‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
design project, located at The Northern Institute, Charles
Darwin University, 2013-2015
Paul Carter
Preliminary
This document is in 2 parts:
A. An introduction to ‘Ocean Connections’. This is addressed to the
relevant CDU research community. It is a first pass at a creative brief for
the project and a call for expressions of interest.
B: A written up version of the seminar given at The Northern Institute on
April 12, 2013. This is a discursive backgrounding of the ‘Ocean
Connections’ project. It is a personal account of the project’s context,
scope and applications, designed to introduce the CI (Paul Carter) to
a new potential team of researchers. It seeks to convey the culture out
of which Ocean Connections has thus far emerged.
Part A can be read in isolation from Part B, but Part B offers an
anecdotal introduction to the transdisciplinary outreach of the project,
as well as a suggestion for the first event to be convened.
PART A
Ocean Connections
1. Introduction
Australia’s interest in maintaining peaceable and prosperous commercial,
social and political exchange across the Indian Ocean, the Timor and
Arafura Sea1 reflects geographical, historical and cultural imperatives. The
growth in the value of the natural resources sector, the rapid modernization
1
For the purposes of ‘Ocean Connections, the oceanic region stretches from approximately Longitude
110 degrees with an approximate southern reach to the latitude of North West Cape and a northern
boundary formed by Java/Borneo, to the Torres Strait in the east. It includes the coastal
environmental and cultures of PNG/New Guinea, East Timor, the southern Indonesian chain of Islands
stretching from Java to Flores and the northern coastlines of Australia.
‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
design project
of Australia’s northern neighbours, the potential and real impact of political
instability in the region on Australia’s national sovereignty and bio-security
make the oceanic environment in question Australia’s number one offshore
territorial interest. ‘Ocean Connections’ aims to make a contribution to the
better understanding of this region through the collection, interpretation and
communication of traditional and western techniques for promoting cultural
and environmental sustainability. Its argument is that the coastal cultures of
the region confront significant challenges to the maintenance of their
cultures and environments and that the capacity to share their knowledges
will assist the emergence of a regional consciousness. The value of this
regional consciousness is that it can play a creative role in shaping new
regionally appropriate governance models, able to resist unsustainable
environmental practices and to promote the rich cultural diversity of the
region.
The methodology of the project combines anthropological, ecological,
cultural and creative perspectives. Its argument is that in practice these
disciplines have artificially separated habits of care that integrate all these
dimensions. To give the project manageable parameters, a triangular
conversation is proposed between Indigenous knowledges of place,
ecological understandings of place coming out of the biophysical sciences
and urban design and planning. The approach is to focus on different local
knowledges and to explore their commonalities and differences with a view
to identifying regional practices of saltwater care. The method is case-based,
dependent on the cooperation of communities: the object is not to centralize
and generalize local philosophies and practices of environmental
sustainability but to put them in touch with one another. Ideally, this leads to a
growing network of creative communities. The term creative is critical to this
project. Translating across communities and cultures entails discovering
shared patterns of thought and worldview: these are couched in language,
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
design project
which, even when it poses as factual, is saturated with metaphorical
assumptions. We make sense of the world analogically, and it is through the
language of analogy that analogies between different place-based
knowledges occur.
‘Ocean Connections’ is based at The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin
University. It grows out of the Cooperative Research Network initiative and
focuses the research capacity building purpose of the CRN on a particular
research project. In line with the CRN initiative, it is designed to create a
widening ring of conversations that enrich CDU’s research culture. Its
transdisciplinary approach is intended to stimulate conversations across
specialisations and to open them to new voices from outside. Although ARC
applications will form part of the funding strategy, the ARC has a poor record
in funding innovative projects of this kind. ‘Ocean Connections’ will look to
negotiate specific partnerships with institutional and community partners in
the region. Most importantly, it will seek to partner with the Northern Territory
government: ‘Ocean Connections’ has embedded in it values of regional
governance and literacy that articulate the government’s desire to brand
Darwin as the gateway to south-east Asia. It explores relationships between
people and place that have direct relevance to the management of
Australia’s northern coastlines; it can thus inform a range of international
discussions, including those focused on biosecurity, illegal immigration,
maritime safety and oceanic pollution.
In summary the scope of ‘Ocean Connections’ is:
 development of a transdisciplinary dialogue that assists in producing a
coherent post CRN research capacity and direction at CDU
 to use this to capture data currently being produced and to ‘value
add’ it so that it builds a regional transdisciplinary research community
 to pursue the opportunities for international research partnerships in
Indonesia and Timor ‘l’Este that can populate the project with regional
data and/or personnel
 development of this in the context of a mutually useful research
partnership with the NTG
 opportunistic application of the new transdisciplinary research
expertise to a range of projects, including northern coastlines heritage
strategies, cultural development-led urban and regional design
 communication of project to colleagues associated with the CRN
program at ANU and James Cook University
 exploration of project’s potential to reinvigorate CDU’s teaching and
research across arts, design and architecture with a particular focus on
populating the Strategic Planning Suite or its equivalent
 establishment of a suite of workshops and/or seminars and symposia to
carry forward the dialogues
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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establishment of a wordpress website to post information about the
project
recruitment of 1 or more staff to provide research assistance
negotiation of studio-based projects jointly sponsored by RMIT’s School
of Architecture and Design, the NTG’s Department of Lands, Planning
and the Environment and CDU
advocacy of RMIT’s lead role in assisting the NTG to design and
program the Planning Suite and to co-lead its strategic prioritization of
middle- and longterm planning topics
the lead researcher is responsible for producing 2 papers a year
ARC Linkage applications will be made in 2014 and 2015.2
2. The Invitation
This document is a follow up to the seminar presented at The Northern Institute
on 12 April, 2013 Its object is to solicit the interest of CDU researchers in
populating, shaping and participating in the development of ‘Ocean
Connections.’ The project identifies a triangulation between disciplines as a
practical way to bring the ambitions of the project into focus. The point was
made in the seminar that the disciplinary separation identified – between
Indigenous place-based ontologies, ecological understandings of natural
systems found in the biophysical sciences and the place-making practices of
urban designers – is not only artificial: it is, at an informal and day-today level
often incorrect. It is more correct to say that each of these areas contains all
three perspectives but that in practice they rarely emerge in an integrated
form.
