In 2015, four UNSW engineering students were invited to spend a week on Mer (Murray) Island, a remote outpost in the Torres Strait. A decade on, they reflect on the experience.
When Sarah Brickhill was invited on a university trip to Mer Island back in 2015, she couldn’t believe her luck. An environmental engineering student at UNSW Sydney, she had spent the previous 13 weeks immersed in the study of the island’s environmental infrastructure for a fourth year subject CVEN4701 delivered by the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering called Planning Sustainable Infrastructure.
Sarah and her peers had developed a series of sophisticated engineering solutions to address energy, waste, water and wastewater challenges on this tiny island in the Torres Strait, best known as the home of Aboriginal land rights activist Eddie Mabo. Now, she and three other students—Felipe Lebensold, Danielle (Dani) Tuazon and Amarin Siripanich—were being offered the chance to see the island for themselves. They travelled with lecturers Prof. Martin Nakata (Nura Gili), CVEN4701 course coordinator Stephen Moore and Prof. Richard Stuetz.
Ten years later, those four students look back at the week they spent on Mer Island as an experience that has irrevocably shaped them all, both as people and engineering professionals.
Sarah, now the Manager for Transport Planning at the City of Sydney, says the trip opened her eyes to the reality of an Australia that she’d never seen before.
“The physical environment was so far from anything I’d experienced before. It was a tropical paradise, but there were sharks swimming just metres offshore. I’ve never seen stars like there were there because there’s just no light pollution. It was incredibly beautiful,” she says.
Mer Island’s remote location meant that residents lived without much of the infrastructure that mainlanders take for granted—the island was powered by a diesel generator, water was treated using a diesel-powered desalination plant, and rubbish was often incinerated due a lack of waste management services.
For the students, the urge to start solving these issues was immediate.
“We went in with the best of intentions. Our collective attitude was, 'I’ve studied this island for the past 13 weeks, and I know there’s a solution,’” Sarah says.
But they quickly realised that the Mer Island community wasn’t interested in having a group of outsiders come and explain what needed to be fixed. Instead, residents wanted to introduce the students to their home—not just the limitations of its infrastructure, but the people, culture and environment that made it such a unique place.
And so they did. Hosted by Mer Island’s Doug Passi, who had visited UNSW prior to the trip, the students ran science experiments and played football with the local school children. They went on fishing trips; shared meals with the community; and listened to stories of the island’s history, culture and music.
“We talked to the young people about the environment and the beauty of their island. They told us about the gardens where they used to grow their own fruit and veg, but the supermarkets had muscled in and now nobody was growing anything. So we talked to them about how they might bring that back,” Dani says.
Community members also took them to nearby Dauar Island, a small islet that used to be inhabited by the Meriam people, the traditional owners of Mer Island and its surrounds. Here, they wandered white sand beaches, caught fish and cooked them in the shade of coconut trees.
Engaging with the Meriam people also introduced the students to the principles of working with First Nations communities and the power of recognising those communities as the experts in their own needs and experiences.
“In Brazil, we say that you have to ask permission to go to a new place. It’s no good going in there thinking that you own it,” says Felipe, who was an exchange student in Australia at the time of the Mer Island trip.
“You have to see what’s around you, to listen to what people are saying, what the environment is saying.”
Through this wealth of experiences, the students started building an understanding of Mer Island that was shaped by the lives, wisdom and culture of its residents.
Dani recalls a growing understanding that all these interactions, even those that seemed disconnected from the engineering challenges the community lived with, would somehow be central to solving them.
“The community was interested in connection. That community engagement, I think that’s where it starts,” she says.
According to Professor Martin Nakata, then the Director of the Nura Gili Centre for Indigenous Programs at UNSW, this was a central premise of the trip. At the time, he described the experience as an opportunity for students to start thinking about engineering as a human-centred activity, rather than a discipline solely focused on delivering optimal technical outcomes.
“We wanted to give the students immersion in a situation that would break the propensity to just deploy technological answers and instead encourage them to create solutions that are meaningful for the community,” he said at the time.
For Felipe, learning these concepts in the classroom was one thing, but it wasn’t until he found himself immersed in the Mer Island community that he really began to understand them.
“It’s something we read in books, it’s something we hear from the people who teach us, but talking with people on Mer Island was the first time I really understood that creating a sustainable society or environment isn’t just about the best machine or the best project to solve the problem,” he says.
Amarin agrees:
“Approaching a real-life challenge solely through numbers can be misguided. People are more than statistics; without understanding their values and way of life, any proposed solution risks becoming just another problem for them to solve,” he says.
All four students have gone on to work in various pockets of the sustainability field—Sarah as a transport planner, Dani in waste management, Felipe as a sustainability consultant and Amarin in transport modelling and data science. Despite the different directions their career paths have taken, they’ve been shaped by the Mer Island experience in ways that continue to inform their work today.
For Dani, the trip remains a constant a reminder that successful engineering solutions start and end with people. It’s a motto that she’s carried through to every job, many of which have taken place in remote First Nations communities across Australia.
“Working in my sector and in environmental services, it’s about creating structures that support people. Engineering is about the qualitative and quantitative data, but you really should lean on the meaningful qualitative stuff more,” she says.
“I’ve also realised how valuable it was to have that direct relationship through this project with First Nations people. It taught me that ownership of a project should come from within the community, and the value of that comes back as a return to industry and the profession.”
The legacy of the Mer Island trip also lives on at UNSW. The course itself won the Australasian Association for Engineering Education 2015 Award for ‘Excellence in Engineering Education Engagement’ and a UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence for team leader Stephen Moore, and team members, Professor Martin Nakata, Professor Richard Stuetz, Associate Professor Iain MacGill, Dr Taha Rashidi, Dr Ruth Fisher and Elsie Edgerton-Till.
Over the past ten years, the Planning Sustainable Infrastructure course has continued connecting students to a range of urban and regional design briefs that challenge them to develop integrated infrastructure designs that consider sustainability in all its forms: water, waste, energy, transport and—of course—people.