Sleeping with the enemy

After more than half a decade in Melbourne studying design, I made the big trip back across the Nullabor with not much more than the carload I left with, but a lot of other stuff in my head.

Back to the south west; I like it here.

I came back here to work. I was back here to get experience of real practice...a job with a large landscape architecture practice was surely what I had intended for myself. I applied, got interviews, wondered whether these jobs were as boring as they sounded. I looked for an opportunity to be the thing I thought that I had been studying to become. I talked to the council and I took advice. I went to interviews, refused job offers...because I didn't study four and a half years to spend nine hours a day in front of a computer screen. I did enough of that while I was studying. Sitting in a dark room by a blue screen when outside the sun is shining might be the norm, but that aint my fault!

I wondered what the hell I was doing. I wondered if it is true that I will I always be an outsider, and as someone suggested to me recently – always be one of the maladjusted unemployed.

I shifted my focus, and in so doing, took some of the dilemmas of the practice into my own mind. What had been externalised now became my issue. What I had felt resistance to externally became an internal corruption. I perhaps might have realised this if, when I put in a quote for an entrance statement, I had noticed a little bit of my discomforture; when a friend refused to even talk about a constructed wetland in the middle of great big housing development that I'd spent a good deal of the afternoon finding things to like about, I had felt a little bit disrupted.

Is this making sense?

The problem is not in the conclusion, but in the slightness of the signs...so many questions were sitting unanswered behind a pile of books that were overdue for return:

Was I being o, blase - or is hard-line green an anachronism?

Is it the transient nature of design thinking that allows this kind of distancing from the subject?

Does design research approach the impartiality of scientific research, where ethical decisions get left to someone else to deal with?

Suspend your judgement, yes, to design (in the process of designing), but not indefinitely. What is happening in Albany is so very wrong. People know it, people care about it, people are trying to change it. Sitting on the fence using landscape architecture as an excuse really was not my original intent. The kind of work that I had come to imagine, (how?) the kind of 'traditional' landscape architecture I thought I should be doing, shooud instead have felt like a moral crime, felt like flirting with the Darkside. Surely that wasn't what they'd taught us at one of the best design courses going? Surely speculative design isn't just something you do in the hallowed halls of academia? Haven't I always been a dreamer? Isn't it possible to live and dream into the world wonders of great beauty and exquisite design, that don't destroy the things that people love? Nor the myriad of non-human species. All this I couldn't put into words, couldn't put my finger on, but I could feel the resistance, and I wasn't rolling anywhere with it. And what exactly was this thing I was imaging? What was this 'conventional' or 'traditional' landscape role I thought I should be taking on? Had I perhaps allowed myself to be confused by too much post-structuralist theory, and stopped caring. Did I need to question my ability to care?

Now that I’m a graduate, I’ve been wondering what that degree will be useful for in this little old town where developers have such a powerful voice; where precious habitat is still being cleared, where harbours are still being dredged, where the urban is still sprawling and where those dedicated individuals who care and who are doing so much are often forced to work against the system.

Too many of the opportunities which I seemed to be contemplating were a temptation to undertake a practice that would see me sitting on the fence where perhaps too much landscape architecture practice sits. Working in cahoots with developers suggested compromising the very values that drove me to open my mind to the university in the first place, and would mean betraying those very people who were working so hard, so tirelessly, to protect the fragile, threatened environment that had birthed me, that had let me breathe, that had given me wings.

It was time to let something slip from my fingers and break.

So I took an unplanned holiday.

It's a useful thing to do, when things don't seem right. Go somewhere that makes you feel really good. And take the time to forget. Sure a couple weeks is nice, but even half a day can do it.

Talk to the I Ching perhaps, open the passageways for the great grey rat-headed hamster. [1]

And really give yourself to it.

Consciously holidaying makes you experience what you wouldn't ordinarily appreciate, like new smells and tastes. Bird shit, rotten barnacles, they're good fodder. Some people visit exotic overseas destinations...edges and shorelines work for me.

A really good holiday takes you somewhere that allows you to loosen the grip on your sense of self. It lets things crumble slightly. It lets you fall. As Hannah said a couple days ago, sometimes some things have to fall apart for other things to fall into place.

This might seem like an obvious statement, but you have to go to the Darkside to come home again, equipped with more effective tools.

I've been back in Albany since spring; it's taken me a while to feel out the narrative that sits in me, waiting to be told. And to answer at lease one of the questions that this blog asked in the first place, while I was still studying: What am I going to do? I'm joining forces with the many, many other brave and caring people in Albany and in the world who are attempting to protect the diversity of life.

I'm using my skills as a designer to participate in change, transitioning from oil dependency, transitioning from relying on planet-warming processes.

Landscape architecture practice can be, IS so much more than decoration.

[1] Hexagram #15: QIAN: the receptive on the mountain, Humbling/the Grey One.

"The literal animal is the great grey rat-headed hamster...with a human stance. It lives in an extensive system of burrows that suggest the underworld, where it hides a great store of stolen grain. It will attack and eat other rodents and can appear suddenly and ominously, standing on its hind legs with forepaws folded." p161 Stephen KARCHER,Total I Ching, Myths for Change. 2003, Time Warner Books/Piatkus/Little, Brown Books, London.