Opal Imaginary explores a landscape of extraction, its constructed settler identities and the intangible emotional-cultural histories across deep time. Located within the ancient and ancestral homelands of the Mardigan and Boonthamurra people in south-west Queensland’s Quilpie region – the project’s extents included research, experiential and creative outcomes.
In addressing the Opal Imaginary within the core of this settler-communal culture and the processes around myth, forgetting, object and the figure of the individual/pioneer, the Opal Imaginary enacts a collective emptying, mastery and inscription on the landscape. Emotionally, this is a landscape of desire – infused with the pursuit of colour, awe, adornment and the tensions between the masculine and feminine.
The critical narrative of this project includes the identification of components within the Opal Imaginary across deep time and the experiential.
The project’s process included extensive archival research across opal mining socio-geological constructs, as well as two trips to south-west Queensland to conduct numerous interviews, retrieve data, make observations, and gather collections of photos and oral transcripts to inform the evolution of the work.
The author’s process included a personal inquiry into the role of the individual/pioneer explored through social memory acts (binding landscape, people and object/opal) and which included adopting the position of the opal miner in visiting south-west Queensland in pursuit of the experience of the imaginary. This investigation informed the author’s relational understanding of landscape and memory, with the author now forever entangled in the imaginary.
This project challenges landscape architecture to consider how we can ground as well as create landscape memories through experiences of social memory – in the making, remaking and binding to landscape.
Due to the extractive nature of opal landscapes and the research/re-constructive nature of this project, the author’s financial contribution to an Indigenous foundation working within the study area was a values-driven response in consideration and care of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights.
