Michael Green

Writer and producer

Cafe Nostalgia

In Culture, Social justice, The Big Issue on

Published in The Big Issue, with a beautiful illustration by Lisa Engelhardt.

Michael Green sips a bittersweet cup in Buenos Aires, a city that has survived the best and worst of times.

On my first day in Buenos Aires I caught the trail of lost love: a friend’s love, not mine. But then the sultry city lured me in.

Not long ago, my friend lived here with his Argentine girl. They had an apartment in Palermo, just north of the centre. A wrought-iron balcony over a shady street. His favourite café, Café Nostalgia, on the corner. ‘They make the only decent coffee in Buenos Aires’, he told me, but he mustn’t have minded the bad coffee. He lounged for days on end in cafés and cantinas, watching the old couples leaning close, listening to the secret card games in the corner.

That was after they broke up. Immersed in the city and lost in confusion, he delayed his return for months. Finally, he went home, for good, and one morning soon after, my plane landed.

That afternoon I walked past his two apartments, the one he shared with the girl and the one where later, he lived alone. As the sun shuffled through the leaves of the knobbly-trunked trees I imagined my friend’s memories. I imagined being in love with the girl and the city. I felt his exhilaration at carving a new, unusual life and felt his uncertainty at its end. I arrived at Café Nostalgia with a list of his old haunts in my hand: travelling alone, with a bittersweet trail to follow.

Bittersweet suits Buenos Aires. Porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, are famously haughty and brooding. Thirteen million live in the city at the mouth of Río de la Plata and history lingers and threatens them like a heavy cloud in the distance. In the last sixty years they have seen dictatorship and despair, war and torture, poverty and economic collapse. But they are famous too, for their reputation as lovers.

At the turn of the 20th century Argentina was rich. It sat among the ten richest countries of the world, and it’s capital bears the marks of wealth: boulevards, parks, plazas and opulent French architecture; tall, carved doors that lead to marble staircases; a blue art-deco spire growing between plain apartments.

But it isn’t so rich anymore. Another night, as I drank my coffee, a small boy hunched in the opposite gutter, ripping open garbage bags and pulling out plastic bottles under the yellow streetlights. In the café, the ceiling fans swirled, the football was on the television and no one paid the boy any attention.

After the peso crashed in 2001, the city changed. A new phenomenon emerged: Los Cartoneros. They are the ghosts pushing trolleys, scavenging the city’s rubbish from sundown, extracting anything recyclable and scattering the rest. It’s hard, long, degrading work for little return. My friend had told me about them before I came. ‘The city doesn’t quite know what to do with them’, he said.

In 2003, the government registered 10,000 cartoneros, but now no one knows the exact numbers. They come from the provinces and spread through the streets every night, catching the city in a great web of poverty, and maybe even sobering the rich and the tourists as they look out from their bars.

Tango, the tourist icon of Buenos Aires, was once the music of the poor. On Sundays, struggling Spanish and Italian immigrants dressed up and danced while the rich turned up their noses. Now, nightly tango spectaculars have become slick foreign money-spinners. At many community dance halls, though, young porteños are claiming it back.

‘On a Thursday night at Cochabamba 444,’ my friend said, ‘you can drink a few beers and watch the people dance tango.’ The doorway opened from a dark street to a narrow dance floor surrounded by simple tables and chairs. The crowd brought a change of shoes for dancing and hung their small bags from hooks on the wall.

With a flick of the eyes, the men asked the women to dance and the floor filled: firm bodies gliding, pausing, leaning; interlocking, kicking legs. They moved with eyes closed and impassioned faces, as though savouring the flavour of a fine wine.

The tango is heartbreak to a tune. Another night, in a small old bar called ‘El Boliche de Roberto’, two silver-haired tango singers played as a storm came down heavily outside. High up on the walls, the wooden shelves were stocked with antique liquor bottles now black and dusty. The young, fashionable crowd shared the anguished lyrics, mouthing the words and staring into their drinks. Then for one song, almost everyone in the bar sang along, and the sadness changed to joy.

