Figure 1: SAHANZ scholar Deidre Brown has analysed
the thatched and woven Maori house. This example of
a house porch was photographed at Hawkes Bay in the
1890s, showing raupo ceiling, painted rafters, tukutuku
wall panel, and flax mat.
Photograph by Samuel Carnell (1832-1920).
Source: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, Ref. 1/2-055340-G.
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FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ 18:1
Indigenous Culture and Architecture in
the South Pacific Region
25 Years of SAHANZ Research
Paul Memmott & James Davidson
This paper retrospectively examines the development of architectural history
and theory within the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand (SAHANZ), with primary reference to the indigenous cultures of the
South Pacific and South-East Asia geographical regions. Through a reading of
some 100 papers with indigenous references or themes, published in either the
conference proceedings1 of SAHANZ since 1984, or in its journal Fabrications2
since 1990, the paper highlights some historiographical differences within the
research corpus, particularly between the research trajectories of scholars in
Australia and New Zealand. Of principal significance are the varying themes
and methodological approaches that have shaped the SAHANZ scholarship on
indigenous environments and architectures in the last 25 years. An overarching
preoccupation in this body of writing is the formulation and politicisation of
alternate definitions of architecture that accommodate indigenous constructs
and archetypes. The ensuing discussion then addresses a number of recurring
themes which fall under the banner of “the representation of indigeneity” in
and through architecture, namely the encoding of meanings into architecture
and place, religious beliefs and values as generators of architecture, cultural
change processes in architecture, the interpretation of changing architectural
traditions, and the indigeneity of metropolitan settings.
The time depth, and hence architectural antiquity, of the various indigenous
groups dwelling in the study area is quite diverse. According to archaeological
and genetic evidence, the earliest migratory groups of modern humans
originated in Africa and travelled eastwards from mainland Asia, eventually
coming to inhabit Australia and New Guinea some 60,000 years ago.3 They
then culturally evolved into many hundreds of distinct language groups or
tribes. A much more recent set of migrations (6,000 years ago) occurred in
the Holocene period when Austronesian language groups from Taiwan and
southern China extended east along the New Guinea coast and then dispersed
throughout the Pacific.4 This included the first arrivals of Maori to Aotearoa
New Zealand from their ancestral homeland of Hawaiki, which occurred little
more than 1,000 years ago, continuing to the thirteenth century. The area
of analysis in this paper pertains to those Austronesian language groups in
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
75
Insular South-east Asia, from Taiwan through Indonesia and the Philippines,
along the coast of New Guinea through the islands of Melanesia and Micronesia,
and east into the Polynesian triangle extending between Hawaii, New Zealand
and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Archaeologists name many of the groups in the
central part of this region the Lapita people (after their Lapita pottery).5 Abel
Tasman’s “discovery” of Australia and New Zealand in the 1640s opened up
a British and European chapter in the region’s history. Captain James Cook
proclaimed Australia a British possession in 1770, with settlement commencing
in 1788; New Zealand was annexed as a British Colony in 1840 upon the signing
of the Treaty of Waitangi with Maori chiefs.
Research on indigenous peoples in the study area commenced within the
emerging social science of anthropology in the mid to late nineteenth century,
including some documentation of indigenous architectures within the sub-field
of material culture. The earliest interest in indigenous architecture in the south
Pacific region from architectural researchers, however, did not commence until
the 1970s with those researchers drawing as much on anthropology as upon
their own discipline; but even then, there was little interest from mainstream
architectural historians.
By the 1990s, these architectural researchers and their growing numbers of
postgraduate students had become increasingly concerned with the processes of
cultural change, both with respect to indigenous societies and their architecture,
and to colonial societies and their architectural processes. Despite minimal
engagement with the postcolonial and postmodern theorists who had been
emerging in cultural studies and anthropology during the 1980s, the authors
around SAHANZ were centrally positioned in the subject matter of these
theories, addressing topics on indigenous architecture that ranged from the
binary analysis of power roles in architectural decision-making (colonist versus
colonised), to the adaptation of indigenous architectural traditions and use of
place to the globalising processes of modernity. A deeper significance of this
literature review is to question the biases and prejudices in the architectural
profession (as well as in architectural publishing) as to how the architectural
traditions of “others” are acknowledged and as to the ethical terms of their
engagement in theory and practice.
Of 100 SAHANZ papers perused by the authors, 79 clearly addressed or
referenced themes on indigenous architecture and/or cultures. Within these 79
papers, the most intensely reported subject group are New Zealand’s Maori (in
some 39 papers), followed by Australian Aboriginal groups (twelve papers) and
then Papuan New Guineans and Cook Islanders, the topic of six papers each.
Some ten further Asian and Pacific groups are discussed in only one or two
papers each, with a number of papers addressing broader cultural groupings.
Five, for instance, deal more generally with Polynesia (Table 1). Whilst there
76
FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ 18:1
Period of Publication
Cultural Groups
19841989
Australian Aboriginal
2
19901994
19951999
20002004
20052007
Subtotals
2
4
4
12
Cook Islanders
1
2
3
6
Fijian
1
1
Global
1
1
Hawaiian
1
1
Indonesian groups
(inc. Balinese, Toraja,
Javanese)
2
1
3
Kiribati (Gilbert
Islanders)
1
1
2
Malaysian groups
(Iban, Kenyah)
Maori
2
1
7
Maya
Micronesian (general)
1
Oriental (general)
22
2
7
39
1
1
1
2
1
1
Papuan/New Guinean
1
5
Polynesian (general)
1
4
Rapa Nui/Easter
Island
1
1
Samoan
6
1
1
4
5
20
1
1
1
Tikopia (Ellis
Islanders)
6
2
1
Tahitian
Sub-totals:
2
1
41
18
88
Table 1: Distribution of SAHANZ Papers on Indigenous Themes,
by Subject Cultural Groups and Periods of Publication
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
77
is clearly a strength of research on Maori and Australian Aboriginal (hereafter
simply referenced as “Aboriginal”), with some coverage of a few other groups,
there are clearly many indigenous cultures in the region to which the SAHANZ
members have not paid attention to date: especially the groups in Indonesia, the
Philippines and South-east Asia where there are many substantial indigenous
populations. This does not imply that the architecture of these indigenous
groups has not been researched by other scholars (some of whom are also
architects), but rather that none of this material has formed part of the SAHANZ
profile for research into indigenous themes and cases.6
The Development of SAHANZ Scholarship in Indigenous Architecture
When SAHANZ was formally established in 1985 it was partly modelled on the
American Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), which had as one of its
objectives the fostering of an appreciation of the architectures of all cultures.
SAHANZ, however, did not adopt any such similar objective, which would have
clearly signalled the inclusion of indigenous cultures in its scope of interests.7
How then did SAHANZ scholarship on indigenous architecture originate?
This is a complex historical investigation in its own right but several key events
and personnel can be briefly mentioned. In the 1970s there was no substantial
architectural interest in indigenous architecture in Australia and New Zealand,
neither from within architectural schools nor from the architectural profession.
In both countries it had been assumed in the 1960s, premised upon government
policies of assimilation, that indigenous peoples would come to occupy western
housing and integrate into western socio-economic systems. Traditional
architectures were more the research domain of anthropologists, topics of
ethnographic recording for posterity, or assigned to specimen collections in
museums. Architectural schools in Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s were
largely preoccupied with transferring European and American modernism into
local practice and simultaneously transmitting the classical architectural history
of Sir Bannister Fletcher.
Subtle pedagogical changes began in the 1970s with influences arising from
diverse sources: the gradual popularisation of vernacular architecture studies;
the advent of architectural psychology and man-environment studies, later
re-named environmental psychology and behaviour-environment systems
respectively; the shift in indigenous political policies from assimilation to selfdetermination, and hence cultural expression, in such Commonwealth nations as
Australia and New Zealand; and the inspiration of the United States’ Civil Rights
Movement to those advocating indigenous rights (including land rights). From
this educational and political context a handful of scholars with architectural
backgrounds commenced tackling the ethnographic recording of indigenous
architectural traditions. One early inspirational scholar (from outside the region)
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Period of Publication
19841989
19901994
19951999
20002004
20052007
1 (1989)
1
2
6
1
2
3
1
Budgett, J.
1
2
Engels-Schwarzpaul, T
1
1
Linzey, M
3
1
McCarthy, C.
2
1
4
1
New Zealand Authors
Austin, M.
Brown, D.
McKay, B.
1
Refiti, A.
2
Treadwell, S.
1
3
Treadwell, J
1
1
2
1
2
8
25
9
Australian Authors
Fowler, M.
Memmott, P.
4
1 (1994)
1
1
Ting, J.
2
1
1
5
2
Table 2: SAHANZ Authors with Two or More Published Papers
on Indigenous Themes, and the Periods of the Publications
who has not been adequately credited was the American-born Professor Wallace
“Mack” Ruff (1912-99) who established the Architectural Heritage Centre of
Papua New Guinea in the Department of Architecture at the Papua New Guinea
University of Technology in Lae.8 This ethno-architectural programme started as
the Village Studies Program in 1973 and continued until 1981.9
A later friend and colleague of Ruff’s was Michael (Mike) Austin who
after graduating in architecture at Auckland University College (since 1962,
the University of Auckland), studied some anthropology and Maori Studies,
attended the Ekistics Centre (Athens) in 1973, and then completed his PhD in
1976 at the University of Auckland on Polynesian influences in New Zealand
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
79
architecture. From that time, Austin had a pivotal role in educating New Zealand
architecture students at the University of Auckland and Unitec (Auckland)
on cross-cultural environmental issues. Most of SAHANZ’s New Zealand
contributors to indigenous architectural themes have either been taught or
influenced by Austin. He also later taught at the Papua New Guinea University
of Technology in 1987, 1993 and 1997. One of his students, Deidre Brown
goes so far as to argue that Austin’s doctoral dissertation (entitled “Polynesian
Architecture in New Zealand”) legitimised Maori architecture as a field for
architectural academics, largely ignored until that date by such, but nevertheless
having been a subject of analysis for up to a century by anthropologists,
ethnographers, Maori historians and Maori political analysts.10 Similarly, Peter
Wood credits Austin’s thesis as a seminal work in this regard.11
Whilst Austin was undertaking his PhD in New Zealand, Paul Memmott
(one of the co-authors of this paper) was carrying out his PhD in anthropology
and architecture with the Lardil Aboriginal people from the Gulf of Carpentaria.
(He was well aware of Ruff’s work at the time but knew little of Austin’s.) In
1976, Memmott established the Aboriginal Data Archive at the Department
of Architecture, University of Queensland, which was formalised into the
Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC) in 1995. He then built up a
school of postgraduate students who have since contributed most of the papers
to SAHANZ on Australian indigenous themes.
(A third significant SAHANZ contribution to indigenous architecture
scholarship has been Martin Fowler’s work on Papua New Guinea stemming
from his PhD research (University of Melbourne) on cultural transactions
between colonialism, modernity and tradition in three Papuan societies and
its subsequent impact on architecture and settlement. Fowler was raised in
Papua New Guinea, being the son of a medical orderly teacher who stayed there
after the Second World War. Like Memmott, Fowler was aware of the Village
Studies Programme at Lae, and was interacting with Ruff’s successors at the
PNG University of Technology in the mid-1970s, these including Ken Costigan,
Gordon Holden, Neville Quarry and Adrian Boddy.)
When Austin and Memmott commenced their independent research
trajectories in Oceania and Australia respectively in the early 1970s, each
established a broad frame of people-environment relations in which to position
their research interests relative to traditional architectures and related topics.
Both were interested in indigenous geographies and navigation; in traditional
territoriality and socio-spatial/socio-geographical organisation; in the sacred
histories and myths of creation and origin, and their manifestation in cultural
landscape, place, settlement and building symbolism; in indigenous constructs
of time and space and how they effect environmental usage and meaning;
in externally oriented lifestyles and appropriate architectural design; and in
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Figure 2: Entrance to the Maori Marae or Meeting
House at Orakei, the site of a Maori settlement of
the Ngati Whatua (tribal group), that is now an
urban enclave within metropolitan Auckland.
Photography by Paul Memmott.
the process of cultural change and the impact of colonialism on indigenous
architectural practices and cultural identity.
Austin’s first paper at a SAHANZ conference was also the first on a
Maori topic: “Landscape and the New Zealand Maori” (Canberra, 1989).12 It
contextualised the engineering and construction of Maori fortified settlement,
or pa, in the cultural landscape of named sacred sites created by ancestral
culture heroes – a theme to which he would return in his keynote address
to the twentieth conference (Sydney, 2003), and a landscape typology that
others would address at later SAHANZ conferences.13 Memmott’s scholarship
took a similar approach with emphasis of Aboriginal shelters and camps
within seasonal patterns of movement and economic exploitation, and with
due attention to ethno-geography.14 Austin extended his writing on cultural
landscape in some of his later papers, alluding to cultural seascapes, navigation,
boat symbolism, Pacific migration history and the application of boat technology
to land-based architecture.15 Austin and Memmott also shared a strong emphasis
on the external orientation of indigenous lifestyles and its cultural impact on
architectural and settlement configuration and socio-spatial properties.16
These theoretical interests of both Austin and Memmott did much to
shape subsequent themes and approaches on the indigenous and bi-cultural
architecture of Australia and New Zealand at SAHANZ conferences and in
Fabrications from the end of the 1980s.
