Jeff Greenaway will never forget the first time he heard his father’s voice. It was in 2017, when he was watching a documentary about the struggle of Indigenous Australians to be recognized in the country’s Constitution.
“It was shocking, surreal,” Mr Greenaway recalled. “In one word: emotional.”
In the film, his father Bert Groves, an Aboriginal and civil rights activist born in 1907, tells how he was prevented from continuing his education because of the size of his skull, a victim of phrenology, the pseudoscience that persisted in Australia. in the 20th century.
Now 53, Mr Greenaway was just a baby when his father died, leaving him to be raised in Australia by his German mother. However, his father’s values—such as championing indigenous rights and valuing education—were embedded in the young boy.
Mr Greenaway is currently one of what he estimates to be fewer than 20 registered Aboriginal architects in Australia. He is also a leading proponent of what is known as ‘Country-Centered Design’, which brings an Aboriginal worldview to building projects.
“People like Jeff are rare,” said Peter Salkhani, an Australian architecture journalist who has admired Mr. Greenaway’s work in Melbourne for some years. His works, Mr Salkhani said, “are undeniably the voice of the indigenous people – we need it now more than ever”.
For many Indigenous Australians, the land they were born into or belong to has spiritual significance. When people talk about “Country”, they don’t just mean physical land and waterways, but a belief system in which everything is alive and there is no separation between people, animals, buildings, plants, rocks, water and air.
A goal for the design approach that embraces this worldview is to reveal what was found on a site prior to European settlement and to do so in a way that prioritizes the environment.
One of the best examples of a Greenaway project that reflects these values is an amphitheater and plaza connecting the University of Melbourne, where the architect studied, with Swanston Street, considered the urban backbone of the city. As he sat under a gum tree, Mr. Greenaway pointed to the mudstone tracks on the ground of the amphitheater that went around clumps of native plants and into the interior of the buildings.
“This represents a creek that was once here,” Mr Greenaway said. For millennia, it was a water highway for migrating eels, before being channeled into a storm water drain. Today, the occasional eel is found disoriented in ponds at the university, lost as it tries to continue its migratory route.
Less of an aesthetic and more of a different approach to the building process, country-centered design begins with an Indigenous architect leading the project and working with the local Indigenous community. Mr Greenaway described it as “code design”.
Country-centered design also puts sustainability at the fore, seeking to give back to the land, not take from it. “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” Mr. Greenaway said, referring to indigenous cultures.
Indigenous Australians are better represented in much of the creative field, from music to visual arts to theater and literature, than in architecture, which remains, according to Mr Greenaway, “something of a last bastion”.
“There is a residual sense that architecture is not for us because it was complicit in colonization,” he continued. “Now that we have more voices contributing to this space, in the coming years, we’re really going to change the idea of what design and architecture can do for the community.”
A short tram ride from the auditorium is the first project where Mr Greenaway tested his design ideas: Ngarara Place, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
What one notices first is the small scale. Ngarara Place consists of a divided garden bed of native plants, each section representing one of the six or seven seasons observed by the Kulin Nations, the Aboriginal people who inhabited the area. It also has a fire for smoking ceremonies, a wooden amphitheater and a contemporary indigenous art installation.
Ngarara means “gathering” in the language of the traditional custodians of this land and the site “activates”, Mr Greenaway said, when it is used in ceremonies or even when students are seated.
“It still amazes me that this little place has accelerated interest in these concepts,” Mr. Greenaway said as he looked around the site. “It kind of changed the conversation and had this ripple effect.”
Before Ngarara Place, his firm, Greenaway Architects, which he founded with his wife, Catherine Drosinos, worked almost exclusively on residential projects. Today, it is involved in larger public projects, reflecting the growing appetite for this design in mainstream Australia.
In the state of New South Wales, major infrastructure projects must now have indigenous designs and there are mandatory credits in indigenous design to obtain an architecture degree in Australia.
“We have reached a level of cultural maturity where we can now have these conversations,” Mr Greenaway said.
Asked about last year’s failed referendum to give Indigenous Australians a voice in Parliament in the form of an advisory body, Mr Greenaway said there were still reasons for optimism.
“I’m encouraged because there is a very strong appetite to engage with indigenous culture and find pathways to reconciliation,” he said.
In Melbourne’s central meeting point, Federation Square, is the Koorie Heritage Trust, a cultural center celebrating the heritage of the First Nations of south-east Australia. Mr. Greenaway recently completed an interior layout of the building, on three levels. The overhead lighting arrangement speaks to indigenous astronomy, the nearby concrete columns evoke scarred trees, and the graphics on the walls symbolize a smoking ceremony.
Many objects of the cultural collection were housed in drawers that invited people to open them, but there were no information panels. When this apparent omission was pointed out, Mr. Greenaway smiled.
“You get it from this Western mindset of what a cultural collection should be,” he said. “This is an invitation to be active, not passive, to step up and start a conversation” with museum staff members.
When Mr Greenaway was a student, he was the only Indigenous person in his class studying architecture at the University of Melbourne. Today, he estimates there are 70 to 80 Indigenous students enrolled in design and architecture degrees across the country.
Many of these students know Mr. Greenaway as an accessible mentor.
He co-founded a not-for-profit organization – Indigenous Architecture and Design Australia – to support Aboriginal people pursuing design careers and help them navigate an industry still adapting to Indigenous design thinking. He also recently co-authored the International Indigenous Design Charter, a global plan to engage with Indigenous knowledge in commercial design practice.
His focus on Aboriginal ecological and ancestral narratives makes him a pioneer whose work is “inherently political,” said Alison Page, a Darawall and Ewin woman and co-author of “First Knowledges Design,” a book that discusses the architecture of indigenous people in modern Australia. .
His approach, Ms. Page said, helped pave the way for other works to address the legacy of injustices stemming from the history of indigenous and colonial encounters.
“By designing in this way, you start to uncover stories and narratives,” he said. “Some of it can be hard to deal with, but it’s part of the truth of a place. That kind of truth is not too far away now.”
Next up for Greenaway Architects will be a national first: a college at the University of Technology Sydney designed specifically for First Nations students.
From the steps of Melbourne’s war memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance, the view of the city is dramatic. While the cityscape from this vantage point is dominated by skyscrapers rising above Victorian-era boulevards, Mr. Greenaway’s works sit discreetly and narrowly at ground level.
Mr Greenaway said his aim was to create places “encoded with meaning but never ostentatious” and to “embed a layer into Melbourne’s urban fabric that gave agency to First Nations peoples”.
Asked about his future aspirations, he said: “My hope, really, is that through our practice, we’ve begun to chart a new direction around design equality, to ensure that the voice of the voiceless is normalized within the design practice in Australia. but also beyond. It’s starting now, but we have to keep up the pace.”
