Michael Green

Writer and producer

Owner-builder

In Greener Homes on

Building it yourself can help you consume less and live more.

IN 2008, Richard Telford bought a small block of land in Seymour, an hour north of Melbourne.

He dismantled the run-down weatherboard bungalow, and carefully stored the materials for reuse. Over the course of a year, the former white-collar worker laboured full-time to build a new home for his young family.

This year, Abdallah House – named for its street – was a finalist in the Housing Industry Association’s GreenSmart Awards.

The 100–square metre, three-bedroom home is largely self-reliant in water and energy. With two toddlers, he and his partner Kunie Yoshimoto use about one-eighth the electricity of an average home.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“People have become detached from where and how they live,” Mr Telford says. “The owner-building process really connected us with what’s involved in a house – the effort to create it and the energy and water we consume. It’s like growing your own food: the more involved you are, the greater appreciation you have for the quality.”

It also gave him control over the way materials were used and re-used.

“In a typical house, several skips go to landfill. We threw almost nothing away. We used things that would be considered waste, and transformed them into something quite beautiful,” he says.

He didn’t do it alone. Mr Telford teamed up with Peter Lockyer, an architect and builder who makes a living helping owner-builders with the nuts and bolts of designing and constructing a dwelling.

The main environmental benefit of doing it yourself, Mr Lockyer says, comes down to size. “Their homes tend to be smaller. You assess your needs more clearly – you don’t build a separate theatre or extra living rooms you’ll never use.”

Over three decades, he’s worked on about 100 passive solar homes of this kind. He remains enthralled by the creativity that emerges when people, with no special skills or experience, work slowly and steadily on something they care about.

“I’m still excited by the hands-on process of people creating their own space,” he says. “Building can be fun. It’s an enriching part of life, not just a transaction to get a product. They’re creating more than a backdrop for a plasma screen.”

He offers a warning too: projects are more likely to take years than months, and that can be stressful for relationships. Also, many banks are cautious in offering loans to owner-builders.

His advice is to make sure you’ve got someone on your side – a registered builder – who can help you avoid the bumps. The Building Commission provides links to tips, training and a useful information kit (PDF), which details your obligations and the required applications.

For Mr Telford, becoming an owner-builder was about choosing a way of life. The land cost $54,000 and the budget for the new house was just $100,000. With the help of the generous government grants then available, the couple have already paid off their mortgage. They have an abundant food garden, very few costs, and a lot of freedom to decide how they’ll spend their time.

Before all this, Mr Telford worked in advertising. Now, he does his own publishing, including a permaculture calendar, and writes about Abdallah House on his blog. “I’m using those skills to promote things I believe in,” he explains.

“I wanted to show people that you can do it without getting in debt for the rest of your life.”

Read this article at The Age online

Footy territory

In Blog on

ONE day, while I was staying in Yuendumu, I took a trip to the Laramba Sports Weekend. My friends collected me in their troopy and we drove east for two hours on dirt roads.

Teams and onlookers from four remote communities showed up and camped out for a few days. The women played softball and the men, football. The night before we arrived, there’d been a song contest. Sports weekends are a regular, lively fixture in desert life.

Yuendumu is about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. Laramba is a smaller settlement, on Anmatjere land, closer to the Stuart Highway. On the way, we drove through a community called Mt Allen (or Yuelamu) and past a few outstations – clusters of houses where families live out of town.

There are several hundred remote communities in the Territory, most of them very small, and all of them profoundly different to mainstream Australia. Visiting Yuendumu and Laramba, I realised I was travelling to different countries. I spent three years taking Indigenous studies subjects at Monash University, but strangely, I hadn’t grasped this reality. The land is still occupied; the spoken languages are not English.

When we arrived at Laramba, a lengthy debate was underway in the timekeepers’ stand about which sides would play each other. We waited, lathering sunscreen and looking at the red dirt oval, its boundaries marked by lime dust.

On the Mt Allen team there was a big lump of a lad, a little chubby, with a plaited rats tail. My friend pointed him out: “I’ve heard he’s the one to watch,” he said.

The games were relaxed affairs. Play was skilful, but not physical. There was little chasing and few tackles – you wouldn’t want to risk your skin on the raspy surface. The big lad positioned himself at centre half back, intercepted several balls and cruised through the middle. It was a fun afternoon.

