ADDITIONS to architectural history

XIXth conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane: SAHANZ, 2002

An Introduction to Architecture + Building

Traditions: lessons from ethno–architects

 
Aboriginal Environments Research Centre
The University of Queensland

This paper offers an introduction and overview of the papers presented to

the ADDITIONS conference under the theme ‘Architecture + Building
Traditions’. These papers are specifically oriented toward scholars of
Pacific rim Indigenous cultures and their vernacular building traditions, in
order that a debate might arise regarding the human values of these
traditions and what they represent by way of contrast to Western constructs
of architecture. A general sub-theme running through this collection of
papers is how a theoretical framework of ‘architecture’ might be
configured, which would serve as a cross-cultural tool to understanding the
nature of constructed and composed environments used as human
habitats across all cultural contexts. An extension of this question would be
why the Western concept of ‘architecture’ has so far not achieved such a
unifying position, at times excluding non-Western and Indigenous building
traditions. This new construct of architecture cannot be dominated by
period aesthetics or popular Eurocentric philosophies, but must be useful
for both theoretical and practical application to the settlements of the non-
European and Indigenous cultures of the world, as well as to Western
environments.

One of the session contributors, Martin Fowler aptly introduces the session theme:

Western architecture, however, remains reticent about valuing Others’

architectures. Embodying cross-cultural richness in human achievement, Others’
buildings continue to be uncelebrated whilst different criteria are applied
unequally across cultural divides. Due respect is still missing….Meanwhile,
architecture absents itself from contributing valuing opinions that might bolster
the external status and self-pride of Others as the resistance of their cultures is
eroded by persistent aspects of modernity?
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James Davidson, another contributor, provides a similar preface:

Do Western ideologies and concepts of architecture hold relevance for non-

Western and Indigenous building traditions and environments? Does Western
theoretical discourse reinforce Western-centric belief systems to the detriment of
non-Western and Indigenous traditions regarding building methods and their
related behavioural systems?

In his paper, Michael Austin notes the problem of suggesting that all ‘primitive’ vernacular
styles share some kind of common identity. This inclusiveness is not based on a
comparative analysis but rather on contrasting it with metropolitan, ‘civilized’, and
Western traditions. Albert Refiti calls for new epistemological categories that “speak from
the realm of the ‘Other’, in order to develop criticism against the process of making
‘Other’.”

Does not such a theoretical position already exist within the study of vernacular
architecture? If we turn to Paul Oliver’s Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the
World1, we find that he has no difficulty combining the term ‘architecture’ with
‘vernacular’ traditions, but that he then assigns ‘architect-designed architecture’ and
‘vernacular architecture’ (as well as ‘popular architecture’) to separate categories. Oliver
provides no explanation of how these separate traditions may be commonly defined as
sub-branches of ‘architecture’, whatever the latter construct may prove to be. Nor does he
clearly address the definition of architecture in a cross-cultural sense. Is it possible to
assume a cross-cultural theoretical position on what architecture is? A consideration of
the full range of forms, traditions and properties pertinent to ‘vernacular architecture’
must surely inform such a theory. In attempting to explore such a range of properties, we
shall see that many of the session’s contributors draw on social anthropology, social
geography, archaeology and material culture in their efforts to establish a place within the
context of universal human discourse, behaviour and achievement.

At the outset there is a need to provide a working definition of ‘tradition,’ and indeed
several contributors diligently do so (eg. see the Austin and Davidson papers). Currently
Australian anthropologists are re-visiting and re-examining the definition of ‘tradition’ (as
well as that of ‘customs’ and ‘laws’) in response to intense programmes of Native Title
Claim-related litigation. I shall utilise the definition provided by Professor Bruce Rigsby, an
eminent anthropologist and linguist:-

