A practice built on place, people, and depth.

I'm Nicci. I remember standing in the Princely Rooms in Salzburg Fortress and feeling utterly overwhelmed, not just by their beauty but by the feeling that washed over me. I welled up with tears. A friend quipped that "made cry" should be the top tier of heritage significance. It was funny. It was also sort of true, and it stayed with me.

Some places just hold you. They hold you because of the memories attached: the first place you worked, the house your grandmother lived in, the place you first had sex, had your heart broken, where you said goodbye to your Dad, where you graduated, where your friends most love to share a drink. Places are not just fabric. They are spaces of grief, joy, and accumulated memory.

On my phone I have hundreds of photos of the Castlemaine Gaol, and every time I glimpse it from the station it captures me as it did the first time. This was the place that made me fall back in love with planning, that inspired so much curiosity and research, and brought me my first invitation to write a journal article. But it is more than that. The place holds trauma and pain and literal human remains: the men who were buried there, unnamed and unmarked. Those men are why, when I sit down to write about a place, the building itself is rarely the whole point. Fabric matters, but the question I keep asking is who was here, who was left out of the record, and what that says about who we've decided matters. That question is as much the work as the fabric itself.

Some of the most important work Know Your Place does is pro bono. Doing right by a place doesn't always follow a fee schedule.

My writing and inquiry into erasure, memory, and the ethics of heritage practice at contested sites runs through everything. The question of whose heritage gets protected, and why that question is never neutral, informs both the work and the thinking behind it.

My work is mostly regional, which is exactly where I want to be.