Aboriginal architecture as you've never seen it before

Read Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley, the first book to detail Australian Aboriginal architecture, and you’re bound to learn a thing or two.

Put together by Associate Professor Paul Memmott and published by UQP, the book turns on its head the belief that Indigenous people were devoid of houses or towns when Europeans first reached Australian shores.

Now the Director of UQ’s Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC), Dr Memmott’s interest in the area began while working with Indigenous communities in North-west Queensland during the 1970’s.

“At that time most councils in the region were bulldozing fringe camps but we saw that they had something important to say in how people organised their residential activity and patterns of behaviour,” he said.

“I realised that these last self-constructed camps were like field stations in which to study Aboriginal kinship and housing design, to understand how much of their residents’ lifestyle was based on traditional customs versus westernised behaviour.”

After completing honours studies in architecture, Dr Memmott pursued a PhD in anthropology so he could study the link between Indigenous peoples’ cultural landscapes, their buildings and their behaviour.

Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley is the result of his extensive research in the field since then, taking 35 years of “detective work” to assemble information from oral histories, explorers’ diaries, paintings, photographic collections and 100-year-old newspapers.

Including contributions from Aboriginal authors as well as fellow AERC staff and postgraduates, the book is written for both academic and general readers and includes hundreds of photos, maps and illustrations – many of which haven’t been seen outside the archives before.

Dr Memmott said the myth that Indigenous Australians lived only in makeshift huts or lean-tos began because early explorers often made their observations in favourable weather, when people were mobile and needing only nocturnal fires and windbreaks.

However research shows a repertoire of different shelters were built in different styles in particular regions depending on the climate – a good example being the durable dome structures found throughout the country.

“In the rainforest area up around Cairns where there was heavy rain for much of the year, people built domes out of lawyer cane with palm leaf thatching,” Dr Memmott said.

“If we go to the west coast of Tasmania we get reports of domes there, with triple layers of cladding and insulation. And then in western Victoria there’s a classical case of circular stone walls of up to a metre or so high and then dome roofs over the top with sometimes earth / sod cladding.”

It is also known that missionaries drew on Aboriginal technology for buildings, namely in the use of bark for roofs and walls, and grass thatching for gables.

This finding links with a new $770,000 ARC research project led by Dr Memmott to examine the ecological and physical makeup of spinifex grass and its potential use in buildings for Aboriginal people.

Dr Memmott said he hoped continuing research in the area would not only clear up the historical record, but help to inform architectural designers working on current housing problems.

“There’s lessons about Aboriginal housing to be learned, and there are more potential innovative ideas that could be generated from such understandings,” he said.

“There’s a large amount of Indigenous knowledge locked into the customary architecture which has yet to be examined and followed through in terms of its potential applications.”

Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: the Aboriginal Architecture of Australia is available from the University of Queensland Bookshop and Avid Reader in West End.

Media: Dr Memmott (07 3365 3660, p.memmott@uq.edu.au) or Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)

To obtain high resolution images from the book, contact Diana Lilley (07 3365 2753, d.lilley@uq.edu.au)