From Desert to Ocean Wave

Kevin Taylor, Director, Taylor Cullity Lethlean

 ‘An explorer’s task is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land’.  I am reminded of these words in Gerald Murnane’s book “The Plains’ when I think of where we stand in Australia as landscape architects today.  I think of artists who are rediscovering this land over and over through acts of poetic exploration and who offer us a new land to engage with, to be enchanted by.  

Are we part of this new exploration, this unfolding discovery?  How do we participate in it, what do we have to offer, and what does the journey offer us?  What happens when we come back from the expedition to the desert, or revisit our landing at the oceans edge?  

Uluru  
My first day in Uluru was a shock.  I hadn’t expected to be in a place so strange.  Almost nobody spoke my language.  This was clearly someone else’s land.  But more than this, this was clearly someone else’s culture.   

I was not just a visitor.  I was a stranger.    Uluru is a massive sandstone remnant shaped by wind and water.  Water and the manner in which it is gathered and dispersed by the rock onto the plain is the major form-giver of the surrounding landscape and its ecology.  Tree, shrub and grass species form communities which emanate from the moisture adjacent the rock out into the desert flatness.  It is at a point where the soils and moisture regime changes and Mulga gives way to Spinifex and Desert Oaks that the Uluru Aboriginal Cultural Centre is sited.  

Uluru is visited by over a quarter of a million people each year.  The lines of movement are mostly predictable in air conditioned buses to designated spots for sunrise, sunset and the climb.  Since regaining ownership of Uluru, Anangu have encouraged visitors to walk and experience the place differently.  To slow down and take cues from the patterns of the plants and open ground, and the gestures which occur at every scale.  This is the purpose of the Cultural Centre at Uluru, to allow people to slow down and take in the beauty of the place and the richness of the living Anangu culture.  

In characterising this place six elements come to mind:  

Cape du Couedic  

At Cape du Couedic on the western end of Kangaroo Island the Southern Ocean comes in from the Pole.  A rhythmic, hypnotic swell crosses the ever increasing vastness between the drifting fragments of Gondwana.  The limestone cliffs gradually give way to islands then recede to the ocean floor.   No Aboriginals here, just speculation of sealers, land bridges and ice ages.  But stories travel across the country and end and begin here, explaining the cape and islands.  

Tourists come by the bus load, hundreds a day to see the seals and cliffs.  They walk in straight lines from top to bottom.   If you leave the eroding path you are gently coerced into another pattern of movement shaped by the calcrete platforms and pockets of bonsai gardens dotted throughout.   This landscape is characterised by the power and rawness of the elements, yet the plants so robust to grow in these conditions are sensitive to human impact.  The rhythm of the ocean abounds and tunes this place.  On the ground a mottled pattern of solid and void is formed by the weaving of rock and plant together.  

Our brief was to create a new means for people to journey from top to bottom and back.  The resulting boardwalk encourages visitors to ‘walk like a wave’ and to embrace a wave length and frequency that resonates with the waves below.  Looping back and forth hovering over the land first one side of the cape then another is revealed.    

Flinders Ranges  

Like the cliffs of Cape du Couedic, the Flinders Ranges are crumbling away.  Built up 800 million years ago these ancient mountains are slowly falling to the ground.  Water is present everywhere like a ghost through the landscape.  Streams of rock and Red Gums carve their way through the ranges, filling with water in a boom and bust cycle of flooding storm and parching dryness.  

Our job was to help design the infrastructure for 64 sites in the park.  We walked each site experiencing what David Tacey describes in his book ‘Re Enchantment’ when he says:   “The feet register the contours of place – the proportions, lines, dots and rhythms of the landscape”.  

Here the characteristics of the place which endure in my mind are:  

The materials and forms emerged from the place.  Stone, rusted steel and local native cypress pine making up the palette of materials.  This seemed new to those who worked there, although it was embraced enthusiastically.  

Port Augusta  

Further south the ranges brush against the coast.  Here Port Augusta perches on the tip of Spencer Gulf, a geographic meeting place of ranges, gulf, desert and plain.   Port Augusta has a rich history of movement, as point of take off, pausing point and destination.  Afghan camel trains left from here to take supplies into the desert.  

Port Augusta was once a thriving port busier than Port Adelaide where tall masts lined the wharfs and ships literally sailed to the doorstep of the desert.  It has had a life as a bustling industrial centre with power stations and railway workshops.  It has always been a gathering place for Aboriginal people moving north and south.  Each summer the population swells as people from the Pit Lands come south.  Many children seeing the ocean for the first time and learning to swim.  

Still, for many it is a place you move through on the way to somewhere else.  

