CAUTION
This document may contain images of Aboriginal persons who are now deceased.
I am aware that it is now fashionable and ‘politically correct’ to call ‘Aboriginal People’ ‘Indigenous’ but they were called Aboriginal at the time of which I am writing so I chose to use that name.
My office in Todd Street had about five steps up to the front door and at the kerb right in front was the taxi rank.
People, mainly aboriginals, used to sit on my steps to wait for a taxi and sometimes staff and clients used to have trouble accessing the entrance.
So I wrote to the NT Administration (there was no council then) to ask if they would put seating in the street. My request was published in the local paper. When the Commonwealth government, Liberal-Country Party coalition, (pre-Whitlam) started an Aboriginal Housing scheme, the director of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs for housing), Kevin Martin, having assumed by that letter that I was not racist, approached me to get involved with aboriginal housing.
One day I witnessed a scene played out on the steps to my office.
A well dressed young aboriginal man and his well dressed young wife, as “station aboriginals” usually were, were sitting on my steps waiting for a taxi but the young woman who was quite drunk kept wandering on to the road and was in danger of getting run over. The young man at some risk to himself kept rescuing her but she was protesting and resisting being rescued. On one of his rescue attempts she was very resistant so he knocked her unconscious, picked her up and lovingly carried her back and affectionately made her comfortable on my steps. I saw this as an act of love. Today’s “politically correct” city dwelling Australians would see this as assault and want to arrest the man.
Sometime around 1970 I read a newspaper report about how the commonwealth government had asked the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to do a study on aboriginal health and report on ‘what could be done to improve it’
The report basically said that virtually nothing could be done to improve the health of Aborigines until their standard of housing is improved.
There had been a number of attempts by governments in the past to house aboriginals but without success.
Many aboriginals just destroyed the houses they were allocated.
The William McMahon liberal federal government devised a housing scheme where the government would provide each community with the materials, tools, equipment and one qualified tradesman to supervise the construction of aboriginal houses but the aboriginal community had to provide all other labour. They reasoned (wrongly or rightly) that the aboriginals would not be so keen to destroy their houses if they had put some effort into building them.
We were commissioned to design a couple of suitable houses for Santa Teresa Mission and part of our job was to produce a bill of quantities and list of equipment required, get prices for it and arrange delivery.
This project had just started when the Whitlam labor government was elected in 1972.
The new government up-graded ‘The Office of Aboriginal Affairs’ to the ‘Department of Aboriginal Affairs’ who determined that the previous government’s aboriginal housing scheme was racist. “ White people do not have to build their own houses, they have builders do it” they said.
Obviously these labor people weren’t poor like I was when I built my first house. I could not afford a builder.
In about 1973 the federal labor government devised a comprehensive plan of procedure that each Aboriginal Community had to comply with to get federal funds to build houses.
They asked the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) to assist. They then organised a national conference of architects who had had some involvement with aboriginal housing including me.
Those with previous experience, including government departments, were asked to provide a report to the conference on their experience and their ideas on how the government should proceed.
The conference was held in Canberra and a committee of the RAIA, ‘The Aboriginal Housing Panel’, was formed to collect, collate and disseminate information on aboriginal housing.
The procedure, basically, was that any aboriginal community wanting housing had to form a properly constituted local council and or Housing Association and had to commission a lawyer, an accountant and architect whose jobs were to do all the necessary relevant paperwork.
When the housing association was set up, their architect was to consult with the aboriginal council and determine their housing needs and with evidence, drawings and estimates, submit an application to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs for funds to implement their housing scheme. It was ,in theory, a good scheme.
The funds were made available to the aboriginal council but had to be administered by their accountant, architect and lawyer.
Near the end of each month the three professionals had to organize a meeting with these councils and present each account and tenders received and obtain permission from the council by voting to pay these accounts or accept tenders presented.
The procedure of setting up the councils, consultations, preparation of evidence, plans of needs, estimating costs, submission to the department for funds and receiving approval to proceed usually took about twelve to eighteen months.
In addition we were directed to get built, before any housing, an equipment and materials storage shed in a secured yard so that materials could not be stolen or equipment misused.