In Standard English, the term tradition has, I submit, the core sense of signifying
the process(es) of the transmission or passing on of culture across the generations.
In this sense, tradition is no more or less than the normal process of cultural
change, as Kroeber (1948:411) recognised when he wrote of “the passing on of
culture to the younger generation” and said that “the internal handing on through
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time is called tradition”. Tradition has a second (metonymic) sense of signifying

the product or products of this process, so that we can identify those elements of
culture, e.g., customs or whatever, which have a history of inter-generational
transmission to be traditions as well. Note then that the term tradition has two
senses: a process and the product of the process. For their part, customs are
simply patterns of behaviour which are shared by members of a social group, ie
they are social, not individual phenomena. In plain English, traditions (as
products of the process of tradition) seem simply to be old customs, handed down
across the generations from the past. 2

We note that there is an emphasis contained within this definition of cultural transmission
between generations, which, if applied to the phenomena of buildings and architectural
activity, implies concepts of enculturation, conceptual encoding and decoding of
meanings, as well as adaptation to sites, socioeconomic contexts and user group needs.
These are all dynamic properties of traditional architecture. Rigsby himself notes that
‘tradition’ must be viewed from within the process of cultural change. Far from reifying the
vernacular as an architectural concept, the following set of papers are concerned both with
the dynamic qualities of the many dimensions of people-environment interaction that
characterise the various cultural categories of vernacular architecture, and the position of
building traditions within human cultural landscapes.3

There are three papers in this session by members of the Aboriginal Environments
Research Centre of the University of Queensland, whose topics are the vernacular
architecture of Aboriginal Australia. They all contribute to the position that Aboriginal
vernacular architecture is an expression of highly complex and diverse relationships
between the physical, social and cosmological environment. This is of special interest
here because Australian Aboriginal architecture has regularly been portrayed during the
colonial and post-colonial periods as little more than primitive huts, and certainly not
deserving of the label ‘architecture’. The modest nature of most Australian ‘Aboriginal
architecture’ poses a number of theoretical questions concerning the role of built form in
Australian Indigenous cultural traditions.

In a paper I prepared with Carroll Go-Sam for the 1999 SAHANZ Conference in Hobart,
titled “Australian Indigenous Architecture: Its Forms and Evolution”4, we concluded with a
definition of ‘architecture’ that we argued was more appropriate for the cultural
circumstances of many Aboriginal people-environment contexts. It was “architecture as a
selected, arranged and constructed configuration of environmental properties, both
natural and artificial, in and around one or more activity spaces, combined with patterns
of behavioural rules, to result in human comfort and quality of lifestyle…” This definition
includes selected environmental features, mental and behavioural rules, spatial
properties, hearths and artefacts. It can also include buildings, but not by necessity. It
incorporates such concepts as socio-spatial settlement structure, avoidance behaviour,
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diversity of construction detailing and its impact on spatial experience, and ceremonial
architecture imbued with meaning and theatrical moment. There are a range of cognitive,
invisible, ephemeral and symbolic properties that instill Aboriginal Architecture with a
culturally distinct nature.

There are clear parallels here with Mike Austin’s description of ‘Pacific Architecture’5 as
“an architecture of spaces open to the sky rather than closed rooms, or sticks and grass as
against mud and stones, poles as against walls, of single cell pavilions rather than
labyrinthine complexes, of buildings raised in the air on stilts rather than sunk in the
ground, of temporariness as against permanence, tension and weaving rather than
compression and building, an outdoor existence and ocean voyaging as against a life
grounded in the land.”

‘Architecture’ as it is defined here is therefore not necessarily based on the creative

manipulation of configurations of forms and spaces, the outcomes of which transcend
local cultural traditions, challenge local architectural phenotypes and re-assess genotypes,
as posited by Bill Hillier6 in his treatise on the difference between ‘architecture’ and
‘building’. His definition establishes a dichotomy between the ‘active’ building systems of
‘architecture’ in the Western sense and the ‘passive building systems’ that reproduce a
cultural template of vernacular building design. The latter notion might be challenged as
suggesting an over-reified concept of human behaviour. No, ‘architecture’ is rather about
the possibility of making choices between different combinations of spaces, artefacts,
behaviours, ideas and identities, and the relatedness of such permutations to surrounding
landscapes and different constructs of place.

