Alison Page: Reconnecting Country, Culture and Design

By Alexi Freeman

 

In 1770, Alison Page’s Dharawal and Yuin Ancestors watched from the shore as the towering mast of James Cook’s Endeavour travelled like an apparition up the east coast into Kamay.

According to Dharawal songlines, some believed the unfamiliar figures aboard the ‘big canoe’ were ghosts.

More than two and a half centuries later, the reverberations of that encounter still echo through contemporary Australia.

Page is helping reshape Australia’s built environment by challenging the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge and returning the world’s oldest continuing knowledge system to the centre of contemporary design.

From reindigenising waterways to reorienting the narrative around Australia’s first encounters, few Australian designers have built a practice as expansive — or as difficult to categorise — as Alison Page.

At first glance, Page’s projects appear remarkably diverse, bridging story and structure, ancient knowledge and contemporary design.

On closer inspection, they’re not opposing forces so much as complementary parts of the same design language — capable of reshaping places, relationships, history and Country.

That breadth made Creative Shape Shifter an apt title for Page’s retrospective at the University of Melbourne.

Walking through her exhibition after her NGV Melbourne Design Week lecture — BLAK: Defining an Australian Design Future — prompted the question: what if design could help us remember who we are, where we are, and repair our relationship to place?

In her lecture, Page explained, “Design is never neutral, so we need to use design as an act of power to respond to the things that are happening in the world today.”

That philosophy has guided a career spanning nearly three decades, beginning with Page’s work at Australia’s first Aboriginal architectural practice, Merrima, where she learned the importance of listening and co-creating with communities.

Since then, whether collaborating on everyday objects, immersive cultural installations or large-scale masterplans, Page’s practice has been anchored by Country.

“I’m a storyteller. I’m bringing cultural depth, narrative, and place-based storytelling,” she added.

For Page, Indigenous storytelling isn’t a decorative afterthought or symbolic gesture; it’s a design methodology for addressing some of the defining challenges of our time.

From climate change and biodiversity loss to fractured communities and uncertainty about what an authentically Australian design language might become, Page’s answer is to design with Country.

Page’s approach asks architects, designers and communities to stop seeing land as an empty site awaiting development. Instead, Country becomes teacher, collaborator and client.

“Designing with Country is about drawing on the wisdom of Country and traditional owners who have adapted to major climatic changes… Sustainability is probably the foundation.”

More than landscape, Country encompasses memory, ecology, culture, and ceremony. It’s everything we build on, inherit and leave behind.

“Country is more than just nature. Yes, it is the land, the sea and the sky, but it is everything we make and build as well and our cultural practices,” she said.

Seen this way, the designer’s role changes too, extending beyond materials, environmental conditions and planning regulations.

“Site evaluation isn’t just about looking at the sun, the wind… It’s actually about the history, the memory of place.”

Listening is the thread connecting every project in Creative Shape Shifter.

Whether product, artefact or masterplan, each unfolds through a process of deep listening — to Traditional Owners, local communities, ecologists, artists, and the stories already held within Country.

For those who’ve arrived on these shores many generations after Cook’s landing, stepping into Page’s practice invites participation in a broader conversation about what it means to live on Country.

Designers are in an “excellent position to be designing for social cohesion and belonging.”

But Page isn’t asking non-Indigenous Australians to inherit somebody else’s history. Instead, she asks us to accept shared responsibility for the places we now call home.

One of Page’s most memorable projects centres on Sydney’s White Bay, where ecological restoration is intertwined with cultural identity.

She told her lecture audience, “I feel like half my life is about freeing the creeks from their incarceration in drains.”

What most people see as stormwater infrastructure, Page sees as Country waiting to be remembered.

The project moves beyond habitat restoration to co-creating custodianship — enabling communities to view themselves as active participants in local ecologies rather than bystanders.

“What if this became the seahorse place and the people of Balmain and this area of White Bay were invited to be the seahorse people and to care for the seahorse?”

Suddenly, the project isn’t just about building infrastructure — it’s a story about interspecies relationships.

A similar shift runs through The Message: The Story From the Shore and The Eyes of the Land and Sea, two of Page’s public artworks responding to Cook’s arrival on Australia’s east coast.

Rather than perpetuating a familiar national narrative from the deck of the Endeavour, Page shifts the perspective to the shoreline, allowing descendants of those who witnessed first contact to share inherited stories across generations.

Through Page’s lens, design becomes a vehicle for truth-telling, illuminating stories that have long remained peripheral within Australia’s built and cultural landscapes.

“We need design because the media we design can give voice to stories. We can embed the truth of our history in our built environments.”

In 2027, one of Page’s most ambitious works will emerge from Sydney Harbour. Designed in collaboration with Rowena Welsh-Jarrett and the Sydney Coastal Aboriginal Women’s Group, the monumental bronze sculpture symbolises the resurgence and spiritual potency of Dharawal women.

Titled Badjgama Ngunda Whuliwulawala (Black Women Rising), the work is strategically situated at the intersection of the freshwater Tank Stream and the original shoreline of Circular Quay.