New Zealand historians had minimal collective involvement in the early
phase of SAHANZ until the 1990 conference in Melbourne, at which the keynote
address (unfortunately not published) was given by a Maori art historian
Jonathon Mané-Wheoki. Although there was a record eight New Zealanders
in attendance in 1990, and although the 1991 conference was held for the
first time in New Zealand (in Christchurch), the New Zealand membership
had risen to only 25 in number by 2003, between one-fifth and one-sixth of
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
81
the total membership at that time.17 Despite their minority in the SAHANZ
membership, the New Zealanders, through their contribution of papers in the
late 1990s and early 2000s, have nonetheless made the largest contribution
to indigenous architectural research. Austin has been the most prolific New
Zealand contributor in this field, being the most senior researcher and mentor
or teacher for most of his colleagues. Like Memmott, Austin intensified his
postgraduate teaching during the 1990s and as an outcome Austin and his
group presented over twenty papers to SAHANZ during the period 2000 to
2005.
The first paper on Australian Aboriginal culture to be published by
SAHANZ was Graham Speed’s “Australian Aboriginal Shelters” given at the
1987 Conference (Adelaide). This was an isolated paper that failed to engage
the already established ethnography for, as in New Zealand, there did exist
a legacy of research on Aboriginal ethno-architecture that had been collated
over 100 years by anthropologists and ethnographers.18 The ninth SAHANZ
conference (Geelong, 1992) focused specifically on Asian and Australasian
themes with short sessions called “Traditional” and “Vernacular”. Significant
papers were presented by David Rapaport on Toraja architecture in Sulawesi,
and Gunawan Tjahjono on Javenese architecture and place, as well as a paper
by Richard Aitken on the Oriental and Oceanic influences on Anglo-Australian
and New Zealand architectures. Unfortunately none of these scholars gave
papers on indigenous architecture at later SAHANZ conferences and there
has been no conference to date that has focused as seriously on Southeast
Asian scholarship.19 A second isolated paper on Aboriginal architecture was
Memmott’s keynote address to the 1994 conference in Brisbane, entitled
“From the ’Curry to the ’Weal: Aboriginal Town Camps and Compounds of the
Western Back-Blocks,” which described self-constructed town camps or fringe
settlements on the outskirts of Australian towns (commonly termed “squatter
settlements” in the international literature), and which had been ignored
by mainstream Australian historians as well as by scholars of the SAHANZ
community.20
The formulation of more theoretical analyses on indigenous architectures
continued to be encouraged through themed sessions at three later SAHANZ
conferences. The “Cross-Cultural Issues” theme at the Launceston in 1999
included papers by Austin, Brown, Bill McKay and Sarah Treadwell from
New Zealand and by Memmott and Carroll Go-Sam from Australia. The 2000
conference in Wellington included the session “Post-European and Indigenous
Architectural History”, chaired by Brown, with papers on indigenous topics
from both within and outside of the session. The contribution was mainly
by New Zealanders (Austin, Brown, Ngarino Ellis, Michael Linzey, Christine
McCarthy, Anna Petersen, Albert Refiti, and Wood21), which drew a strong
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criticism of the Australian membership from one member of the audience on
the failure of the latter to clearly acknowledge and promote an understanding
of Aboriginal architectural history in their scholarship.22 Consequently, at
the nineteenth annual conference (Brisbane, 2002), Memmott was invited
to convene an “Architecture + Building Traditions” session which brought
together Austin, Ellen Andersen, Brown, McKay and Refiti of New Zealand
with James Davidson, Shaneen Fantin, Fowler, Go-Sam, Stephen Long and
Timothy O’Rourke of Australia23 – thus creating a more balanced and mature
contribution on Polynesian, Melanesian and Aboriginal topics.
The younger scholars fostered by research communities based in Auckland
and Brisbane have continued to contribute to SAHANZ conferences. A central
strength for SAHANZ has been the emergence of a number of indigenous and
bi-cultural scholars including Brown, Ellis and Andersen from New Zealand, GoSam and Kevin O’Brien from Australia, and Refiti from Samoa.24
Methodological Approaches
To some extent, factions among and tensions between SAHANZ members have
existed from its outset, pitching empiricist historianship against theoretical
preoccupations. “The extent to which papers should be theoretically informed
continues to attract discussion among members,” wrote Julia Gatley in 2003.25
This difference in approaches is visible to some extent within the contributions
on indigenous architectures. (For example, contrast Fowler’s account of the
history of Melanesian influences on the work of western architects in Papua
New Guinea with the more theoretical interests of Refiti, Michael Tawa, and
Christoph Schnoor.26) Two further methodological approaches are, however,
clearly apparent in this SAHANZ literature. One employs an anthropological
methodology to record the knowledge systems of indigenous groups, combining
such techniques as participant observation, structured or semi-structured
interviewing, field observation of architectural practice and usage, often
employing photography, linguistic analysis and analysis of earlier ethnographic
documentation.27 We also see the convergence of this approach with an empirical
historical method and its emphasis on primary archival sources, pictorial
images and measured architectural drawings in an attempt to reconstruct past
traditions that are no longer practiced. This fourth approach can be best termed
“salvage architectural ethnography”, particularly when there are no longer living
informants who witnessed or participated in the architectural processes or
events under study.
A proficient technical application of this last approach that draws as
much on pictorial representation as it does on contemporaneous text, is
Treadwell’s architectural discourse analysis of alternate cultural readings of
the mid-nineteenth century church Rangiatea at Otaki, New Zealand.28 In
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
83
Figure 3: Salvage architectural ethnography of
Maya traditions by James Davidson includes
this Kaqchikel House from the community of Los
Encuentros in the state of Solola in the western
highlands of Guatemala, 2002.
Photo by James Davidson.
addition to drawing on the perceptions of artists, travellers and ecclesiological
commentators of the time, Treadwell overlays the more recent ethnographic
understandings of customary Maori architecture and its post-contact
transformations as documented by archaeologists and other architects like
Austin.
If post-modern writing in cultural studies can be criticised as opening a
disjunction between “actual” and “theoretical” culture, this is certainly not
the case with the SAHANZ literature on indigenous architecture, with a good
proportion of the papers being in the empirical or ethnographic modes.29 New
Zealand-based researchers who have used fieldwork as a primary source for
their SAHANZ papers include Austin (in the early to mid-1970s while working
on his PhD research into Polynesian meeting houses), Jeremy Treadwell (Cook
Islands), Sarah Treadwell (Rangiatea), McKay (Ratana churches and the Ringatu
house, Rongopai, New Zealand), Ellis (East Coast and Northland meeting
houses, New Zealand), Andersen (a meeting house near Wellington), McCarthy
(Captain Hankey’s carved residence near Dunedin, New Zealand), Jeanette
Budgett (southern Cook Islands), and Deidre Brown (Ratana churches, some
Northland houses). Many of these researchers are primarily interested in the
representation of Maori architecture and have moved on from field research to
theoretical issues as demonstrated in their more recent SAHANZ papers.30
Australian researchers who have employed fieldwork and carried out
empirical research include Memmott (numerous Australian regions), Long
(upper Georgina River basin, Queensland), Fantin (Arnhem Land, Northern
Territory), O’Rourke (Tully and Murray River region, north-east Australian
rainforest), Davidson (Maya indigenous groups in southern Mexico and
Guatemala), Go-Sam (Herbert and Wild Rivers, north-east Australian
rainforest), O’Brien (Murray Island, Torres Straits) and Fowler (Papua New
Guinea, especially central southern coastal groups of Papua).
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Figure 4: Documentation of Australian rainforest
architecture by Tim O’Rourke includes this
double-dome structure constructed by Jirrbal
and Gulngay consultants near Tully River, 2004,
with fan palm cladding and lawyer cane ties.
Photography by Timothy O’Rourke.
Three notable examples of salvage architectural ethnography are Davidson’s
documentation of traditional Maya house architectures in Guatemala and
Mexico (Fig 3), O’Rourke’s work on North-east Australian Aboriginal rainforest
dome constructions (cane and sapling frames with palm leaf and blady grass
cladding) (Fig 4), and the New Zealand documentation of Maori bundled reed
wall construction by Rao Hoskins and Carin Wilson (reported by Brown).31
Davidson’s work is the first of its kind to fully document the last vestiges of
traditional thatch architectures of the Maya, while O’Rourke and Hoskins
and Wilson employed interviews with knowledgeable elders and applied the
knowledge to simulated architectural reconstructions that were filmed in the
field. Another example of historical-based salvage ethnography is Austin’s
overview of the sixteenth century architecture of Rapa Nui, dating from when
socio-economic conditions were flourishing prior to the period of ecological and
cultural crisis from the 1600s to the 1800s.32 He examined the relation of the
famed 900 statues (moai) of ancestral entities to the raised stone platform courts
in which ritual events occurred. An outstanding methodological contribution on
salvage ethnography is Brown’s paper “He Hokonga Whare e Kimihia: Seeking
the Corner of the House,” which examines the problems of reconstructing
the stylistic profile of early contact northern Maori building traditions based
on the slim evidence of twenty museum-held timber architectural fragments,
poorly and erroneously documented texts, photos and post holes identified by
archaeologists.33
The SAHANZ indigenous-research scholars draw on the cognate disciplines
of mainstream architectural history, national and regional histories, political
history, art history, fine arts, anthropology, archaeology and cultural studies.
Increasingly, researchers combine a range of disciplinary techniques that rely
on the “triangulation” of results, rather than being perturbed by criticism
that different source data may be incompatible for analysis.34 One technical
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
85
Figure 5: A comparison of scale of Gothic Cathedrals with
Papua New Guinea Men’s Houses by Martin Fowler (2004).
Courtesy Martin Fowler.
topic under debate is the proper method for reconciling indigenous narrative
analysis with written dated archival sources.35 Ellis seeks an integrity of Maori
architectural history research through drawing on a balanced combination of
oral sources, written records, visual ethnographic records and carved treasures
found in archaeological and other sites.36 Her range of oral sources includes
human histories, “celestial knowledge” (sacred histories), genealogies, song
types (including lullabies, laments, love songs), dance, proverbs, tribal sayings
and place names.37 Ellis goes further, outlining a framework of specific ethical
guidelines for tribal architectural history research which deals with intellectual
and cultural property issues as well as the inter-relational issues of “voice”,
audience and tribal consultants’ roles.38
Empirical historical research on Maori architecture and its post-contact
colonial transformations is one of the strengths of the New Zealand contribution
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to SAHANZ. An outstanding example of this work is Brown’s reconstruction of
the traditional early nineteenth century whare raupo, or thatched and woven
Maori house, with its bulrush cladding, and bundled reed interior wall linings
(Fig 1).39 Other important empirical contributions are Long’s account of the
trans-generational persistence of externally-oriented, hearth-centred domiciliary
and camping practices of Aboriginal people on the upper Georgina River in
north-west Queensland, and Fowler’s analyses of the complex political and
cultural factors underlying the widespread and thorough destruction of the
spectacular men’s houses (ravi, eravo) of southern Papua in the mid twentieth
century (Fig 5).40
Whilst the empirical focus has been maintained in many SAHANZ papers
on indigenous themes after the mid-1990s, an increasing preoccupation with
theoretical issues became especially prevalent in the 1999, 2000 and 2002
conferences. The only attempt to categorise theoretical topics in the indigenous
SAHANZ literature was made by Memmott in 2002, and we re-visit here
some of these themes. The majority of SAHANZ papers on indigenous and
bi-cultural topics can be sorted into two broad categories. The first relates
to the politicisation of definitions of “architecture” and its fit to indigenous
architectural traditions. This leads to a perception of inbuilt bias lying at the
heart of whether or not the mainstream Euro-American academia accept the
architectures of “others”. The second is the representation of “indigeneity”
(indigenous identity) in and through architecture, which can be also seen as the
contestation of the architectural terrain wherein people of different cultures
meet, react with, and interact with one another. The following brief overview of
these themes will naturally reveal many links and overlaps.
The Formulation and Politicisation of Alternate Definitions of Architecture
Based on their understanding of Aboriginal architecture, the first SAHANZ
paper to open a debate on the politics of defining “architecture” was presented
by Memmott and Go-Sam in 1999. Memmott has since refined this as:
Architecture is a selected, arranged and constructed configuration of
environmental properties, both natural and artificial, in and around one or
more activity spaces or behavioural settings, all within a cultural landscape, and
combined with patterns of behavioural rules and meanings as well as incorporating
cultural constructs of space and time, to result in human comfort and quality of
lifestyle.41
In this cross-cultural view of architecture, the fundamental elements of
residential design can thus be defined as domiciliary spaces, with subspaces for
particular activities and hearths, and optional shelters – all within preferred
site characteristics. The “architecture” is initially defined by the selection of the
site and then by distinct spatial and cognitive rules and behaviours articulated
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
87
1. ENCODING MEANINGS INTO ARCHITECTURE AND PLACE
−
−
−
−
−
−
Bi-cultural significance of specific building designs – embedded symbols of
indigeneity.
