to the rivers, and roads filling in streams. Streetscapes were favoured over landscapes. Cities like Sydney are lacquered with so many impermeable layers of Western thinking that architects, designers and builders must decide how each new layer can dig below the surface and reveal the original story of Country. How can we, as designers, pick the scabs and allow the cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Note on spelling
• Contents
• First Knowledges: An Introduction Margo Neale
• 1. Personal Perspectives Alison Page & Paul Memmott
• 2. Objects and Spirituality: Building on Country Alison Page & Paul Memmott
• 3. On Camps, Shelter and Country Paul Memmott
• 4. Engineered Structures Paul Memmott
• 5. Materials Alison Page & Paul Memmott
• 6. Camp Layouts and the Importance of Kinship Paul Memmott
• 7. Placemaking in Country Paul Memmott & Alison Page
• 8. Contemporary Indigenous Architecture and Design Alison Page & Paul Memmott
• 9. The Offering: A New Australian Design Alison Page
• Acknowledgements
• Image Credits
• Notes
• Further Resources
• Index
• Copyright Page