INTERNATIONALISM IN LANDSCAPE EDUCATION

Formal landscape architectural education in Australia only began in the late 1960s and it seemed to adopt a relatively unmediated British approach, with an overlay of Australian environmentalism.

Historically, landscape design has a long tradition of chauvinistic nationalism. The Brits were always scathing about the axiality of French-designed landscapes and Aussie landscape architects took on this attitude without question, with the design ethos of the 1960s Sydney Bush School style. The Chicago adaptation of French Beaux-Arts was grudgingly accepted in the designs of Walter Burley Griffin, despite attempts to turn the triangulated pivot points into eighteenth- century English landscape follies, and Marion Mahony Griffin’s drawings were heavily mediated by nationalistic bush icons.

We admired the restraint in Japanese gardens and Roberto Burle Marx’s exuberant Brazilian designs and in the late 1970s, we also became interested in the practice