Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country, encompassing inner-north Melbourne, provides a critical site for understanding how architecture and planning functioned to enforce displacement while sustaining the appearance of order, protection, and improvement. Contemporary practice, as situated at 67 Smith Street, Fitzroy, occupies this layered historical and spatial context and requires a form of architectural accountability.

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Dispossession in Australia is not a historical event but a continuing spatial condition embedded in housing policy, planning systems, and architectural practice (Moussaoui, 2024). While dispossession removed First Nations peoples legally and administratively, evacuation operated as its physical counterpart, enforcing movement away from sites of economic, cultural, and political value. Evacuation was rarely framed as violence; instead, it was justified through the languages of protection, hygiene, and civil order (Attwood, 2003). Architecture and urban planning were central to this process, enabling the spatial clearing of land while preserving the appearance of benevolent governance.

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The Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation maintained complex systems of land stewardship, mobility, and governance across what is now Melbourne prior to British settlement (Broome, 2005). Early colonisation rapidly disrupted these systems through the seizure of fertile river corridors, the declaration of Crown land without treaty, and frontier violence (Jacobs, 1996). By the mid-nineteenth century, colonial authorities increasingly relied on managed evacuation, relocating Aboriginal people to missions and reserves away from expanding urban centres. The establishment of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station in 1863 exemplifies this approach. Although often portrayed as humanitarian, Coranderrk functioned as a spatial instrument of control, restricting movement, regulating labour, and severing Wurundjeri people from urban land undergoing rapid economic development (Broome, 2005; Attwood, 2003). As the city expanded through this absence, Aboriginal presence was rendered peripheral both spatially and politically.

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Fitzroy, including Smith Street, was among Melbourne’s earliest suburbs, developing as a dense working-class and industrial area. While the suburb later became a site of Aboriginal political organisation and resilience, its nineteenth-century formation reflected a broader settler-colonial logic in which Aboriginal people were excluded from urban life by design (Shaw, 2012). Urban exclusion operated through policing Aboriginal movement, informal denial of access to housing and labour markets, and the regulation of behaviour through sanitation, zoning, and moral laws. As Dovey and Pafka (2020) observe, displacement in settler cities is often incremental rather than spectacular, embedded in everyday governance rather than announced as extraordinary violence. Evacuation in Fitzroy thus occurred not only through formal removal to distant reserves, but through administrative, economic, and regulatory pressures that made urban life untenable for Aboriginal people.

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Moussaoui Architects now operates from 67 Smith Street, Fitzroy, on Wurundjeri Country. This location is not neutral; it is situated within a corridor shaped by historical patterns of labour, migration, resistance, and exclusion. To practise architecture in this context is to engage with the inherited structures of evacuation and urban displacement. Architectural authority itself is a colonial inheritance (Jacobs, 1996), and decisions regarding density, renewal, and redevelopment continue to determine who is permitted to remain and who is displaced. Acknowledgment of history without accountability risks reproducing the very spatial hierarchies that architecture has the potential to challenge.

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Evacuation did not conclude with missions or reserves. Contemporary forms include the demolition and renewal of public housing, gentrification that renders inner-city areas economically inaccessible, and planning frameworks prioritising yield and efficiency over social continuity. In Wurundjeri Country, evacuation now operates primarily through market mechanisms rather than direct force, yet the outcomes remain consistent: community fragmentation, cultural discontinuity, and the loss of place-based knowledge (Dovey and Pafka, 2020; Victorian Government, 2024). Architecture is implicated in these processes both through action and through silence.

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If architecture is to move beyond complicity, it must reject neutrality. Practising on Wurundjeri Country requires recognising evacuation as a foundational condition of urban form, prioritising continuity of community over abstract models of renewal, and engaging Indigenous knowledge holders as spatial authorities rather than symbolic consultants. While architecture cannot undo the legacies of evacuation alone, it can refuse to normalise them and actively participate in ethical spatial practice.

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Evacuation is a critical, yet under-examined, mechanism of settler-colonial urbanism in Victoria. On Wurundjeri Country and at 67 Smith Street, Fitzroy, architectural practice is already embedded within this history. The question is not whether architecture participates in displacement, but whether it does so consciously, critically, and with accountability.

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References

Attwood, B. (2003) Rights for Aborigines. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Broome, R. (2005) Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Dovey, K. and Pafka, E. (2020) ‘The urban politics of displacement’, Urban Studies, 57(1), pp. 1–18. Jacobs, J.M. (1996) Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge.

Pascoe, B. (2014) Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books.

Shaw, W. (2012) Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Victorian Government (2024) Closing the Gap Annual Report. Melbourne: State of Victoria.