Poetry of Roe 8

Poetry of Roe 8 The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started to fence off and then bulldoze a footprint for the highway extension, resulting in in one of the largest protests ever seen in the state. Over the next 3 months alongside constant protest 40 hectares of bush was cleared and deposited back on the site in 3 metre-high piles which were left to rot as the windy summer topsoil blew across the suburb and into our houses. The project stopped the night before the Western Australian state election of March 11, 2017. One of the promises of the Opposition was to stop Roe 8, and their election was partly attributed to the high degree of animosity and grief engendered by Roe 8

Reimagining Perth's Lost Wetlands

A major outcome of a multi-disciplinary collaboration with the City of Perth and Landgate (WA), the exhibition visualised the network of Perth's wetlands which existed prior to colonisation in 1827. A digital model was the centre piece of the interpretive exhibition which invited viewers to reimagine Perth. Using imagery, colonial newspapers and literature, nature writing, poetry and historical and cultural scholarship, a series of interpretive panels was designed, which depicted elements of Perth's wetland history. Physical Exhibition, 21st September - 9th October, 201

inConversation

inConversation was a collaborative exhibition amongst creative higher degree by research candidates (from the School of Communications and Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), local, national and international arts practitioners and researchers from different art forms and discipline backgrounds. The exhibition invited conversations between artists and researcher collaborators working together to produce a broad range of creative works, culminating in an exhibition titled inConversation, staged at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space in October 2014. The context for the inConversation exhibition aimed to inform and expand on current debates about the challenges and benefits of inter- and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the arts. While collaboration within discrete artistic disciplines has been quite common, it is now becoming increasingly important for artists to look beyond their silos and invite interactions with researchers in other disciplines and art forms. This exhibition explored what complexity may mean in terms of the processes of practice-led research in probing how the push and pull of the collaborative process, by which the outcomes become more than the sum of the parts, plays out in a cross-disciplinary, creative context.https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecubooks/1000/thumbnail.jp