Michael Green

Writer and producer

The weather on the road

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I MADE it to Cairns. It’s a long way to hitch hike. For six weeks, in every lift or chance encounter, I had this exchange:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m heading to Cairns for a friend’s wedding.”

It became a kind of pilgrimage, and Cairns – in my imagination – a lush, secret village in the clouds. I’d never been further north than Fraser Island. What would life hold after Cairns?

With just over a week to go, I was loafing on the Sunshine Coast. I had a closer look at the map of Queensland, and observed that I still had 1700 kilometres to travel. The next day I put out my shingle again. My first lift was from Australia Zoo’s wildlife rescue team. I shared the backseat with kookaburra with a broken wing, sheltering in a cardboard box. The rescuers were on their way to pick up a python from a construction site.

As I got further north, people spoke more and more about the weather. “It’s some strange kind of year, this year,” they’d say. “An early wet – we never even had the dry. The weather’s all mixed up nowadays.” The radio reported predictions of a ferocious storm season coming. Climate change is bringing more intense, variable weather.

One sunny afternoon I waited for hours on the highway at the Bundaberg turn off, just north of Childers. Eventually, I gave up, crossed the road and hitched back into town. The next morning I got an early lift, but my heart sank when I was dropped at the same turnoff.

Hitch hiking is a slow way to travel, but you can’t beat it for the people you meet: beautiful, heavily pregnant Spanish women, South American spiritual drug-takers, travelling salesmen, miners, police. Most of my lifts have been from people who hitched when they were younger, or from lonely middle-aged men.

I waited another hour at the turnoff. Finally, an aging sports car pulled up. It looked like the car from Back to the Future. When I got in, Rodney, the driver, told me at length about the engine, and I tried to rev my approval at all the right moments. He had a chubby face and a curly mullet hairdo, and his eyes had long since parted ways. When I asked where he’d come from, he told me he’d been on suicide watch overnight at the Hervey Bay hospital. “They’re probably still looking for me,” he said. “I’m in a bad way these days.”

Rodney said he didn’t have anyone to talk to about his troubles. We spoke about cars and motorbikes and road maintenance, well past my capacity. He drove to Gin Gin, toured me through the town to the free camping area and returned me to the centre. He showed me great care.

Further north, as I passed through Proserpine – in a little red Mitsubishi driven by a man named Matt – no smoke billowed from the sugar mill. Matt was a plumber-turned-mineworker who grew up in Mount Waverley, the same suburb as I did. He split for the north a decade ago and now lives at Midge Point, near the Laguna Quays resort. “I’d come up here in my twenties, working,” he said. “Everything was a grind in the city, my marriage ended, so I came back – I wanted to find that feeling I had when I was younger, that sweet way of life.”

He told me that so much rain was a curse for the cane farmers. Right now, the earth was too soft and the big harvesters would bog. If the rain keeps up until the wet season proper, the farmers will lose their crop. The mills close in December.

For my friends’ wedding on the beach, at least, the weather held out. And it was, as forecast, a damn good knees-up of a wedding.

The freeway, a long way to go

The Sunshine Coast Highway near Brisbane. A long way to go.

Hepburn Wind

In Greener Homes on

Community-ownership could herald a gust of green power.

CONSTRUCTION is about to begin on Australia’s first community-owned wind farm. The Hepburn Community Wind Park Co-operative held its official groundbreaking ceremony last week at Leonards Hill, 10 kilometres south of Daylesford.

Vicki Horrigan, a director of Hepburn Wind, says the turbines should be ready and rotating by mid-2011. “It’s over five years since the local community here had the idea. And now we’re building a project worth just under $13 million.”

The wind farm comprises two turbines with a combined capacity of 4.1 megawatts. They’ll be built by German company REpower Systems AG and connected to the grid.

“The turbines are estimated to produce about 12,200 megawatt hours each year,” Ms Horrigan says. “That’s enough to power 2300 homes, which is more than the number of households here in Daylesford and Hepburn Springs.”

Hepburn Wind was set up as a co-operative. Membership is open to all Victorians, but there’s a lower minimum investment threshold for locals. All members get one vote, regardless of the size of their shareholding. Once they’re whirling, the turbines will generate a return for members and contribute funding for local projects.

“The structure has been a real bonus for engaging the local community, because they can see the idea came from here and they can participate in it easily,” Ms Horrigan says. “It’s a good financial model, but it’s also a good philosophical model – it’s socially responsible investment.

