Michael Green

Writer and producer

Black Mountain sauerkraut

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ELIZABETH and Frank Fekonia live on a thigh-tremblingly steep block on Black Mountain near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast.

Frank is an eccentric, longhaired septuagenarian who long ago escaped from the army in communist Yugoslavia and landed in Sydney a refugee. He moved to Cooroy in the early 1990s (Elizabeth arrived soon after) and built a series of concrete structures, culminating in a concrete castle at the top of the block. The home has commanding views over the green hills towards Gympie. “Everything you see here, Michael,” he says to me often, “I built it. Every bloody thing.”

Together, Frank and Elizabeth have established systems that provide nearly all their food. This morning Frank pointed down at two nearby houses with large lawns. “They’re English. Strange people, the English,” he said. “Always mowing the lawn. Mowing, mowing. No food, just mowing.”

After a lifetime of labour, Frank’s lost his kick. He’s still got his raucous, squealing laugh, but he’s too sick to work. Elizabeth keeps their challenging block going, on two parts will, two parts faith and one part strong arms.

Each morning she does her rounds, down and up the hill, calling out to her cows and goats as she goes. They call back, and the singsong echoes around Black Mountain. She waters the veggie patch, milks the goats, checks the chooks, waters the pigs, looks in on the tropical vegetable food forest, and collects a bucket of pollard to keep Lydia the cow happy while she milks her.

Elizabeth is mad for ferment food. Every day she mentions in passing yet another product she makes or ferments herself. Yesterday it was vinegar; the day before, a kind of fermented tea called Kombucha. She makes her own cheese, yoghurt, kefir, sourdough bread, sauerkraut, butter, ghee, soy sauce, miso, tempeh, lemon wine and soap. I’m sure there’s more. She teaches short courses in nearly all the above, as well as her TAFE classes in organic gardening.

Before I left Melbourne I made a mouldy attempt at sauerkraut – much to my housemates’ disgust. Here I did it better, and it turns out to be very simple.

I cut up two cabbages finely, added half a tablespoon or so of salt and crushed the cabbage in my fists until my fists were sore and there was a puddle of cabbage-water in the bowl. Then I packed it into a huge jar, pressed it all down and put a couple of the outer leaves on top to keep the cabbage submerged in its juice. We left it for days to ferment – usually about five days, depending on the season and how tangy you want it – then drained the juice and stored the sauerkraut in the fridge. 

Elizabeth and Lydia

Elizabeth, Lydia and the new milking machine.

The rainforest, the reef and the ringer

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I’M wwoofing once more, this time near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast. My host, Elizabeth Fekonia, is a fermented foods guru. I’ve been making and eating all sorts of fermented food. And how!

It’s just as well. I caught a long lift with Phil – a ringer, roofer and mechanic – from Tully, two hours south of Cairns, all the way to Cooroy. We left at 7 am and Phil dropped me off at lunchtime the next day, after stopping for the night above a rundown pub in Rockhampton. Along the way, as I ate oily roadhouse food, I consoled myself with the thought of freshly picked vegetables to come.

I stayed in Cairns for longer than expected, and I was a dutiful and astonished tourist. I visited the Daintree Rainforest, gasping as I drove the stretch of road between Cairns and Port Douglas. It tracks the coast, with forest on one side and deserted beaches and aqua-clear water on the other. I did an introductory scuba dive on the reef one day, and drove on the lush Atherton Tablelands the next.

As always, I kept my eye out for the rivers. Up there, rivers have Apocalypse Now foliage: trees and vines of the darkest green, growing so thickly they extend from the shore and hover well over the water’s edge.

I could have stayed longer, but Phil called me. He’d given me a lift on the way up, from Ingham to Caldwell. He was driving back down again, all the way to the Gold Coast. Would I like a lift?

So I traversed the giant state again, at an unexpected pace, entranced by Phil’s tales of life on cattle stations throughout Queensland. He’s a tall, solid man, with goofy enthusiasm and long, gentle eyelashes. The kind of guy who’ll spend days helping you – or driving you – and ask for nothing in return.

He told me about mustering wild bulls and riding them in rodeos; about the time he made a plucky pass at a tough cocky’s daughter and later scored a punch in the head in return; and about vomiting blood and passing out alone in the middle of a highway, hours from death, after his appendix burst. (Maybe that’s how he learnt about the kindness of strangers.)

He told me about Clint, his force-of-nature friend, a sometime hunter, cattle dog breeder and free-diving spear fisher who could hold his breath and plunge to prodigious depths. In the two weeks that elapsed between my lifts, Phil had been offered land on Clint’s property near Tully, home of the big gumboot, the wettest place in the country. “Yeah, they say it rains 360 days a year,” Phil laughed. “At least it’s a bit cooler than other places up north.”

