Winner: UDLA
On Behalf of: Yawuru Registered Native Title Holders Body Corporate

The cultural management plan for Yawuru coastal country and the Yawuru Conservation Estate. 

This project has been awarded the AILA National Medal for Landscape Architecture as it achieves a number of outcomes. The published Yawuru Cultural Management Plan expresses past, present and future; it offers discussions about Culture, Country, Community and liyan (wellbeing) that transcend other reports of this kind, that record and map values. This Cultural Management Plan will and should respectfully drive conservation plans, land management decisions and design activities in marine and terrestrial areas Australia-wide, such is its generous and visionary approach.

It is more than a conversation, more than a listening and recording, more than walking and seeing the land; it is all of these things, but most importantly, it is none of these, but the land and its people.

UDLA was commissioned by the Yawuru people of the Broome area to assist in the creation of a long-term management plan of Yawuru country, which has resulted in the creation of a unique document. The Yawuru Cultural Management Plan (YCMP) has been produced under the guidance and leadership of the Yawuru Culture and Heritage Sub-committee (chaired by Jimmy Edgar) and endorsed by the Yawuru Registered Native Title Holders Body Corporate (RNTHBC) with the key intent to produce a document to guide the joint management of the Yawuru Conservation Estates and achieve best practice outcomes.

On behalf of the the Broome Yawuru People, UDLA in coordination with Sarah Yu were commissioned by the Yawuru Registered Native Title Body Corporate (RNTBC) to assist in facilitating a long-term cultural management plan for their Country.

The Plan explains how the Yawuru RNTHBC will be involved in managing country through their Ranger Program, working in partnership with the Department of Environment and Conservation, Shire of Broome, government agencies and researchers to make sure that Country is cared for in the best possible way and ensures that the management of country brings the greatest possible benefits to Yawuru people.

UDLA Director Greg Grabasch considers Yawuru's decision to undertake such an initiative can be seen as a strong empowering precedent for all communities that have an inseparable custodian relationship towards their landscape, it is a unique 'Place-based' plan.

The Landscape Architect whom is principled upon equally respecting culture and landscape have skills that provide a wonderful opportunity to sensitively facilitate these once in a lifetime opportunities.

"This project goes beyond a one way consultation approach towards a process of facilitating, engaging and empowering culturally known understandings into a form that could be understood in a cross-cultural and inter-generational way, a key to the project’s understanding and success. This Yawuru Cultural Management Plan precedent and process has the opportunity to respectfully drive planning, conservation and land management decisions, including design activities in marine and terrestrial areas, certainly within Broome and possibly Australia-Wide."

Clifton Hill Railway Project Landscape

Jeavons Landscape Architects

Client: Department of Transport (Victoria)

Jeavons Landscape Architects has skilfully reclaimed a much loved but badly degraded portion of the public realm along the Merri Creek and given it new life as a sensitive and well considered space much to the delight of users and stakeholders alike.

As a design, the Clifton Hill Railway Project Landscape overcomes the challenges of unifying a long and linear site with multiple level changes to achieve an accessible path through revegetated creekland. Well-researched and ecologically sensitive planting reflects the character of the site and the materials are recycled, salvaged and robust. Travel along the path is punctuated by nodes giving the user a reason to stop and recreate in a previously derelict and abandoned space.

As the principle designer of this project, Jeavons Landscape Architects exhibited the breadth and scope of the landscape architect by having a key role in broad scale planning and visioning as well as addressing multiple functional requirements including design, planning, consultation, conservation and reclamation.

Roogulli (Bywong NSW)

Fresh Landscape Design

Fresh Landscape Design’s Roogulli is a leader in sustainable residential design, offering a clear and repeatable demonstration of what can be achieved with a small budget, passionate persistence, thoughtful creativity and spades of patience.

Salvaged, low impact materials and local grassland plants have produced a rural garden strongly identifying with the local area, complete with a rampant and evolving vegetable garden that nourishes the household.
Integral in the design is the creation of a ‘slow’ garden that has evolved in response to materials available for salvage and the landscape architect’s developing ideas about how sustainable design principles can be expressed in the manufactured landscape. This project draws on ideas from permaculture, water sensitive urban design, sustainable construction, regenerative farming and native grasslands management.

This is ‘living sustainability’ clearly demonstrated and beautifully rendered.