For example, northern Australian and southern Indonesian saltwater
communities understand their place-based ontologies as simultaneously
2
The CI’s papers (published and in press) relevant to the philosophical underpinning of ‘Ocean
Connections’ are: 1. ‘Incontinence: the politics and poetics of passage,’ in Visualising Australia:
Images, Icons and Imaginations, eds Kylie Crane & Renate Brosch, KOALAS (Konzepte Orientierungen
Abhandlungen Lektüren Australien Studien) series, WVT (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier), 2013
forthcoming. 2. ‘Sea Level: Turbulent Media, International Relations,’From International Relations to
Relations International: Postcolonial Essays, ed. Phillip Darby, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2013.
3. ‘Archipelago: The Shape of the Future’, Antithesis, vol 21, 2011, 11-25. 4. 'Polyhedral: Recycling
Boundary Ecologies', International Review of Information Ethics, vol. 11, October 2009, 45-51. 5.
Freuds Salto: Turbulenz als Mechanismus des Eros oder die Lehren der Katastrophe’ [‘Freud’s
Somersault: Readiness, Turbulence and Care’], Lettre International, sommer 2011, 93, 48-52. 6.
'Trockenes Denken: vom Verlust des Wasserbewustseins und von der Poesie des Fluiden' ['Dry
Thinking: on praying for rain'], Lettre International, Winter 2008, 76-81.
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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governing social relations, environmental management techniques and
design (constituting every aspect of what constitutes ‘home’). Similarly,
environmental scientists working in Australia’s northern freshwater/saltwater
habitats increasingly cooperate with Indigenous communities: ecological
models of sustainable ecosystems complement Indigenous understandings of
both specific sites and the longer-term dynamics informing their vitality.
Finally, it is usual for urban designers, landscape architects and architects to
ahead of new developments to conduct site analyses that take account of
the environmental characteristics of the site and its cultural heritage: in these
analyses Indigenous connections to place often figure prominently.
In other words, each disciplinary partner to the conversation already contains
in potential an insight into the other’s perspective and interests. It is this latent
commonality that makes translation between them possible, and which
ensures that the generalized, transdisciplinary insights emerging fro the
conversations are intellectually robust.
After the seminar I had conversations with a number of researchers, and
these led to the following suggestions for topics that would situate the
conversations concretely
2.1 an interregional lexicon of Indigenous place-based knowledge terms.
Different Indigenous communities around the Timor and Arafura seas appear
to have broadly comparable place-based ontologies. However, their local
knowledge is couched in concepts unique to each community. What are the
key words, their internal relationships and contexts? What principles are held
in common or are comparable or may act as bearers of an inter-regional
philosophy and practice of governance?
In the first instance, a comparison of north Australian place-based ontologies
can be undertaken. Evans and Jones argue for the historical existence of the
Pama-Nyungan language family, including Yolngu, and intermittently
detectable in other languages spoken east, west and south ( Nicholas Evans
& Rhys Jones, ‘The cradle of the Pama-Nyungans: archaeological and
linguistic speculations, in P. McConvell & N. Evans, eds, Archaeology and
Linguistics, 1997). Macgowan discusses ‘Arafura sea laws from a Yolngu
perspective,’ with the implication that Yolngu perspectives can be
regionalized – ‘It is my contention that an Indigenous aqua-aesthetics
constitutes the philosophical ground from which a legal argument that allows
seas to be closed can proceed.’ (Fiona Magowan, ‘A sea has many faces:
Multiple and contested continuities in Yolngu coastal waters,’ in L. Taylor et al
(eds), The Power of Knowledge). For a social archaeological perspective on
inter-localism or inter-regionalism, with a particular focus on Yolngu culture,
see Franca Tamasari & James Wallace, ‘Towards an experiential archaeology
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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of place: from location to situation through the body’ in B. David et al (eds),
The Social Archeology of Australian Indigenous Societies. (See also in this
volume Marcia Langton, ‘Earth, wind, fire and water: the social and spiritual
construction of water in Aboriginal societies.’) Michael Christie’s exacting
phenomenological contextualisations of key Yolngu place-making terms are
foundational in this context and comparable studies exist for other areas –
see Allan Marett, Deamings and Ghosts for example, or Nonie Sharp’s work.
Patrick Sullivan writes about Yawuru salt and fresh water understandings.
2.2 a collapsible (bamboo) coastal edge urban prototype, involving partners
in Bali, Seattle and Singapore. This stems from a passing suggestion of Andrew
Campbell and needs his further information; however, the attractiveness of
this in terms of ‘Ocean Connections’ is manifold. Besides its role as a building
material, bamboo has a rich mythological (and perhaps archaeological)
history in east and south-east Asia: it is associated with the first crossings to
Australia (see D.J. McConnell, The Forest Farms of Kandy: and other farms of
complete design, 491). Bamboo’s cultural uses are also diverse – and interregional, from the Australian didjeridu to the pipe organ in Las Pinas near
Manila.
In the context of exploring fragile edge urban typologies – housing styles
consistent with the character of coastal zones susceptible to tide surge and
cyclone – the potential of bamboo buildings to provide accommodation that
is lightly installed, collapsible and reconstructible not only offers a rich topic in
tropical design: it raises broader questions about adaptation to the
environment as well as bringing into focus the potential to develop locallysourced and processed building materials. These points are hardly new: in
1998, for example, they were showcased through temporary Asia Pacific
Cultural Village constructed for the 1998 Darwin Festival held in Darwin,
Victor Cusack claims, ‘With Australia's influx of Asian people accustomed to
bamboo, demand for good quality bamboo timber (ie, culms) for a diverse
range of uses will increase considerably. However, our use of bamboo will be
limited by our (Australian) lack of sufficient good quality, mature bamboo, our
lack of architects and/or engineers trained in bamboo design, joining
systems, harvesting, treatment and strength of relevant species, and of
carpenters with the skills to economically and efficiently build bamboo
structures.’ (www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/bamboo.htm)
Traditional houses in the Torres Strait have bamboo for poles and the
framework and the potential of bamboo in mainland Aboriginal residential
design remains under-explored
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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2.3 Driftlanes, a deep time map of ocean ways, climatic, hydrological,
migratory and commercial. A reconfiguration of exiles, asylum-seekers,
migrants in terms of the oceanic highways that score the ‘mediterranean’ of
the east Indian Ocean the Arafura and Timor Seas. On this topic see for
example Greg Dening’s discussion of Oceania, ‘Deep Times, Deep Spaces:
Civilising the Sea’, in Makenthun and Klein (eds), Sea Changes: Historicising
the Oceans
The word ‘driftlane’ is a neologism (see Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land, 1996)
and refers to sea routes that are not formally mapped but correspond to
prevailing wind directions and ocean currents, which in combination have
influenced patterns of human migration and cultural diffusion so that we can
reasonably talk about traditional sea ‘lanes’ even if these are not formally
mapped.
