ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on a conflict about a statue built by a wealthy landowner in the Western Australian Margaret River wine region in contravention of the Planning and Development Act 2005 (WA). Despite community disagreement about the statue, throughout the planning law process conducted by the local council in the first instance and the state administrative tribunal on review, there was no formal community participation but there was persistent resident letter-writing, while the nearby township subsequently erected its own statue as a way of reasserting its views and values about the landscape. It explores the materiality of the statues including the landscape within which they were located, and the local news media which represented a materiality that was informally produced by the community. The chapter argues that the deliberative process for planning matters, especially when the values of a landscape are an important consideration to determine the merits of a development, needs to attend to plural aspects of materiality. It is within materiality that planning officials can find an articulation of value about place and landscape and an expression of community views over locally controversial developments that may be absent from participatory processes constrained and conditioned or excluded by the law.
