Covered By Concrete

Out of the Ruins is a practice-led PhD that interrogates the concept of inspirited landscapes in an Australian context. Inspirited refers to the spirit of a site that may be enlivened by invoking the memories and histories that lay embedded in its layers, allowing visitors to reconsider their own agency in relation to the active materiality of their surrounds. Through a combination of creative arts practices, the PhD maps the creation of two site-specific projects to create what Jill Bennett would call ‘affective encounters’ to demonstrate how historical affect and cultural memory flow through bodies, singular subjects and the places that are made transactive by the newly activated relationships. The research project also addresses particular acts of attention that invite visitors to look outwards rather than inwards: from the body to the site and from the site to the culture, context and history. The research positions site-specific art practice as a form of material philosophy concerned with what could be perceived as a revitalisation of the social sacred. In particular, the ‘sanctification’ of social life that consists of a revaluing of the importance of ‘live and emplaced’ intra-action and a reading/perceiving/feeling the ‘affects’ of community as deeply integral to the human subject. The larger question of the creative research is interrogating how I make a bridge as an artist to the culture – and as the person to the pre-individual field of affects that have been mapped on each site. How we can/can we begin to learn to ‘walk softly’ and listen to what we walk upon? The creative practice has been developed through two creative works developed on two sites that share a reflective history and affective experience. The first work created and installed in 2014, was Anthology, a journey through Stirling Park in the ACT produced in collaboration with local artists to resurface the layers of history and story in the Westlake site. The major submission and contribution to new knowledge was TIDE, a site-specific work that addressed the way in which Australian cultural memory is circulated and repressed though affective understandings of location. The site for TIDE, (Royal Park, Melbourne) was mapped as an affective field in which its historical points of connection were activated and distilled through installation. The conceptual and processual terrains of this creative practice will be explored and developed in detail in this exegesis, in relation to the key theorists and practitioners who address ways to position processes of research, practices and social engagement through material aspects of site and specific modes of post-traumatic engagement in art, theatre, performance and philosophy. This project aims to produce new knowledge concerned with the ways in which historical narratives, individual or psychological affects in a particular place cannot be separated from a pre-individual field of affects. If the affective field is viewed as a net of connections, when we create trauma in one section of the net it will impact upon the whole. The PhD deploys modes of creative engagement designed to draw attention to the way affects imprint upon the social/cultural space in a given site. The project builds upon my previous research on trauma’s mark on the body, and contributions to an understanding of how trauma also marks the land. In this way, my creative practice attempts to demonstrate how two specific parklands (where a community continues to fight to protect an apparent terra nullius from development) reflect Australian cultural memory, a shared and remembered history, but are deeply revealing of the lived reality of what we think we know, and our amnesia: what is forgotten, ignored or silenced. My central claim is that the Australian landscape is inspirited with all that has been, and replete with beings and becomings. In this project, I demonstrate how site-specific creative practice can open our awareness and provide modes of engagement and potentially, modes of access, to the irrepressible land and the materiality of history. The aim is to retune our perception of the agency and liveliness of all matter. Creative action in situ can begin to foster deeper connections between the sacred and the social as we share knowledges about each other and place, and in doing so, reawaken the sacred in relation to the deep ecological mesh, the human-non-human community to which we all belong.

2014

Place identity in Australia is currently in a state of flux, owing to the decentralization of cultural landscapes through urbanization. Indigenous caring for landscape has always been associated with the originary condition of Australian wilderness. This paper argues that an understanding of place identity in Australia can arrive from a reassessment of national cultural landscapes, both wild and urban, when we take seriously the imbrications of colonial and Indigenous landscape practices. It does this through an investigation of contemporary Indigenous art, focusing in particular on the work of artist Michael Jagamara Nelson. His work allowed Indigenous art to become recognized as significant in regards to place identity, referencing the alternate cultural markings within the landscape. The argument also draws on Bill Gammage's observation that Australian wilderness landscapes are not 'pristine' but have already been manipulated by Indigenous people for many millennia, h...

