Indigenous Living [‘Heritage’] Designing Tenets

Abstract
Country provides everything the Wadawurrung need for their life, informing and enabling the curation of their lands and waters, feeding humans and animals alike, offering language and nomenclature and providing the ‘operational’ structure to their society today and into the future in anticipation of the return of their Creation Beings. Wadawurrung man Gareth Powell has explained that it is all a ‘design’, a ‘masterplan’. [Designing and] constructing ‘identity and belonging’ in First Nation’s (Aboriginal) Australia comprises the act, art and narration and involves multi-genre-modes of navigating and empowering respectful Indigenous design (and this living heritage) in a complex realm. In part, it is substantially stifled by Australian contemporary history and colonisation fault lines enveloped in undiscussed topics of sovereignty, dispossession and dislocation and biological and forceful invasion. Therefore the ‘art’ of designing in this realm comes with a huge truckload of cultural baggage even before one attempts to navigate concepts of respect, identity, Country, language and relational ontologies. This chapter surveys some of these key variables, in the Australian context, with reference to several recent exemplars, especially unravelling the Mirambeek Murrup/North Gardens project on Wadawurrung Country, offering points of guidance to the reader and practitioner.