NATIONAL AWARD OF EXCELLENCE FOR DESIGN

Rio Tinto Naturescape, Kings Park & Botanic Gardens

Plan (E)

Client: Botanic Gardens & Park Authority (WA)

An innovative response to a challenging brief, Rio Tinto Naturescape delivers not only a natural creek system as a playspace for children, but it does so in a manner that is respectful and sensitive to the existing environmental conditions and cultural systems.

The thoughtful, contemporary design elements, sculpters and hierarchy of paths also provide an educational experience and journey for adults and carers.

This responsive design sets an exemplar for the future provision of recreational and educational facilities in bushland settings located in urban environments.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR DESIGN

Pirrama Park

ASPECT Studios

Client: City of Sydney

Project Partners: ASPECT Studios. Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, CAB Consulting and The City of Sydney

Pirrama Park restores the powerful relationship between Harris Street and the water, delivering unique, waterside community facilities, innovative sustainable components (including solar energy and far reaching storm water initiatives).

Pirrama Park transforms a fenced-off post-industrial concrete slab into a richly varied urban waterfront parkland. The park design interprets the site’s successive shorelines and rich maritime associations and creates a series clearly defined park rooms each with different opportunities for use and activity. The materials palette unifies the site and promotes durability and robustness appropriate to a public situation and suggests the site’s former character. The harbour edge has again become a wonderful social place for landing small watercraft, wading and swimming, fishing and yarning, reinstating ways in which the harbour at Pyrmont used to be incorporated into daily rituals.

A key to the Pirrama’s success has been the Play Space by Registered Landscape Architect Fionna Robbe. The Play Space reflects her philosophy that best possible opportunities should be available to children and young people to kindle resilience and to encourage and support active, engaged participation in a future of challenge and dynamic change.

This new parkland is evidence of the ability of good design to change and revitalise communities returning valuable open space to the hands of the community.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR DESIGN

Jack Evans Boat Harbour - Tweed Heads

Client: Tweed Shire Council

Project Partners: Tweed Shire Council, McGregor Westlake Architecture, Cardno Grogan Richards, Webb Australia, Wilde and Wollard

This project responds sensitively to the challenges faced by many coastal areas -beach erosion, tidal surges and flood events.

After extensive consultation with the local community, the final design preserves existing beach areas, introduces new and durable interpretations of beach-like experiences and creates a broad, high-quality, harbour-side public domain.

The use of timber boardwalks reflects the jetties of the area, while stacked, concrete fingers are a visually-pleasing adaptation of traditional sea-wall stabilisation techniques.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR DESIGN

NATIONAL AWARD FOR LAND MANAGEMENT

Lollipop Creek

Fitzgerald Frisby Landscape Architecture

Client: Devine Communities

As our cities and town push further and further into new areas, developers and communities will face important questions about the management of their new urban interface.

Will the traditional methods, such as broad acre clearing, mowing and weed spraying, prevail? Or will communities embrace the opportunities to preserve, enhance and regenerate the biodiversity that could exist over their back fence.

The Lollipop Creek master plan recognises the loss of natural grasslands on the western plains of Melbourne and adopts a pragmatic and evidence-based response. The Lollipop Creek master plan retains natural rocky outcrops and other features of the interface area, minimises new disturbance and applies contemporary best practice in weed-control and grass management to stimulate regeneration of indigenous species. The use of ecological and fuel-reduction burning rarely occurs this close to new urban development, but forms an integral part of the success of the land management program.

Data collected as part of the project confirms improved biodiversity and habitat value through increased cover of native herbs and small shrubs and a marked decrease in weed coverage.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR PLANNING

Kimberley LNG Precinct Strategic Assessment: Ethnobiological Report, James Prices Point

UDLA

Client: Kimberley Land Council

This project goes beyond the norm by using the owners to interpret their own land instead of the consultant interpreting that landscape. 

The landscape architects' role was significant in this process, in this collaborative partnership that has been established for truly consultative design to occur. The report notes "the interrelated impacts that occur when a physical or biological component(s) of the land’s ecology is disturbed causing cumulative effects with regard to changes in ethnobiological practice".

The report utilises Goolarabooloo and Jabirr Jabirr traditional knowledge of plants, animals and ecological systems to form management recommendations that function at both a political and cultural level, to provide sustainable solutions to the potential impacts of the LNG precinct at James Price Point.

The outcome is a document that clearly and unequivocally values all elements of the site. Many of these values are only known by the traditional owners themselves. This document greatly facilitates the exchange of these values to achieve a rich design response.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR PLANNING

Bendigo Botanic Gardens Master Plan

City of Bendigo

Client: City of Bendigo

This body of work is an extremely comprehensive assessment of all the layers that contribute to a public park. 

