 Thank you to Susan Barry for Welcome to Country. Thank you particularly to Melinda for extending this invitation to be at the ANU. It's been and continues to be a wonderful opportunity to think about some of the what I'll call forming situations in research practice and public policy in Australia. And I suppose in essence what I'm hoping to communicate this morning is a proposition about a changed cultural and political landscape as regards discourses around design, storytelling and definitions of social and environmental resilience. It's not a scientific hypothesis, it really is a reflection on the experiences I've had in this rather hybrid territory of moving between investigations of histories of communication and noncommunication between different cultures in this country with a particular focus on the ways in which spatiality and through that shared or sometimes contested trajectories in a colonised country can translate themselves into forms of civility and inclusiveness. So somewhat utopian and the kinds of remarks and experience that I want to share this morning extremely susceptible to detailed critique in different places but I'm not too concerned about that. I'm quite happy to be fairly vulnerable in material thinking I make the paradoxical claim that true collaboration, strong collaboration is based on weakness. In other words, it's not like an operatic set where you have very fixed roles. It depends on a certain willingness to be weak, to acknowledge inconsistencies, not to be complacent about them, obviously to investigate them and seek to change them. But the process involving one that we heard about in the Welcome to Country at the heart as well as the head and I think that's part of where an engaged if you like creative research community which is a fairly parasitic community dependent on the expertise that comes out of disciplines as diverse, sociology, psychology, anthropology and planning sits consciously if you like weak. But maybe that's no bad thing. I'm not going to create an artificial arcana mystery around this title. I want to explain it very quickly and get out of the way. It's as simple as this. In relation to the placemaking practice, we'll just let placemaking sit there for the time being, a large part of what I suppose I'm interested in doing is trying to overcome European notions of places enclosure and to replace that with a much more interactional, processual and performative notion of placemaking. But let's just keep placemaking there. The central issue that arises in large urban projects, public art projects in Australia has to do with the language of representation. Where now it's conventional and normal practice to have a consultative group that involves indigenous interests, whether or not they're supported by land title claims or whether it's done on the basis of a moral repatriation of intellectual property. The expectation is that the language of discussion as we start to ideate, we start to think what the new form is going to be, whether it's a public square, new facility, it could be a new just program of events. The default position is computerated design. So it's basically what comes up on the screen. So I'm using screen memories obviously in a complex I hope way. It could be referring to the ubiquitous screen culture where we have screens in public squares. Obviously has a Freudian possibility. What I'm interested in is particularly the screen as the site for the ideation of new designs. So and therefore what happens to the line, the line which is both the gesture of drawing out, but it's also the way that we constitute the outline of a form that's going to be there in the future. So that's what I mean by screen memories. I'm referring to the default position that exists even where one might be talking with communities whose primary investment in ideation is volumetric. That is to say choreographic, gestural, processual, dialogical. We often go back to a very shallow idea of how that process of place making will be represented. What are the challenges of that? And as you can tell, even just to announce that is to put us into a place of practice where somehow we're trying to deal with the planners on the one side, the architects on the other side, people who are visually trained. And that tends to mean trained to look at images rather than trained to perhaps listen carefully to the rhythm of the sand. What happens to the volume of place? So volumetrics in this is simply the problem of measuring the hollow, measuring what might be the between, the inter-essay, what lies between us, which after all is the meeting place. So in a sense, things that we intuitively understand immediately, but because of the difficulty of documenting them, particularly in CAD or in parametric design, we tend to leave them out. I'm entirely dependent for the interventions I make into public space design on the skills of my son, who's a very talented modeler, designer, architect. And so we have quite, shall we say, a testy intergenerational exchange where I am endlessly insisting that he knows no history and he's endlessly rolling his eyes and saying it would not be nearly as hard if you could just use Rhino or something like that. So anyway, this is probably quite productive. And there's actually, which I won't go into today, there's actually probably a moderately interesting discussion there about what happens in universities more generally across that analogue digital line, which is still current until we retire. So screen memories then is referring to what I'll call the dominant motive of representation that's used in these placemaking exercises. The reason that there's a problem is because it doesn't really deal very well with volumetric ideation and therefore it creates a problem of representation. This, just to put you further in the picture about speaking from the heart as well as the head, maybe also from the hand, this is the kind of drawing that I do when I'm working with communities. This is actually Alice Springs. And these drawings are ideation drawings. What they do is they provide what seemed to me graphic analogs of dialogue. So this is a process where we were discussing the problematic of convergent storylines across two cultures. The pages in the background refer to possible ways of annotating the overland telegraph in relation to the building, a place of reconciling in the middle of Alice Springs. The sort of plate cells you can see sort of floating around on the surface there refer to various safe places. Would a meeting place be a meeting place or would it in the form of Arakaw and Ginza's theory of places be a sequence of landing places. In other words, a sequence of overlapping contracts, a performative moving which at the same time provides a form of stability and you can go on. What is useful I find with these things is of course whilst they're fairly enigmatic out of context, in context there's a strong sense of identification. Everybody can sign up to this and they're not committed to anything. So it's a classic example of strong collaboration. The very weakness of this as a final outline is to its advantage. If anything it captures a sense of imminence or movement, if we're lucky. What I want to do is I want to just give you a short history of how I got into this because that will give you, in a certain sense, the ammunition to critique. To what extent is what he's doing any different from other kinds of colonising activity where indigenous capital is taken and reappropriated for somebody else's use. A criticism that we can work through if it's felt to exist. I want to talk briefly about two placemaking projects which to some degree I think typify the application of the proposal in this conference. This proposal that we now sit in a different place in relation to representations of place in Australia and the application of those insights to the practical purposes of urban design or for that matter landscape design. So a place where some of these issues and themes which have been separate now just coalesce in a quite chaotic fashion. So I'll be referring to Golden Grove which is a landscape work at the University of Sydney and to Passenger which is a work in progress at Jaigansquare, named for an early freedom fighter as we would say now for the Noongar people and Jaigansquare is the new civic square in the centre of Perth. So when the Premier decided to rename it he's certainly up to the ante. When I was writing the road to Botany Bay shortly after coming to Australia I was very taken from the very beginning about the challenge of interpreting indigenous art. In this case a plate from Grey's expeditions into Western Australia. The way in which he describes and indeed as you can see represents a one-genar figure from the Kimberley was to me a classic example in those early days of how a cultural frame laid over an unfamiliar visual object produces certain kinds of clear distortion. So this figure gets changed obviously into a Semitic kind of or Babylonian priest and indeed as you'll know if you're familiar with the passage in which Grey responds to this he attempts to offer it a genealogy from outside of Australia. There's a whole set of drawings in that second volume of the expeditions. The other reason for mentioning that even in those early days what fascinated me was the extraction of the rock art from the volumetric. So it's presented on a flat page whereas of course and it's a project I'm now going back to in a different context. These are echo locations. There are places where there are certain kinds of multi-sensory resonance.