Reverse Greening Australian Landscape Architecture Education:Charting an Indigenous Perspective on Country Respect and Design

While many Australian landscape architecture programs can talk about their green ‘credentials’ and their ethical and design inquiry commitments to sustainability, this is a Western educational pedagogy and agenda. Since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm) many and the international policy shift towards sustainability theory and practice, few programs have shifted from nor sought to engage in alternate educational paradigms that offer a non-Western perspective. This paper considers current research that is reviewing the state and agendas of Australian landscape architecture programs, the obligations of their host Australian universities
to reconciliation and offering respect to Australia’s Indigenous communities, the role of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) (http://www.aila.org.au/) as an accreditation body but also an future education agenda-maker, and the initiatives several of these programs are making in addressing these challenges. In particular, the paper reviews the innovativeness
of several programs in re-charting Australian student perspectives about non-Australian and non-Western environmental and cultural knowledge systems and paradigms, and where this may chart Australian landscape architectural education.