Editorial

Paradise Editorial Team

As an editorial team of seven postgraduate and two undergraduate students entering our final years of study, the professional practice of architecture is not as radical as we hope it to be. We find ourselves facing a future that crumbles underfoot with each timid step.

Paradise is dissatisfied with the echo chamber that is architectural discourse in Australia. The cloistered pages of traditional academic journals stifle most genuine messages with inaccessible jargon or theoretical wank. This discourse is produced by the academic, for the academic, primarily to meet the institutional quota. On the other hand, the glossy feeds of popular architectural media serve only to sell the image, the service, or the mythology of artistic genius. Laboured obsessions with the autonomous object and our self-image as a creative field distract us from the reality that we are a service industry,¹ fully entwined and implicated in the global flows of capital and carbon.²

Paradise seeks to play with the productive tension of being neither properly academic nor popular, but both at once. Through presenting a multitude of formats, disciplines, practices and voices, Paradise makes equivalent the vast and varied forms of research that constitute architectural knowledge in Australia today. This journal is our attempt to cut our way out of the chamber, make a new door. We hope that it brings fresh winds and signals a possible exit; that it allows some new and unexpected perspectives to enter.

Backyard is the inaugural issue of Paradise. The Aussie backyard is nostalgic to the point of fetishisation. Its paraphernalia and decoration are enduring icons of suburban Australiana. For many, it was the very first place of learning about worlds outside. In the backyard we learn that grass can scrape and sting, that water from a warm hose will soothe sunburnt skin, that when the shadows get long, it’s time to eat. We coevolved with these backyards. We crawled over the dirt with the ants and insects that invaded our space.

The backyard establishes binaries. In here and out there, me (us) and the other. It is the act of making private and marking ownership. To be human is to be the protagonist, landing upon a terra nullius “empty of its own purposes or meaning.”³ In Parramatta, Western Sydney, against a backdrop of sandbag retainers and glittering curtain walls, Kalanjay Dhir converses with sacred contaminated waters.

Nature, according to humanity, is divided by degrees of usefulness. Farmland is productive and nourishing; national parks a conserved breath of fresh air for the weekend getaway; the far ranges of central Australia are barren on the surface, yet ripe for resource extraction. Isaac Harrisson examines the Outback as antagonist in film – vast, sublime, hostile – and begins to peel away the veneer of its terror. In our urban centres, we have carved up perfect individual portions: the backyard.

The backyard is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a hard-yakka dream of a freestanding three-bed-two-bath, and a lawn or two. It is a collectively manufactured construct, carefully and thoughtfully packaged. These fences that enclose sprawl, moving outward further and further. They are capitalist carbon form manifest, driving unaffordability, inaccessibility, and increasingly urbanised environments – hotter, denser, more toxic than ever. Using the popular renovation reality show The Block as a lens, Madeline Lo-Booth dissects the trends in suburban housing and land packages. Little pieces of paradise divided up and protected stretching as far as the eye can see.

Home and land ownership is deeply embedded in the Australian way of life. The intensity of the Australian speculative real estate market and its focus on personal property wealth cedes control of our public and collective civic realms to those with the capital and influence to shape it. Our cities are continually dedicated to hubs of “technology” and “innovation,” poorly-built residential towers, and immense unwalkable precincts. An interview with the team behind the grassroots planning campaign, Gabba Community Vision, explores the possibilities of activist architecture in Australia, working with communities and councils to counter the Western tendency towards top-down masterplanning.

Our human and cultural identities are inextricably tied up in the land. It is deeply embedded in the cultural, social and spiritual lives of Indigenous peoples. It is the same land that they managed sensitively and responsively for thousands of years, the land that was sung into stories of creation, the land that sustained them and that they sustained in turn. Our backyards are carved out of these unceded lands. Lines of demarcation were traced long ago with foreign inks and drawn and redrawn over and over, erased and revised. Through time, the sallow yellow of freshly-treated pine lap-and-cap leeches away into a warm grey. These are obscured sites of memory and erasure, in which actions towards remembrance and care can act as resistance, as Rhiannon Brownbill, Matte McConnell, and Roger Miranda explore.

The backyard as an icon of Australia has captured the imaginations of millions of migrants searching for receptive soil and a place to set down their memory of home. Elesi Atsu remembers her family’s transplanted plantains and explores marginalised more-than-human relations. The land we feel belongs to us begins to turn us away, soon to make migrants of us all. “When the rug is pulled out from under your feet, you understand at once you are going to have to be concerned with the floor…”⁴ Lifting from the photobooks of late Australiana, Eleanor Peres and Alex Psaltis peel apart its saturated imagery to blur the rule of time and borders in so-called Australia.

Backyard is about all our thorny relationships to the land that holds us. Through a meditation on her methodologies of practice-led research, Paola Balla reflects on the backyard as a space for acts of repair and healing. The soil underfoot obscures a world of microbiomes and rhizomatic relations, winding and turning, oblivious to the boundaries we draw.