Shifts in the meaning and status of buildings as a result of directed and nondirected cultural change.
Meanings of Indigenous places and cultural landscapes.
Sedentary versus mobile use of place and the significance of meaning for design.
Adaption of western housing to express indigenous lifestyles.
Meanings of semi-sedentary Aboriginal shelters and villages as well as their
application to cultural tourism.
2. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND VALUES AS SEMANTIC GENERATORS OF
ARCHITECTURE
− Ethno-architecture and associated religious meanings.
− Mission architecture and its bi-cultural architectural properties.
−
Appropriation of European religious architecture by Indigenous groups and
acculturation into their indigeneity.
3. CULTURAL CHANGE PROCESSES IN ARCHITECTURE
− Biculturalism and bi-cultural architecture – varying constructs.
− Cycles of cultural exchange (including ‘double movements’) between two or more
groups.
− Cultural stereotyping and simplification of indigenous architecture.
− Bi-directional change: dual design agency and interpretation of particular
buildings by colonial and indigenous groups respectively.
4. INTERPRETATION OF CHANGING ARCHITECTURAL TRADITION
− Alternate constructs of tradition: static versus dynamic.
− Cultural renaissances: re-invention of tradition and its functions.
5. INDIGENEITY OF METROPOLITAN SETTINGS
− Modes of juxtaposition and maintenance of tradition in metro settings.
− The symbolic role of indigenous architecture in political contestations for rights in
metro settings.
− Re-construction of tradition for indigenous tourism.
− Encoding pan-tribal symbolism into buildings of national significance.
Table 3: Themes in the SAHANZ Literature Concerning the
Representation of Indigeneity in Architecture and Place
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within that site. The introduction of structure and buildings is dictated by these
rules and behaviours, and represents a material extension in response to climatic
and social factors. Cultural symbols and meanings encoded in physical form
may provide yet another overlay of architectural properties. The architecture
is thus supportive of domiciliary lifestyle, social organisation and associated
human needs, resulting in a cultural “fit” or congruency between behaviour and
environment.42 In 2001, Mike Austin defined Pacific Island architecture as
open to the sky rather than closed rooms, of sticks and grass as against mud and
stones, poles as against walls, of single cell pavilions rather than labyrinthine
complexes, of buildings raised in the air on stilts rather than sunk in the ground,
of temporariness as against permanence, tension and weaving rather than
compression and building, an outdoor existence and ocean voyaging as against a
life grounded in the land.43
Later, Austin described Pacific architecture as being obsessed with the tectonic
and the ornamental potential of joints.44 An ethnographic basis for the tectonic
aspect is to be found in Brown’s paper “Clothed not Clad,” which aims to
redress the imbalanced preoccupation with Maori carving and painting arts and
technologies in the fine arts and ethnographic literature.
In developing five primary architectural types, Fowler modelled what
constitutes Melanesian Traditional Architecture in Papua New Guinea, with
each type based on distinct concepts of form-making and tectonic technique,
and the potential for spawning many sub-types and variations generated
through expressive or decorative elaboration.45 Fowler’s typology is based on
the idea of tectonic languages (weaving and binding) and syntactic (form/space)
vocabularies. His premise is that preoccupation with weaving and binding
stands out in the artistic production of everyday items such as wrist bands,
bag, mats and so forth, of almost all Melanesian societies. The character of a
number of the genotypic roof forms can be defined as woven three-dimensional
basketlike frames, although Fowler notes that one is closer to South-East Asian
structural traditions.
These definitions of indigenous architecture draw on or reference cultural
constructs of space and time, which are the subject of a number of the SAHANZ
papers. Andersen discounts certain architectural theorists and historians (e.g.
Fletcher, Alan Colquhoun) as having separated “modern” society from the
so-called “primitive” world, the latter fictionalised as existing in a vacuum of
timelessness. She notes that the crude colonial assumption of primitive cultures
being grounded in timelessness ‘stood as an obstacle for Maori architecture for
some time.’46 Indigenous traditions were thus reified, stifling any understanding
of ever-present cultural change processes, and intimidating any evolving
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conceptualisation, so valued in Euro-American architectural discourse, in the
realm of indigenous environments.
This failure to incorporate cross-cultural constructs of time and space into an
understanding of architecture has been discussed by a number of authors. For
example, Bill McKay writes:
the Maori space and time construct can be thought of more like a constellation with
the past and the people of the past always felt in the present, like the constellations
of the sky – enmeshing, surrounding – always before you, always behind, forming
patterns that can be interpreted in various ways.47
In considering the life-cycle of Maori meeting houses (aging, decaying, rebuilding
and adaption), McKay notes that Maori re-building cements social relations
and ensures the transfer of skills with an invariable change of form. He explains
this as a process of cultural revitalisation and positions modern Euro-American
architectural notions of permanence and durability against the mutable,
flexible, adaptive nature of Pacific building. Central to McKay’s argument is the
acknowledgement of how time, memory, embodiment and ornament, rather than
form and structure, order Maori architecture. McKay and Walmsley position this
building cycle within inter-generational “building time”; they describe the process
as reflecting Maori concepts of cyclical or “resonant” time.48
Austin suggests that buildings can look both to the past and to the future in a
double temporal-architectural process, and interprets the Maori meeting house
as drawing on dynamic notions of tradition while representing a vision of hope
for a stable future.49 This conforms to the Maori concept of cyclic time in which
‘events of the past determine those of the future’.50 In this regard, both Fantin (on
Aboriginal architecture) and McKay (on Maori) speak of the seasonal and cyclical
uses of different dwellings and alternate residential sites.51
Andersen uses the Maori model of whakapapa, the tracing of genealogical
lineage and the positioning of ones self into layers of a temporal and generational
continuum, to examine changing Maori architectural tradition. She contends
that from ‘the mid 19th Century onwards, European arrival in New Zealand can
be seen as a catalyst for a transformation in Maori building use and settlement
patterns.’52 Andersen analyses the architectural lineage of the Maori settlement of
Pukekaraka as ‘an evolving built environment, where new parts draw inspiration
from the past, yet never stagnate’.53 Wood’s 2000 paper “The Maori Land Occupation Structures of
Waikaremoana, New Zealand” presents a contemporary example of the
manipulation of the definition of architecture by New Zealand’s mainstream
politicians to legitimate the removal of temporary structures built by the Tuhoe
tribe during their occupation of land in the Urewera National Park on the shores
of Lake Waikaremoana. Wood compares the Tuhoe structures with the Pakeha
founding myth of “Man Alone” to show Man Alone as a resourceful pioneer
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who is able to build himself a small dwelling (a bach) in the face of enormous
obstacles, taming the New Zealand landscape.54 In contrast, structures of a
similar scale that are deemed to be illegitimately occupying the landscape were
legitimately removed.
One common architectural myth is based on the racist premise that Western
versions of the built environment are necessarily ‘advanced’ formal expressions,
while that of so called ‘native peoples’ is merely primitive, indeed not architecture
at all. This (Western) preconception points not only to difficulties of reconciling
cultural difference, but also brings into question the wider cultural assumptions that
shape the institutional structure of architecture itself.55
Representation of Indigeneity, In and Through Architecture
The following discussion is broken into a number of sub-themes that fall under
the banner of the representation of indigeneity, in and through architecture.
The way in which the architectures of indigenous peoples reflect their specific
cultural milieus is multiform, and relates to: the encoding of meanings into
architecture and place; religious beliefs and values as generators of architecture;
cultural change processes in architecture; interpretation of changing architectural
traditions; and the indigeneity of metropolitan settings. These themes are not
exhaustive but have been purposefully selected as broad categories under which
the majority of papers and articles written for the SAHANZ community can be
placed.
1. Encoding Meanings into Architecture and Place
A number of papers written for SAHANZ conferences and Fabrications are
concerned with the encoding of indigenous meanings into contemporary
architectural and planning designs, their juxtaposition and contrast with
non-indigenous meanings and the subsequent bicultural (or multicultural)
significance of such statements. An architectural icon that receives recurring
attention in this regard is Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand
(Wellington, JASMAX, finished 1998).56 A number of papers treat the topic of
clarity versus ambiguity in the cultural meaning of symbols embedded symbols
in the museum’s architecture. Linzey, for example, addresses this topic by
invoking philosophical theories of signs or metaphors that reference pan-Maori
identity, like that of the fault-line wall. He approaches Te Papa with tools drawn
from Greek Stoicism, Plato and C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs. (Memmott has
elsewhere drawn on Peirce’s theory of signs for analyzing Aboriginal meanings in
environmental constructs.57)
Curiously, there are no contributions to SAHANZ publications on other
recent national architectural icons designed and built in the region despite their
strong indigenous references, specifically the National Museum of Australia in
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Figure 6: The vaulted platform
dwelling of Arnhem Land
(northern Australia) provides
a symbolic vehicle for
Aboriginal sacred history.
Photography by Nicolas Peterson.
Canberra with its precinct sibling building, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Ashton Raggatt McDougall, finished 2001),
or the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Culture Centre in New Caledonia (Renzo Piano
Building Workshop, finished 1998).58 One challenge for the designer of national
indigenous icon buildings is to find readily communicable architectural signs
of pan-tribal significance that transcend those local and regional meanings that
might be interpreted as privileging one group.59 A problem that also surfaces in
Brown’s analysis of Maori education architecture is how to appropriately design
Maori Studies centres in tertiary educational institutions (and even to name such
complexes) for Maori students from multi-tribal backgrounds, given the lack of
precedence in cross-iwi kaupapa (tribal protocols) or tikanga (customs) that are
normally firmly embedded in local group traditions, identities and symbols.60 She
asks: should or can any one tribe’s protocols be observed?
The meaning of indigenous places is a recurring theme in SAHANZ papers on
Aboriginal Australian themes. Ursula de Jong’s 2006 paper “Contested Terrain:
Point Nepean Victoria” discusses the difference between Aboriginal and whiteAustralian place values.61 Through a discussion of meanings, stories and memories
in landscape, De Jong’s account analyses a land tenure dispute in the Point Nepean
National Park in Victoria between the dominant mainstream Australian government
and the traditional owners. De Jong argues for a holistic approach to landscape,
place and country in uncovering, decoding and understanding the conflicting
respective meanings of natural heritage and cultural heritage. In underscoring the
importance of Aboriginal place values, de Jong uses a description by Deborah Bird
Rose to explain that place ‘requires you to be intercultural, inter-temporal, openminded to the imperatives of the lives that are lived.’ She continues:
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Figure 7: A contemporary
application of sacred symbolism in
an Aboriginal house designed for
a Galawin’ku client in 2001 who
requested the verandah detail to
symbolise the forked post and ridge
pole associated with a Galpu Fish
Trap ancestral history.
Photography by architect Richard Layton.
From an Aboriginal perspective, Rose explains the Australian continent is
crisscrossed with the tracks of the Dreamings: waking, slithering, crawling, flying,
chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving birth … making relationships … The
multi faceted relationships are holistic … [I]n the context of nourishing terrains
… holistic systems are open to accommodation of that which is new … Aboriginal
systems of philosophy and ecology accommodate the new according to the logic of
the country.62
In her essay “Remote Control,” Angelique Edmonds also discusses the gulf of
ideological difference existing between Aboriginal people and the Australian
Federal Government in the provision of housing and settlement planning in the
community of Ngukurr in northeast Arnhem Land.63 She writes:
Aboriginal people and the conditions of country in the Ngukurr region still favour
a mobile lifestyle, yet the provision of services assumes that populations will be
sedentary … [All of the technological infrastructure] sourced outside of Ngukurr,
indicate that the style of living permanently in that particular location has long
since ceased to be a response to the [local] place; to the conditions present and the
constraints and opportunities that place offers.64 By way of contrast, Long’s 2002 paper examines the retention of Aboriginal
place properties in a north-west Queensland setting despite a degree of
urbanisation.65 Long studies a remote, riverine Aboriginal people who continue
to move between temporarily established bush camps and conventional AngloAustralian housing in a rural township, transformed and adapted to suit
customary aspects of lifestyle. These two contexts respectively demonstrate the
postcolonial continuity and adaptation of customary “architectural” practices
in traditional places, and the simultaneous use of urban Western houses with
special yard “attachments” to facilitate customary outdoor behaviour patterns.
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O’Rourke’s contribution is more purely ethnographic, and his findings on
the semi-sedentary villages of Aboriginal rainforest camps will contribute to the
revision of Australian architectural stereotypes.66 There is much more variation in
the extent of sedentary settlement versus residential mobility than was formerly
portrayed in earlier ethnographic glosses of Aboriginal Australia, which held that
the continent was peopled exclusively with hunter-gatherer nomads. A national
overview of Aboriginal architecture by Memmott strongly hypothesises that
semi-sedentary villages were formed in places where abundant seasonal staples
were available. This was particularly so if there was also inclement weather that
necessitated durable weatherproof residences and a need for protected indoor
environments in which one could stand up and move between inner-connected
spaces with minimal discomfort.67 O’Rourke’s work is also interesting as it may be
applied to the discussion surrounding cultural tourism through the reconstruction
of one or more sedentary villages at customary campsites on rainforest walking
paths. A number of these paths are currently being reconstructed by National
Parks in collaboration with Traditional Owners.
