It's time to unsettle our settler-colonial disciplines Matt Novacevski

It's time to unsettle our settler-colonial disciplines

Words by Matt Novacevski

I’m writing as a secondgeneration settler of continental European heritage on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri-Woi Wurrung peoples. The call of a yellowtailed black cockatoo has pierced the hum of traffic. The sound reminds us as architects, planners, designers, all practitioners of place – we need to talk about settler colonialism.

The violence of colonialism has reverberated across the globe for centuries and continues to be lived in the everyday. Now, the latest Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC) report has called out ongoing processes of colonialism for exacerbating both the impacts and the rate of climate change.1 In so-called Australia (and elsewhere), settler-colonial city-making professions including urban planning and architecture – have played a key role in instigating and enforcing the dispossession and attempted erasure of First Nations peoples. Soon after British ships arrived, planning got to work carving up ill-gotten land, imposing Euro-centric layouts and mass earthworks in an attempt to tame landscapes fit for Imperial expectations. Further subdivision then established markets in stolen land; another step in the attempted erasure of Indigeneity.2 Next, architecture worked within and beyond these subdivisions to create grand structures of Imperial authority, legitimising invasion in stone. Our professions’ ongoing complicity in all this remains visible all around us: today, Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid is vibrant and cosmopolitan, but it is nonetheless built on drained wetlands of vital significance to the people of the Kulin Nations.3 As Munanjahli and South Sea Island scholar Chelsea Watego and settler-historian Patrick Wolfe remind us, settler colonialism is not a one-off event.4 Rather, settler colonialism endures. It is a series of ongoing systems and processes that seek to justify invasion by erasing Indigeneity; built on the foundational lie of terra nullius. Upon this shaky foundation, our sister disciplines – architecture and urban planning – enable and accelerate the extractivism, exclusion, expropriation, and extermination upon which settler-

Above: Melbourne in 1838, from the Yarra Yarra. Colour lithograph print by Clarence Woodhouse. Reproduction courtesy of State Library Victoria. http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay/SLV_VOYAGER1657219/MAIN

colonial ‘progress’ relies. We see the consequences in dispossession, in trauma, in biodiversity decline, in ever more intense bushfires and floods – but also in ongoing acts of everyday exclusion. Settler-colonial urbanism is both insidious and enduring, and it happens in place. As architects and planners, we play a vital role in either its continuation or its upending. Darug scholar, placemaker, and archaeologist, Maddison Miller, illustrates how we as settlers and urbanists need to learn to live and work in partnership with Country, rather than treating place as passive and ripe for exploitation.

“Our cities are located on unceded Aboriginal lands. Yet cities can feel openly hostile to Indigenous peoples. They don’t reflect our cultural values or sense of place. They ignore Country, bulldozing or building up the terrain in order to serve a colonial concept of what a city should be, rather than working in partnership with what Country provides.”5

Too often, the regulatory instruments of planning ignore the complexities of place, sanitise further destruction and, as we are repeatedly reminded, provide little recourse for First Nations communities.6 Contemporary building and planning regulations prioritise private property rights ahead of the wellbeing of place; they scarcely even acknowledge the vibrant, life-holding, nourishing terrain of Country.7 All the while, as practitioners we are forced to shackle ourselves to the wheel of extractivism; forced to ignore the broken beings we leave in our wake as though ignorant of the fact that very well may run over us, too. Working in partnership with Country demands that we urbanists see ourselves as people of place and take up the responsibilities this entails. Our future – entwined as it is with this land – will be defined by the many choices we make, every day. We need to stop fortifying the false castles of our colonial-constructed disciplines: such self-indulgence only diverts time, energy, and resources away from our responsibilities to place; our shared responsibility to confront (and mitigate) the impending emergencies of climate change and biodiversity loss. Years of experience has taught me that urban planning – itself a variegated discipline, prone to disagreements – needs reflexive critique to make it accountable to place. Yet, across planning and architecture we waste energy firing gratuitous potshots across disciplinary parapets, finger-pointing while the systems we are enmeshed in stoke the fires of a world burning around us. This is not the time for disciplinary egotism or silos. Rather, we must turn the torch on our own disciplines, together.

