Architect, Susanne Pini, head of retail and town centres at Rice Daubney discusses the Wollongong project.

Not a nook or cranny, twist or turn, shape or contour proposed for both inside and outside GPTs West Keira development has happened by accident.
Likewise, every building material, fabric and finish has been  hand-picked to serve a purpose beyond simple aesthetics.
At its most basic level, the West Keira complex tells a story: Wollongong’s story.

Journalist Shannon Tonkin writes about Advanced Narrative’s contribution to the dramatic design of Wollongong’s central district.

I come from a family of people who tell stories. We often told the same one over and over again. Enduring tales were events that might have prevented my parents meeting.

My father was a gunner in the merchant marines and there is a story of him getting drunk and missing a boat that was sunk by the Germans. Such stories were meant to describe the randomness of fate and fragility of good timing. They would always end with my father saying, “And if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have met your mother and none of you would be sitting around the kitchen table enjoying red jelly topped with tinned fruit”. I would feel giddy, a sort of fizzy feeling of wonderment that in the end we had all won somehow. It was a ‘feel good’ story with unlikely heroes.

But within this tale was another narrative that my father did not tell at the family dinner table. It was related to a single listener in a hushed voice because the story bewildered him. The tale about being a drunken sailor would always get lots of laughs in a crowd but the other side of that event—missing the boat and surviving—contained something far more complicated. My father could not come to grips with why he’d been saved from a watery grave in this way when so many fine men had died. Did God reward bad behaviour? Or was it that in end my father had been sent to hell—the crippling guilt that he had been spared? The events were the same but different reasons for relating them changed the form of the story entirely.

I think the compulsion to tell a story at a particular time and for a particular reason is an essential ingredient of ‘voice’.

Distance from the event also affects tone. How might my father tell that story right after it happened as opposed to how he might tell it as a man in his eighties?

This compulsion to tell is most obvious in a first person narration or in third person limited, where voice is coloured by the character’s attitude. But what about omniscient narration? This question was posed to me recently and so I put down Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, which I love and was reading again, and turned to The Vagrantsby Yiyun Li. Yet even in this voice I sensed the compulsion, which had translated into restraint—a narrator aware that personal emotion would muddle what must only be shown.

What compels you to tell a particular story at a particular time, and do you think it affects voice? Can we identify the urgency to tell the story in books that we love and are there books that we love where that urgency doesn’t seem to be there, but which work regardless?

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I sense that the popularity of a particular type of true story―and I am not suggesting all non-fiction, much of it is very fine―but those accounts that simply point a finger, have a tendency to objectify events. In other words more fuel is thrown on horrible things without illuminating the coordinates of horror.

When I first began researching adoption policy in the 1960s I wanted to go beyond obvious content and look at pattern. The idea for this process came while reading newspapers during the September 11th crisis. Two seemingly unconnected stories appeared at this time. I’m not sure if they were in the same paper, although in the interests of art I would like to think that they were. One showed a photo of a jet plane flying into the Twin Towers with the story of the terrorist attack underneath and then buried on another page was a story about scientists in Wisconsin who were teaching whooping cranes to migrate south. The cranes had been raised in captivity and with no parent birds to guide them on their inaugural journey the scientists took on the task. They wore feathered suits and boarded a light plane.

Two stories―one happy, one awful―that happened around the same time. They seemed to speak to each other and together said more about what it means to be human within a particular period than if each event was considered alone.

And so to write about adoption policy in the 1960s, I began looking at all that occurred in that landscape. Inevitably I came to the removal of Aboriginal children, the treatment of state wards and the Vietnam War. There were so many links―the parallels between the mental states of the soldiers and the single mothers. Both were told they would be the very best people if they made a sacrifice, both suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, both bore the brunt of so-called civilising policies and later were left to carry the shame.

And so I imagined a story set in a brothel. Enter Meredith an unmarried high school teacher in her late forties who thinks it is a healing centre. Her old friend Zoe runs the place. A teenage friendship between Zoe and Meredith did not survive Meredith’s confinement in a home for unwed mothers. Zoe, a state ward at the time, was blamed for leading her astray. Years later when adoption records were opened there was no record of the birth.

Meredith is distraught after slapping a student during a history class. She can’t explain to the principal the reason why. Zoe suspects her state of mind is a result of the past. She hires a detective to unravel the truth. While the hunt goes on, Zoe pays Meredith to look after the child of one of the prostitutes, a role that leads to resentment among the working girls. In the climax Meredith must integrate notions of the division between motherhood and sex.

Read a chapter of A Certain Kindness 

Some people went to extreme lengths to make sure unmarried mothers would relinquish their babies. Strategies included placing a pillow or similar screen over the mother’s face during delivery to block her view. The rationale was that if she did not see the infant, she wouldn’t bond with it, making it easier to part with the child. Other coercive strategies were less overt.

