Michael Green

Journalist, producer and oral historian

Knowing how hard to push

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ON the first morning I worked with Michael Kelly, I arrived at eight o’clock, as agreed. “Let’s see how much we can get done in a day,” he’d said. He planned for us to complete the framing for a small timber studio, even if we had to work until dusk.

His shop-home is a model in the artful management of space. It has a narrow paved courtyard, only eight feet deep and fifteen wide. Yet Michael and Nadeen sort and store stacks of salvaged timber out there, and inside too, in neat overhead racks and shelves Michael has crafted. Chairs hang from hooks high on the walls until they’re needed.

We began. The studio was to be seven feet long and high, and four feet wide, plus a steep pitched roof. Michael assembled the simple tools: hand saw, tape measure, pen, set square, hammer and nails. He let me do the sawing.

“I’ve got a simple tip for sawing a straight cut,” he told me. “As you saw, lean the blade lightly against the inside top corner of the timber.” It worked like a charm – I guess it stops the blade wobbling while your elbow pumps back and forth. Next, I learnt to place the groove precisely, by steadying the blade with my other thumb as I began.

In Michael’s hands, the saw flowed over the timber like a stream over a stone. In mine, it stuttered and stopped. I didn’t know how hard to push.

Last year, I was caught up in melancholy and a longish writing project – perhaps the two go together – and didn’t often go outside. I grew unaccustomed to using my body. When I re-emerged in the summer, I wasn’t so sure how my limbs would respond to orders. One day, I watched some new friends practicing acrobalance, a kind of circus balancing act in pairs. I hung back because I had no idea how strong, or weak, my muscles were. I didn’t know what my legs would do if I tried to use them. Likewise, when I danced, I wasn’t quite sure how my booty would shake (this may be congenital).

That hesitance lingers. For people unused to making and doing, it takes practice to gain confidence in your hands. When I pushed on the saw, swung the hammer or lifted timber, the physics didn’t click. My reactions seemed less than equal-and-opposite.

We cut the first length from a long piece of timber and used it as a template for the others. When they were all done, we began nailing. The initial, unfinished frame was beautiful; so satisfyingly square and logical.

We worked diligently throughout the morning, stopped for a coffee, then worked through lunch. Michael regularly tidied our offcuts and swept up the sawdust gathering in the courtyard. Small spaces demand order.

The pitched roof required angled cuts. Again, we created a template – this time a triangle – and cut matching pieces and nailed them in place. By three o’clock, well ahead of schedule, we set solid the quivering ribs of our roof and manoeuvred the frames together: the studio’s skeleton assembled in but one short day.

Later, I walked home grinning stupidly, closed my bedroom door, turned up the music and danced my joy away, limbs flailing.

The frame

Asylum

In Culture, The Big Issue on

In a small room at Oregon State Hospital, in Salem, north-western USA, hundreds of shiny copper urns line up like cans on a supermarket shelf. Dating from 1920s and earlier, they contain the unclaimed ashes of the asylum’s former residents.

The image comes from a new book of photography by Chris Payne, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. It is a room guarding burnt bodies and souls. Who were these people? How did they live? And why are they here, like this?

These themes fascinated the architect-turned-photographer for six years as he documented 70 decaying mental hospitals across 30 US states.

“I fell in love with the buildings and the places – the communities that the hospitals had been,” he says, “and with thinking about the thousands of people who had lived, worked and died there.”

Asylum is a grand, melancholy tribute to the lives spent in the institutions and to the astonishing scale and quality of the buildings themselves.

In 2002, when Payne needed a new project, a friend suggested he visit abandoned mental hospitals. The New York-based photographer drove to Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital ever built in the world – at its peak, it housed over 14,000 patients. “I was amazed to find this abandoned city just sitting there,” he says. “I quickly learned it wasn’t isolated to one hospital or one area. It was all over the country.”

From the mid-19th to the early-20th century in the US, nearly 300 institutions were built for the insane – often designed by prominent architects and always set in spacious grounds. The facilities were intended to offer calm and comfort, to treat inhabitants by means of fresh air and beautiful surrounds. The hospitals functioned as self-sufficient communities, including farms, workshops and auditoriums, and in some cases, even cafés and bowling alleys.

