A Collaborative Artwork Brings Aboriginal Voices to Sydney Metro

The three-level station reflects the town’s complex past. Here, wetlands, swamps, and low sandy hills were first inhabited by the Aboriginal Wangal and Gadigal peoples. However, in the modern era industry has dominated–from the early Waterloo flour mill to subsequent distilleries, breweries, and factories. 

At the platform level, bronze-colored metal wall linings have a machine-age feel, and are perforated with abstractions of an ancient silcrete blade tool fragment that was discovered on site during excavation. Along the concourse, a long, top-lit wall suggests the sedimentary layers of Sydney sandstone, and other surfaces feature the patterns of the Banksia scrub plant and others inspired by native species. At street level, a black diamond patterned ceiling suggests energy and futurism, while robust rusted steel, brick, and concrete facades play on the scale and character of neighboring buildings. As these spaces develop, they will include ground floor retail and community spaces, with student and social housing above.  

The project’s most explicit references to local culture are Monk’s three installations. Monks’ lineage includes Wajarri Yamaji, Dutch, and English and her work is largely informed by this cross-cultural identity. “We’ve been connected to this area for over 60,000 years,” she says, noting that she felt extra pressure to ensure that Indigenous stories were told as the city’s outlying neighborhoods continue to change and develop. “I’ve been passionate about making visible whose country we’re actually in.”  

For example, her work, Footprints on Gadigal Nura, references the area’s Aboriginal history and it actively included those communities in its making. At street level, a mirrored lenticular wall includes text developed in collaboration with local Gadigal Elders Uncle Charles Madden and Aunty Joanne Timbery. Next to the escalators leading to the concourse are over 100 individually cast aluminum feet, molded from the feet of local children at an Aboriginal community workshop. Portrayed in circles, curves and lines, they create an informal map of the area, based largely on Aboriginal histories and places.  

Mounted in the concourse is a striking, 31-foot-tall, perforated aluminum image depicting a young Aboriginal dancer, Roscoe, holding a boomerang. Aboriginal photographer Wayne Quilliam took the shot during a session with the local Brolga dance company, of which Roscoe is a member.  

“I wanted a powerful, young, proud Aboriginal boy signaling to everyone ‘we’re the future–powerful andstrong in culture,’” says Monks.  

“It was so powerful as an image and as a reference that it really was kind of overwhelming. I’ve never seen anything like that,” notes McAslan, whose firm has developed a niche working on transit projects worldwide, including a vaulted addition to the city’s historic Sydney Central Station that serves as another Sydney Metro station.  

The process at Waterloo wasn’t always simple. Troy Uleman, a director at McAslan, notes that he had to mediate the sometime divergent timelines of the contractor John Holland Group, and Monks and her team. Monks notes that she had to fight to maintain her art’s integrity, and the acknowledgement of local tradition, in the midst of what was a very fast-tracked, nuts-and-bolts project. She made sure, for instance, that her pieces were properly lit, and that there would be an opening celebrating those involved. Roscoe was there, “and he was a little superstar,” says Monks. Uncle Chicka (Uncle Charles’s nickname) brought five generations of family to look at the work. 

She adds: “You can see how proud people are to have their culture represented in the public domain. We want it to be a place people engage with in the future. To take their loved ones down and show them they’ve been part of the art.” 

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• Infrastructure

• Australia
• Indigenous
• Peter Bennetts
• public art
• Sam Lubell
• Transportation