It is interesting to note that writers in the ‘cultural studies’ field also appear to be moving
toward similar positions. Thus Hodge has acknowledged that Aboriginal residential
camps utilise ‘space as walls’ and are organized using ‘semiotic strategies,’ which he
defines as ‘signs and laws’ in relation to ‘centres’. A more expansively cross-cultural
position is taken by Nalbantoglu and Wong who challenge the primacy of the visuality that
they claim dominates contemporary architectural studies, and who are concerned about
the repression or exclusion of the “differential spatiality’s of often disadvantaged
ethnicities, communities or peoples.”7

Central to the task of accommodating the diverse cultural traditions of the world, is the
development of case studies, which deal adequately with: (i) the dynamic properties of
architectural activity occurring both within and between cultural groups and
longitudinally through time, and (ii) the full complexity of architectural articulation from
the minimalist adjustment of natural environments to highly complex structures with
multiple overlays of properties. The twelve papers in the session are divided into four sub-
themes based on these ideas. Each of these will be examined in turn.
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(i) Values, traditions and architectural constructs – cross-cultural perspectives.

(ii) Cultural change, transmission and acculturation in architectural traditions.
(iii) The maintenance of architectural traditions: further phenomenological and
dynamic perspectives.
(iv) Religious beliefs and values as generators of traditional architectures.

Values, traditions and architectural constructs – cross-cultural perspectives

In this sub-session, Fowler firstly presents a strong position on what constitutes

Melanesian Traditional Architecture in East New Guinea. He develops five primary
architectural types. Each is based on distinct concepts of form making and tectonic
technique, and have the potential for spawning many sub-types and variations generated
through expressive or decorative elaboration. Fowler bases his typology on the idea of
tectonic languages (weaving and binding) and syntactic (of form/space) vocabularies. The
“weaving and binding preoccupation stands out in the artistic production, and everyday
items such as wrist bands, bags etc, of almost all Melanesian societies.”…. The character of
a number of the genotypic roof forms can be defined as woven three-dimensional basket-
like frames, although there is one type that Fowler notes is closer to South-East Asian
structural traditions.

Austin in his paper (that follows), briefly examines the distinction made between architect
and builder in Oceania. We note that Paul Oliver, in the Encyclopedia of Vernacular
Architecture of the World8 stated that ‘vernacular builders’ (note that he does not say
‘architects’) are customarily from the communities that use the structures and are
frequently ‘owner-builder-occupiers’. However Austin concludes that the idea that
traditional building could be executed by everyone is not correct for Oceania. He provides
the examples of the Maori architect (tohunga), a skilled carver knowledgeable in myths
and traditions, and of a Samoan guild of builders (tufunga) who constructed the complex
geometries of the fale and left the installation of only final building elements to the local
people.

Elsewhere I have reported that Oliver’s position on this matter appears to have been the
case within most Australian Aboriginal societies in pre and early contact times, with every
individual being versed in shelter construction. Nevertheless, there is anecdotal evidence
to suggest that certain individuals excelled and would then specialise in more permanent
shelter construction. For example, amongst the Wongkanguru and Dieri who utilized a
variety of dome forms throughout the arid surrounds of Lake Eyre, certain builders were in
such demand that they were borrowed from one camp by another and recompensed.9
However we note that Oliver also qualifies his general proposition by stating that
craftsmen may become more specialised and may occasionally be organized into guilds.

Austin goes on to examine the dynamic nature of the construct of ‘architectural tradition’:
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In Aotearoa/ New Zealand tradition is continually being reinvented, and every

denial of tradition is a restatement of it while every representation of tradition is a
modification of it…Modernism in constructing itself in opposition to its own
tradition referred to the primitive. However the primitive was the invoking of
another tradition….

Austin also addresses the concept of ‘hybrid architecture’, which is also discussed in other
contributors’ papers (eg Shaneen Fantin and Bill McKay) as ‘bi-cultural architecture’,
being a syncretisation of customary and western elements. Elsewhere Linzey10 has defined
‘biculturalism’ as the phenomenon of two cultures co-occupying one place. Davidson also
explores the possibilities of syncretism in his paper.