A couple of weeks later, back in Alice Springs, I watched the inaugural game of the Central Australian Redtails in the NTFL, which is the competition held in Darwin over the wet season. I noticed the big lad playing at full-forward, and found out his name is Daniel Stafford. He’s only 18.

He kicked four goals as the Redtails surged in the last quarter to win by five points and, later, was named the competition’s rising star for the round. The team did a long, raucous lap of honour while the crowd cheered and whistled. The newspaper reported effusively:“Pandemonium struck the ground as the final siren sounded, with emotional scenes of jubilation and local pride”.

The day before, one of the new club’s founders, Rob Clarke, said the Redtails were about more than sport. “This football team is about changing people’s lives here in town and in communities.” He’d decided to start the club two years ago, after a promising young player died in the summer off-season. The Redtails are playing a four-game trial, and seeking to join for the full competition next year.

A couple of weeks later I arrived in Darwin and stayed with my friends Charlie and Ness. Charlie is the director of the Clontarf Academy at Kormilda College.

The first Clontarf program was started in Perth in 2000, and it now operates in nearly 50 schools all across the country, with thousands of students enrolled. It uses football – Australian rules or rugby league – as a drawcard to keep Indigenous boys in school. The website explains: “Clontarf is a sophisticated behavioural change program, not a sporting program”. Many schools have set up similar incentive-based sports schemes for girls, such as Katherine High’s Stronger Smarter Sisters.

For now, school retention rates are low among Indigenous students. Less than half make it to year 12, compared with nearly four out of five non-Indigenous students.

I visited the Clontarf common room one morning before school started. About 30 teenagers were in there early, playing table tennis, pool and video games. On the walls were photos of the camps they’d been on. The staff run footy training sessions twice a week, among other things.

The build-up to the wet season has begun, so the weather is hot and steamy. It’s the witching hour, the time when tempers fray. Later that day, Charlie told me, there was a nasty fight. For many of the students, there are no easy answers. But the programs boost attendance and retention rates and support school-leavers to find work or more training. The boys have a place to be, somewhere on campus where they belong.

When he lived in Katherine, Charlie helped start the Big River Hawks, a new team in the Darwin under-18 competition. To get a game, you’ve got to be attending school or work.

Players travel to Katherine from communities spread across an area the size of Victoria: south-west as far as Lajamanu, east to Ngukkurr and north-east to Numbulwar on the Gulf of Carpentaria.

I saw them play one week in Darwin. Gosh, can they play. At half-time, up by nine goals, the young men ran off the field whooping and cheering. After the break, they emerged from their rooms whooping again and jumping with joy, literally. They won by 128 points in the fierce midday sun.

I’ve watched local football nearly every weekend I’ve been in the Territory. In part it’s because I like footy. It’s something here I understand. But it also feels like I’m witnessing something constructive, both on the field and in the crowd. The players are talented and determined. Among supporters, the game is a shared language.

So, of course, I went to the footy another weekend in Darwin too. There was an NTFL triple-header on at Marrara Stadium. The Central Australian Redtails were playing the reigning premiers, the Tiwi Bombers. They were behind all day, but late in the last quarter Stafford, that big lad with a rats tail, kicked a goal that put them within reach.

The sun had set and the grass was luminous beneath the lights of the stadium. I glanced up and saw a skein of geese flying in formation across the purple sky. This week, it wasn’t to be: the Tiwi Bombers kicked away again. There will be another week. 

Smart Living Ballarat

In Greener Homes on

A new project proves what’s possible with local knowledge.

KENNY and Tammy live on Ballarat’s eastern edge. They cultivate a veggie patch, keep chickens, geese, quail and bees, and stay comfortable in their super-insulating straw bale home. If that weren’t enough, Kenny has designed and built an aquaponics system, which grows fish and veggies together.

They’ve got knowledge and experiences to share, but how?

The couple’s story is now part of the Smart Living Ballarat project. Since February, dozens of volunteers have been staffing a shopfront stocked with the expertise of locals who’ve reduced their environmental impact and improved their quality of life.

The information covers five themes: home energy, water, food, transport and local environment. There are displays on each of them, covering insulation, lighting, flooring, paint, glazing and furniture, among others. There’s a model of a passive solar house designed for the region, and directories for local food suppliers, building expertise and materials.

