This paper examines the design and delivery of a learning program with First Nations students, their teachers, community, and non-Indigenous educators that created experimental locative games in the Dja Dja Wurrung region of Bendigo in Victoria, Australia. We discuss the programs experiential, place-based and relational ways of learning and how these were enacted through a reflexive approach embedded in local community and cultural engagement and participation. The games are analyzed in relation to how players connected to Country through playing in Country, demonstrating how their situated and embodied interactions invited a multisensorial engagement with place to support social and physical well-being. The program is critically reflected on as a case study for a two-way learning approach supporting young First Nations people’s connection to, and expression of Country through locative games as place-making experiences.

The action of drawing or mark making has been used for tens of thousands of years to trace human perceptions of surrounding environments, to make sense of or make evident what is physically there, and to imagine other geographical or historical perspectives. The human need to link, connect and find relations to things, even though they may be disparate, are core to this project’s investigations. Such an analogical application ties together the phenomena that are both visible and invisible to the human eye, a way to express ourselves in relation to familiar and unfamiliar experiences. Drawing is a way of seeing these interconnections through the methodology of chance, such as the technique of frottage which reveals a surface that can be interpreted physically, historically, and culturally. The action of embedding marks across a paper surface is a visceral, physical, and gestural method using both haptic and auditory senses. It allows the drawer to absorb the echoes, sounds, and tactile experiences from their environs.
Frottage was therefore used by Yimbaya Maranoa (Arts Collective) formerly known as the Remapping Mitchell Arts Collective in a collaborative session during its camping residency at Mt Moffatt in 2023. The area is a profoundly significant place for Gunggari People and is part of the Carnarvon Range, headwaters of the Maranoa River and a recharge site for the Great Artesian Basin.

This panel explores new approaches to placemaking through the development of urban play projects led by Indigenous practices that connect with and entangle knowledge with place. Cases studies discuss affordable and engaging experiences that activate existing public spaces, a typology and methodology for analysing the impacts of urban play, and a comparative study of urban play in Narrm/Melbourne and Ōtautahi/Christchurch. Impacts of these projects include First Peoples storytelling experiences, city activation post-pandemic, community engagement, and the potential of ‘creative placemaking’ to make cities more inclusive and resilient post-pandemic.