The Cooroora Institute is a community place of landscape memoir.

The Cooroora Institute brings together artists and artisans with public intellectuals to celebrate community connectedness to place and environment. Soundscape artists and musicians play us into the more-than-human world. Craftworkers remind us of every object’s origin and emotive story. Artists abstract the details of our love of place and express an ever evolving relationship with the environment. Designers and architects build the songs of each place into the material fabric of the everyday. Philosophers and cultural theorists dissolve the strictures of institutionalised knowledge to allow a remerging of human /nature.

The magic of this fecund valley lies under the spell of the long view and the supervision of Cooroora Mountain. The organic gardens and orchards team human and nature in the production and consumption of food. The underground housing and straw bale studio decrease longer term environmental impact. The arts and crafts workshops create product whilst overcoming the work/family dilemma of capitalist practice. The bunya trees remember the Gubbi Gubbi’s ceremonial embeddedness in place. The large library reminds us of the impossibility of originality whilst inspiring us to be always more. The outside stage sits between remerging rainforest and realms of more human domain. The interaction of artists and scholars in residence with visiting musicians and the whole community grows imagination and creativity.

A cellist plays with large green tree frogs. A group of artists come to paint the wet wildness of the weeds. A Murri smudging initiates adulthood artistry. A table of furniture and musical instrument makers consume fine food along with good discussions. A map-worked canvas, too big for the workshop, lies across the lawn. Celebrations of place by young musicians go on until dawn. Intellectual debate grows along with the garden’s bush foods and flowers. Both sawdust and unused words create its trails. Visitors abound, staying for hours and for months. Courses and traineeships end in gallery exhibitions and journal articles. The Cooroora Institute offers the theory and practice of environmental creativity amidst a beauteous and careful construct of our place, this piece of earth.