PLACEMAKING
IN IPSWICH 

Clean-Up Day

28/7/2025 - Kirsty O'Brien

Research shows that solutions for littering are most effective when targeted at the source, before items are sold and consumed. Retail businesses selling food can incentivise customers to bring their own coffee cups or supply takeaway packaging only when requested. All businesses selling packaged goods could provide bins at the point of sale, taking responsibility for their emptying and ensuring waste is securely kept for disposal, preventing it from being blown away.

Not all solutions can be enacted locally. We need our state government to incentivise waste collection and recycling schemes, like the drink container recycling program, and to ensure companies pay the hidden costs of selling in single-use packaging. At the federal level, our government must take product stewardship seriously, including banning materials most likely to become litter or dumped domestic waste.

Community action also plays a crucial role. We can keep our city areas clean and cared for so littering isn’t seen as normal or acceptable. Groups like Clean Up Australia partner with local communities to maintain problem areas and show that people care for our urban environment. A clean environment discourages littering, as people are less likely to litter where it’s clear others care. For example, Brighter Brassall has seen improvements and reduced vandalism at Battye Park through monthly clean-ups.

We invite the Ipswich community to join Ipswich Central Partnership this Saturday for a litter pick-up and graffiti removal. When people see others caring for the area, they feel it’s worth visiting and living here. Ipswich is growing rapidly as a great place to raise a family, and your participation demonstrates city pride and love for our place. We hope to see many of you there, helping keep Ipswich clean and cared-for.

The First Placemakers

22/6/2025 - Kirsty O'Brien

Placemaking is the layering of meaning onto the landscape, this meaning is shaped by memory, story, and lived experience.  In Ipswich, that meaning runs deep. Every life lived here has contributed to a shared culture, with rivers of subculture flowing like tributaries into a greater stream that stretches behind us and flows on ahead, long after we are gone.

The first lives here began more than sixty thousand years ago. Despite the violence and upheaval of colonisation, the original culture endured and was passed down in stories, songlines, and the lived knowledge of today’s custodians, the descendants of those ancient families.

This is Ugarapul and Yuggera country. The place we now call Ipswich was once known as Coodjrer, and the Bremer River as Urara. These names speak of a different understanding where land is not owned but embracing and sustaining, not taken but cared for. The people were of the land. From the Brisbane basin to the Scenic Rim and the foothills of Toowoomba, people moved through Country, welcomed others, harvested seasonally, and tended the landscape with respect.

Placemaking was part of life. Sacred places held in legend, and practical places of sustenance. Meaning came through intimate connection to the land, its contours, and the plants and animals that existed alongside its people. This was a culture in balance.

Then came colonial occupation, bringing new meanings, Cartesian ideas of mapping, measuring, and imposition. Land became property, Country became resource, and culture collided into conflict. But meaning is not fixed. And over time, our perspectives shift.

Today, in a society shaped by many voices, we have the opportunity to listen again to the first ones and to amplify the stories that were once silenced. Through placemaking, we can honour the custodians of this land, support reconciliation, and be proud to reconnect with the fantastic, unique stories of this place. The place we call home.