In the context of SAHANZ, and painting with broad strokes, Australian
authors appear to have been preoccupied with contextualising architecture within
the surrounding properties of place, while New Zealanders seem to have focused
more on the encoding of meanings into buildings.
2. Religious Beliefs and Values as Generators of Architecture
Religion has been a potent generator of architecture in western cultures, and
we find from the SAHANZ contributions that it similarly pervades indigenous
architectures. In Aboriginal Australia, religious knowledge and practice was,
and within many groups continues to be, one of the more complex dimensions
of culture that was integrated with both the secular and profane dimensions of
everyday life. The system of religious knowledge evolved to explain and even
direct or influence environmental changes and transformations. Belief systems
involve a configuration of human environmental elements that are believed to
be interconnected in a variety of ways, often through systems of environmental
signs and indices, as well as through a spatio-temporal model of the universe
and notions of visible and invisible phenomena. In addition the model carries
with it codes of behaviour or “laws”, determining norms of social and territorial
behaviour. Identity is defined within a cognitive domain of place-specific
knowledge and invisible properties of place.
Fantin’s 2002 paper gives an overview of the relation between religion and
architecture for the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia.68 She
considers the sacred history of the ancestral Wagilag sisters of the Dreamtime in
which structural elements of the house (forked post and ridge pole) were imbued
with religious significance providing a constant reminder of ones cosmological
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position in the Yolngu universe (Fig 6). Fantin examines the creation of Yolngu
religious architecture through ceremony as a creative synthesis of song, dance,
performance, painting, ground sculptures, ceremonial artefacts, poles, and
shelters, which become imbued with ancestral power, thus constituting a
temporary religious architecture which contains “ancestral aesthetic” qualities.
She presents the idea of the ceremonial Elders as architects creating a form of
religious architecture:
Preparing the ground for ceremonies, creating the appropriate structures to be
used in them, and enacting the song and dance in them is a highly ordered process
which is controlled and directed by particular Yolngu elders; they are the architects
of the ceremony. The processes required to organise, prepare and build ceremony
grounds, and then invoke an ancestor’s presence and power through song and
dance creates a Yolngu religious architecture.69
Fantin argues that any construct of Yolngu architecture would need to
incorporate an understanding of the relationship between the structure of
Yolngu cosmology and human social identity. Elsewhere she has written:
that in particular Indigenous regions such as Arnhem Land contemporary
Indigenous people continue to interweave their ethnoarchitectural, spatiobehavioural and religious traditions with Western architectural components in
their commentaries and that this is slowly evolving into a truly modern Aboriginal
Architecture, one which will provide a substantial contribution to the future
Australian identity and global cultural heritage.70 Many of the New Zealand SAHANZ scholars have examined the architectural
consequences of early contact between European missionaries and Maori and
other Polynesian peoples.71 Andersen writes on the appropriation of Catholic
concepts learned from French Marist missionaries into Maori architecture at the
settlement of Pukekaraka. She describes the meeting house of Hino:
Hine Nui o Te Ao Katoa was built in 1905. The name incorporates references to
both Hine-nui-te-po, the first woman in Maori mythology, and Mary, mother
of Jesus. Various meanings are given to the name of this whare [house]. The
translation given by Archdiocese publication on the site is ‘Mary, Great Woman
of the Whole World, Woman of Light’. They also state that the reason the whare
is uncarved and undecorated is because it is dedicated to an ancestor common to
both Maori and Pakeha [Anglo New Zealand]. Although uncarved on the exterior,
Hine fits the general plan of a traditional whare, except it has a centrally placed
door with windows on either side…Hine [is] described as the result of ‘partnership
between the Maori and the European Peoples’.72
Following Brown’s work, Andersen categorises her Maori examples as forms of
counter-colonisation.
All of the forms of appropriation used by these [Maori] leaders can be seen
as movements towards meeting the new and changing needs of a people, and
adapting new concepts to fit into an authentic Maori world. The strong adaptability
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shown through the appropriation of colonial architectural forms, and resistance to
pure assimilation shows the Maori as highly progressive, which has until recently
been taken for granted by scholars.73 These types of case studies dealing with religious architecture introduce the
theme of cultural change processes, which pervade many of the New Zealand
papers and contribute significantly to post-colonial knowledge of architecture.
3. Cultural Change Processes in Architecture
Within the study of cultural change, anthropologists have identified a range of
types of change processes, although this field of study is by no means coherent
or unified, and much integration of the theory remains to be done. Many
SAHANZ papers concerned with indigenous or bicultural themes address
processes of syncretism, and contribute to an understanding of cross-cultural
architectural exchanges, “borrowings” and appropriations, which result in
transformations of architectural meanings and built configurations.74 Authors
have been preoccupied with biculturalism and bicultural architecture. For
example, the 2002 papers of Fantin and McKay both employ the term “bicultural
architecture” as a syncretisation of customary and western elements. Elsewhere
Linzey defined “biculturalism” as the phenomenon of two cultures co-occupying
one place.75 Also in 2002 Austin addressed the concept of “hybrid architecture”.76
Bicultural architecture might appear to make sense as a label in a relatively
simple political context of two-way non-directed change between two groups
whereby both groups accept and acculturate something of the other’s cultural
tradition as products. Good-quality empirical studies, however, powerfully
illustrate that such exchanges are often more complex processes that may
challenge the theoretical usefulness of the term “bicultural”. We shall return to
this point in due course.
Again at the 2002 Brisbane conference, Refiti writes on the appropriation of
the European Christian church as an architecture and a liturgy by Samoans in
the nineteenth century.77 This was accomplished within a Polynesian worldview
with neither a comprehensive understanding of Christian culture nor an
attempt to authentically create a facsimile Christian religion; Christian ideas
were adapted selectively and integrated with local customs as these churches
became local idealised versions of Christian spirituality. Refiti then analyses the
transposition of that construction form to the contemporary urban context of
New Zealand by a non-indigenous New Zealand architect who attempted to use
it to reflect a Pacific identity. What might be finally read as ‘Pacific architecture,
is a New Zealand European architect’s fantasy of what a Pacific heavenly
paradise might be, based on a Pacific fantasy on what a European missionary
paradise might be.’ Refiti describes the overall process of transformation of
architectural properties as ‘a double movement of cross-cultural exchanges’.78
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Figures 8 & 9 (detail): Maori Battalion War Memorial Community Centre,
Palmerston North, New Zealand, by John Scott opened 1964.
Photographs by John Macarthur, 2005. Reproduced with permission.
McKay also writes on appropriation, but in this case by colonists of
selected indigenous architectural stereotypes. He examines the stereotyping
of Maori architecture by Anglo-New Zealanders through the media of politics,
museums and texts into a single genotype, that of the whare. Any post-contact
architectural acculturation in Maori architecture was seen by colonists to
represent a loss of indigenous identity and to be somehow inauthentic. He
asserts:
This paper discusses the perception of ‘Maori architecture’ as it has been seen in
the mainstream narrative of New Zealand architectural history. It offers a critical
overview of buildings by Maori from the perspective of their portrayal in New
Zealand architectural histories. It is not so much about the buildings themselves,
but rather the processes of selection and representation and how this has reflected
the political and cultural concerns of the times.79 McKay provides architectural examples of the mixing of Pakeha and Maori
motifs by Maori builder-architects as a distinctly New Zealand form of bicultural
expression, and certainly not as an outcome of assimilation. Brown extends
McKay’s analysis by projecting forwards from the era of western museumcontrolled depictions and stereotypes of Maori meeting houses to contemporary
depictions and constructions of the same building completed by tertiary-trained
Maori artists and curators.80 The latter examples are for art gallery settings
where artists and curators are empowered to express Maori cultural values on
their own terms. Brown also mentions the relatively recent repatriation of a
meeting house to a Maori group from whom it was originally commissioned,
once again demonstrating a cycle of the transformation and dissemination
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of an architectural construct between two groups. The combination of these
three papers from the 2002 conference provides an insightful overview of the
transformation of architectural constructs over several hundred years within a
Polynesian context of colonial encounter.
McKay’s analysis of two buildings by architect John Scott, dating from
the 1960s, offers further consideration of the concept of architectural
biculturalism.81 He starts by defining “integration” as the incorporation of
one cultural group into the dominant monoculture with no reciprocal shift to
recognise the former group’s cultural position. This process corresponds to
the more commonly employed term “assimilation”. By contrast, he employs
“bicultural” as a sharing or blending of two cultures on more or less equal
terms whereby two sets of elements are fused together, but both remain overtly
recognisable.
In “Half-Caste or Bicultural?” McKay comments on a famous example of this
balance: the Futuna Chapel in Wellington was completed in 1961 and designed
by Scott, of Maori and Pakeha descent. It is arguably the best successful example
of bicultural New Zealand architecture. This Chapel was designed for a retreat
centre for Catholic men and women, a complex that included facilities for
worship, reflection, counselling, dining and sleeping. Scott drew on the analogy
of the Maori marae courtyard, designing the chapel as the equivalent of the
meeting house within the marae.82 Although antecedents and stylistic influences
can be seen in European ecclesiological architecture, Scott drew on the New
Zealand vernacular timber traditions of barn and woolshed, and on his own
Maori traditions. The Chapel integrated the Polynesian model of symbolising the
building as a person with Catholic traditions through at least three techniques:
(a) the altar has an inset of a bone fragment of the first Pacific martyr, St. Pierre
Chanel, emphasising its sacrificial nature; (b) the porch in Maori mythology
‘carries human dimensions of homage and reception’, signifying the human
welcome, and marking the transition from the marae to the meeting house,
from body to soul; and (c) the central post represents the soul of the person, also
symbolism drawn from Maori mythology.
In this same paper, however, McKay points to a second possible outcome
of dual cultural influences, which he labels “half-caste”, whereby there is an
uncomfortable sharing of cultural elements with an architectural result that
belongs to neither one nor the other, that lacks a coherence from either cultural
perspective, and which may even undermine or debase the donor cultures. He
uses Scott’s Maori Battalion Memorial Building in Palmerston North (1964) to
illustrate this outcome and goes so far as to hint (following Wood) that Te Papa
may also fall into this category in its attempt to represent bicultural nationalism.
Treadwell’s 1991 analysis of Rangiatea demonstrates a similar outcome. The
church has been subject to two distinct cultural readings: as a church adapted
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for Maori, and as a Maori meeting house adapted as a church. Its construction
was fraught with a struggle for control over design between church officials
and Maori craftsmen-builders. For example, Maori carving style predominated
during the Archdeacon’s absence, but upon his return to the building site
its application was restrained due to its un-Christian themes; and when the
Maori workers shaped a 26-metre-long symbolic ridge pole (tahu) – which
they nevertheless considered too short – a missionary arose in the middle
of the night to saw three metres off it! Treadwell also makes it clear that the
respective interpretations depend as much on cultural contextualisation as they
do on highlighting particular architectural elements or decorative features. She
concludes that as a meeting house Rangiatea lacks a porch, and as a church it
lacks a chancel; it ‘lacks the forms considered to be essential to [either of] the
[two] models’.The end result was that Maori architecture became concentrated
within, whilst the architecture of the colonisers was imposed on the exterior, to
make the building ‘safe and consumable’ in keeping with the early colonial policy
of containment and assimilation.83 The architectural result was an example of
bicultural ambiguity and tension rather than of harmonious integration.
What might seem a fairly simple procedural analysis of how missionaries
imposed and adapted British church designs for Pacific Island communities in
an assimilative approach may take on added bicultural complexity if sufficient
contextual data can be collected and assembled for analysis. At the 1998
SAHANZ conference, Treadwell presented a paper on the architecture imposed
by mid-nineteenth century English missionaries in three of the southern Cook
Islands. The buildings were constructed of timber with wattle and mud plastered
walls and coated with whitewash (manufactured from coral lime) to symbolise
a range of Christian attributes centring on purity, chastity, and virtuousness.
Traditional woven architectures were displaced, as was carving, and symbols of
perceived paganism such as the marae podia. This colonial imposition could be
interpreted as directed cultural change with the adaptation of English chapel
architecture using locally sourced materials.
