BELONGING: ARCHITECTURE & BROCH EXPERIENCE

Belonging Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership - Peter Read, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000.

Peter Read’s Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, revealed an understanding of place, meaning, and feeling that belittled that of architects, highlighting, yet again, how an historian can expose and explain sensitive matters to do with place far more openly and comprehensively than any architect, even though architects pride themselves on being the experts in habitation, space, and place, and can recite erudite explanations that attempt to engage such issues rather smugly - coldly and intellectually.#

Unfortunately, Read’s study only proves this to be so, showing how architects frequently insensitively miss the real point of caring for connections in an eagerness to be bespokely clever. The study points out how architects need other disciplines, not to use as a prop for various new theories like seeing architecture as music, and interpreting architecture as a language, etc., but to adopt and learn from informative, core material to enrich perceptions, to be a beginning for the subtle, inclusive, and responsive forming of space and place.+

With the importance of this diversity in understanding in mind, one has to express concern that architectural studies have retreated back behind the walls of ‘the School,’ with courses now being managed by the School’s staff or selected imports rather than letting students engage in other disciplines - (at least in University of Queensland). Students are given ‘special architectural’ courses on other speciality subjects that leave matters not only watered down for their consumption, but also adapted to how staff believe the issues should be handled for things architectural. This specialisation of speciality subjects might lift student participation numbers for the School’s budget, but it does also turn architects into lesser, mollycoddled egotists, apparently not prepared to undertake the rigours of equivalent study of another field in its own context.^ This part-time approach allows the sessions to be called ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses that make architects look like idiots in need of special treatment. Is it this adaptive attitude that allows architects to become self-important gurus to be managed with kid gloves?

It is unfortunate that our era has become so self-centred, and hyped by a distracting, entertaining technology, that style appears to have become the central point of interest and ambition of all new work: quirky style. One can only encourage the reading of Peter Read’s wonderful studies in the hope that architecture might regain its human roots, and engage with people in a richly caring and supportive manner, instead of becoming examples to show the skill of the smart architect, more interested in ‘the shot’ for publication than in supporting any lived need or response.

So it was with some excitement that Read’s next study was discovered. This happened some time ago. Events over this lengthy period have repeatedly put off a closer look at the new work; but when perusing the shelves recently for a book to take away for a weekend, the hand landed on this book titled Belonging, with the explanatory subtitle of Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership.* This discovery was a timely event given the interest in ‘The Voice’ that the political world is generating today in Australia (April 2023).

Mousa Broch, Shetland.

In this text, one finds some references to aboriginal experience. In the writings on brochs – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-broch-its-intramural-stair.html and https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-broch-symbol-place.html - the importance of interpreting brochs with the knowledge that the broch dwellers saw things differently to us, has been noted. While one cannot say that the aboriginal experience was the same as that of the broch dwellers, one can learn something about the aboriginal experience and use this both as a reminder of the type of difference there might have been, and as a template for us to use to test assumptions, for we have little else in this emotive matter to help us.

Broch of Gurness, Orkney.

So it is that sundry pieces of Read’s text that have been highlighted with this in mind, have been reproduced here, to provide a basis to begin understanding how different broch dwellers were, and to suggest other fields of knowledge that might help us in our struggles to glean meaning from scattered ruins.

p.3

The epigraph to the 1998 book Seeking the Centre, (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999), a study of the significance of the desert in Australian culture, asserts: . . .

The author, (Rosslyn Haynes), writes: ‘The poet Judith Wright has succinctly expressed the conceptual divide between European notions of a landscape derived from the perspective of an empowered observer, whose magisterial gaze calls an appropriately aesthetic prospect into being, and the Aboriginal understanding of a spirit-filled landscape through which individuals access their identity.’

p.18

Assertion is not belonging; that’s possession, without knowledge. Miriam Rose Ungunmerr of the Daly River region of the Northern Territory believes that what Australians need is ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.’ My ‘quiet, still awareness’ includes outrage . . .

p.19

I’ve got perhaps ten per cent of the feel; so it does give you more of a respect, but it’s an unknown book that we don’t know how to read. Intellectually and emotionally I know the [Borroloola] area quite well, and I know how rich the stories are of that place. The extraordinary thing is to think of all of Australia being like that. And that’s the extraordinary indictment on western people in Australia that maybe forty percent of Australia’s left with stories intact . . . It gives you an emptiness driving to Sydney down that freeway - even the European history has been obliterated. No one now knows what the full level of those meanings were.

