Conversation THEMES & GUEST Speakers

Conversations - Friday 14th October 

Conversation one – The Meaning of Country: Elders in Conversation  
Country is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Aboriginal peoples belong to Country through historical, existing, and future networks of shared and unique connections and reciprocal relationships with Country. The relational tapestry of spatially identifiable Country comprises continuously evolving systems of knowledge that ground Aboriginal cultures, communities, and peoples. These groundings permit Aboriginal peoples to practice roles, responsibilities, and obligations to Country within the network that honours the continuity of past, present and future. 

In 2022, Country is often considered across various work within the built environment professions, and for good reason. Today, landscape architects are challenged with the call to make Country an everyday practice across wide-ranging work that can positively connect the past, present and future. To respectfully inform an expected collective response to this challenge, Aboriginal community Elders are invited to renew and share rich cultural knowledges, personal meanings, and multi-communal understandings of Country through conversations and storied truth telling.

As the starting point of the festival, this conversation will ground the audience in preparation for deep dives into the complexity of the many disclosures and in anticipation to all possible tensions to be experienced and acknowledged in subsequent sessions – maintaining relationality and continuity.

Since 1966, AILA has been the peak body for creating great places to support healthy communities and a sustainable planet. Today, the landscape architecture profession may be described as a multi-disciplinary and all-encompassing approach to recognising, valuing, protecting, and sustaining landscapes for the benefit of the community. Yet, the profession and discipline in Australia aren’t free from a deeply rooted colonial model that supports Eurocentrism. That archaic model is the mechanism that has permitted landscape architecture to contribute to perpetuating colonial authority, excluding the Aboriginal presence in landscapes and the omission of Country. 

In our current era of addressing the manifest of inequity and injustice towards Aboriginal communities and the Australian environment, lays bare an opportunity for renewing Country as the antidote to a series of sustainability and social challenges. This includes the decolonisation of landscape architecture throughout Australia.

This challenging conversation is found in interdisciplinary criticality to question perceptions and to reveal truthful cultural tensions that entail the creative process and practices. It is not to offer answers, rather it invites one to unsettle their current professional trajectory that struggles with questioning to disassemble archaic habits of thinking and of doing. 

Acknowledging Country in spaces and places enables landscape architects to engage with inspiration, ideas, and opportunities directly from the Aboriginal people and communities who belong. As a practice, designing with Country contributes to improved inter-disciplinary understanding by creating spaces that connect with pre-colonial and modern Aboriginal cultures and reveal the multi-layered relationships between Aboriginal peoples and their Country.

This conversation brings together professionals to present their Country based philosophical and technical knowledges through projects and other achievements, all of which are cultural affirmations that exemplify the emerging modern architectural paradigm of Country.