However, in 2005, Budgett presented another paper on church building in
the southern Cook Islands with a focus on one of these three islands (Mangaia),
which provides a more complex picture of cultural change processes and
the transformation of architectural traditions.84 She commences with an
investigation of the anthropological literature on Mangaian social and territorial
organisation, explaining a dual distribution of power with, on the one hand,
a relatively stable power base of spiritual rulers founded on hereditary right
succession and, on the other, territorial chiefs whose estates were less stable,
being transformed in size by periodic warring followed by peace rituals. The
initial acceptance of, or resistance to mission-promoted change was dictated
by whether particular chiefs wanted to freeze their existing ample territorial
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estates under a new and more stable colonial governance system, or whether
those chiefs with insufficient land wanted to repel any incoming colonial power
structure that was threatening to stabilise the current status quo, prior to their
having had opportunity to reclaim their lands. Budgett then goes on to argue
that it was a particular segment of the Mangaian who incorporated the culture
of the colonisers and that embraced a more bi-directional (or bicultural) process
of change. She shows that Mangaian social structure was incorporated into the
church through the spatial allocation of sub-groups to internal sitting spaces
and external yard areas, i.e. through sociospatial behaviour. The church was
‘reinscribed to reconstruct Mangaian identity within the whole’.85 References to
Mangaian sacred cosmogony (origin myths) were also incorporated in symbolic
ways, such as in the decorative sennit (cordage) binding with their lozenge
designs, which seem to derive from Mangaian carving and tapa cloth.
The following year (2006), Budgett again presented research on Cook Island
architecture with a critique of western approaches to heritage conservation
methods arising from the recent renovations of the Oneroa Sunday School on
Mangaia Island, one of the last remaining coral-stone, gabled, mission buildings
dating from the pre-colonial era (1879) that incorporated both European and
indigenous architectural detailing.86 Her paper transcends the New Zealand
tendency to focus on bicultural architectural elements by re-analysing the
role of the architecture in the cultural landscape and the contemporary global
society in order to explain why a Cook Islander Church Council chose to replace
the 125-year-old, post-supported, carved, sennit-lashed, timber roof-framing
with a clear-span, steel frame carrying a horizontal ceiling. Budget employs a
range of cultural change hypotheses to explain why the client group rejected an
orthodox western architectural conservation attempt to retain the indigenous
decoration. She draws upon McKay’s understanding of the cultural significance
of periodically re-building the Maori meeting house, where the activation of
social roles and networks and the transmission of skills and knowledge form
key elements in this dynamic maintenance of tradition, in which the building
form invariably changes. In the case of the Sunday School, the social network
was activated globally as ex-patriots were recruited to donate the building
funds, such ‘that building [became] a privileged activity acting to bind the wider
community into social relations and hierarchies well beyond the geography of
the islands’ in an agenda to build “new” and “modern” in an “unfolding” society
(‘cyclical notions of history and time’) but within a more stable and wider
context of an island cultural landscape of ringed, cosmologically significant
sites.87 Budgett continues to review the challenging implications for cultural
tourism and architectural conservation policies when the active role of the
subject (building user/creator) dominates the value of the object (heritage item)
in the dynamic re-interpretation of tradition.
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The work presented in Budgett’s papers is generally reflective of a number of
the themes pervading SAHANZ publications on indigenous and bicultural topics.
4. Interpretation of Changing Architectural Traditions
In considering the nature of cultural change, a number of scholars have used
SAHANZ as a venue in which to examine the construct of “tradition”. An
examination of the anthropological literature on tradition reveals two competing
theoretical paradigms for tradition as a scientific construct. In the first paradigm
one sees a tradition naturalistically, as a bounded entity made up of constituent
parts that themselves have defined properties. In this atomistic paradigm,
culture and its constituents are regarded as entities having an essence apart from
any interpretation of them. Anthropologists may prescribe, for example, which
traits are old, which are new innovations, and show how such traits fit together
to make up the abstract concepts that we call a “tradition” and a “culture”.88
An increasingly preferable definition of tradition accepts that changes occur
to traditions particularly within the processes of inter-generational transmission
and enculturation, in which ‘interpretations are made of the tradition
presented’.89 The alternate paradigm, then, is of an interpretive process: any
tradition is continually re-interpreted; unchanging traditional societies never
existed.90 Since all cultures change constantly, there can only be what is new,
although what is new can take on symbolic value as “traditional” in reference to
what is perceived as being “old”.91 Our view is that both of these paradigms of
“tradition” can usefully co-exist, and that our task in configuring a longitudinal
theory of architectural stability and change is to explore both the attributes
of cultural traits and to understand the interpretative styles and methods of
cultural participants in their daily processes of creative cultural production,
including architecture.92 Recurring comment on these issues is found in
the SAHANZ scholarship. For example Andersen (2002) emphasises that
indigenous cultures are ‘dynamic societies, in a continual process of adaptation,
choice, and constraint.’93 Austin has commented on the dynamic nature of the
construct of “architectural tradition” both in New Zealand and universally:
In Aotearoa/New Zealand tradition is continually being reinvented, and every
denial of tradition is a restatement of it while every representation of tradition is
a modification of it …. Modernism in constructing itself in opposition to its own
tradition referred to the primitive. However the primitive was the invoking of
another tradition …94
In analysing the nature of tradition in Maori architecture, the New Zealand
contributors make constant reference to three periods of architectural
“Renaissance” in recent Maori history as part of a wider cultural rejuvenation:
the development of the Maori meeting house in the period from 1850 to 1890;
the Maori Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1920s and 1930s; and the collective
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work of Maori architects in the 1970s and 1980s. All three of these periods yield
comment on the dynamic nature of “tradition” whereby it is renewed or reinvented; however, the first two periods have been best interrogated and debated
in SAHANZ literature.
In discussing tradition, the architectural focus of the New Zealand SAHANZ
scholars has been the “marae” and the “meeting house”, two terms which
are sometimes used synonymously but which in fact have distinctly different
meanings while referring to elements of the same architectural complex. Austin
adopts a definition of marae as the ‘courtyard in front of a house’, but notes a
second meaning of this Maori word to be ‘generosity’ or ‘hospitality’.95 He infers
a common root meaning of ‘openness’, and argues that the marae is the making
of openness via a horizontal platform that recreates the ocean’s horizontality for
Pacific peoples.96 Austin discusses the use of marae more generally throughout
the different Polynesian groups noting that the orientation of the marae is not
consistent but dependent on local contextual landscape/seascape attributes
(especially prevailing winds), and giving particular attention to the ahu
(equivalent of marae) of Rapa Nui (or Easter Island), which are bounded by the
moai or stone head sculptures.97 The Maori meeting house can be defined in
relation to the marae, as McKay explains:
[It] is widely considered the primary architectural form of the Maori people and
their major artistic achievement. It is a structure that has evolved from earlier chiefs
houses during European settlement of New Zealand and is a communal building set
on the marae (gathering place) for a hapu (part of the tribe) or whanau (extended
family group) to gather in. It is not a dwelling, but is used for meetings, discussions
and sleeping in by both the people of the marae and visitors during events. The
Meeting House has a long ridged roof, and consists of one large space entered
through a gabled porch. This internal space is often highly decorated with carvings,
painting and weaving, that usually represent ancestors.98 McKay puts forward the interesting case that the whare (commonly sited adjacent
to the marae) was largely a nineteenth century invention and a product of contact
with colonial immigrant society, despite its subsequent reification in museums as
a traditional building type. He argues that meeting houses were a form of Maori
modernism, ‘that they eschewed customary practice, and evolved new techniques
and forms to face the challenge of a radically changing world.’99 Austin describes
this innovation, which occurred during a severe Maori population decline in the
1870s and 1880s following the New Zealand Wars (sometimes called the Maori
Wars or the Land Wars), as ‘a most extraordinary architectural response’.100 Brown grounds the “invention of the tradition” of the meeting house in more solid
anthropological research with an assertion that it synthesised mission church,
pioneer hall and chief’s house.101 Although this type has received substantial
attention by SAHANZ scholars, it still lacks a detailed analysis of this origin.
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The second period of analysis concerning the re-interpretation of tradition
is best accessed through Brown’s analysis of the School of Maori Arts and Crafts
at Rotorua.102 This was conceived and instigated as an architectural Renaissance
from 1926 to 1937 by the Maori Member of Parliament (Labour) Sir Apirana
Ngata, who helped revive traditional carving, painting and woven panelling for
40 commissioned public buildings, but within a complex set of conflicts and
dilemmas concerning the maintenance of traditional Maori philosophy and
politics against the pressure for conformity with Government policies, and the
adaption of Maori technologies to Anglo New Zealand architectural and building
practices. Brown has further outlined the underlying anthropological debate in
New Zealand on the “invention of tradition”, concluding that this theoretical
approach facilitates architectural historians’ examination of the relation of
building types to strong nationalist or popular culturist movements, as well as
providing opportunities to analyse the dynamic attributes of the maintenance
of tradition as a process.103 She sees this as an important direction for future
architectural history research.
5. Indigeneity of Metropolitan Settings
Whilst post-modern architecture has had its biggest impact in the larger
metropolises of Oceania (e.g. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland),
it parallels a struggle to maintain indigenous identity and its associated
architectural. This theme has not escaped SAHANZ scholarship. Although
Auckland is the largest city in Polynesia with a cityscape that is largely
European in origin, the Polynesian 20% of its 1.5 million inhabitants do not
necessarily utilise houses and suburbs as its western architects and planners
envisaged. Through an analysis of contemporary New Zealand cine films, Austin
demonstrates that Polynesian domiciliary practices are likely to be transferred
in metropolitan settings to, for examples, an externally oriented use of space,
outdoor cooking practices, the use of certain external doors by specific people
in particular household roles, and abandonment of buildings following the
death of a householder.104 This is an exceptional paper in that few Australasian
researchers are concerned with profiling indigenous people in metropolitan
settings. An Australian correlate is the work of Kelly Greenop (of UQ’s AERC)
who has been examining the “tribalisation” of urban space and place by
Aboriginal people in Brisbane.105
At the 2006 SAHANZ conference in Fremantle, Glen Hill presented a
paper entitled “Dreaming the Block: Three Decades of Architectural Imagining
for Redfern’s Indigenous Community,” concerning the political history and
indigeneity of a one hectare parcel of land close to the central business distract
of Australia’s most urban metropolitan centre, Sydney. “The Block”, as it is
commonly called, is one of Australia’s most contested urban landscapes, being
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103
a national symbol and microcosm of the struggle for indigenous rights in
Australia. Hill’s paper addresses the recent history of the Block from the early
1970s, when the local Aboriginal community first took formal ownership over
this medium density residential area following the political momentum of the
1967 referendum that recognized Aboriginal citizenship, as well as a change
from a conservative to a liberal socialist government. The paper examines
the role that architecture, in representing a vision of indigeneity, has played
across three decades of political processes, as Aboriginal people have resisted
takeovers by the dominant mainstream political forces vying for control over
its highly valuable precinct. Hill’s paper presents the three major periods
(called “Architectural Dreamings”) that represent ‘waves of self destruction
and renewal’ accompanied by different social and architectural visions for the
Aboriginal people of the The Block in response to metropolitan politics and
the struggle for cultural survival.
The three architectural visions for the Block thus evidence an unfolding from
an inward looking, cooperative image of Aboriginal communality, perhaps
reflective of the innocence and naïve optimism of the 1960s and 70s, to an
aggressively open and outward facing image of cosmopolitanism, reflecting
the commercial and political imperatives of the moment .… While this shift
parallels that occurring in wider society, it is the litany of contestations
– contestations within the Aboriginal community between community
members with different outlooks, beliefs, genders, family affiliations; personal
contestations with alcohol, drugs and crime; contestation with developers;
contestation with (at different times) all three tiers of government – that
has made the woes of Redfern Aboriginal community such a visible public
commodity.106
Returning to the New Zealand contributors, Austin’s “Pacific Building”
examines indigenous tourism and the resultant re-construction of “tradition”
through a hybrid of traditional and international architecture that facilitates
new syntheses. He provides the example of Polynesian environments created
in the post-war United States, albeit from a mixed number of sources, and
their emergent behavioural cultures. Some of the results from the 1950s,
which were exported back to Hawaii and Tahiti, have been subsequently
identified in the United States as heritage architecture.
One of the relatively new building types to appear on the campuses of
Australian and New Zealand tertiary educational institutions campuses
over the last 20 years is the Indigenous Studies Centre or Unit – in New
Zealand, the Maori Studies Centre. Brown makes a valuable practice
contribution in her review of some ten or so Nga Whare Matauronga
Maori or Maori Studies buildings as a relatively new architectural type
that must address both indigenous and Western educational philosophies
in nurturing Maori students.107 She outlines a range of challenging design
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problems including the balance between academic and cultural space, and the
planning of spaces to conform with Maori concepts of tapu (sacred, restricted,
protected, prohibited) and noa (free from taboo). Unfortunately there is no
corresponding analysis to date by any Australian researcher despite a similar
number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Centres being
realised on Australian campuses. A further critical issue that Brown raises,
based on user responses and Post Occupancy Evaluation,(POE) is that the
development of these centres with a set of strong traditional identity symbols
is appreciated and utilised more by rural and more traditionally orientated
students rather than urban born and raised Maori who may have a greater
sense of tribal and cultural alienation.108 This finding indicates the importance
of fine-grained user response surveys in POEs of cross-cultural architecture.