Now I am back at Café Nostalgia, on my last afternoon in Argentina, already reminiscing. My plane leaves tonight. Here I am, looking out at the flower stall beneath the trees, daydreaming of the city. I followed my friend’s bittersweet trail, and I too, have fallen for his lost love – Buenos Aires. I never did meet the girl.

Waste not

In Environment, The Age on

Recycling is more than the weekly trudge to the nature strip: it’s the alternative resource boom. Meet Melbournians who are turning rubbish into a recycling revival.

ART

Ash Keating has taken in the trash. Truckloads of it. The 27-year-old artist wants to shock with the sheer bulk of waste going into landfill everyday. And for his Next Wave Festival show, 2020?, he’s putting it to better use.

Keating had five trucks of industrial waste dumped at the Arts House Meat Market in North Melbourne and asked more than 20 artists to shift through it to create sculptures and installations.

“We’ve got a connection with waste in our family,” says Keating. His grandfather ran a rubbish-removal service and his mother started a waste-management business.

The concept for 2020? came years ago, while Keating was working for Waste Audit. He saw potential art supplies squandered: “Being a visual artist and understanding how expensive materials are to get a hold of, it became really obvious to me that there was a huge gap in terms of the value of resources. I really dreamed about being able to intercept these trucks and take them elsewhere.”

Melanie Upton is also gripped by garbage. “I often turn up at home with rubbish,” the artist admits. “I have piles of rubbish in my house that I’ve collected.”

Her installation in the city, Beautiful Trash, features dozens of small sculptures – replicas of discarded drink bottles, cast in aluminium, plaster or concrete. A shiny silver milk carton stands next to a gold, deflated water bottle. Logos and colour schemes may have disappeared, but the brands are easy to pick by their distinctive shapes.

Upton believes there’s a message in her bottles. “I think this work definitely speaks strongly about the sort of consuming society that produces this waste and then people’s relationship to that.”

CRAFT

On the first weekend of every month, Sam McKean opens her colourful Fitzroy North store, Aprilmay. Betty Jo bird-shaped brooches, crafted from discarded lino and buttons, rest on an old, white shelf. Made By Maude ducks, hatched from reclaimed fabrics, perch on top of a wardrobe. McKean makes cushions and bags from 1970s furnishing fabrics and stretchy bangles from rolled-up tights. She thinks that demand for recycled things is growing as people are becoming more environmentally aware. But that’s not the only benefit of her stock. “There’s always a story behind every product,” she says.

Former history student Dan Vaughan is also captivated by the stories behind his Nearly Roadkill bags, wallets and belts. The 29-year-old makes his wares with car upholstery gleaned from motor trimmers. Years ago, while travelling in Europe and the US, Vaughan saw people making new goods from waste.

“I was attracted to it not just because it was recycling, but because there was a history embedded in the materials already,” he says.

Vaughan began Nearly Roadkill in 2006, using a “mega-industrial sewing machine that can go through anything”. He savours the thrill of the hunt for materials. “(The motor trimmers) don’t know what they are going to be throwing out every week. It’s always a surprise. When you find gold it’s really like, ‘This is going to be so much fun’.”

So what’s the message behind all these artisans’ thrifty flair? “The resources are non-renewable, unless we do it ourselves,” Vaughan says.

FASHION

“When you have limited resources,” says Ellie Mucke, “you’re pushed to come up with better designs.” In her hands, a man’s business shirt, nipped, tucked and turned back-to-front becomes a halter-neck dress.

The 28-year-old designer makes clothes from discarded shirts and slacks. “People buy them without actually knowing that they’re recycled,” she says. Fashion can be frivolous. Take this: according to a 2005 estimate by the Australia Institute, we spend $1.56 billion every year on clothes and accessories we don’t wear. Thankfully, a slew of local designers such as Mucke are making good from our mistakes. For their A Name Is A Label brand, Nicole Fausten and Lina Didzys make one-off clothes and jewellery. “(We use) any sort of materials we come across: anything from old clothing to tablecloths and curtains, pillow cases, ribbons or stockings,” Fausten says. “We believe in trying to utilise resources around us rather than going out to buy new things.”