Key to the reconfiguration of the oceans in ‘Ocean Connections’ as regions
of care is a better understanding of them as cross-cultural zones
characterized by a long history of maritime exchange, migration and
exploitation. To map the history of voyaging is also to chart human
relationships with the non-human environment (notably through fishing).
Current governance orthodoxies discourage an awareness of the oceans as
places of communication and connection. Behind this lies a longer tradition
of seeing the world from the perspective of terra firma: Foucault indicated in
Madness and Civilisation that western definitions of knowledge have a
distinctly landed quality and it’s a point taken up in my essay ‘Dry Thinking.’
One of the spin-offs of this divisionism in the interests of national sovereignty is
the further dehumanization of those who cross these seas (notably asylum
seekers). Some cross-ocean connections are well known, notably those
focused on the pearl shell, pearl and trepang industries, but other forms of
historical contact, hybridisation and adaptation are under represented.
It seems likely that this project would also engage researchers from ANU, also
part of the CRN consortium. Promising discussions about Driftlanes were held
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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with Catherine Koerner
PART B
Filtering the Tides
an introduction to ‘Ocean Connections’, a new region leadership, care
and design project.
1. Introduction
The object of today’s seminar is to introduce a research project called
‘Ocean Connections.’ ‘Ocean Connections’ aims to build an effective
dialogue between three areas of research interest and expertise that rarely
talk to one another. These are Indigenous understandings of saltwater systems
or simply for coastal peoples ‘country’3; non-Indigenous or cross-cultural
science relating to coastal and offshore ecosystems – an immense
oversimplification of a spectrum of intermediate amphibious land/water
bodies and their non-human communities; and fragile environment design
with a particular focus on climatically appropriate public space design that
responds to the imperative to develop new tropical coast infrastructure. The
idea is that these fields of interest share broadly similar tacit assumptions
about the ultimate goals of their research. These can be described in terms of
biodiversity, well being and are tied to notions of rationality, justice and the
carriage of these values through the evolution of democratically-based
governance systems.
It will immediately be questioned whether this perceived lack of cross-interests
dialogue accurately characterizes the situation. In fact, the plausibility of this
project depends on the existence of a long counter-tradition and vigorously
evolving culture of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues across the
areas I have defined. So well established, for example, is the combination of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental management methods and
practices that the Yolngu ‘refer to the two way approach as ganma – like
brackish water which combines saltwater and freshwater as ganma – ie
brackish water which combines saltwater and freshwater.’4 My experience as
a public space designer teaches me that it is normal practice to build cultural
and environmental heritage values into propositions about future placemaking. However, a triangulation of discourses is comparatively rare. In
relation to the brackish water metaphor – which, importantly, introduces one
3
‘We do not make a distinction between and sea in the same way as Ngapaki do when talking about
country; it is all country.’Banduk Marika et al, ‘Ranger djama? Manymak!’, People on Country, 136
4
Emilie Ens, ‘Conducting two-way ecological research,’ People on Country, 47
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
design project
of the underlying methodological assumptions of ‘Ocean Connections’ that
water is a tool of thinking poetically as well as scientifically – the addition of
design can be likened to the advent of rain. And, one last point while
touching on philosophical perspectives. Thinking of rain clouds: the
relationship of ‘Ocean Connections’ to the forms and fields of research
already outlined is rather as the relationship of the shadows to the fleets of
clouds that cast them ‘Ocean Connections’ is a reflective archipelago.
Dappling the distinct territories of thought outlined here, it is poetic, reflective
but also capable of reconfiguring the field of action.
‘Ocean Connections’ has an institutional and cultural context. It seeks to
assist in building the kind of transdisciplinary knowledge that enables CDU’s
diverse and specialist research community to participate influentially and
collectively in regional development. Obviously, the phrase ‘regional
development’ is used with a sense of irony. Like the region in old-fashioned
‘regional studies’, the region in ‘regional development’ is conceptualized as
a subset of the national interest. In contrast, the region that is defined by
‘Ocean Connections’ is archipelagic. It is a non-hierarchically imagined
region, which holds in common the value of difference. This formula applies
to the geopolitical environment but also to the configuration of knowledge
‘Ocean Connections’ proposes. The ‘region’ that our project brings into
conversation is the archipelagic one connected by the Arafura and Timor
Seas. In one sense it is a network of coastal cultures that share common
concerns but which, currently, have no dialogue with one another. In another
sense, the archipelago is an image of the kind of knowledge ‘Ocean
Connections’ generates: a host of local exchanges across differences that
discloses a new transdisciplinary region of concern.
The triangular conversation proposed, between Indigenous ecological
knowledge, traditionally non-Indigenous biophysical science and coastal
design grows naturally out of situations in which I have been involved as a
storyteller, public artist and sometime designer. And I will flesh out this
background shortly. Here, though, I want to emphasise the strategic
importance of the triangulation. Research emanating from the Humanities
and Social Sciences struggles to influence public and political opinion of the
collective self-interest associated with changed environmental management
practices. Research that may be broadly based theoretically finds itself
pragmatically instrumentalised when it depends on, for example, ARC
Linkage support. Because of this and other factors to do with disciplinary
specialization and non-communication, the societal insights that HASS offers
do not translate into major and sustainable innovations in governance. In this
context the strategic value of allying new conversations about coastal
ontologies and epistemologies to the domain of design is that design has an
established relationship with planning. In terms of the present administration’s
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
design project
focus on business, a project like ‘Ocean Connections’ produces exportable IP
in the form of holistic approaches to the longterm adaptive or recuperative
design of fragile coastal environments and their cultures.
In present company ‘design’ may be the least familiar term, so let me explain
what I mean by it. By doing this I can make a first pass at answering the
question: what principles of translation will be used in building the triangular
conversation? I use design in a very loose sense, understanding it
etymologically as a process and practice of drawing out. It corresponds to a
process of improvisation through which parties begin to construct together
the first sketch of common ground. Drawing out has its conversational aspect.
