Time, Seasonality and Design:
Reconsidering temporal dimensions and patterns of the Australian landscape

Dr David Jones

In 2000 the South Australian Museum undertook a renovation of its entry spaces together with the creation of the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery within the bowels of the original 1800s structure. The Museum established a conceptual vision for the entry spaces, but prepared a detailed brief for the Gallery. The successful tenderer was a team led by Woodhead Australia with Freeman Rayn Design and X Squared Design.

At the outset, the works and brief occurred within a management transitional phase in the Museum. Change of museum philosophies to the project, and the appointment of Dr Tim Flannery (1994) as Director, resulted in changing emphases within the project deliberations and the interpretive strategies in the Gallery. Philip Jones, originally prepared the brief for the Gallery in 1996 the subject of this discussion, and proposed that the Gallery, amongst other aims, should seek to:

… present an encyclopaedic view of Aboriginal material culture and traditions which cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The depth of the Museum’s artefact and archival collections, together with our commitment to a working partnership with Aboriginal communities, will ensure that result (Jones in Kean 2000: 9)

The main aim of the exhibition is to describe the technologies used by Aboriginal people who have lived in the climatically variable continent of Australia for over 50,000 years (Clarke 2001: 29, in Megaw 2001: 116).

Concepts of Aboriginal time and seasonality were not new to Clarke as they had been raised in his doctorate and his editorialship of Berndt’s research on the Yaraldi of the Murray Mouth region in south-eastern South Australia (Berndt, Berndt & Stanton 1993). This inquiry continues in his research directions today. At the same time, the design and incorporation of time and seasonality in the Gallery presented a dilemma. The interpretative display design was too advanced to entertain major changes in the format and spatial configuration of the display spaces. The opportunity left to Clarke was to massage the spaces and displays, their information and interpretative strategies to better convey a richer picture of the complexity of Aboriginal life, the multiplicity of communities across Australia, and the enormity of the Aboriginal artefact collection housed within the South Australian Museum. Partial knowledge about what was transpiring in the design of Bunjilaka at Museum Victoria (Museum Victoria 2000) provided little guidance, but chance discussions with Jones and Heyes re-affirmed a possible alternate and more creative interpretive strategy that embraced time and ecological relationships. These discussions aided in the development of Heyes Kaurna Calendar as a model for the Adelaide Plains and assisted in its incorporation in the electronic interactive displays in the new Gallery.

Time was also incorporated into the display strategy to enable a dynamic flexible outlook for the gallery rather than constraining it. As Clarke (2001: 29) noted:

The future challenge for the South Australian Museum is to maintain the relevance of the material it displays. Given the flexibility of the design and the use of the ‘Speaking Land’ interactives, it should be possible for future curators to reinvigorate the display without going through a total reinstallation.

In hindsight the interpretative model and design approach of time and seasonality provided a richer interpretative strategy. But its crystallisation came too late and lacked clarity of incorporation into the overall Gallery interpretive design strategy. The current bio-geography gallery proposal, that echoes Flannery’s Future Eaters (1994) thesis, in final design phases, is seeking to address this deficiency and to better convey time and seasonality for the Australian landscape.

The interactive electronic displays in the Gallery enabled detailed personal exploration of topics. One of the topics was ‘time and seasonality'. A significant portion of the interactive display considers this topic by graphically analysing various calendars across Australia, particularly Northern Territory and South Australian examples. Kean (2001: 9) and Megaw (2001: 117) have both observed that the interactives serve as temporal displays, albeit restrained, but which work successfully in the overall ‘Speaking Land’ interpretative strategy. Kean stated that the:

Multimedia design has the same restrained approach; thankfully the media is always in service of the message. The Speaking Land computer interactives are brilliantly designed to accommodate several users comfortably and the screen provides silky smooth access to further layers of information about the exhibition (Kean 2001: 9).

DIRECTIONS

The key theme here is that culturally-rich and attuned ‘time’ can be incorporated into our landscape designs and interpretative narratives.

The foregoing case studies provide glimpses as to the possibilities for better designing, expressing, and developing culturally-rich design strategies. In particular, the outlined approach and methodology:

- offers a new approach for expressing the changing cycles and patterns of the Australian landscape generally and especially in micro-climatic regional tracts, and in interpretative and management plans;

- -provides a theory upon which to examine and devise a cultural planning approach, analogous to McHarg’s ecological planning approach, for the renewal of a landscape evocative of its pre-contact character and personality.