Cultural Landscape
In coordination with the elders of Yung Balug Clan of Dja Dja Wurrung Country, this cultural landscape project reimagines lunette landscape becoming a space of return that enables the Yung Balug Clan to repatriate their ancestors, revive cultural practices, and re-establish a living connection to Country.
Sympathetic support Paul Haw has offered to sell his farm situated on the lunette of Lake Boort to the Clan. The project proposes to use a neglected transport zone leading to the farm to develop a new landscape of return and remembrance. Working with my architecture thesis partner, a Keeping Place is incorporated into the landscape design to present a unified Country design.
Site Relations
Ephemeral Landscape
Located on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, the site is defined by its ephemerality, shifting through irregular two-to-three-year cycles.
Lake and Lunette
Lake Boort is the living bowl for Yung Balug Clan and lunette is the spiritual terrain for the clan. Poetically, the volunteered farm is on the lunette.
Spotted Stories
The waterscape of the Loddon system creates a landscape of bowls, flats, and mounds. This patterned landscape aligns with the pattern of the Spotted Quoll Possum, which is the totem of the Yung Balug Clan. By combining these natural formations, the lunette becomes a concentrated landform.
Across this landscape, the path from the Keeping Place to the Yung Balug farm gradually shifts from public to private. Only with the guidance of the Yung Balug Clan can visitors traverse this sacred landscape to view the ancestral burials at Resting Rocks and the lunette.
Wet Season
Bowls, mounds, flats take advantage of the ephemerality of the landscape to enhance certain vegetations creating contrasting landforms. Meandering through these forms create conceals and reveals of the landscape beginning at the Keeping Place and continuing toward to the Yung Balug’s farm.
Dry Season
Following the inspiration of Country elements, the paths of the sacred landscape are formed with earth for their tectonic quality, and with cultural and local agricultural materials as binders for different landscape programs and languages. This creates variations in the earth colours of these paths which become more apparent during the dry season.
Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Boort, Victoria, Australia
Landscape Thesis | 2025 Semester 2 | A/P Jillian Walliss
Site Area: 720,000 m²
Elevation: 77.5–99.7 m AHD
Height Change: +22.2 m
Developed in coordination with Sulochana Khatri’s independent architecture thesis, the building forms are shown as indicative outlines to provide context for the landscape strategy.