For landscape architects working today, there can be a vast chasm between the cultural values espoused by our profession and the realities of our work. Our collective professional identity is founded on aspirations towards creativity, social justice and environmentalism. However, we work under a near-constant state of deadline pressure to deliver projects that are often at odds with our own sense of justice, usually with programs dictated by clients whose primary motivation is profit. As US-based architectural researcher Elizabeth Yarina explains, “In a neoliberal framework, even attempts by architects to contribute to the production of democratic civic places is appropriated by developers for capitalist accumulation, depublicizing public spaces in the process.”1
While these circumstances may appear insurmountable, the same challenges were successfully overcome through collective action by Australian construction workers in the 1970s. Their struggle demonstrates what is possible if workers actively
