Australian architecture

Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. As one reflection has it:

In the era before motels and resorts, a holiday at the Gold and Sunshine coasts usually meant either pitching a tent and camping by the beach or staying in a simple cottage owned by family or friends […] Simplicity, informality, individuality […] were the hallmarks of these humble places.

The design of specific buildings to house Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ activities and organisations has become important in Australian architecture since the 1960s. A growing number of buildings—and new architectural types—have been devised to support, display and safeguard Indigenous cultures and to accommodate Indigenous organisations that have become more
prevalent since the self-determination era of the 1970s. These new institutional, public and community building typologies provide an architecture that often speaks to the public—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—and raise the issues of how buildings represent Indigenous identities and how architecture may meet such a challenge through design.
To understand the Australian context, it is important to note that while there are a number of commonalities between Indigenous peoples and societies across Australia, there is equally great diversity. Each Nation has its own traditional lands, culture, customs, traditions (including architectural practices), lore and language/s. At the time of European invasion (1788), there were over 260 Indigenous Nations across
Australia, and within each Nation there existed separate, but often related ‘clans’. Each Nation had its own language, often with several dialects (Bianco 1990: 4). Massive collapses in Australian Aboriginal populations occurred immediately after European invasion, initially caused by introduced diseases, then through the dispossession from traditional lands and the destruction of food sources. Unconscionable numbers of Aboriginal peoples lost their lives in conflict, as Indigenous peoples resisted the colonising invasion and infringements on their rights and lifeways. Indigenous peoples were both targeted by civilian settler colonists and government military forces and punished for resisting attacks (Harris 2003; Reynolds 2006). Successive government policies and legislation from the late nineteenth century across all of Australia’s (then) independent colonies attempted to control every aspect of Indigenous peoples’ lives and destroy Indigenous cultures. Many government policies over the course of Australia’s history were used to ‘justify’ the treatment and control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lives (see, for example, Read 1982; Kidd 1997; Australian Human Rights Commission 1997).
The 1967 Referendum resulted in changes to the Australian Constitution that removed discriminations in law against Aboriginal people,1 but this did not result the positive freedoms required for Indigenous peoples to experience equality within Australian society. The effects of colonisation are still felt by every Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander person in Australia today. Compared to non-Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have shorter life expectancies, suffer disproportionally higher rates of suicide, domestic and family violence and incarceration and have poorer employment and educational outcomes (Australian Government 2017). Against this backdrop, Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples have sought to retain and revive individual and collective identities, and made considerable progress in affirming rights to land, cultural practices and identity. Architecture and placemaking that celebrates cultural identity, fits with Indigenous peoples’ socio-spatial and cultural needs and is devised by or with Indigenous peoples, is an important aspect of reasserting Indigenous control and demonstrating Indigenous resistance and resilience in contemporary Australia.
In this chapter, we examine a number of different types of Indigenous institutional, public and community buildings, and in particular, survey architectural precedents within the genres of keeping houses and cultural centres, museums, art centres and educational and health projects. Some of Australia’s leading architects, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have contributed to these works, often seeking to create architecture that better fits the needs of Indigenous users, to participate in the recognition of the unjust treatment of Indigenous Australians and to dignify contemporary Indigenous cultures through architectural excellence. However, the scarcity of Indigenous architects means there has been controversy over whose culture is represented in building designs, and the design of Indigenous buildings by non-Indigenous architects (especially in regard to the application of Indigenous symbolism) remains a politically fraught topic.
The recognition of Indigenous cultural domains by Australian institutions has fundamentally changed since the mid-twentieth century,when architects (who were almost exclusively non-Indigenous Australians at that time) first accepted and then later celebrated
Indigenous cultures and identity/s in building design. The need for more
Indigenous architects, architectural critics and architectural historians is apparent.
Slowly across Australia, there are increasing numbers of Indigenous architects, who attempt to engage sensitively with Indigenous communities. This may lead to further improvement in built environments for Indigenous communities into the future.
The projects discussed in this chapter are not a total list, nor a definitive survey. One could debate whether some of the projects included in this chapter are, indeed, contemporary Indigenous architecture. In writing the chapter, we sought out historical projects, those of national importance, exemplars of architectural design and examples that illustrate various architectural approaches, debates and discourses. In the meantime, the number of Indigenous institutional, public and community architectural projects in Australia continues to grow.

The scholarship of émigré architects that arrived in Australia in the period between 1930 and 1960 has focused on developing an understanding of individual architects and their particular contribution to the discipline and profession integral to a dominant architectural historiography. Examination of how architects together form movements, aesthetic
affinities, and attitudes about architecture generates an understanding of the collective dimension of the discipline, and the complexities of architectural production. Significant
to the capacity of the individual émigrés architects were the opportunities gained firstly, through the network of the architecture profession and institution, and secondly with one
another. On arrival, except for migrants from Britain, many émigrés faced a difficult path of migration and struggled to gain registration and thus employment in the architectural
profession. What were the relationships between émigré architects and architecture’s institutional infrastructure – the institute, the university, and the profession? And how did
this affect their experience of migration and resettlement, as well as their capacity for architectural production? This paper will argue that the potential contribution of émigré architects to Australian architecture was limited by institutional structures, operations and the boundaries constituted through social networks. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus elaborates a
process in which modes of speech, bodily mannerisms (such as gait), gestures, are internalised, unconscious and embodied; and that an individual’s aspirations and ambitions are conditioned by what members of that community are expected to want. In Bourdieu’s theory habitus is interactive with the field and this is defined by a collective and institutional set of rules, procedures and attitudes. Potential contribution and influence
on the Australian architectural scene at the time will be examined from this perspective of the relationships between the habitus of the émigrés architects and the field in which
they could operate.

The construction of the Cambridge Downs homestead, built between 1876 and 1877 on the Stawell River in central north Queensland, has long been thought unusual for the region. Local folklore suggests that it was intentionally fortified as protection against Aboriginal attack and a 2009 replica of the homestead in the main street of Richmond presents this story as a central part of the region’s history. A survey of the structure, however, reveals a building that is atypical but not necessarily fortified. Archaeological and architectural studies of supposedly fortified structures elsewhere are similarly equivocal. We argue that such accounts are part of a long tradition of representing Aboriginal people as a threat. The attacks that such architecture is intended to deter are on domestic spaces, and often on the sacrosanct spaces of family, women and children. As such, they enhance visions of ‘ordinary’ people as battlers and are automatically cast in terms of choices that are defensive rather than offensive. While fear was a very real experience on the frontier (on both sides), uncritical acceptance of accounts of fortified structures obscures the complexity of the frontier in the past and prevents us from seeing the ways in which such claims are being used to remember or forget the consequences of the frontier in the present.