I have been working with Michael Kelly less frequently lately and the finer details have taken longer. But we are nearly there. The courtyard studio is nearly complete. All that remains is its assembly.

As we finished the larger panels and began the smaller ones, we moved from the rear courtyard to the front of his shop, by the tall windows. Michael’s small workshop is set up in one window, with his bench, tools, coffee machine, stereo and books. Everything he needs for a day’s work.

The studio will have two entries and we are crafting them as saloon style shutter-doors. My role, for much of the project, has been to measure and saw the hundreds of strips of Oregon lath. When I began, my routine was without routine. The sawing bench was at right angles to the table where the uncut lath waited. I would swivel left to de-nail a length, return to the table to measure, then turn left again to saw.

Soon, I shifted the sawing bench in front of me – it fitted neatly underneath the table – so I didn’t need to turn at all. I began to de-nail in batches, measure in batches, saw in batches. I placed the pen, saw and hammer conveniently at hand. Honing this simple order was very satisfying.

Likewise, the simple pattern of our shutter-doors is very pleasing. The horizontal strips of lath are fortified by a rectangle frame and x-marks-the-spot crosspieces.

I recently borrowed the books of architect Christopher Alexander. In the 1970s, he wrote a trilogy outlining his design concepts: The Timeless Way of Building; A Pattern Language; and The Oregon Experiment.

I have only read a third of The Timeless Way, but our elegant shutter-doors seem open in concert with his argument. There is something whole about their design. Alexander writes that certain patterns of materials and behaviour bring life to buildings and their inhabitants:

“…the Alhambra, some tiny gothic church, an old New England house, an Alpine village, an ancient Zen temple, a seat by a mountain stream, a courtyard filled with blue and yellow tiles among the earth. What is it they have in common? They are beautiful, ordered, harmonious—yes, all these things. But especially, and what strikes to the heart, they live.”

On those days when we work in the window of the shop, it feels like we’re getting close to the timeless way. We toil there in the daylight, listening to Bob Dylan, waving and smiling to people who passed.

“Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

For instance, in some towns, the pattern of relationships between workplaces and families helps us to come to life. Workshops mix with houses, children run around the places where the work is going on, the members of the family help in the work, the family may possibly eat lunch together, or eat lunch together with the people who are working there.

The fact that family and play are part of one continuous stream helps nourish everyone.”

My experience matches Alexander’s words. Some towns, cities, neighbourhoods and homes can make my spirit sing, and so can certain patterns in my daily life. Days and months pass as I slowly take this in, notice what works for me, and what doesn’t, and seek that which fits. 

Last weekend, the Urban Bush-Carpenters returned to Stewart Lodge, in Brunswick. Six happy chooks were pecking around the home we built for them when we were there previously.

This day, we held a pallet planter box workshop. As the egg is to the chicken, so pallet planter boxes are to the UBC (except we don’t have to push them out of a small hole). No one can say which came first: the group or the boxes.

Here’s the idea: we use discarded pallets to make a big, cheap, handsome container for growing food.

German Michael drew up the excellent plans attached below. If you try to build one, remember that it’s not very complex, and there are no rules. No two pallet planter boxes seem to turn out the same.

At Stewart Lodge, we split into four teams, each one a mix of UBCs and volunteers, with residents helping out. We were building the containers to be handy garden beds for residents who can’t bend down easily. They can be set up on bricks, blocks or sleepers for extra height.

To begin, you’ll need at least two pallets. You can pick them up for free all over town. Ask your local shops or hardware stores and be sure to avoid the painted, treated kind. You’ll also need a saw, hammers, a drill, nails and screws.

Saw one pallet to the width you’d like for the container’s base. Next, dismantle the rest of that pallet and the other one, careful not to break the slats as you go. You can use the claw end of a hammer or a jemmy bar to prize them off.

