‘A magical, serendipitous thing’: The co-constitution of a community labyrinth

The Mount Ainslie Nature Reserve in Canberra is home to Five Senses, a community labyrinth first created in 2006. The labyrinth continues to exist, an example of everyday heritage maintained by community, although both its materiality and the community’s engagement are dynamic. The labyrinth has nurtured an intimate relationship within the reserve, one whereby the human and the more-than-human are co-constituting the labyrinth’s very existence in a constant and symbiotic act of reordering and rearranging.

This essay is a reflection on that co-constitution. It is a placed-based story within the environmental and cultural histories of Canberra, a city often described as the ‘bush capital’ of Australia. As Deborah Bird Rose suggests, place provides ‘a nexus of analysis that calls for the study of relationships and motion’, allowing for a more holistic rather than conventional topic of study’. Telling the story of Five Senses: The Mount Ainslie Community Labyrinth is not to situate it within the context of labyrinths broadly, but to concentrate on what might have enabled an earthwork to be maintained over almost two decades within a publicly accessible nature reserve.