Criticism soon started.
“These people have received a million dollars and twelve months later, no houses have yet been built!” Or “only two houses have been built for a million dollars!”.
Consultation with the aboriginal people was sometimes made difficult by community politics.
It was usually the (white) community adviser or the community shop manager who saw, we housing consultants, as a threat to their superior position in “their community”. We at first had to rely on these people to organize meetings with the aboriginal councils but some would instead, organize that the people we had to meet with were not there when we arrived after a 300 km drive mainly on dirt roads.
When we had organized meetings through other channels these manouvres were confirmed to us.
After consultation with one mission run community we designed two houses (we usually started with only two houses to give everyone a chance to assess the designs). Their requirements, as told to us by the aboriginals appointed to speak, were ‘houses just like the shop manager’s house but with a wider verandah and no concrete floor on the verandah.’ “We want sand on the verandah” they said.
When the houses were complete a missionary from Adelaide wrote to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs saying “the architect has not put concrete floors on the verandahs, he must be a racist, I am told on good authority that Mr. McPhee has concrete on his verandah.”
Amusingly I had just built my verandah on an old house I bought and had not yet laid the concrete floor at that stage.
Some aboriginal people asked for just one room with a verandah all round and shutters instead of glass in the windows. The comments from, usually city people, were ‘would you live in a house like that?, so why give an inferior house like that to an aboriginal.?’
It was difficult to discover what exactly the aboriginal community wanted.
Sometimes we found that someone had preceded our visit for consultation and told them what to tell us but always the people we spoke to were obviously not the decision makers. The decision makers or elders would select two or three representatives, usually young men who could speak English well, to be interviewed. These spoke-persons would give us answers that the rest of the community might not necessarily agree with. Also the aboriginal culture is quite different to ours and they do not necessarily respond to direct questions as we expect. The result often is that the questioner gets totally the wrong impression, sometimes the opposite impression from the expectations of the aboriginal community.
My solution to these problems was to devise a method of consultation so there was no doubt about their requirements.
When we had explained the purpose of our visit to an aboriginal community and what we could do for them we would say “we do not want you to tell us today what you want,”
Would you think about who will be the first two families to get a house?, and
where will those houses have to be built?.
Talk about it with everyone and we will return next week, if it suits you, and you can tell us then.”
On our return visit we would talk to the two families that had been chosen and inspect their chosen sites. Usually the two chosen would be Elders of the community. At the end of the second visit we would say “would you talk about who will get the next two houses and tell us next week?” and so on…From this “on ground” information we would build up a community plan.
The site for each house I believe is of paramount importance. In my opinion many government housing attempts have failed because of their failure to recognize the importance of the position of one house in relation to others. I am writing about tribal aboriginals not urban aboriginals.
In one community, after following the above procedure, one single man, a widower, had chosen a site where the water from a large area gathered to drain into the river.
I explained the problems he would have with water when it rained and suggested that we move his site about ten metres and he agreed.
Back in the office while preparing the preliminary plans I thought it may be important to not move his site. At the next visit I said to him “we will build your house where you first asked and reshape the riverbank slightly to divert the storm water.”
Standing with him on his site he replied “ I am happy that you will build my house here because no matter where you build my house, I have to live here”.
I don’t need to know why the position of each house is important to them, I only need to know that it is.
This did not apply to every community and even the one described may have evolved away from that by now but this procedure of consultation ensured that we got it right at that time.
For the community just described, we designed houses with three or six rooms and two store rooms around a court with a roof shaped like a truncated pyramid so the occupants could have a fire in the court and the smoke would be drawn through the opening at the top.
There were cosy places outside where you could sit protected from the cold South East winds but in the sun or in the shade of a large roof overhang, or sit in the shade where you could catch the breeze in the summer.
After my third visit, this community had accepted me, and every man met me at the air strip and I had to shake hands with about fifty men before we walked to their meeting place.
While we had the meeting under a tree the women gathered under another tree about thirty metres away.
When the meeting was concluded with the men the elders asked me to now have another meeting with the women so that they understood what was happening.