*
Over the last 25 years, SAHANZ researchers have departed from a EuroAmerico-centric preoccupation with the region’s historiography to embrace a
broadening set of cross-cultural themes that move beyond commentary about
the influences of indigenous groups on transported colonial architectural
styles from the 1800s to more complex issues about the representation of
indigenous cultural identity in contemporary architecture and the processes
of cultural change and transforming indigenous architectural traditions.
Gradual infusion into the debate of scholarly contributions from such
disciplines as architectural anthropology, cultural studies, colonial and postcolonial history, political history and fine arts has culminated in a sustained
revisionism of what architecture is in the South Pacific area and how crosscultural theory may serve the region’s architectural production in a socially
and environmentally appropriate manner, reflecting the ongoing presence and
cultural significance of first peoples.
These SAHANZ papers are specifically oriented toward scholars of
Pacific Rim indigenous cultures and their building traditions, in order to
progress the debate regarding the human values of these traditions and
what they represent by way of contrast to western constructs of architecture.
A general sub-theme running through this collection of papers is how one
might configure a theoretical framework of “architecture” that would serve
as a cross-cultural tool for understanding the nature of constructed and
composed environments used as human habitats across all cultural contexts.
An extension of this question would be why the Euro-American concept
of “architecture” has so far not achieved such a unifying position, at times
excluding non-Euro-American and indigenous building traditions.
Parallelling the shift within SAHANZ from strictly canonic architectural
historiography to the inter-relation of history and architectural theory, the
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105
Society’s discourse on indigenous culture and architecture is thus developing
into a strong voice within the region’s architectural culture. The greatest body
of indigenous architectural research over the last 25 years, however, has been
delivered at SAHANZ conferences (some 74 papers), rather than in the more
visible outlet of the Society’s journal, Fabrications (some 15 articles). Of these
15 articles (spread across 24 issues), Austin (4) and Linzey (2) were the most
prolific indigenous-focused authors to publish in this high-ranking journal.
These statistics illustrate that SAHANZ is not immune to the wider debate in
architectural research and teaching,regarding the acceptance and definition of
“other” architectures. We contend that it would be fruitful to publish indigenous
architecture related research on a more frequent basis in Fabrications to
provoke debate on cross-cultural architectural values, theories and aesthetics
and to promote the adoption of a clear post-colonial perspective on architectural
history discourse in the wider architectural cultures of Australia and New
Zealand (as well as in Europe and North America). Indeed, there is a wider need
to reflect on how the political, social and aesthetic biases of the post-colonial
societies of our region inform and prejudice the political economy of architecture
and architectural publishing.
One of the most interesting observations arising from a reading and
comparison of the indigenous literature published by SAHANZ is the difference
in ideological positions between New Zealand and Australian architectural
scholars. We believe the historical cultural and social contexts in which these
scholars have been working has heavily influenced the respective positions: New
Zealander maintaining a focus on issues surrounding the concept of “bicultural
architecture” through the vehicle of a narrow number of built archetypes;
Australians focussing on place and identity representation when discussing
Aboriginal settings.
In looking at the historical context of New Zealand, Austin’s early work
in the 1970s about Maori marae and meeting houses is heavily referenced by
subsequent New Zealand authors. His work appears to have led the renaissance
of “bicultural” architectural theory in New Zealand since the 1970s. A critical
observation, from an Australian perspective, is whether or not the Treaty
of Waitangi has actually worked for indigenous representations in the New
Zealand architectural context, or against them. With the nature of architecture
being to create public and private representations of collective human
identities, questions arise as to whether or not the Treaty has indeed provided
a balanced philosophical framework that has been adopted into architecture
as biculturalism in a modern era. Has biculturalism resulted in a maintenance
of Maori culture and identity or has this concept led to a reification of Maori
identity representation in New Zealand architecture? These questions remain for
SAHANZ to debate.
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It appears that the Pakeha acceptance of Maori architectural traditions
was due to the Maori having building and settlement systems that could be
easily grasped in British terms. This sits in contrast to the Australian context
where European invaders deemed Aboriginal territory Terra Nullius, devoid
of observable land tenure as well as of building and settlement systems. The
irony of this observation is that the Aboriginal occupation and the evolution
of its cultural fit to the environment was some 60 millennia longer than that
of Maori. Did the fact that Maori have an architectural tradition (alongside
developed concepts of trade and exchange) more aligned with European
traditions influence their decision to offer a treaty to the local Maori?
Regardless of the answer, the different definitions of landed property and
architectural context between Australia and New Zealand have informed
separate national theoretical paths in architectural historiography.
Perhaps both can learn from each other. The value of the New Zealand
perspective to the Australian context seems to be the more widespread
acceptance of a definition of architecture that incorporates and is congruent
with indigenous building traditions. Austin’s work has greatly assisted this,
as have the active professional and academic participation of Maori architects
since the 1960s. It has, however, only been with the recent publication of
Memmott’s Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley that an Australian scholar has
systematically attempted to redress this theoretical imbalance. The conclusion
to Memmott’s book briefly outlines the emergence of the first conventionally
qualified Aboriginal architects in Australia from the mid 1990s (graduates
include two SAHANZ authors, Go-Sam and O’Brien). Maori architects – like
John Scott, Bill Royal and his son Perry Royal, Rewi Thompson and Rau
Hoskins, not to mention their late nineteenth century predecessor, Te Kooti
– a have made their impact in the New Zealand profession over a much longer
time, and this is reflected in the SAHANZ scholarship. That the histories of
scholarship of indigenous peoples experiencing colonisation are parallel and
separable has likewise affected the historiography of the two cases, Australia
and New Zealand, both inside SAHANZ and out.
Thus, from our reading of the SAHANZ literature it appears that the
first proposition in both the Australian and New Zealand contexts has
been whether or not to accept (as in mainstream New Zealand), or to resist
(more the case in mainstream Australia), a definition of architecture that
encompasses indigenous building traditions. If accepted, the second step,
which is heavily addressed in the New Zealand SAHANZ literature, is the
representation of indigeneity in architecture. While New Zealand historians
and theorists work with a framework of biculturality, Australian authors work
with identity and place, and appear to have assumed that place theory, as
an adjunct to the lack of a wider acceptance of an indigenous architectural
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
107
definition, provides a way forward for Australian architectural practitioners
who wish to incorporate an Aboriginal component into their design process
and product. Both approaches attract multiple modes of criticality, implicating
issues of cultural history and relationship to the politics of nationalism and
reconciliation, as well as to methods of historical analysis.
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NOTES
James Davidson presented a version of this paper to the 61st Annual Meeting of the SAH at
Cincinnati, April 2008; as did Memmott at the 25th annual conference of SAHANZ, “History
in Practice” Geelong, July 2008. A draft appeared in the proceedings of the latter, which were
edited by David Beynon & Ursula de Jong.
1. Conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand have
been held annually since 1984. The current analysis, however, does not include any relevant
papers that may have been delivered in the third (1986) SAHANZ Conference, since no
proceedings from this conference have been located by the authors.
2. Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand was first published in 1989. From 1989 to 1999 (inclusive, vols. 1-10), one volume was
published per year each comprising one issue, except in the case of vols. 2 & 3 which were
published as a double issue. From 2000-01, one volume (vol. 11) was published, comprising
two issues over the two years. From 2002-07, one volume was published per year (vols. 1217), comprising two issues per year. The journal thus totals 17 volumes and 24 issues to date
(1989-2007).
3. Kevin Pope & John Terrell, “Environmental Setting of Human Migrations in the CircumPacific Region,” Journal of Biogeography 35 (2008): 1-21.
4. Nigel Prickett, Maori Origins, from Asia to Aotearoa (Auckland: David Bateman Ltd. &
Auckland War Memorial Museum, 2001), 16, 17.
5. Of the Austronesian language areas, the only ones not covered in this current regional
analysis are Mayotte Island off Madagascar and pockets of the interior of Indo-China
(Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.).
6. For example, see Paul Oliver, Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Yuan Lim Jee, The Malay House:
Rediscovering Malaysia’s Indigenous Shelter System (Pulau Pinang: Institut Masyarakat,
1987); Roger Boulay, La Maison Kanak (Marseille: Editions Parèntheses, 1990); Roxana
Waterson, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Singapore
& London: Thames & Hudson, 1997); James Fox, Inside Austronesian Houses: Perspectives
on Domestic Design for Living (Canberra: Department of Anthropology in association with the
Comparative Austronesian Project, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University, 1993); Janet Carsten & Stephen Hugh-Jones, About the House: Lèvi-Strauss and
Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
7. Julia Gatley, “SAHANZ: The First 20 Years, 1984-2004,” Fabrications 13, no. 2 (2004): 63-87.
8. Mike Austin, “Elgin in the South Pacific: The Work of Mack Ruff,” Fabrications 11, no. 2
(2001): iii-x.
9. Wallace Ruff & Ruth Ruff, “The Village Studies Program for the Recording of Traditional
Architecture,” in Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, ed. Nancy
Lutkehaus (Bathurst: Robert Brown and Associates, 1990); Martin Fowler, “Colonial
Architecture’s Fraught Grappling with Melanesian Traditions,” in In the Making: Architecture’s
Past: The Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, Darwin, Australia, September/October 2001, ed. Kevin Green
(Darwin: SAHANZ, 2001), 84-100.
10. Deidre Brown, “Post-European and Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New
Zealand,” in Formulation Fabrication: The Architecture of History: The Proceedings of the
Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, November, 2000, ed. Andrew Leach & Emina Petrovic
(Wellington: SAHANZ, 2000), 15-21.
11. Peter Wood, “The Maori Land Occupation Structures of Waikaremoana, New Zealand,” in
Formulation Fabrication, ed. Leach & Petrovic, 163-68.
12. Mike Austin, “Landscape and the New Zealand Maori,” Landscape and 20th Century
Urban Design in Australasia (Canberra: SAHANZ & Australian National University, 1989), 5258.
13. For a much later ethnographic case study of the Gate Pa near Tauranga in the Bay of
Plenty, New Zealand, see Sarah Treadwell, “Images of Gate Pa,” In Contested Terrains:
Proceedings of the XXIII Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, Fremantle, Western Australia, September 29-October 2, 2006,
ed. Terrance McMinn, John Stephens & Steve Basson (Fremantle: SAHANZ, 2006), 557-62.
Mike Austin argues that the pa is the iconic New Zealand monument in “Kiwi Architecture:
Modernism Recycled,” Fabrications 14, nos. 1&2 (2004): iii-ix.
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
109
14. Paul Memmott & Carroll Go-Sam, “Australian Indigenous Architecture: Its Forms and
Evolution,” in Thresholds: Papers of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Society of
Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Launceston and Hobart, Australia, 1999,
ed. Richard Blythe & Rory Spence (Launceston: SAHANZ, 1999), 233-40.
15. Mike Austin, “Watery Ground: Island Architecture,” in On What Ground(s)?, ed. Sean
Pickersgill & Peter Scriver (Adelaide: SAHANZ, 1997), 9-14; “Navigational Maps and
Architectural Mappings,” in Thresholds, ed. Blythe & Spence, 9-12; and “Pacific Island
Architecture,” Fabrications 11, no. 2 (2001): 13-19.
16. See, for example, Austin “Pacific Island Architecture,” 13; and Memmott & Go-Sam,
“Australian Indigenous Architecture,” 235.
17. Gatley, “SAHANZ,” 67, 68.
18. Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley: Australian Aboriginal Architecture (St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 2007). See Appendix for a guide to this work.
19. In Australia, much work on South-East Asian architecture has already been accomplished
alongside the limited efforts of SAHANZ by the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern
Architecture (CAMEA) founded in 1997 by Dr Samer Akkach and his colleagues at the School
of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design of the University of Adelaide.
20. Paul Memmott, “From the ’Curry to the ’Weal: Aboriginal Town Camps and Compounds
of the Western Back-Blocks,” David Saunders Memorial Keynote Lecture to Sarsparella to
Muckadilla: A Conference on Towns in Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, September 30,
1994; published in Fabrications 7 (1996): 1-50.
21. There was also a paper on Rastafarian architecture in Jamaica and another on Chittagong
Hill Tracts in Bangladesh. See Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, “Fabricating a Space and an
Architecture: The Rastafarian Experience of Jamaica”; and Glen Hill & Kabita Chakma, “Using
Architectural History to Invent a Nation: The Case of the Indigenous Architecture of the
Chittagong Hill Tracts,” in Formulation Fabrication, ed. Leach & Petrovic, 73-84 & 401-10 resp.
These papers lie outside the geographic area that we have nominated for our analysis.
22. Pers. comm., Andrew Leach, August 2007. Leach was a convenor of this conference.
23. Roxanne Waterson of the University of Singapore also assisted with this session.
24. Deidre Brown, an eminent Maori scholar of Ngapuhi and Ngati Kahu iwi (or tribes) has
contributed six papers to SAHANZ conferences and was an Honorary Editor of Fabrications
from 2004-07. The first issue of Fabrications published under Brown’s co-editorship (14,
2004) took the theme “Kiwi Architecture” and included papers by Austin, McKay and Linzey
on indigenous themes. Carroll Go-Sam is an Aboriginal scholar from the AERC and is of the
Dyirbal tribe of the north-east Australian rainforest region. She has co-authored a number of
works with Memmott including “Australian Indigenous Architecture” (1999). Kevin O’Brien is
a Torres Strait Islander architect from the eastern or Meriam people of the Torres Straits. He
is also a scholar who came through the AERC and is now a leading indigenous practitioner.
