The earnest antipodes; New Conversations with an old landscape: landscape architecture in contemporary Australia.

NEW CONVERSATIONS WITH AN OLD LANDSCAPE: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

By Catherine Bull, Melbourne: The Images Publishing Company. 2002. [pounds sterling]35

Never mind the publisher's sexed up title, this is actually the first proper survey of recent Australian landscape design and it's not only essential reading for anyone interested in serious landscape, it's also pretty revealing. And it is a labour of love too. Bull is professor of landscape at Melbourne University which is right down at the bottom right-hand corner of the main landmass of Oz whose nearest big cities are two hours flying time away. The logistics of doing a survey book in these geographic circumstances are hideous and it is no surprise that it all needed funding (from Dame Elizabeth Murdoch no less) and relied on the knowledge of local landscape architects for 'projects and people they considered important'. That, sort of, guarantees that any avant-garde projects are un-nominated. Happily Richard Weller and Vlad Sitta, aka Room 4.1.3 and Sinatra Murphy and Urban Initiatives make it, but only in a little chapter at the end where they need not to be taken too seriously: 'because they introduce issues that are yet to be established as social preoccupations.' Ho, hum.

Australians in the arts have always gone on, mostly very tediously, about the importance of establishing a regional Australian architecture or painting or music or whatever. The case of Glenn Murcutt is probably the exception which proves the general rule that internationalism is the real norm. But after you have seen the evidence of the landscapes approved by Conversations you are drawn to the view that there is something in the regional thing after all. Here is an approach to landscape design which is, almost universally, dominated by, first the native landscape, then a commitment to ecological issues, then the use of native planting and configurations and, most of all, the Light Touch. Plus, you glean, a guilt about the early white settlers sniffing at the local scrub and introducing plant species they knew and loved. The way Bull thinks about it goes like this: 'These landscape architects have recognized that the fundamental characteristics of the place, such as the availability of water and the relationship between indigenous flora and fauna, cannot be substantially changed without profound negative impacts, and that human activity in the landscape should therefore adapt and change instead'.

So if you are of the school which believes landscape should be earnest, unamusing and responsive to (in the sense of almost imitating) the prevailing ecology, this book represents some of the best of such practice. And, let it be said, some of the examples are extraordinary transformations of drab suburban environments. But you must secretly hope that there are more than two sets of landscape mavericks in that great continent. Just remember that line from Joan Iverson Nassauer: 'landscape architects may consult the genius of the place but they do not expect the genius of the place to design it.' In Australia, it seems from this book, quite a lot of them do.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]