‘Ocean Connections’ is an invitation to draw out the implications of different
research practices and through this to discover overlapping patterns –
thematic, attitudinal, logical, discursive. Design understood in this way is
generative and it is the trace of a social performance. Of course, in this the
environment is an active player, ground or region. Because of this broad
definition, philosophers of design sometimes claim that design offers
fundamental insights into the logic of ideation: how we arrange thoughts or
concepts (their design) is the primary criterion of their truth value. This notion
corresponds to the archipelagic conception of ‘Ocean Connections’, where,
if the enquiry works, a compelling pattern of islands will emerge. Evidently the
value of the work lies in the skill developed to navigate the passages
between different islands: the archipelago extends beyond any boundary.
The conclusion of the project is a sustainable process not a destination.
My approach, then, is less imperialistic (in a disciplinary sense). The question of
translation between different research frameworks, topics and interests is in
my view a poetic one. It demands a method or way of relating that avoids
one-to-one equivalences that render banale, eliminate or otherwise cancel
out the local differences that count. The poetic is invested in storytelling: the
collective mental and cultural place where different interests meet is in their
common dependence on a narrative structure to make sense. The key point
here is that the language of translation is poetic. That is, it gives value to
analogies and to the truthfinding value of metaphor. One of the practical
spinoffs of this re-engagement with science is an enriched role (or brief) for
the arts. I was recently part of a successful bid to review the costs and
benefits of the national investment in desalination plants. The novelty of our
bid was what was termed ‘an enriched communications strategy.’ In this
writers, artists and designers were to work collaboratively to produce poetic
analogs of the processes informing the science, design and operation of the
desalination plants. Instead of the instrumentalist brief to provide a
retrospective website and short documentary, plus educational pack,
something more akin to MONA’s Cloaca exhibit was envisaged.
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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In short, in this introduction to ‘Ocean Connections’ I have emphasized the
project’s potential to generate concrete outcomes. I have focused on the
tangible public benefits of its archipelagic transdisciplinary accommodation
of different voices. In The Fourth Pillar Jon Hawkes argues that an arts and
heritage version of culture ‘has marginalized the concept of culture and
denied theorists and practitioners an extremely effective tool.’ A definition of
culture that embraces ‘the community creation of values, meanings and
purposes in life,’ offers, Hawkes suggests, a new foundation for ‘public
planning’, particularly in the context of achieving such ‘key goals’ as
sustainability and well-being. In short, he proposes integrating cultural
heritage, cultural production and public planning. Obviously missing from this
is environment; also dubious is an essentialist notion of culture. However, his
attempt to bring story-based knowledge into the realm of public space
governance is to be applauded. In the context of ‘Ocean Connections’, my
triad is different (but related). It is reflection, recreation, action. Reflection is
the traditional role of the Humanities. The social sciences and the hard
sciences build models; they are recreative. It is this intellectual logic that links
them to engineering but also to the arts. Action follows from these activities
because they all emerge locally, in response to concrete situations. Action is
a way of adding value to the field work; it occurs when recreation passes
through the reflective process, one this project promotes by creating a space
of poetic exchange or meta-discourse, one that contributes to the
emergence of a new regional governance culture.
2. Background
Let me give a little background to ‘Ocean Connections.’ ‘Ocean
Connections’ grows out of the entanglement of many conversations going
back at least a decade, and I guess it bears the imprint of the conviction that
good research is many-voiced and that the errancy of the process – the
changing participants, the accidents of political and institutional fortune – are
essential ballast. There could be another reason, of course, for briefly
retreating into the past: it is interesting, not to say daunting, to be in a room
where everyone possesses expert knowledge of one or other of the research
areas I have identified as parts of ‘Ocean Connections.’ It is strange (again)
to know nothing and to have no skills to contribute beyond a certain wit for
seeing connections and, let’s admit it, an impatience with the disjunction
between the aspirations of our creative communities and the dispiriting
performance of our democratic institutions. There is something Socratic about
taking the risk of founding the new knowledge we jointly generate on a
primary ignorance. In my defence I can say that the earlier iterations of the
project proved to me that my nomadic life, between disciplines, institutions
and professions, had a certain value. Like the Fool, I could act as a gobetween; a certain non-threatening play-acting was possible. And after all a
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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better, hopeful knowledge of the world’s meaning is ultimately driven by the
desire of co-existence, by the discovery of common ground not its unilateral
assumption.
In 2007 an architect friend of mine and I were invited to design a bridge for
the Adyar Poonga recuperative ecology project in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. This
project exemplified stresses and strains between western-style administrative
managerialism and community-based cultural understandings of place with
which we are quite familiar in the Top End. In writing the reverse brief, I noted
some other familiar biases and omissions from the proposed recuperation
strategy. Given the downstream pre-estuarine Adyar was brackish and, in
particular, composed of a fractal pattern of shallow flows, porous edges and
tidal meanders, it was an oversight not to articulate the character of these
edges. In the classic Tamil period the Tamil land was divided into five kinds of
country. One of these was the ‘Neydal, the coastal or littoral tract.’ This was
not simply a physiographic tract but denoted a distinctive mode of behaviour
(‘Tinai’), social or moral. The notion of ‘Tinai’ comprised ‘the features of the
plant life as well as of the human beings, their tribes, and clans and the gods
and religious ideas … In fact, each of the regions was conceived as a total
web of life in itself.’5 This place-based, ecologically-nuanced ontology
assumed a new significance and poignancy a few months later when the
tsunami overwhelmed our project – and dumped a tent village of tsunami
survivors on the beach immediately outside the heads.
The Adyar Poonga project was thought provoking because it intended to
introduce another bridge into the cross-cultural/disciplinary mix: a physical
one. The challenge in essence was to design and engineer a piece of
infrastructure that responded more sensitively to fragile edge conditions than
the old colonial Elphinstone Bridge. I had previously worked on soft edge
morphologies in an early project for Melbourne’s Docklands, so this challenge
spoke to me. There was, though, a local context that made architecture and
design a plausible partner in the project. This was the influence of a bicultural
spiritual discourse associated with the Theosophical Society, whose
headquarters adjoined the study site. The way in which the project leaders
explained the benefits of their project captured this tradition of east-west
spiritual mingling: for the Plan proposed to implement a ‘recuperative
ecology’ that ‘will involve the citizens in an exercise in self-reflection and
practical action … when we destroy a river we increase our thirst and lose
some of our soul …as biodiversity is diminished so we are diminished … the
restoration is offered as a contribution to making the lives of the people of
Chennai more whole. So the people are to be understood ecologically, as a
5
K.K. Pillay, A Social History of the Tamils, vol 1, University of Madras, Madras, 1975, 164
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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living culture that needs renewal: wisdom, order, beauty and creativity are
common to both.’
