Revisited Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre

Architect Build Up Design

Words by Elizabeth Grant Photography by Peter Eve In North East Arnhem Land, the realization of a cultural centre – led by Yolngu – sets an important precedent for the creation of sacred Indigenous architecture.

100 Architecture Australia Completed in 2014, the Garma Cultural Knowledge protector of the land. Gumatj clan leader Galarrwuy The Garma Cultural Centre sets an architectural precedent based on Yunupingu AM describes the anchor’s significance: Knowledge Centre, located 1 at Gulkula in Wiwatj (North two-way knowledge transfer, a long-established Yolngu East Arnhem Land). practice of combining Indigenous customs with The anchor represents unity and strength. Architecture is used by the introduced ways to negotiate a creative synthesis. It anchors Yolngu to our land and makes Indigenous clients as a medium to convey oral Here, that synthesis was with architect Simon Scally real our ties to the ceremonial meeting histories and tell their story. of Build Up Design, and the result is a powerful and ground at Gulkula. Our guests are anchored distinctly Yolngu place – a building that expresses to us and share in our cultural strength.3 Yolngu’s interconnected approach to politics, social identities, ancestral law, kinship relations, education Many sacred narratives are incorporated into and religion, and exerts their ownership of the land. the building’s design. For example, the late Gulumbu While joyful and light, the project exudes gravitas, Yunupingu’s internationally famed work Garak, The highlighting the significance of place, sacred Universe – an interpretation of Yolngu cosmology – was knowledge and knowledge transfer to Yolngu. interpreted as a series of laser-cut Corten steel panels The Knowledge Centre is located at Gulkula installed along the balconies as privacy and sun shields. (known as Djalkiri Wanga in Yolngu Matha, the Yolngu Elsewhere, yellow-painted external panels and linguistic family) in Miwatj (North East Arnhem Land). dark red timber work – using the local and culturally The late Mungurrawuy Yunupingu, a revered cultural significant gadayka, or grey stringybark (Eucalyptus leader from the Gumatj clan within the Yirritja kinship tetrodonta) – replicates the colours of the ochre that group, described Gulkula as “an all-encompassing represents the blood of the region’s Yirritja and Dhuwa philosophical, physical, cosmological, theoretical kinship groups. This colour palette demonstrates clan place” where Yolngu “have danced from the beginning.”2 affiliations, frees users of the space from the potential It is a sacred place, cosmologically associated with dangers of mystical powers, and links the past to the many Wangarr (Dreaming) stories: it was at Gulkula present. In The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous that the yidaki (didgeridoo or didjeridu) was brought to Architecture, Shaneen Fantin postulates the material the people, an act that imbued the land with spiritual selection may demonstrate ancestral affiliations: properties from the escarpment above to the ocean below. The sound of the yidaki remains a call to the To use a particular material or resource is clans of Miwatj to unite in ceremonies that have been to imbue the thing one is building, or creating, performed at Gulkula since time immemorial. with the stories and qualities that the resource The building is located on the sacred contains in ancestral law. For example, escarpment with spectacular views down to the ocean. stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) for Telling stories through architecture was an essential Yolngu people has a moiety (Dhuwa) that component of the design, with a series of complex links to a number of important ancestral Wangarr narratives layered into the project. The floor histories associated with ethno-architecture plan, for example, references the shape of an anchor, from Arnhem Land. A building or structure with a round window at the front of the building made from stringybark has, therefore, an referencing the anchor’s “ring.” The anchor symbol identity anchored in the Dhuwa moiety. Metal is embedded in Yolngu cultures as a result of their or steel products have been categorised by historic relationship with the Macassan people from the Yolngu under the opposite moiety (Yirritja) modern-day Indonesia. Over centuries, it has become a and are associated with a different set of symbol rich in significance, even appearing in the stories, many originating with the Macassan Wangarr story of the female warrior Bayini, the spiritual history of northern Australia.4

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Key

1 Conference room 2 Seminar room 3 Meeting room 4 Office 5 Tea room 6 Verandah 7 Plant

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6

4 2 5 4

1 3

Site plan 01 5 10 m 1:1000

102 Architecture Australia The project is based on a two-way knowledge transfer, in which Indigenous customs and knowledge gained through Westernized processes come together to strengthen Yolngu culture and maintain autonomy.

The design allows occupants to remain continually connected to the surrounding landscape. Multiple entries and exits also accommodate socio- spatial preferences and avoidance practices.

Yellow-painted external panels and dark red timber work in culturally significant gadayka (grey stringybark) represents the blood of the region’s Yirritja and Dhuwa kinship groups.

Laser-cut Corten steel panels on the balconies interpret Gulumbu Yunupingu’s internationally famed work Garak, The Universe.