This community had never been managed by a mission or government and was still totally tribal even to the extent that every one had to have their hair cut on the same day and the women spun the hair into a large ball of string. They showed me their communal ball of string which was kept in the fork of a tree.
After one meeting I could see some preparation for a corroboree was happening and the elders showed me where to sit so I could watch but I said we have take off for Alice Springs in an hour, how long does it go on?. “All night” one of them said.
“But I will have to leave by 5.30”, I thought it might be rude to leave a corroboree before the end.
“No matter” he said, you can watch til then.
The corroboree was about exorcising the evil out of two young men who had been to town and got drunk. Drinking alcohol was not permitted by this community.
While the two young men were being prepared three or four older men were chanting to the rhythm they were beating out on their rhythm sticks.
The preparation happening was; sticking vertical stripes, about 70 mm wide, of little fluffy white feathers, leaving bare skin about the same width between, all down their bodies. They had obviously been washed before because their skin was shining black and with the fluffy white stripes they looked like they were going to play Swan Lake. The adhesive they used looked like honey but they said it was Spinifex sap. People were gathering around, sitting on the ground and a fire was lit at the centre of the circle.
This looked like it was going to be very interesting and I discussed with the pilot, my instructor, if there was any possibility of our staying the night. “Not a chance, the plane is booked for first light in the morning” he said. Because I was officially on a training flight we were supposed to be back before dark so we had to leave before the corroboree got properly underway. There was a head wind and so I got my first lesson on landing at night.
Although some stirrers criticized us for using planes it was a lot cheaper than driving because driving would take three days, one there, one to do business and one back. Using a plane took only one long day.
JENNY THE DONKEY.
An officer of the South Australian Government’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs who I met on one of my jobs in the North of South Australia was promoted and transferred to Adelaide. While he and his family lived with this remote Aboriginal community he acquired a pet donkey called Jenny. He asked me if my family and I would mind Jenny until he found somewhere in Adelaide to keep her.
I said “yes, it will be good experience for my four boys.
To the amazement of Wallis street, Jenny was delivered to our place at number 3.
It was very much like having a giant dog, she would run up to greet me every time I came home from work, put her front feet on my shoulders and push me to the ground and lick my face. I could be seen dodging around, keeping a tree or bush between me and the donkey while working my way to the front door. So I had to fence off the back half of the yard to keep her under control and I could walk up to the fence and greet her in a civilized way.
But Jenny only stayed in the yard while it suited her. Whenever she wanted she could get out of our yard and into anyone else’s which fortunately was not that often, mostly she was content to stay in the yard.
The Baptist Minister and his family lived about three doors to the South, they were all afraid of Jenny and she knew it.
We would get a phone call from the Baptist Minister or his wife. “Would you please come and get your donkey, she won’t let us go outside of our house”. On the occasion that I went to get her she was having so much fun. She would wait at the side of the house, listening. When someone came to the back door she would race to that door a chase them back inside and some how she would know that at the same time someone was trying to get out the front door and in flash she would be at the front door chasing them back inside.
One weekend she wandered out onto the street as a pack of five or six local dogs came along. They chased her, she raced along the footpath with her head high making this dreadful distressed noise, the entire street ran out to see what was happening. I was thinking “what am I going to do” when she reached the end of our street. She stopped, turned and chased the dogs who then raced back along the street with Jenny after them yelping help help.
Then, just by watching us, she learnt to open doors.
We could not leave apples or bread or any other food that she fancied out on the kitchen bench or table or she would come inside and eat it.
I was refueling my car at the local service station when a young guy on a motor cycle pulled up on the opposite side of the pump. “Do you own that donkey in Wallis Street?” he asked.
“Yes I said”.
He said “My mate and I rent that house on the opposite side to you, on the corner”. “Yes I know it” I said and thinking “what’s she done now.”
”Well, last night we were taking our girl friends out to dinner and had them to our place for drinks first. The front door handle started to twist
. I thought hello, some bugger is trying to sneak into our house,
I crept up to the door, grabbed the handle and jerked the door open.