Bird Girl – Sophie McAlpin and Anita King – share the lost-and-found ethos. They sew outfits on the spot in their Fitzroy store. McAlpin hails from a family of recyclers. “My grandmother was a dressmaker so, to pass time, she’d say, ‘Oh take these scraps and there’s a needle’. When I was really young I used to do lots of costumes. I’d be like, ‘Mum, can I have an old sheet? Dad, some fencing wire?’.”

Where the art is

In Architecture and building, Culture, The Age on

Two exhibitions are giving new meaning to the tag ‘artist-in-residence’.

Phip Murray sits in the cluttered lounge of her Collingwood house. “I’m one of those people who drags stuff home from markets or street corners,” she says. Two stuffed squirrels crouch in a small cabinet. The walls are a patchwork of paintings. “And I’m looking forward to more artwork coming in. It’s going to be great.”

Her small home is one-seventh of House Proud, a Next Wave Festival show constructed by artist and festival assistant producer Tai Snaith. Every second day from 17-29 May a different house will open for a one-off viewing, each with artwork specially made for the occasion.

Visual artist Rowan McNaught is working at Murray’s home. “I’m just going to fill it with even more stuff,” he says, looking around with a shy smile. “Just to exacerbate the situation.” With cardboard and scotch tape, the 23-year-old artist is building a colourful range of sculptures, including a microwave, an anvil and a full-sized rickshaw.

To mimic an open-inspection, Snaith has made flyers and flags (with the help of real estate company Hocking Stewart). “The artists are responding to what they see in the space but also to the person that lives there,” she says. Audiences will be invited into each house and given a floor plan and an artist statement.

But you won’t see musty rooms and peeling paint. House Proud features an eye-catching range of artists and mediums, from video work to a food-infused project. Two illustrators have created a giant octopus-like toy slithering down a spiral staircase. Elsewhere, a sculptor is working with thousands of bouncy balls and helium balloons.

The concept for the show came from Snaith’s interest in creating art outside the galleries and also her fascination with the line between public and private life. “People have this bizarre, morbid fascination with personal spaces that they don’t know,” she says, counting herself among those who fancy a sticky-beak over the neighbour’s fence. “So I thought, why not explore that and put some artists into personal spaces and encourage people to look at the stuff rather than just the real estate?”

Surprisingly, Snaith had no problem finding homeowners willing to bare their walls. Initially, she contacted friends and soon found too many takers. “I ended up calling the project House Proud because I realised that there is this group of people who are really proud of their houses, almost like it’s their baby,” she says.

Jeff Khan, Next Wave’s artistic director, is excited about the exhibition. “It’s a wonderful idea. It’s really playful and brings down the austerity of a gallery environment,” he says. “Even though it’s an unusual context for art to be found, audiences might feel less intimidated about going into someone’s home than going into a gallery.”

That’s one reason House Proud rests snugly under the festival theme, ‘Closer Together’. Khan also believes the show breaks down “the barriers between art and everyday life” and twists the way audiences experience art and interact with artists.

He’s attracted too by the closeness of the artists and homeowners. “Some people are getting along better than others…but that is all part of the process. It shouldn’t necessarily be smooth sailing. Sometimes the best dialogue comes out of the awkwardness of that interaction and…might lead to a result that neither the artist nor the homeowner would have anticipated – strange and wonderful things,” Khan says.

At her Wellington Street cottage, Phip Murray is happy to let McNaught do as he pleases. “That’s how it will work,” she tells him. “You’ll get the key, make some tea, put on some music and get to work.”

McNaught thinks it will take about a week to install his creations. To begin with, he was nervous about intruding on someone else’s space, but now that idea is framing his show. “It’s about making things that invade a house but are necessary to keep the house going,” he says.

Murray is curious to see the new additions to her collection and to think about the way, in this project, art responds to life. As for hundreds of people crashing her home, she’s relaxed. “It’s like having a party,” she says. “And house parties are the best parties.”

Groundhog Day

A university student is challenging our notions of land values.