To construct the sides and the ends, place slats between two uprights and screw them in place and onto the bottom of the box. Voilà! It usually takes a couple of hours to put one together. We’ve also been lining the timber with old chook feed sacks to postpone the rot setting in.

See Dale settling in for a well earned rest: 

One more thing: the UBC needs an HQ. We’re looking for somewhere in Melbourne’s inner north to store a small amount of timber and hammer away for a few hours one evening during the week. It could be a garage, shed or backyard, or space on a community garden or a quiet corner of a warehouse. Just so long as you don’t mind some clanging now and then…

I have worked on the little building with Michael Kelly for half a day each week. Mostly, we’ve been outside, in his narrow, paved courtyard. Courtyards fascinate him.

In the window of the shop, next to the flowerpots, a framed A4 printout is headed PRISONER GETS “LIFE”. It begins: “At a time when many young people are beginning a career or university, Michael Kelly was doing hard time for armed robbery. Life and death stood before him. He chose to make good use of his time in study, physical training and art.”

After prison, he was accepted directly into post-graduate study at the Sydney College of the Arts. The story continues: “In the years since, Michael has applied his art in a unique, hand-made building style.”

In jail, one of the benign things he discovered was that when one courtyard was uninhabitable because of brutal sun, another, on the shady side, might be too cool for comfort. “Courtyards can be their own little worlds,” he said one afternoon.

With a sideways, impish smile, he told me his incarceration might also explain why he had become so intrigued by small spaces. Planned and fitted out with care, they can enlarge even the most confined of lives.

At that time, I was reading The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka. The book, first published in 1978, is the Japanese farmer’s manifesto on growing and eating food, and on the limits of human knowledge.

As Michael spoke, I recalled Fukuoka’s observation: “…if one fathoms deeply one’s own neighbourhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.”

In the book, Fukuoka recounts his quest for simplicity in ‘natural farming’. “‘How about not doing this? How about not doing that?’—that was my way of thinking.”

One chapter explains the cycles in his rice fields and outlines his practices. “There is probably no easier, simpler method for growing grain,” he concludes. “It involves little more than broadcasting seed and spreading straw, but it has taken me thirty years to reach this simplicity.”

Michael’s design for the courtyard studio is the result of steady simplification, stripping out anything unnecessary in the structure. Each of the four wall frames is separate. The roof frame rests above, on a rectangular timber plate.

After the first day, in which we built the frame, we have worked on the cladding for the roof and walls. Using the thin strips of Oregon lath (reclaimed from demolished lath-and-plaster walls), we have built lightweight panels. We overlapped the lath, like pixie weatherboards. The whole building can be easily dismantled and moved.

That kind of elegance takes thought. On his chalkboard one day, Michael wrote, “There’s no wisdom on a silver platter”.

ON the first morning I worked with Michael Kelly, I arrived at eight o’clock, as agreed. “Let’s see how much we can get done in a day,” he’d said. He planned for us to complete the framing for a small timber studio, even if we had to work until dusk.

His shop-home is a model in the artful management of space. It has a narrow paved courtyard, only eight feet deep and fifteen wide. Yet Michael and Nadeen sort and store stacks of salvaged timber out there, and inside too, in neat overhead racks and shelves Michael has crafted. Chairs hang from hooks high on the walls until they’re needed.

We began. The studio was to be seven feet long and high, and four feet wide, plus a steep pitched roof. Michael assembled the simple tools: hand saw, tape measure, pen, set square, hammer and nails. He let me do the sawing.

“I’ve got a simple tip for sawing a straight cut,” he told me. “As you saw, lean the blade lightly against the inside top corner of the timber.” It worked like a charm – I guess it stops the blade wobbling while your elbow pumps back and forth. Next, I learnt to place the groove precisely, by steadying the blade with my other thumb as I began.

In Michael’s hands, the saw flowed over the timber like a stream over a stone. In mine, it stuttered and stopped. I didn’t know how hard to push.

