R
eflections on the theme of this issue of Landscape
Architecture Australia revea l t hat my pract ice a s a
landscape architect in Australia has paralleled, over
a professional lifetime, the development of Australia’s
relationship with the Asian region, both culturally and
economically.
As the introduction to this issue outlines, the 1970s and the
Whitlam Government saw a reorientation of national focus –
away from the previously dominant relationships with the
United Kingdom and Europe and toward our relationship with
Asia. This reorientation was to directly impact the practice of
landscape architecture from the start, as Australian landscape
architects worked as part of multidisciplinary teams to
spearhead the way – tasked with delivering a round of bold
new Australian embassies in countries where previously,
Australian representation had been much more modest.
These new embassies were to have an overtly symbolic role
and support Australia’s new diplomatic and cultural agenda.
Most of the first wave of homegrown and fully qualified
landscape architects to practise in Australia in the 1960s and
1970s, particularly those who taught or led government-based
teams, had qualified at a higher degree level in the United
Kingdom and North America. They included Malcolm Bunzli
and George Williams in Queensland, Beryl Mann and Grace
Fraser in Victoria, Lindsay Robertson and Finn Thorvaldson in
New South Wales, and Richard (Dick) Clough and Margaret
Hendry in Canberra. Roger Johnson (Canberra CAE) and Peter
Spooner (UNSW), both from the UK, were the leaders in the
educational field at the time. The practitioners who were
empowered by the Whitlam agenda often positioned their
practice to contrast with those who had been formally
educated in the UK. Responding to the mood of the times, they
brought a new and distinctly nationalistic (and post-colonial)
flavour to their work and actively promoted the idea of
landscape planning and design that was more overtly rooted in
the idea of Australia as place. Their designs explored and
expressed an emerging sense of what identity meant in
landscape design, an approach that underpinned their work
not only nationally, but also internationally.
This trend is evident in the projects of Bruce Mackenzie, Adrian
Pilton and to a lesser degree Geoff Sanderson, all of whom
worked on Australian embassies across Asia and in the Middle
East. While Whitlam had stepped onto Chinese soil
to the tunes of overtly nationalistic folk songs, landscape
architects and architects made designs that consciously or
unconsciously expressed the interplay of contemporary
cultural relationships and aspirations. Typically they
questioned the degree to which each embassy should reflect
either Australia or the host as a place or nation – individual or
together? While the resulting work was as diverse and specific
a s t he locat ions, it cou ld be a rg ued t hat most desig ners resisted
overt references in their work and pursued a more nuanced
for m of ex pression. T hey soug ht to ex press, in physica l for m,
an implicit (if optimistic) desire for harmonious political and
cultural relationships. As a young project landscape architect
in the mid-1970s I worked with Bruce Mackenzie and the
example I know best is the Australian Embassy in Bangkok,
where he and Ancher Mortlock and Woolley designed a project
that aspired to express unity between the global and the
01
The design of the Australian
Embassy in Bangkok, by
Ancher Mortlock and Woolley
and Bruce Mackenzie Design,
aspired to express unity
between the global and
the local. Photo: John
Gollings
02
The landscape design for
the embassy referenced local
Thai culture selectively, using
the urban waterway and
massive tropical trees as
inspiration but resisting
the fussier traditions of
local Thai garden design.
Photo: John Gollings
02