Davidson’s contribution concerns the contemporary social environment of Maya America,

where Western-style cottages constructed of concrete and galvanised iron are proliferating
through processes of both direct (imposed) and indirect cultural change. These dwellings
are aspired to as symbolic increased status. Rather than maintain their traditional
architecture, many Maya people prefer to adapt aspects of their customary behaviour to
these Western dwellings, despite their not being architecturally accommodating of certain
customary forms of behaviours. At the same time the residents become indebted to
lifelong mortgages. Maya traditional domestic architecture, which encompasses 36
different design types distributed among twenty eight Maya language groups, is gradually
diminishing in the extent of its use. Davidson proposes a project to produce a bi-cultural
prototype house for each of these groups that would combine selected traditional
properties with certain Western housing technologies, materials and infrastructure, in an
attempt to synthesise the positive attributes of both architectural systems. (Fantin later
mentions a similar approach.)

Cultural change, transmission and acculturation in architectural traditions

The papers in this sub-session also address processes of syncretism, and contribute to an
understanding of cross-cultural architectural exchanges, ‘borrowings’ and appropriations,
which result in transformations of architectural meanings and configurations.

Refiti writes on the appropriation of a Western architectural construct (the European

Christian church) and accompanying (Christian) ritual by another cultural group
(Polynesian/Samoa) in the 19th century. This was accomplished within the intellectual
terms of the Polynesians with neither a comprehensive understanding of the Christian
culture nor an attempt to authentically create a facsimile Christian religion. Only
particular Christian ideas were selected and integrated with local ones as these churches
became local idealised versions of Christian spirituality. Refiti then analyses the
transposition of that construction form to the contemporary urban context of New
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Zealand by a non-Indigenous New Zealand architect who attempted to use it to reflect a

Pacific identity. What might be finally read as…… “Pacific architecture, is a New Zealand
European architect’s fantasy of what a Pacific heavenly paradise might be, based on a
Pacific fantasy on what a European missionary paradise might be.” Refiti describes the
overall process of transformation of architectural properties as “a double movement of
cultural exchange”.

McKay writes on appropriation, but in his case the appropriation is by colonists of selected
Indigenous architectural stereotypes. He examines the stereotyping of Maori architecture
by Anglo-New Zealanders through the media of politics, museums and texts into a single
genotype, that of the Meeting House or ‘Whare’. Any post-contact architectural
acculturation was seen by the colonists to represent a loss of Indigenous identity and to be
somehow non-authentic.

This paper discusses the perception of “Maori architecture” as it has been seen in
the mainstream narrative of New Zealand architectural history. It offers a critical
overview of buildings by Maori from the perspective of their portrayal in New
Zealand architectural histories. It is not so much about the buildings themselves,
but rather the processes of selection and representation and how this has reflected
the political and cultural concerns of the times.

McKay provides examples of the mixing of Pakeha (European) and Maori motifs by Maori
builder-architects as a distinctly New Zealand form of bi-cultural expression, and certainly
not as an outcome of assimilation.

Deidre Brown, in her paper, extends McKay’s analysis by projecting forwards from the era
of Western museum-controlled depictions and stereotypes of Maori Meeting Houses to
contemporary depictions and constructions of the same building completed by tertiary-
trained Maori artists and curators. The latter examples are for art gallery settings where the
artists and curators are empowered to express Maori cultural values on their own terms.
Brown also mentions the recent repatriation of a Meeting House back to the Maori Group
from which it was originally commissioned, once again demonstrating a cycle of the
transformation and dissemination of an architectural construct between two groups.

The combination of these three papers provides an interesting overview of the

transformation of architectural constructs over several hundred years within a Polynesian
context of colonial encounter.
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The maintenance of architectural traditions: further phenomenological and dynamic

perspectives

In the third sub-session of this conference stream, Lesley McFadyen reminds us of some
important phenomenological, as well as dynamic, properties of architecture by
considering it within a broader set of people-environment relations. To do this she takes
the interesting example of a neolithic ‘long cairn’ or tomb from south-west Britain and
considers it as a construction site that was undergoing constant architectural modification
over centuries, brought about by successive generations of workers. Noting that the use of
architectural drawings can simplify the conception of buildings to mere solids and
surfaces at the expense of other important properties, McFadyen argues that previous
archaeologists have collapsed constructional histories of such buildings into “one
exclusive snapshot of a 'monument' in use as a tomb for the dead….”