Nomadic action research does not work on country. It is at best a messenger
between territories. A kind of theorist by default reporting on developments
observed in different places, the creative researcher and maker goes where
the work is and tries to make sense of it. The calling card is a certain
impatience with a localism that ignores the constitution of places in their
connectivity with a region of other places. These were dispositions I brought
to the work I did at the Darwin Waterfront in 2009-2010. The tsunami had
reminded us, if we needed reminding, that we belonged to a turbulent
oceanic region. The image of the gateway to south-east Asia might conform
to the expansionist logic of late capitalism but it ignored the existence of a
regional economy that was better defined in the characteristic behaviour of
the interstitial water body – the Arafura and Timor sea, whose fringes were
dynamically tidal. The currents differently streaked blue, the migrations of
clouds and peoples, the ganglion of seabed gas pipes, the entire
international culture and technology of maritime travel, the oral historical
expression of this archipelagic sea body in the endless mingling of tongues
and sounds – such an oceanic or archipelagic consciousness places Darwin
in a very different relation to its environment.
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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But it is not, after all, one that is so unfamiliar. According to Vanja Hamzic, ‘the
world’s largest archipelagic state’ (Indonesia) exhibits a distinct ‘cultural and
spiritual plurality’6 - ‘The turbulent tides of trading, migration and warfare
have raged along their shores for centuries, moulding syncretic ethnoscapes,
wherein an islandic self is dynamically negotiated between the allegiance to
local narratives and the need to adjust to foreign winds, be they of Indic,
Arab, colonial European or some other more or less distant origin.’7 But isn’t
this self-becoming through the other characteristic of Aboriginal societies,
where it is underwritten by the moiety system? And, more adventurously, isn’t
the Aboriginal estate archipelagic in its preferred system of self-governance?
Jon Altmann appears to accept this characterization: when he recommends
‘A new vision for the massive Indigenous estate’ celebrating ‘the potential of
Aboriginal lands to function as “territories of difference”,8 he draws on his
understanding that Indigenous communities were localized in relation to one
another, connected or inter-regional in their outlook but in which ‘relations to
the sentient landscape … were consubstantial.’9 Altman’s third way, where
Indigenous estates are managed partly from within and partly from without, is
remarkably like the traditional governance of the archipelago.
The Pearl project at the Waterfront was an architectural and landscape
design concept that aimed to collect, recreate and, to an extent, so far as
physical forms and digital screens permitted to inhabit a tidal environment. It
was, if you like, a ‘bridge’ of a non literal kind, symbolically infolding different
domains of becoming where they grew brackish producing new kinds of
complexity and clarity. In the context of ‘Ocean Connections,’ it is the use
that Pearl made of the phenomenon (and the figure) of filtration that is
relevant. For filtration is a way of purifying brackish water; however, in the
case of the pearl oyster, the repressed brackish comes back in the form of a
new knowledge and value. ‘One of the major factors causing [such
significant] shell growth in the north-west of Australia is the phenomenal rise
and fall of the tide…the strong tidal currents supply rich marine food’ - and
the same conditions also favour the production of pearls, as pearl-producing
oysters depend on a steady supply of nutrients, which vigorous tidal activity
underwrites. As a fundamental technique of energy transfer, filtration wastes
nothing: what is rejected is also incorporated, in the form of anomalies. It is
significant that these anomalies (or deformed pearls_ are called baroque; for
the baroque style is the pre-eminent characteristic of oceanic forms of
knowledge, turbulent, eddying, situational and unpredictable. As regards
6
158
Ibid
8
People on Country, 21
9
Ibid, 7
7
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filtration as a way of finding out new things, the consideration of Francis
Bacon is axiomatic. When Bacon conducted water filtration studies (1627), he
understood this process as having an epistemological significance: his classic
speculation about producing fresh water from salt water through sand
filtration not only produced something vital to human life. It also produced a
kind of clarification. It improved health; it also, he wrote, increased the
pleasure of the eye.
To put it in contemporary terms, a facility that aims to communicate the
culture of the tides, their human histories and environmental connections,
takes quantitative data – tidal data sets and perhaps a broader range of
data sets collected to monitor climate change trends – and seeks to visualize
them. When negotiations on Pearl stalled, I took the opportunity to take these
ideas forward through a sub-project called ‘Tidal’ co-convened with COFA
and Fort Hill Tidal Monitoring Station administered by the Darwin Port
Authority. The rationale for the project was the demonstrable importance
accorded to tidal behaviour and tidal studies in North Australian Indigenous
and non-Indigenous cultures. Among the many initiatives and programs
evidencing this we cited the CSIRO’s crosscultural Tropical Rivers and Coastal
Knowledge project to record Indigenous social and cultural knowledge
relating to water.
Our point of difference was that these programs lacked public visibility or, for
that matter, any rigorous framework for their filtration. Further, little work had
been done on the ethics and aesthetics of quantitative data visualization:
clearly, in the context of planning for anthropogenic environmental changes
that will, in the first instance, transform our coastlines, the effective but
responsible communication of complexity is desirable. An enriched
communications strategy able to calibrate different levels of probability, to
represent ambiguity and to let different patterns co-exist is not instrumentalist.
It exposes the common roots of pattern-making in the arts and the sciences. It
substitutes an archipelagic image of the future for a linearist one. So again,
you see, a relationship emerges between forms of knowledge and their
design.
3. Polyhedral
Out of these experiences came an essay called ‘Polyhedral’. I remember
writing it in a room in the Vibe Hotel looking out onto the green promontory
where Pearl was to be sited. Perhaps I was trying to will that convoluted
architectural shell into being! ‘Polyhedral’ was an attempt to articulate the
kind of place-based knowledge that emerged from an engagement with the
tidal, and it contains incipient thoughts for ‘Ocean Connections.’ In
particular, I want to quote part of it by way of introducing an important basis
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‘Ocean Connections,’ a new region leadership, care and
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of ‘Ocean Connections’, its investment in storytelling. For, in simple essence,
‘Ocean Connections’ examines structural and thematic convergences
between narratives originally developed in isolated contexts. It maps these
convergences not in order to absorb them into a generalised aster narrative
but to create a neighbourhood of passages that can talk to one another –
hence, once more, the architecture of the archipelago
Community consultations held five years ago found that people
wanted certain stories told. They also wanted a meeting place. The
inference was that a new public space should be designed that
incorporated such themes as Indigenous Dreaming narratives, colonial
accounts of first contact and settlement, evocations of the pearl shell
and pearl economy, together with symbolic representations of various
non-human attributes (biodiversity) and human characteristics
(multiculturalism) of Darwin and the 'Top End' generally. A parody of
this wishlist would be a functional 'meeting place' (incorporating
informal performance facilities) staked out with symbolic
representations of the grand narratives said to define Darwin's identity.
