Studio 04

Designing for Dissonant Heritage: Tatura Music Camp

Athanasios Tsakonas and Anoma Pieris

Tatura Group, the five camps around the Waranga Basin, and Dhurringile, drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule based on Aerial Survey of Waranga Basin, Australia 1:31,680 State Aerial Survey of Victoria topographic map, 799 A, Murchison, prepared by the Department of Crown Lands and Survey, Victoria, 1954, State Library of Victoria.

Studio Description

During the Second World War, Australia interned over 16,000 nationals from the Axis countries [Germans, Italians and Japanese] concentrating them in military style camps. The largest camp cluster was located near Shepparton in Victoria on the shores of the Waranga Basin. Within barbed wire enclosures, in austere timber and corrugated-iron barrack facilities, the unfortunate prisoners waited out the war, modifying their bushland settings to simulate the places they had left behind. Among them were many artists, musicians and scholars who used their ingenuity to creatively transform these forbidding material landscapes. The camps evolved into minor townships including cafés tennis courts, schools, and religious buildings, modified using the structures and materials at hand. Children revelled in their collective companionship unaware of the anxieties of dispossession and exile. Recreational and educational activities relieved generalised boredom and continuing trauma. More particularly musical instruments created by the prisoners enabled them to form several orchestras and a sound shell and dais were purpose-built in Camp 1.

Studio Outcome

This studio asks you to seek inspiration from the art works, artefacts and survival stories of wartime internees and prisoners of war on display at the Tatura wartime camps museum in designing a music camp and interpretive centre on the Waranga Shore. It asks you to reconcile Australia’s dissonant heritage through a space designed for creative harmony in a practice conceived in the wartime camps. The studio includes a 3-day weekend field trip to Tatura in Week 1. The first design exercise is a modular interpretive centre for the Camp 13 heritage site that acts as a parti for testing the material palette to be applied to the music camp. This module will become the reception centre and entry point into a camp complex, elevated to allow for annual flooding and sensitive to the complex ecology and sensorial effects of the man-made reservoir.

Studio Leaders

Athanasios Tsakonas is an Australian architect and urban designer with extensive experience in Southeast Asia. A partner in Tan + Tsakonas Architects, a Singapore based design practise with a portfolio in public housing, institutional and community projects, his focus is on exploring the contemporary condition through new approaches to urban housing amidst the wider social and built environment. He is also a licensed builder engaged in design+build projects in Melbourne.

Anoma Pieris is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. She has published widely on issues of nationalism, citizenship and sovereignty, including on the wartime camps.

Readings & References

• Ball, Kay (2017). Art Captured: Hans-Wolter von Gruenwaldt. Murchison, Murchison and District Historical Society, VIC.
• Goad, Philip, Stephen, Ann, McNamara, Andrew, Edquist, Harriet, and Wunsche, Isabelle Bahaus Diaspora and Beyond. Melboune: The Meigunyah Press 2019.
• Inglis, Ken, Seamus Spark and Jay Winter with Carol Bunyan (2018). Dunera Lives, vol.1. Monash University Publishing, Clayton, VIC.
• Knee, Lurline and Knee, Arthur. (2008). Marched in: an account of the seven internment and prisoner of war camps in the Tatura area during World War 2, Lurline and Arthur Knee, Tatura, VIC.
• Miller, Patrick (2007). “A Little Marvel of Timber and Tin – the Military P1 Hut of the Second World War,” conference paper, 14^th National Engineering Heritage Conference, Crawley, Western Australia, 18–21 September, pp. 2–3, available at http://www.ipenz.org.nz/heritage/conference2007/papers/miller_patrick_paper.pdf
• Neumann, Klaus (2006). In the interest of national security: civilian internment in Australia during World War II, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
• Pieris, Anoma (2016). “Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps”, Fabrications, 26:3, 255-285.

Schedule Mondays 09:00-15:00 in MSD Room 239

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