Remember or Revive: Alice Payne and the Gold Coast and Hinterland Historical Society

In this creative practice work, designer Alice Payne examines the history of twentieth century Queensland fashion icon Paula Stafford, and interprets her story into an illustrated narrative and textile print. Paula Stafford was a swimwear designer operating in the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia 1940s to 1980s, and is credited with bringing the bikini to Australia. This project was commissioned by The Fashion Archives as part of their series Remember or Revive, in which the curators partnered designers with museums to reinterpret historical costume for a contemporary fashion audience. To develop the project, Payne visited The Gold Coast and Hinterland Historical Society to view Paula Stafford’s swimwear, resortwear, photographs, newspaper articles, fabric swatches and other artefacts relating to Stafford’s practice. Through examining Stafford’s work and history, Payne developed a series of designs based on the story and the experience of viewing and handling the garments. Research statement Fashion history is often experienced via static museum displays of garments and photographs from the period, and this research examines other means through which the archive and the fashion museum collection may be reinterpreted and made fresh. It does this in two ways: first, the work interprets a story from fashion history for a contemporary audience. Second, the project illuminates the fashion design process by demonstrating how garments from the past may be reinterpreted to inspire contemporary textile prints. The Paula Stafford collection at The Gold Coast and Hinterland Historical Society has a number of garments and photographs on display, however these only show a partial picture of the richness of Stafford’s work and legacy. Undertaking a practice-led methodology, in the course of developing the work, Payne examined the archive in order to interpret Stafford’s contribution to Queensland fashion through photography, narrative, and illustration. The work contributes to research into historical fashion curation and interpretation. The work appeared in Issue 11, March 2014 of the The Fashion Archives, an online publication by fashion curators Nadia Buick and Madeline King. The Fashion Archives has received funding from Arts Queensland, State Library Queensland and Creative Partnerships Australia and has published over 200 articles and projects related to Queensland Style. The Fashion Archives is the first project to examine in depth Queensland fashion history. As Paula Stafford is one of Queensland’s most iconic designers, this project is significant in being the first to examine her legacy through creative practice. The Fashion Archives was established in 2013 and involvement is by invitation from the curators.

Planning the unplanned City: The story of the gold coast

One of the distinctive features of Gold Coast urbanisation is its historically ad hoc approach to development with little or no strategic planning to guide it. Many have commented on the lack of planning on the Gold Coast calling it ‘an experiment in freedom’ or ‘free enterprise city’. Following a major restructuring of the Queensland’s local councils, the 1990s witnessed a shift from ad hoc decision making to more systematic planning on the Gold Coast. Understanding the past is important for shaping the future. This paper reviews the history of regulatory planning on the Gold Coast, encompassing decisions affecting the form and development of its earliest settlements through to its periods of greatest construction and most streamlined decision–making. It focuses mainly on past planning processes, the problems identified in each planning exercise and the interventions introduced, asking whether these were implemented or not and why. The paper positions the Gold Coast as a physical embodiment of this history of decision making, assessing the effects on the city as a whole of specific measures either affording freedoms or insisting on accountability to various levels of regulation. It examines how the absence of some planning measures influenced the form of the city and its internal arrangements and considers how the shift from ad hoc decision making towards more systematic planning efforts affected the city’s urbanisation. The lessons that the Gold Coast example provides will resonate with places elsewhere in Australia and the world, if not always in scale definitely in substance.

Integrating urban ecosystem sustainability assessment into policy-making: Insights from the Gold Coast City

This paper introduces a policy-making support tool called ‘Micro-level Urban ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX)’. The index serves as a sustainability assessment model that monitors six aspects of urban ecosystems, hydrology, ecology, pollution, location, design, and efficiency based on parcel-scale indicators. This index is applied in a case study investigation in the Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. The outcomes reveal that there are major environmental problems caused by increased impervious surfaces from growing urban development in the study area. The findings suggest that increased impervious surfaces are linked to increased surface runoff, car dependency, transport-related pollution, poor public transport accessibility, and unsustainable built environment. This paper presents how the MUSIX outputs can be used to guide policy-making through the evaluation of existing policies.

Selecting rainfall events for effective Water Sensitive Urban Design: A case study in Gold Coast City, Australia

The current approach for protecting the receiving water environment from urban stormwater pollution is the adoption of structural measures commonly referred to as Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). The treatment efficiency of WSUD measures closely depends on the design of the specific treatment units. As stormwater quality is influenced by rainfall characteristics, the selection of appropriate rainfall events for treatment design is essential to ensure the effectiveness of WSUD systems. Based on extensive field investigations in four urban residential catchments based at Gold Coast, Australia, and computer modelling, this paper details a technically robust approach for the selection of rainfall events for stormwater treatment design using a three-component model. The modelling results confirmed that high intensity-short duration events produce 58.0% of TS load while they only generated 29.1% of total runoff volume. Additionally, rainfall events smaller than 6-month average recurrence interval (ARI) generates a greater cumulative runoff volume (68.4% of the total annual runoff volume) and TS load (68.6% of the TS load exported) than the rainfall events larger than 6-month ARI. The results suggest that for the study catchments, stormwater treatment design could be based on the rainfall which had a mean value of 31 mm/h average intensity and 0.4 h duration. These outcomes also confirmed that selecting smaller ARI rainfall events with high intensity-short duration as the threshold for treatment system design is the most feasible approach since these events cumulatively generate a major portion of the annual pollutant load compared to the other types of events, despite producing a relatively smaller runoff volume. This implies that designs based on small and more frequent rainfall events rather than larger rainfall events would be appropriate in the context of efficiency in treatment performance, cost-effectiveness and possible savings in land area needed.