But care diminished as hospitals became overcrowded and pressed by tight budgets. Then, as treatment came to encompass extreme methods such as electro-shock therapy, ‘asylum’ became a by-word for squalor and abuse.

Payne’s elegiac photos, with flaking colour and tender light, show beauty in places we least expect. “Every society has its asylums, but I think there is a misconception that the buildings are bad and should be torn down. In a way, the stigma of mental illness has been passed onto the architecture of the buildings,” he says.

His previous book documented abandoned substations that had powered the New York subway. His photography shows the architecture of an optimistic era, a time when industrialism promised human progress. “I’m fascinated with buildings that really had purpose. We don’t build like that anymore,” Payne says. “And I think it represents a shift in the way we function as a society. It’s sad we’ve lost that faith in building.”

Community gardens

In Greener Homes on

On the first Sunday of every month, the members of Dig In Community Garden hold a working bee. “We make compost and we tidy the place up,” says Ann Rocheford. “Then we retire to the barbeque and open the red wine – it’s good community-building time.”

The Port Melbourne garden, in Murphy Reserve, has been running since 2003. There are 51 plots and well over a hundred people who regularly stop in. The members reflect the mix of the suburb, from old-timers to newly arrived apartment dwellers. “In the garden they all speak a common language: it’s about how their crops are going. That helps people get to know each other,” Ms Rocheford says.

The plots range in size from four to ten square metres. “It’s amazing how much you can grow on a small amount of land if you look after it properly,” she says. On her plot, she grows “more than enough” for her and her husband. She has finished her winter planting and although it’s a slower time of year, she still tends her patch at least once a week: watering, harvesting and tormenting white cabbage moths.

“You have to be there regularly. It’s a constant thing – community gardens have a ‘use it or lose it’ policy. In summer, you’ve got to be able to water your plants three times a week.”

But the returns on that commitment are many. As well as reinforcing your sense of community, regular trips to the garden are good for your health. “Bending your back and doing some work is very beneficial – if you really want a good workout, try making compost,” Ms Rocheford says. “Also, the vegetables are organic. You pick them, put them in the pot that night and eat them. It’s terribly healthy.”

Ben Neil is the president of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network. He argues that these gardens are a crucial part of the bigger push towards sustainable living. “If we are to face the challenges of climate change, then urban agriculture and community gardens have got to be part of the solution.

“They tick so many boxes: they give you an opportunity to meet your neighbours, improve your mental and physical health, and grow and eat locally produced, organic, fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Melbourne’s oldest community garden, in Nunawading, has been running for over three decades. At last count, in 2006, there were 75 gardens across the city. They’re sprouting. “There’s tremendous demand for new gardens,” Mr Neil says. “A lot of councils now are developing policy to deal with the requests.”

The start-up process is never quick and easy – establishing a group, finding land and gaining council permission is more likely to take years than months. (The South Australian neighbourhood house association, CANH, has released a comprehensive how-to guide.)

One thorny objection is that starting a community garden means privatising open land. Mr Neil says groups can keep the wider public involved by running regular tours, workshops or growing fruit trees anyone can harvest.

“But the reality is that land is going to become harder to find,” he says. “The natural progression is the sharing of backyards. Many people have more space than they need and are happy for others to use it.”

 

 

City Boy Slinks Home With Sore Arm

In Blog on

I was WWOOFing this past week or so. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, and concerned for my spelling, WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms.

It has become a verb (to WWOOF) and a noun (a WWOOFer). There are WWOOF organisations all around the world, connecting the willing with the work. People – usually travellers – exchange their labour for food and board.

For me, it is a chance to leave the city, learn, and be part of a way of life where food is grown and eaten, not just eaten.

Su Dennett and David Holmgren kindly agreed for me to stay at Melliodora, their property in Hepburn Springs, an hour-and-a-half north-west of Melbourne. Dave is the co-originator of permaculture, and an insightful commentator on matters from bushfire preparation to geo-politics and peak oil.

Melliodora is one hectare, teeming with food and thought. Each building, tree, path, plant and detail is carefully placed for the benefit of everything else. The household economy provides both physical and intellectual nourishment.

The evening I arrived, Dave walked me through the property. We left their owner-built, passive-solar mudbrick home and walked past their kitchen garden to the shed and chook-house. Through the swinging gate, we came to the barn and loft where I’d be staying. Close to the house, these buildings are the crossroads of the property. Here, the animals are tended: goats milked; chooks fed and eggs collected. This is the place to get tools and equipment. It’s the throughway to the orchards and the other veggie patches. It’s the spot for solitary time on the compost toilet.