All the information is replicated on the Smart Living Ballarat website, and there are regular events and workshops in the space, from bike maintenance and solar hot water to LED lighting and permaculture.

The project was conceived in 2009, at a time when the drought had completely dried out Lake Wendouree, the large artificial lake to the city’s west. Household water restrictions were set at Stage 4.

Local environment group Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions – one of the centre’s partners – wrote that there was “strong scientific evidence that climate change is directly affecting the Ballarat region”, with warmer and drier conditions and long-term predictions for more hot days.

“Climate change was starting to affect our community very personally,” explains Sophie Akers, the centre’s project manager.

“A lot of people got their heads together and wanted to create a place where we could engage our community in an independent, non-commercial, non-government way, and to have a place where we could talk about sustainable living.

“It was clear that we needed to offer something in all aspects of a household – everything from the natural environment through to transport, the built environment to the food we eat.”

The centre itself offers a working model. It’s housed at the front of the city’s old Mining Exchange building, which opened in 1889 and fast became one of the world’s busiest stock exchanges. But within a few decades it had shut down and the last gold mines were closed.

This time, behind its tall, arched windows, the volunteers are building another kind of wealth, one that consciously aims to avoid the boom and bust cycle.

Part of the project’s funding from Sustainability Victoria was dedicated to retrofitting the shop with the kinds of energy-saving techniques that would be on display. A solar photovoltaic system was installed on the roof and it produces much more electricity than the centre uses.

Above all, however, the local stories and expertise are crucial to the project’s approach, both in the shopfront and on its website. Ms Akers says it’s always influential for visitors to see close-to-home, real-life examples.

“People can talk local to local, and see what’s happening around town,” she says. “They can even go out to people’s places and see what they’re doing.

“In regional areas especially, it’s essential that people get to see those local stories. Our communities really look to each other for help, learning, support, and leadership.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Doing the legwork

In Community development, Environment on

Modern jobs give us longer hours, more money and less life. But two bike riders are meeting the people pushing back.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 4

WHEN you’ve been cycling for three full days in constant rain – and when you know that everything, everything, is wet, and you are 2000 kilometres into a monstrous 5000-kilometre adventure – well, by now, you’ve had plenty of time to contemplate how and why you got here.

For Greg Foyster and Sophie Chishkovsky, these are some of the reasons: catastrophic climate change, the cello, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau; a panic attack, a 30-year mortgage, and the biggest question of all – how can you shape a life that makes your soul sing?

The couple set off from Melbourne in March, marking the occasion by stripping off for the World Naked Bike Ride. Since then, they’ve cycled and camped through Tasmania and Victoria and interviewed three-dozen people along the way, from the founder of permaculture to a forest activist living at the top of a tree. It’s only the beginning. They’re on the slow road to Cairns.

As they go, Foyster is writing a blog, called Simple Lives, which will become a book called Changing Gears (to be published next year, by Affirm Press).

 

When we speak on the phone, he and Chishkovsky have just dried out from those interminable days of rain. They’re in the Bega Valley, in south-eastern New South Wales, staying with a couple who raise pigs and grow shitake mushrooms. “They’re downshifters. They used to work in IT in Canberra,” Foyster reports. “Now they’ve got a funny sign on the gate that says ‘Beware of roaming piglets’.”

The pair’s journey is a tour of tactics for simple living, documenting the alternative ways we can meet our needs, from food, water and shelter, to community, work and health.

“What we’re doing isn’t new,” he stresses. “There’s a long history of people choosing to reduce their reliance on material things and explore a more direct way of living.”

It’s true: way back in the 3rd century BC, the philosopher Diogenes spruiked simplicity through the streets of Athens (apparently he lived in a barrel).

Simple living is a thread that unites Eastern and Western philosophers, writers and religious teachers, from Buddha and Lao Tzu to Tolstoy and Gandhi.

Perhaps its most famous adherent is Henry David Thoreau. He was nearly 28 years old in 1845 when he ventured to the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for just over two years.

His book, Walden, partly written in his hand-built cabin by the lake, is the classic case for plain living and elevated thinking. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” he wrote.

Walden is dense and difficult reading, but it’s closely stocked with quotable wisdom. On the supposed connection between wealth and happiness, he wrote that we “labour under a mistake”; on material possessions, that people “have become the tools of their tools”.