Soon he’ll drive back up the coast and begin building a new home for his young family. He’s planning to use Besser blocks, with a wide verandah all the way around and a roof strapped down and set in concrete: protection from the sun, rain and cyclones.

One reason Phil wants to move to Tully is for the community. “I’ve only been visiting there a while,” he said, “and already it seems like everyone knows my name.” I’m not surprised though – he’s a good man to meet.

Planning for sustainability

In Greener Homes on

Better planning controls can add to household sustainability.

From next May, new houses and renovations must reach six stars. Even so, our building standards will still be full of gaps, according to Alan March, senior lecturer from the Melbourne School of Design at University of Melbourne.

“The current star rating system measures the performance of buildings. That’s good – it means they don’t let heat pass through windows or walls as badly as in the past. But there’s a whole range of opportunities to make them perform even better,” he says.

In a forthcoming research paper, co-authored with Christina Collia, Dr March found that the building code skips over bigger picture concerns, including the location and materials used in the home, as well as waste production and links with public transport and bicycle paths.

Even simple things, such as clotheslines, are left out in the cold. “If people want to dry clothes outside, it’s no good if the backyard or the balcony never gets sunlight. They’ll buy an electric dryer instead, and all the building technology goes out the window very quickly when you start using electricity from Hazelwood Power Station,” Dr March says.

He believes it would be simple to peg extra features onto existing planning controls. Those guidelines could encompass native habitat, rainwater tanks, fixed heating and cooling systems, lighting and daylighting, and even food growing and composting areas.

“We could go beyond a technological view of individual houses and start to create whole communities,” he says.

The Moreland City Council is already hoisting homes above the average with STEPS, a web-based tool that assesses residential sustainability. It covers five areas: greenhouse emissions from operating energy, peak energy use, water use, stormwater and building materials. The program also considers bike storage and space for waste and recycling.

Shannon Best, from Moreland City Council, says STEPS predicts household energy use more accurately than the star ratings. “If you install a lot of lights or an inefficient hot water service and air conditioner in a five-star house, you can end up with a much worse result than an existing home. It’s important to look at the whole product, not just the thermal efficiency.”

A group of 14 Victorian councils – the Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment – is now promoting STEPS as a voluntary measure for residents submitting planning applications.

Mr Best says the tool’s key benefit is to begin conversations about sustainable design. “If you’re going to build a house, ask your architect or designer to put it through STEPS to see how it performs,” he says.

“Last year alone, we calculated that the savings were equivalent to one-third of council’s greenhouse emissions and water use. That comes from getting people to talk about sustainability initiatives in their buildings – people can and do learn.”

Dr March says that while STEPS opens up a path to greener homes, a more comprehensive, compulsory scheme would be easier for local governments to enforce. “It’s a simpler and better outcome if the process is standardised across Victoria,” he says.

“Whether it’s sooner or later, we will do these things – and we as a community will be better off. People will be happy not to have to switch on their lights. Developers will enjoy the certainty that it provides, and they’ll have a better product to sell.”

Life cycle assessment

In Architecture and building, Environment on

Life cycle assessment reveals more than ever about the impact of building products.

IF you want to reduce your construction footprint, sooner or later you’ll need to dive into the murky world of materials.

Take a deep breath first. It’s a place where everything is connected and the products have different impacts, but it’s hard to tell exactly how they relate to one another, and how big the differences are.

In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to the concept of embodied energy: it’s shorthand for all the energy used to make a product, from the mining and processing of base materials, to the packaging and delivery of the manufactured goods.

Now, life cycle assessment is becoming increasingly common. “Embodied energy measures only the energy aspect, whereas life cycle assessment measures all the environmental impacts,” says Dr Usha Iyer-Raniga, assistant director of RMIT’s Centre for Design. “It’s not just about energy, but also about biodiversity, greenhouse gasses, land use and toxins.”

Tim Grant, from consultancy Life Cycle Strategies, says that the depth and rigour of life cycle research sets it apart.

“Life cycle assessment is an internationally standardised methodology for analysing the impacts of products and services. It looks at the cradle-to-grave impacts, including all the relevant environmental indicators,” he says.

The function of the product is a key part of the analysis: nothing can be viewed in isolation. “The assessment becomes very complicated in building industry, because we don’t use materials as they are,” Iyer-Raniga says. “You’ve got to think about how those materials are assembled together to become a square meter of wall, and how the wall performs its role.”

