Exploring Place In The Australian Landscape

This book offers an original framework on how to investigate, understand and translate sense of place at a regional scale. The book explores contemporary sense of place theory and practice, drawing upon the Western District of Victoria, in Australia, being the "Country of the White Cockatoo". It offers a unique multi-temporal and thematical analytical approach towards comprehending and mapping the values that underpin and determine strengths of human relationships and nuances to this landscape. Included is a deep ethno-ecological and cross-cultural translation, that takes the reader through both the Western understanding of sense of place as well as the Australian Aboriginal understanding of Country. Both are different intellectual constructions of thoughts, values and ideologies, but which share numerous commonalities due to their archetypal meanings, feelings and values transmitted to humans.

This book offers an original framework on how to investigate, understand and translate sense of place at a regional scale. The book explores contemporary sense of place theory and practice, drawing upon the Western District of Victoria, in Australia, being the "Country of the White Cockatoo". It offers a unique multi-temporal and thematical analytical approach towards comprehending and mapping the values that underpin and determine strengths of human relationships and nuances to this landscape. Included is a deep ethno-ecological and cross-cultural translation, that takes the reader through both the Western understanding of sense of place as well as the Australian Aboriginal understanding of Country. Both are different intellectual constructions of thoughts, values and ideologies, but which share numerous commonalities due to their archetypal meanings, feelings and values transmitted to humans. .

Planning for Urban Country addresses a major gap in knowledge about the translation of Aboriginal values and Country Plans into Australia’s built environment contexts. How do you ‘heal’ Country if it has been devastated by concrete and bitumen, excavations and bulldozing, weeds and introduced plants and animals, and surface, aerial and underground contaminants? How then do Aboriginal values and Country Plan aspirations address urban environments? In this book, David Jones explores the major First Nations-informed design and planning transformations in Djilang / Greater Geelong since 2020. Included are short-interlinked essays about the political and cultural context, profiles of key exemplar architectural, landscape and corridor projects, a deep explanation of the legislative, policy and statutory precedents, opportunities and environment that has enabled these opportunities, and the how Wadawurrung past-present-future values have been scaffolded into these changes.

This book explores international practice in landscape architecture, focusing on the provision of services from Australia to China during China’s contemporary urbanization and Australian landscape architects’ approaches to place. Landscape architectural practice requires planners and designers to have a deep understanding of local culture, site characteristics, craftsmanship and even project procedures that are often intangible. How to acquire the above local knowledge has become a major challenge for international teams. Through the survey of the practice of Australian landscape practices in China and the case study of Li Lake planning and design project, this book reveals the process and difficulties of landscape planning and design as a transnational practice, as well as its special value as a way of cross-cultural fertilization. This book is intended for students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of landscape architecture, architecture and urban planning.

Stories and phrases can powerfully shape the ways we experience and manage our environment. What languages have been used to characterise Australian landscapes and how have they influenced the way we see and treat our environment? How do stories take root in particular places? How do we find the right words for those parts of the country that matter to us? "Words for Country" answers these questions while exploring the inter-relationship between Australia's landscape and language. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths have brought together a collection of essays whose subjects range from the Ord River in the far north-west to Antarctica in the south, from the centre to the coast, the prehistoric to the present. Their terrain is environmental and cultural, political and poetic. Words for Country reveals not just how language grows out of the landscape but how words and stories shape the places in which we live.

Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical explora-tion of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. In this book we explore the ways in which gardens and gardening prevent illness and restore wellbeing, and how they improve social and health equity via tradi-tional and innovative mechanisms and across a range of sites. Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the pro-cesses of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to pre-vent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors de-termining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians, and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethno-graphic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces, and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, on-tological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, thera-peutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation. This book provides much-needed critical insights into the impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing, and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilising horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in the areas of health geogra-phy; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environ-mental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies; and health policy.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the historical, economic, and cultural foundations of capitalism, cities, and climate change. By exploring the intersection of urbanization, consumerism, and colonialism, the book sheds new light on the origins and development of the economic system that has shaped our world today. What sets this book apart is its unique approach, which challenges conventional wisdom and offers new insights into the complex relationships between culture, politics, and economics. The book is intended for readers interested in the history and evolution of capitalism and its impact on society, as well as those interested in climate change and urbanization. The content level is accessible for general readers, yet sophisticated enough to appeal to scholars and researchers. The two most important features of the book are its fresh perspective on the history of mercantilism and its examination of the economic landscape of cities and climate change. By reading this book, readers gain a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between urbanization, colonialism, and economic policies, and their impact on contemporary society.

The feeling of connectedness to one's sensations, mind and the surrounding environment is acute while walking. My project considers the feeling of immersion while bush walking and examines how this can be evoked in an artwork.I use photography and video to create artworks that consider and translate to the audience my own embodied experiences while walking through remote locations in the Australian environment. I am particularly interested in the unspectacular scenes that I encounter, as these are the places that are most characteristic of where I find myself bush walking. I am not interested in producing beautiful photographs of aesthetically pleasing or overly romanticised landscapes. Rather, I want to create embodied impressions where the viewer gets absorbed in the physical experience of walking, and becomes connected to the landscape in a non-hierarchical way.

Rethinking Wilderness and the Wild: Conflict, Conservation and Co-existence examines the complexities surrounding the concept of wilderness. Contemporary wilderness scholarship has tended to fall into two categories: the so-called ‘fortress conservation’ and ‘co-existence’ schools of thought. This book, contending that this polarisation has led to a silencing and concealment of alternative perspectives and lines of enquiry, extends beyond these confines and in particular steers away from the dilemmas of paradise or paradox in order to advance an intellectual and policy agenda of plurality and diversity rather than of prescription and definition. Drawing on case studies from Australia, Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the United States and Iceland, and explorations of embodied experience, creative practice, philosophy, and First Nations land management approaches, the assembled chapters examine wilderness ideals, conflicts and human-nature dualities afresh, and examine co-existence and conservation in the Anthropocene in diverse ontological and multidisciplinary ways. By demonstrating a strong commitment to respecting the knowledge and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, this work delivers a more nuanced, ethical and decolonising approach to issues arising from relationships with wilderness. Such a collection is immediately appropriate given the political challenges and social complexities of our time, and the mounting threats to life across the globe. The abiding and uniting logic of the book is to offer a unique and innovative contribution to engender transformations of wilderness scholarship, activism and conservation policy. This text refutes the inherent privileging and exclusionary tactics of dominant modes of enquiry that too often serve to silence non-human and contrary positions. It reveals a multi-faceted and contingent wilderness alive with agency, diversity and possibility. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of conservation, environmental and natural resource management, Indigenous studies and environmental policy and planning. It will also be of interest to practitioners, policymakers and NGOs involved in conservation, protected environments and environmental governance.

This collection of essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to the ecological, social, economic and, in particular, the cultural dimensions of the Australia-India relationship. The essays provide many levels of focus on environment, place and culture. Some evoke appreciation of particular “places,” either in India or Australia. Many explore how literature has treated “landscape,” while some are comparative studies of cultural, historical and political development. The essays arise from a particular gathering of scholars: The East India chapter of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) held its inaugural international conference in Kolkata on 22–23 January 2009. Much of the work is comparative, exploring common Indian and Australian themes of colonial and postcolonial experience, implications of migration and diaspora, and shared language and literature. The work also explores shared environmental crisis, manifest in landscapes such as the Mouths of the Ganges and Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Such comparisons indicate our shared experience of the “crisis” of ecological, social, economic and cultural sustainability. As human future is colonized through environmental degradation, and determined by human migration and shared culture and values, our relationship to “place” is revitalized and reassessed. We seek simultaneously a reconciliation between humans and a realignment of the human-nature relationship. This is the most basic meaning of social and ecological sustainability.