A reflection from Dr Kate Hislop

As a new casual tutor at UWA in 1992 I had the opportunity to meet some of the inaugural landscape architecture cohort in their first year of studies, and remember many names and faces from then, including Peta-Maree Ashford (Bates) who we are now proud to see as AILA's National President. We were housed then in the 'Architecture' building custom-made for the school, adjacent to the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. By 1994 we had outgrown it and moved to our current premises on the Nedlands campus.

The thirty years of landscape architecture at UWA is a milestone worth recognising, not least because the graduates from the degree programs since the first completions in 1995 have indelibly shaped landscapes and the landscape architecture profession in WA and beyond. The alliance we enjoy here between academy and profession is special and brings great value to our program, our students, and our graduates. This LA30 celebration is, importantly, a way of sharing our intersecting journeys and achievements.

Graduates from our program are far flung – from Broome to the South-West, to Sydney, and Berkleigh. They are practitioners, academics, advocates. And they share a common grounding in the central role played by design as a poetic, propositional and pragmatic force in the conceptualisation of landscapes across micro and macro scales; in urban, regional and remote environments. The design paradigm continues to distinguish the education and practice of landscape architecture from allied fields also associated with the planning, planting and maintenance of the landscape environment. Those educated here have enjoyed and complemented the emphasis placed not only on design, but also theory and, of increasing importance in today's circumstances, on culture, care for Country, and the sharing of space. Biodiversity, urban ecology, blue-green infrastructure, and the opportunities for urban greening are increasingly permeating parlance, curriculum, and research.

It has been a privilege as Dean over the past six years to see the program through two professional accreditations (in 2017 and 2022), to welcome new staff to the team, to witness growth in the diversity of the student cohort, and success in PhD enrolments and completions. At postgraduate level the program is offering Focus Areas in allied fields (BIM, GIS, Urban Design), and strengthening students’ appetites for projects engaging with research through design. The promise of disciplinary cross-over and collaboration is increasingly being realised in recent years, with Landscape Architecture staff and students working alongside those in Architecture, Urban Design, and Fine Arts, as well as in Geography and Science disciplines outside the bounds of the school. The course continues to have strong local focus and engagement – with a wide range of communities, balanced alongside broad outward-looking interests and connections, from Arizona to Nanjing.

So, what next?

Plenty of challenges have been weathered over the three decades, not least the UWA (in 2012) and sector-wide shift in course structure from the four-year Bachelor of Landscape Architecture to the 3+2 model of Bachelor-plus-Masters. Institutional change will be inevitable and ongoing. Flexibility in educational models and diversifying of offerings will be a feature of the next decade; in this School – housing a suite of built environment disciplines – cross-disciplinary studies will continue to provide students variety and choice in the courses they take and the careers they build. AI is in the mix as well, to keep educators and practitioners on their toes. Human imagination will still be a powerful point of difference. So many of the pressing environmental, social and cultural challenges preoccupying the world enter the domain of Landscape Architects, and we are dedicated to the opportunities that education brings to prepare for and transform futures. Thirty years is a generation – it gives us pause to think about the next one, and what we collectively want to make of it.

Dr Kate Hislop
Dean/Head of School
UWA, 2023