Introduction

I entered this degree seeking to understand the relationship between the individual and their surrounding landscapes, and how the landscape informs the creation of individual and collective identities. I have always understood landscapes as contested territories, an issue that is heightened in Australia due to our nation existing on stolen land. Even so, I have constantly been challenged by the fact that I still feel ‘at home’ here - particularly in the landscapes of NSW.

This is the confusion that I sought to clarify. I feel that it is an issue particular to colonial settler nations. As Simon Schama notes in Landscape and Memory, the landscape is where we find the roots of our national myths; it is the place where our identity is conceived. So then in Australia, how can we successfully form a sense of identity via the landscape, when/where there has been so many challenging moments of violence and dispossession?

Even post-invasion, what does our landscape say about our relationship to the land? How have we modified the land to make it bow to our systems of capital extraction? What do our landscapes convey regarding our exploitation of our natural resources, and each other? It is not that I wish to solely focus on histories of tragedy and exploitation, it is more that I have realised that the landscape is an essential forum where we discuss these things, a place where we deal with these difficult histories. From a few years of looking at landscape design approaches in Australia and around the world, it has become apparent that the landscape is the single most effective way at dealing with historic trauma, truth-telling, and offering us a chance to move onwards.

It is here that my studies are focused. How to ethically, effectively, sensitively memorialise the past in the landscape. To reveal past injustices, to create a sense of place that is founded on material reminders of what has happened in particular landscapes.

Most importantly, however, I’m interested in creating a sense of optimism via landscape design in these landscapes. How can we both memorialise, and offer a path out - some kind of collective redemption vis a vis what has occurred in/on any particular site?

Left Rise by John Nicholson Tamarama, NSW Sculpture to victims of LGBTQIA+ violence Middle Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Peter Eisenman/Buro Happold Berlin, Germany Right Cretto di Gibellina Alberto Burri, Sicily, Italy Memorial to the town of Gibellina, lost to an earthquake

Each landscape response to tragedy seeks to instill a sense of permanent memorialisation. There is no other means in our cultural/linguistic toolbox to more effectively instill a sense of historic inquiry and acknowledgment of past wrongs/natural disasters. Landscape based truth telling has immense power.

Reflections on history that are designed via the landscape use materiality and relics as their main mode of communication. The spirit of the past is captured in the physical make up of objects of the site.

The use of these materials in design is a powerful way to communicate and transfer meaning from the past to the present.

The Bays Precinct, with its defunct Power Station, extensive concrete aprons and crumbling edges with emergent novel ecologies is a place where material history can be easily noticed, and touched.

The site has a contested history, from invasion where all signs of First Nation use has been either quarried or in-filled. Port-side working class culture has been replaced with million dollar property. A once magnificent natural landmark of Glebe Island has been flattened. What we have left on this contested ground is a collection of forms and materials that are now needed to be ‘curated’. The landscape architect has the ability to approach White Bay, to preserve histories for remembrance and to create a deeply meaningful sense of place in reference to the site’s challenging histories.

Figure 2: Twisted impact steel from the 9/11 Memorial Museum. To Marita Sturken, these objects act as stand ins for the violence wrought on human bodies.

https://inhabitat.com/911-memorial-museums-design-honors-the-history-and-recovery-of-ground-zero/911-memorial-museum-impact-steel-below/ visited 20th April 2021

stand-ins for people and their histories (and subsequently their communities’ histories). This on the one hand heightens their value, but also reinforces the need to display with care. The style of representation has immense weight in how historical objects and materials are received. Objects that are over-aestheticised have the potential to lose their ability to memorialise history, becoming

Figure 3: Rusted digesters at Waterfront Park, Pyrmont. These objects at first appear as sculptures representing an industrial past. They are in fact actual parts of an industrial process that took place on site - digesters for the extraction of cellulose from wood. Do these objects memorialise? Photo by author

The existing forms and materials of Glebe Island are products of the dialectical relationship that exists between us and the landscape. We had the industry to quarry and flatten a 20m high island, to infill its borders and to create an immense deep water port. But also, in reverse, natural forces have eroded concrete, have rusted steel, have crumbled bricks, and have infiltrated liminal spaces with novel native and weedy ecologies. What we now have is a complicated synthesis of natural and human forces.

I believe there is beauty in this complicated relationship, and it is this relationship that forms a sense of place.

I think it is tangible in the landscape - our destruction and industrial use of Glebe Island has created an extremely unique space. When visiting the site, we observe a totality of visual and material reminders of the site’s industrial history. But also, some elements don’t fit. The casuarinas clumping chaotically - the pampas grasses appearing as islands in concrete deserts. These outbreaks of nature in such a desolate landscape offer a disconnect in understanding the site. They open up conceptual thoughts of what the site could become. Dialectical Relationship

Humans People Landscape

Current form of landscape - never static Potential

Then

Now Future