I have come to understand the efforts of these labours more in terms of entwined
assemblages: where materials that were intimately caught up in people's
identities, material culture, were knitted into these areas of construction; where
people attempted to engage with past materialities and create material histories of
their own; where human bodies were literally incorporated into these assemblages
of things while construction work was actively taking place….

McFadyen notes that the architectural workers engaged in construction work at any one
time in a long cairn tomb, are only one of the many groups of workers involved with such a
building whose life might span centuries. Such a group would have encountered the
artefacts and material remains of their forebears. The negotiation of such assemblages
would have then led...

…to further connections between things, and things and people. Each of these
encounters facilitated acts of remembering or forgetting previous groups of
people. There would have been a continual negotiation of how to go about
remembering or dealing with the materiality of those past lives….construction
was about the possibilities and impossibilities in imagining architectural space.
Construction work pulled those that laboured in these areas into unimagined
points of contact that departed into other articulations of how people might be
caught up in materialness and each other.”

McFadyen goes on to consider the construction work in the context of a constructional

continuum and a politics of building, which is continually being negotiated. McKay makes
a similar, albeit shorter critique of this failure of previous archaeological interpretations.

Steven Long brings us back to Aboriginal Australia with his paper on a remote, rural and
riverine people who continue to move between temporarily established bush camps and
conventional Anglo-Australian housing which albeit has been transformed and adapted to
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suit customary aspects of lifestyle. These two examples respectively demonstrate the post-
colonial continuity and adaption of traditional ‘architectural’ practices incorporating
acculturated artefacts, and the simultaneous use of Western houses with special yard
‘attachments’ to facilitate customary outdoor behaviour patterns. Long includes in his
analysis the concept of the ‘travellers’ camp’.

The Aboriginal ‘travellers’ camp’ is a most interesting example of the culturally

constructed use of domiciliary space, which employs minimal (if any) structure, thereby
challenging the conventional concept of 'architecture' as at very least comprising a
building. A travellers' camp is quickly-made, comprising domiciliary spaces, hearths and
artefacts, and sometimes windbreaks or shades. It is used overnight or perhaps for only a
few hours (such as a 'dinner' or midday camp), by a group who is travelling through the
country. As there is little time to invest in the construction of shelters, the natural qualities
of the chosen camping site are of substantial importance in enhancing residential comfort.
Consider the properties of such a camp. There are comforts of surface, vegetation, sound,
smell, warmth, security, spatial definition, customary domiciliary behaviours, and
connection with nature. In the circumstance of a strong wind, a windbreak would have
been quickly constructed of mulga limbs. If there was a rain-shower, the fire would have
been stoked up; while persistent rain would have possibly resulted in the stretching of a
plastic sheet or blanket over a tree. This is ‘architecture’ at its most minimal, yet the
campers retain a certain level of comfort.11

O’Rourke is the second Australianist in this session and although his contribution is more
purely ethnographic than theoretical, his work on the semi-sedentary villages of Aboriginal
rainforest camps will contribute to the revision of Australian architectural stereotypes.
There is much more variation in the extent of sedentism versus residential mobility than
was formerly portrayed in earlier ethnographic glosses of Aboriginal Australia, which held
that the continent was peopled exclusively with hunter/gatherer nomads. A national
overview of Aboriginal ethno-architecture by the current author12 is currently developing a
working hypothesis, which holds that semi-sedentary villages were formed in places where
abundant seasonal staples were available. This was particularly so if there was a also
inclement weather that necessitated durable weatherproof cladding and a need for indoor
environments in which one could stand up and move between inner-connected spaces
with minimal discomfort. O’Rourke’s work is also interesting as it may be applied to the
discussion surrounding cultural tourism through the reconstruction of one or more
sedentary villages at customary campsites on rainforest walking paths. A number of these
paths are currently being reconstructed by National Parks in collaboration with
Traditional Owners.

