Unsettling the badlands: community art and the governance of place

The effects of neo-liberal modernity are perceived as unanchoring the relationships between people, culture and their social and material surrounds. Within this context, place and place-making have assumed new currency as a motivation for governmental intervention in the lived social world. “Place” is revalued as a way of belonging to, and knowing the nation, the community, the self within the flux of this unsettled present. In Australia, invoking place also invokes more enduring dissonances between the settler-colonial national imaginary, the territory it occupies and the history of settling and unsettling this territory. Settler-colonial belonging in the nation is secured through repeated forms of destruction and mis-inhabitation of place, and through the excising of unruly places from symbolic inclusion in the nation. For Deborah Bird Rose and Ross Gibson, these are the frontiers and badlands to settlement; they are both material places and symbolic projections of everything that disturbs colonial imaginings of place.<br><br>This thesis extends Rose’s and Gibson’s theoretical perspectives on place into unusual locations for thinking about settler colonialism: three community art projects, each located in suburban badlands of urban settlement. The West Welcomes Refugees is a public mural incorporating the stories of recent and past migrants who have settled in Footscray, and old industrial centre in Melbourne’s inner west. The Weaving Lands is a cross-cultural weaving project conducted in Broadmeadows, in north-western Melbourne. Refill is a multi-media project conducted over three years with Arabic-speaking and Indigenous students at a school in Miller, western Sydney. Each of these projects is government-sponsored and located in socially diverse, disadvantaged, formerly mis-governed neighbourhoods to the ‘west’ of Australia’s two largest metropolitan centres. They are attempts to restore inhospitable places to a kind of normative social order, at once a nurturing of people in place and a more liberal form of emplacement, a putting people in their place, the right place for sustaining the national community.<br><br>But circumscribed as they are by instrumental rationalities, these art projects are also material practices of place, literally, assemblages of people and objects into new and unlikely relationships. Such assemblages exceed the rationalities that legitimate community are as a technique of governance. In this thesis, a rich description of the material practices of these projects and the places they address offers a glimpse of more complex forms of living together than have been imagined either within settler-colonial mythologies of the good nation or within liberal paradigms of multiculturalism. <br><br>