Your donkey walked straight to the coffee table, consumed all of the peanuts and went home. We couldn’t believe it, it made our night”.
She would let the boys ride her around the back yard but when she got tired of it she would go under a low branch of a tree and wipe them off. I heard Heather say to her “Jenny you are not to wipe the boys off like that” so Jenny would go around to the side of the house, out of our sight, and wipe them off.
Donkeys are apparently the self appointed fire fighters of the bush. Heather would get frustrated because she used to rake the dead leaves off the lawn and burn them in a heap but not since we got Jenny. Heather would light her pile of leaves and go inside, then someone would say “Jenny is all smouldering” and we would have to hose her down. Whenever Heather lighted the fire the donkey would roll on it and extinguish it.
I do not know why some people use the term “he’s a donkey” meaning he is stupid because donkeys are very smart animals but they can be very stubborn. You will never force them to do something against their will but you can persuade them.
Son Peter riding Jenny
****
Finke was a town with existing streets and surveyed blocks of land and a totally different set of circumstances to Willora. It used to be a railway town but the new railway by-passed the town.Before tackling the Finke housing challenge I spent a great deal of time talking to John McNeil and Margaret Bain who were working with the community of Finke. Margaret Bain in particular was living at Finke and trying to help them sort out their social problems and although she was with the Australian Inland Mission her efforts were of a practical nature, not only religious.
John McNeil was getting them involved with some economic activities that were compatible with their life style, like catching camels and selling them on the international market. Australian camels are sort after because there is no chance of them having foot and mouth disease.
I also visited the government run community at Amoonguna situated between Alice Springs and the airport where there was a government housing experiment at which they built ‘staged housing’.
This idea was to build a few of a ‘stage 1’ house, very simple and basic with no internal facilities. They cooked outside in the traditional way. They built a few that were, ‘stage 2’, still simple and basic but had some internal facilities, like a sink and wood stove and doors on the doorways and a few ‘stage 3’ houses that were like basic ‘white fella’ Housing Commission houses and if I remember correctly there was also a stage 4.
The stage 1 and 2 houses had a communal ablutions building.
The government plan was to settle a family in a stage 1 house and if they took good care of that they would be upgraded to stage 2 etc.
I was introduced to a young man and his wife who had rapidly risen to a stage 4 house which they proudly showed me through.
It was kept spotless.
Not a thing out of place, the vinyl floors gleaming, the laminex bench tops shining and all of the beds neatly made, like an exhibition house.
After talking to them for a while it came out that they actually lived on her parents’ verandah in her parents’ stage 2 house, not in the stage 4 house that they had been allocated.
Each morning the young wife went to her stage 4 house and cleaned it.
I asked “Why don’t you live in your own lovely house”.
Her reply was “it is too far from my parents. We like to live close to my parents”.
I know that in some aboriginal communities the son in-law is never allowed to see the mother in-law but that was not the case here.
They showed me their camp on her parents’ verandah which was tidy but was only a bed and a small cupboard.
Pointing to a stage 2 house next to her parents’ house he said “we liked it better when we lived in that house”
The government representative with me interpreted that to mean that a stage two house is all they want.
My interpretation was that the position of the house was more important to them than was the standard of sophistication.
At Finke there were additional problems that everyone except Margaret Bain and John McNeil had given up trying to solve.
The first being: When someone dies in a house, as part of the ceremony to send off the deceased’s spirit, they have to burn the house and the possessions of the deceased.
The second: If a very important person or persons should die then the entire community might move to another site altogether.
My attempt to solve these housing problems was to design a house structural system that would enable a ‘stage one’ house to be upgraded to a ‘stage two’, then to a ‘stage three’ etc. leaving it on the same site.
And should the worst happen and the entire community abandon the settlement, the houses could be dismantled and the components used to build new houses on new sites.
I had noticed that the men at Finke were particularly good at keeping their old cars going using innovative mechanical ideas no one else would have thought of. In other words they were good with spanners, nuts and bolts.
I designed a house built using a modular structural and modular wall system but much more robust than those already on the market.
The Finke people called it The ‘Aputula House’. This design was intended only as a solution to the peculiar and specific needs of the situation at Finke.
