Page 4009 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 25 November 2014
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festival, a four-day celebration promoting the diversity of Canberra’s design community, from 20 to 23 November. I had the honour of launching the event at the Crace pub, the District, featuring the Crace field study, an exhibition by the ANU environment studio’s artists inspired by the new suburb and the natural and urban environment.
Traditional custodian Wally Bell gave the welcome to country and spoke of Aboriginal sites around Crace. We were joined by Professor Helen Berry, a lead researcher in the University of Canberra’s population study of the Crace community’s health and happiness. John Reid of the environment studio in the ANU School of Art coordinated the artists who took part in the field study. John led Crace residents, planners, developers, builders, businesspeople, researchers and artists on an evening walk around the exhibition venues in buildings around the community core of Crace.
The suburb of Crace is a fine example of urban planning excellence in tune with the environment, continuing in the tradition of the Griffins. The landscape was the inspiration for Walter and Marion Griffin in their urban design for Canberra—an artistic response to our hills and valleys which we continue to celebrate and revere.
As I have noted before, geography is very important to Australians. Our national anthem’s first stanza is mostly about geography. The national capital was located here early in the 20th century because of our stunning geography. The choice of Canberra pays homage to Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts. It has been a meeting place for thousands of years. The role of the land in shaping people is central to Aboriginal thought.
The government of the day sited Canberra here in the cool climate as it was thought to be helpful to intellectual pursuits and policy development in this new capital for the new nation in an ancient land. In 1900 they also thought it was handy for the capital to be inland, out of range of naval bombardment. In a twist, one of the Crace family sons who grew up here became a distinguished admiral in World War II and is commemorated in the Crace Hilltops community park.
In the Crace field study we see the interplay of underlying landscape and the new urban landscape inspiring artists. Art and culture enriches our soul and is at the heart of any community. The artists’ interpretations of the Crace space and place are even more exciting given their vivid imagination and the different media they work in. It contrasts to and complements the Crace study of the community’s health and happiness. Each study reflects on the human spirit and how it is expressed in Crace.
I would love to see the results of the same studies done in decades to come and see how the artistic response and the survey responses have changed over time. Landscape, our wide brown land, has power and will inevitably pull all Australians towards our spirit and our land being intertwined—the views that have prevailed here for the last 40,000 years.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Lawder): Before I call the next member, I want to address Mr Wall’s point of order, although he does not appear to be here any longer. They certainly were not offensive words. However, there may have been some
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