This essay is set in the cultural life, as it is lived in the current era, in the
landscape of the South-West of West Australia. This essay presents and briefly analyses three of this region’s in-landscape local artistic and community
practice cultural achievements. Some display the successful use of traditional methods, and all work to develop unique regional identity. This essay briefly
considers and analyses the particular ways these cultural creations bear
witness to change and contestation of landscape.

This essay describes three arts or community practice in the everyday
(Williams, 1958) cultural life of the South-West region of Western Australia. This essay describes only a tiny sliver of the society’s “cultural geography” (Crang, 1998, p. 2). This community and region are is diverse, increasingly so in this digital-information era (Bonnett, 2004).

In that region of Australian (as elsewhere now, in this modern world) ” … social and ritual” values emanate from a uniquely ” … heterogenous … ethnic, cultural and social mix” (Kaino, 1995,p. vii). In this region art locates itself and its audience visibly within its landscape. The first cultural landscape this essay describes is “Re-Discover Bunbury”.

This is the Bunbury Street Art project (SixTwoThreeZero, 2016). This fits the definition of the arts:

the expression or application of human creative skill and
imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting
or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily
for their beauty or emotional power
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2016).

Locals and visitors alike experience: “the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested” (McKenzie, S1, 2016, Week 1) as they adore or detest the street art. They view, talk about and reflect on right there in Bunbury, in these South-West streets. A visitor-blog entry on “Life Images by Jill” (26 January, 2016), and associated Facebook website, provides an animated, personal experience of Re.Discover Bunbury, amplify this community practice.

Social activist group Six Two Zero Three (2016) run the project, and so contribute to the overall quality of Bunbury landscape. They maintain and use excellent statistics gathered from this project to peacefully support cohesive community,
They develop a regional arts dialogue and enliven regional landscape.

However, Wilson shows how projects like this may still be contested, due to:

insufficient interest… in progressing the artistic agenda…
exacerbated by a paucity of data and insufficient
community between arts, higher education and research
policy and the practitioner worlds that are governed by
them (cited by Hare & Lousieksien, 23 March, 2016).

Wilson, an academic researcher, who demonstrates this failure is not confined to universities, says: “artists need audiences, both critics and public, to hone their skills” (cited by Hare & Lousieksien, 23 March, 2016). This is a high level of contestation of landscape and Wilson is shown to be instigating a counter-movement.

The contestation begins by those who could communicate “the arts and learning —the special processes of discovery and creative effort.” (Williams, cited by McKenzie, Week 1, S1, 2016). Wilson states there may be some positive change to this situation (cited by Hare & Lousieksien, 23 March, 2016).

Change came through generations of community who have continued to lobby for the Busselton Jetty (Busselton Jetty Timeline, 2016). Here, generational
success is an example of: “Orr’s work, [1990] and later, Wave[‘s] and Lenger’s [1991, which] presents a key insight; namely, that knowledge, and therefore learning, [are] embedded in cultural practices” (Hoadley, 2012). The Busselton Jetty
communicates to its community as an excellent long-term example of often
continuous, harmonious landscape-building: positive power and people in work.

Now a cultural community installation, the jetty dexterously operates both “Lexus… [and] Olive Tree” (Lull, 2007, p. 52). The Busselton Jetty, and its story, display as almost-magical, historic theatre (Busselton Jetty Timeline, 2016). The beginnings of this working jetty were over a century ago; a working life, hard-wrought by community, endeavour, and entreaty. This month the jetty landscape will be enlivened with hot cups of tea and Arnott’s biscuits.

Jetty length will be activated as visitors stroll the long walk, view the mural and play arranged games at its end in the “Busselton Jetty Biggest Morning Tea” (2016). The jetty will, as it has now for generations, awaken, live, and work fruitfully – on many arts and community practice levels. Even while it delivers high community theatre – right there, onto its South-West landscape.

The gentle community practice-role of arts and crafts of the South-West
community is in the “Waroona Yarn Bombers’ Heartfelt Project”. (Trip Advisor (May, 2016), It lends thoughtful, creative, highly-visible support to community of the South-West and the landscape terribly affected by bushfire (Hondros, 15 January, 2016).

This community endeavour expresses solidarity for sad and awful loss in the
bushfires (Waroona Yarn Bombers, 2016). The wider West Australian community empathises strongly and actively with this project. This peaceful and spontaneous endeavour reflects the arts and crafts movement. Founded in the 19th century England, where:

decorative arts… sought to revive the ideal of craftsmanship
in an age of increasing mechanization and mass production
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2016).

This community response; authentic, cultural communication, employs
traditional Caucasian handicraft skills, like crochet. These products project
“… certain ideological principles (sets of governing ideas)… displayed,
perceived, [and] conform” (Crouch, 1999, page1). Their Facebook sites (2016) widely communicate this re-gain of burned landscape.

Facebook widely communicate this identification with landscape and event. The the artwork works how , as Hall (1959) explains, “culture is communication and communication is culture” (p. 169). Via this adornment of landscape, sadness and support are expressed, for the people’s wounds, and the landscape’s.

This swell of support is cultural community practice. It communicate messages to and about community (Brown, cited by Kaino, 1995, p. 115). These regional
practitioners, culturally innovative, “re-creat[e] more traditional and less alienating lifestyles” (Kaino, 1995, p. ix). The artistry on the burned trees use traditional modes.

This is a strong confirmation of craft as “cultural production” (Kaino, 1995, p. ix). In those communications are key factors, cultural: “psychological … relational …
situational … environmental… ” (King, 7 April, 2016). They operate within Australia’s diverse landscape of “culture… or beliefs or values” (Crang, 1998, p. 2).

They crochet mandalas, or “circular figure representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism” (Oxford Dictionary, 2016)”. These reflect the landscape, the region’s cultural diversity, and its inclusiveness. These regional cultural practices are:

(micro)movement[s] …. [not] grand-scale and calculable
transformations in society … [these are] tiny or almost
imperceptible actions … [with the] potential to produce
change (Harlot of Hearts, 2016).

Furthermore, the digital plunges these three real, regional cultural products, into the virtual, and into the “international”, (Brown, cited by Kaino, 1995, p. 115). There each communicates its unique “cultural geography” (Crang, 1998). There they
show and develop meaning for [many] people” (McKenzie, Week 1, S1, 2016, slide 10).

This essay is set in South-West of Western Australia, where three particular art, and community practices create identity and argument about that landscape. This essay describes how the region enjoys a rich in-landscape of local artistic and community practice. These cultural achievements arising from and continue the use of successful, traditional methods of peaceful cultural dispute. All work to develop unique regional identity. This essay considers and analyses the particular ways these cultural creations bear witness to change and contestation within the South-West landscape. These are places of cultural ideas, communicate and
respond to thoughts and ideas about landscape and place. These three places are good examples of how digital communication may extend, globally. knowledge of regional, novel cultural product, and of regional landscape and identity may extend far and wide. So these cultural communications activate their own
landscape globally. This essay thus communicates about a most complicated, culturally alive and well landscape. While economic support is critical and yet uncertain, art activates this South-West place, is disputed within that
landscape is vital and changing. Via community practice the people re-use,
re-engineer their environment. This landscape is supportive of the identity of the region and its people. The impact of the South-West on its artisans, and its landscape is, opportunity: places to practice, places to mount and exhibit art, to air their identity, to practice change and to grow.

Reference

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and

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