As one of the young mothers who relinquished a child during those years, I wanted to understand the motivation among those involved. The easy answer is that people thought they were doing the right thing at the time. But are we to be forever blinded by social paradigms so that we refuse to witness pain until history moves on?

Close Encounters with a Constructed Universe is the first chapter of a series of essays that explore this question and the use of fiction as a way of reaching a deeper truth. Another version of this essay titled Engineering Redemption appeared in Meanjin

Eudora Welty, On Writing

Several years back I was grappling with the knowledge that deletions in my chromosomes had mutated further giving my daughter a very severe form of muscular dystrophy. I was also working on a piece for Research Australia on breakthroughs in gene therapy―research that makes me feel complicated because of assumptions about good and bad genes. So I wrote a short piece called Big Block Letters. The story is about how I feel about these things, not the events themselves, even if true-life events led to that feeling.

I think the hard bit, which all writers grapple with, is keeping the story true to the feeling, not events locked into position in real life.

“It’s not that hard,” Mary replied, sitting down next to them. “See,” she held two scraps together. “These match.”
Parallax South
Carol Major

While I was working on the novel component of my thesis I had a map of New South Wales and a collection of personal photographs pinned to my bulletin board. The photos included: my youngest son in snorkeling gear at the Marriott Hotel in Surfer’s Paradise, windswept trees on an island in northern Canada, a graveyard in the Egyptian desert and three photos taken of me and my sister. In one we are children on the Leven Bridge in Scotland, in another we are in front of a glacier in Jasper National Park, and in the third we are sitting on a bench at Mona Vale Beach in Sydney’s northern suburbs.

The map was to remind me of the geographical location of my story. The photographs were to remind me of place.

My youngest son once claimed the Marriott Hotel to be his favourite place. I found this affection for a motel chain amusing and wondered if he would change loyalties as he grew up. But of course it was the fun we had on a family holiday that was important. It wasn’t so much the location; it was that happy memory he wanted to return to again and again. The photo of the Canadian island has similar significance to my partner.

I have never been to Egypt but my father has told me so many stories of his travels during the Second World War. In doing so he joined the memory of listening to him to an idea of Egypt. The graveyard and listening to my father are in the same place.

The photos of my sister and me are another reminder of how place neatly circumnavigates the globe. It is over twelve thousand kilometres from Australia to central Canada, and another eight thousand from there to the Leven River in Scotland. My sister and I have moved through so many locations together and now we are so far apart. I make telephone calls to Edmonton to tell her how my novel is going while outside my door the agapanthus seem to gasp in the heat. Alice sits on the other end of the line beside a double glazed window that holds back winter snow. Such different spots on the globe and yet as I chat I realise I am in exactly the same location as I was in all three photos. I am with Alice and for me being with Alice is to be in place.

I am conscious of the importance of attachment to location when working on place making strategies for designers. It is one thing to gather information on landscape and history but to make these ingredients place I must also discover personal attachment—how people saw these things, what they meant to them. Suddenly a landscape becomes place when you hear elders in a community speak of pretending to be Tarzan of the Apes when they played there—of how lianas hanging from a rain forest became their monkey trees.

Not every piece of information holds the same weight. It is about the links between particular aspects of landscape, recorded history and attachment—so that information as seemingly diverse as an amphitheatre shaped cliff and the discovery that great moments in history were played out in the city below suddenly speak to each other. The unifying metaphor of a stage takes shape.

This is the place where a particular story has unfolded. These are the physical ingredients. Now to translate them into design.

The idea of looking at place this way is not about putting up plaques with snippets of history. The aim is to create architectural forms and use materials that echo a region’s story—a story that moves from the past into the future.

Advanced Narrative is a boutique writing consultancy. We use story to:

• communicate complex information
• inform the design of community spaces
• illuminate statistics and other mathematical information
• complement creative projects

‘People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.’ Stephen King

The aim of place making is to design spaces that reflect attachment to a landscape. Carol’s documents provide inspiration for architects and designers.

She researches geography and history. She gathers oral memories. She asks questions about why this place feels like home. Connections are made between landscape, history and personal story to create a plot line that provides a sense of movement from the past into the future.

Stories are linked under unifying metaphors that relate to physical form. Side panels pull out story elements that can be translated into building materials.

Examples of Carol’s work include the redevelopment of Charlestown Square in Lake Macquarie and architect plans for Wollongong Central.

Photographed from space the area surrounding the lake resembles a constellation. Towns become bright stars. The roads between draw connecting lines that define form.

(Inspiration for a lighted water feature)