JG It was about the phenomenology of architecture and its potential to train the mind. The headland site of this project is traditionally known as Yirannali, or place of falling rocks. It’s a sacred site, the point of observation over the land and ocean. You can see the harbour and surrounding landscapes, observe the incoming seasonal fish, watch and feel the wind as it approaches, and the distant fires. It is a place of great importance. Families would take their newborn babies to the edge of the cliff and hold them up to the sky, to the ancestors, as a welcome. It was a place of great ceremonial significance, yet a lot of people don’t know about that. My project was a sculptural element, rather than a habitable building, designed to frame views and enable visitors to experience and more importantly interpret the surrounding landscape, to potentially reveal these stories of time immemorial and latent histories. So, my thinking about the phenomenology of architecture had moved on from the mental preparation of war zones, but it was still somehow concerned with conflict and conciliation.
RL And there was no holding you back after that. It was just a sheer pleasure to talk with you about those issues. Of how important it is to have a place where you can hold your newly born child up to the cosmos and introduce them to the ancestors. And why shouldn’t we be able to do that today? It was a great time. For both of us. A teacher-student relationship should be on that level.
JG Fortunately, I’ve met incredibly inspiring figures such as yourself and Peter Stutchbury. You share a considered and sensitive approach to architecture relative to the Country and culture your projects are visiting. I’ve learnt a great deal from this. It was through you and Stutch that I gained appreciation of this knowledge about the complex intersection between architecture and Country, the lessons that are learnt from studying the landscape. Not just the tangible surroundings, but things you can’t necessarily see, like the wind and the rain, embedded stories, things that Aboriginal people use to determine places that they would inhabit. They would live from a cave overhang that faces north, for instance, which is something that we have to address in contemporary architecture.
RL Much of my knowledge of the land came from Uncle Max Dulumunmun, who died in December 2021. He taught Stutchy and me that there’s an underlying force in the land, a real power in how it works and how it effects (as against affects) culture. How it levers culture. So, nature comes first and culture follows. And the whole issue of that equation between nature and culture is what’s facing us as colonisers. Uncle Max made us realise that we are on the oldest cultured Country on Earth, and that culture is our true foundation and footing.
JG The eucalypt is part of that, although to be honest it wasn’t until I worked on Eucalyptusdom that I began to reflect on and investigate my relationship with the eucalypts. I didn’t know the histories of it that you shared with me through the design process. So, it was a big learning environment for me, reflecting the power of the trees. Having lived in Sydney for the last six years or so, every time I go home to Newcastle, there’s a moment crossing the Hawkesbury River at which I always wind the window down. I never knew why I did this until the exhibition. I wind the window down because of the different smell in the air from the oils that come off the eucs across the Hawkesbury, it means home to me, that intangible sense of home.
