Michael Green

Writer and producer

Concrete and paving

In Greener Homes on

When you’re building or paving, put concrete alternatives into the mix.

IT’S hard to get away from concrete. According to Dr Peter Duxson, from eco-concrete company Zeobond, it’s the second most used commodity in the world, behind only water. It also accounts for about five per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

“Wherever there is human activity, there is concrete. It’s versatile and cheap,” Dr Duxson says. “It just turns out that the base ingredient that makes concrete go hard is bad for the environment.

Conventional concrete is made up of sand, rock and water, bound together with Portland cement. Although the cement comprises only 10 to 15 per cent of the substance, it accounts for about 70 per cent of its carbon footprint.

The high greenhouse gas emissions come from burning limestone to create lime – from both the energy required to heat the kilns and the chemical reaction in which limestone releases carbon dioxide. “One kilo of carbon dioxide is emitted per kilo of cement,” Dr Duxson says. “So every concrete truck equals about two tonnes of CO2.”

Among the material’s plusses are its extremely long lifespan and usefulness as thermal mass in appropriate solar passive design – it can help to even out day and night time temperatures.

For example, an exposed concrete slab floor, positioned by the window in a north-facing living room, will receive direct sun in winter. It absorbs heat and warms the house into the night. With appropriate shading, the sun won’t hit the slab over summer, so the chill of the concrete will help the home stay cool.

Even so, you can significantly reduce the emissions caused by concrete in your home by opting for lower-carbon concrete and choosing other materials where you can, especially outside.

Look for products with reduced Portland cement content, such as TecEco’s magnesia-based Eco-Cement, Boral’s Envirocrete or Independent Cement’s Ecoblend. Up to 30 per cent of the cement in conventional concrete can be directly replaced by fly ash and slag (by-products of burning coal and smelting iron ore, respectively) without compromising quality. “Once you get beyond that, it starts to take longer to go hard,” Dr Duxson says.

There are also many products that use recycled crushed aggregate. Be aware that although it’s a good way to save virgin resources, it doesn’t significantly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of the product.

Dr Duxson’s business, Zeobond, makes Ecrete, a kind of concrete that completely replaces Portland cement with fly ash and slag. Known as a geopolymer or alkali-activated concrete, Ecrete produces two-thirds fewer carbon dioxide emissions than the conventional product. It uses other chemicals to kick-start the binding process and ensure the curing time is fast.

The first Ecrete supplier is located in Epping, in Melbourne’s north-east. Zeobond also manufactures pre-cast panels and pavers. “The cost premium on Ecrete is about ten per cent, but as we get to scale, we expect that price to come down quite significantly,” he says.

The other alternative is to minimise your use of concrete altogether. Inside the home, there are other materials that can provide thermal mass, such as earth or brick. Outside the home, the sustainable design guide Your Home recommends only paving where you sit, stand and walk. Too much paving will make your house and garden hotter and reduce the amount of rainwater that soaks into your soil.

Paul Kelly, How to Make Gravy

In Culture on

A FEW days before I was scheduled to interview Paul Kelly, I happened to be in Newcastle, watching a singer-songwriter night in a quiet bar. A rangy looking man stood up and performed a halting, anguished cover of Kelly’s song How to Make Gravy.

In the lyrics, a man calls his brother from jail, just before Christmas. He passes on his gravy recipe, together with an extra serving of regret. It’s the kind of taut, empathetic storytelling for which Kelly has been acclaimed throughout a career spanning 30 years and two-dozen albums and soundtracks.

Now he’s added a “mongrel memoir” to his catalogue – and it’s also called How to Make Gravy.

“The title suits the way the book mixes things up,” he explains, on the phone from his St Kilda home. “You’re cooking a roast, and you throw in a bit of this and that, and you make gravy. That’s what writing the book felt like to me: it was a by-product of something else.”

In 2004, when the Spiegeltent first arrived in Melbourne, Kelly performed a series of special shows. Over four nights, he sang 100 of his songs in alphabetical order, and leavened the one-man act with a selection of stories. Audiences gobbled it up, and he later toured the format around Australia and overseas.

How to Make Gravy follows the same A-to-Z structure. Each chapter contains the lyrics to a song, together with an anecdote. The result is something like a big, snug patchwork quilt, in which Kelly has stitched stories about his family history and song writing, together with pop music lore, literary references, band travel yarns, and hard-won life experience. There are even occasional puzzles.

