Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Dovey, Kim. 2000. “Myth and Media: Constructing Aboriginal Architecture.”…

- - - - a 10-page spread appeared in the BHP promotional magazine Steel Profile in December 1993. using terms like: “blueprint for future Aboriginal housing”
      - Not so far north of this site, at Ok Tedi in Papua, New Guinea, BHP were at that time engaged in a long-running legal dispute with the indigenous population over massive environmental damage caused by mining operations, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. This dispute was being reported regularly in the Australian press, and the company’s failure to reach agreement on compensation was causing a serious public relations crisis. The BHP sponsorship of an “Aboriginal” house was a form of counter-publicity, an investment in some potent symbolic capital.
      - mechanism for display of aboriginality
        
        A film of Murcutt’s work entitled Touch the Earth Lightly was made by BHP, shown on national television during 1994, and the cover image used in promotion shows Murcutt with Marika and her baby, his arm extended in a gesture of offer.
        
        The “window… looks back to the billabong and waterhole and it’s very important isn’t it… the location of the room in relation to the man-groves, the fresh water mangroves, to the sea and to your billabong at this end of the house.” - Marika’s relationship with the landscape is spoken for by Murcutt. As a “bridge”: between cultures the house does not quite span the divide, but they are not the only parties who want this bridge to stand in film.
  - - - By contrast with the beach shelter and the photographs, the house is mostly kept closed.
    - - Architects have never been able to control the reproduction of architectural imagery
      - By controlling the reproduction, Murcutt controls the critique of his work. The representations have been deployed to make the design fit the theory.