Austin, in his paper, also examines tourism and the resultant re-construction of ‘tradition’
through a hybrid of traditional and international architecture that facilitates new
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syntheses. He provides the example of Polynesian environments being created in the USA
(post WW2), albeit from a mixed number of sources, and their emergent cultures of
behaviours. The resultant hybrid was then later being re-exported back to Hawaii and
Tahiti. Now, in the USA, certain examples of these buildings from the 1950s are being
identified as heritage architecture. (Compare with Refiti, McKay, Brown.)

Religious beliefs and values as generators of traditional architecture

The first contributor in this sub session, Fantin, writes of the Yolngu people of Arnhem
Land in northern Australia and their religious and architectural practices. In a previous
paper dealing with this subject, she and her co-author drew attention to the work of James
Fox13 who had assembled and compared ethnographies of Austronesian houses that were
drawn from Malaysia and Sumatra in the west, to New Zealand and Goodenough Island in
the east, and from south-east Asia to Melanesia and the Pacific. Fox noted14 that most
Austronesian homes possessed what he called a ‘ritual attractor’, or a pre-eminent
structural element of the house’s architecture that is usually a focus of ritual or at least
acknowledged in ritual, and generally recognized as such from the time of construction. It
represents the house as a whole in a concentrated or symbolic form. For Austronesian
houses, Fox concluded15 that the ritual attractors most frequently encountered were posts,
the ladder, the ridge-pole, and the hearth within an encompassing roof. Fantin, building
on the work of others such as Thompson and Reser, drew upon the evidence for the
symbolism of the archetypal forked-post and cross-pole in Arnhem Land and Cape York,
indicating that these components were also ‘ritual attractors’ in these regions of Aboriginal
Australia.16

She extends her arguments further in this current paper by examining the creation of
religious architecture through ceremony. A creative synthesis of song, dance, ground
sculptures, ceremonial artefacts and shelters, becomes imbued with ancestral power, and
constitutes a temporary religious architecture which contains ‘ancestral aesthetic’
qualities. She also explores the lightweight and low-tech nature of traditional domiciliary
architecture whose ephemeral qualities can contrast with the powerful cultural meanings
imbued in the former. This traditional domiciliary architecture comprised a repertoire of
some 12 or 13 architectural types that were used at different times of the diurnal and
seasonal cycles, and under varying socio-economic circumstances. Note that such
repertoires appeared to be the norm for most Aboriginal groups, particularly the more
mobile groups in semi-arid environments.

Fantin presents the idea of the ceremonial Elders as architects creating a form of religious
architecture:

Preparing the ground for ceremonies, creating the appropriate structures to be

used in them, and enacting the song and dance in them is a highly ordered
process which is controlled and directed by particular Yolngu elders, they are the
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architects of the ceremony. The processes required to organise, prepare and build
ceremony grounds, and then invoke an ancestor’s presence and power through
song and dance creates a Yolngu religious architecture.

Fantin argues that any construct of Yolngu architecture needs to incorporate an

understanding of the relationship between the structure of Yolngu cosmology and human
social identity. Elsewhere Fantin has written “that in particular Indigenous regions such as
Arnhem Land contemporary Indigenous people continue to interweave their ethno-
architectural, spatio-behavioural and religious traditions with Western architectural
components in their commentaries and that this is slowly evolving into a truly modern
Aboriginal Architecture, one which will provide a substantial contribution to the future
Australian identity and global cultural heritage.”17

Qinghua Goa, the second contributor in this sub-session writes of the remarkable survival
of Chinese tombs as residences for the after-life (beginning around 200BC), and their
transformation into monumental and ritual architecture, reflecting the change and
development in views of life and death. Once again this highlights the process of cultural
change within Chinese classical traditions.

Finally in this sub-session Ellen Andersen writes on the appropriation of Catholic concepts
into Maori architecture.

All of the forms of appropriation used by these leaders can be seen as movements
towards meeting the new and changing needs of a people, and adapting new
concepts to fit into an authentic Maori world. The strong adaptability shown
through the appropriation of colonial architectural forms, and resistance to pure
assimilation shows the Maori as highly progressive, which has until recently been
taken for granted by scholars.