Last year, I was caught up in melancholy and a longish writing project – perhaps the two go together – and didn’t often go outside. I grew unaccustomed to using my body. When I re-emerged in the summer, I wasn’t so sure how my limbs would respond to orders. One day, I watched some new friends practicing acrobalance, a kind of circus balancing act in pairs. I hung back because I had no idea how strong, or weak, my muscles were. I didn’t know what my legs would do if I tried to use them. Likewise, when I danced, I wasn’t quite sure how my booty would shake (this may be congenital).

That hesitance lingers. For people unused to making and doing, it takes practice to gain confidence in your hands. When I pushed on the saw, swung the hammer or lifted timber, the physics didn’t click. My reactions seemed less than equal-and-opposite.

We cut the first length from a long piece of timber and used it as a template for the others. When they were all done, we began nailing. The initial, unfinished frame was beautiful; so satisfyingly square and logical.

We worked diligently throughout the morning, stopped for a coffee, then worked through lunch. Michael regularly tidied our offcuts and swept up the sawdust gathering in the courtyard. Small spaces demand order.

The pitched roof required angled cuts. Again, we created a template – this time a triangle – and cut matching pieces and nailed them in place. By three o’clock, well ahead of schedule, we set solid the quivering ribs of our roof and manoeuvred the frames together: the studio’s skeleton assembled in but one short day.

Later, I walked home grinning stupidly, closed my bedroom door, turned up the music and danced my joy away, limbs flailing.

I was WWOOFing this past week or so. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, and concerned for my spelling, WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms.

It has become a verb (to WWOOF) and a noun (a WWOOFer). There are WWOOF organisations all around the world, connecting the willing with the work. People – usually travellers – exchange their labour for food and board.

For me, it is a chance to leave the city, learn, and be part of a way of life where food is grown and eaten, not just eaten.

Su Dennett and David Holmgren kindly agreed for me to stay at Melliodora, their property in Hepburn Springs, an hour-and-a-half north-west of Melbourne. Dave is the co-originator of permaculture, and an insightful commentator on matters from bushfire preparation to geo-politics and peak oil.

Melliodora is one hectare, teeming with food and thought. Each building, tree, path, plant and detail is carefully placed for the benefit of everything else. The household economy provides both physical and intellectual nourishment.

The evening I arrived, Dave walked me through the property. We left their owner-built, passive-solar mudbrick home and walked past their kitchen garden to the shed and chook-house. Through the swinging gate, we came to the barn and loft where I’d be staying. Close to the house, these buildings are the crossroads of the property. Here, the animals are tended: goats milked; chooks fed and eggs collected. This is the place to get tools and equipment. It’s the throughway to the orchards and the other veggie patches. It’s the spot for solitary time on the compost toilet.

We continued down the hill, past the orchards to the dams. Dave introduced me to Melliodora’s real owners: Tan, Bett and Flame. They were chatting and chewing on some willow, and they implored Dave to cut them more.

Su milks the goats each morning, all four (goats and human) united in constant conversation. Su makes yogurt and cheese from the milk. She also keeps bees, runs a bulk-foods and veggie box co-op, and works on the Hepburn Relocalisation Network.

I emerged from my loft each morning at seven-thirty. We lit the wood-stove in the kitchen, cooked porridge and boiled water. Dave roasted chestnuts. Life at Melliodora revolves around the gravitational pull of that wood stove.

My days were largely spent harvesting: apples, grapes, feijoas, mushrooms, potatoes, cherry guavas. It has been a bumper season, after so many of drought. I bottled pears, de-netted fruit trees, de-sludged a massive water tank.

The nights are cold in the Victorian central highlands. One evening, after the second afternoon digging spuds, I caught sight of a muscular man in the mirror: my shoulders were broad, my arms bulging. I was wearing five jumpers.

And alas, below the layers, my feeble arm was hurting. T’was the spuds that did me in. My left forearm and wrist swelled up like a thin snake that gobbled a mouse. The local physio told me to rest, then advised me to build up my muscles before returning. 

