Architects Without Frontiers | Australia

AWFs’ work in Arnhem Land to build community capacity is funded by the Thomas Foundation. Their grant allowed us to travel to Darwin and the communities, as well as covering QS expenses for these projects. The Thomas Foundation’s support for this work is much appreciated and AWF looks forward to a continuing affiliation with the Foundation.

Maningrida Arts Centre

AWF is working on a new Arts Centre, in Maningrida, north central Arnhem Land. Deb Kunda and Beck Adams travelled to the area in April to determine the current state of the project. The existing Art Centre is very overcrowded with art works - bark paintings, fibre baskets and 3D art are stacked on top of each other, potentially damaging the work.

Maningrida and its surrounding outstations have around 800 contributing artists, and Maningrida Arts and Crafts helps the community to sustain and develop itself economically while maintaining its cultural roots. The current facilities were built in the 1960s as a soup kitchen, and are completely unsuitable for housing and storing artwork. When artists come to sell their work they have to discuss payment in public, as there is nowhere else to do this, sometimes causing embarrassing social problems for the artists.

Gunbalunya Cultural Centre

AWF have produced a scoping document which can be used by Maningrida Arts and Crafts to apply to funding bodies in order to get the new Arts Centre built. AWF is also working on a Cultural Centre for Gunbalunya (Oenpelli) in Western Arnhem Land. There have been 3 stages to this project. The first stage saw AWF going to Gunbalunya to get to know the site and the brief, and to consult with the community about what they wanted for their building. Gunbalunya is about a 3hr drive from Darwin, so we were picked up at 6am. Gunbalunya sits just outside the border of Kakadu National Park - a spectacular drive.

On arrival we were taken on a tour of Injaluk Arts and Culture and the town (which is in the throes of the Federal Intervention), and then a walk up Injaluk Hill by Wilfred, one of the traditional owners - one of the highlights of the trip. Wilfred showed us incredible rock paintings, and was very generous in sharing some of his people’s stories with us. The following day there was a community meeting, where all the relevant people (including the traditional owners) to the project came and talked to us about what they expected and hoped for the Cultural Centre. We were enormously impressed with their enthusiasm for the project. The meeting was held on the proposed site, and Garry sketched out design ideas in the sand.

After this meeting we went back home and taking on board all the ideas we had heard about what people want from the building, Garry came up with a sketch design.

Stage 2 of the project saw us take the plans and a model back up to Gunbalanya to present to the community for feedback. This was the trip where we had to work hard, taking our work to all the different groups - the school, the arts centre, peoples’ houses - explaining the design to everyone, and getting feedback. At the end of the day we left the design proposal set up in the Arts Centre office as we couldn’t find some important community members that day due to ceremonies happening at the time.

The final phase of this project has been to modify the design according to feedback we got from the local users, and then create a package so that the community can take the design we have done and show it to funding bodies and get the project built.