The Garden of Australian Dreams

The Garden of Australian Dreams is constructed from arrangements of copies, that is, its elements can be sourced to cultural artifices, not original landscapes, as, for example one finds at the Australian National Gallery. As well as this attempt to play into the symbolic order of things, the garden is concerned with manufacturing landscape design surfaces and forms through the generative power of computers. Generally, the garden is concerned to find a space between the popular and the academic, the virtual and the real, the political and the poetic, and the playful and the serious. The Garden of Australian Dreams is about emergent senses of place, about writing, mapping, imaging, reading and singing the country.

It is fundamentally a map of Australia upon which visitors can walk and read complex layers of information. A footstep across the map would equate with 30 miles across the real landmass of Australia. The ground surface of the garden is a richly patterned and written concrete surface made to look like a map printed on fabric that has been stretched and folded across the site. The map connects the National Museum and the Gallery of First Australians, thereby suggesting a shared cartography between different land-use practices and different cultural interpretations of property and place.

The garden can be thought of as a theatrical interweaving of both the `Great Australian Dream' and the `Aboriginal 'Dreaming'. The former being the ideal of acquiring a cornucopian suburban property and the latter a mystical system of mapping and a comprehensive set of creation myths vested in landscape. Both are landscape based mythologies, both concern defining boundaries and kinship. Both are profound systems of orientation.

The two main maps used are a standard English language map of Australia and Horton's map of the tribal boundaries of indigenous Australia. The names and lines of these two maps interweave, erase and overlay one another, forming a complex weave. Other mapping information used to form the surface of the garden includes: vegetation maps; soil and geology maps; electoral boundaries; maps of Australia's history of exploration; road maps; a weather map taken from Australia Day 1998; the Wik land claim; and various cartographic oddities, such as the Dingo Fence and the Western Australian border, derived from lines inscribed by the Pope in the late 15th century to divide Spanish and Portuguese interests in the region. Adding to the mosaic is the word 'home' translated into the various languages spoken in contemporary Australia and written across the surface of the whole map.

The map provides a continuous groundsheet, but it is not always flat. It folds and rises like a sand dune or a ridge to form a tunnel, so visitors can, in one brief passage, pass under the layers of information. Although not yet complete, the tunnel space is to offer an aural interpretation of place, a counterpart to the visual and written surface. The topography of the garden was originally abstracted from models of Shrapnel Valley in Gallipoli. In construction, the folds of the map surface have lost much of their designed complexity.