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.

The central-place territorial model does not apply to space-use by juvenile brook charr Salvelinus fontinalis in lakes

1. Territoriality is widely accepted as the mechanism responsible for density-dependent mortality, emigration, and 'self-thinning' of populations of juvenile salmonine fishes in streams. Numerous studies have focused on territoriality exclusively in stream (lotic) environments and thus have fostered a stereotyped view of juvenile salmonines as sedentary and territorial. We term this behavioural paradigm the central-place territorial model (CPTM).

2. We tested predictions characterizing the CPTM for young-of-the-year (YOY) brook charr (Salvelinus fontinalis) in two Canadian lakes to determine if territoriality may also potentially limit space and population size of brook charr in lakes.

3. Our findings were not consistent with the CPTM. Fish in both lakes were not central-place forages. Maximum displacement distance did not increase with body length as predicted by the general salmonine model of Grant and Kramer (1990). Net displacement distanced increased with the proportion of time spent moving. Aggressive frequency was greatest for fish which spent large proportions of time moving and did not defend from a central-place.

4. Fish in both lakes were rarely aggressive, highly active, and often moved back over the same areas. However, lake fish which migrated to a tributary stream had no net displacement (central-place foraging) illustrating the immediate effects of current on foraging tactics and space-use.

5. The effect of hydrodynamic environment (flowing vs. still water) on fish behaviour needs to be explicitly considered in future models of salmonine behaviour.

Introduction : making Indigenous place in the Australian city

This introductory essay situates this special issue's concerns in the context of Indigenous cultural centre design in settler-colonial Australia. Given the very small number of Indigenous architects in Australia, architectural facilities for Indigenous communities are routinely designed by non-indigenous architects. The implications of this are significant. Given the often complex social, historical and political ambitions that are invested in the construction of Indigenous cultural centres, and their frequent intention to represent a broad Indigenous constituency, can non-indigenous architectural and spatial practice ever realize these? As a way into this question, the essay surveys postcolonial and architectural scholarship that explores the spatialization of setter-colonial politics and the distinct place-making traditions of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The making of place in the Australian city is an ongoing force of conflict, assertion, exclusion and forgetting, but it is also central to the realization of a possible post-colonial state in which no one ‘centre’ can ever stabilize and resolve questions of legitimacy and power. Instead, such a centre might hold these questions in tension and as questions in common, which would mean a new foundation for the making of place.

The place of scandal : Lara Bingle and Brendan Fevola

Over the period of a few short weeks in 2010 Australian media coverage and public discussion was dominated by news of a ‘sex scandal’ involving two high-profile celebrities – Lara Bingle (model and then fiancée of the vice-captain of the Australian cricket team Michael Clarke), and the Australian rules football ‘bad boy’ Brendan Fevola. The scandal began with the publication of a pixellated photograph in the popular Australian women’s magazine, Woman’s Day, of a naked and apparently unconsenting Bingle in the shower, which was allegedly taken by Fevola during a brief affair years previously and distributed via his mobile phone. This article examines the constructions of women’s sexuality, gender and celebrity scandal in mainstream media coverage of this event. Attending to the Australian news media’s discursive constructions of Bingle’s sexual behaviour, this research begins to map the ways in which celebrity scandals in the mainstream media provoke wider debate about ‘gender appropriate’ conduct (sexual and otherwise).

Place-taking and place-making in waterfront renewal, Australia

Waterfront and port zones around the world have long been subject to change, as they have variously been used for trade, waste disposal, leisure and most recently for urban re-imagining, spectacle and lifestyle housing. While such a narrative has been well explored in the urban studies literature, another element of port development – its relation to imperialism and colonisation has not. In the case of colonized countries – such as Australia, but also Canada, the United States and across Africa and Asia – waterfronts were often the entry points of imperial occupancy and key sites for colonial trade and industry. Contestation over how to value and use these sites is integral to their constitution as landscapes, as place taking becomes part of their place making. It will be argued, using case studies drawn from Adelaide and Melbourne in Australia that these sites register a range of culturally-specific imprints connected to the colonisation process. For Indigenous Australians, sea country was indistinguishable from land, but subsequent assessments have seen land demarcated from the ocean, water defiled and obliterated, slums designated but then redeveloped and the Indigenous present rendered benign through its symbolic re-presentation. This post-colonial reading will correlate the divide between land and water with those who have the imperial and class power to define this elemental boundary to add a new dimension to studies of waterfronts.

The country’s not what it used to be : research participants’ understandings of space, place and identity in rural Victoria

This chapter explores the various ways in which research participants from rural areas located in country Victoria, Australia, construct and reconstruct their understandings of themselves and their rural spaces in terms of place and identity. This chapter draws upon the data of two separate research projects that bought together a variety of researchers and research participants either growing up in, working in, or studying in rural areas.

The place of Israel and Jewish peoplehood in Jewish education in the diaspora : an Australia casestudy

This chapter aims to identify the different ways Israel is conceptualized and focused on in the Zionist day schools of Melbourne, Australia. It seeks to establish a comparison between schools, which all define themselves as Zionist, in how they differentially engage their students with Israel. This analysis considers how Israel is conveyed in the context of the school's ideological orientations.

Light the towel : narrative and the negotiated unconscious

This investigation is a practice-based inquiry. It takes place in the context of writing and editing a novel manuscript: The earth does not get fat (Prendergast 2012). The unpublished novel manuscript is a fractured narrative, a tale told in multiple first-person voices. One of the problems the writer encountered, as the novel developed, was a problem from the perspective of logic and continuity: the stories did not fit together in a linear way. As a result, the writer felt estranged from the writing and, at the same time, strangely familiar with it. Despite having produced the narrative, the writer felt that it was ‘other’. This paper summarises the writer's methodology; it explains the writer's attachment to this fractured style of telling. This fractured style is assessed within the context of the mind's ability to produce its effects without full consciousness. The analysis of authorial intention therefore focuses upon the influence of altered states of consciousness upon narrative material. In particular, the writer uses Andreas Mavromatis’ (1987) work on hypnagogia: described as ‘the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep’ to describe the experience of the operation of the unconscious in authorial intention.

A/r/tography and place ontology

Through lived experience, I learn how my education, life habits, changing abodes, and different career trajectories are intertwined with my identity and place. A/r/tography is a way of exploring these interconnections through reflexive practice as a visual artist, creative arts therapist, art educator, and researcher. Knowledge emerges from contemplating my artistic practice, my art education, the drawings of clients who participate in my creative art therapy sessions, and the work of students who attend my art classes, from which I contemplate early art images as shapes or figurative forms floating on the page. This paper asserts that creative art therapists are able to use the creative-artistic processes of living inquiry found in a/r/tography to make connections between identity and place.

My place: exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children’s place-related identities through their engage- ment with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey’s notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt’s notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.

Place-related identities through texts : from interdisciplinary theory to research agenda

The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attract- ing growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analy- sis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and rep- resent their place-related identities through reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts.