Michael Green

Writer and producer

Maintaining the backyard

In Architecture and building, The Age on

A renovation that re-discovers outer space

ARCHITECT Andrew Maynard is standing in the grassy garden of a newly renovated house in Ilma Grove, Northcote, explaining why his design blurs inside and outside space.

“If you invest in a big block, then you’re investing in outdoor land. Don’t feel like you need to fill it all up with building,” he says. “But you have to make your house connect with the backyard, otherwise you won’t use it.”

As if to prove the point, his littlest client, three-year-old Harvey, barrels through the very wide backdoor and demands a game of cricket.

“Australians talk about growing up in the suburbs with all the space,” Maynard continues, while bowling to Harvey. “But we’re building these big homes and renovations, which are empty most of the time. Going small is really important environmentally – and also, in terms of design, it’s so much fun.”

When the young cricketer’s parents, Anna MacWilliams and Cameron MacDonald, decided to renovate their heritage California bungalow, they had three main objectives: to create an open plan living area, to use passive-solar design principles and to retain their garden.

“We didn’t want to build a mansion. We love having a backyard,” MacWilliams says, as she steps out from the kitchen to visit the compost bin.

The rear of the house faces north, but the couple rarely used the old dining room, because it was dark and pokey. The sun was blocked out by a lean-to laundry and toilet.

“It was all brick wall, with a tiny little window,” she says. “We used it as a storage room and had visitors in the front room. The backyard was segregated. You had to make an effort to get outside.”

Today, MacWilliams is cooking a vegetarian shepherd’s pie in the open, blue and red kitchen. “We get beautiful light coming in here now. In winter, the low sun definitely penetrates into the living space,” she says.

The northern wall of the Ilma Grove house’s new living area is comprised of large double-glazed doors. Among other eco-friendly attributes, the extension is clad in recycled bricks and all the timber was salvaged or harvested sustainably. All paints and finishes are either low- or no-VOC, and a rainwater tank is plumbed into the toilets. Up the space-saving spiral staircase is a spare bedroom and a roof-terrace boasting a solar array and views to both the Dandenongs and the CBD.

“I love opening up the doors,” MacWilliams says. “We’re always going in and out, to the vegie garden or the herb garden. Harvey can be in the backyard and I can still do what I have to do.”

Maynard used a number of design elements to make sure the yard was not only preserved, but also, used regularly. The first step was to demolish the rear laundry and toilet. The new laundry lives in a cupboard.

“Over time, people tend to add wet areas to the back of homes, and they dislocate living spaces from the outdoors. We knock them down and build them in the middle of the house, close to the bedrooms,” he says.

The broad double-glazed doors mean that the garden is always in view. “Visual connection is fundamental,” he explains. “And then you try to pull away the edges.”

He blurred the border between inside and out by retaining sections of exposed brickwork inside, and extending the light blue shade of the indoor cupboards to the external service area. A small patch of garden protrudes into the home, planted with basil and lettuce.

Beyond the broad doors, a narrow deck doubles as bench seating. “It means the edge becomes a social space, not just the line between inside and outside,” Maynard says.

“You’re always going to have some people who want to be inside and some who want to be outside, especially in a climate like Melbourne’s. Don’t force people to choose: instead of ‘either-or’, give them ‘both-and’.”

In de-fence of the backyard

WHEN Anna MacWilliams and Cameron MacDonald bought their Northcote home, they were already considering a renovation. Their real estate agent gave them clear advice: keep your backyard and you’ll do well.

The agent, Grant Leonard, a partner at Nelson Alexander in Northcote, says oversized renovated houses are a turn-off for many buyers.

“You can devalue the property if you don’t leave any backyard. They’re harder to sell,” he says. “Sometimes I see really large houses where they’ve taken up most of the land. Big houses suit families with kids, but generally, those families will want a backyard for the kids to play in.

“When people are renovating, the main thing is to get the balance right between the size of the backyard and the size of the house.”

In his recent book, The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard, Professor Tony Hall argues that the balance has been lost. He found that the proportion of an average suburban block covered by a new residence has increased significantly since the 1990s. “The cause is bigger houses, not smaller blocks,” he says.

Professor Hall, an urban researcher from Griffith University, believes planning regulations should require less block coverage and houses should be designed with more windows looking out onto gardens. He says vanishing backyards not only stop children from playing outdoors, but also reduce the biodiversity, natural drainage and cooling effects previously provided by trees and vegetation.

To Kirsten Larsen, from Melbourne University’s Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, existing backyards present an invaluable resource for food production. Larsen says the city’s food security is threatened by a number of constraints, including water, oil, energy and agricultural land. Backyard vegie gardening must be part of the answer, and for that we should limit house sizes.

“It makes sense to produce some of our food in cities. We have a lot of the resources here that we need – water, nutrients, space and sunlight,” she says. “We need to increase urban density if we’re to stop encroaching on agricultural land, but we need to do it in a way that allows people to continue to grow their own fruit and vegetables.”

Indoor amenity need not suffer for the change. Whenever clients ask Andrew Maynard to design a modest building on a large block, the architect’s mind starts to race. For the addition to be small, the concept must be inventive.

“Doing something small on a big block is really exciting. When you have to put a number of functions in a confined space you’re forced to think differently,” he says.

“One of the reasons houses become big and horizontal is because people just line up functions next to each other. The moment you’re forced to overlap them is the moment something strange and beautiful will happen.”

Read this article at The Age online

Secondary glazing

In Architecture and building on

Secondary glazing is second best to double glazing, but it’s a cheaper option providing good results

WINDOWS are wonderful for transmitting natural light. The only trouble is they’re also great at transmitting heat. In a typical insulated home, windows cause more heat gain and loss than any other part of the building fabric.

No matter what climate you live in, double glazing can vastly improve the insulation performance of your house. There are a few ways to get double glazing into an existing dwelling: you can remove and replace the whole window frame, replace just the glazing unit, or install dual glazing (an extra glass window on the inside or outside) or “add-on” double glazing (an extra window or pane on the inside).

Unfortunately, all these measures can tear a hole in your hip pocket in the short term (though you’ll save on active heating and cooling costs over the long term).

In this article, Sanctuary takes a closer look at the cheaper end of the scale: dual glazing and “add-on” double-glazing units.

But before you open your chequebook at all, it’s smart to close some other holes around the home. Maurice Beinat, from household efficiency specialist ecoMaster – which produces ecoGlaze “add-on” double glazing – says windows are normally the third priority. “Every home is different, but usually the first port of call is draught proofing. The second one is sufficient ceiling insulation that’s properly installed,” he says. “Then the third stage is a toss up between secondary glazing, window coverings and window shading.”

External shading is crucial to prevent radiant heat transfer through any glass that gets direct sun in summer. Internal window coverings such as heavy drapes and pelmets will help cut down the warmth conducted through the glass. But Beinat says many householders aren’t keen on curtains at all – let alone heavy ones. “If you don’t want window coverings, secondary glazing is a good alternative,” he says.

So what should you look for?

Gary Smith, from the Australian Window Association, says secondary glazing performs two functions – thermal and acoustic insulation.

Some products, known as dual window systems, comprise of a whole new window – with glass and frame – attached to either the inside or outside of the existing window frame. They’re available from many companies – see the AWA website for a list of members in your state.

 “You get some benefit thermally but they’re usually installed for acoustic reasons,” Smith says.

For soundproofing, the air space between the two windows should be at least 100mm; however, for the best insulation results, the gap between the panes should be much smaller.

“In an insulated glass unit you need dry, still air or an inert gas,” Smith says. “The problem with having a big space is that the air moves around inside and it reduces the thermal performance.”

He says the thermal insulation value provided by double glazing increases with gaps of 6mm to about 16mm, and then begins to decline. “When you get up to spaces like 80mm and 100mm, the performance drops off quickly.”

By way of warning, Smith says would-be buyers shouldn’t accept claims about a product’s performance without independent testing under the Window Energy Rating Scheme (WERS). “If you can’t compare it, you’ve got to be careful,” he says.

The other type of secondary glazing system on the market more readily achieves narrower gaps, by using magnets to attach an “add-on” acrylic panel to the existing frame. These systems include Magnetite, MagicSeal and ecoGlaze (by ecoMaster).

Adrian Lafleur, from Magnetite, says high quality seals and materials make all the difference. “You have to make sure you get an air-tight seal. With the frame, PVC or timber will insulate much better than aluminium,” he says.

Products are available that will suit most kinds of windows, and allow them to be openable. Maurice Beinat, from ecoMaster, says acrylic panes work well in retrofitted systems because they’re light, easy to handle and safer than glass.

Cleaning too, is no trouble. “The best way to clean acrylic is with an antistatic solution or a mild detergent and a microfibre cloth,” he says. “Never use ammonia based cleaners, like Windex, because that will make the acrylic go cloudy.”

Acrylic scratches more readily than glass, so beware of combining low windows with pawing pets and toddlers. Mild scratches can be polished out, or the panels easily replaced.

Although secondary glazing systems are much cheaper than replacing the windows altogether, they’re not cheap. Covering your whole home could cost upwards of $10,000, depending on the product you choose.

Clear Comfort is a low cost solution. It’s a kind of plastic wrap stuck onto the frame and shrunk to fit (see case study). For just a few hundred dollars and a little DIY labour, you can double all your windows – but it won’t last as long as the sturdier systems on the market.

Another alternative is to replace just the glazing unit, but this requires a certain level of know-how, and it’s still not keep. You can get started with www.diydoubleglaze.com.au.

CASE STUDY

Two years ago, Adam Tiller applied Clear Comfort to the southern and western windows of his 1928 Federation bungalow, and he’s hooked on the benefits.

“I think it should be compulsory in every house,” he says. “It eliminates the cold draught you feel coming off the bottom of big windows, even when you have heavy drapes.”

The transparent membrane looks “like glad wrap” in the roll, but once installed, it’s hard to see at all. He had no trouble fitting it to both casement and double-hung sash windows, with the help of his partner.

So far, it’s proved surprisingly resilient – though he wouldn’t recommend it where pets scratch or toddlers reach. “My kids poke it and lean on it and it doesn’t come off,” he says.

COST COMPARISONS

A typical window is around two square metres.

Clear Comfort: $198 for a 10 metre by 1.6 metre roll (about $12 per square metre), together with tape and instructions.

ecoGlaze: $300 to $350 per square metre, but more if the windows are oversized, oddly shaped or require scaffolding.

Magnetite: $380 to $420 per square metre.

Article published in Sanctuary Magazine

Star ratings on the ground

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

HUNDREDS of thousands of new homes across the country are not performing at their promised energy efficiency rating, forcing residents to use up to double the predicted energy required for heating and cooling, experts say.

Research by air-tightness testing company Air Barrier Technologies has shown that air leakage in new homes is five to 10 times worse than expected under the star-rating scheme.

This means that an average five-star home is likely to perform only to a three-star level, potentially doubling energy bills for residents.

About 40,000 new homes are built in Victoria each year, and all must adhere to the five-star standard. This will rise to six stars from May.

But a group of industry players, including Henley Homes, who have been lobbying state and federal government and building regulators to crack down on the air leakage problem, say unless more action is taken, customers cannot be confident their homes meet the stated star rating.

“At the moment there’s an assumption that houses are built to a far tighter standard than what we believe they are in reality,” Adam Selvay, Henley Homes energy and sustainability specialist, told The Sunday Age last week.

The question of builder liability was raised in a meeting with the Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and the Australian Building Codes Board in April last year.

Following that meeting, Terry Mahoney, president of the Air Infiltration and Ventilation Association of Australia, emailed other attendees, as well as federal government ministers and senior public servants, criticising officials for failing to respond to the issues discussed.

“It became apparent that no amount of scientific evidence, or global best practice comparisons or safety and health risk concerns raised by the visiting group, would engender any action or urgency from either the [Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency] or the [Australian Building Codes Board] at this time,” he wrote.

Mr Mahoney noted the attendees’ view that there is “overwhelming evidence” that the current star rating method “proves grossly inaccurate when constructed homes are performance tested”.

Bruce Rowse, from building efficiency consultants CarbonetiX, said air gaps are common around doors, light fixtures, window- and door-frames, and places where pipes or cables enter the home.

“Sealing is very important and to do it properly is really laborious. And there’s no inspection for it,” he said.

He also expressed concern that the regulatory regime doesn’t ensure insulation is adequately installed. “The building inspector has no idea of what insulation actually goes into the walls,” he said. “It’s also very difficult to validate exactly how well the ceiling is insulated.”

Victorian Building Commissioner Tony Arnel denied there was a systemic problem with air leakage standards or insulation in five-star homes. He maintained that an auditing process had consistently demonstrated that new homes complied with regulations.

“But building is not necessarily always a perfect science. We did some research two years ago with Air Barrier Technologies and that did tell us that there was potentially an issue with draughts and gaps that we needed to continue to work with industry to ensure that quality is met,” he said.

Mr Arnel said if testing proved a home did not meet its star rating due to building deficiencies, the owner could take legal action against the builder “because presumably it hasn’t been built to the right specification”.

Housing Industry Association building and environment director Kristin Brookfield said the association was not aware of any specific research on air leakage but acknowledged that a building’s energy efficiency is affected if it is not properly sealed.

“It’s important that this is seen as an issue about the rating tools,” she said. “This is not an issue about the actual construction of the homes.”

Lin Enright, from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said that concerns had been raised with the Department of Climate Change about air infiltration, but no complaints or inquiries had been brought to the attention of the consumer watchdog.

The issue was privately championed last year by former Victorian Planning Minister, Justin Madden. In July, he wrote to the federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, requesting that the Australian Building Codes Board consider testing for air leakage to ensure greater energy efficiency of housing and other properties.

Read this article at The Age online

Martin Schoeller: Close-Up

In Culture, The Big Issue on

Photographer Martin Schoeller gets up close and personal with some familiar faces.

BEFORE he takes portraits, photographer Martin Schoeller thoroughly researches his subjects. If they are actors, he watches their movies. If they are writers, he reads their books.

“A lot goes into each shoot,” the photographer told the Artinfo website in 2008. He brainstorms concepts, scouts locations and sources props. All of which seems curious, as each of his photographs looks much the same: a passport-style close-up, enlarged to epic proportions, with shallow depth of focus – the eyes and mouth are sharp, the tip of the nose and the lobes of the ears are not.

Close-Up, an exhibition of Schoeller’s portraits, is now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The gallery’s walls are lined with his large images, some the size of muscle-car bonnets. Almost every square inch within the frames bulge with the (mostly) famous faces they contain, from a grizzled Jack Nicholson and an alien Paris Hilton, to a waxy Christopher Walken and a crinkly Helen Mirren.

The Schoeller exhibition raises an intriguing question: is celebrity, blown up and unretouched, still just celebrity? Or does it convey something more substantial? Michael Desmond, senior curator with the gallery, admits to some initial trepidation as to how the exhibition would be received, before it opened in November. “I was a bit cautious,” he says. “I thought people were over celebrity. They’re so familiar with Brad Pitt’s face that they might not come and see this show. Interestingly, they’ve responded really well. Most people come in as fans. Some come in slightly cynically – as I did – and are then converted.”

Schoeller was born in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and studied photography in Berlin at Lette-Verein – a training more technical than artistic. At 25, he moved to New York to be an assistant to Annie Liebovitz, the renowned celebrity photographer. He has since described that time as very challenging.

“My English was not that good when I first came [to New York], and she’s extremely demanding,” he has recalled. “She doesn’t have that much patience. I got along with her very well after about a year, but the first year was very intense and not very pleasant.”

After three years, Schoeller became a freelance photographer and later began contributing to The New Yorker and other prominent magazines, including Rolling Stone, GQ and Vogue. Dissatisfied with the glamour and commercialism of conventional celebrity portraits, he devised his trademark technique. “They allow me to walk away with something for myself – a very honest, simple portrait that no publicist can say anything about. You can’t see what they’re wearing and they’re not having to do anything, so no red flags go up. Only three or four times have people refused to have a picture taken that close,” he told Artinfo.

Schoeller, who is still based in New York, uses a long lens and simple lighting in his portrait sessions. He takes about 200 frames, talking incessantly to put the sitter at ease while he seeks an expression between expressions: a moment when the subject is temporarily not posing.

His headshots are often praised for their ‘democratic’ approach. By presenting every subject the same way, regardless of their status, the photographs can invite reflection and debate on the nature of celebrity.

“The images are commissioned by high circulation magazines, so in that sense, they’re reinforcing the cult of celebrity,” Desmond observes. “But, on the other hand, the way they’re photographed undermines it. They’re not necessarily flattering. When you are confronted with the images you think about what makes these people famous. Why this person? What are the things you actually see? The size is a bait to make you question the notion of fame.

“The large scale creates a sort of false intimacy,” Desmond says. “You’re forced to make an emotional connection. There’s a feeling that the faces are really close to you. Normally people only get that close when they’re either in love with you or you’re having a fight.”

Close-Up also includes a number of portraits of Indigenous people from South Africa and Brazil, shot and presented in the same way. But given the bias towards celebrities, is ‘democratic’ really the right word for Schoeller’s approach? Arguably, it’s only democracy in the most corrupt form: a means of placating the many, while reinforcing the power of the few.

But Desmond argues: “Maybe it’s an Australian version of democracy, where we bring the rich and famous down to our level,” he says. “They’re imperfect. Barack Obama is one of the most powerful men in the world, but when you see his face in the exhibition you’re conscious of how misshapen it is. He doesn’t look particularly powerful. Even the rich and famous are mortal.”

Desmond also believes the portraits transcend notions of celebrity. “In the end, you’re conscious less of the fame and more of the physiognomy: eyes, noses, mouths. Some are beautiful, some are engaging, some are quite freaky. You see so many faces that you leave with a feeling of the breadth of humanity, which is not something you expect when you walk in.”

Close-Up is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until 13 February. See the article in The Big Issue for photos.

Down to earth

In Community development, Environment, The Big Issue on

Communes are back. Actually, they never went away. They’ve shaken the naked-hippie image to offer a practical alternative to modern challenges.


ONE idyllic Friday afternoon – like many afternoons at the Homeland community – an impromptu parents’ circle formed outside Rose West and Kai Tipping’s small, rented house.


Rose knelt on the grass in her long skirt, while their elder daughter, Mali, home from primary school, alternately strode and sprinted around the open space with her friends. Their other daughter, Persia – two years old and possessed of an altogether wicked zest for life, laboured indiscriminately in the vegetable patch.


Two years ago, the young couple had left the city for the country. They sought a manageable, affordable lifestyle and more freedom and safety for their daughters. They found a commune. And in that, they’re not alone.


TWENTY-FOUR years before Rose and Kai made their life-altering move, Phil Bourne’s family moved to Seymour, 100km north of Melbourne, to start a communal living project with another like-minded family.


The small community was named, aptly, Commonground. Over the years other families have come and gone; the community hasn’t yet grown as Bourne had hoped. But the original two families, the core group, remain, and have since formed links with others through Cohousing Australia – a hub for communal living projects, which Bourne chairs.


Living enmeshed with others isn’t always ideal. There are times when, as he says, Bourne would have preferred to be a “hermit”. But he still feels that, ultimately, it’s worth it. “It’s what we term a high-input, high reward lifestyle,” he explains.


Recently, Bourne and the old guard of communal dwellers have been sensing that people are, once again, beginning to see value in their way of life. “I don’t know whether we’re kidding ourselves, but when the people who’ve been in this scene a long time get together, we’re convinced there’s a new energy around,” he says. “People are looking at what’s happening with the world and they’re hungry to find other options.


“In current times of climate change, peak oil and social isolation, when the single person household is the fastest growing housing sector, we think it’s time for the next wave of intentional communities,” Bourne says. “But to get from dreaming it to doing it is not easy.”


In Australia, rural landsharing communities flourished throughout the 1970s. After the 10-day Aquarius festival in Nimbin in 1973 – often described as Australia’s version of Woodstock – a number of attendees stayed on and started utopian communities throughout northern NSW.


The movement was inspired by New Age and simple-living ideas, together with concern about spiking oil prices, environmental degradation and the limits to economic growth.


“The intentional communities of the ’60s and ’70s had a lot of good intentions, but the application was vague,” Bourne concedes. “In many ways, it was downtrodden by the mainstream as hippie nonsense – a percentage of which had truth to it and a percentage of which missed the point.”


The Homeland community was founded in 1977, on a former dairy farm half-an-hour by car from Bellingen, an artsy town on NSW’s mid-north coast. Now, about three-dozen adults and children live there. The members aren’t allowed to own any land, but they can own their home. Each adult pays $30 per week in rent to cover upkeep on the extensive shared facilities, including the recreation house, guests’ cottage, laundry, shower block, barns, orchards and festival fields.


The community was modelled on the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in Scotland, famous for mystical gardeners who grew supernaturally large cabbages on sandy soil. But the connection vanished in the early 1980s, as the overseas philosophy became obscured by the haze of marijuana smoke closer to home.


Like all communities, membership and motivation has ebbed and flowed. “Five years ago,” one long-term Homeland resident explains, “we were lamenting that we were becoming a geriatric farm.” Then a number of young families started moving onto the land.


AT Homeland, the afternoon continued on its comfortably unplanned course. A friend of Rose and Kai dropped in with his toddlers, and two other young mums from up the hill happened by with their daughters. “There are no play dates on Homeland,” Rose explained later. “You don’t ring up the other mother, organise a week in advance and go to a cafe and spend money. It just happens.”


While the children whooped, the adults spoke about placentas and sleeping patterns, the uncomfortable crevices that ticks find, and the humility required when asking someone else to remove them.


It was an earthy conversation, not an astral one: more permaculture than counter-culture.

 

IN all likelihood, this kind of practical exchange wouldn’t be uncommon among latter day communal dwellers. “You don’t get naked hippies running around the hills any more,” says Dr Bill Metcalf, a ‘communitarian’ scholar at Griffith University who has published several books on the subject.


“A lot of people see communal living as a very sensible option,” Metcalf continues. “They aren’t looking at it in the utopian sense – it’s just a much more sane way to live in a rural area. The interest is moving to a strata of society that wouldn’t have considered it 20 years ago, because it was seen as too outrageous.”


Metcalf says there are hundreds of intentional communities throughout Australia, from spiritual groups to survivalists, nudist colonies to eco-villages.


“No matter where you go, we’ve got these communities. Some are very upmarket, some very downmarket.”


For two decades, Metcalf has been working on an encyclopaedia of communities established in Australia before the ‘baby boomer’ generation. When he began, he expected it to be a brief undertaking. But, he says, “I keep finding new ones faster than I can research them. In every state there are amazing examples: there are lesbian separatist communes from the 1870s; groups who believed in a single tax; nudist groups; vegetarians. You name it, they’re out there.”

 

JUST as the kinds of communities and structures change over time, utopian dreams are also tempered from within. Close to Rose and Kai’s house, along a short walking track, is an open-walled barn, set among small beds of flowers and vegetables. It is home to Jacque Flavell, who has lived on Homeland for 22 years.


“What we’ve gradually come to realise is that you don’t have to try and work it all out so you love everyone,” she said. “When you see someone and you don’t really want to talk to them, it starts to make you sick. Eventually I think: ‘Well, I better do something about myself. I may not get to love them, but I better not let them give me an ulcer.’”


Flavell arrived on the community as a single mother with two young children. She had been a cabaret dancer, including a stint with the Moulin Rouge in Paris, but decided to radically simplify her life. She raised her children on the property without a car, avoiding machines wherever possible.


“I laugh now, when I look back,” she said. “I thought I would come here and learn from these much more evolved beings, but they were just like us. We’re just a bunch of people who are trying to figure something out. I still have things to learn.”


Later in the afternoon, Kai arrived home after teaching a samba drumming class to school kids in another town. He has the broad shoulders of someone who’s grown up on the land but, until recently, little of the practical know-how. (“I’m terribly scared of snakes,” he confided.) He and Rose, like Flavell, both hail from cities.


“I’m reaping the benefits of the work other people have put into the community, and it’s been a blessing,” he said. “The relationships are more complicated – I’m still getting used to the protocols. If you see an old fridge, you can’t just throw it out. It takes a long time to get anything done.”

The couple are clear about the obstacles associated with life this far from the mainstream, be they snakes and ticks, car-reliance or disputes with ex-members. Even so, their choice makes sense.


“If you look around the world and throughout history, I think people have lived like this most of the time,” Rose said. “When I travelled overseas this is how I saw people living: they pool resources and they share work, and a big part of that shared work is raising kids.”


Mali entered the room with a present for her mother: a soft, crocheted bird she had made at school. Rose murmured her approval by clucking like a chook, but the child protested. “Oh, it’s a bluebird,” Rose said. “It just looks a bit like a hen.” Unfussed, Mali raced off again, after asking permission to go to the common house with another child.


“All the faces around here, I know them all, and they’re my friends,” Rose continued. “I hope to spend many years together raising our kids and doing that all in a beautiful environment, with mountains in the background and a river flowing in front. I can’t ask for more than that.”

 

DIY community


IF you want to start an intentional community, don’t be naive: expect conflict and learn how to get over it. That’s the advice from Dr Bill Metcalf, gleaned from decades researching and living on communities.


“None of them run smoothly,” says Metcalf. “And the vast majority of people who want to create a community never succeed.”


The flip side, however, is that at their best, communities are socially enriching, environmentally sound and cheap to live on. “Almost invariably, people who grow up in intentional communities say they had a wonderful childhood.”


There are some practical challenges. Wedged by strict council regulations and steep property prices, people often have trouble finding suitable land. Also, properties classed as multiple occupancies usually can’t be subdivided, and without the security of individual title, banks take a lot of convincing to approve loans. Increasingly, would-be communities opt for strata title, rather than a cooperative, corporation or tenants-in-common structure.


“The old model, where a few hippies would pool their dole cheques and put illegal shacks on a clapped out dairy farm – those days are well and truly gone,” says Metcalf. “Now it requires elaborate financial management. It can cost millions of dollars by the time you get something operating with roads and facilities.”


Rural communities aren’t the only option. Phil Bourne, from Cohousing Australia, is promoting an urban hybrid model, called cohousing, in which about 15 to 30 homes are clustered around a common house and open space.


The individual dwellings are private and self-contained, not communal, but the residents pool some resources. The common house might include a shared guest room, kitchen, laundry and shed.

The concept began in Denmark in the 1970s and has become popular in Europe and North America. There are about half a dozen cohousing communities in Australian cities already, and several more in planning.


“Cohousing has a lot of appeal for current generations because you maintain personal equity and autonomy,” Bourne says. “And you don’t have to move out to the country. It’s an option for medium density urban living that still has the room for chooks and a veggie garden.”

 

Published in The Big Issue, with photographs by Conor Ashleigh.

For further information, go to abc.net.au/rn/utopias