Eco Home Among the Gum Trees

     Olive Veverbrants, a Western Arrernte woman, treads softly upon her traditional land in the heart of Namatjira country. Her famous countryman, Albert, immortalised this land through his distinctive watercolour paintings. Olive, 69, is leaving her own footprints at Arrillhjere, 30 km west of Alice Springs, in the form of an eco house that is a model for clean, green living in the arid zone. The microwave oven converted into a mailbox at the start of the driveway tells you that you have arrived at the eco home among the gum trees.

          Outside, the summer sun beats down and it is already brutally hot at 10 in the morning. Inside the earth-brick house, it is noticeably cooler. Olive lays the table while I peruse the gallery of family photographs on the pastel-painted walls. Chinese grandfather. Aboriginal mother. English father. Latvian husband. Multiculturalism runs in the family and in Olive’s very veins. She is a citizen of the world, determined to preserve the world for the next generation.

          “Australia is second only to the US for greed and wastefulness. In many ways, modern Australian society is very ugly,” she says in a tone of sorrow, not anger.

          Olive has named her house after her late mother, Gloria Lee Ngale. To give it its full name, it is the Gloria Lee Ngale Environmental Learning Centre and students and helpers are welcome. They come from around the world to absorb Olive’s subtle teaching, which often begins with the contemplation of a humble water drum.

          Olive’s mother and father, “Lofty” Purdy, an English minerals prospector, raised four daughters on remote Territory mining fields. They scraped a living from meagre yields of mica, wolfram and gold. They lived in a bough shed and a tent. Water they obtained by filling a 200-litre or 44-gallon drum at the nearest government borehead and carting it home on the back of a store truck. It was these early experiences of making do with next-to-nothing that inspired Olive to honour her family’s legacy of desert survival through the eco house. She shows one of the old drums to demonstrate her parents’ extreme challenges with water conservation.

          “Yes, we were poor, alright, but so was everybody else in the Depression years,” she said. “My parents coped with the deprivations and the hardships. There was no access to medical help, no shops, no electricity, no phones, no bitumen roads. We did not own a vehicle. The whole family bathed in the one lot of water. Mother then used it to grow pumpkins and climbing beans up the bough shed walls for food and shade.”  

          Olive recalls the struggle of growing up in rural poverty without bitterness or regret, although the early years have taken their toll on her health. She thinks that poor nutrition caused her to lose most of the sight in one eye. She has diabetes and is less sprightly these days due to the onset of arthritis. Nevertheless, she was pleased and proud to show me around her place and to describe the design features that enable her to conserve energy and resources and to reduce waste.

          Earth building, using local materials, is a central tenet of Olive’s “design for living” philosophy. Her house is made from 14,000 mud bricks, all from the rich, red earth beneath her.

          “The advantages of earth building, as I saw it, are related to cost and resource-use,” she said. “There is plenty of earth available for bricks on-site so why spend money on cement that costs three times what it does on the coast? And there’s the cost of transport of the cement from the Alice Springs railhead, especially when it’s going out to the remote Aboriginal communities, hundreds of kilometres away.”

          The result is a modest, east-west oriented bungalow of 135 square metres that certainly does blend in well with the environment. Its constantly shaded walls, under large, overhanging eaves, produce dramatic cooling effects inside, where there is no air conditioning. The house is positioned to catch the breezes and reduce the impact of the sun.

          Harnessed properly, the sun, of course, is far from unwelcome at Olive’s place. Solar energy fuels her modest array of household appliances and provides hot water. Solar panels on the roof can produce and store 8.8 kilowatt hours of electricity. Olive must look at the gauge on the laundry wall to determine the extent of her daily energy use.

          “If the gauge indicates low storage,” she said, “I probably can’t watch the evening news on TV. My solar system has no diesel backup, so what you see is what you get. I don’t wear whites (because it takes more energy to wash them) and I never do any ironing.”

          A shower at Olive’s house is strictly limited to three minutes. Although she does receive the town water supply, her main source of H2O is rainwater, falling inconsistently from the desert heavens and stored in two enormous tanks.

