d 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 Tubow-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.’ 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.
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 country to breathe again?
Just as trees, mountains and rivers contain stories, the design of new places, objects and systems can be a purposeful extension of Country and imbue meaning and story into them, so that as we engage with them over time, multiple narratives are strengthened. If the stories are rooted in cultural values that reinforce our relationship to nature and compel us to care for it, then this will ultimately become our collective and cultural identity.
What a transformational perspective for Australian designers and architects: to be part of an Australian design ethos that views the construction of the built environment as an extension of our creation stories, that these ‘things’ are to be sung into existence with a purpose of clarity that reinforces our connection to Country and our ecological responsibility to care for it.
The framework of Indigenous culture is not just a collection of songs, stories and myths from the ‘noble savage’. What we know now, through our genuine engagement and deep listening, is that beyond the dots in the paintings and the etymology of the languages is a network of symbols that reveal traditional knowledges – knowledges that have allowed Indigenous peopl