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.
Rain “harvesting” is one of the techniques on show in the
modern eco house. Other green features include a solar electricity
system and a worm farm for waste recycling. In the garden, from old car
tyres, arranged in ascending rows and secured with packed earth, Olive
has built an amphitheatre to entertain her visitors. But she does not
lecture them from a great height. Her down-to-earth philosophy is
self-respect and respect for Mother Earth.
Meredith Campbell |
