Aboriginal Stories of Victoria Park: Negotiation, consultation and engagement. Navigating design consultation on colonised and contested urban land

Abstract

In 2008, Col James, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, initiated a collaborative design project celebrating Aboriginal culture in Victoria Park, an historic public park on the outskirts of Sydney’s CBD. This project was supported by members of the Aboriginal community, but as the project progressed concerns were raised about the consultation process. A subsequent investigation identified poor consultation as a common trigger for failure in design projects for Aboriginal peoples. A review of the existing literature showed that most consultation guidelines are written for regional or remote areas, and little information is available for urban or contested locations. This research addressed these gaps in the literature by asking whose voices, ways of knowing and conferring authority are given precedent in consultation guidelines for design projects celebrating Aboriginal culture on colonised and urban land, and how might such design projects be best negotiated. Using an ‘outsider researcher’ perspective to address the interface of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal knowledge systems, the research adopts an outsider’s decolonising and post-colonial critical methodology informed by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha. This approach foregrounds previously silenced voices through interviews conducted as guided conversations with Aboriginal Elders and Aboriginal and non-aboriginal design experts. Existing consultation guidelines are critically analysed to identify the different themes, world views, standpoints and agendas which inform them and the findings are then compared to identify correlations and disconnections with the interview findings. The thesis confirms that consultation for Aboriginal design projects in contested locations is a complex issue for designers requiring specialised skills, strategies and competencies to account for and accommodate for historically unequal power relationships between colonised Aboriginal peoples and non-aboriginal people. The thesis re-frames and re-presents the knowledge on consultation in a more fluid, dynamic and flexible form, revealing new understandings about design praxis that move towards the increased inclusion of Aboriginal peoples' voices, perspectives and practices in the design consultation process.