You’ve heard of the UBC, I’m sure. Everybody’s talking about the UBC. The UBC is a revolutionary organisation.

It’s also just a group of my friends. After much discussion and self-mockery, we called ourselves the Urban Bush-Carpenters. We take discarded timber, make things and give them away to people who need them. The three S’s: salvaging, socialising and sharing.

It started over summer. A group of young men decided they wanted to do something practical, enjoyable and valuable for the community. One Monday evening they met up, dismantled a pallet and transformed it into a veggie planter box, by way of much hammer clanging and gnashing of screws. We’ve built many since, plus some outdoor benches and a big chook house, and held some workshops to encourage other people to have a go.

Our skills vary. Geoff and German Michael are engineers. Sam’s an electrician. Andy works in a bronze foundry; Stephen, in community development; and Dale, a council. Mainly, we’re enthusiastic.

Our crowing achievement is the chook shed at Stewart Lodge, a supported residential service in Brunswick, Melbourne. Stewart Lodge is home to 80 men and women living with mental illness, physical or intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, or drug and alcohol dependency.

There was a permablitz there last October and as part of the follow up, we were asked if we could construct the coop. We built it in one long day, directed by Geoff and Andy, and assisted by a brood of helpers.

I showed up at nine o’clock in the morning. I looked at the rough plans and I thought we’d never get it done. Despite my furrowed brow, we dispensed with the spirit level and completed the framing by eye. Geoff would squint and say: “Oh yeah, that looks good.” And it did. Damn good. At eight o’clock in the evening the residents walked down carrying the chooks to their new home.

I’ve seen the future and the future is urban bush-carpentry: we take a waste product and make something useful, often to grow food in. We don’t wait for things to happen for us; we get out of the house, swing a hammer and learn something. We share our time, experience and output. Then we sit down for a good natter, and maybe a beer. 

UBC-guru Geoff and the new Stewart Lodge chook shed 

Close to my house, there is a curious shop. It says MICHAEL KELLY above the door in bold red letters. Nothing seems to be for sale. The shop is filled with petite, white, pitched-roof dwellings. Elegant, handmade shutters have been installed in all the windows.

In one front window, Michael Kelly has a small workbench. His tools are carefully arranged, both on the wall and on shelves behind the bench. Small containers of small nails are neatly stacked on the shelves. Another set of shelves contains books: the wisdom of Primo Levi, and psychiatrist and academic Thomas Szasz, among others.

There is a small blackboard resting in the window, and every day Michael chalks a new aphorism, something that reflects the matters he has been mulling. Today, it reads, “What is life without love and beauty, the gifts of art, music and ideas?”

Others I remember, off the top of my head, are: “Walk with wise people”, and “No truer comment on the human heart is the state of the environment”. Many people stop and talk to him about what he writes in the window and many others wave as they pass.

When I first visited Michael and his wife Nadeen, he spent all afternoon talking with me. Their dog Rusty pawed around us. Michael is tall, straight-backed and square-jawed. His hazel eyes see with strict, clear purpose.

He told me about his belief in building as simply as possible. “If you can build a rectangle, you can build a box. If you can build a box, you can build a house.” As you construct a rectangle, be sure that the structure is square, not skewed. Measure the two angled lengths, from opposite corner to opposite corner, and knock the structure until those lengths are equal.

Michael owns a battered yellow ute, in which he collects discarded timber from demolition sites. He seeks out Oregon (otherwise known as Douglas Fir), the soft but strong timber that was previously used for framing in houses. He picks up not only sizeable planks, but also the Oregon lath (thin timber strips) from old lath-and-plaster interior walls. He makes it into shutters, shelves, tables, walls, roofs: you-name-it.

I have since spent several fruitful afternoons at the shop, sharing labour and conversation. We are building a small dwelling (or studio structure) in his courtyard – and that will be the subject of forthcoming posts.