“The saying ‘Dirt is cheap’ doesn’t hold anymore,” says David Short. The 25-year-old artist speaks with authority. He knows the city’s soil like the back of his dusty hand.

For his exhibition, Land Inspection Now Open, the RMIT Media/Arts student ploughed the earth of 99 suburbs, plucking 10cm-cubed samples from the yards of surprised homeowners right across Melbourne. The show is “a massive reaction to my generation…not being able to buy our own property,” he says.

During the Next Wave Festival, from 20-31 May, Short will bring the samples together as a grid at Seventh Gallery on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. Every petite plot will carry a price tag based on median land values for each suburb. The Epping cube costs only $4.94 while South Melbourne makes the bank manager happier at $17.12.

“You can’t distinguish between each suburb,” Short says. “The only distinguishing thing is the price claimed on it.” During the exhibition, he will set the gallery up like a real estate agency, complete with leaflets and A-frame signage out the front. A performance artist-cum-settlement agent will even be on hand to assist interested buyers.

Short gathered his lumpy harvest by door-knocking residents at random. In return for their earth, he invited the land donors to the exhibition. As an upshot, Land Inspection Now Open is set to bring people together from all parts of the city.

The lean-framed artist, who sports a pierced nose and scruffy stubble, was pleasantly surprised with the supportive response to his unusual request. “Everybody’s been great,” he says, grinning as he recalls his only chastisement. “A really nice Italian lady told me ‘You should take this [nose ring] out’”.

The exhibition will culminate in a closing night faux-auction. But there’s bad news for anyone hoping to buy a tract of Toorak. “The samples deteriorate over time,” says Short. By the end, they will crumble together. “We’ll auction off one pile of dirt.”

According to Jeff Khan, the festival’s artistic director, it will be a fitting finish. “The idea of putting a value on a neighbourhood or a suburb is so arbitrary and will probably be completely different in another two years time.”

Khan says Short’s concept highlights the social and financial differences that separate the city, leading to lopsided property prices. But it “strips that idea back to its most basic element, in that the object of all this economic and cultural discourse is actually dirt.” Short agrees. “It’s just dirt we are sitting on.”

Tour of duty

In Environment, Social justice, The Age on

Want to shop with a conscience? Learn how to check out the ethics of the checkout.

In a fluorescent-lit side room of the Footscray Baptist Church, a dozen people are plotting to change the world. They’re going to start with their shopping habits. Already there are complications. “So you can’t assume it’s organic if it says organic?” asks Trudy, a community sector worker from Williamstown, looking perplexed.

“Definitely don’t make that assumption” answers Nick Ray, the leader of today’s ethical supermarket shopping tour, explaining that it’s best to look for logos that show the product is ‘certified’ organic. Gathered around Ray and his whiteboard, the audience nods and murmurs in agreement. 

Ray, 37, looks bookish in his glasses, black t-shirt and slacks. Along with cofounder Clint Healy, he began the Ethical Consumer Group (ECG) in 2004, aiming to compile a broad product list that would help people shop in a way that reflects their values. “I’d found that people with their everyday purchases were actually endorsing the things that they were protesting against,” he says.

Last year, Ray started running ‘Shopping with a Conscience’ tours. Tonight, he begins with a pep talk. “We can make a huge difference. It’s about empowering ourselves. It’s about reclaiming choices. Food is what gives us life, so this is part of a bigger journey of getting back to understanding the things that sustain us.”

Before braving the aisles, Ray holds a chat about the issues behind our shopping habits. Talk goes straight to the nitty gritty: Chocolate. Alas, the news isn’t good. One by one, each person brings up a new concern: food miles, fair trade, third world slavery, excess packaging, water wastage, overseas production.

There’s a lot to keep in mind. To help bridge the information gap, ECG recently published the pocket-sized ‘Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping’. The guide, available on ECG’s website, lists products in categories, from baking and cooking through to snacks. It rates the goods on environmental and social impact, treatment of animals and business practices.

