Revolutionary Terrains is a collaborative research workshop by UniSA Masters of Architecture students. A team of 18 students and architectural educators explored ways of reading and depicting Australian regional landscapes, architecture and artefacts as a terrain of colonial ambition, imposition and obsolescence.

Initial exercises played with unconventional and physical modes of researching place and space. Next, a group road trip from Adelaide to Warracknabeal, across nine Aboriginal lands and declining country towns, charted 16 archetypal ‘monuments to the everyday’ (e.g. post offices, courthouses and silos) as uncanny objects. These formed the material for a co-operative photographic journal, speculative drawings, animation and public exhibition.

Allied with Studiobird’s After Warracknabeal [2019] and Parallaxis for the Adelaide 2020 Festival, the project’s ostensible focus is the redundant 1890 Warracknabeal Court House, and its regeneration as a community artspace: but more critical is its role as an immersive educational experience for students, one that benefits from fresh eyes and tactics on familiar places.