The Emergence of an Architectural Anthropology in Aboriginal Australia: The work of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre

Abstract

Colonial ethnographers commenced compiling records on Australian indigenous shelters and camps from the 1870s and this work was extended into more complex settlement models by a small number of anthropologists and archaeologists in the mid-twentieth century. Building on this earlier work, a distinctive architectural anthropology has been developed and practised by researchers at the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC) based at the School of Architecture, University of Queensland, since the 1970s. The broad focus is on the nature of peopleenvironment relationships of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but the resulting theories and methods may contribute to ongoing developments in the field internationally. This paper (with the aid of a case study) demonstrates how various research tools in the AERC theoretical frame have been incorporated into design processes, including the constructs of the "intercultural", "recognition space", "personhood", and "cultural landscape". in Australia were established much earlier through the pioneering observations and records of late-nineteenth-century ethnographers. R. Brough Smyth (1878) and Thomas Worsnop (1897) generated early interest in the comparative studies of settlement patterns by collating written descriptions of shelters, houses, and camps from the journals of early marine and terrestrial explorers of the continent.1 Walter Roth (1897) attempted to understand the continental diffusion of shelter styles and technologies based on his empirical research in north-west Queensland and Cape York exploring architectural properties, materials, and uses.2 Short descriptions of Aboriginal camps, shelters, houses, and domiciliary spaces were provided by late-nineteenth and early-and mid-twentieth-century ethnographers and anthropologists, 3 but few considered these subjects of primary interest to anthropology, with the mainstream preoccupied with kinship, social and local organisation, economy, religion, and ceremonial life. 4 An exception in the 1930s and 1940s was anthropologist Donald Thomson who executed significant research in Cape York and Arnhem Land, finding that different architectural types were contextualised within complex models of indigenous knowledge. These models combined environmental ethnosciences, material culture, seasonal economies, lifestyle patterns, and religious practices and obligations. In his work with the Yolngu of north-east Arnhem Land, Thomson documented Aboriginal people's domiciliary and ceremonial architectures through photography, drawings, and film. 5 He developed a methodological approach to understanding the diverse forms of Aboriginal architectures in the region, providing a systematic understanding of their uses, meanings, and properties, and was the first researcher to document Aboriginal dwelling knowledge from an indigenous (emic) perspective. 6 Thomson's published typology of seasonal shelters for the Wik Mungkan in western Cape York (1939) was highly influential, 7 and subsequent architectural anthro...