As we’ve matured, listening has become more important to our service and translation is often a more useful skill than creation. Our recent work at Fremantle’s Victoria Quay is an example. In this instance we were briefed to develop a medium-term vision and strategy for using some of the most beautiful heritage buildings we had ever seen.

Italian author, dreamer and urbanist Italo Calvino surmised the challenge of listening in a place neatly when he wrote, “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” Last decade’s Right Angle would have rushed off to think of great new ways to use the old buildings, but the current Right Angle kept a lid on our own opinions and spent time listening. We mean listening in the broadest sense; sure there were stakeholder interviews but there was also a lot of reading what quieter people thought, plenty of walking, watching, mapping and reflecting on the way the place once was or could be. 

In the end, we produced a strategy that has been endorsed by the Fremantle Ports Board and supported by the WA Government, who are investing approximately $42mil to realise the potential at Victoria Quay. But as proud of those outcomes as we may be, it is impossible to separate our thinking from that of the people we listened to along the way and there is no way we would take credit for it. That one very commercial strategy contains traces of Sea Country wisdom, the strategic imperatives from the Future of Fremantle Planning Committee, the aspirations of local creative industry, the desires of government and the faint whispers of ghosts who once also used the buildings and who also had dreams of what the buildings could be. 

Local character photography by Chris Gurney.
Drone image captured by Michael Haluwana.