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Junk Tectonics, Feral Communities: The Metamorphosis of the Mildura Golf Club

Part 2 Project 2022
Amelia Audrey Griffin-Toovey
University of Melbourne | Australia
Large-scale networks of capital have driven a global anthropogenic transformation, where extractive values govern regional landscapes.1 This thesis project investigates the hierarchies of a golf course and an adjacent landfill site upon the arid lands of Mildura; a regional, riverside town that sits along one of Australia's most vital water sources. The golf course is exposed as thriving from the resources of extraction and exclusion, which it imposes upon communities, ecologies, and a diminished Murray River. Looking through a lens of feminist ecological thought, this project extends the notion of human and non-human entanglement to include the discarded junk which has become part of our geological landscape.2 Therefore, in conducting a reversal of these extractive hierarchies, this project seeks to celebrate ecologies, communities and junk.

This thesis proposes a staged metamorphosis of the Mildura Golf Course and its clubhouse, using junk tectonics and compositional devices to create experimental spaces for ecologies and communities. The imposition of reformative interventions transforms the site from an exclusionary space favouring the few, to an experimental one with multiple users, fostering symbiotic relationships rather than extractive ones.

Footnotes:
1 Jillian Walliss. "The Antipodean Limits of a Manifesto: OMA and the Australian Countryside." Landscape Australia, October 10,2017.
2 Lara Stevens, Peta Tait, and Denise Varney. Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene (Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64385-4.

Amelia Audrey Griffin-Toovey

Tutor(s)
Virginia Mannering
2022
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