The architectural profession and most city people were horrified.
A meccano set house for indigenous people.
How unsuitable.
They should have houses made of indigenous materials like mud and sticks.
But to do that building skills are required and they had none.Most other architects did not like the shape of the fascia because there had been many dreadful ugly buildings built in city outskirts with this fascia shape. I also thought about changing the fascia shape but decided that this shape was the natural form of the roof structure so it would be fake and more expensive to devise a different shape.
With the help of John McNeil, some Finke men and money from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs a prototype was erected in Alice Springs.
The roof structure was a small-space frame made of one metre square pre-fabricated modules that were bolted together on the concrete floor slab. Temporary timber battens were placed on the slab to form a pre-camber in the frame. For the normal house there were four special modules with a sleeve through which four steel columns were passed. Additional columns could be used for larger buildings.
The space frame was jacked to one metre above the slab.
The columns were welded to base plates that had been cast in flush with the slab surface.
The roofing material was fixed to the space frame leaving out a sheet where the columns project through.
The roof frame was jacked to two metres above the floor.
An Aputula House
Electrical wiring and any other required services were run through the ceiling space and the straw ceiling panels placed in the bottom of the space frame, all done while standing on the floor. No ladders or scaffolding were necessary to this stage.
The roof is then jacked to it’s full height and bolted in position.
The last roof sheets and the ceiling panels around each column were fitted.
The ‘space frame modules’ were designed so that when all bolted together the bottom structural members also formed a ‘ceiling grid’ into which the ceiling panels were fitted.
We now had the full roof of a house supported on four columns.
The roof is not dependent on the walls for support so walls can be moved, added or deducted at any time.
Wall panels were 950 mm wide, 2,400 or 2,600 mm high and 50 mm thick made of light weight concrete sandwiched between two sheets of cement fibre board. Four men could easily carry and lift one panel into position. The panels were positioned with a 50 mm gap and the gap covered with pressed steel sections forming a wiring or plumbing duct between panels.
Where a window or door was required a panel was left out and a window or door panel fitted.
We planned a series of layouts that would work within this system.
A stage one house would have a large room each side of a central breezeway.
A stage two house would have the same as stage one but with a simple kitchen in one corner of one room and the other large room divided into two bedrooms.
A stage three house would have the breezeway glassed in using sliding doors and more sophisticated internal fittings.
The design was approved by the department of aboriginal affairs and a factory set up at Finke where the modular components for the roof frame were manufactured by the aboriginal men.
Several houses were built at Finke.
I was hoping that a manufacturer of pressed metal products, like steel door frames, would mass produce the space frame modules which would have dramatically reduced the cost but no one did.
Margaret Bain and John McNeil first convinced the community that instead of burning the house of a deceased person they could dismantle it, take the pieces back to the factory and burn the deceased’s possessions. The floor slab could stay vacant as long as they felt necessary and the modular units would be repainted and reused in other houses.
Years later I heard that they found it only necessary to repaint the house after leaving it vacant for sometime.
When an important member of the community died, Margaret Bain suggested that they try the idea of going bush (on a camping holiday in white mans terms) and return to their houses at Finke when they felt ready. As far as I know they adopted this procedure.
All this was thirty four years ago and I expect none of it would apply to the new generation that would now occupy Finke. I can imagine a team of anthropologists going there in the year 2008 and reporting back to Canberra ‘there is no evidence to support anything that Mr. McPhee has stated’ because young anthropologists had used this sentence in relation to my efforts frequently.
Some aboriginals told me how they used to, for fun and because they didn’t want them prying into their culture, send these young anthropologists on fools errands.
On one of my early visits to Finke when we were about to board the six seat plane, which was a regular service, Margaret Bain brought a young aboriginal woman with a baby to me and asked if I could take the baby to the Alice Springs Hospital because otherwise it probably would not survive the night. The Flying Doctor could not come until the next morning.
I said “could the mother come too?. “No, we have tried to persuade her but she will not get on a plane. We will drive her up tomorrow.”
