LAA#124: Bologna

As this is my final perspective I wish to thank all of you who have contacted me to discuss this column. The feedback has been far reaching, and it demonstrates that we are a profession of a common spirit,though we rarely get the chance to see over the hills and horizons that contain us in our daily toil. Being National President is an incredible opportunity, and I would like to thank my council members for their support over my tenure.

One of the particularly fruitful pieces of feedback was the chance meeting of Catherine Neilson, following ‘Spot the Landscape Architect’ in LAA issue 118. We met while walking our dogs. Catherine had only recently moved in around the corner, and she recognised my photograph. Catherine is now the AILA’s Senior Project Manager for two Commonwealth funded climate change research programs.

For the time I have been on National Council the two most critical issues that have been raised with me by members have been registration, and the perceived lack of rigour or standard to the AILA’s policy, and education, for the same reasons. Council implemented a new registration system now several years ago. The mentoring component of the system has been seen to be its strength in developing and then cementing relationships between senior and junior practitioners. The registration process is continually being modified as a result of member feedback. Similarly, registration categories are being expanded to include areas of practice that previously sat outside the process, but are areas of significant employment or practice areas for landscape architects. One of the outcomes is that our membership base has been on a steady increase for almost eight years. A growing membership raises our collective voice.

This year council has reviewed the Education Policy. This has followed changes to the Accreditation Policy, to a coordinated national-panel accreditation system. The panel has now visited five programs. The revised Education Policy will set a base standard for AILA’s accreditation of programs, mandating numerous minimum criteria. The policy will encourage new programs, and allow existing programs to specialise, it will also support the Academy in their deliberations with Vice Chancellors.

As for education, recently most current programs in Australia have moved to follow the Bologna declaration of 1999. This sees courses align to a 3+2 format, matching the convention in Europe,for a five-year program. For someone like me with a mind that catches on words and phrases, the ‘Bologna’ title has caused some problems. I get stuck on an image of Yossarian, in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, (at least the 1970 film adaptation)with his arms inside Snowden’s chest cavity, pointlessly trying to keep Snowden in one piece, as the wind whips through the tattered fuselage, as the bomber limps back to its island base. ‘Bologna was a milk run’, Yossarian had thought, but the outcome was nothing like it.

Catch22 shifts time and passages flit from prior to and post the Bologna run. The reader is never sure of the outcome, Heller approaches it approached obliquely, never really disclosing all the details, and the reader’s trepidation grows with Yossarian’s torment.

It is no secret that from time to time, like any relationship, there have been underlying tensions between council and the academy. I had prepared myself for an Education review process that would be anything but a ‘milk run’. There have been moments, but on the whole, the outcome matches the following passage:

‘He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order. He gasped in utter amazement at the fantastic sight of the twelve flights of planes organized calmly into exact formation. The scene was too unexpected to be true. There were no planes spurting ahead with wounded, none lagging behind with damage. No distress flares smoked in the sky. No ship was missing but his own. For an instant he was paralyzed with a sensation of madness. Then he understood, and almost wept at the irony. The explanation was simple: clouds had covered the target before the planes could bomb it, and the mission to Bologna was still to be flown.

He was wrong. There had been no clouds. Bologna had been bombed. Bologna was a milk run. There had been noflak there at all.’

As this is my last perspective – I have a tip for the incoming president, Mandy Rounsefell: The now retired press gallery icon, Alan Ramsey was often derided by his fellow journalists for lifting large slabs of Hansard and writing it straight into his weekly column, with a bit of a top and tail and the odd insertion there was your thousand words. I hope none of my readers have noticed my tendency to do the same thing!

Ramsey’s approach was to find something he either violently opposed (usually hubristic politicians) or passionately supported, (these were often obituaries for his heroes). One of his heroes, and the subject of an obituary in 1994 was my father-in-law Stewart Harris, whom Ramsey first met fresh to the press gallery, when he moved into an adjacent office at the now Old Parliament House. Stewart was the reporter for The London Times prior to its purchase by Murdoch in the early nineteen seventies. Stewart resigned following Murdoch’s purchase. Ramsey wrote of how ‘Stewart Harris would talk about the world and our individual responsibility to make it better’.

In a roundabout way this is my token offering of thanks to Stewart’s daughter,Karina, my partner, who has been looking to the hills and horizons for the term of my presidency, and who has accepted and tolerated all that the last two years has entailed.

So, from the next issue, a new face and a fresh perspective – please welcome Mandy Rounsefell, as I pass on the baton. Mandy, its only eight thousand words – make them all count!