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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Federation Square: a cosmopolitan site « Previous | |Next »
September 20, 2007

In Towards home and away from home: the networked cosmopolitanism of Federation Square in Crossings Fiona Druitt asks:

Is Federation Square a cosmopolitan site – and what might this mean? This paper concentrates on answering the theoretical aspect of this question (how the site is designed rather than how people interpret it) using Federation Square as a scaffold upon which to imagine a theory of networked cosmopolitanism. I will argue that the design of Federation Square imagines a framework for identity that reflexively engages with both a coming together and a coming apart in federating the Australian nation.

She says that Federation Square isn’t merely iconic and... that there is no suggestion that its desert motif is meant to refer to aboriginality. Such an iconic reference would collapse the relationship of traditional to contemporary aboriginality and run a large risk of cultural appropriation. Instead, Federation Square plies the line between appreciation and appropriation of the desert motif and seems to offer a reflexive, interrelated interpretation of both - of the iconic and the unconscious.

The urban desertscape might be read as an interior desert: a reference to negotiating the badlands of white Australian identity that intersect those histories of Aboriginal dispossession, a haunting return of an imagined desert (a strange, barren exterior) to the interior of the city and the self. Conversely, it might also be read as an appropriation of a central Australian desert, a centripetal red heart, that joins the states together in sand and in symbolism, in geographies both physical and imagined. The stones used in Federation Square (that look nothing like stones found in this part of the country) were mined in the Kimberly region and then cobbled in Perth, suggesting a national rhetoric of sharing, not only of resources, but of a symbolism. This kind of symbolic, desert nationalism is often iconic, which means that it signifies in excess of itself: here the excess signification is actually ironic, it evokes the very opposite of a desert (an exterior, a harsh, barren landscape), imagining a symbolic home for all Australians whether or not they have ever seen a desert before, let alone set foot in one. Federation Square is certainly redolent with national sentiment, from the flagpole out the front to the Australia collection hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria. [5]
The urban interior desert at once holds us together and keeps us apart, just as that disparate, imagined desertscape of Australia brings us symbolically together and at once unconsciously undoes us. Since Federation Square is both a deconstruction and a construction, its urban interior desertscape is at once a self-conscious parody (a city desert) and a celebration of imagined nationalism (a bush desert approaching appropriation or iconicity in the city) that acknowledges both a coming together and a coming apart in terms of a dialectic of exterior and interior to place and space.
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:11 PM |