n 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 people to survive successfully despite major changes in climate, with a culture that is responsive to and coherent with nature.
And the potential goes further. The arrangement of knowledges within the environment – built and grown – has been achieved through Songlines as a method of recording vast amounts of ecological data without the written word. In the first book in the First Knowledges series, Songlines: The Power and Promise, co-author Lynne Kelly describes how Indigenous Australians used the three-dimensional world around them – mountains, rocks, rivers, stars – as visual triggers to remember traditional knowledge. This was further reinforced through songs, elaborate Dreaming stories and dance, so that as people moved repeatedly through Country over time, that knowledge was embedded into the synapses of their brains.
Perhaps here is the vital clue to the true meaning behind Tu-bow-gule. Maybe it was a clearing house for knowledge about marine ecology that connected to Songlines within and beyond the Sydney area, so when the nawi (traditional bark canoes) pulled up on the shores of what is now called Circular Quay, people gathered, shared and updated this knowledge around the camp fire.
When Jørn Utzon conceptualised the Sydney Opera House as looking like shells growing out of the ocean and as a gathering place for song and dance, you could imagine that he was connecting with the memory of Tu-bow-gule. Within his practice, he often looked to nature for guidance and cited shells, birds’ wings and clouds as inspiration for his building designs. Although his homage seems purely aesthetic, Utzon was a pioneer of sustainable architecture in that he used prefabricated modular forms; his reverence for nature was not skin deep. I am sure he would have loved the chance to sit with traditional owners at Tu-bow-gule and share a meal or even spend the night and discuss how his building could be activated through ceremony and song. Imagine if the decision-makers and architects had joined them under the stars – perhaps the pr