The town has largely turned its back to the foreshore and Woolworth’s have planted their backside firmly on it.   Mangroves, a small beach and a long straight wharf coexist within a remarkably small section of shoreline.  The community, struggling with social and economic issues, is resilient and hopeful.  The rejuvenation of the foreshore is a possible symbol of the city’s re-engagement with its place.   

Our consultation with townspeople encouraged story telling as a way of making conscious shared experiences from the past when the foreshore was alive with activity both on the wharf and beach.  Historical photos were found in front bars, butchers shops, personal albums and libraries.  

The three characterisations of this place emanate from its geography.  Port Augusta has a paradoxical quality in that it is both threshold and centre.  Threshold to the desert, plain, gulf and ranges yet a focus of activity itself.   Movement creates the experience of threshold and intersecting lines of travel create a point of concentration and interaction.  A sense of journey is integral to this place.  

The city is surrounded by a sense of expansiveness.  The plain, the desert, the gulf and the line of the ranges all take the eye to the horizon.    The foreshore masterplan seeks to bring these underlying qualities into focus while responding to the community’s needs.   A broad path creates a rhythmic gesture along the shore moving to and from the water’s edge shaping the spaces and alternatively opening and contracting views to the water.  Links back to the city centre are created to straddle the supermarket and incorporate it within a wider context of public infrastructure.  

The foreshore is envisaged as a place of recreation for young and old.  Particularly for the townspeople, but also as a lure to entice travellers to stop awhile.  The foreshore is therefore part of a move to rebalance the threshold/destination equation.  To slow movement and encourage appreciation of the richness which exists at the place where desert, plain, ranges and gulf meet.  

North Terrace  

If we travel south along the plain between the Southern Flinders and Mt Lofty Ranges and the widening Spencer Gulf we reach Adelaide.  The city and suburbs wrap themselves around what geographic and topographic indentation and undulation they can find.  A river, some creeks, an estuary and some minor hills and swales.  But here the plain holds sway.  

In the context of the Adelaide plains, William Light, the city’s planner, chose one of the few places of relative topographic complexity to site the city.  The river, its valley and escarpment and the nearby hills to the north provided variation in elevation uncommon on the otherwise flat plain between mountains and sea.   Within the city area the valley edges facing the river have the greatest variation.  Here, east-west escarpments interact with north-south drainage lines, and the underlying remnant form of the Para Fault to provide a matrix of dips and rises which reverberate into the surrounding streets of North and South Adelaide.   North Terrace negotiates the southern edge of this zone of topographic and geographic intensity and is the primary mediating form between the flat plain (city) and the undulating discontinuity caused by the interaction of geological process over time (river).  

As background to the reading of the ground, Paul Carter a member of our team on the North Terrace project dug into the background of William Light.  Paul’s offerings are “that in Spain and Italy, whence Light derived his conception of the Terrace, the terrace is a place of heightened social intercourse, where pedestrians predominate, entertainments proliferate and the view creates a theatrical backdrop to these activities.  The prospect terrace was conceived as a link between religious, political and cultural authorities.  In addition it was imagined as a distinctively urban (and urbane) zone where a heightened sense of civic identity was inculcated.”  

It is not surprising that despite the layout of South Adelaide identifying Victoria Square as the ‘centre’ of the city; Government House, the Institute Building and a chorus of subsequent civic and cultural institutions gravitated to the most ‘interesting’ place within the city plan.  Here elevation (in the micro sense most appreciated by dwellers of flat plains) offered prospect over the river flats and across to the minor ‘hills’ of North Adelaide.  To the south the city, regularly set out on its grid across the even terrain of South Adelaide, went about its business of commerce and striving for prosperity.  To the north the river and its landforms represented a remnant of the natural forces of the locale.  North Terrace, perched between, offered a place to contemplate both, a place where a third alternative might emerge.  

The development of this alternative is one of the great continuous ‘projects’ of Adelaide.  William Light recognised something of the genius of the place by siting the city to straddle the Torrens River valley.   Moreover, his placement of perimeter terraces and surrounding parklands set North Terrace apart from the beginning.  It being the terrace which addressed both the river and its associated landforms, and the plain.  He thus set up a geomantic dialogue with North Terrace as its centre.  As a consequence North Terrace took on the potential to translate this conversation into a physical form.  Over time, the array of cultural and civic institutions lining the Terrace developed an equally powerful east-west potential.  In this case, the latent possibilities being more to do with the heightened outcomes achievable through collaboration and cooperation.  