“I wrote it in sequence, starting with the letter A. Some stories I had for a while, but generally, when I sat down I didn’t know what I was going to write. It was only when I got to the Ds or Es that I had the confidence to say, ‘I think I’m writing a book’,” Kelly says, sounding surprised he ever got through it.

“I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I just used the songs as a jumping off point to write in a different way. Love Never Runs On Time had one little mention of bad coffee in it, so I thought I’d write about the struggle to get a good coffee on the road.”

He strove for his writing to be “companionable” – and it is. It’s the kind of book you read with a smile on your face. You get up to make a cup of tea, and notice you’re still smiling, and humming too, and pondering some dusty escapade from your childhood.

Or you might be contemplating one of Kelly’s lists. The book is full of them: from Good Smells (Bakeries at dawn, Onions frying…), to They Don’t Make Names Like This Any More (Frank Necessary, Earl Scruggs…).

“I’ve been a bit of a lister,” he says. “I like list poems. Walt Whitman is the obvious example – the poet who lists. A few of my list poems snuck into the book, like Reasons To Wear Black (Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash…). And I would often use lists to get me started writing.”

In one sense the whole book is a list, an extended tribute to Kelly’s many collaborators and to his eclectic sources of inspiration, both musically and intellectually. The ‘Index Of People and Bands’ runs to eight pages of tiny type, and includes poets, playwrights, authors and activists, as well as musicians.

“I’ve always seen myself as a collaborative writer,” he says. “I’ve relied on other musicians to realise my songs – I don’t write bass lines or guitar riffs.

“Then there’s the invisible collaboration, which is the books read and the music listened to. And there was always letter-writing with friends and family.”

As the chapters roll on, Kelly reflects on friends who’ve influenced him and those who’ve died, on aging and the passing of time. In the chapter corresponding to the song Winter Coat, he describes listening to a Frank Sinatra album in the dark on the night Ol‘ Blue Eyes died. After surrendering to an overwhelming sense of loss and fading possibility, he emerged “refreshed by tears…and glad somehow to be sad”.

“Looking at the book at the end, I realised that it’s all about time, death and getting old. You get over 50 and you can’t help it,” he laughs. In any case, for him, the subject isn’t wholly grim. “No one can do anything about loss. But you can be attuned to it, respond to it, and derive some joy from it, because it’s part of life.”

Back at the singer-songwriter night in Newcastle, when the rangy singer sat down after performing the heart-rending cover, a punter approached him, bearing compliments: “Great song choice man – I love Paul Kelly. He’s a voice for the nation.”

“Yeah,” the singer replied. “Everybody loves him.”

As I listened in, I could scarcely believe my good fortune. But, of course, when I tell Kelly the story, he has none of it. “Oh, well, I think you tend to hear about it more often when people like you than when they don’t,” he says humbly, after stifling an awkward cough.

He does, however, admit to nerves about the way people will respond to How to Make Gravy. “My CDs are fiction,” he says. “This is like standing naked in the street.”

Published in Readings Monthly, October 2010.

Baking with Les

In Blog on

I STAYED a while at Crystal Waters, an ecovillage about half an hour from Maleny, on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Over 200 people live on 85 one-acre lots, spread among bushland and fields. No cats or dogs are allowed, but kangaroos and wallabies abound.

On my first night I woke after only a few hours. I was the only guest in the bunkhouse. The room seemed particularly familiar. As I lay thinking, I realised the room was set out exactly same way as the bedroom of my childhood. The bunk bed, the door and the window: they all fitted precisely. I looked up at the slats above me, at one moment utterly disoriented, and the next, so vividly a child again. The timing was slightly unsettling – I turned 30 this week.

When eventually I slept again, I woke to a sunny, steamy morning. The evening before I’d met Les Bartlett, who bakes sourdough loaves twice a week in his small bakery on Crystal Waters, and sells only locally. Today was a baking day and he’d said I could pop in.

In the morning I watched Les and Penny mix their doughs: sourdough starter, organic stone-ground flour, water, salt. Penny is from Melbourne, but is staying here to learn the craft. I came back at lunchtime and watched them shape the loaves with Leslie (Les’s partner), then returned again in the evening to watch the baking in a wood-fired oven – each time staying an hour or two to talk (or eat pizza and sip beer).

When the baking was nearly done, two young children knocked on the door. The boy said his mum had sent him for a loaf. Penny put a still-hot Pain de Campagne in a paper bag, and told him to set it on a cooling rack when he got home.

As they left, Les said, “That’s something isn’t it? He’ll never forget it.”

