A short account of the work, the places, and the people who've shaped how I think about a life worth living.
A Landscape Architect, Social Ecologist and Educator by training, I've designed environments across Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Tasmania, in deep community with the people who live in them.
That breadth isn't incidental. It's precisely what shapes the way I work.
I understand transitions from the inside. I know what it means to leave something behind, to stand in the gap between who you were and who you're becoming, and to find — through intentional design — that what comes next can be richer than what came before.
I don't teach from a textbook. I draw on a life genuinely and fully lived, across culture, community, landscape, and loss, and I bring all of it into the room with quiet assurance and openness.
The Wellbeing Design Studio is not a side project. It is the synthesis of everything I've learned about what makes a life sustaining, meaningful, and worth inhabiting.
Every place I've worked on has, in some way, been a place of transition. This is the story of how a practice was shaped — by the land, by the people, and by the moments that asked something new of me.
Click or tap the collages to explore!
It all began in 1983, designing and constructing ‘Doveton Park’, a six-acre lake and garden for Peter Tobin Funerals in Ballarat North. Working in a place shaped by loss and remembrance, I came to understand what landscape can hold: grief, celebration, solitude, and renewal. Raw earth to abundance and lushness in maturity. That's where my practice was born.
Whilst studying at QUT Brisbane, I spent four years at the award-winning practice of Richard Jones and Associates in Wellington Point, gaining exposure to all levels of the practice. In my final year, I produced a 260 page A3 thesis called ‘Participatory Landscape Design: The Landscape Architect’s Potential Role as a Facilitator and Educator in User-Oriented Design Processes’, researching national and international co-design processes committed to authentic user involvement.
Many residential and commercial projects plus local government and green subdivisions; Chairperson of the Ballarat Region Conservation Strategy Management Committee that began the LINCS (Linear Network of Communal Spaces) Project for the Yarrowee River. From 1991 to 2000 Stuart lectured in year-long Landscape and Graphic Design Courses for Horticulture students at Fed. University TAFE.
We moved to a gracious old house and a new studio by the lake, full of promise. But after 22 years, three great kids, and a truly wonderful wife, I could no longer avoid the pain of being gay. Not wanting to be gay. Not wanting to hurt anyone and to give space for healing, our marriage ended. What followed was unexpected: a gift of ten years teaching Yolŋu kids on the Crocodile Islands in the Arafura Sea, 600 kilometres east of Darwin — a deeply spiritual homecoming, and for our kids, an expansive world that they carry still.
Adopted as Dhanbaniny Wanybarrnga Dhamarrandji in 2001, began a period of being present to a living 65,000 year culture on Country with the privilege of being a co-learning educator for Yolngu children and adults in their island homelands, working towards their empowerment within two cultures
Premaydena, Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania. A five-acre Permaculture property, also run as an Airbnb.
Working within the Anindilyakwa Community of Angurugu as pre-school and Direct Instruction Teaching Model towards empowerment in two worlds.
Residential and Commercial Interiors and Landscapes in Ballarat and Tasmania Plus Packaging Design
Nine weeks, sixteen retirees, two questions: Who are we now? And how can we create interior and exterior spaces that are authentic to who we want to become?
The Black Hill Microforest is part of the national Microforest Collective based in Canberra and is a 100% volunteer organisation . Colleen Filippa and I co-founded this in May 2025
Coming up the home stretch of the 5km — one of only two runners in the 75–79 age group!