Trudy, with her chin in her hand, is looking despondent. But Ray chimes in as gloom begins to take hold. “I hear you say, ‘Oh my goodness, there are so many issues in one block of chocolate. How can I do this without being overwhelmed?’”

He offers a helping hand, in the form of five guiding principles to think about as you load your weekly basket [see box]. Nods reverberate throughout the room. People are taking notes. Discussion continues and more concerns bubble to the surface – genetic engineering, embodied energy, home brand products. What is the right choice?

There are no absolute rights and wrongs, Ray says. Choices are all about priorities. For Alberta, a teacher from Geelong, priorities lie in social justice. “For me, fair trade is the most important,” she says. A self-confessed “big chocolate fan,” she has recently switched brands over concerns about one company’s alleged unethical practices in developing countries.

The supermarkets agree that customer preferences have been changing. Coles spokesman Jim Cooper says the chain’s product mix reflects “increasing customer interest in products claiming environmental benefits, or products promoting ethical considerations.” Woolworths too says it wants to meet customers’ needs and, according to spokesperson Benedict Brook, expects that its organic range “will expand in correspondence with demand and product availability”.

With the pocket guides and calico bags in hand, it is finally time to go shopping. People shuffle to the bright lights of the Footscray Coles in four groups, each one charged with buying different supper goodies: drinks, breads and bikkies, dips and toppings, and desert.

The toppings team strikes trouble, unable to find a dip that fits their organic wish list. Meanwhile, the bikkie trio struggle in their search for minimal packaging and appear trapped wandering back and forth between aisles. The desert squad opts for fruit salad in a bid to cut down on plastic.

The drinks buyers are first through the checkout, after choosing locally made thirst-quenchers. But distracted by their success, they forget about their reusable bag and have to ask the attendant to take back the plastic one.

Together again after the expedition, each group explains their choices while the listeners munch on the newly gathered harvest. Seasonal fruit and veggies and Australian products were popular, but it was difficult to find organic options or information on genetically engineered ingredients.

When the food is finished, the tour party lingers to talk more, with satisfied stomachs and whirring heads. Katherine, a botanist from West Footscray, is upbeat about her new shopping duties. “The prioritised approach was the best thing about tonight. We’re not living in a perfect world,” she says. 

Ray says he isn’t trying to tell people what to do. “Everyone has wisdom and sharing it will be the thing that moves us forward over the hurdles, whether it be climate change or whether it be fair working conditions in other places.” Everybody must take their own steps. “It’s all about drawing a line in the sand, but making it your line.”

The ECG runs ‘Shopping with a Conscience’ tours on the last Thursday of the month.

Five tips for sustainable shopping

Ask yourself: “Do I need it?” We often buy things we don’t need. According to Nick Ray, of the Ethical Consumer Group, 80% of consumable products end up in the bin within six months.

Remember: Every choice makes a difference. You may only be one out of 6.7 billion people on the earth, but your decisions count. Your dollar is your vote.

Don’t be overwhelmed. Learn about the issues behind your shopping, but just take on one issue at a time.

Go for the best buy. You won’t find the right product all the time. Choose as best you can, based on your values and availability.

Make new habits. Once you learn about a product, put your decision into action every time. Give feedback to the shop or manufacturer – let them know what you want.

Powering down

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

A colourful new Geelong house opens the door on sustainable design.

“You can live well and you can live consciously,” Anne Wissfeld says. “It isn’t an either-or choice.” From high across the Barwon River, a red streak on her new home stands out like a crimson bolt of lightning. But don’t mistake the Queens Park House for a power-guzzling eyesore.

“For me, this house really connects you with nature,” says the architect, Mark Sanders. The corrugated iron roof is slightly twisted, matching the contour of the sharp hill leading to the riverbank. It looks sleek and unobtrusive among a flock of pitched-roof homes.

A combination of hard-nosed eco commitment and eye-catching design, this 200m2, three-bedroom house won the 2007 Housing Industry Association GreenSmart Building of the Year. It is also in the running for this year’s Royal Australian Institute of Architecture awards, to be announced in July.