Index Journal, 2021

Contemporary reception of colonial monuments in Australia is informed by global debate on race, memory and representation in public space, typified in the decolonial and anti-racist movements Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. While art historians and anti-colonial iconoclasts alike easily conceive of statues as objects for critique, non-figurative sculpture is no less effective when deployed as an ideological tool. Given the typically progressive politics of twentieth-century abstractionists, this study asks how comfortable these artists are with the nation-building function often ascribed to their work by political elites. Through a thematic survey of the commemorative landscape of Newcastle, NSW, this article describes a city punctuated by patriotic references to war, colonialism, and Indigenous absence, exemplified in modernist sculptor Margel Hinder’s (1906–1995) Civic Park Fountain (1966). Recounting its relaunch in 1970 as a memorial to Captain James Cook and its vandalism in 2020, the article examines changes in public reception of the fountain, from hostility towards abstract art and government spending to outrage at colonial symbols. Archival reconstruction of Hinder’s responses to local government demonstrates her silence on the fountain’s assimilation to colonial celebration. When contrasted with Hinder’s activities as a lobbyist and camouflage designer, this finding reveals a complex political biography. Without ignoring Hinder’s concern for Aboriginal rights, her attitude towards the instrumentalisation of her work is at best ambivalent. Beyond challenging the apolitical readings of Hinder’s work in existing scholarship, this study provides a key example of the ideological malleability of abstract public art. By producing “empty” signifiers to then “fill” with meaning, abstract sculptors and administrators together help to shape the semiotic and racial topography of urban space.

Borderlands Journal, 2021

Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named Honouring Land Connections, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that Honouring Land Connections represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period dis...

Visual Studies, 2005

Ethnos, 2013

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2015

This paper presents how a 2015 public space design competition, made available to students of landscape architecture in Australia and New Zealand, provided an opportunity for investigations to be carried out into the experiences, values, and the importance of hangout places in public settings. Following successful and enriching partnerships with Indigenous communities as part of previous design studio teaching and research activities we developed a brief for our current landscape architecture students from the University of Canberra and the University of Melbourne to explore the notion of hangouts, inclusive of Indigenous perspectives. With support from the Local Eden Aboriginal Land Council from the South Coast region of New South Wales (NSW) and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, we formulated a design brief that involved students spending five days camping at an Aboriginal site of significance known as the Haycock Point Culture Camp. Located at the northern end of the NSW Ben Boyd National Park, the Culture Camp site is a space that has been, for some time, purposefully set aside for the local Aboriginal community to share, celebrate and transmit their knowledge. Consisting of a set of separate family camping sites, each connected to a central meeting place, the campground is located within walking distance of bush foods as well as fishing and diving spots that have been important to the local Aboriginal people for generations. And while the Culture Camp serves as a modern-day hangout, where Aboriginal families typically travel to on weekends and holiday periods, the archaeological record and oral accounts indicated that the site has been occupied for thousands of years. Indeed, the site represents an old hangout location. Through the act of "hanging out" at the Culture Camp with our students, and by learning about the use and history of the site through the insights of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal knowledge holders, we explore in this paper how the knowledge gained through the experience helped to inform and inspire design thinking about hangout places in both regional and urban contexts. This paper features design concepts developed by students, along with critical reflections on how the fishing, sketching, bushwalking, storytelling, and other camp activities imbued their design approaches with meaning.

Aboriginal History, 2002

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea, 2021

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sites are commonly thought about as 'natural' locations onto which people variously undertook activities. This chapter argues and shows that sites are architectural constructs, built through a combination of design (preplanning), bricolage (improvisation), and engagement. Sites are artefacts whose cultural modes of construction are amenable to archaeological investigation. By employing a chaîne opératoire approach to the study of sites as landscape-scale artefacts, how and when they were built can be worked out, offering new insights into the cultural history of peoples and places.