Remnant Hybrids, Hybrid Remnants?
Dawn breaks on the sublime claypans of Perth. This view could be an imaginary past landscape, but we are within the contemporary landscape, inside a vital ‘remnant’ patch, bounded by highways >>
IN TIME WITH WATER
These tracings show the highly varied cretaceous period coastlines of the Australian continent in times of sea regression and transgression moving In Time With Water, a project of design studies with water across three Australian cities >>
SWAMPSCAPES
Ecological immersion through poetry, cartography and soundscape. Swampscapes ignites awarenesses of place. A little ecological engagement recalibrates how we see and read Perth >>
MCHARGIAN PERTH
Viewing the metropolitian landscape through a McHargian Lens, renders a clear picture of the planned sprawl of Perth and the conflicts with ecological systems >>
TESTING GROUNDS
Urban forms and housing designs need to respond to the hydrological conditions of Perth, to different ecotypes of sand, clay, groundwater and vegetation >>
MAL ARIA
Early European responses to The Wet City >>
PERTH'S SECOND COAST
Cutting, filling, benching and hydrological erasure is the norm across Perth’s development frontier >>
Dedicated to cataloguing and communicating the lands, waters and structures of our city.
DEEP STRUCTURE
Conceptualising and communicating Perth’s ‘deep structure’ is an essential prelude and catalyst to designing a city that responds to its ecological and hydrological imperatives >>
MANDALUP
The landscape of Perth is a tapestry of streams and wetlands. In 1861, Alfred Stone Hawes took this stereoscopic photograph of Mandalup, present-day Claisebrook in East Perth.
An overlay of topography and rainfall averages across the biodiverse Kwongan ecoregion in the south west of Western Australia.
ON THE ESTUARY BED
The dunal banks of Moore River north of Perth offer a view of what the edges of the Bilya – Swan River once looked like.
NOONGAR BOODJAR
These ancestral waters, lands and skies are Noongar Boodjar. Always was and always will be Noongar Land. The Noongar People are the Traditional Owners and ongoing custodians of the south west region, through culture, knowledge and wisdom.
KEPA KALYAKOORL
Kaya, Wanjoo Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar. Winja noonook bidi wah? Nguny kepa bidi. Duba Kan Koorliny! Nidja Kepa nyinniny Kalyakoorl. Where is your path? My path is the water path. Walk slowly and softly, and here the water will sit forever.
Aquifers underpin our city, our biodiverse ecology and our future. Few cities globally share this remarkable condition >>
After Rod Simpson's Three Cities of Sydney, it can be useful to think of Perth as Three Coasts and three broad environmental types. The iconic First Coast at the Indian Ocean, the Second Coast formed by the long chains of wetlands, and the Third Coast: the clayey high-groundwater plain at the foothills >>
We find trickles and flows of water all along the Darling Ranges or Katamoornda (Noongar ‘black hills’). These are memories of much larger paleodrainage channels flowing to the Swan Coastal Plain after glacial meltdowns around 15,000 years ago, a time recorded and referred to in Noongar stories as the ‘white times’.
perth is a wetland
Perth is a Wetland, was then, now, still is. By opening the eyes to this underlying ecology, it becomes apparent. Water’s continuity, presence through the city, and its continuing persistence. Through the unapparent, rerouted, encoded; through the rich, sublime and filthy. We recognise that Perth is and remains a Wetland we inhabit. Before we build and design, we need to walk, resee – and listen >>
HOTSPOT
There are numerous and intricate interdependencies between city and ecology, impacts of urbanisaiton upon biodiversity >>
ACCESS TO TOOLS
The Whole Perth Catalogue is an environmental toolkit for Perth, Western Australia, cataloguing relationships between our city and ecoregion—a map of our stories, challenges and imaginations. It is inspired by the legacy of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (1968), which provided a generation with ‘access to tools’. It also follows in the footsteps of its namesake, a local directory of social tools by Zoe Sofoulis and the late Jenny Boult, the Whole Perth Catalogue (1975).