What is it to work with love on stolen land?

This is a story about love, and how settlers like me might come to understand it on stolen land.

The move to talk about “love” in the context of our cities is welcome, in turning discussion away from quantitative metrics towards the less tangible elements that make human habitat conducive to life – like joy, memory, play, and affection.

Less discussed, though, is “love” as a verb - how we infuse the world around us with a constellation of acts of care, kindness and affection that demands no extractive return. On a continent still ravaged by settler-colonial urbanism and the violence it has wrought, the urgency of exploring acts of love in place is paramount.

Invasion and settler-colonial urbanism

Cities were conceived as bastions of British Empire, at once centres of administration and production for the ends of Empire. This is illustrated in Melbourne’s 1850s coat of arms, showing a bullock, a sheep skin, a whale (almost hunted to extinction) and a ship, all telling a story of the city’s raison d’etre.

Settler-colonial urbanism is an ongoing process and system, not an event. It endures in systems that prioritise extractivism at all costs and continue what historian Patrick Wolfe shows as the elimination of Indigeneity, made all too visible in mining giant Rio Tinto’s ability to blow up 46,000 year-old rock paintings at Juukan Gorge as one in a catalogue of acts of destruction, the destruction of sacred trees for road upgrades in Victoria and the removal of rock art at Murujuga to make way for yet more extractive activity.

This is not love.

As our nation embarks on a referendum process associated with The Uluru Statement and Voice to Parliament, it is clear that planning and the urban professions need to embrace truth-telling if we are to move beyond the ongoing destruction baked into the systems we work in.

An epidemic of displacement?

Any attempt to chronicle the effects of settler-colonial urbanism in a piece of this length will necessarily be incomplete, suffice to say its workings and consequences still pervade daily life. We see it in the alarming list of species extinctions, driven out of their habitats that have been swallowed by bitumen, or burned out in climate disasters. This is not love. In the layers of harrowing injustice perpetrated against First Peoples that are hinted at through decades of Closing the Gap reports, yet told more deeply in the severing of existential bonds between people and Country [8]. This is not love.

There are also consequences that might not be immediately obvious. In the US, another settler-colonial state, the Surgeon General has gone as far as to nominate social isolation as the nation’s greatest public health challenge. When cities are designed according to a modus-operandi of severing bonds between people and place, perhaps this is no surprise.

To put it another way, the settler-colonial approach to place has ensured that settlers exist in a condition of unsettlement characterised by never being properly at ease with place. When we treat place without love, as a passive container to be exploited, how can we shape cities people love?

Acts of love and reckoning

Early on in my PhD research, which explored a post-colonial approach to evaluating placemaking practice, I came across a potent invocation from Kombumerri-Waka Waka Elder and scholar Aunty/Dr Mary Graham. Her advice to settlers that seek to invoke a “more mature” sense of identity in this land is to:

“start establishing very close ties with the land, not necessarily via ownership of property but via locally-based, inclusive, non-political, strategy-based frameworks, with a very long-term aim of simply looking after land” [9].

Since reading these words I have pointed them towards anyone who would listen, and plenty of people less inclined to. Graham’s words reverberate from everyday actions of kindness to place, right to an ethic of stewardship based in a non-teleological care for place, wherever we are. They are a portal into the tasks of coming to grips with the terrible legacies of settler-colonialism, as part of the essential work that must be done if deep scars in place and people are to be healed. They might also be a portal to treating place with love.

When we care for place or, as Dharug scholar and placemaker Maddi Miller points out, when “we work in partnership with Country and what Country provides” [10], Country in turn flourishes in ways that support our wellbeing as part of an intricately interconnected web of life. Divesting ourselves of the extractive, exclusionary settler-colonial approach to place opens possibilities for true ecological wellbeing. For fellow settlers, this requires deep reflection and unlearning the approaches to place and other beings that are constraining our ability to relate.

Cycles of care and connectedness

During my research which explored placemaking practice on three sites on Kulin Nations land in Naarm (aka Melbourne) and Djilang (aka Geelong), what kept coming to the surface was how the investment of love and care in place resulted in a kind of virtuous cycle of care and connectedness that begets more acts of stewardship.

These virtuous cycles manifested in slightly different ways across different sites, but there were some notable trends. First, connecting more deeply with place and investing it with acts of care seemed to engender a sense of groundedness and wellbeing in people’s lives. If place holds our lives, perhaps a place also teaches us about reciprocity in cultivating an ecological symbiosis. At the Point Cook Pop-Up Park, acts of care and connectedness clearly built a stronger fabric of community based in belonging together, demonstrated in a constellation of greetings, conversations, handshakes and other such everyday acts.

Secondly, in terms of placemaking or urban design interventions, the level of care and connectedness invested in a process by individuals seemed to influence the propensity of an intervention to promote vibrancy, activity and a belonging-together that enriches the fabric of community. Care and connectedness are difficult to quantify, but we can observe them through a lattice of actions, or through interviews and storytelling that uncover how people’s sense of connectedness with place changes over a placemaking process, or the development of a garden.

What this shows us is that even small acts of love or kindness in place can catalyse others, building a web of reciprocity that sustains life. Healthy ecological systems, and of course Indigenous conceptions of Country, show us this through demonstrations of symbiosis. Being a catalyst for such symbiosis to take shape, seems a remarkably loving and powerful way to be in the world. For anyone in the built environment professions, the implications are clear and generative.

What is it to Love?

If we are to be in loving relationship with place, we start with listening. We see the colours in the land, hear and heed the calls of fauna, flora and each other. We listen to stories that echo through land, sea and sky, taking time to understand. Chances are we might see a thrumming of life where we thought there was none, and we might feel a sense of our own connectedness in the web of life.

We not only then move to our own acts of stewardship; we also, as anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose reminds us, “can take up responsibility for place and action, and can assist others to take up their responsibility. We can act and bear witness” [11]. For settlers like myself, this means working to open up opportunities for sovereign Indigenous agency, to amplify Indigenous voices and to cultivate our relationship with Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous place.

Love in the mall

No, this isn’t the start of a short story of suburban sprawl. It’s a parting lesson, brought to you from Wominjeka Tarnum Yooroom (Welcome Bowl), a stunning work at the southern end of Footscray Mall in Melbourne. Here, in this site dominated by hard surfaces and at times, hard stories [12], a ring of basalt boulders rises from the smoothed crust of the settler-colonial city.

The artists, Maree Clarke, Vicki Couzens and Jeph Neale, started this work with a story. The coolamon form of the boulders’ arrangement tells the story of the Welcome To Country, enacted on this land fringing the border of Bunurong and Wurundjeri Country on the bountiful shores of the Maribyrnong River over thousands of years. I watch kids clamber over the bigger boulders, bringing play into an environment bereft of it. On one of the smaller boulders, I watch a man with one leg lean and shake the hands of passers-by.

I listened to the rocks, the stories of people that interact with them, and I came to see this work as an act of the most generous subversion. Subverting the hardness, the exclusion, the smooth crust of the settler-colonial city, with stories of Country and its will to hold life. Offering an invitation into a deeper communion with place that passers-by take up on their own terms. It is here that I came to wonder, what if our work in placemaking, planning or design became focused on fostering the will of place to hold life [13]? What if every planning project, every building, or landscape, was shaped in line with this fundamental objective?

To love in and with place seems to me a life’s work, a lattice of actions and interactions held together by our intention and our ability to listen. Place calls us to this form of love every day, from the bird calls and blooms that brighten our lives, to the sounds of the breeze and the ocean, to the calls of the coolamon of rock. How might we love place as though our own very being depends on it? The question I ask myself every day is, how am I going to answer the call today?