          Water “harvesting” and conservation is another mainstay of her arid-zone living practice. Her 400-square-metre garden is marked by channels and runnels, which direct rainwater to the most deserving plants and trees. Citrus and mulberry trees flourish under the care of a friend and volunteer gardener, Nick, who has also recently planted an olive tree. With his help, Olive hopes to get much more out of her garden. She remembers her mother’s efforts at food production on the stony mining fields of the 1930s and, typically, applies her catch-all philosophy to the management of her desert garden.

          “From these plants that I tend with scarce water, I expect a return in this order: food, shade, windbreaks, bush regeneration, ground cover and dust suppression.”

          Waste disposal also features highly on her green-living agenda. A worm farm serves the dual purpose of organic waste-disposal and compost-production. Non-organic waste is burnt and buried. She incinerates, then buries, tin cans after she has crushed and flattened them. Her property has no rubbish collection service, so the waste materials, although few, are returned to the earth of Arrillhjere.

          Now part of the Iwupataka Aboriginal Land Trust, Olive’s home is at a former, popular picnic and camping spot that used to be called Fenn Gap. Six years after she commenced her low-impact occupancy, Olive is still picking up shards of broken glass from old beer bottles. Whitefella picnics at Fenn Gap, it seems, were rarely dry affairs.

          Seated comfortably at her dining room table, noticing the thermometer showing the interior at about 10 degrees cooler than the outside, we enjoy a cup of tea, brewed from town water. From one outside tap, the water passes through an activator to remove impurities, including calcium, before arriving in the kitchen in 10-litre containers. Bringing in the water is a job that has fallen to Barry, the other volunteer and housemate. He has found Arrillhjere to be a place of personal refuge and his friend Olive restful and inspiring company.

          Her forebears also trod lightly upon the earth, using its resources wisely and well. Her Chinese grandfather, Ah Hong, ran a market garden and informal boarding house on Gap Road in Alice Springs after arriving in Australia from Macau in 1873. Her grandmother, Ranjika, was a Western Arrernte woman. Their daughter, Gloria, Olive’s mother, was born under a gum tree in 1908.  

          Olive, born in a tent in 1933, the second of four daughters for Lofty and Gloria, remembers her early childhood on the barren mining fields and later in Alice Springs as a boarder at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart school. Her life was peopled by the legends of the Outback, one of whom was her famous namesake, the anthropologist and Aboriginal rights activist, Olive Pink. Although many thought her “fierce”, Olive remembers Miss Pink as a polite and prim figure, wrapped in her trademark white frock and shielding her skin with her pink parasol.

          “As children, we would always be polite to Miss Pink,” said Olive. “You gave her respect and it was returned. We were never in awe of her, though.”

          As a young woman, Olive was living and working in Sydney when the first wave of European migrants arrived after the Second World War. Nineteen-year-old Verners Veverbrants, from Latvia, was part of the fresh new face of urban Australia and must have appealed to the young woman from the heart of the country. Before long, Verners had obtained her heart and she his Baltic name. Olive recalls that Sydney in the early fifties was a heady and intoxicating place, mainly because of the new ethnic mix.

          “Living there gave me my first real taste of multiculturalism,” she said. “I loved the languages and the food and the intensity of the times, both socially and politically. It seemed that we all got on together so well.”

          During more than 30 years of marriage, Olive and Verners covered a lot of territory. They raised two children, Lisa and Jon, and Olive pursued many careers and personal interests. When Verners died in 1983, Olive began to look more closely at the place that had sustained her early life and nurtured her spiritual beginnings. Her thoughts turned towards home and she returned to her mother’s country, west of Alice.

          Olive was at Gloria’s side when the diminutive Aboriginal woman returned to her spiritual keepers. For Olive, her plan to preserve her mother’s heritage and spirit in mud-bricks and mortar became a full-time occupation. The Gloria Lee Ngale Environmental Learning Centre was rapidly taking shape.

