The Bulletin, November 15, 1995
Australia's Leading News weekly
Victoria Laurie reports:
Transcript from p95
Innovative and colourful options for housing Aborigines in remote
communities aren't without controversy.
Victor Isaacs is an unlikely champion of architectural innovation.
He saw active service in the Korean War, joined a travelling boxing
troupe to become Victor "The Butcher" Isaacs and spent many years
odd-jobbing around Western Australia's wheat belt.
But in the past two years he has waged a quiet campaign to change
ideas about remote Aboriginal housing, partnered by Perth-based
architect Phillip Gibbs.
The result is a radiantly hued space dome erected amid the stony
undulations north of Leonora in W.A's desert.
The canvas dome is covered with exuberant dots and curves depicting
a water snake. An aerial view of the dome reveals five squatting
figures and on the side is Isaac's totem, the eagle.
It recently won a commendation in the national Dulux colour awards.
The company provided weather-resistant paint to render the dome's
cotton calico covering.
"It's guaranteed to last 10 years," says Gibbs. "And if someone puts
a foot through the canvas, you patch it by simply painting over the
tear, which then sticks together. It's rather like the old wheatbags
and whitewash."
Gibbs, who is also an unconventional designer and author of a book on
Malay house design, developed an active interest in Aboriginal housing
problems after visiting fringe camps around Perth. Born in the NSW
Riverina, he grew up on a farm whose perimeter included the town tip.
" One day I discovered there were Aboriginal people living there.
Fifty years later, coming to Western Australia I found things hadn't
changed much."
Isaacs has a different connection with Aboriginal housing - with his
wife, Joan, he ran one of Perth's first hostels for Aboriginal people
visiting the city. In the mid-1980s the couple moved back to Isaacs'
birthplace at Wilson's Patch, a bleak and stony terrain 80km north
of the remote mining town of Leonora.
Destructive: The couple wanted to set up an alcohol-free settlement
in which their nine children, their families and others could live
isolated from the destructive influences of city life. They took with
them a few elderly relatives. Then they salvaged building materials
from abandoned mining sites and rubbish dumps and built huts.
Running water and telephone were connected in 1990 and last year the
WA housing authority, Homeswest, provided two portable dwellings.
Over the years Isaacs has accepted requests to house a small number
of juvenile offenders, parolees, petrol sniffers and a few Aboriginal
patients from Perth's psychiatric hospital. In 1990 the couple obtained
a 50-year lease and, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
assistance, drew up a five-year plan to run a hostel on the land.
Isaacs has met some opposition, not least from a local Aboriginal group
which objects to his use of tribal land and which publicly protested when
Joan Isaacs, a non-local Aborigine, was buried at Wilson's Patch after her
death in 1990. Adverse publicity of another kind followed last year when
the Burdekin inquiry into the rights of people with mental illness
criticised the primitive conditions for the psychiatric patients.
Urgent improvements were needed, yet the community had few resources
and only modest government subsidies for its care of welfare cases.
When Isaacs met Gibbs, they explored the idea of Buckminster Fuller-designed
geodesic domes, which Isaacs had seen in Korea. Gibbs designed a
10 metre-diameter dome, standing six metres high at the apex, that proved
comparatively cheap to erect. Gibbs found a Perth manufacturer to make
the 165 struts and 65 special joints, and the dome was erected by four
men in a day. "When the last pentagon was slotted in, the whole structure
suddenly locked rigid," say Gibbs.
Unbleached canvas was sized by painting lengths of cloth on the dusty
ground before they were stretched over each pentagonal plane. The dome
was dubbed a "wilga", a local Aboriginal name for a beehive-shaped canopy
traditionally made of natural materials. It cost about $6000 for the
frame, $4000 for the canvas and another few thousand dollars for
paving and brickwork. The eye-catching water snake motif, painted
by Isaac's son-in-law, Billy Dean, is fitting the dome covers the
ablutions block.
Wilson's patch is now an incongruous group of serviceable but ugly
shanties huddled around the rainbow-coloured structure. Isaacs'
plan is to build several dome clusters, big and small, to provide
families with sleeping areas and a community kitchen.
Repeated: "The idea is that this structure will be repeated many times
around the community, just like the traditional wilga canopy shape,"
says Gibbs. European-Australian culture, he says, "focuses unashamedly
on the isolation of the single family unit, [but this] may have little
relevance to an Aboriginal family living in a remote settlement with
complex inter-family relationships".
The airy, open dome structure contrasts with the grim failure of many
purpose-built Aboriginal housing projects. Gibbs and Isaacs point to
flat-topped tin sheds or shacks with small louvred windows, made of
indestructible panels that, says Gibbs, "are the pride of housing
authorities because you can't put your boot through them".
It's 50 degrees in the shade in places like this. Try to live in one of
these boxes with a flat roof and by ten in the morning they are
unbearable."
Isaacs is convinced the dome structure is the solution: "I have spent
two years of time and effort working with professional people to come
up with a building that the community wants."
WA's building industry training body, the PPISTC Skills Centre, calls
it "a brilliant... practical and low-cost" building solution for
semi-skilled communities.
But money is the major obstacle. While $163,000 has been allocated
for construction at Wilson's Patch, Homeswest's Aboriginal Housing Board
spokesman Bob Browning says further funds cannot be released until
problems of "long-term durability and design" are addressed. Gibbs
and Isaacs have been told the wilga dome does not meet health regulations
- for example, food preparation under a dome would not meet sanitation
by-laws.
Gibbs says Homeswest "appears to have a policy that Aboriginal housing
must be visually indistinguishable from mainstream housing, [meaning]
Aboriginal people end up living in a garden shed."
Isaacs is equally disillusioned. "Homeswest may feel that it will lose
some of its control," say Isaacs. "Our experience is that it enjoys
having control over our lives."
The Bulletin, November 15, 1994
William Croft Perth Australia
mktrecon@iinet.com.au