INTERSTICES 11 Fig. 1. The Discovery, Level 1 Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. 99 Re-tracing History: Drawing the anti-monument Michael J Ostwald, Chris Tucker and Michael Chapman A design brief for a monument to commemorate the ‘discovery’ of the city of Newcastle, Australia, was the catalyst for this set of drawings that explore no- tions of tracing, mapping and incarceration. Inspired in part by poststructuralist interpretations of “zones of control”1 and the “violence of naming”2 – both acts which operate through the power of drawing and writing – the project proposes an alternative to a conventional monument which was intended to be sited in the city’s civic park and was expected to depict heroic colonial explorers naming (and thereby claiming) the region for an English Monarch. Instead, a counter- design was proposed that was sited in an abandoned reservoir that is hidden, underground, at the base of a stone obelisk on a hill overlooking the city and its coastline. The historic obelisk is an important marker because colonial car- tographers used it to chart the highest peak in the city and the distribution of the surrounding urban street grid: it represents the known. The reservoir is of interest because it is an unstable structure that has restricted access and which resists simple attempts to map its form or influence; for the present project, it encapsulates the imagined. Our counter-proposal involves the mapping of a series of historic events, each of which might reasonably offer an alternative discovery narrative, and the sites they are associated with. Amongst these alternative sites are the original loca- tion of Aboriginal inhabitation in the area, a site out to sea where Captain Cook charted the location of the peak and the harbour mouth, the place where escaped convicts hid from their colonial oppressors, and the office, far to the south in Sydney, where the colonial legal and bureaucratic process of renaming finally took place. Through this sequence of events a complex process is mapped which gradually transforms a place from being known, by aural tradition, as Muloob- inba (“place of ferns”) to its renaming and gazetting first as Kingstown and later as Newcastle. This same sequence records the growing dominance of the line, in its drawn and written incarnations, over speech. The lines drawn on the map from the alternative historic sites are traced through the centre of the reservoir forming a series of cuts into different layers of the drum. As visitors rise through the interior of the drum they uncover a series of vistas, sliced through the surrounding earth, each denoting a different, equally valid, location for the ‘discovery’ of the city. In this way the project sets out to question the European notions of claiming and possessing the landscape. It uses architecture to chronicle the gradual incarceration of the land through physical, symbolic and legal operations. From the highest geographical vantage point in the city, the monument explores the sites where the city was successively sited, sighted, inhabited, colonised, mined and then named. 1 This idea is well-known in architecture through Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon, but in this case the power structure is changed to allow the visi- tor to construct their own process of incarceration of the land. In this way the project also has much in common with Vidler’s mask: the blank face for the labyrinthine interior. See: Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Penguin; Vidler, A. (1999) The mask and the labyrinth: Nietzsche and the (uncan- ny) space of decadence. In A. Kostka and I. Wohlfarth (Eds.). Nietzsche and “An Ar- chitecture of Our Minds”. (pp. 53-66) Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. 2 Derrida in Of Grammatology analyses Lévi-Strauss’ account of the origins of language, which relies upon a description of the Nambikwara and the violence of their naming. In this description the acts that define the tribe initially are twofold: the picada, a crude track, and the aban- doned telephone line, both of which allow the Nambikwara to be architec- turally, spatially and cartographically drawn, mapped and thereby imprisoned. See: Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 101-40. INTERSTICES 11 Fig. 2. The Discovery, Level 2 Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. Fig. 3. The Discovery, Level 3 Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. Fig. 4. The Discovery, Level 4 Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. Fig. 5. The Discovery, Level 5 Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. 101 Fig. 6. The Discovery, Site Plan, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. INTERSTICES 11 This design is depicted in six layered plans, each functioning like a clock face, to record events in time and their corresponding location in space. Two cross- sections complete the depiction of the design. Fig. 7. The Discovery, Cross section 1, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1. Note: Each drawing was first construct- ed by hand on tracing paper, as a sketch overlay on a regional map. This sketch was then scanned and used as a con- struction layer for a CAD plan to be pro- duced and printed. This black and white drawing, part CAD drawing and part sketch, was then printed, airbrushed and pencil-rendered by hand. Finally the im- age was scanned once more and natural elements were rendered by computer (the sky, trees and grass) while the syn- thetic objects, the buildings, retain their hand-drawn qualities. Significantly, each drawing represents the skills of three people, not just in design but in the con- struction of the image. Initial sketches by Michael Ostwald and Michael Chap- man were traced and converted into CAD images by Chris Tucker, before being airbrushed and rendered by Chap- man, and then scanned and computer- retouched by Ostwald. 103 Fig. 8. The Discovery, Cross section 2, by Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman. Pencil, pen, ink, collage. Size: A1.