In Paul Carter’s words, “North Terrace was conceived as a lacework of knots – some of whose threads were perceptual, cultural and associational, others of which were topographically inscribed, and architecturally reinforced in the Terraces physical form.”   And so the characteristics of the place are:   Topography – The coalescing of river terrace and terrace as a planning device.  The effects of which are heightened by the flatness of the surrounding plain and the wall of the city behind.   Transition – The terrace as a deliberate transition zone between city and river.   Geomantic Dialogue – The inherent energetic intensity of the conversation between city and river, plains and valley with North Terrace at its centre.   Cultural Intensity – The concentration of political and cultural institutions along the north side of the terrace, and the collaborative potential which this exhibits.  

The design reinforces and responds to these underlying tendencies.  The historic 25m pedestrian garden zone on the north side of the Terrace in reinterpreted.  This is a strong east-west integrative force while being permeable north-south.  At the same time it has a veil-like quality, inviting contact yet protecting the adjacent institutions from full exposure.  These institutions are deliberately set back, not to be aloof and secretive, but to gain the intellectual and creative space to develop ideas which when passed back to the community are enriching and the basis for further growth.  

In this context the inner and outer paths which run the full length of Stage One have at least two functions.  Their continuity is an essential integrative east-west gesture.  Their change from active linear kerbside thoroughfare, to the more contemplative fluid movement of the inner path is symbolic of the transformative nature of the influences from river and city to the north and south.  This change is typical of such mediating spaces which absorb and respond to influences on either side.   The ‘garden’ typology is appropriate here, being that form which has historically expressed the combined influences of both the natural and the cultural. 

Further aspects of the proposed garden edge which reinforce the fundamental flows of the site are:   ·         It steps down into the escarpment – it subtly accepts the landform and embraces its edge position between plain and valley.  In doing so it links with both, yet maintains its distinctive topographic location.
·         It opens and closes in a gentle rhythm responding to the intensity of north-south movements.  Plazas invite entry into institutions, forecourts and laneways to the north and encourage movement to and from the city to the south.
·         An even quality of light is brushed across the garden though the dappled shade of the three rows of trees.  Strong in their continuity along the length of the garden, they offer a transitory experience of filtered light between the city and the institutions.
·         The encouragement of north-south permeability is most striking in the banding of vegetation in rows which allow movement along a series of narrow connections between the inner and outer paths.
·         Elements which link and bind are reinforced, those which isolate and impede movement are reduced.  The fences around the institutions are therefore carefully examined to determine their role in supporting the integrity of the 25m wide garden frontage and allowing north-south movement.
·         Art works which explore the twilight, ephemeral, mythological, and linking qualities of the site have been commissioned.  

Victoria Square  

To the south of North Terrace Victoria Square sits in the symbolic centre of the city.  This is a place of contradictions.  It evokes great passion in the hearts of Adelaidians, yet they choose to drive through and around it in a manner that severely diminishes its worth as a place for public enjoyment.   It is a place of civic significance for many people of varied cultural backgrounds.  Queen Victoria presides from her central podium with cars crisscrossing around her base, her pre-eminence a constant reminder to the Kaurna people that this sacred place is claimed by a foreign force.  

The characteristics of Victoria Square centre on its role as the symbolic heart of the city.  A place of personal and public celebration and ceremony.  A place that breathes life into the city rather than sapping energy from those who venture there.  

• The square by its very nature of being at the centre of the city has a strong relationship with the four directions.  The qualities of each direction, the horizon and particularly the hills play into our experience of the place.
• The square is a meeting place.  Meetings of individuals, small gatherings, and major political rallies are held there.  Aboriginal people until recently met there regularly to greet newcomers to the city or catch up with friends.  Stories cross the country from far away and link Aboriginal people with the square.  The exploration of the meaning of, and ways of meeting of Aboriginal and settler cultures is a rich source of inspiration for the redevelopment of the square.
• The creation of a meeting place implies a threshold.  A transition space where the outside world drops away a little and new perceptions enter.  Where relationships can be nurtured.

  In March 2002 Karl Telfar, a Kaurna artist on the redevelopment project team, and his sister Waita conceived and executed a week long event in Victoria Square as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.   The central through- street was closed and other traffic reduced while a series of performances by indigenous people from around the world took place.  We all witnessed Victoria Square transformed into a place of celebration and ritual.  It was a welcoming meeting place, there was an invisible threshold to be crossed to enter the central space; the event spoke to the directions.  It was the symbolic heart of the city for all, for a week.  

Acts of artistic courage such as this are an inspiration.   “An explorers task is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land”.         Karl is an explorer in his own country.                    

© Kevin Taylor, Director, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, August 2002.