To help solve the puzzles, she suggests householders ask a lot of questions when sourcing products and materials. “People have to be really savvy. There’s a lot of greenwash out there, particularly in the building industry – not just with materials, but with appliances and furniture as well,” she says.

“You need to think about your needs. Is it a house you want to live in for the rest of your life? Think about using long-lasting materials that aren’t entirely dictated by fashion. Consider where the materials come from, how durable they are and whether they need maintenance.”

So far, not much life cycle information has been available for homeowners. The Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society is working on locally relevant environmental impact weightings and a database of products and services, but the project is progressing slowly.

Eco-product database ecoSpecifier recently launched GreenTag, a third-party certification system based on life cycle assessment principles.

Technical director David Baggs agrees that the strength of life cycle analysis is its breadth. “There are lots of carbon calculators available, but as a society we have to be careful to not create counter-productive outcomes by focussing purely on greenhouse gases,” he says.

Under GreenTag, products are compared against a worst-case business-as-usual scenario. They’re rated in four tiers: platinum, gold, silver and bronze (although bronze signifies a health and eco-toxicity rating, not life cycle analysis).

“Once our new website is launched next year, people will be able to see the products’ key performance indicators,” Baggs says. “They could use it to specify minimum standards for their building materials.”

For a rough guide to good life cycle choices, Grant says there are simple rules of thumb for householders to follow. “Firstly, anything that will improve operational efficiency is worth doing, whether it’s solar panels or light sensors that switch lights off automatically. The environmental impacts of production will nearly always be outweighed by savings during the life of the home.

“The second thing is to reduce the size of everything. Smaller buildings use less material, less energy for heating and have less room for furniture and fittings.”

That means modification or refurbishment is preferable to building from scratch, if it can ensure energy efficiency. Earth building techniques such as mudbrick have very little embodied energy, but to remain ahead of the rest, they must also operate efficiently.

“There’s nothing that has no environmental impact,” Grant says. “After doing life cycle assessment, you come to realise that less is more. We really need to reduce our consumption of everything.”

Published in Sanctuary Magazine. Read the article online here.

Place making

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A place making conference draws a new map for the city’s public life.

WHAT makes a “good” place? It could be a street where kids can safely chalk their hopscotch squares, a neighbourhood where you walk to the locally owned baker, or a public square that fizzes with action.

According to Gilbert Rochecouste, from Village Well, vibrant places such as these often connect high quality of life with low environmental impacts. They’re likely to reduce private transport and consumption, and encourage food production, green building and socially responsible business practices.

“The biggest thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprint is to create affordable, accessible, amazing places,” he says.

The Melbourne Place Making Series conference will be held from Wednesday 27 to Friday 29 October. It is hosted by VicUrban, together with Village Well, Fed Square, City of Melbourne and the Department of Planning and Community Development.

The series has been running six months, including online discussions and forums for developers, financiers and the community sector. It aims to engage government, industry, planners and international experts on how we can make our city and our suburbs better places to be.

Mr Rochecouste says development too often focuses on hard infrastructure, such as roads, buildings and utilities, at the exclusion of less obvious necessities.

“Place making brings in the soft infrastructure, like the gathering places, the culture, the walk-ability and the daily rituals of living,” he says. “All the things that we yearn for and take for granted when we visit great places, like Europe.

“But we don’t get them here. We’ve taken our model from America and delivered it to disconnected places. We’ve separated living, working and entertaining. Place making brings it all together,” he says.

VicUrban CEO Pru Sanderson says the idea differs from normal urban design in its scope and holistic vision. “Place making cuts across a whole range of disciplines. It is about more than just design,” she says.

“It’s about creating places that are resilient and can grow and respond in a climate-challenged future. We want this to be the mindset for new developments and for revitalising older areas in Melbourne.”

The agency has brought a place-based approach to its Revitalising Central Dandenong initiative. It is transforming the main road, Lonsdale Street, into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and creating areas for people to congregate. It’s also running community arts programs with the local council. “It is about nurturing the economy, culture and physical place all at once,” Ms Sanderson says.

Mr Rochecouste says the best changes are resident-driven, rather than design-driven. “We run participatory democracy sessions, so people are deeply engaged in the process. When you do it well, you get much better places – you get the x-factor,” he says. “People say what they want and how they want it, and we end up with a much more informed and inspired citizenry.”

In that forthright spirit, he says we shouldn’t wait for good places to fall upon us: place making begins at home. “The first physical structure is our household, and then our footpath, street and local shops. All these things are our daily narratives – the more beautiful they are, the more connected, the more people feel like they can say hello to their neighbour. They feel safer,” he says.

“Neighbourhood renewal, street parties and celebrations. All these details add to people’s quality of life. That’s place making.”