Janet McGaw

Indigenous Place-Making in the City: Dispossessions, Occupations and Implications for Cultural Architecture

This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.

Complex Relationships between Détournement and Récupération in Melbourne's Street (Graffiti and Stencil) Art Scene

The Society of the Spectacle, written by Guy Debord in the late 1960s, critiques the commodification of the post-industrial city, with its seductive spectacles that induce citizens to increasingly passive consumption. This article will argue that in the 40 years since Debord first developed his theories, it has become apparent that the relationship between ‘spectacle’ and ‘commodity’ is more complex and nuanced than he originally envisaged. It will focus specifically on the critical urban practice of street art in Melbourne and the discursive power plays that occur between street (graffiti and stencil) artists, authorities and commerce.

Aboriginal “Country”: An Implicit Critique of Terra Firma and Traditional Architectural Practices

This paper draws on creative research conducted with members of Victoria’s Indigenous communities to explore the notion of Aboriginal “Country” as an implicit critique of the European concept of terra firma and the architectural notion of “site”. Our research and discussion are motivated by a desire amongst a number of members of the Victorian Traditional Owner groups to create an Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in Melbourne. With this in mind, we also discuss the evolution of the Indigenous Cultural Centre in Australia and the challenges faced by the architects who design them, as well as by academics and researchers who seek to do the background research necessary before such a centre can be developed.

Indigenous Placemaking in Urban Melbourne: A Dialogue Between a Wurundjeri Elder and a Non-Indigenous Architect and Academic

This chapter explores the particularities of placemaking in the south-eastern Australian capital city, Melbourne. The Wurundjeri peoples have occupied the place for 40,000–60,000 years. Since colonisation by the English in 1834 Wurundjeri’s placemaking practices have been shaped by the histories of colonisation, and ongoing political, economic and legal contingencies, as much as they have by precolonial traditions. Wurundjeri, like most Indigenous peoples around the world, suffer economic and political marginalisation and consequently have limited capacity to use architecture as a means of staking out territory or expressing contemporary social identity. Instead they have used varied contemporary Indigenous placemaking approaches to reclaim place in the city, some that have emerged from traditional Indigenous practices, and others that have developed through encounters with (and in reaction to) colonising forces.

Mental health care for Indigenous young people: moving culture from the margins to the centre:

Objective: Recently, Indigenous academics have evolved an Indigenist discourse that centralises Indigenous ‘ways of knowing, being and doing’. Through this dialogue, Indigenous ‘ways of knowing and being’ augment Western biopsychosocial treatments. Methods: This paper outlines the authors’ clinical encounters with young people from the Koori community and ongoing consultation with Koori community Elders in Victoria that led to engaging young people and their families in an Indigenist dialogue. Results: The Indigenist dialogue facilitates deeper engagement in the therapeutic process, opportunities to mirror and reflect on young people’s experiences, and drawing parallels between Western health interventions and Aboriginal cultural ways of doing health and being healthy. Conclusions: The young people and their families evince greater faith in the management process and a deeper focus, centred awareness and knowledge of their Cultural rights and responsibilities. Future developments should include a systematic database with qualitative and quantitative data to support its evaluation and iterative development and improved community engagement to ensure holistic health gains are maintained.

Reciprocal performances: The (un)making of an architecture

Over the past forty years there have been many experiments by architects into the ways ‘performance’ can liberate architecture from stasis. The best-known examples of ‘performative’ architecture have focused on the generative processes of becoming that are intrinsic to performance. This paper will argue that performance is a discursive process and so the reciprocal performances of the on-lookers and the subsequent destructive performances of degeneration and demolition may be just as illuminating as the actions and intentions of the originary performance by the architect or the parametric systems of becoming they set in place. This paper will discuss this proposition in the light of several projects but in particular, a collaborative creative installation in the city of Melbourne by the author and a group of homeless women.