“People often feel powerless about climate change on a global scale. This project shows that local communities can set up systems that really go towards making ourselves sustainable.”

Precinct-scale power generation can also be much more efficient than a house-by-house approach. The Hepburn Wind turbines will cost far less per household in the area than a comparable roll out of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels.

The group’s success has turned heads. “We get a couple of requests every week from other communities wanting to find out about what we’re doing and how they could start something similar,” Ms Horrigan says.

There’s a lot of advice to pass on – among the thorniest impediments have been raising the capital, estimating costs and gaining planning approval.

For this reason, a spin-off organisation, called Embark, has been founded to support other communities through the process.

Embark’s executive director Mary Dougherty says the organisation is already in contact with about ten groups, including some working on proposals for mini-hydro and solar schemes, as well as wind turbines.

“We’re trying to break down the steps involved and provide practical advice and templates, like business plans, financial models and landholder lease agreements. It’s much easier than starting with a blank slate.”

There are scores of articles on Embark website, covering everything from the ins-and-outs of the energy market, to how to run effective public meetings, together with case studies from both here and abroad.

In Denmark, co-operatives own over a quarter of the country’s wind farms. “In the European countries where these community projects started out, they have a far greater uptake of renewable energy overall. These small projects lead to large ones,” Ms Dougherty says.

“In ten years, we’d love to have started 100 projects. Through all the investors, that translates to about a million people who are exposed to the benefits of renewable energy first hand. That’s really powerful.”

The shipwright

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RENNIE gave me a lift from Miriam Vale, north of Bundaberg in Queensland, to Agnes Water, about 40 minutes away on the coast. Agnes Water is the last surf beach before the Great Barrier Reef.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Rennie told me he was going to throw himself in the sea. He had his surfboard stowed in the back of the ute. It sounded like there was something he needed to wash away.

He was 50 years old, with a heavy, but still-athletic build. He shifted constantly in his seat. There was a restlessness about him and the force of it engulfed the cab. He wore a shabby fedora-style hat and had a gap between his front teeth – the combination lent him the air of an old circus performer.

In fact, he was a shipwright by trade, a boat builder. At 14, during his school holidays, he began working as a deckhand on fishing trawlers. Then, at 16, he took three months off school and worked a stint as a cook at sea, and came back with ten grand for his troubles. School couldn’t keep him after that. He began his shipwright’s apprenticeship the next year.

I asked questions and Rennie’s tales tumbled out. He wasn’t a direct storyteller. “Bloomin” was his adjective of choice and he baited every line with it, twice over.

He’d worked on many famous boats and yachts built in this country: Australia II, Sydney-to-Hobart race winners, even Collins class submarines.

Some years ago he packed it in to start a business up north. “It was supposed to be about the simple life. I went to the Whitsundays with lots of money and left with none. It was the dengue. Nearly bloomin‘ killed me.”

Now he worked fixing up mining accommodation, moving from site to site and living each place a while. “All the ugliest places in the bloomin‘ country,” he said. “I never thought I’d be startin‘ again at 50.”

I mentioned that I wrote a column about sustainable housing and living.

“Don’t get me started on the building industry,” he said in a wild staccato, like I’d triggered an eruption, but his throat was too small a passageway for the flow of his mind. “The whole thing’s a bloomin‘ fraud. What’s wrong with this country is there’s too many rules and we’re too bloomin‘ comfortable.”

He told me that in north Queensland, all the coal money meant big, stupid houses. “In Gladstone, people are building garages with turntables in them, so when you drive in, it turns the car around for you.”

Rennie had chosen the timeless way instead. He had bought an expired mining lease on a hill overlooking the water near Gladstone, and was sculpting a small home into the rock, more than a kilometre through bush from the nearest car access. Sheer granite walls and benches.

“Gosh. Incredible!” I was the one gushing now. “I love hearing about handmade homes like that. Amazing. So how’d you do it? Can you just build anything you turn your hands to?”

“You could say that.”

He told me he’d carved a natural swimming pool deep in the rock behind the rest of the home, with a 40-metre skylight shaft. A few barramundi live in the pool. He used mirrors, like the Egyptians did, to shine light from the skylight throughout the other rooms.

He’d been working on the house for 16 years. “Started when my wife was alive. That’s the trouble with life, you know. You think you’ve got a plan and then your wife goes and bloomin‘ dies just to bugger it all up.”

Agnes Water

The beach at Agnes Water

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.