Negotiating green space between ecological threats and beloved objects

Abstract

This paper is directed at furthering understandings of the function of space, time and sensory experience in environmental discourse. It does this through an empirical study of the publicity campaigns and counter-campaigns around North Port Quay, proposed as a sustainable property development project for coastal waters off Fremantle in Western Australia. The case demonstrates how a proposed ecological improvement project is contested in discursive struggles over the space and time of environmental problems. It shows how representations of an immediate threat to local environment can be more powerful than representations of a model solution to future global ecological crisis. The radical imposition of a futuristic island town by the beach triggered an effective, localized popular movement unified through people's desire to restore their sensual experiences of local environment. This desire linked people's diverse demands for conservation behind a discursive frontier against anyone supporting North Port Quay. Standing for ‘our beaches’ against the proposed sustainable development not only blocked the project through localized practices of institutional democracy, it also helped transform the institutional political landscape of Fremantle.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Associate Professor Steve Mickler and the late Professor Niall Lucy for supervising this study, and Dr Vijay Devadas and Dr Aidan While for their feedback. This work was supported by the Commonwealth of Australia Government under an Australian Postgraduate Award and by Curtin University under a Curtin Research Scholarship and an Early Career Development Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. The event in Oz was located popularly in Fremantle, the colonial name for a port town in an area approximated with Walyalup in Nyoongar country. This public dispute over environmental meaning and spatial governance was waged within a colonial semiosis (Mignolo 2012) that enabled radical change in local land and water usage, such as the tearing open of the river mouth at Walyalup a century ago to support commercial and communication exchanges of British Empire to the detriment of Aboriginal trade and communications. The continuing process of colonization of Nyoongar country is touched on only briefly in this paper. For more information, see Note 3.

^2. Even NPQ's offer of restoring marine life and sea-grass beds at the site was met by suggestions of its arrogance and subjective science in letters to the local press: ‘Who has determined that the bed in question is degraded and what is meant by degraded in this context?’ (Fremantle Herald, 13 September, 2008).

^3. Hage (2003, 94) has described Australia's enduring problem of the ‘unfished western colonial project… in a land of permanent de-colonisation’. Hage (2003, 93) argues that there continues to be ‘two communal subjects with two wills over one land; two sovereignties of unequal strength’ in Australia. Although there were references to Aboriginality and native title claims in the case texts, NPQ was not located in Nyoongar country in public conversation of its environmental impact. Instead, the project was firmly located on ‘public’ land, particularly for the purpose of delegitimizing NPQ by describing it as a privatization project. It is worth noting that disputes over private versus public land have been a part of colonial occupation discourse in the area since the arrival of Captain Fremantle (Stratham-Drew 2003). While the private land category may support a more overtly aggressive form of colonization, the public land category has been employed effectively for marginalizing the spatial claims of Nyoongar people (Kerr and Cox 2013).

^4. The NPQ case is an example of the contradictory relations in urban development described by Harvey (2000), who argued that tensions in these relations were a product of a collision between spatial utopias and utopianism of the free-market process. Ideal places were threatened by the coming to ground of free-market utopianism, requiring new spaces for capital accumulation to continue.

^5. Corruption and Crime Commission (2008) investigated allegations of municipal-council manipulation by developers of large coastal properties. Public hearings were held by the commission in relation to Smiths Beach in 2006 and to Port Coogee (just south of Fremantle) in 2007. The Port Coogee hearings publicized the large cash donations made by proponents of the Port Coogee project to the then Cockburn Mayor, Stephen Lee, to fund his successful re-election campaign. Through these public hearings and their media coverage, the community of Fremantle and Western Australia learnt about the alleged wrongdoings of coastal property developers and how their consultants and lobbyists affected the outcomes of municipal elections and the partiality of public officials.

^6. It is not difficult to identify similarities between the reclaimed island project of NPQ and More's (1999) artificial island of utopia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thor Kerr

Thor Kerr is a Lecturer in Curtin University's School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts. His research focuses on media and public representation in negotiations of urban space, particularly in relation to green built environments, native title and heritage sites. Recent publication includes the co-authored book, Setting up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy: A Report on Perth Media.