It’ll be a fine memory one day: walking to the community baker with your kid sister, and returning for dinner with fresh hot bread from the wood-oven.

It was a day to remember for me too. A gleaming day, a day when people are so kind and welcoming that everything clicks, like a turn at Chinese checkers where you jump all the way home.

Half a dozen Japanese hippies had set up camp during the afternoon. Les gave me a fruit-and-nut loaf for them. It was warm from the oven. The Japanese didn’t speak much English, but some things I understood: the murmurs in appreciation of the smell, the extended silence as they chewed, and then the contented mooing – the sound of satisfaction from their bellies.

Finally, one guy, called Nobu, held the remainder of his portion aloft and said: “It’s like art.”

Les Breads

Left to right: Penny, Leslie and Les 

The nine-star house

In Greener Homes on

Top line energy efficiency isn’t just possible; it’s affordable.

NEAR Lexton, in Western Victoria, a small white house looms large on the hill. While governments raise building efficiency standards ever so slowly, John Morgan’s home stands on a different plane.

Inspired by the need to respond rapidly to climate change, the retired schoolteacher and renewable energy installer has designed and built one of Australia’s first 9 Star homes. It needs next to no heating or cooling to stay comfortable.

“I wanted to demonstrate that you could build for a lot less than on the TV shows like World’s Greenest Homes,” Mr Morgan says. “You can get that level of comfort without any high-tech gizmos.”

The neat, two-bedroom house was completed in 2008 for Mr Morgan, his wife Belinda and their cat Millie. The dwelling is small and simple, at just over 100 square metres, including a sunroom and an office, which functions as an entry and air lock. But it doesn’t lack any of the usual conveniences: the washing machine, dishwasher and kitchen appliances, as well as Mr Morgan’s ham radio set up, all run on solar power.

Altogether, it cost about $160,000, including two 20,000-litre water tanks and a 2-kilowatt off-grid solar photovoltaic system.

“This home has no architectural merit,” Mr Morgan admits. “And it was deliberate. I wanted a house that was extremely comfortable and would cost nothing to run.

“I don’t get power or water bills and I don’t have water restrictions. I have a high-flow showerhead. When I have my morning shower the water goes absolutely everywhere and for most of the year it’s heated free of charge by the sun.”

He chose to use reverse brick veneer construction. “It’s a brick house with the bricks inside, not out,” he explains.

The exterior is clad with EcoPly (a non-toxic plywood made from plantation pine). Between the bricks and the cladding there is a 50 millimetre gap, and then reflective foil and batts – making a total insulation value of more than R2.

The ceiling and the slab floor are also highly insulated and the windows are double-glazed. This combination of insulation and thermal mass serves to keep the indoor temperature stable, trapping warmth during winter and protecting against the scorching summer sun.

“It means that in summer, the outside wall doesn’t heat up and stay hot all night,” he says.

The home is well oriented, shaded and draught-proofed, but there are no out-of-reach whiz-bang solutions. “All the books ever written about environmentally sensible design say these things. I’ve just put them all into practice. That’s where the nine stars came from,” he says. For more information about Mr Morgan’s home, there’s a detailed description in ReNew magazine (issue 112).

“My goal was to deal with climate change here to the extent that I can. This is, to all intents and purposes, a zero emissions house,” he says. He sometimes uses a small gas heater, but is planting and tending trees on his property that will more than offset his emissions.

“If anybody else wants to follow this lead they can. Lots of people do it,” he says.

His one indispensable tip is that would-be builders or renovators seek good passive solar design advice ahead of all else. “Talk to someone who knows their facts first. Do it before you write your first cheque.”

The outdoor shower

In Blog on

AFTER a day’s dirty work in the garden, or painting ceiling boards, it’s always nice to have a shower to wash the humidity away. It is, however, especially enjoyable to shower at Mel and Ant’s place. They have an outdoor shower (see the photos below).

The water comes from a spring on their property, and Ant has rigged up a greywater system from the shower that feeds a banana circle.

The greywater runs down to a circular trench and mound (or swale), around which the bananas are planted. Bananas need lots of nutrients. In the middle of the circle you can put compost scraps and cut vegetation. Ant explained to me that to productively manage the circle, you should have banana plants in threes – a grandma, a ma and a baby. Only the grandma of produces bananas. Eventually she’ll be cut and composted in the circle and replaced by the ma, and so on: the circle of life (banana edition).

The shower looks like this:

The shower

The view from the shower looks like this (gosh):

The view from the shower