Transcriber: Autumn Roberts Reviewer: Taher Koja
It's a bloody great idea. You still fail because everyone finds that
the important thing is that you fail differently.
That's what Victor Hunter and you're going to Aboriginal,
Elder said to my partner and me when he excitedly invited us to try our new
project idea in ways remote Kimberley.
So we packed our van and we crossed
the continent from Melbourne to Fitzroy Crossing with no clear plan
and no funding. Our friends and family thought we were mad,
but really insanity is doing the same thing again and again
and expecting different results.
And that is what Australia has been doing
for decades now in remote community housing. We wanted to propose a new model.
The idea of this involve and enable people to decide what they want,
design what they want and build what they want.
Homes that belong to the people adapted to
the local climate using local materials and passive solar design.
And that is where a house becomes a home.
We learned this on our journeys throughout the world,
working in each place with the local people
as they built something which uniquely reflected themselves.
The land below them and the climate around them.
In the tropical jungles of Colombia, open air, bamboo bungalows,
colorful urban costumes. In remote Peru,
cool desert hideaways with succulents growing on the roofs in
the Scottish Highlands, a snow covered straw bale house and in Transylvania,
a hobbit home dug into the hillside,
collecting the southern sun like grand designs.
And then we arrived in Australia, a vast continent.
Tropical climates in the north. Cold winters in the south.
Cities apex is its cultural diversity.
Everywhere we went, we found the same kind of houses.
My partner is an architect from Spain.
She was dismayed to find that despite our
incredible and unique Aboriginal culture,
all the houses in these communities were
Western city like hot metal boxes with
no connection to the people or to the land.
I believe that building yourself a house is also about building yourself.
I know it sounds corny, but building your own shelter gives
a very primal sense of satisfaction. How often do we work with our hands?
How often do we work with our communities?
Our modern lifestyles might have changed,
but our need for this sort of connection has not changed,
as the journalist Sebastian Junger noted. Humans don't mind hardship.
In fact, they thrive on it.
What they mind is not feeling necessary,
and modern society has mastered the art of making people not feel necessary.
Imagine yourselves standing alongside family and friends with your hands
on your hips and saying the words.
“We made this, we made this.” When was the last time you felt that way?
Sara and I arrived in Fitzroy Crossing in the remote Kimberley.
By then, we had passed through panoramic wildfires,
biblical plagues of stink bugs and cane toads.
And we arrived in a town which one week earlier had literally been
an island thanks to the wet season floods. Exciting and exotic.
But,
remote Australia is also a place of extreme need and hardship.
Most of these Aboriginal communities suffer from chronic housing shortages,
overcrowding, unemployment is disengagement,
mental and physical health crises and amongst the highest suicide rates in
the world. We visited a small community called Otago on Guni.
Any country where the desert meets the limestone caves and cliffs.
Bodega was established 20 years ago by a couple of artists,
and Andrea and their extended family
and Andrea were spiritually connected to their land and culture.
They had a passion for growing plants,
and they had been living in a six room retired mining donga,
which had burned down in an electrical fire.
A couple of months before we arrived, by the time we met them,
co-owner Andrea and their extended family,
three generations were living in a small tin shed on the edge of
the desert in 45 degree heat.
We sat down with the family, exchanged some stories, had a few cups of tea,
had a few more cups of tea and then we proposed to build a house with them.
We said you guys need a house. We know how to build them.
None of us have got any money, but we are standing on a lot of Earth.
The only catch. It's a lot of hard work, and they said, Hey, right,
we got a big mob family to help him. And that's how the co-design process started.
Sitting together with them on
the Red Earth Hour started with two dimensional cardboard models with movable
walls. That way, the family could play around with ideas of what they might want
from a space. And then we moved to 3D models using damper,
and the family built a miniature version of their house.
And that was great until one day when the house got eaten by a bird.
At one point, Andrea noticed that the house had
an internally accessible toilet.
She suddenly stopped and said, Hey, that's disgusting.
You got to have the toilet door on the outside of the house.
So what's going on there? Well,
it's seen that we got in a white gloves with our en suites.
Well, we should be right next to where we sleep.
While all this was happening, we were dirt poor.
