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State of the Art Facilities
Dandjoo Darbalung, the largest Indigenous Support Program for Aboriginal students and the first-of-it's-kind in Australia, integrates aspirational educational achievement with tangible skills and increased employment opportunities.
The Program
With 100 current students who hail from 30 different Aboriginal communities across Australia, they have a shared goal to pursue tertiary study, graduate and successfully secure employment. Nationally the retention rate for Indigenous Australians is c.47%. In comparison, students supported through the Dandjoo Darbalung program achieve a 90% retention rate and a 78% pass rate which is comparable with non-Indigenous pass rates.
The program is strongly based in culture and includes participation from senior Indigenous Elders and mentors, families and communities. For the 130 alumni of the program, the active celebration of art and dance coupled with strong academic support is pivotal to the success of the program
The Facilities
Funded by the WA Government’s Department of Communities, a culturally focussed brief informed the design of the building. It is grand but a contemporary living and learning environment with an intimate scale. The elements are creative and purposeful and designed with input from the residents.
The tower and fire pit
The design of the tower with the fire pit at the crown, is open to the elements, suffused with natural light and connected to key symbolic features. It emphasises the relationship Aboriginal people have with the land, with nature and the importance of birds and animals to their songs, dances and belief systems. It contains deeply symbolic elements such as the circular seating around a fire-pit within a garden open to the sky.
Students meet in small gendered groups with appropriate mentors to discuss issues and ideas, fears and hopes and includes all residents. The yarning circle is a powerful model and the fire-pit garden is designed to facilitate small group meetings and ceremonies. At other times the space can be used as a relaxed social space, community meeting space or quiet reflection space open to the sky.
The shared communal areas
In the brief, the residents wanted spaces where they could commune as a family – eat together, talk together and study together. The communal spaces are generous and functional but provide quiet for study purposes and are centrally located with kitchen facilities.
A varied living configuration to reflect a family
Designed in pods of 9 or 10, the bedrooms vary in size and design, as you would find in any home. No long corridors of the same size room! This allows older and younger students to live together and peer-to-peer mentoring to naturally occur.
Cultural Centre
The Cultural Centre is a dynamic connection point with the wider community and includes mentoring, tutoring and cultural celebration, surrounded by beautifully tranquil gardens.
It will be both the home of the program for the Indigenous students and a space to foster knowledge sharing more widely, including hosting school visits and visits from students in partner programs like Follow the Dream, Clontarf, Shooting Stars, Girls from Oz and AISWA.
Gardens for dance and creativity
It is also a performance space connected by themed gardens, designed to be welcoming and allow students to study outdoors, soak up the sun and commune in an informal way. The wider community is invited to share in cultural learning activities and as with each element in this project, connection to the landscape is essential to the success of the design.
Through sliding panels that open onto the native garden, this indoor/outdoor space greatly enhances community coming together across the College and from a diverse range of external organisations, interest groups and supporters of the program.
Learning Centre
Academic excellence is integral to St Catherine’s College and the Learning Centre has been a welcomed space for individual and group study. A light-filled, quiet yet communal space that allows students to work collaboratively and pursue their academic goals.
Roof garden
Every roof space at St Catherine’s is productive in some way, either through generating energy or green space. This further models sustainability and the liveability of high density urban communities.
The roof of the Cultural Centre provides a quiet space for small groups to gather in much the same way as the meeting and ceremonial spaces provided in the native gardens and the tower.