(Un)making Canberra: Craft and the designing of settler-colonialism in Australia

This paper examines how practices of craft and design are involved in making and unmaking worlds. Specifically, it draws attention to the role of craft and design within settler-colonialism, understood as a structural condition in which a colonising force seeks to appropriate land from indigenous inhabitants. While the topic of settler-colonialism implicates questions concerning sovereignty, biopolitics, and coloniality, this paper demonstrates how these issues can be studied as both designed and designing effects. This is done through an analysis of the colonial history of Canberra, Australia’s capital city and home of its federal parliament. Following an account of how the traditional world of the original indigenous inhabitants was displaced through the material and symbolic interventions of early settlers, this paper argues that the first design proposals for the city bear out key characteristics of the relationship between craft, design and colonialism. The whole of Australia is an Aboriginal artefact. (Bayet-Charlton 2003: 174) Craft is an empire. (Greenhalgh 1997: 21) Introduction: History against the (un)making of colonial defuturing Using Canberra, the federal capital of Australia as a case study, the broader intention of this paper is to present a critical counterposition to those discourses and practices that sustain the ‘durabilities of duress’ that persist within a settler-colonial context such as Australia (Stoler 2008: 192). As Ann Stoler has argued, virtually all colonies, and as I would argue here, all settlercolonial societies, ‘are artefacts of deliberate and concerted design’; that is, conscious material interventions in the ‘subjunctive mood’ whose shifting impact over time conditions the socio-political topology of domination and resistance (Stoler 2011). In doing so, this paper presents a rudimentary sketch of relations between histories, futures, craft and design, and coloniality. It is worth acknowledging that my experience of writing this paper — a task which marks the beginning of a longer term project — has been one of way finding within an inchoate theoretical territory. This is not to suggest that there is no literature that bears on the relations I am trying to articulate, but such material craft + design enquiry 106 is almost exclusively produced in other disciplines. As a consequence, the historical agency of craft and design tends to be disclosed in diffuse, indirect or unintended ways. Work that directly problematises the role of craft and design vis-à-vis enduring conditions of colonial domination is scarce. That said, there has been recent work done in the history of planning, architecture and housing that provides a valuable point of departure for this paper (Banivanua-Mar & Edmonds 2010; Pieris 2009; Veracini 2012), some of which also examines the spatial politics of Canberra (McGaw, Pieris & Potter 2011; Pieris 2012). Much of this work either emerges from or draws upon the critical framework of settler-colonial studies (Bateman & Pilkington 2011; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006), a strategy that is continued in this paper. To this I bring a perspective developed in my work with Tony Fry’s concept of defuturing, a term that names both the designed autodestruction of futures and a mode of reading that looks to disclose its agency (Fry 1999). The result is an analysis positing colonial violence as a designed effect that continues to design, rather than as a bounded event or period of the past. More specifically, my aim here is to demonstrate that there are consequences of the kind of histories we produce that are reflected in, and amplified by, acts of making.1 This point is not meant to imply that making simply receives, in a passive way, the authoritative interpretations of historians. Rather, as the philosophical thinking of Martin Heidegger suggests, making is an active part of our beinghistorical (1962; 2008). This point speaks to the hermeneutical structure of making, a phenomenon cogently described by Anne-Marie Willis as ‘ontological designing’ (Willis 2007).2 In short, ontological designing acknowledges that the understanding that allows making to happen, an understanding that always includes an historically conditioned sense of its own temporality, tradition and direction, is itself changed by what is made. Clocks and war memorials, for instance, are each, in their own ways, both products and mediums of the temporal rhythms of imagined communities (Anderson 1991; Davison 1993). ‘The made’, understood here as the combined effect of ‘the designed’ and ‘the crafted’, is, therefore, the condition in which histories are written, just as the historical understanding reflected in written histories conditions what is made. 1 In a work that parallels the interests of this paper in various ways, Paul Carter has characterised imperial history — a