Learning to listen, learning to care

As we shine the torch where it needs pointing, it becomes clear that working in partnership demands that we learn to listen to land, to water, and to each other. A vital plank for settler-practitioners like me is to learn to listen to First Nations knowledge that, as Palyku Elder Gladys and Professor Jill Milroy AM point out, comes from place itself over deep time.8 Time and again, in reading Indigenous scholarship, we learn that taking the time to listen and to relate is at the heart of being with this land. Recently I came across a beautifully written piece by Tagalaka author and cultural burning expert, Victor Steffensen, about a walk on Country with an old man, who reminded him that: “You have to take notice of Country, otherwise you will get lost.”9 Perhaps we settler-colonial professionals – operating in the wake of generations of wanton disregard for Country – have always been lost in this land. Thankfully, we live in a time when First Nations writing and scholarship is flourishing, giving us ample opportunity to listen, learn, reflect, and learn anew. In a seminal piece, Korumberri and Waka Waka scholar Aunty/Dr Mary Graham advised white settlers interested in reconciliation and the cultivation of a more mature sense of Australian identity to:

“…start establishing very close ties with the land, not necessarily via ownership of property but via locally-based, inclusive, nonpolitical, strategy-based frameworks, with a very long-term aim of simply looking after land.”10

Care for its own sake eschews extractivism. Care is not focused on what we can take from land or how we can shape it for Imperial expectations of productivity. Rather, care asks what we can give to

place, pointing towards the ethics of reciprocity and interdependence that Country could teach us – if only we could learn to listen. The radical act of listening, which I am working to continually cultivate in myself, provides the portal to move us from siloed disciplines of urban planning and architecture to people of place. It is here – with place and with deep listening – that we may take the first steps toward unlearning the stillviolent and still-insidious ways of settler-colonialism. The yellow-tailed black cockatoo outside my window is another potent reminder that it is not just our lives at stake, but the future of life itself.

Matt Novacevski is a planner (yes!), writer, teacher, researcher, and advocate for place. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Melbourne, looking at a post-colonial approach to the evaluation of placemaking practice.

Acknowledgements I acknowledge that this work has been written on unceded Wurundjeri-Woi Wurrung Country. I pay my respects to Elders Past and Present, to Country and to First Nations around the world for their ongoing stewardship of place.

Notes

1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers. 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_ SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf: 14. 2 Jackson, Sue., Libby Porter, and Louise C. Johnson, eds. 2018. Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,

3 Johnson, Louise C., 2018. “Planning Melbourne” in Sue Jackson, Libby Porter, and Louise C. Johnson eds. Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: 111-130. 4 Watego, Chelsea., 2021. Another Day in the Colony, University of Queensland Press: St Lucia; Patrick Wolfe. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. https://doi. org/10.1080/14623520601056240. 5 Miller, Maddison., 2021. “The Future of Our Cities Is Indigenous”, Pursuit: Science Matters: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-future-of-ourcities-is-indigenous. 6 See, for example: Austin, Sissy Eileen., 2020. “The Destruction of a Sacred Tree on Djab Wurrung Country Has Broken Our Hearts”, The Guardian: https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/27/the-destruction-of-a-sacred-treeon-djab-wurrung-country-has-broken-our-hearts. Calla Wahlquist and Lorena Allam. “Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’”. The Guardian, Wednesday 9 December, https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/09/juukan-gorge-inquiry-rio-tintosdecision-to-blow-up-indigenous-rock-shelters-inexcusable. 7 Pascoe, Bruce., and Bill Gammage. 2021. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming. Port Melbourne: Thames and Hudson; Deborah Bird Rose. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission; Ambelin Kwaymullina. 2008. “Introduction: A Land of Many Countries”. In Heartsick for Country: Stories of Love, Spirit, and Creation, edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia, and Blaze Kwaymullina. North Fremantle: Fremantle Press: 6-20.

8 Milroy, Gladys., and Jill Milroy. 2008. “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too.” In Heartsick for Country: Stories of Love, Spirit and Creation, edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia, and Blaze Kwaymullina. North Fremantle: Fremantle Press: 22-40.

9 Steffensen, Victor., 2019. “Putting the People Back Into Country.” In Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, London: Zed Books: 224–38.

10 Graham, Mary., 1999. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (2): 105–18. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853599X00090.