Victoria Park Consultation and Engagement Research
I was born in Sydney and my earliest known ancestors in Australia were two convicts, Anthony and Elizabeth Rope, who arrived in Sydney on 26 January 1788 with the First British Fleet. I grew up in Sydney and for many years thought I knew my birth country well. One Sunday during the Sydney Olympics, I opened a newspaper and found a two-page spread of interviews with Aboriginal leaders. As I read these pages, I suddenly realised that my knowledge of Australian Aboriginal peoples was very poor, gained mostly from my British-informed school education, popular media or word of mouth. This realisation triggered a desire to be educated about Aboriginal people from Aboriginal peoples’ perspectives.

During this period, as a student of architecture intending to practice in Australia, I also felt it was important to learn about providing architectural services for Aboriginal people. In my final year of studying architecture, I focussed on a community housing design for the Gandangara Aboriginal Land Council at Barden Ridge, Sydney. The knowledge I gained during this period was substantial, but it also generated many questions.

Some years later, I enrolled in a postgraduate research degree to further my understandings of architectural design processes for working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. While I was eager to begin research, I did not quite know where to start. I visited the local Koori Centre at the University of Sydney, where academic Leah Lui-Chivizhe recommended reading Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies. Smith’s work opened my eyes to Indigenous research methodologies and liberated my thinking from conventional academic approaches. Smith’s methodology suited my “decolonising” aims, but I struggled to find a research project or case study on which to base my research. The communities I approached were either over-researched, not interested in my topic or had other priorities. It was difficult to proceed.

During this time, I was coincidentally involved with “Logs on the Park” [the Logs], a collaborative design project based in Victoria Park, Camperdown. The Logs was initiated by architect Col James as a collaboration between University of Sydney architecture and Eora TAFE design students and received funding via a City of Sydney Council Local Actions Matching Grant in 2007/2008. The design process developed by James incorporated an Aboriginal consultative panel. However, as the Logs gained wider exposure and feedback was received from the broader Aboriginal community, it became clear that a more inclusive consultation process was essential for it to be widely accepted. The consultative process was under fire and a solution was not yet clear. As a consequence, the Logs, later called the Victoria Park Design Project [VP Design], provided the opportunity for launching this research investigation. The research journey had taken an unexpected diversion under my own faculty roof, but this was just the beginning.