Gurness.

p.20- 21

Working amongst the Maori, King’s [Michael King, Pakeha, 1985] Celtic ancestory allowed him the more readily to absorb the deep values of which his English education had kept him in ignorance: a feeling of connection between living and dead; the sense of spirituality which recognises that people and places are more than physical presences; the conviction that the consequences of behaviour remain somehow embedded in the ethos of places, just as they do in the lives of people; a belief in the power of psychic communication in those who are open to such faculties; a need for ritual and tradition; emotional honesty; the fierce warmth of friendship and a lack of physical inhibition in the physical expression of it; an equal lack of inhibition in the expression of anger and grief.

p.25

Discussing the inter-relatedness of species, she [Debbie Rose in Nourishing Terrains Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra, 1996] remarks:

A ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ country is one in which all the elements do their work. They all nourish each other because there is no site, no position from which the self-interest of one can be disengaged from the interests of others in the long term. Self-interest and the interest of all of the other living components of country (the self-interest of kangaroos, barramundi, eels and so on) cannot exist independently of each other in the long term.

p.82

I don’t believe in any great thing up there governing things, and I don’t have an architect-of-the-universe view of the world, but I do think you’ve got to be opportunistic about gaining meaning, to link things that may appear to be unlike each other, or linking things which in fact are like each other but which you’ve tried to forget are like each other. It’s the connecting sensibility, and that’s what Aborigines are doing talking about the dreaming and land . . . Connect Connect Connect. We [Westerners] tend to compartmentalise much more in a linear way.

p.84

He learned first the social rather than the religious stories of the land. In the rocky ridge country dwelled the menumemeri, Marrithiyel-speaking little pygmy men, quite black, who were felt, or heard, at night or who twinkled at the edges of vision. They are dangerous. A man travelling by night or camping in their country is liable to be enslaved, a woman to be raped. Amongst the men of Bill’s generation, stories were told of Marrithiyel who had found themselves surrounded in the ridges, but who had talked their way out of trouble by speaking to menumemeri in Merrithiyel and by giving gifts of flour, tea or sugar.

p.85

Aboriginal land was thronged by the presence of the creators, the spiritual guardians, and of the dead. It sang, it cried out, it assumed multiple forms simultaneously, it knew when it was respected or violated, cared for or abandoned. Country knew, and knows, newcomers; it looks to visitors to identify themselves; in return, country will care for its children.

p.85

The anthropologist Debbie Rose, (Deborah Bird Rose, author of Dingo Makes Us Human, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992), felt the connection one nightfall in the Victoria River district not far from the Daly. Sitting beside her in the ute was her mentor Jessie. Debbie was normally conscious of what she called Jessie’s ‘attentive acceptance’ of the natural world, which that evening so affected her that Debbie experienced something of what, she believes, is an Aboriginal perception of country, ‘channels of energy connecting everything to everything, every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, every stone, the hills on the horizon.’ She felt ‘concentrated and connected, incredibly alive and incredibly valuable.’  

 p.86

As Debbie Rose puts it, ‘Dream country is belonging. Every person has a place in the world in which they are needed, and in which they are “healthy”.’

The idea is that these writings might establish an ambience that can create a framework to assist with the understanding of the broch people, given that man and the relationship to the world/cosmos has some basic roots in emotional and spiritual needs.

#

The previous example of the work of an historian being important to architects was a lecture given many years ago on the Japanese House by a University of Queensland historian - (apologies: name forgotten). The understanding of the house and its details extended to a knowledge of the place and its social role, giving a broad but integrated understanding of the elements of this unique house in an all-embracing, comprehensive exposé on form, structure, purpose, and meaning. This talk could be compared to other presentations given by architects that reveal the stark difference in approach, which is similar to that discrepancy one experiences in Read's writings on place, memory, and feelings, and an architect’s version of the quality of place and its richness. The architect’s version is self-conscious, theoretical, and indulgent; the historian’s version is of the everyday, involving real people and real emotions - complex, sensitive, and enduring.

+

It was Aldo van Eyck in an article in Team 10 Primer (edited by Alison Smithson, The MIT Press, London, 1974), who first raised this subtle but significant difference in these phonetic matches when he declared that we must attend to PLACE not SPACE, that abstraction that Modernism seemed happy to use as an a location for matters experientially significant; the anchor of mystery that was difficult to discuss in other terms. Architecture as Space was an influential book by Bruno Zevi, published by in 1948 (Italian); 1957 (translated); 1974 (revised); 1993. van Eyck noted that the concept of place included space and embraced a far-reaching set of complex emotional engagements.

^

Historically, the architecture course at U of Q was involved in doing course work in Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and Engineering in these separate schools, as well as the architectural courses, with architecture students being involved beside those specialising in these ‘outside’ studies - in the ‘real’ world as it were. Courses were never ‘tailored’ to suit lesser architectural expectations, or to ‘manipulate the books.’

*

Tom Heath, the late Head of the Queensland University of Technology School of Architecture and author of Method in Architecture, Wiley, 1984, once gave a talk on one of his papers in which he explained the necessary requirements for a title for a research paper: the title should be in two parts, with the first part being a short, snappy word or words that catch attention, followed by the second part which is a more lengthy explanatory text that spells out the subject matter of the work. Read’s titles fit these requirements very nicely.