The resultant master plan responsively and responsibly interprets these layers and formulates them into a vision "that will celebrate the past, appreciate the present and embrace the future".

The depth of understanding and commitment to gardens is clearly shown in the end result: a document that will result in a lasting legacy for the community, the region and in fact, botanical gardens and arboreta nation-wide.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR PLANNING

Bonner P-6 School & Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Learning & Cultural Centre

Harris Hobbs

Client: ACT Education and Training Directorate

The landscape and external environment planned for this School provides a sensitive reading of the environments inhabited by all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples over the continent and islands of Australia. 

These inherent values of the client have been carefully planned into the 'school' and site so that the landscape does the informing and teaching.

This has formed a very sound platform for the deliverance of an embedded cultural response for all children and residents of Canberra. The theory of the landscape has been fused with the practice of the planned use of space. "The planned school delivers on the educational and curriculum based brief, with regard to the functions of the external spaces."

Itaoui Woodland Park

McGregor Coxall

Client: Modernity Pty Ltd, Robert Itaoui

This project is of a new cemetery model. The burial park is located on a remnant patch of the Cumberland Plain Woodland which is now and endangered landscape type.

The landscape architect’s insights and exemplary landscape approach to the originally limited brief included: responding to the opportunity to protect and reinstate a unique landscape; revising the earlier master plan; and establishing comprehensive ESD initiatives for the whole site. This contribution also led to an expansion of the client’s role for the site including and educational program for this landscape.

The master plan located the small area of formal memorial gardens and the suspended walkway through the site in response to rigorous site planning and sustainable principles. The restored woodland landscape provides an inspirational setting for the visitor and as a whole transforms the cemetery model and visitor memorial experience.

Clarence River Way Masterplan

Clouston Associates

Partners: SGL Consulting Group

The Clarence River Way masterplan is an exciting expression of the multiple benefits that landscape appreciation can bring to a community.

In a brilliant statement of clarity, the entire masterplan is built on one simple element -building a future on the area’s greatest asset -the Clarence River. This focus expands the masterplan from being a traditional ‘destination-based’ assessment to one that encompasses the broader region, with its range of places, linkages and systems.

The Clarence River Way masterplan contemplates broad increases in the level of access to, engagement with, and use of the Clarence River. It addresses a broad spectrum of environmental, social and cultural outcomes. But perhaps the most surprising element is the extent to which a thorough approach to the ‘core work’ of landscape architecture also enables the development of a plan for the future economic prosperity of the region.

Chinatown Public Domain Plan

Spackman Mossop Michaels

Client: The City of Sydney

This is an innovative plan for a complex part of Sydney that has not only a diversity of commercial uses and public realms but many layers of cultural values and built form expressions. 

The landscape architect’s rigorous program of community engagement and site assessments led to one of the key imperatives being that winning back space for the public domain was key to the master plan success.

The landscape architect initiated an unconventional approach to the urban master plan approach in response to the diversity of both communities and urban spaces in the Chinatown locality. Their ten independent yet interrelated upgrade projects provided the flexibility needed for implementation and funding.

Victoria Square/Tarndanyangga Urban Regeneration Project

Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer

Client: Adelaide City Council

The Victoria Square / Tarndanyangga Regeneration Project seeks to address the existing deficiencies and enhance the great potential of the site and the surrounding precinct. 

The Regeneration Master Plan locates the Square within its precinct and greater city context and identifies initiatives to improve access, connectivity, economic and social benefit beyond the boundaries of the specific site.

Exemplars in urban design, landscape architecture, movement and event planning, civil and structural engineering, ESD planning, lighting design, water sensitive urban design, architecture, horticulture, public art planning, furniture design, graphic design and cost planning have been examined, in addition to a close observation of site context, history and Aboriginal/Kaurna culture. However, the resulting Master Plan is neither derivative nor is it a pastiche of many ideas.

It will provide, most importantly, a series of cohesive spaces for people, at a variety of events, scales, and uses, from the intimate to the spectacular.

A comparative study of Melbourne’s freeway planting designs – implications for biodiversity conservation

Zoë Metherell

Partners: The Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology.

This research project is an interdisciplinary partnership that sought new ways for landscape architects to meet the challenge of preserving biodiversity in the face of threats such as urbanisation, climate change and habitat loss. 