Foyster and Chishkovsky’s quest, however, is also propelled by the crises of 21st century global capitalism. “By geological standards, humans have only been around for a short time, but we’ve already increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a third and multiplied the species extinction rate by as much as 1000 times,” Foyster says. “And the biggest and most damaging changes have occurred during the consumer boom of the last 60 years.”

The simple life is now a matter of moral necessity, not only spiritual wellbeing. But simple doesn’t mean easy. How can you afford a home? And what about kids and a career?

Foyster is 29 and, lately, he’s noticed those social expectations loitering in the corners of his mind. Chishkovsky, a cellist and music teacher, is 23 and already more accustomed than him to the idea of living differently. Soon after leaving home for university she became vegetarian. “When you think about animal rights issues, you start thinking about other social and economic issues and about the planet as well,” she says.

“I had a natural inclination towards it, whereas Greg has to intellectualise something before he adopts new habits. He needs a very specific motive, backed up with reason and statistics.”

***

Foyster never was a flowerchild. He was an ad man. His epiphany started slowly.

For five years after university he slaved over TV and print commercials for big brands such as Heinz, Holden, CUB and ANZ. Despite the creative thrills, the money and the corporate sheen, he couldn’t shake a niggling scepticism about his profession.

When he began moonlighting as an occasional environmental writer, the contradiction pressed hard on his mind. He’d learnt that overconsumption in rich countries was the main driver of climate change and other environmental crises. But he was writing ads for a car company.

At an industry awards night the hypocrisy finally cracked him. “Why are we congratulating each other for making the world a worse place?” he thought. Part way through dinner, he escaped the stifling self-celebrations and found himself sobbing next to a nearby pier instead.

That lucid moment was the easy part. Foyster tried avoiding the accounts he abhorred, but it wasn’t enough. Four months later, he quit. The following day, numb all over, and breathing fast and weak like a wounded rabbit, he admitted himself to hospital. It was a panic attack, the doctors told him.

In the next phase, the epiphany’s long tail, Foyster channelled his workaholism into freelance journalism, covering environmental and social issues. Still in his mid-twenties, he moved into a “hippy sharehouse” in Melbourne’s north. When they started going out, Chishkovsky introduced him to her more radical friends – artists and activists who lived another kind of existence, one where money was scarce but passion and free time were thick on the ground.

“It was a good time in my life,” he says. “I was making a small income doing something I loved and my environmental impact was very low by Australian standards. What I believed and what I did were finally aligned, and that made me happy. But the situation couldn’t last.”

***

Like many people who work in creative, interesting, low-paying jobs, Foyster and Chishkovsky are in a bind: renting doesn’t offer the secure tenure they want (unlike in some European countries), but buying is unaffordable. If they shackle themselves to a typical 30-year-mortgage, they’ll have to forgo doing what they love.

“Housing is definitely the biggest barrier to living a simple life in Australia,” Foyster says. “Homeownership is tied up with the accumulation of wealth and that means people see a home as an investment property, which pushes up prices.”

With this in mind, they’ve been pedalling between alternatives. Near Castlemaine, in central Victoria, they met a filmmaking couple who took three years off to build their own house and who emerged with a beautiful dwelling and without much debt.

Not far from there, they visited Peter Cowman, who trained as an architect, but now describes himself as “an itinerant shelter-maker” – he teaches people how to build tiny houses, measuring three metres by three metres.

“His idea is that we’ve forgotten what a house is actually for. We think it has to be a permanent structure that increases in value over decades, but in many other cultures a house can be a temporary dwelling you abandon when it no longer serves your purpose,” Foyster says.

So far, the tiny house is the idea that’s stuck. While their wheels turn, in their daydreams they see a mini-dwelling in the corner of one of their parents’ blocks. “We’d be putting the capital in that property to use, rather than letting it sit there. And then we can establish a life with variation – something physical and something mentally challenging each day,” he says.

Their vision mimics the elements of their journey: both the legwork and the new ideas they traverse as they pedal and greet.

In a typical day on the road, they spend about five or six hours in the saddle. To their surprise, it usually takes about that amount of time again just to secure their necessities: water, food and a safe place to camp for free.

