Restoration of Yollinko Park wins Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize

The Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize is an prize awarded annually by the Landscape Architecture Australia journal to final year landscape architecture students to recognize outstanding student work in landscape architecture.

Congratulations to Jen Dearnaley, Masters of Landscape Architecture student, who is the 2015 Deakin School of Architecture and Built Environment prize winner for her project entitled Restoration of Yollinko Park.

The project Restoration of Yollinko Park is about remembering and respecting local Indigenous history. 

Yollinko Park is where the Barrabool Clan of the Wadawurrung Tribe lived prior to European colonisation of the Geelong region in 1827. This site, at the confluence of Kardinia Creek and the Barwon River, offered food in abundance and shelter from the cold winter winds.  In 1981, three middens and 780 artefacts (axes, anvils, spear heads, blades, wooden and stone tools) were discovered on this site, dating back to over 5,000 years.

Opened in 1992, the Park today does not achieve its original design intent of being a place of education, and has become a place with no spirit – a thoroughfare, not a destination point. Aboriginal people believe that as much as people need the land, the land needs people; through the design proposal, by bringing people into the heart of the Park it will re-activate the spirit of the place.