Ideas
On Country
in the Colony.
The mind map above represents the grappling with the invitations and provocations to connect with Country that are increasingly extended by First Nations knowledge holders and designers. Norm Sheehan (Wiradjuri) poses that ‘Country is a consciousness-enhancing program that we share with all peoples’.[1] The invitation to learn to live more lawfully on this continent informed by Indigenous knowledges is an important shift that is being embraced by many non-Indigenous designers, for example through the revisions of the National Standards of Competency for Architects, 2023.
The revised NSCA asks designers to consider the ‘implications for Country’ of our work. As we do this, we must recognise the terrible damages that have been and continue to be done to Indigenous peoples, knowledges, land care practices, and design – whole life ways, through the colonisation of this continent. Settler colonial theory poses that there is a ‘logic of elimination’[2] inherent in the colonisation of this continent. Building upon this understanding, theorists have further shown the ways that settlers desire for colonial completion; to become the rightful inhabitants of a place; can lead to strategies that appear to be progressive, but are in fact intended to eliminate difference, by absorbing First Nations into the settler colonial state.[3] So how do we embrace this relational invitation to engage with Country and ensure that we don’t reconstruct it in the patterns of settler domination of peoples and place?
Colonial relations with
place are extractive,
understanding land as
‘resource’, and humans
as entitled to extraction
and exploitation. These
land relations are
incommensurable
with Country.
This talk was delivered for the Australian Institute of Architects to discuss the ways that we need to move beyond settler colonial relations with peoples and place that are about taking territory through erasure and replacement of First Nations including though assimilation – the erasure of difference. Colonial relations with place are extractive, understanding land as ‘resource’, and humans as entitled to extraction and exploitation.[4] These land relations are incommensurable with Country. The notion of entitlement to country evident everywhere on this continent is also a risk when we are considering Country. Neither country nor Country belongs to non-Indigenous peoples. This offering of learning about Country is very powerful and compelling. The challenge for non-Indigenous peoples is how we engage with it – rather than consume it. Relationality is not a feature of dominant western scholarship nor design education, but there is an evident ‘turn’ to relationality following the work of critical Indigenous scholars who have shown that relationality is profoundly embedded in Indigenous knowledges.[5] The ontology of Country asks us to think relationally, to understand our work and our selves as always being in relations with First Peoples and Country.
[1] MORAN, UNCLE C, HARRINGTON, UNCLE G, AND SHEEHAN, N, 2018, ON COUNTRY LEARNING, DESIGN AND CULTURE, 10:1, 71-79, DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2018.1430996
[2] WOLFE, P, 2006, SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE ELIMINATION OF THE NATIVE, JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH, 8:4, 387-409, DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240
[3] STRAKOSCH, E, AND MACOUN, A (2012) THE VANISHING ENDPOINT OF SETTLER COLONIALISM, ARENA JOURNAL, 37 - 38, PP. 40-62
[4] LIBOIRON, M, (2021), POLLUTION IS COLONIALISM, DURHAM, DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
[5] MORETON ROBINSON, A, (2020), INCOMMENSURABLE SOVEREIGNTIES, IN HOKOWHITU, B, MORETON ROBINSON, A, TUHIWAI-SMITH, L, LARKIN, S (EDS), ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ROUTLEDGE, NY
Healthy vs
Wild Country
A Biodiversity Emergency
Wunggurrwil Dhurrung is on the left side of this image, and on the other side, the paddock, is the ‘Wild Country’. Professor Michael Shawn Fletcher (Wiradjuri) shows that colonisation of this continent was the event that triggered the biodiversity emergency, and that the wild fires leading to massive carbon emissions only began when First Nations land care practices began to be oppressed 200 years ago. Fletcher shows us that ‘Wild Country is sick Country’.[1]
This idea of wild country is told through the saga of Captain Cook, shared by Debra Bird Rose who quotes Hobbles, a lawman of the Victoria River district in Northern Australia:
Captain Cook was the real wild one. He failed to recognise Law, lived by damage, and promoted cruelty.[2]
Wild people (colonisers) make wild country (degrading, failing). Colonisation and the wild form a matrix: settler societies and their violence.[3]
The stark contrast between one side of the fence and the other raises some important questions, such as these posed KJ, co-chair of Koling wada ngal, and a key driver of Wunggurrwil Dhurrung from the beginning:
What does it mean in terms of this landscape, and the ownership of this landscape? What does it mean in terms of what happens outside of the fence line, and other landscape and Aboriginal ownership in that space?
This is also important - outside of the fence. We’ve got people who are activating the inside but we need to think around that broader notion of space and place and belonging and connections. If we continue to keep engaging in the right way, then it has a bigger impact across the whole of Wyndham perhaps, in the future development of spaces.
KJ
[1] FLETCHER, M.S. (2020), THE 2020 NARRM ORATION, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
[2] ROSE, D.B, 2004, REPORTS FROM A WILD COUNTRY: ETHICS FOR DECOLONISATION, UNIVERSITY OF NSW PRESS, NSW
[3] ROSE (2004)
Wild Country is what has
come with colonisation,
in contrast to generations
of care and connection to
place by First Nations.
—
MOONDANI BALLUK / DESIGN BY GRESLEY ABAS (WITH GROUNDED STUDIOS TEAM AS EMPLOYEES OF GRESLEY ABAS) IN COLLABORATION WITH GREGORY BURGESS, REALMSTUDIOS AND ARTIST PAOLA BALLA.
Reflect
Reconciliation
Action
Plan
Grounded Studios Reflect RAP is endorsed by Reconciliation Australia. Our RAP is one of many ways that we embed respect for First Nations and Aboriginal Country into our work. The RAP program connects us with a multi-disciplinary network of people working to address the aims of reconciliation. The Architecture and Design Reconciliation Industry Network Group (A&D RING) invites design practices who have an endorsed RAP to join the national conversation about industry-wide changes that can support the aims of reconciliation.
A project featured in this RAP is Moondani Balluk at Victoria University Footscray Park campus (pictured above), which sits on the escarpment by the Maribyrnong River. The transformation of the ground floor of building G and the Aboriginal History Archive offered the opportunity to reconnect to place, designing an intervention that works with the brutalist architecture to create new opportunities that complement the community’s ways of working.
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Endorsed by
Reconciliation
Australia.
—
WUNGGURRWIL DHURRUNG / DESIGN BY GRESLEY ABAS (WITH GROUNDED STUDIOS TEAM AS EMPLOYEES OF GRESLEY ABAS) IN COLLABORATION WITH GREGORY BURGESS AND REALMSTUDIOS.
The Heart of
Sustainable Design
Architecture.
Sensuous Peripheries
The Sensuous Peripheries podcast features creatives working at the edges of their realms; the innovative, path-breaking voices shaping our conscious design futures. In this episode, recorded in July 2022, host Caroline McMillan speaks with Emily Cox about coming to design from a community development background, the shifting appreciation of what sustainability means in the design of the built environment, the relationships between art and design, and the importance of materiality to the sensuous experience of space.
Warakurna is a small community in the Nganyatjarra Lands, also known as the Gibson Desert. In 2010 Warakurna Artists, Ngantjarra Council and Warakurna Community Council worked with Emily Cox to undertake a participatory design project to design and then refurbish an existing building to create Warakurna Gallery.
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Warakurna
Gallery
