Working together over the last five years on various WA urban redevelopment and infrastructure projects, Neville and Paul have identified a significant disconnect between cultural advice and its meaningful translation and implementation.
As a result, Noongar knowledge custodians often express frustration: different agencies frequently replicate consultations, producing controversy rather than a clear path forward.
Equally, government agencies and their subcontractors do not know how to interpret the information they are given. They lack the technique to embed Indigenous stories, place knowledge and attachment to Country in infrastructure design and program. Country continues to be despoiled(trees removed, aquifers compromised). Responsibility for interpretation is handed over to public art with limited opportunity for integration.
To address these issues, Neville and Paul brought their different skill sets together. Neville is heir to a storytelling tradition that is regional and relational: storylines weave together to clothe the living body of Country. The white habit of thinking in terms of sharply-bounded, isolated places cuts up Country into fragments, producing unsustainable environmental divisions and profound cultural and psychological shock.
Paul approaches this issue from a different angle. Recognising that places are meeting places of many paths, historical as well as physical, he has developed a technique for weaving very different story-paths into forms that bear a significant relation with one another. The outcome of his analysis is a ‘creative template’, a document that translates between culture, design and place-based creativity.
For more information about the creative template, see MT_CreativeTemplate
Putting these approaches together, our business mission is to instil ‘creative region’ values in urban and regional development, to show how embedding relational principles and practices in project briefs, project team building, design and program can arrest the war on Nature (and cultures that align with it) and contribute to our Country’s creative repair and healing.