Quarry Pedagogies Summer Camp,
Feb 2023

Photo credit: Ivan Masic

“Creative practice has the role to try to bring closer the conditions in which we would like to live, and to try to dismantle the cultural apparatus that sustains the system, creating spaces of reclamation, re-appropriation and maybe eventual confrontation where tension and friction can play out in an interesting way, by serving as points of departure for new scenarios.”

—Garcia-Dory, F 2016 ‘A Different Rhythm’ in Pais, AP, Strauss, C (eds). ‘Slow Reader’, Valiz, NL.

Background

Since 2016 These Are The Projects We Do Together has been working with an old sandstone quarry in the Otway Ranges in the town of Beech Forest, on the traditional lands of the Gadubanud people.

The quarry is currently undergoing rehabilitation.

Through this work, we are developing ways of thinking about rehabilitation as a creative process — elaborating on and testing through the various tasks associated with the rehabilitation plan. These tasks include making the landforms stable and safe, removing invasive species while improving soil conditions.

and creating a place for future activities that enable the site to be productive and sustainable as an ongoing project.

The long-term goal is to establish a productive and sustainable project with facilities to accommodate study and research groups, creative projects and residency programs.

In 2022 we were successful in securing State Government funding through the ‘Innovative Quarry End Land Use Grant’ for initial works to commence. This includes site preparation for building works, consultant input, and an inaugural camp.

Future Quarry Pedagogies Camps

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We respectfully acknowledge the Gadubanud people as original inhabitants of the area now known as the Otway plains and ranges. Through process, design and action we express gratitude for our shared connection through place, to the oldest continuing cultures on earth.

Information

Held in February 2023 at The Beech Forest Quarry, Quarry Pedagogies Summer Camp brought together 70 participants (over 2 camps) for six days.

The Quarry Pedagogies Summer Camp brought people together to investigate notions of pedagogy through place, land rehabilitation, ecology at the edge, and forms of regenerative culture.

“The return of extensive disturbed land to a stable, productive and self-sustaining condition may take quite a long period of time.”

—Hannan, JC 1984 ‘Mine Rehabilitation: A Handbook for the Coal Mining Industry’.

“In the most general sense, care is a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies,
our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

—Tronto, JC 2015 ‘Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics’, Cornell University Press, NY.

Camp Program

The future requires rehabilitation.

The camp program was essentially about rehabilitation: how we work with rehabilitation as a process and a program, and how we propose an alternative mode of rehabilitation that, instead of filling or flooding the quarry, considers other approaches and outcomes.

The Quarry, as a former extraction landscape and current rehabilitation project, raises a range of themes and questions about our relationship to land. We were interested in unpacking the idea of rehabilitation, and shifting from extraction to care.

Program activities during the camp were informed by a series of prompts. These prompts come in in the form of tools, materials, questions, themes and readings that each in different ways related to rehabilitation.

Sunday started with a train journey from Southern Cross Station to Colac followed by a short bus ride to the quarry. The afternoon was spent making camp and coming together for a Welcome to Country and our first meal.

Monday was an initial immersion day where participants had the chance to learn about the site including the various conditions and ecologies, as well as learn about the proposed long-term vision for the project.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were project days where participants developed projects and experiments in response to prompts (questions, materials, tools, readings etc). Each evening, following dinner there was a presentation or workshop with an invited guest.

Each day there was a series of guided collective tasks that go towards the active care of the land including short periods of blackberry removal from the fern gully and contour path.

On Friday participants returned to Melbourne via bus and train.

There were artists in residence working from site and producing projects in parallel with the camp activities, and cross-disciplinary conversations were encouraged.

There was a writer, a photographer and a filmmaker present who documented the project and activities — collecting anecdotes, stories and excerpts.

The camp brought together researchers and professionals from art, architecture and landscape architecture fields to have conversations, share ideas and make work in response to the theme of rehabilitation. — contributing to the community and ecology of the project over the long term.

“School is not a place for the safe enclosure of lessons. School is an amplifier for the world. Lessons are not fixed ahead of time, or they become rules. The Syllabus is written after the course ends. The course is endless. The curriculum emerges out of the energy and relationships in the space and the world. It emerges out of the encounters in the world. It emerges out of the social contracts for how we negotiate and engage with each other in the world. It emerges out of the questions and feelings, empathy, the politics of experimentation, perceptual awareness, the responsibility of taking risks and compassion. A philosophy of care.”

—Eliasson, O 2016 ‘From The Past With Love’ in Pais, AP, Strauss, C (eds). ‘Slow Reader’, Valiz NL.

“No extensively disturbed area can ever be returned to precisely its original condition prior to disturbance.”

—Hannan, JC 1984 ‘Mine Rehabilitation: A Handbook for the Coal Mining Industry’.

Camp Logistics

Accommodation at The Quarry comes in the form of comfortable canvas bell tents that are shared between two participants. When you come to the Quarry, if you come as a group of two and would like to share a tent please nominate your tent mate as part of the application process.

During camps, the camp canteen will provide nutritious meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner with collective involvement in meal preparation included in the daily program.

The camp bathhouse provides simple, Japanese-style bathhouse facilities. Camp toilets are designed so waste is captured and processed as part of soil regeneration.

“Our rural and peri-rural mining sites should not be forgotten, but let’s think more widely than pursuing a simple return to nature. In many instances, farming and forestry have changed natural landscapes although the perception often is that these man-made settings are natural. The reality is that many rural mine sites could be transformed into new landscape features that fulfil a new role.”

—Fourie, AB, Tibbett, M, Beersing, A. (eds) 2011 ‘Mine Closure, Australian Centre for Geomechanics’.

We respectfully acknowledge the Gadubanud People as original inhabitants of the area now known as the Otway plains and ranges. We respectfully acknowledge elders – past, present and emerging. We extend our deepest respects to all First Nations peoples. In the context of the work we do, we express gratitude for our shared connection through place, to the oldest continuing cultures on earth.