As you approach the house, down the steep road towards the river, your gaze strikes the solar panels and solar hot water system on the roof. Then you absorb the vivid colours: window frames and doors painted in green, yellow, blue and red.

The walls are clad in sustainable plantation timber and there’s a patchwork fence made from cut off second-hand palings. A crushed, recycled concrete and brick path leads past the veggie garden to the red front door and north-facing sunroom. This is no ordinary abode.

“The brief was for a deep green level of sustainability in terms of aiming for 100% [renewable] electricity coverage and water consumption, as well as wastewater reuse and really sustainable materials,” Sanders says.

It’s a cool and bleak autumn day, but the temperature in the sunroom is well into the 20s. Sanders’s eyes light up below his short, greying hair. “Imagine this in winter?” he enthuses. Warm air can flow from here into the living area to keep the temperature comfortable without extra heating.

The block’s orientation made passive solar design a challenge. “We’re on a goat hill here basically,” Sanders says, eyeing the slope. “If we can get to clients to assist them in choosing sites, that’s always a great help.”

But for the Queens Park House, Anne and her German husband Jan had their hearts set on this south-facing site leading to the river. “We chose the wrong block,” Anne admits, a light brown bob framing her face. To maximise sunlight, the house is set well back from the street.

The sunroom opens onto a large, bright living area with white walls, featuring a polished concrete floor and a high, slanting ceiling. Next to the door, toy cars and trucks are strewn around a wooden railway track.

The Wissfelds and their two-year-old son moved in over a year ago. “We don’t have air conditioning and the house doesn’t overheat,” says Jan. A stay-at-home father, he enjoys the perks of the smart design. “The passive solar works extremely well in winter…it’s always very comfortable.”

Eco-friendly elements include double-glazed windows with external shading for summer, as well as insulation in the walls, floor and roof. The exposed concrete slab provides ‘thermal mass’. A heavyweight material, it absorbs and stores heat, helping balance out the room temperature between night and day.

Two skinny, horizontal windows look out over the river, keeping the gumtree view but cutting the amount of glass facing south. According to Sanders, this is a must. Even double-glazed windows still let out heat at between five to seven times the rate of an insulated wall.

The 39 year-old has focussed on sustainable design since graduating from Deakin University’s School of Architecture in Geelong in the mid-1990s. He started Third Ecology Architects with co-director Glen Rodgers six years ago, and staff numbers have now grown to ten. As specialists in sustainable construction, demand is high. “We’re just flat out,” he says. “Certainly there’s more consumer interest and more business interest. I think it’s the real deal, not a kind of fad.”

Tucked along one wall of the main room, the narrow kitchen is fitted with bench tops made from solid, recycled Victorian hardwood. At the end is a walk-in pantry, stocked high with jars and spices. Placed in the southeast corner, it stays cool year round. “Instead of having these bigger fridges, there’s a lot of things we keep in the pantry,” says Jan. “It’s more of an old style larder,” Sanders adds. A wicker basket brimming with tomatoes sits next to a small flour grinder full of grain.

The fridge and dishwasher are both highly energy efficient, like all the appliances and lighting throughout the house. In summer, the 2040-watt solar system installed on the roof generates more electricity than they need. The excess is fed into the grid, and the credits they receive balance out their higher energy use during winter. “We didn’t have a power bill for the first year,” Jan says, proudly.

In the garage the inverter shows that right now, under cloudy skies, the panels are putting out about 240 watts. Jan thinks it is more than the house is using.

Planning the house was an arduous process, but including a solar power system was non-negotiable. Inspired by eclectic Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the couple’s initial plans were, according to Sanders, for “a pretty crazy building”. “The whole house was curved.” Anne explains. “We had a stream running through the house. It would have been utterly amazing. And totally impossible to do.”

A soaring construction estimate forced them to cut some of the more unusual design features. “The essence of the house is the same…but the structure has been so simplified,” Jan says. “When we had to reduce costs we always looked at how [to do it] without compromising on the environmental issue.” In the end, including the garage and workshop space, building costs came in at around $2500 per square metre. Sanders says that’s about normal for a custom built home, and is quick to point out the house’s very low ongoing bills.

