In response to the devastation caused by a bushfire in Rosedale, a quiet hamlet on the South Coast of New South Wales, UTS landscape architecture professor Martin Bryant launched a series of projects in partnership with the local community to build resilience and address the challenges posed by future fires.
Rosedale is a quiet, leafy hamlet on the NSW South Coast, but on the morning of New Year’s Eve 2019, it hit the national headlines: an out-of-control bushfire was bearing down on the town, forcing residents to flee to the beach while embers rained from an orange sky.
For UTS Landscape Architecture Professor Martin Bryant, who had long-held family ties to the area, the fire’s devastation of some 70 homes and much of Rosedale’s surrounding bushland felt very personal.
But even early on, he could see the potential of landscape architecture as key to rebuilding the town.
“A landscape is not just a setting; it harbours the way in which people relate to their environment and the natural systems in the environment, which is why it makes sense to place landscape architecture at the core of this work,” he says.
“A landscape architect is a person who engineers that relationship between people and their environment, giving due regard to both.”
In partnership with the people of Rosedale, the Mogo Local Aboriginal Land Council, the Rural Fire Service and Eurobodalla Shire Council, Professor Bryant and his UTS colleagues Professor Penny Allan and James Melsom launched a series of projects designed to build resilience in a community still reeling from devastating loss.
Drawing on 60,000 years of local knowledge
The Mogo Local Aboriginal Land Council played a key role in shaping the project in its very early days. Local community members invited Rosedale residents and the project team to attend a traditional smoking ceremony on the beach and shared stories of Aboriginal fire practices that have been used to protect Australia’s natural landscapes for 60,000 years.
These cultural insights became a form of shorthand for the research brief, which recognised that fire is a force of nature that humans must increasingly learn to live with in the future.
In response, the research team launched a series of initiatives designed to show Rosedale residents what that future might look like. Among them was a landscape architecture studio in which UTS students were tasked with making Rosedale more resilient to future fires.
Their ideas spanned the traditional, including a ‘hydro commons’ scheme that uses existing creek lines to embed moisture in large swathes of land around the waterways, to the speculative, such as a field guide that teaches people about the local bushland and ecosystems, and a soundtrack of what happens during a bushfire.
“These ideas are landscape architectural in the sense that they’re building the relationship between people and their landscape,” Professor Bryant says.
From the mouths of locals
The project team also conducted extensive interviews with residents around the rebuilding process, which was rife with differing viewpoints. For some locals, enhancing public safety in the face of future fires meant the rigorous clearing of trees; for others, Rosedale’s very essence was tied to its location amid a profusion of spotted gums.
“Most of the houses burnt because of the fire at the ground level rather than the fire in the tree canopy,” Professor Bryant says.
“We started to talk about the idea of a community agreement where everyone keeps fuel down by clearing leaf litter and other ground vegetation, they keep water nearby, and then you can still have the idyll of a simple little shack on the beach in the forest.”
These interviews became the foundation for Living with Fire, a film about the post-fire rehabilitation of the Rosedale community that formed part of the winning entry for the 2022 AILA National Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence for Research, Policy and Communications.
Collectively, the project findings are shaping the way forward for a community still dealing with the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster. A UTS Social Impact Grant is now funding the development of a website called Resilient Coastal Communities that will house all the project outputs and capture Rosedale’s story and future directions.
The work also holds important lessons for other rural and regional communities at risk of bushfires and other natural disasters.
“It demonstrates how small rural communities can be aware of threats from the landscape, but that they’re willing to protect the values of living in the landscape,” Professor Bryant says.
“The research with the Rosedale community shows our role as outsiders working with local communities, along with multiple techniques for designers to be involved with a grassroots approach to building resilience.”
To date, Rosedale residents have identified three pieces of work — the hydro commons scheme, the field guide and Aboriginal-led ‘cool burns’ — to progress into the future.
The Problem
In 2019, an out-of-control bushfire devastated some 70 homes and much of the local bushland in the NSW coastal town of Rosedale. For residents, rebuilding and learning to live with the threat of future fires created a unique opportunity to redefine the relationship between people and their surrounding environment.
The Response
UTS Landscape Architecture academics Professor Martin Bryant, Professor Penny Allan and James Melsom launched a series of landscape architecture-led projects designed to build community and environmental resilience in Rosedale. A website called Resilient Coastal Communities will capture this body of work and share the findings with other communities facing ever-growing bushfire risks.
What helped accomplish this?
The project was a collaboration between UTS Landscape Architecture academics and students, Rosedale residents, the Mogo Local Aboriginal Land Council, the Rural Fire Service and Eurobodalla Shire Council. The diverse outputs describe a future town that is more resilient to bushfire risk while retaining the essential features of the landscape that give the town its character.
What has changed as a result?
Collectively, the project findings offer opportunities for a community still dealing with the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster. To date, Rosedale residents have identified three pieces of work — a field guide, a hydro commons scheme and Aboriginal-led ‘cool burns’ — to progress into the future.
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