In Melbourne extensive planting projects are undertaken along freeways. These projects provide opportunities to improve urban biodiversity conservation on a grand scale. This research compared planting designs from seven projects representing a 40-year time span.

This project demonstrates excellence in methodology, methods (data collection and analysis) and in the writing up of final outcomes. It offers landscape architects, local and regional authorities a rigorous and cogent demonstration of how ecological analysis can be applied to landscape architectural designs, to achieve biodiversity.

NATIONAL AWARD FOR RESEARCH & COMMUNICATION

Green Infrastructure

Oxigen Landscape Architects, Urban Design

Client: Botanical Gardens of Adelaide

The Green Infrastructure Working Paper looks to advance the case for Green Infrastructure and its importance to the future planning and design of Adelaide as a sustainable city. 

It consolidates and explains further the South Australian Government’s intentions under the 30 Year Plan to improve liveability, drive sustainability and increase resilience to climate change.

The Green Infrastructure Working Paper outlines the value Green Infrastructure has to Adelaide, but also, notably, to other Australian cities and communities, reflects international best practice and sets a ‘roadmap’ for Green Infrastructure delivery that will be responsive to Australia’s varying, yet unique landscapes, climates and socio-political settings.

This document is the first in Australia to provide such a useable and flexible planning tool.

LESS (Local-area Envisioning and Sustainability scoring System)

HASSELL

The LESS (Local-area Envisioning and Sustainability scoring System) is a design decision-making framework developed to generate sustainable design solutions that lessen emissions, use of resources, and social disparity. 

LESS allows mapping, measuring and monitoring of sustainability in urban areas and integrates four domains: social, infrastructure, governance and environmental, to allow for a triple bottom-line assessment, and identifies strengths and weaknesses in both the built environment and society to allow diagnosis of problems and successes in policy and planning.

LESS will be an invaluable tool for all levels of governance, and for landscape architects and planners, as it does not function as a ratings tool, but rather, and more importantly, as a means by which to identify opportunities for further development.

Lucinda Hartley

Lucinda is an award winning, registered landscape architect, who demonstrates exceptional leadership across the private and non-profit sectors. She seeks to develop a landscape identity that is deeply connected with, and committed to fostering, communities, here and overseas. 

Lucinda graduated with Honours in Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne, receiving an AILA Victorian Chapter Student Award. After 5 years of practice, Lucinda founded CoDesign Studio - a volunteer run, non-profit design enterprise committed to helping disadvantaged communities to envision, design and implement neighbourhood improvement projects. CoDesign engages over 400 people with projects in six countries. Lucinda is also an Associate with award-winning firm Hansen Partnership, and is regularly invited to sit on boards and committees, nationally and internationally.

Lucinda is an inspiring role model for young landscape architects: this is exemplified in her approach to a project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which she describes as devising an ‘anti-masterplan’ of urban development. Here she worked directly with communities to design, envision and then implement low-cost, high impact neighbourhood improvement initiatives. This process has been repeated locally and overseas in projects of high environmental, sustainable and cultural significance.

Lucinda sets a new direction for young leaders in landscape architecture by advocating the importance of community relationships and cross-cultural understanding as key drivers or the design of future cities and spaces. This is clearly evident in her approach, in which she seeks to empower, rather than engage, with communities, as an approach to creating places that are truly unique and sustainable and is accessible to everyone, regardless of socio-economic status. Lucinda actively uses art and landscape as a catalyst for positive changes and promotes the important role of Landscape Architecture in community and international projects that assist disadvantaged communities.

Gweneth Leigh

Gweneth Leigh was first drawn to the field of landscape architecture as a 13 year old. During her final year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she studied the Grand Canal in Mexico City, a central drainage artery 29 miles long which carries sewerage and rainwater out of the city – most of it above ground. 

Studying this giant piece of infrastructure and its effect on local residents opened Gweneth’s eyes to the impact that design can have on people’s health, habits and, ultimately, quality of life. This ethos continues to underpin Gweneth Leigh’s contribution to the field of Landscape Architecture and establishes her as a leader within our profession.

Gweneth’s journey so far – practitioner, writer and curator – has broadened her perspective and helped her spread the essential message about good design and healthy places. The Bruce Mackenzie Leadership Award will support her efforts in promoting the public health benefits of our profession by turning the BLOOM Exhibition into a book which can explore, in more detail, the way people engage with our public spaces, and assess what the profession can learn from these examples to improve current standards of practice.