EDWARD ELGAR THE GARDEN OF AUSTRALIAN DREAMS: THE MORAL RIGHTS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS DR MATTHEW RIMMER SENIOR LECTURER ACIPA, FACULTY OF LAW, THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY ACIPA, Faculty Of Law, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200 Work Telephone Number: (02) 61254164 E-Mail Address:
[email protected] THE GARDEN OF AUSTRALIAN DREAMS: THE MORAL RIGHTS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS DR MATTHEW RIMMER* * Matthew Rimmer, BA (Hons)/ LLB (Hons) (ANU), PhD (UNSW), is a Senior Lecturer at ACIPA, the Faculty of Law, the Australian National University. The author is grateful for the comments of Associate Professor Richard Weller, Tatum Hands, Dr Kathy Bowrey, Dr Fiona Macmillan and Kimberlee Weatherall. He is also thankful for the research assistance of Katrina Gunn. 1 Prominent projects such as National Museums are expected to be popular spectacles, educational narratives, tourist attractions, academic texts and crystallisations of contemporary design discourse. Something for everyone, they are also self-consciously set down for posterity and must at some level engage with the aesthetic and ideological risks of national edification. Richard Weller, designer of the Garden of Australian Dreams1 Introduction This article considers the moral rights controversy over plans to redesign the landscape architecture of the National Museum of Australia. The Garden of Australian Dreams is a landscaped concrete courtyard.2 The surface offers a map of Australia with interwoven layers of information. It alludes to such concepts as the Mercator Grid, parts of Horton’s Map of the linguistic boundaries of Indigenous Australia, the Dingo Fence, the 'Pope’s Line', explorers’ tracks, a fibreglass pool representing a suburban swimming pool, a map of Gallipoli, graphics common to roads, and signatures or imprinted names of historical identities.3 There are encoded references to the artistic works of iconic Australian painters such as Jeffrey Smart, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and Gordon Bennett.