Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (review)

Paul Memmott's Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia provides a painstakingly researched, elegantly formatted, and highly readable account of Aboriginal architecture from precontact periods to the present. The book is thoroughly and beautifully illustrated, with photographs and drawings of individual structures including primary domiciles, shade and storage shelters, and windbreaks, as well as diagrams and maps of camps, cultural regions, geographic territories, language groups, and even family trees. Given the breadth of Memmott's treatment of Aboriginal architectural traditions, this book is important historically; it is also unabashedly political and promotes an attitude of critical awareness toward contemporary Aboriginal societies and the need for informed architectural practices in service of Aboriginal peoples.

Memmott carefully situates a methodology for understanding Aboriginal building and settlement patterns within an "ethno-architectural" approach. He establishes this methodology as central to the book's overall intention "to provide an introduction and a framework for a scholarly approach to ongoing debate and research on the subject; and, more broadly, to introduce the lay reader to the subject, to nourish popular interest and provide avenues of insight into the lifestyles and cultural heritage of the Aboriginal peoples" (xii). Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience that includes architects, activists, historians, anthropologists, planners, sociologists, and many others.

Chapters focusing on general, inclusive themes and that use examples from throughout the continent (for example, chapter 5: "Socio-Spatial Structures of Australian Aboriginal Settlements") weave together with chapters devoted to particular regions, cultural groups, and building traditions (for example, chapter 7: "Northern Monsoonal Architecture"). Further, one- or two-page "boxes" are inserted throughout that address special subtopics connected to chapter themes and provide individual case studies of Aboriginal architecture. As an example, a box within a chapter devoted to a regional architectural tradition may highlight a specific instance of a comparable building type found elsewhere on the continent, and speculates as to the reasons for their similarity. A glossary and a highly detailed appendix, "Our Knowledge Base of Aboriginal Architecture," add important contextual material.

Often the narrative is captivating, especially first-person accounts and descriptions by ancestors and explorers of the role and organization of Aboriginal architectures in gatherings, initiation ceremonies, and aspects of everyday life. For example, in chapter 3, "Customary Camps and Lifestyles in the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria," a case study follows Birdibil of the Lardil people from timber cutting camp to trading camp to a mainland initiation camp, and one comprehends with immediacy the cultural significance of movement within a diverse network of traditional gathering places that define a regional homeland. Here and throughout, consideration is given not only to the connection between architecture and religious and symbolic traditions but also to architecture and resource availability, economic opportunity, and environmental factors, and how the variability of these factors lead to a high degree of diversity in Aboriginal building technologies and the size and permanence of individual structures and entire communities. With the villages of the northeast rainforest cultures, for example, greater relative architectural permanence is associated with abundance and dependability of food resources and building materials. In contrast, within the Western Desert "cultural bloc," peoples were highly mobile in response to scarcity and unpredictability of resources, so the architectures of this region are an extension of a nomadic livelihood.

Despite the fact that this is undoubtedly the most comprehensive single source of information on Aboriginal architecture ever produced, there is repeated, humble acknowledgment of the need for more detailed study in countless areas. Memmott provides lists of research projects that would contribute greatly to knowledge of Aboriginal architecture, be they cross-comparisons of spatiocultural organizations, studies of individual architectural variation within specific traditions, or performance-based investigations of building materials such as framing members and claddings (as examples, spinifex grass used throughout the Western Desert, clay coverings in more permanent shelters in central Australia, and "Palm leaf cladding technology in Arnhem...