Such a theatral mix would successfully preserve the ideology of cultural
invariance, and empty the site of any creative power to incubate
'alternatives' - that is, to incubate the possibility of anything taking
place or happening.
Sentiers give passage sense, just as passage scores places. Here, the
first clue to the arrangement of things is the successive walls normally
relegated to the status of scenography: the window, the jigsaw of
divisions across the hotel grounds, the breakwater, the handsome
curving wharf, the horizonal coastline of the Cox Peninsula with its
refineries, and the horizon itself - I say 'itself' but the horizon is also
seven-shelled with mother-of-pearl cloud laminations climbing into the
dusky evening. If you Google Earth the region, passing from one scale
to another, you discern that the geographical forms exhibit a
Mandelbrot-like tendency to reproduce essential characteristics at
different scales. The generalisation of this is a coastline that is not a line
at all but an arrangement of permeable passages - promontories
sinking to form necklaces of islands, the emergence of straits,
alternative passages and new permeable barriers - spits, banks and
shoals - created and uncreated by tidal fluctuations. At progressively
smaller scales, the archipelago effect is reproduced in the constitution
of coastal flora - the aerial root system of the mangrove swamp is a
field of stakes that supports a colloidal medium (mud) able to stabilise
land-sea relations. The oyster that finds a home in this humid
environment carries out its own filtering operations. The branchiae or
gills leach the salt water for nutrients and occasionally by a kind of
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fertile oversight admit grit that a process of nacreous inhumation
transforms into pearl.
These stories of passage that makes a difference could be multiplied.
They are essentially sites where the flux is inscribed with significance,
where media incubate embryonic forms. The structure of these forms is
hingelike, jointed, constitutionally doubled and asymmetrical. Their
philosophical counterpart is Parmenides' figure of a gate filled with
gates. Their historical counterparts are the mimetic performances
improvised wherever Europeans encountered non-Western peoples:
an archetypal instance occurs a few kilometres north-east of where I
write. The Beagle, in which Charles Darwin circumnavigated the globe,
was subsequently deployed as a coastal survey vessel. The great
theorist of hybridisation was not part of the survey that encountered
Larrakia people near here. He was not witness to the spectacle of
English officers 'dancing for their lives' at the foot of a cliff on which, at
least in the melodramatic lithograph prepared for the publication of
Stokes's journal, Indigenous warriors furiously brandished their spears.
This absence did not prevent the naturalist's name being appended to
our section of coast (and subsequently to a town). But the point is that
the antics of the officers and the naming practices of their captain are
related acts of place-making.10 In both cases, a mere coincidence is
exploited. Wickham's reasons for commemorating a former Beagle
passenger here remain inscrutable: perhaps he perceived in the
potential harbour an analogue with the collecting places that Darwin
favoured. Here was a geographical hollow where debris, or
overlooked data, accrued, a bay where passage had slowed down
and sedimented, providing the evidence (for those who could
interpret it) of change.
In any case, a discourse of passages is one that continually renews
itself, in the absence of a fixed grammar (or invariant culture)
continuously filtering the environment for indications of intention. The
site of the Larrakia encounter became known on the map as Adam
Bay, a mythopoetic acknowledgement of the fact that coastal
communication was adamic, representing a vernacular re-enactment
of Logos as Creator. What signified in these tense exchanges was not
any content - the trading of agreed signifiers - but the tidal momentum
of the desire to communicate. In these situations the traditional,
10
The illustration referred to here is reproduced in my Dark Writing on page 64. The 'third voyage'
(1837-1843) of the Beagle, to survey the coasts of Australia was under the command of John
Clements Wickham. Wickham named Beagle Bay and Port Darwin with the Beagle's previous (second)
1831-1836 voyage in mind in which the naturalist Charles Darwin circumnavigated the world.
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anthropologically-sanctioned relationship between place and place
name is inverted. Place names are compacted stories or myths of
place-making: the deplorable effect of colonisation, we are told, is to
uncouple names from their places - 'What people thus lose is the
relationship between the stories and the particular portion of the
ground.'11 In this case, names/place-names like Darwin and Adam Bay,
obey a different, future-oriented associative logic, one in which the
attachment of a signified to the signifier lies in the future, and the value
of the name resides not in the place it conjures up but in the
opportunity it creates to imagine settlement.
There emerges from these Waterfront reflections an idea of place as a
boundary ecology, as a filtration system in which flux is endowed with
a network character, as if it could be imagined as a double figure
integrating wall and way, fence and flow. The architecture of passage
is characterised by knots where different story lines do not simply meet
but entangle, hybridise or otherwise activate a principle of mere
coincidence to improvise a chiasmatic or riddling formation. To riddle is
to speak enigmatically, to veil senses: it is also to sift coarse material.
The act of sifting works here to preserve data that do not conform,
which for this reason hold the potential to attract new associations or
revive old, neglected ones. In design terms data of this kind are forms
that may look strangely familiar but which resist identification. Such
forms serve as hinge works, mediating between different physical
states, diverse story lines and cultures of settling. In the context of
designating a boundary ecology poles have this function: stylised
islands, mooring posts, palisades, sticklike figures, gills, nets ... they are
twinned in this typology with hollows, bays, ears, shells and other saillike receptacles materialising the history of passage. It is evident that
these signatures of passage localise, materialise and connect, but the
sense of place they might incubate does not replicate the ‘placebased perceptual ecology’ Thomashow advocates.