He contributed the paper “Architecture and Aboriginality” to the 2003 SAHANZ conference,
in Progress: 20th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia &
New Zealand, ed. Maryam Gusheh & Naomi Stead (Sydney: SAHANZ, 2003), 219-25. Albert
Refiti is a Samoan scholar who contributed papers at the 2000 and 2002 conferences; he has
held editorial roles for the journal Interstices (published in New Zealand). Ngarino Ellis (Nga
Puhi, Ngati Porou) is affiliated with the Department of Art History, University of Auckland;
her Maori grandmother was born on the porch of a Ngati Porou meeting house at the mouth
of the Waiapu River in New Zealand’s North Island. Ellen Andersen is also a Maori scholar,
being of Ngati Raukawa descent, and having completed her Bachelor of Arts in Classics and
Architectural Studies at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
25. Gatley “SAHANZ,” 71.
26. Fowler “Colonial architecture’s fraught grappling with Melanesian traditions”; Alberti
Refiti, “Fabricating Difference and the Periphery of Architecture,” in Formulation Fabrication,
ed. Leach & Petrovic, 527-32; Michael Tawa, “Grounding the Question: Implications of
Indigenous Narrative Practice for Architectural History,” in On What Ground(s)?, ed. Pickersgill
& Scriver, 229-35; Christoph Schnoor, “Celebrating Idea over Reality: Some Approximations
of the ‘Primitive’ in Oceanic and European architecture,” in Celebration: Proceedings of the
22nd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand,
Napier, New Zealand, 24-27 September 2005, ed. Andrew Leach & Gill Matthewson (Napier:
SAHANZ, 2005), 323-28.
27. For example, Stephen Long, “Between the Georgina and the Great Western Railway:
The Transformation and Maintenance of Aboriginal Architecture in North-West Queensland”
and Shaneen Fantin, “Recognising Aboriginal Architecture from Northeast Arnhem Land:
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The ‘Ancestral Aesthetic’ in Yolngu Dwellings and Ceremonial Structures,” in Additions to
Architectural History: Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, Australia, 4-7 October 2002, ed. John Macarthur & Antony
Moulis (Brisbane: SAHANZ, 2002), published on cd-rom.
28. Sarah Treadwell, “Rangiatea: Architecture Between the Colonial and the Indigenous,”
Fabrications 2-3 (1990-91): 19-34.
29. Brown, “Post-European and Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand,” 20.
30. Pers. comm. Brown & McKay, January 17, 2008. Brown went on to say: ‘Certainly in New
Zealand history and anthropology there has been a similar movement towards ‘representation
of Maori life’ by non-Maori scholars. Most notably the late historian Michael King, who did
some important work on Maori before he felt ‘forced’ out of the area, and Professor Dame Anne
Salmond, who moved from studying marae to looking at Cook’s relationship to Maori.’
31. Deidre Brown, “Clothed not Clad: Maori woven architecture,” in Celebration, ed. Leach &
Matthewson, 62.
32. Mike Austin, “Rapa Nui: Beyond the Limit,” in Limits: Proceedings from the 21st Annual
Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne,
2004, ed. Harriet Edquist & Hélène Frichot (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004), 9-13.
33. Deidre Brown, “He Hokonga Whare e Kimihia: Seeking the Corner of a House,” in Limits, ed.
Edquist & Frichot, 64-68.
34. Example see criticisms of revisionist historians noted by Brown, “Post-European and
Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand,” 18.
35. Compare Tawa, “Grounding the Question” and Brown “Post-European and Indigenous
Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand”.
36. Ngarino Ellis, “Narratives of Change: Ngati Porou Architecture in the 19th Century,” in
Formulation Fabrication, ed. Leach & Petrovic, 127-38. For a comparative set of data sources on
Australian Aboriginal architectural research see Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley.
37. Ellis, “Narratives of Change,” 128.
38. In this respect Australian scholars tend to follow the ethical guidelines of the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS): http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/
research_program/grants.
39. Deidre Brown, “Clothed not Clad: Maori Woven Architecture,” in Celebration, ed. Leach &
Matthewson, 59-63.
40. Long, “Between the Georgina and the Great Western Railway”; also Martin Fowler, “The
Burning Question in Papuan Architecture,” in Progress, ed. Gusheh & Stead, 114-19; and “Magical
Limits: Other, Others, Gods, Dogs, Crocodiles, Architectures, Other’s Architecture’s,” in Limits, ed.
Edquist & Frichot, 160-65.
41. Memmott & Go-Sam, “Australian Indigenous Architecture,” 238; Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie
and Wurley, 300.
42. Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley, 300.
43. Austin, “Pacific Island Architecture,” 17.
44. Austin, “Kiwi Architecture,” viii.
45. Martin Fowler, “Five Types of Traditional Melanesian Architecture of Papua New Guinea,” in
Additions to Architectural History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis.
46. Ellen Andersen, “Pukekaraka: A Study in Architecture and Whakapapa,” in Additions to
Architectural History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis, 3.
47. McKay, Bill. “Looking at Maori Architecture,” in Additions to Architectural History, ed.
Macarthur & Moulis.
48. Bill McKay & Antonia Walmsley, “Maori Time: Notions of Space, Time and Building Form in
the South Pacific,” in Progress, ed. Gusheh & Stead, 199-204.
49. Mike Austin, “Polynesian Influences in New Zealand Architecture,” in Formulation Fabrication,
ed. Leach & Petrovic, 121-26.
50. Ellis, “Narratives of Change,” 129.
51. Fantin, “Recognising Aboriginal architecture from Northeast Arnhem Land”; McKay, “Looking
at Maori Architecture”.
52. Andersen, “Pukekaraka,” 3.
MEMMOTT & DAVIDSON
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53. Andersen, “Pukekaraka,” 8.
54. The “bach” is a term for the New Zealand settler’s basic hut, which for Wood symbolises
the colonial conquest of the land. – Wood, “The Maori Land Occupation Structures of
Waikaremoana, New Zealand,” 165.
55. Wood, “The Maori Land Occupation Structures of Waikaremoana, New Zealand”, 163.
56. Michael Linzey, “On the Name: Te Papa,” in Formulation Fabrication, ed. Leach & Petrovic,
471-78; “A Fault-line at Te Papa: The Use of a Metaphor,” Fabrications 17, no. 1 (2007): 69-82;
Paul Williams, “Bicultural Space in the Museum: The Case of Te Marae,” Fabrications 16, no.
1 (2006): 91-104.
57. Paul Memmott, “Aboriginal Signs and Architectural Meanings,” Architectural Theory
Review 1, no. 2 (1996-97): 79-100; and 2, no. 1 (1996/97): 38-64.
58. But on this see Mike Austin, “Pacific Culture Centres and Antipodean Museums,” in
Museum Gallery and Cultural Architecture in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region:
Essays in Antipodean Identity, ed. Michael J. Ostwald & Steven D. Fleming (New York: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2007), 150-62. Although one SAHANZ paper deals with the National Museum of
Australia (Brent Allpress, “Ornamental Misappropriation in Recent Australian Architecture,” in
In the Making, ed. Kevin Green, 291-304), it does not focus on indigenous themes.
59. Paul Memmott & Joseph Reser, “Design Concepts and Processes for Public Aboriginal
Architecture,” People and Physical Environment Research (PaPER): The Person-Environment
and Cultural Heritage Journal of Australia and New Zealand 55-56 (2000): 69-86.
60. Brown, “Nga Whare Matauranga Maori: The Recent History of Maori Tertiary
Architecture,” in Thresholds, ed. Blythe & Spence, 22.
61. Ursula de Jong, “Contested Terrain: Point Nepean, Victoria,” in Contested Terrains, ed.
McMinn, Stephens & Basson, 81-88.
62. de Jong, “Contested Terrain,” 82-83.
63. Angelique Edmonds, “Remote Control: Sustained Encounters of Difference in Aboriginal
Living Environments in Arnhem Land,” in Contested Terrains, ed. McMinn, Stephens &
Basson, 111-17.
64. Edmonds, “Remote Control,” 115.
65. Long, “Between the Georgina and the Great Western Railway”.
66. Timothy O’Rourke, “Notes on Dyirbalngan Dwellings Ethno-Architecture in the Rainforests
of Northeastern Queensland,” in Additions to Architectural History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis.
67. Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley, 13, 16.
68. Fantin, “Recognising Aboriginal Architecture from northeast Arnhem Land”.
69. Fantin, “Recognising Aboriginal architecture from northeast Arnhem Land,” 9.
70. Shaneen Fantin & Paul Memmott, “Yolngu Ceremonial Architecture,” in The Encyclopedia
of Religion and Nature, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan & Bron R. Taylor (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum,
2005), 106-07.
71. See Treadwell and Budgett on the Cook Islands.
72. Ellen Andersen, “Pukekaraka: A Study in Architecture and Whakapapa,” in Additions to
Architectural History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis, 7.
73. Andersen, “Pukekaraka,” 6, 7.
74. Paul Memmott, “An Introduction to Architecture + Building Traditions: Lessons from
Ethno-Architects,” in Additions to Architectural History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis, 6.
75. Mike Linzey, “Bi-Cultural Architecture: evaluating the contribution of Te Kooti,” in In the
Making, ed. Green, 101-08.
76. Austin, “Pacific Building: The Construction of Tradition,” in Additions to Architectural
History, ed. Macarthur & Moulis.
77. Refiti, “Uneven Boundaries that do not Flatten,” Additions to Architectural History, ed.
Macarthur & Moulis.
78. Refiti, “Uneven Boundaries that do not Flatten,” 1.
79. McKay, “Looking at Maori Architecture”, 1.
80. Brown, “The Whare on Exhibition”, 2002.
112
FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ 18:1
81. McKay, “Halfcaste or Bicultural: John Scott, Maori and Architecture in the 1960s,” in
Contested Terrains, ed. McMinn, Stephens & Basson, 363-69.
82. See also Russell Walden, Voices of Silence: New Zealand’s Chapel of Futuna (Wellington:
Victoria University Press, 1987), 60, 62.
83. Treadwell, “Rangiatea,” 30.
84. Budgett, “Congregating Practices: Church building in the Cook Islands,” in Celebration, ed.
Leach & Matthewson, 65-71.
85. Budgett, “Congregating Practices,” 69.
86. Budgett, “Contested Terrain: Heritage Conservation in the Cook Islands,” in Contested
Terrains, ed. McMinn, Stephens & Basson, 47-53.
87. Budgett, “Contested Terrain,” 49.
88. See Richard Handler & Jocelyn Linnekin, “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,” Journal of
American Folklore 97, no. 385 (1984), 273-90; and Bruce Rigsby, Fiona Powell, Lee Sackett, et
al., “Expert Report: Combined Gunggandji and Mandingalbay Yidinji (Q6016/01),” in Native
Title Claim, unpublished report to the North Queensland Land Council, 2002.
89. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 13.
90. Shils, Tradition, 19.
91. Handler & Linnekin, “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,” 273.
92. Compare Michael Linzey, “Bicultural Architecture: Evaluating the Contribution of Te
Kooti,” in In the Making, ed. Green, 101-08.
93. Reference to be supplied by Memmott.
94. Austin, “Pacific Building,” 5.
95. Austin, “Watery Ground,” 10.
96. Austin, “Watery Ground,” 10
97. Compare Austin, “Rapa Nui”.
98. McKay “Kiwi Architecture,” 296.
99. McKay, “The Whare Face of Modernism,” in FIRM(ness) commodity De-light?: Questioning
the Canons: Papers from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, Australia, 1998, ed. Julie Willis, Philip
Goad & Andrew Hutson (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 1998), 262.
100. Austin, “Polynesian Influences in New Zealand Architecture,” 124.
101. Brown, “Post-European and Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New
Zealand,” 16.
102. Brown, “Apirana Ngata and the School of Maori Arts and Crafts,” In Loyalty and
Disloyalty in the Architecture of the British Empire and Commonwealth, ed. Hugh McGuire
(Auckland: SAHANZ, 1996), 1-13.
103. Brown, “Post-European and Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New
Zealand,” 16,17.
104. Austin, “Polynesians in Auckland,” in Contested Terrains, ed. McMinn, Stephens &
Basson, 15-18.
105. Greenop, “Uncanny Brisbane: New Ways of Looking at Urban Indigenous Place,”
in History in Practice: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference of the Society of
Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria,
Australia, 3-6 July 2008, ed. David Beynon & Ursula de Jong (Geelong: SAHANZ, 2008), cdrom.
106. Hill, “Dreaming the Block: Three Decades of Architectural Imagining for Redfern’s
Indigenous Community,” in Contested Terrains, ed. McMinn, Stephens & Basson, 233-34.
107. Deidre Brown, “Nga Whare Matauranga Maori: The Recent History of Maori Tertiary
Architecture,” in Thresholds, ed. Blythe & Spence, 19-24.
