Heliotope, in collaboration with SBLA [landscape architecture] and Sandpit [user experience] were shortlisted by Hobart City Council to re-centre the nipaluna | Hobart waterfront with a Tasmanian Aboriginal context.

We were privileged to spend time with Tony Brown [Senior Curator of Indigenous Cultures at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery TMAG] to understand pre- and post-European settlement experiences. Through our research we mapped the location of the waterfront across the millennia First Peoples have inhabited this place; as well as a zoomed in study of the shifts that have occurred over the last 250 years; and projected sea level rises.

Our scheme proposed a series of tactics around peeling back the layers of settlement to reveal and re-instate Country. Our central gesture was to re-instate a floating version of what was once known as Hunter Island the natural docking point for the first ships that came into the river, now subsumed by the concrete docks on the site. This island would be densely planted with endemic species, and perceptual shifts across time would occur as it changes location around the waterfront, one day appearing next to a docked yacht; another day out in the river.