          From the mid 1990s, Olive used her own inspiration and tenacity to get various arms of the bureaucracy to the drawing board and to provide the support and funding to make her “sustainable arid-zone living dream” a reality. Once the land trust property at Iwupataka became available to her, through traditional ownership entitlements granted to her mother, she set about making good her design for low-impact living in the desert.

          Her ideas caught the imagination of the renowned Alice-based architect, Brendan Meney, with whom she discussed her design and lifestyle requirements. She then obtained the support of the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CAT), an Alice-based organization that develops technologies for Indigenous people living in desert communities. She made the CAT connection because she wanted Aboriginal people to be involved in the building of her dream home.

          The construction manager was Andrew Parnell. The Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), the Arrernte Council and the Tangentyere Council combined to provide an enthusiastic, young works team. Many were first-time trainees and English was often not their mother tongue.

          After much planning, construction began in the summer of 1995. Olive was on the site most days, ever the gentle and inspiring Earth Mother. She probably had her hand, literally, in most of the 14,000 mud-earth bricks that went to make up her very special country residence.

          Of course, being the sort of person she is, she did not stop on that day in June 1997 when David Curtis of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which provided the funding, did the honours by cutting the ribbon to declare the house open. It has been “open house” ever since with visits by over 3,000 people from “grey nomads” or retired travellers to parties of school children.

           We walked out to a bough shelter and campfire area, ringed by mature ironwood trees, where she brings the bigger groups, many of them Indigenous people, to absorb the quiet and the lessons of her philosophy. She has lately put another brilliant idea into practise – she and her volunteers have constructed an amphitheatre from recycled car tyres, arranged in ascending rows and secured by packed earth. You won’t find her at the top, though, lecturing people about the necessity to go easy on Mother Earth. Olive has always had her feet on the ground. Her philosophical grounding is respect for the earth, for the wisdom and endurance of her people and for self.

          “As an Indigenous woman, who has (lived and worked) in an arid-zone, sustainable, earth-built house for the past six years, I feel that I have personally addressed many issues,” she said. “Seventy-five per cent of inland Australia is low-rainfall, arid land but, until recent times, architecture and other lifestyle factors have always favoured the Australian coastline, where the majority of the people live. By building my home and making my lifestyle accessible to others, I hope eventually to influence a wider population, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who live in remote Australia.”

          As I take my leave, I see Olive, bending to the red earth of her country, retrieving more broken glass, the legacy of the white man’s dreaming that so recently exerted its moral and physical domination over this land of the Western Arrernte. About ten black cockatoos, a red band across their splayed tail-feathers a vivid slash of colour, ascend to the scrawny branches of an ironwood in a cloud of rusty screeches. I interpret this as a most prophetic sign, knowing that the black cockatoo is an important totemic creature for the Western Arrernte people.

          In the years to come, the black cockatoos will hold their noisy, tree-top corroborees and there won’t be any more broken glass to sift from this ancient earth. The young people will sit in the shade of mature mulberry trees to absorb more of Olive’s brand of gentle inspiration and desert knowledge. These will be just some of the fruits of Olive’s labour.  

Olive welcomes her guests

 Technical Data

 The house has an enclosed floor area of 135 square metres and an overall roof area of 252 square metres, 1.86 times the floor area. The various technologies and arid-zone features include earth construction, rainwater harvesting, careful handling of wastes and careful use of energy-consuming appliances. The renewable energy features include a solar electric system, without diesel backup, which is connected to a battery bank and control systems. There is a wood-fired booster for the solar hot water system and for cooking on a combustion stove in winter. The only energy purchased is bottled gas for the stove.

The solar electric system consists of eight Neste 120W crystalline panels plus four Sharp 175 W monocrystalline panels mounted on the roof at 24 degrees. The system is connected to a bank of 6x4 Volt Century lead acid batteries, with a Trace C60 regulator and a Selectronic 2.2 kW sinewave inverter. The array produces up to 8.8 kWh/day.

The cost of materials, equipment and some labour was AU$ 142,000, not including the subsidised training programmes. The house has minimal running costs by Australian remote-area standards.

Meredith Campbell