The mother handed the baby to me with such care and sadness she looked like she was saying goodbye to it forever. The baby was seriously dehydrated and did not make a sound, I nursed it in a torn off part of a blanket to Alice where we had radioed ahead and had an ambulance waiting. Margaret Bain said “I hope this doesn’t turn you off coming to Finke for ever”. “Not a chance“ I said. About two weeks later when I saw Margaret Bain I asked her if the baby had survived she looked thoughtful and said “yes, its alright now”, but I had the feeling that she was telling me what she knew I wanted to hear.
A comprehensive hostel for Aputula aboriginal people visiting Alice Springs was successfully built in Alice Springs using this Aputula modular method of construction.
However John McNeil was ambitious for the Aputula people of Finke and decided that they could build all of the houses necessary for all aboriginal communities.
I did not agree with this because every community has its’ own needs and requirements.
The department of Aboriginal Affairs told John that he could sell an Aputula house to any community that wanted one.
This was a disaster.
This modular system worked well as long as the instructions were precisely followed but when some of the long time traditional tradesmen of mission managed communities tried to erect them using methods they considered ‘the right way to build a house’ they turned a simple procedure into a disaster. Basically they couldn’t cope with the idea of building the roof first. These missionary tradesmen resisted any idea of building houses in any method other than the traditional one they had been taught with a dogmatism that rivaled their missionary masters.
The result was that the department received scathing reports about the total failure of this method for building houses. And you know what politicians are like, they can not tell the difference between crap and facts. All they had to do was take a look at the successful ones at Finke.
If you want to use a new method of construction, I found it is best not to use tradesmen.
A popular criticism amongst the ignorant was “look at all of that steel in the roof, a roof for a house should not need all of that steel”. What they failed to understand, because they did not want to, was that most of that steel was very common, easily available and cheap ten millimetre diameter reinforcing bars.
Ernabella, in the North of South Australia, was one place where the Aputula house was a failure but I would not have tried to introduce it there myself.
I was doing other work at Ernabella like an Arts and Crafts Centre.
The women at Ernabella were producing a lot of art work but using acrylic paint instead of their traditional ochres. They were also printing fabrics with indigenous designs that were becoming popular.
The premises where they had to work was an old corrugated iron shed with gaps and parts of walls missing and no doors so they could not lock up. They badly needed better premises if they were to maintain and progress with this positive industry they had started.
After discussions with the community and Kevin Martin I designed an Arts and Crafts factory for them with all necessary facilities, but the politicians were tardy about approving the funds until the collapse of the Whitlam government put an end to it.
Aboriginal Directors of Aputula and John McNeil – Margaret Bain
****
On some mission communities the missionaries had been building the odd house using locally made concrete bricks but with clean washed sand from the dry creek beds which produced un-sympathetic dead grey walls.
When I suggested to the tradesmen in charge of these houses to make the bricks using the red earth and ten percent cement so the colours would blend with the landscape, they would not.
They said when they went to trade school they learned that the sand used should be clean, sharp and free of vegetable matter.
So it should be if you are making structural concrete but bricks do not have to have a high strength, what about mud bricks?.
The Priest at Balgo Mission just used the surrounding earth to make bricks and those houses blended well with the landscape.
I tried to introduce ‘squat toilet pans’ in a couple of communities where there had been a lot of trouble with the normal ‘western’ pans. In public toilets no one would want to sit on a dirty seat so they would try squatting over the pan with their feet on the pan which was causing them to be broken.
For that reason we always specified stainless steel pans but as a better solution I suggested installing squat pans which are used throughout Asia.
The political reaction was violent.
Only the worst racist would attempt to give aboriginals squat pans, imagine the backlash the government would suffer! (is it not racist to hold the opinion that Asians use inferior toilet pans?)
We were commissioned to design two houses for the Papunya community, a government settlement. There could be no direct consultation with the aboriginal people and the only house design that the white managers would tolerate was a suburban ‘Housing Commission’ type.
Since it had been the habit of some aboriginal persons at Papunya to light a fire in the centre of the living room to keep warm in winter, we designed an open fire place for the centre of the living space.