We continued down the hill, past the orchards to the dams. Dave introduced me to Melliodora’s real owners: Tan, Bett and Flame. They were chatting and chewing on some willow, and they implored Dave to cut them more.

Su milks the goats each morning, all four (goats and human) united in constant conversation. Su makes yogurt and cheese from the milk. She also keeps bees, runs a bulk-foods and veggie box co-op, and works on the Hepburn Relocalisation Network.

I emerged from my loft each morning at seven-thirty. We lit the wood-stove in the kitchen, cooked porridge and boiled water. Dave roasted chestnuts. Life at Melliodora revolves around the gravitational pull of that wood stove.

My days were largely spent harvesting: apples, grapes, feijoas, mushrooms, potatoes, cherry guavas. It has been a bumper season, after so many of drought. I bottled pears, de-netted fruit trees, de-sludged a massive water tank.

The nights are cold in the Victorian central highlands. One evening, after the second afternoon digging spuds, I caught sight of a muscular man in the mirror: my shoulders were broad, my arms bulging. I was wearing five jumpers.

And alas, below the layers, my feeble arm was hurting. T’was the spuds that did me in. My left forearm and wrist swelled up like a thin snake that gobbled a mouse. The local physio told me to rest, then advised me to build up my muscles before returning. 

Tan

Sustainable prefab

In Greener Homes on

Modular houses can be green, if you choose carefully.

For most buyers, prefabricated homes have three big pluses: a set product, a set price, and construction in double-quick time.

The factory-built process can also result in far less waste. Architect and environmental design consultant Chris Barnett, from Third Skin Sustainability, says that even if prefab companies aren’t eco-minded, they’re likely to use materials efficiently.

“Supply chains can be refined and controlled to reduce waste – there’s an alignment between waste saving and cost saving,” he says. “Also, the site impacts, noise and ecological disturbances will all be cut down if the on-site construction time is short.”

But it’s a mistake to assume that modular always means green. Most modular houses use steel framing, which has much higher embodied energy than timber. Another potential disadvantage of prefab is the lack of thermal mass, meaning the homes can’t store the heat from winter sun or the cool from summer nights. Quality modular buildings compensate by adding extra insulation so they require little energy to stay comfortable.

Homebuyers need to assess a modular dwelling’s design and performance just as they would conventional on-site builders and plans. “Look at the building fabric and the star rating, as well as the energy and other environmental impacts of delivery,” he says. “If it’s a green modular house, it should have a high star rating and low energy demand through smarter appliances and lighting.”

Mr Barnett is developing SmartSkin, an innovative manufactured housing system that uses timber wall panels that are both structural and insulating, and a factory-built technology pod. He expects to complete the first home by the end of the year.

“We’ve been building the same way for hundreds of years – we still get handed the same piles of sticks and nails,” he says. “Over the next 20 years we are going to see significant changes. The efficiency of manufactured and component-based construction will be crucial in creating greener housing that remains affordable.

“There aren’t many sustainable options on the market now, but products are starting to come from overseas and Australian manufacturers are beginning to gear up.”

One Australian manufacturer taking sustainability seriously is Eco Villages Worldwide, based in Bendigo. They sell Eco Pods – flat pack homes that are assembled on-site in three weeks. “When someone buys one, I make an order and it creates a list of every product needed,” says Bryce Tonkin. “It’s a manufacturing process for the building and that has massive ramifications for efficiency, and reducing waste, time and effort.”

Mr Tonkin says the market for prefab homes has grown over the last few years. “More and more, people want buildings quickly. Our path has been to design those homes for their eco-friendliness and energy efficiency.”

Eco Pods are rated at 7.5 stars, which means they need about two-thirds less energy than standard five-star homes. Among the carefully selected materials are compressed-straw wall panels made locally in Bendigo, recycled carpets and decking made of old milk bottles and sawdust. The three-bedroom design sells for $230,000.

“There are a lot of people who want to reduce their carbon footprint and ongoing energy costs, but it’s complicated if you’re starting from scratch,” Mr Tonkin says. “We’re trying to make it easy for people to get something they can move into now.”