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For our graduating project, our site was/is on Wangal and Gadigal Country - part of the Eora nation. I would like to recognise the continued Wangal and Gadigal connection to the land and waters of the site of my studies, and acknowledge that they never ceded sovereignty. I would also like to acknowledge Wangal and Gadigal Elders and Ancestors, and any First Nations people who might read this submission.
SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange Ariel’s Song from The Tempest William Shakespeare
Glebe Island in 1875
Explorative Drawing 5 (Disintegration and Renewal)
Introduction Throughout my studies at UNSW I focused on the way the landscape informs our culture and identity. I have come to understand the human relationship with the landscape as a dialectical one: we alter the landscape, and simultaneously the landscape alters us. There are multiple modes of reflection and change, and this continues with the movement of time. In urban settings around the world, natural landscapes have been altered beyond recognition. Tidal flats are walled and in-filled; cliffs are flattened for freeways and large developments. This de-naturalisation directly effects the role and philosophy of the landscape architect operating in such places. While studying, a question that kept arising was how should we deal with the concept of the ‘natural’ (a key concern for landscape architects) in the context of a ‘natural’ that has been obliterated? This question brings up issues regarding our cultural relationship to nature, our responsibility to remediate the natural and the complex - and even ethical problems regarding the memorialisation of natural landmarks, particularly within our Australia’s national foundation in colonial invasion. For our final project at UNSW, we were tasked with studying the Bays Precinct in Sydney. And within the Bays Precinct, I found Glebe Island to be a fitting landscape to explore these ideas. Once an impressive 20 metre tall sandstone island (pictured above), today Glebe Island is a flat, disused concrete port terminal. I thought to use this monumental deconstruction of the natural as a place to study concepts of remembrance, identity, remediation, and redemption - all through a landscape architecture lens. I wanted to find out, through design studies, if and how can we move forward beyond and from our destructive history. On the one hand acknowledging our destruction, but also helping to make Glebe Island enjoyable and fulfilling for humans and generative for ecosystems. My driving design philosophy was to not change the existing terrain in a major way - rather to reveal the ‘rich and strange’ on the site. The current state of things is the most fitting memorial to what humans have done to the landscape since invasion. The challenge was to make Glebe Island redemptive via design to offer a change-of-course in our destructive relationship to the land. 1. At the start of the project I figuratively modeled the tidal effects on the site as a study in dissolution: Exploring ways to represent the celestial movements and their YLSH[PVUZOPW [V H Å\PK [PKHS LKNL I was looking to interrogate the natural forces still existing on site. These forces may take centre stage once again.
As the tide rose the site was overwhelmed. Quite quickly the model was dissolved - a dissolution that was relative to the way Glebe Island was so rapidly flattened. Interestingly the grid I used to plot the site remained. This revealed the resilience of ideas above the landscape - the landscape dissolved but the guiding grid stayed firm. It appeared that the meta-structure of ideas and theories that guide interventions are important and resilient and probably should be foundational. And so for this project I needed to start with a good theoretical base.