Working with Country really taps into people’s need to connect to enduring stories, our need for tradition and ceremony. If you look at the broader cultural landscape there are spiritual and potent stories in every place that are very unique, which is a really interesting proposition for urban designers because the world is getting very homogenous—there’s no uniqueness to any kind of neighborhood … no real meaning.
I’m currently working on a project on Sydney Harbour, the Bays West Development. We went to the site and it had no relationship to its original landscape—it was not just stolen (unceded), it was new land stolen from the sea.
So how do you work in a space like this? How do you even find the memory of a place?
An Indigenous way of seeing things sees a holistic order—there’s no separation between plants, animals, humans, arts and practice. Think about totemic relationships. It’s the responsibility of a clan group to do ceremony to make sure that a particular plant or animal is looked after. Everything connects back to ceremony and to making sure that the ecological balance of all things is maintained.
We applied this same system to our work at White Bay. White Bay is home to the endangered white seahorse. Our Caring for Country Design guidelines hope to increase the white seahorse population by filtering the tidal waters through creeks planted with saltmarsh and effectively clean the harbour water. This method will also enable peak stormwater to flow through the natural creek lines as additional filtering.
So every 12 hours, the site will be breathing in and out this fresh water. Then we’ll bring in Aboriginal marine scientists and rangers to come in and start building little ‘motels’ for the sea horses—we might even use shopping trolleys to do this.
I’m working with my community to basically ‘reverse engineer’ the Dreaming.