Hidden Rippon Lea is an immersive sound and augmented reality experience delivered through an app, which explores memory, plant and animal life, infrastructure, and waters at Rippon Lea Estate in Nairm (Melbourne). The project works to challenge the colonial legacies of the site – to recognize that it is Boon Wurrung Country, connected to a wider ecological and hydrological landscape.

We used a relational interface in the app to enable visitors to interact with sound layers through a physical gesture – looking up and looking down. Unfolding soundscapes can be selected and heard by tilting the phone across five horizontal strata of the site: sky, canopy, understory, ground, and underground. This open-endedness invites the listener to explore and influence the soundscape through their own movement in a reciprocal process of exchange. The app overlays a one-to-one abstraction of the underground pipes, visualized as a shimmering refraction of the above ground world, activated as the visitor looks down, beyond the apparent boundaries of the earth. As the visitor lingers, listening, they hear the voice of N’arwee’t talking of looking up and looking down to be aware of our place in Country.