Instead of practising 'biospheric perception by virtue of three
interconnected pathways', the wanderer in this networked place
experiences the suspension of settlement, the creative and recreative
potential of passage to produce out of chiasmatic events ambiguous
settings. These offer creative templates not for the restoration of
invariant cultural stereotypes but for things to take place. Staged here
11
Weiner 2001, but no further reference given in Thomas F. Thornton, 'Place Names and the
Language of Subsistence in Southeast Alaska', in Maintaining the Links: Language, Identity and the
Land, eds. J. Blythe & R. McKenna Brown, Foundation for Endangered Languages, Bath, UK, 2003, 2935, 31
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is the setting of exchange rates and the shadows cast by the
processes of filtering, selecting, classifying and quarantining essential to
the constitution of stable forms and identities. These are clearly
choreographies with a global application, but they educate not by
leading out from the neighbourhood but by marking and remarking
exploratory sentiers amid it. These sentiers are not paths yet. In fact,
they may never evolve into signposted ways through the labyrinth:
passage here will have the same oscillatory nature as breathing,
always timed and placed, always expressive, relational, dependent
and poised between inspiration and expiration.12
The capacity to inhabit passage, to recover the act of place-making to make these interstitial activities constitutive in an environmental as
well as creative sense - demarcates one function of art in the context
of the eschatological language used to communicate the implications
of climate change. It is not sufficient to use art instrumentally to show
forth what environmental scientists seek to prove with numbers. The
challenge is to articulate the common place these warnings are
designed to defend. But the common place cannot be the flat plane
of instrumental reason and its institutions. It must be composed
differently - in the way sketched here as a region of gathered creative
potential, analogous to a high pressure region in meteorology. The
designer's task is to create the hinge mechanisms that render this
boundary ecology inhabitable imaginatively, and by materialising the
nexus between creativity and change to alter our position vis-a-vis our
ethical responsibilities as citizens of a shared biosphere.13
12
Implicitly contrasted with design practices that produce Ersatz senses of place or, worse the anomie
of placelessness, these emotionally-engaging networks of sentiers might aspire to be aesthetic
counterparts of what Hokari refers to in Gurindji philosophy as the 'Right Way' - 'a geographical
landscape as ell as human behaviour. Morally is spatial as well as behavioural.' The design is ethical
not because it successfully cites traditions associated with the place but because it rightly orients
people, teaching them 'how to look after this created world.' (Minoru Hokari, 'Gurindji mode of
historical practice', The Power of Knowledge, 214-222, 216-217
13
On the concept of 'boundary ecologies' in ecological discourse, see Richard T.T. Forman, Land
Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 82ff
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4. Darwin Harbour: Making Place for Local Knowledge
I have quoted this passage in order to convey a poetic mode of
conceptualising data. Like the passages it praises, it advocates fluid
interconnections. It focuses on the discoveries made where peoples,
phenomena and places meet, cross over and produce new modes of coexistence. Quoting the passage also completes my retrospect of ‘Ocean
Connections’ and shows that the prehistory of the project is itself archipelagic
– as stylistically varied and locally particular as it is thematically and
geographically scattered. So many islands and there is still a sea to find! What
I want to do is to conclude this inter-island introduction with a set of horizons I
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would like you to explore with me over the next three years. The voyages will
be punctuated with the usual atolls of ARC Linkage grants, the reefs of
rejection and the occasional ports of funding triumph. However, first, I want to
sketch a map of a concrete situation, which ‘Ocean Connections’ can and
should address. It is the future of Darwin Harbour. Note: I do not say yet ‘the
future of Darwin Harbour’s environmental heritage’, although the
development and application of a holistic approach to managing its
‘country’ is obviously at the heart of the exercise.14
‘Ocean Connections’ emerges from an engagement with concrete
situations. It responds to realworld change. It seeks to meet a need. It aims at
the salvation or amelioration of places but in an unusual way; that is, it begins
by contesting the usual attributes of place, the local or regional, the fixed or
bounded, the ecological or homeostatic. It reconfigures places as networks
both internally and externally. It also crosses sensory and cognitive
boundaries, mingling the visual, the remembered, the experienced and the
imagined. Now this it will be said is hardly problematic, at least from an
everyday intersubjective point of view: from the point of view of defining
‘sense of place’, the combination of personal, historical and cultural
associations and their correspondence to affordances in the environment is
clearly understood to underpin place-based knowledge. The problem comes
when we want to care for larger polytopic environments, ones whose fluid
character defies representation inside traditional spatio-temporal categories.
The harbour, for example, it is boasted, is larger than Sydney Harbour, but this
begs the question – what will be done to make it like Sydney Harbour, that is,
a comparable tourist attraction, a rival destination. Larger than Sydney
Harbour, perhaps it is archipelagic, that is, unable to be contained. In this
case, in the event we cannot narrate its character oceanically, as a meeting
place of tidal flows and economies, it is more than probable that the
development of Darwin Harbour will continue as it has begun: piecemeal,
subject to instrumentalist discourses of ‘region development’ whose
fragmentation of a vital system mirrors the silo-reinforced instrumentalism of
state and federal policy development and funding categories.
Obviously, here as throughout every part of the proposed passage from
reflection to recreation and action, the project negotiates its place within an
advanced knowledge ecology. Indigenous associations with the Harbour
were dense, detailed and various – over 120 sacred sites are registered in
Darwin Harbour and ‘Larrakia remain active in mainstream land and sea
14
The total area of land within the Darwin Harbour region is 2417 sq km, extending from Darwin River
Dam to the south, the outskirts of Humpty Doo and the Cox Pensinsula – although this areal
mesurmenet is naturally disputed. The catchment area is relatively small compared to its estuarine
area of 810km; the catchment to estuary ratio is 3:1, as compared to Port Phillip Bay’s 5:1.
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management, via involvement with the NLC’s Caring for Land and Sea
Country units, the Beagle Gulf Aboriginal Fisheries Committee, Greening
Australia and Natural heritage Trust Bushcare projects,’ and the potential of
this to inform the Caring for Country movement is recognized: the traditional
owners “have a broad and deep knowledge of ecosystems of the Darwin
Harbour region that would enhance management of natural resources.’
Likewise local scientific knowledge of the hydrology, the fauna and flora (all
of which is extensive) is essential to any local characterisation that preserves
the difference of the system within a broader archipelago of industriallychallenged coastal environments around the Timor and Arafura seas. The
cultural significance of Pinctada maxima offers a bridge from purification to
clarification, from monitoring the health of the harbour to communicating the
importance of its conservation. The clean waters around Darwin Harbour and
high concentrations of plankton favour nacre production. Oysters therefore
make useful ‘biomonitors’ to measure levels of marine pollution. Recently,
pearl oysters have even been proposed as a “novel bioremediation”
technology to restore polluted waters by removing toxic contaminants,
lowering nutrient loads and reducing the concentration of microbial
pathogens. But I take this primarily as an injunction to think more generally
about the role of good design in remediating or recuperating damaged
places and peoples.