May / Jun 2019 103 Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre

In this project, the choice of steel and metal The Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre Clan performances at the opening of the Garma with timber flooring and posts may align the building is a powerful agent in preserving and conveying Cultural Knowledge Centre with Yirritja kinship law, history and the identity of the cultural knowledge, reinforcing the strength, allowed cultural knowledges Gumatj Clan who developed the building. Importantly, and demonstrating the ingenuity of Yolngu cultures. to be embedded into the building, establishing it as to allow Aboriginal people to use the building with Unravelling processes of cultural production an important Yolngu place. ease, it is designed to accommodate Yolngu socio- behind the project’s architecture reveals significant spatial preferences and avoidance practices – it has complexities of Yolngu knowledge, power and identity, multiple entries and exits to enable people to move of land rights, politics and social systems, of religious away from one another as needed, while allowing beliefs and the forces of representation. occupants to stay continually connected to the The efforts to sustain and to further build surrounding landscape.5 upon these unique traditions, taking into account the The Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre poverty of remote Australia, economic and political was initially conceived as a training centre and pressures from without, and personal pressures from a venue for a range of cultural activities, but the within, are heroic. agenda for the centre has evolved. Yolngu have always rigorously resisted outside control and occupation Elizabeth Grant is an associate professor of architecture and urban design at RMIT, an adjunct professor of architecture in the Faculty of their lands and view themselves as unceded. of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and an adjunct associate As such, discussions regarding Yolngu futures, land professor at the Indigenous Design Place in the School of Architecture use and other matters need to be conducted at the University of Queensland. She is the lead editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (Springer, 2018). in an appropriate setting, at a significant place on Yolngu Country. The Knowledge Centre dispels any Footnotes notion that Yolngu have been alienated, disempowered 1. Yolngu (or Yolŋu) are an aggregation of Indigenous Australian people or subjugated in their engagement with the dominant inhabiting north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. non-Aboriginal Australia. 2. Brenda L. Croft, “Biography: Gulumbu Yunupingu,” National Gallery Yolngu activists, artists and performers of Australia, 2012, nga.gov.au/Exhibition/NIAT07/Detail. have been at the global forefront for decades, and cfm?MnuID=1&SubMnuID=1&BioArtistIRN=30380&IRN=165869. this project has broken new ground in the field 3. Yothu Yindi Foundation, “Gulkula and Ganbulapula,” 2014, yyf.com.au/ of Indigenous architecture, as Kelly Greenop and pages/?ParentPageID=2&PageID=109. I explain in The Handbook of Contemporary 4. Shaneen Fantin, and Gudju Gudju Fourmile, “Design in Perspective: Indigenous Architecture: Reflections on Intercultural Design Practice in Australia” in Elizabeth Grant, Kelly Greenop, Albert L Refiti and Daniel J Glenn (eds), The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 433–464. This appears to be the first Australian example where Indigenous clients have exerted absolute 5. Elizabeth Grant, “Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre,” Australian Design Review, June 2015. control over their cultural knowledge, using architecture as a medium to convey oral 6. Elizabeth Grant and Kelly Greenop, “Contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community, Public and Institutional Architecture” histories and to tell their story. During the in Elizabeth Grant, Kelly Greenop, Albert L Refiti and Daniel J Glenn (eds), design process, the meanings and symbols The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (Singapore: embedded into the design at the request of Springer, 2018), 57–105. the client were not conveyed to the architect.6 7. Shaneen Fantin, “Aboriginal Identities in Architecture: How Might Architecture Interpret Cultural Identity?,” Architecture Australia, The design defied convention by using ancestral vol. 92, no. 5 (2003), 84–87. histories as the basis of design, incorporating stories of divisions, boundaries and ownership. As Carroll Go-Sam notes, “if you put it in a building it is disenfranchised.”7 However, far from being disenfranchised, this design is strengthened by the incorporation of Wangarr signs and symbols, and its gravitas increased. There are long traditions of Yolngu overlaying and blending their culture with the ideas, customs and social behaviour of other societies to achieve positive outcomes and maintain autonomy. Combining aspects of non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal cultures to form a coherent whole has meaning for Yolngu that is not just imposed on them from outside. For Yolngu, to lose tradition would be to lose the functional logic through which ancestral law is exercised and the human experience is sanctified.

Architect Build Up Design; Project team Simon Scally, Mark Lytter, Kate Harbison, Ilma Ali; Building surveyor and structural, civil and mechanical consultant Irwinconsult; Electrical consultant Ashburner Francis; Cost consultant QS Services; Builder DRG Industries; Construction manager Delta Reef; Project manager Klaus Helms

104 Architecture Australia