What you see
Four Seasons runs from 1826 to now, and nothing in it is a photograph. The left wall is the town as a plan, the right wall the country around it, both seen from directly above; the centre wall looks across the town as it builds. Everything is placed by record — survey plans, land titles, the heritage register, satellite surveys of vegetation — and where the records are silent, a simulation fills the gap. It is a simulation of a town growing, not a history of one, and the list below says which is which.
The fires that close Six Seasons carry on into this one. Here they are supposition, not record: Menang burning is inferred as a scatter of fires across the country in 1826, thinning through the nineteenth century and returning in recent years as cultural burning resumes. Where they burn, and when, is imagined — but on reasonable supposition: placed on the flats and lower slopes where burning makes sense.
The streets come from historic plans and charts of the town, from 1834 to 1954 — among them the survey of 1851 (Chauncy, 1851) and the Lands and Surveys townsite plans of 1895 and 1954 (Department of Lands and Surveys, 1895, 1954) — each aligned by hand against today’s streets. The earliest sheets defeat any machine: on the 1851 watercolour nothing separates street from paper, so the 1834 and 1851 roads were traced by hand, line by line, over many hours — some thirty kilometres of them. A road appears when the plans first show it. In the centre, the town’s heritage places rise in the order they were built — 88 of them dated from the state heritage register (Heritage Council of Western Australia, 2026), each rising from the year its construction began. The heritage buildings were modelled from historic photographs using generative 3D techniques: careful, reasonable approximations of how they looked, not photogrammetric reconstructions.
Around them the ordinary town fills in. The footprints are real — some 5,700 building outlines from OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap contributors, 2025) — but the houses on them are generic, generated models, not Albany buildings, and their dates are simulated: ranked outward from the 1826 landing along dated roads and paced to approximate figures for Albany’s population.
The simulation also conditions what is built, and where. A lot cannot be built on until a road reaches it; land value — views of hill and water, closeness to town and beach — sets how large a house is and how often it is rebuilt; and what it is built of follows both the period and the purse — wood and stone in the early town, then weatherboard and fibro, then brick and tile — so the prosperous hill suburbs turn over into bigger and newer houses while the working suburbs keep their modest homes for longer; and zoning decides what may stand, so sheds and warehouses gather on industrial land and shops arrive after the houses they serve. The 1890s bust, when the port trade went to Fremantle, takes some houses away; the post-war years replace some old cottages. The events are real; which houses they took is not.
On the side walls, colour is land use: bush in deep green, protected land in emerald, cleared farmland cycling through the four European seasons (summer straw, autumn brown, winter green, spring canola), settlement in umber, plantations in teal. Until 1972 the clearing is simulated — spreading outward from the town, fast along roads and slow uphill, quickening with the railway, the group settlements and the post-war soldier-settler schemes — but it may only clear land that the first satellite record shows as cleared. From 1972 the country is data: woody vegetation cover mapped from Landsat imagery (Landgate, 2026) — at intervals from 1972, then every year from 1988 — with nothing invented between. Protected land appears at roughly the year it was reserved (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, 2026).
Four times the three walls join into a single panorama, and each time the two centuries run again from the beginning: over Princess Royal Harbour, the town to the left and Toondarrup (Torndirrup) to the right; across Tjuitgellong (Lake Seppings) and Binalup (Middleton Beach) to Miaritch (Oyster Harbour); over Binalup and Ellen Cove, with Mt Clarence to the right and Tjuitgellong to the left; and last, the town itself, seen from in front of the Town Hall (City of Albany, 2020).1
The last panorama ends on the Town Hall itself, built 1886–88 — two days and two nights that are also two hundred years. As the years pass, the traffic in the streets around it thickens: a stand-in for the town’s growing population, its busyness rising decade by decade. Through all of it the Town Hall stands still, as the heritage buildings do across the town: witnesses to everything that changes around them, and a reason to value them. Then it hands on to Now.