term he applies not to writers of a past ‘imperial era’, but to more contemporary historians such as Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey — as a ‘defensive appeal to the logic of cause and effect’ that ‘demonstrates the emergence of order from chaos’ (Carter 2010: xvi). As Carter’s argument intimates, the meaning of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ is always perspectival, that is, dependent upon whether you are, say, the coloniser, the colonised, or the historian who disciplines the contingencies of events into a coherent narrative. Again, the chaos caused when one ‘worldview’ (often obliviously) dominates an Other, is a violence that continues to play out today. For a current Australian example, see Tess Lea’s account of the bureau-professional anarchy of the Northern Territory ‘Intervention’ (Lea 2012). 2 The significance of ontological designing has been most extensively demonstrated in the work of Tony Fry (2009, 2011, 2012). A theoretically similar approach was used by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1987). (Un)making Canberra: Craft and the designing of settler-colonialism in Australia 107 The issues at stake here — including what, how, or why we make; our understanding of what designs a city and what a city designs; and how we, as historical agents living in the present, engage with what consequences past actions have determined for ‘us’ and ‘our’ futures — are all questions that are either confronted or obscured by the histories we choose to write. In this sense, the politics of this paper is based on the idea that historical enquiry is always a more or less futural (re)interpretation of our historical understanding, in that it either aids or hinders a confrontation with defuturing, rather than ever being an ‘objective’ account of the past (Fry 1999: 60–63). Therefore, against any interest in celebrating Canberra as an achievement — architectural, cultural, national or otherwise — this paper proposes that Canberra should be read as a designed instrument of, and for, the ethnocidal destruction of indigenous people (Clastres 1988), and the biopolitical production of compliant subjects (Foucault 2007; 2008). While what follows can only be a single and provisional sketch of a much larger project — design towards decolonial sustainment — it is nevertheless grounded in an explicit cultural politics, one that argues that histories either annihilate futures by legitimating the defutural present, or challenge us to mount a serious response to the designed durability of duress. Dwelling as (un)making worldhood Craft and design are world-making practices. As Fry (1994) and Willis (2007) have argued, both craft and design are essential to being-in-the-world — the term coined by Heidegger to describe the ontological structure of ‘our’ existence (Heidegger 1962: 78–90). This ‘being-in’ names something that is different from either a physical or abstract sense of location, such as being ‘in the house’ or ‘here on the map’. These descriptions are too Cartesian, too caught up in discrete notions of cogito and extension that conceptually distinguish ‘me’, as a thinking subjectivity, from the ‘objective’ world ‘outside’. Being-in-the-world, on the other hand, acknowledges that we never encounter ourselves as a discrete subject, that we are essentially a being whose existence is its worldhood. In other words, we are a being who always finds itself thrown amidst a meaningful context of equipment, people, and practical choices that matter to us. As the later Heidegger would describe it, being-in-the-world has something more to do with dwelling; with having a body, temporality, language, and skills; with being on the earth, under the sky, amongst other mortals, and in the presence of the gods (Heidegger 2008). Following Heidegger, this paper takes up the idea of dwelling (by craft and design) as a precondition for building (by craft and design). craft + design enquiry 108 The ethics of world-making, however, is never a given, due to the fact that craft and design are always equally involved in world-unmaking.3 It is through these practices that weapons are produced, plans are laid, and campaigns that entail the destruction of people and cultures are waged. At one level this dialectic between destruction and creativity is unavoidable and necessary (Fry 2004). Making something always requires the destruction of something else. Destruction is, therefore, the basis upon which all making is possible, and the only means we have of sustaining ourselves. The world-making of Western, ethnocidal modernity, however, has come to represent a way of being that radically departs from the principle of only creating things that are more important than whatever is destroyed in the process. Rather, modernity has come to represent a way of being that progressively destroys the ability to sustain anything at all (Fry 1999). Knowledge, power, and the colonial academy