This recalibration is significant. Within Western architectural and academic traditions, knowledge production is frequently abstracted from place—generated through representation, documentation, and precedent rather than encounter. Here, movement through Country operated as a counter-method: a slow, observational practice in which meaning emerged through proximity, repetition, fatigue, elevation, and scale. The road itself became a methodological device, allowing time for attunement rather than extraction.

 

We stayed several days in Jindabyne, allowing time for the landscape to unfold rather than be consumed. Walking the trails of the Kunama Namadgi, and moving alongside waterfalls and exposed rock formations, the land revealed itself through undulation, scale, and endurance. Burnt trees stood upright—scarred but alive—quiet witnesses to fire, survival, and regeneration. Immense boulders sat with a presence that felt older than narrative, shaping space without intention or ego. These forms—curved, weathered, and resolute—offered an unspoken lesson in architecture without authorship: land as the original designer, time as collaborator.

 

Here, landscape does not function as scenery or context, but as an active agent in spatial formation. The terrain instructs through resistance and accommodation: slopes dictate pace, rock formations shape movement, weather alters perception. This is not a landscape that is interpreted so much as one that co-produces understanding. The burnt trees, in particular, stand as architectural artefacts of survival—structural, vertical, enduring—bearing memory in their bodies rather than in text. They refuse erasure while carrying evidence of rupture. In this sense, they echo Indigenous epistemologies in which land is archive, teacher, and witness, rather than inert ground awaiting inscription.

 

The boulders—larger than life, immovable, indifferent to occupation—expose a temporal scale fundamentally at odds with architectural production cycles. They assert a form of authority not derived from hierarchy or authorship, but from duration. Their presence unsettles the Western impulse to impose geometry, symmetry, and control, reminding us that form can emerge without design intention, and meaning without representation. This encounter reframes architecture not as an act of dominance over land, but as a possible act of listening to it.

 

Unexpectedly, the Jindabyne rodeo introduced another layer of reflection. The spectacle triggered memories of Canada and the landscapes of Alberta, where rodeo culture intersects visibly with First Nations histories, treaties, and ongoing negotiations of land, a Lore and identity—particularly among the seven First Nations of the region. The rodeo, often read as a Western European settler tradition, revealed itself instead as a site of overlap: where Indigenous horsemanship, colonial performance, survival, and resistance converge. What appears celebratory or nostalgic is also deeply political, carrying unresolved histories of dispossession alongside enduring Indigenous presence.

 

In this moment, culture operated much like the landscape itself: layered rather than singular, contested rather than resolved. The rodeo becomes a performative space where Indigenous knowledge—particularly equestrian skill, land navigation, and embodied relationship with animals—has been simultaneously appropriated, obscured, and yet never fully erased. It is a space where Western settler narratives attempt to assert heritage and continuity, while Indigenous presence persists as both participation and quiet resistance. The familiarity of the spectacle masks its complexity, much as colonial architectures often mask the deeper sovereignties beneath them.

 

This overlapping—of landforms and memory, of Indigenous continuity and European imposition, of survival and spectacle—forms the conceptual threshold of the papers that follow. The journey created space to observe how Western systems repeatedly settle on top of First Nations landscapes and knowledge systems, often without acknowledgment, while simultaneously drawing from them. The following three papers emerge from this lived observation: grounded in movement through Country, attentive to form and story, and committed to examining how displacement, endurance, and layered sovereignties continue to shape the nation—beginning in Kulin Nation, but echoing far beyond it.

 

It is from this recognition of overlap—between land and memory, endurance and erasure—that the journey extends beyond this continent. The rodeo encountered in Jindabyne did not remain a local or isolated cultural moment; it transcended temporal measurement - and place measurement-  it unfolded in my being onto a broader transnational terrain in which settler colonial traditions repeatedly rest upon Indigenous foundations. This movement across landscapes was accompanied by a parallel condition of isolation: a productive displacement in which I, as the writer, situated away from my own ancestral homelands and Indigenous lineage, find myself ethically bound to the lands on which I live and practise rather than those from which my bloodline originates. This is not a detachment from Indigeneity, but an attachment formed through obligation—an obligation to listen, to serve, and to act with care in relation to the Country that sustains my work.

 

In this sense, the writing and the journey operate (in now present unfolding into past) at what Yunkaporta and Kelleher describe as a Global Indigenous Dialogue (GID)—a scale of relational thinking that exceeds national borders and replaces fixed identity with responsibility, biology with behaviour, and ownership with custodianship (Yunkaporta and Kelleher 2023). This dialogue recognises a biological and energetic relationship to Indigenous land that is not reducible to ancestry alone, but is enacted through reciprocal practice.

 

As a city builder moving across territories, this approach allows deeply embedded Indigenous skills and intuitive knowledge to remain active rather than suppressed. The work becomes migratory, adaptive, and responsive—less a claim to place than a commitment to abundance wherever one stands.

In this travelling condition, the figure that emerges is not the architect as author, but as carrier: moving like a great Quetzalcoatl, slithering across lands and cultures, seeking ways to harvest, build, and sustain without depletion.

 

The journey itself becomes nourishing. Language turns kinetic. Writing becomes a form of dance, and through this movement, weariness recedes rather than accumulates. The more the words move, the more energy returns, charging a continued obligation to remain on the path. It is from within this state—simultaneously displaced, connected, and accountable—that the inquiry turns toward the Canadian plains and the Calgary Stampede, where Indigenous continuity, treaty, and spectacle converge within one of the most enduring settler performances of the modern era.