(Un)making Canberra : craft and the designing of settler-colonialism in Australia

This paper examines how practices of craft and design are involved in making and unmaking worlds. Specifically, it draws attention to the role of craft and design within settler-colonialism, understood as a structural condition in which a colonising force seeks to appropriate land from indigenous inhabitants. While the topic of settler-colonialism implicates questions concerning sovereignty, biopolitics, and coloniality, this paper demonstrates how these issues can be studied as both designed and designing effects. This is done through an analysis of the colonial history of Canberra, Australia’s capital city and home of its federal parliament. Following an account of how the traditional world of the original indigenous inhabitants was displaced through the material and symbolic interventions of early settlers, this paper argues that the first design proposals for the city bear out key characteristics of the relationship between craft, design and colonialism.