Andersen returns us to the idea that Traditional Architecture possesses dynamic qualities
by introducing the properties of time into her reading of buildings. Andersen discounts
certain architectural theorists and historians (eg Bannister Fletcher, Colquhon) as having
separated ‘modern’ society from the ‘primitive world’, with the latter being fictionalized as
existing in a vacuum of timelessness. She re-emphasises that indigenous cultures are
“dynamic societies, in a continual process of adaptation, choice, and constraint….” Any
understanding of the dynamic nature of vernacular or traditional architecture must, by
necessity, consider temporal properties. In this regard, both Fantin and McKay speak of
the seasonal and cyclical uses of different dwellings and alternate residential sites. The
failure to incorporate a cross-cultural appreciation of constructs of time and space into the
understanding of architecture is pointed out by a number of authors. For example Bill
McKay states:
ADDITIONS      - ⁄    

…the Maori space and time construct can be thought of more like a constellation
with the past and the people of the past always felt in the present, like the
constellations of the sky – enmeshing, surrounding – always before you, always
behind, forming patterns that can be interpreted in various ways.

I trust that within the following collection of twelve papers, the reader will find some
valuable lessons from Ethno-Architects.

Associate Professor Paul Memmott is Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre at the University of
Queensland..

Endnotes
Note that references to the papers of the contributors to the ADDITIONS conference, may be incomplete or
inaccurate in page numbering as the Proceedings were in press at time of writing and subject to further editing.

1
Paul Oliver Encylopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Vol 1,
p. vii.
2
Bruce Rigsby 2002 ‘Introduction’ in Rigsby, B., Powell, F., Sackett, L., Taylor, J.C. & Wood, M. Expert Report:
Combined Gunggandji and Mandingalbay Yidinji (Q6016/01) Native Title Claim. A Report to the North
Queensland Land Council, July, pp. 10-16.
3
Dell Upton 1993 ‘The Tradition of Change’ in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. V, No. 1, p. 14.
4
Paul Memmott & Carroll Go-Sam 1999 ‘Australian Indigenous Architecture – Its Forms and Evolution’ in
Blythe, R. and Spence, R. Thresholds, Papers of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural
Historians Australia and New Zealand, Launceston and Hobart, Australia, September/October, pp. 233-239.
5
Michael Austin 2001 ‘Pacific Island Architecture’ in Fabrications, Vol. 11, No. 2, September, p. 17.
8
Oliver, Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, p. xxii.
9
George Horne and George Aiston ‘Camp and Camp Life’, Savage Life in Central Australia, Macmillan, London,
1924, p. 19.
10
Michael Linzey 2001 ‘Bi-Cultural Architecture: Evaluating the Contribution of Te Kooti’ in In the Making:
Architecture’s Past, the collected and edited proceedings of the 18th annual conference of SAHANZ, Australia,
Sept/Oct 2001, pp. 103-110.
13
James Fox 1993 ‘Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Houses: An introductory essay’ in Fox, J.J. (ed)
Inside Austronesian Houses, Perspectives on Domestic Designs for Living, Dept of Anthropology in association with
the Comparative Austronesian Project, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University,
Canberra, pp. x-28.
14
Fox, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Houses: An introductory essay’, p. 1.
15
Fox, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Houses: An introductory essay’, p. 14.
16
Paul Memmott and Shaneen Fantin 2002 ‘Donald Thomson’s Contribution to the Study of Indigenous Ethno-
Architecture in Australia’ [paper read at Centenary Anniversary Symposium on Donald Thomson” at University
of Melbourne, 13th – 15th July 2001] in Rigsby, B. and Peterson, N.(eds) Donald Thomson’s Contribution to
Anthropology, Academy of the Social Sciences, Canberra (in editorial stage).
ADDITIONS      - ⁄    

17
Shaneen Fantin and Paul Memmott ‘Yolngu Ceremonial Architecture’ in Kaplan, J. and Taylor, B. (eds) The
Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Continuum International, London (in press).