108. Brown, “Nga Whare Matauranga Maori,” 24.
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Indigenous Culture and Architecture in the South Pacific Region:
Selected SAHANZ Sources
Prepared by Paul Memmott & James Davidson
Aitken, Richard. “Oriental and Oceanian Influence on Australian Garden Buildings.” In AsiaAustralasia: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, July 3-7 1992
(hereafter Asia-Australasia, 1992), Geelong, Victoria: Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, 1992.
Andersen, Ellen. “Pukekaraka: A Study in Architecture and Whakapapa.” In Additions to
Architectural History: Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, Australia, 4-7 October 2002, edited by John Macarthur
& Antony Moulis, cd-rom (hereafter Additions to Architectural History, 2002). Brisbane:
SAHANZ, 2002.
Anderson, Graeme & Gina Jones. “Design Constraints Particular to Wellington”. In Regional
Responses: Papers and Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Society of
Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, Christchurch, New Zealand, 6-8 July
1991, edited by Ian Lochhead, 157-61. Christchurch: SAHANZ, 1995.
Austin, Mike. “Elgin in the South Pacific: The Work of Mack Ruff.” In Fabrications 11, no. 2
(2001): iii-x.
———. “Kiwi Architecture: Modernism Recycled.” In Fabrications 14, nos. 1&2 (2004): iii-ix.
———. “Landscape and the New Zealand Maori.” In Landscape and 20th Century Urban
Design in Australasia, 52-58. Canberra, Australian National University & SAHANZ, 1989.
———. “Navigational Maps and Architectural Mappings.” In Thresholds: Papers of the
Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand, Launceston and Hobart, Australia, 1999, ed. Richard Blythe & Rory Spence (hereafter
Thresholds), 9-12. Launceston: SAHANZ, 1999.
———. “Notes on the Colonial City.” In Fabrications 2-3 (1992): 35-44.
———. “Pacific Building: The Construction of Tradition.” In Additions to Architectural History,
2002.
———. “Pacific Island Architecture.” In Fabrications 11, no. 2 (2001): 13-19.
———. “Polynesian Influences in New Zealand Architecture.” In Formulation Fabrication:
The Architecture of History, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Society
of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, November
2000, edited by Andrew Leach & Emina Petrovic (hereafter Formulation Fabrication, 2000),
121-126. Wellington: SAHANZ, 2000.
———. “Polynesians in Auckland.” In Contested Terrains: Proceedings of the XXIII Annual
Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Fremantle,
Western Australia, September 29-October 2, 2006 (hereafter Contested Terrains, 2006), edited
by Terrance McMinn, John Stephens & Steve Basson, 15-18. Fremantle: SAHANZ, 2006.
———. “Rapa Nui: Beyond the Limit.” In Limits: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference
of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2004, edited
by Harriet Edquist & Hélène Frichot (hereafter Limits, 2004), vol. 1, 9-13. Melbourne: SAHANZ,
2004.
———. “Watery Ground: Island Architecture”. In On What Ground(s)?: Conference
Proceedings of Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, edited
by Sean Pickersgill & Peter Scriver (hereafter On What Ground(s)? 1997), 9-14. Adelaide:
SAHANZ, 1997.
Bell, Peter. Review of Traditional Architecture in the Gilbert Islands: A Cultural Perspective, by
John Hockings. In Fabrications 2-3 (1990-1991): 58.
Brown, Deidre. “Apirana Ngata and the School of Maori Arts and Crafts.” In Loyalty and
Disloyalty in the Architecture of the British Empire and Commonwealth, edited by Hugh
McGuire, 1-13. Auckland: SAHANZ, 1997.
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FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ 18:1
———. “Clothed not Clad: Maori woven architecture”. In Celebration: Proceedings of the
22nd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand,
Napier, New Zealand, 24-27 September, 2005, edited by Andrew Leach & Gill Matthewson
(hereafter Celebration, 2005), 59-63. Napier: SAHANZ, 2005.
———. “He Hokonga Whare e Kimihia: Seeking the Corner of a House.” In Limits, 2004, vol. 1,
64-68.
———. “Nga Whare Matauranga Maori: The Recent History of Maori Tertiary Architecture.” In
Thresholds, 1999, 19-24.
———. “Post-European and Indigenous Architectural Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand.” In
Formulation Fabrication, 2000, 15-21.
———. “The Whare on Exhibition.” In Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
Budgett, Jeanette. “Congregating Practices: Church building in the Cook Islands.” In
Celebration, 2005, 65-71.
———. “Contested Terrain: Heritage Conservation in the Cook Islands.” In Contested Terrains,
2006, 47-53.
———. “Negotiated Boundaries.” In Limits, 2004, vol. 1, 69-74.
Davidson, James. “Western ‘Architectural’ Ideology and its Impact on the Traditional
Building Practices of the Maya Peoples of Guatemala and Southern Mexico.” In Additions to
Architectural History, 2002.
De Jong, Ursula. “Contested Terrain: Point Nepean, Victoria.” In Contested Terrains, 2006, 8188.
Edmonds, Angelique. “Remote Control: Sustained Encounters of Difference in Aboriginal
Living Environments in Arnhem Land.” In Contested Terrains, 2006, 111-17.
Ellis, Ngarino. “Narratives of Change: Ngati Porou Architecture in the 19th Century.” In
Formulation Fabrication, 2000, 127-38.
Engels-Schwarzpaul, Tina. “-13.833333/-171.73334 in 51.466667/14.766666 Whose Tropics,
Whose Fale?” In Contested Terrains, 2006, 119-25.
———. “Ornamental symbolism: Means of persuasion and narratives of identity in Aotearoa/
New Zealand.” In In the Making: Architecture’s Past, Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, Darwin, Australia, September/October 2001, edited by Kevin
Green (hereafter In the Making, 2001), 109-22. Darwin: SAHANZ, 2001.
Fantin, Shaneen. “Recognising Aboriginal architecture from northeast Arnhem Land:
the ‘ancestral aesthetic’ in Yolngu dwellings and ceremonial structures.” In Additions to
Architectural History 2002.
Fowler, Martin. “The Burning Question in Papuan Architecture”. In Progress: 20th Annual
Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand, edited by
Maryam Gusheh & Naomi Stead (hereafter Progress, 2003), 114-119. Sydney: SAHANZ, 2003.
———. “Colonial Architecture’s Fraught Grappling with Melanesian Traditions.” In In the
Making, 2001, 84-100.
———. “Five Types of Traditional Melanesian Architecture of Papua New Guinea.” In
Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
———. “Magical Limits: Other, Others, gods, dogs, crocodiles, architectures, Other’s
Architecture’s.” In Limits, 2004, vol. 1, 160-165. Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004.
Gatley, Julia. “SAHANZ: The First 20 Years, 1984-2004.” In Fabrications 13, no. 2 (2004): 63-87.
Hill, Glen. “Dreaming the Block: Three Decades of Architectural Imagining for Redfern’s
Indigenous Community.” In Contested Terrains, 2006, 227-35.
Linzey, Mike. “Bi-Cultural Architecture: evaluating the contribution of Te Kooti.” In In the
Making, 2001, 101-08.
———. “A Fault-line at Te Papa: The Use of a Metaphor.” In Fabrications 17, no. 1 (2007): 6982.
———. “On the Pointing Signification of the Meeting House.” In Fabrications 14, nos. 1&2
(2004): 13-20.
Long, Stephen. “Between the Georgina and the Great Western Railway: the Transformation
and Maintenance of Aboriginal Architecture in North-West Queensland.” In Additions to
Architectural History, 2002.
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McCarthy, Christine. “‘The Maori House’, ‘Te Pa’ and ‘Captain Hankey’s House’: Bicultural
Architecture in New Zealand at the Turn of the Century.” Fabrications 11, no. 1 (2000): 62-78.
———. “Partial architectures: Post World War II New Zealand Government Housing.” In
Fabrications 13, no. 1 (2003): 33-62.
McGrath, Ann. Review of Just for Living, Aboriginal Perceptions of Housing in North West
Australia, by Helen Ross. In Fabrications 1 (1989): 96-97.
McKay, Bill. “Halfcaste or bicultural: John Scott, Maori and architecture in the 1960s.” In
Contested Terrains, 2006, 363-69.
———. “Looking at Maori Architecture.” In Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
———. “Maori Architecture: Transforming Western Notions of Architecture.” In Fabrications
14, no. 1&2 (2004): 1-12.
———. “Resonant Time and Cyclic Architecture: Notions of Time and Architectural History in
New Zealand”. In Limits, 2004, vol. 2, 295-300. Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004.
———. “The Whare Face of Modernism”. In FIRM(ness) commodity De-light?: questioning
the canons: Papers from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, Australia, 1998 (hereafter FIRM(ness)
commodity De-light? 1998), edited by Julie Willis, Philip Goad & Andrew Hutson, 259-62.
Melbourne: SAHANZ, 1998.
McKay, Bill & Antonia Walmsley. “Maori Time: Notions of Space, Time and Building Form in
the South Pacific”. In Progress, 2003, 199-204.
Maguire, Hugh. “All things bright and beautiful: Architectural Bi-culturalism in Aotearoa/New
Zealand”. In FIFIRM(ness) commodity De-light? 1998, 209-18.
Memmott, Paul. “From the ‘Curry to the ‘Weal’: Aboriginal Town Camps and Compounds
of the Western Back-Blocks.” David Saunders Memorial Keynote Lecture to Sarsparella
to Muckadilla, A Conference on Towns in Australia and New Zealand, SAHANZ, Brisbane,
September 30, 1994.
———. “An Introduction to Architecture + Building Traditions: Lessons from Ethnoarchitects.” In Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
Memmott, Paul & Carroll Go-Sam. “Australian Indigenous Architecture: Its Forms and
Evolution.” In Thresholds, 1999, 233-40.
O’Brien, Kevin. “Architecture and Aboriginality.” In Progress, 2003, 219-25.
O’Rourke, Timothy. “Notes on Dyirbalngan dwellings Ethno-architecture in the rainforests of
northeastern Queensland.” In Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
Petersen, Anna. “Signs of Higher Life: Maori Whare and the European Concept of Civilization,
c.1800-1850.” In Formulation Fabrication, 2000, 153-62.
Rapoport, David. “Toraja Architecture in Sulawesi.” In Asia-Australasia, 1992.
Refiti, Albert. “Fabricating Difference and the Periphery of Architecture.” In Formulation
Fabrication, 2000, 527-32.
———. “Uneven boundaries that do not flatten.” In Additions to Architectural History, 2002.
Schnoor, Christoph. “Celebrating Idea over Reality: Some Approximations of the ‘Primitive’ in
Oceanic and European Architecture.” In Celebration, 2005, 323-28.
Skinner, Robin. “Celebrating the Lord’s Supper at Orona.” In Celebration, 2005, 329-33.
Southcombe, Mark & Wendy Pettigrew. “European Fruit: ‘Tikitiki’, a Treaty Signatory’s House.”
In Celebration, 2005, 341-46.
Speed, Graeme. “Australian Aboriginal Shelters.” In SAHANZ 87, Proceedings of Society
of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand: papers: fourth annual conference,
Adelaide, 9-10 May 1987, edited by Paul-Alan Johnson, 35-38. Sydney: SAHANZ, , 1991.
Tawa, Michael. “Grounding the Question: Implications of Indigenous Narrative Practice for
Architectural History.” In On What Ground(s)? 1997, 229-35.
Ting, John. “The Egalitarian Architecture of the Iban Longhouse.” In Celebration, 2005, 35965.
———. “Fort Alice: Syncretic Architecture in Sarawak under the Brooke Regimes.” In
Contested Terrains, 2006, 543-49.
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Tjahjono, Gunawan. “Space and Place in the Javanese Architectural Tradition.” In AsiaAustralasia, 1992.
Treadwell, Jeremy. “Constructions of Privacy in the Cook Islands.” In Limits, 2004, vol. 2, 49296. Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004.
———. “Continental Architecture – Island Buildings: A Chinese Court Building in Rarotonga.”
In Contested Terrains, 2006, 551-56.
Treadwell, Sarah. “Dazzling Reflections: Images of Architecture in Missionary Polynesia”. In
FIRM(ness) commodity De-light? 1998, 397-404.
———. “Electric Images: Illuminating Anxiety.” In Thresholds, 1999, 351-57.
———. “Heavenly Groundings: Missionary Architectural Practice in Nineteenth Century New
Zealand.” In On What Ground(s)? 1997, 243-49.
———. “Images of Gate Pa.” In Contested Terrains, 2006, 557-62.
———. “Pacific Architecture of the Transit of Venus.” In Limits, 2004, vol. 2, 497-502.
Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004.
———. “Rangiatea: Architecture Between the Colonial and the Indigenous.” In Fabrications
2-3 (1990-1991): 19-34.
Williams, Paul. “Bicultural Space in the Museum: The Case of Te Marae.” In Fabrications 16,
no. 1 (2006): 91-104.
Wood, Peter. “The Maori Land Occupation Structures of Waikaremoana, New Zealand.” In
Formulation Fabrication, 2000, 163-68.
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