More than ever before, they’re fronting the essential facts of life. And it turns out that the weather matters more than they thought. Just as the days of rain were cause for misery, so the sunshine brings joy. So much joy, in fact, that Foyster lists fine weather, along with flat roads and food, as their prime sources of daily exhilaration.

Above all that, however, are the people. They’ve interviewed so many folks with sparks in their eyes that it can’t be a coincidence.

“Everybody we’ve met has been happy and content and very much in control of their lives. They’re not the sort of people who complain about their lot in life – they’re all very proactive, positive and full of energy,” he says.

“The most inspiring moments have come after we’ve had a conversation with someone and Sophie and I lay down for bed and start talking about some of their ideas and how we’re going to apply them in our own lives.”

The day after we speak, the two are off to battle the high pass to Cooma, over Brown Mountain (if it rains, there could be snow and sleet). The road rises 900 metres in 17 kilometres and Foyster expects it might be the hardest stretch they’ll do in the whole trip. He is no athlete, he assures me, and expresses concern about being hit by a car.

I check in a couple of days later. “We made it up the hill in the record slow time of 3 hours, 53 minutes and 22 seconds, including a leisurely one hour lunch break at a look out,” Foyster writes, by email. “We’re soft-core.”

They’re already a month a half behind schedule, delayed by the flu, floods and Foyster’s gammy knee. They should make it to the tropics in time for the worst of the wet season. But no matter – today they’re warm, dry, well-fed and chipper. It’s simple, really. What more do you need?

Retrofitting the suburbs

In Greener Homes on

Environmental and economic pressures combine to boost activity at home.

PERMACULTURE founder David Holmgren grew up in the suburbs – in Fremantle – in the 50s and 60s. As a young teenager, he concluded that the lifestyle he observed was the most wasteful that had ever existed.

Now, however, he regards our post-war subdivisions as fertile territory for the relocalisation movement: places where people could grow much more of their own food, work at home and meet their needs while consuming much fewer resources.

Why the change in perspective? Unfortunately, Mr Holmgren explains, it’s because “we’ve moved so far in the wrong direction in those succeeding decades”.

Earlier this year, he spoke at the Wheeler Centre on “retrofitting the suburbs for a resilient future”. (You can also find this video of his talk on the Centre’s website.)

In it, he sums up our neighbourhoods by way of the fictional – and often amusing – happenings at four properties on “Aussie Street”. He tracks the residents from the “golden age of suburbia” (1950s), through “rising affluence and additions” (1960s and 1970s), “aging and infill” (1990s), to the more speculative possibilities of a “permaculture retrofit” (2000s) and “the second great depression” (2015).

His thinking challenges the notion that higher urban density is the answer to reducing our environmental impact.

In the 1950s, the residents of Aussie Street have small houses and large gardens; most tend vegie patches, fruit trees and chickens. One couple, Mario and Angela, who live at number 4, even keep a goat.

As the decades pass, however, food production diminishes, the dwellings are extended, gardens and driveways concreted, and one block is subdivided for townhouses. All the while, there are fewer people living in the homes, and they spend less time there.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In a recent essay explaining his analysis, published on the Simplicity Institute website, Mr Holmgren argues that instead of re-building a denser city, we should aim to adapt what we’ve already got.

“Even with a growing economy, the building stock and infrastructure turns over slowly,” he says. “In 50 years, short of catastrophe, the city will be largely filled with the things that are there now. But within that, people can change their behaviour quite rapidly.”

Aussie Street begins to change in the 2000s, when a young couple and their baby move in. They set up a backyard nursery and an intensive vegie patch, and sell their seedlings and greens. A friend and his parents buy next door; they knock down the fence, take in a boarder and retrofit the house for passive solar gain.

With an eye on the economic strife in the USA and much of Europe, Mr Holmgren also extended his scenario to 2015, and addressed some of the financial coping strategies people could choose here as well.

The key change, he says, is to shift from seeking high incomes, to reducing your costs. That’s what people naturally do when times are tougher: more people live under the same roof, and meet more of their own needs. On Aussie Street, the goats return to number 4.

“You can minimise your costs by slowing down, going fewer places and being more productive with the underutilised fixed assets you’ve already got,” he says.

“People in Australia have a sense that really big change is coming. Every household knows their own situation best, so people should think hard about how they can seriously plan for the future.”

Read this article at the Age online