But one of the good things about being dirt poor is that you've got
a lot of dirt,
[Laughter]
dirt or Earth has some great properties for building.
It’s shape solid
nontoxic, non-polluting, breathable and it has great thermal mess,
which means it can slowly absorb, store and release heat.
Taking a long time to change temperature in a place where
the daytime temperature can reach up to 50 degrees, dropping again at night,
you want a house that does not bounce around with the extremes.
Building with Earth also had great symbolic and spiritual significance
for the bodega up in court and Andrea's words.
It's like living in the world of Mother Earth.
Eventually, we were fortunate enough to make contact with and be employed by
a foundation for indigenous sustainable health fish,
which was the support that we critically needed to continue with the project.
Fish works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to break
the cycles of intergenerational trauma,
poverty and engagement with the justice system.
The idea of our project was always that the house was never just a house,
but also a programme of education, justice , youth support,
community governance. For example,
we partnered with the local high school after they noticed huge improvements
in the classroom amongst kids working on our team by building a house.
If you can teach kids planning angles measurements,
you can teach problem solving routine teamwork, safety.
Anyone can learn Pythagoras theorem
they can just see how
it’s useful to them.
The courts, and the Department of Justice got involved as well,
with the result being that our project was able to keep several young people
out of prison.
Instead of chucking kids behind bars. Who would have thought?
But many magistrates would actually prefer to allow
troubled youth to spend their time
on projects like this. Instead of being locked up,
our kids were building a house with their community.
OK, so we’re building an Earth house. Why?
Well, because it's better,
the Kimberley is a region which basically runs off diesel generators
and air conditioners, which is insane.
A lot of Kimberley people literally hold their beds outside to sleep at night
because their bedrooms are just too hot.
What's the point of having a bedroom if you can't keep your bed in it?
The Bodega House does not even need an air conditioner.
How? Passive solar design.
Magical words.
One.
Air movement, every room in
the house has opposite openings to allow cross ventilation and a ceiling fan.
Two. Shading. The House has a freestanding
white tropical roof which shades
the House like a giant umbrella and allows airflow to move underneath.
Three. Orientation and shape the House works like
the magnetic termite mounds in Kakadu,
which along seen running from east to west as the termites figured out.
This maximizes shading at times a day when you need it most when
the sun is high. The roof provides the shade when the sun is low.
Morning and afternoon, east and west.
Only the narrowest parts of the house are exposed
and for thermal mass, which changes temperature very slowly.
It is like living in a five star cave.
What makes this house a home?
Co-design and code built. When Claude and Andrea take you on
a tour of their home, this is what they'll say come many more welcome.
Take off your shoes. Feel the cool, polished earth beneath your bare feet.
Touch the walls, feel the curves, the texture,
the smoothness that's good in any country,
come to the bathroom and look at the round windows.
Those round windows in our wet areas, they represent our juice,
our water holds and those are sacred places.
Look at the flat river stones at the base of our walls.
Our ancestors protected those rivers.
And now those river stones protect our walls from the wet season.
Rains come and sit around the fire in our outdoor kitchen. We hunt a kangaroo.
We cook it here. We eat it with the whole family on
the rocks from our hunting grounds. This is what Claude says about his house.
My house is alive. It's like a person breathing.
It's made from Mother Nature Goondiwindi country in the daytime.
It keeps you cool, and at nighttime it keeps you warm.
How many of us can say all that about our house
or feel that connected with our physical environment when we open our eyes in
the morning and we look around?
What things can we see and touch which remind us of our own creativity,
passion and achievement? In the end. We didn’t fail.
The community didn't fail.
Together, we created a true, sustainable Kimberly home.
A traumatized community was able to grow and heal,
and into that we were able to weave education,
justice, culture, self-reliance
and closed words. The government is going to look at this thing,
going to look what we've done, what we've created, and it's going to go forward.
This is Claude and Andrea,
another thing man thing we all are sitting on with a big smile.
Yeah, we're happy. You're probably happy in that manner.
Like, again, do something different. Work with your hands.
Work with your communities. When it's you making the decisions.
When it's you lifting the shovel, when it's you solving the problems,
that, that is truly empowering. It worked for Bodega.
It will work for other communities.
So I challenge you as Victor challenged us dare to fail differently.
Thank you.
[Clapping]