From the living area, a light green door leads into the bedrooms, bathroom and laundry on the west side of the house, each with a different coloured entrance. Sanders recommends low Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) paints and joinery finishes, as well as water-based coatings on all timberwork. As a result, the Wissfelds say the Queens Park House never had a noxious new home smell.

Sanders leads on to the laundry. Here, instead of a dryer, the home has an innovative drying cupboard. White doors slide open to reveal a deeper than normal space, with a duct for air circulation and a gunmetal grey ladder-like frame on the wall: a hydronic heating panel. Instead of a standard ducted system, the house warms up with hot water pumped through these pipes. “It’s the most efficient form of heating,” Sanders says. “It’s a little more expensive to put in, but the running costs are better than half. It’s quiet and a lot healthier too. There’s no air movement blowing dust around.”

In the bathroom, the heating pipe-ladder works as a warm towel rack. Nearby, next to a narrow window, is a short, deep Japanese-style bathtub. Rather than lie down, you sit in it, and plunge yourself past the shoulders. Sanders says it uses less water than a standard tub, but that doesn’t matter, because the house runs entirely on rainwater harvested on the roof. “It’s a very efficient water collector,” Anne says. Despite Geelong’s low rainfall, she says they haven’t used any mains water since they moved in.

Two 9600-litre tanks are parked side-by-side below the house. After rain, Jan dumps the first flush in a separate 700-litre tank to use on the garden. A filter and steriliser cleans the rest before it is put to use inside. “The water quality is better than what comes out of the tap, by a long shot,” Sanders says.

A yellow rubber ducky perches by the bath. But there’s no risk Anne and Jan will throw their baby out with the bath water: all wastewater stays on-site. Outside, a black tank pokes out from the earth. It is a vermiculture treatment system. Worms chomp through all the grey and blackwater before it’s filtered and pumped to the top of the block and for irrigation underneath the garden.

There’s no smell and no chemicals breaking it down. Sanders adds another benefit. “You’re not swimming amongst it,” he says. Normally, Geelong’s sewerage is treated at Barwon Water’s Black Rock plant and then pumped into the ocean. He believes the Queens Park House could be the first in Geelong or Melbourne to use a system where all wastewater is processed and reused on-site.

For Sanders, sustainable design is the future for his industry and he’s excited about leading the change. “The sort of technologies here are at the forefront, but in five years time, they will be the standard,” he says. Right now, energy smart designs are not beyond anyone’s reach. With good advice, he says, “you can halve energy and water consumption and still be cost neutral with whatever plan you have.”

The Wissfelds are delighted with their new house and glad that its sustainability can be used as an example for others to follow. “It’s about stretching the boundaries. Here’s a house right out to the extreme. What are the things we can learn from it and apply more generally?” Anne asks. But Jan, a keen wood worker, has one minor complaint. With a wry grin, he waves towards the back of the house. “There’s a little workshop down there. That’s the only problem. Don’t mention it. It could be bigger.”

Sustainable Design: the golden rules

Is small is good. Big houses use more of everything. ‘Honey, do we really need a three-tier home cinema?’

Face north. Plan living areas for the north side, to make the most of winter sun.

Reflect on windows. Go for double-glazing to cut down heat loss. North-facing windows are best, but shade them in summer. Keep east and west windows small – the lower sun is tricky to shade. Minimise windows on the sunless south.

Insulate. Good insulation can cut heat loss by up to 70%. Put it in ceilings, walls and floors.

Make it massive. Thermal mass, that is. Heavy building materials like concrete, brick and stone absorb and store heat, curbing the extremes of winter and summer.

Close the gaps. Be sure to seal all external doors, windows and exhausts. According to eco-architect Mark Sanders, gaps in leaky houses can add up to “having a one metre by one metre window permanently open.”

Use efficient appliances and fittings. Cut down on electricity, gas and water use. Choosing one extra star rating can mean savings of between 10-30% on running costs.

Go renewable. Super size your sustainability with solar panels and hot water, water tanks and wastewater treatment systems. Remember to cash in on hefty government rebates.