The previously mentioned Aboriginal Housing Panel decided to get more closely involved and to assess the practicability of the Aboriginal Housing Scheme so they sent a young architect and an anthropologist to Papunya to ‘help erect’ these two houses.
They obviously had no idea how to build a house because they sent a report to the Panel which was totally negative and some of the typical examples they gave were:
The screws for the door hinges that Mr. McPhee’s office sent out were too long and passed right through the doors and dangerous sharp screw points projected from the face of the doors that could easily cause injury. (they were screwing the hinges to the face of the doors instead of on the edge!!!) and reporting that it was me at fault.
And : of all of the houses designed by Mr. McPhee’s office, fifty percent of them have been abandoned and the occupants of the other fifty percent are talking about moving out of their houses. ( remember there were two houses).
The author of that report received an Institute of Architects award for good report writing.???
A friend who regularly visited Papunya and knew the aboriginal people well, told me that the family that had supposedly abandoned their house had no problems with it and had moved to a different settlement for family reasons. He saw them in their new settlement.
This Aboriginal Housing Panel was a committee of the RAIA so I complained to the president of the RAIA, Donald Bailey, that this young architect had acted unethically and had he talked to me instead of writing a report behind my back, he might have learnt something. Also a committee of my institute, of which I am a member in order to be protected from unfair criticism that can damage my reputation, is engaged in damaging my reputation.
I had no reply for about three weeks and the essence of the reply was that the Aboriginal Housing Panel is no longer a committee of the RAIA but is now an independent body. I objected to this cop-out but got no-where.
I was in Canberra and was asked to attend a meeting after dinner with a group of people from the Aboriginal congress.
Persons at the meeting were, Kevin Martin, the Director of ‘Housing, Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Ken Woolley, a well known architect who was advising on aboriginal housing, Ron Sevitt from Pettit and Sevitt, Housing developers, also an advisor, Virginia Braden who was a co-ordinator between consultants working on aboriginal housing and the Department of Aboriginal affairs without whom probably no houses would ever have been built.
We waited for more than an hour after the arranged time for these people (all city dwelling part aboriginal men) to turn up and when they did they had been drinking, sat at the board room table with their feet on the table.
With an extremely aggressive attitude their spokesman said ”you bastards are spending aboriginal money.”
Kevin Martin said “the money you are talking about is tax payers money made available for building houses for aboriginal people”
Ken Wooley said something like “I am just someone who is freely giving my time to advise the government where I can on the best way to house aboriginal people and if you don’t like it I will gladly stop doing it”.
Ron Sevitt said something similar.
I said nothing, but thought “what’s the point in getting involved in this crap”. These people don’t control the aboriginal housing program.
The congress representatives said “That is our money and we want control of it”
When I started to hear people in political circles saying things like “we are supposed to be giving aboriginals ‘self determination’, why shouldn’t they buy a car instead of building a house if it is their choice” and remembering that meeting in Canberra, I decided it was time to get out of aboriginal housing.
I took on no new commissions and as the work in hand was completed at each community I resigned my position as their architect.
Kevin Martin from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs came to see me to offer a commission to design a large hostel for aboriginal people in Alice Springs which would be built by Aboriginal Hostels Limited, a company chaired by Charlie Perkins and funded by the commonwealth government.
I was tired of the politics and frustration involved with anything to do with the combination of aboriginals and government and thought “I could bring quite a bit to this but can I cope with the frustration that the politics would bring”?. So I said “are you aware that Charley Perkins, at a council reception for the Premier of Queensland, harassed and insulted me and said that I would get no more aboriginal work for associating with Bejelke Petersen”.
“No I wasn’t, I will have to talk to Charley to see if his political stance is more important than having the right architect for the job” replied Kevin.
I heard nothing more and so knew where Charley Perkins stood and was relieved not to be involved.