Part of the problem of understanding a place ’oceanically’ as an
entanglement of passages is representational. Here, again, we encounter the
fact that ‘design’ is not an after-the-event cosmetic presentation of data but
an active participant in the creation of a patterning that makes conceptual
sense. In this regard we have an opportunity. Recent discussions with people
in the Department of Lands, Planning and the Environment have revived the
proposal to create an NT Strategic Planning Suite. In its current iteration, it
aims to address the growing gap between departmental responsibilities and
skill sets and the necessity to think complex longterm infrastructural investment
holistically. Behind this growing gap is a knowledge deficit, one that is
worsened when on ad hoc reactive departments outsource specialist
consultancies. The potential of the Planning Suite is to create a new
conversation between the university research sector, regional policy
development and public planning. The catalyst of this is the Department’s
embrace of the proposition that place-making values must inform good
planning. Place-making as a methodology includes in their words identifying
issues in a broader context, integrating cross-silo planning issues, creating
synergies between the community, university think-tanks and the Department
and strengthening the role of creative design in the planning process.
There is a sense in which ‘Ocean Connections’ is an ideal project for the
Planning Suite as it brings together the resources just listed to develop a
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regime of care able to respond to a complex environmental condition in a
comparably complex and nuanced way. It is possible that the University and
the Government may seek to collaborate in the resourcing, programming
and utilisation of the Suite. This remains to be seen. In the meantime, the
possibility of access to a variety of mapping and visualisation tools, and the
chance to bring high-end digital design into the project, concentrates the
mind again on the terms of translation and, indeed, on the commensurability
of key concepts in the different study fields. Take, for example, the concept
of ‘local knowledge’, central to all three domains of enquiry. In order to equip
it to migrate – to be scaled up spatially or to be translated between human
and non-human domains – its identification with place needs to be
renegotiated as an art and science of placing. In doing this attention is
transferred from the fixity of a spatial arrangement to the ecology of its
boundaries – which exist interstitially as passages and not simply at the
borders. In this coastal or edge condition filtration is not an option: it is the
condition of ordering reality. In another language, that of sociability, the
refocus on the conditions of passage gives epistemological value to the
performances of everyday life.
How far can these clearly related concepts, derived respectively from the
ecological sciences and Indigenous ontologies of being and becoming, be
translated? Is there, as it were, a discourse of movement forms, some
grammar of reciprocities. Occasionally, in evoking the vitalities of a designed
landscape, I talk about topographical acupuncture, an intuitive treatment of
physically distant sites to bring out their bio-energetic connections. Can the
localisation of energy points in and around Darwin Harbour be subject to this
holistic regime, one that exchanges centralised government for a distributive
pattern of locally-managed governance?
The point here in every case is that ‘local knowledge’ needs to be
understood generatively. It needs to be understood archipelagically as a
dynamic arrangement that is regional. It is this topological redefinition that
equips it to travel. The same insight may be beneficial in the situation Altman
describes: ‘the productive negotiation of differences in Indigenous and
western worldviews’ he recommends reverses a one-way flow – of Indigenous
knowledge into increasingly alien bureaucratic management discourses and
structures. However, the driver of this may be the demonstration of the export
potential of Indigenous knowledge: already off-country Indigenous people
and on-country people cooperate. And even within the traditional
‘ontological linkage to country’ there are clearly mechanisms applicable to
other situations. The Yolngu concept of raypirri, discussed in Michael Christie
and Matthew Campbell’s summary of the ARC funded project ‘More Than a
Roof Overhead,’ emphasises that the principle of ‘congruence’ (the right
way of doing or arranging things) is ‘a positive and productive thing.’ It is a
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performative template , a diagram of relative positions, that, in a housing
context, is the basis of good design. Its vitality party resides in its contextual
flexibility, the room it creates for adaptation and modification – ‘Yolngu have
a keen sense of the environment, the way the breezes work …’
Here environmental knowledge, cultural protocols and good design
effortlessly meld. It is not the case that in the new triangular dialogue each
field of knowledge exports a ‘product’: it is a complete and integrated way
of living that is tested for its applicability. For example, how or can the
principle of congruence inform the management of uninhabited wetlands or
mainly unvisited tracts of ocean? Of course, the question is simplistic. At a
minimum it is essential to place this word in its broader ontological setting:
how does the idea of congruence relate, say, to the institution of galtha,
which, again, Christie has illuminated, and which Yolngu elder Raymattja
Marika describes ‘[it is] the place where people assemble, arriving from their
different territories to sit for some time with related groups of people’ but also
‘the whole process of meeting, discussion, negotiation, planning, agreement
and action. Galtha marks the nexus between plan and action, theory and
practice.’15 This is not actually a question of semantics. It is not resolved by an
ever more exact definition of different terms. It is a question designed to
provoke poetic sense-making, the elucidation of shared senses of good
placing that can be applied in other situations. Fundamentally, such
investigations of the senses in which sense of place is articulated propose a
future management structure that is performative, an archipelago of care
that is galtha-like.
15
R. Marika, The 1998 Wentworth Lecture, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1999, number 1, 6.
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5. Populating the islands
As a first step towards finding passages of shared interest between the
different disciplinary centres and interests, a symposium is proposed called
‘”Local Knowledge”: the challenge of translation.’ The three discipline areas
each claim to practice ‘local knowledge’, but they do so in different ways.
What principles exist in common? What can each learn from the other? What
is the framework that allows these local knowledges to be uplifted and
generalized. It may be the region or the place reconceptualised as an
entanglement of passages.
In theories and practices of Indigenous knowledge, the relationship to country
is primary. But this direct derivation of meaning from place begs a question.
‘Local knowledge’ is promoted in direct opposition to the abstract
representations and operations associated with western science and
administrative culture. Yet the fact that being in place can generate stable
relationships, laws, responsibilities and accounts of the inter-relatedness of
things and humans demonstrates the obvious fact that the local can be
communicated: local knowledge can be learnt and shared and important
concepts/words have to be interpreted. What contribution to the better
understanding of these terms can a comparative study of local knowledges
make?
In the biophysical sciences the usefulness of ecological principles emerges
locally. An ecologically defined place is always a region; regions are nested
within regions; and so on. The value of this perspective can only emerge
when it serves to differentiate one locality or eco-system from another. Hence
the method used to confirm an ecological understanding of place consists in
a minute study of a particular tract of land or water (or both). In this case
‘local knowledge’ follows from the general model; however, the local
knowledge thus gained is valuable mainly in its practical application to the
conservation of the locale in question. How can this knowledge be
‘regionalised’?
A further question: how is an Indigenous place-based ontology ‘mapped
onto’ an ecological understanding of place? Is the inevitable mismatch the
beginning of a local knowledge that escapes the local?
April 22 2013
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