Editorial Letter

"Ever since I was a child I've collected things: pebbles, shells from the rocks in the Abruzzi, strands of wire, little screws.”         

- Lina Bo Bardi

In the callout for this issue, published almost three years ago, we gave ourselves permission to sit and think slowly—“(a few days, months, another year?)” We cannot say this was unintentional, or that the prolonged silence that followed was wilful. Time has sped up; or it finds itself spread thinner across those things that are necessary, sometimes tediously so, and those things at the centre of this issue. 

The generosity of Lina Bo Bardi’s words speaks to these intentions: to collect, to bring together, never mind how disparate or tangential, the things and the people, that have come to exert any amount of influence on how we perceive and experience the world - for better or for worse. The third issue of Paradise Journal assembles a collection of essays that dwell and diligently unpick the Icons and Idols that have been taken up as representations of the Australian context, sometimes unveiling the unsteady ground below. But this issue also makes space for those more fleeting, if one would allow it, nostalgic ponderings for those precious things we have come to hold dear.

The pieces of this issue vary in tone and ambition. Edward Cook and Leyla Oz give their attention to deconstructing the ideological intentions that legitimise architecture's creation in the Australian context. Cook assesses the logic of abstraction in the construction of an iconography of luxury in Crown Sydney Casino. Recounting the processes by which marble, steel and air are commodified, stripped of their material and extractive reality to become simplified icons of capital. Oz critiques the patriarchal hierarchy of religious experience in the Australian Mosque, calling for a reinterpretation of the typology that is more equal and inclusive. Chloe Walsh, Matthew Darmour-Paul and Andrew Copolov ponder those more familiar images that have been assimilated into what we have come to recognise as distinctly Australian. Walsh addresses the marketing campaigns that have emerged since the 1980s to conserve the natural world, where animals with anthropomorphic qualities have become icons illustrating man’s destruction, neglecting a much more complex reality: the non-human world. Darmour-Paul and Copolov critique the promise of a sustainable future that preserves our current levels of consumption and social relationships: emblematic in the image of what they call ‘The Solar Family’. Sasha Ivanovich’s and Renato Giacco’s work belong to the third, more amorphous category of the precious. Ivanovich and Giacco recount the promises of post-war reconstruction in Australia through revisiting their 1967 student project at UNSW that was lovingly preserved by a friend. 

This is the third and final issue of Paradise Journal. We wish to thank those who have taken the time and effort to contribute to the journal, along with those friends and colleagues without whose dedicated labour Paradise would never be possible. In spite of how difficult it may be, a culture is made of little but also large and forceful contributions. To that we must thank all the mentors and teachers who provided the space for such a thing as Paradise to come about. See you in a next life.

With Love,

Paradise Journal