The people of Australia had been conditioned to believe that ‘anyone who differentiated between full blood aborigines and those of mixed blood were racist’. The Whitlam government introduced a definition of ‘aboriginal’ which is still used and is something like ‘anyone who has any aboriginal blood at all and wants to be aboriginal is aboriginal’. I believe that few would object to that definition but I object to the way many Australians interpret and apply it because the end result is that the genuine tribal aboriginal has missed out on most of the two billion dollars a year of tax payers’ money allocated to aboriginal welfare. Although most tribal aboriginals are full-blood (meaning not of mixed race) some who have both European and aboriginal heritage are still living a tribal life and are predominately motivated and governed by tribal law and some full blood aboriginals live an urban life. The important thing is to not generalize and to listen to each individual.
Most past attempts to house tribal and nomadic peoples had failed and my special attention to try to design housing to suit the tribal way of life were unrelated to attempts to house urban aboriginal people.
If we are not permitted to differentiate there can never be a solution to their housing problems.
In somewhere around 1964 or 1965 [I will try to find the exact date] there was a report in the Adelaide Advertiser by a professor of anthropology about how central Australian Aboriginals survive the below freezing temperatures they experience at night in winter. He put the question
“These people live basically without clothing and with no shelter that would contribute to their warmth, how do they survive minus six degrees temperatures?”
To find an answer he went to live with a Central Australian nomadic tribe for about three months and recorded throughout the night their body temperature, their heartbeat and their breathing. He found that as the ambient temperature dropped so did their body temperature and their heart beat and breathing slowed. They went into a state of semi hibernation as many mammals do. We white people would die because we struggle to maintain our normal body temperature.
We moved to Alice Springs in July 1966, mid winter, and at first lived in a house at no. 10 Mueller Street where across the road was still natural centralian scrub.
Our neighbour employed an aboriginal couple for a few days so the man could do their garden and the woman to clean their house. At the end of the first day the aboriginal couple made a camp in the edge of the scrub, directly across the road from our place. Their camp consisted of nothing but a piece of tarpaulin for a ground sheet.
The man wore a pair of cotton jeans and a light cotton shirt and the woman a light cotton dress.
Remembering the above newspaper article I watched with interest.
They lighted a small fire and prepared their meal and I thought that maybe they will gather enough firewood to last the night but no, after dark when the small amount of wood they had was gone the fire went out.
I slept snug with my wife under a thick warm doona and woke just after sunrise, keen to see what the aboriginal couple were doing. They were also just stirring and the first thing they did was gather wood to make a fire. I went out onto the front lawn and noticed that I had not fully turned off the sprinkler the night before and a small volcano of ice had grown over the sprinkler, as the water oozed out of the sprinkler it had frozen and formed a dome of ice about 200 mm in diameter. The temperature had been minus six degrees and these two aboriginals had slept in the open on a tarpaulin in light clothing with no blankets and it appeared to be quite normal for them.
This amazing discovery of the ability of tribal aboriginals to survive freezing nights has been ignored in my opinion because it is not politically correct to suggest that they may be a little different to us. I believe that part aboriginals would not have that ability.
The aboriginal activists are nearly all half to seven-eighths white and they can’t do it and they are aboriginal according to the commonwealth definition?.
At a social gathering in Adelaide I was trying to explain to a young Adelaide architect why you can not , as he suggested, just build rows of hundreds of ‘Housing Commission type’ houses and expect tribal aboriginal people to live in them. “They do not have the experience of European type houses or the equipment we are all familiar with” I said.
To try to explain I told him, as an example of the ‘innocence’ of the tribal aborigine, a little story as related to me by a fellow Alice Springs architect who was also working on aboriginal housing and had brought four tribal elders to Adelaide to meet their accountants. He Said :
I took them into the foyer of this multi storied office building and pressed the button to summon the lift, they were wide eyed with amazement at the glitter of the space in the foyer.
The lift doors opened, I ushered them in and pressed the button for the twenty first-floor and the lift doors closed.
One of them said to me “why are we all standing in this little room?”.
This stupid young prick said to me “I often wonder why I stand in that little room too”, turned his back on me and walked away.
I thought “what hope have you got to get these city people of such narrow experience and prejudice to understand and, these are the type of people who make policies on aboriginal affairs”
There are some aspects of aboriginal culture that are still savage and cruel. On one trip for a meeting with the community at Warrabri, North of Alice Springs, we were stopped at the edge of the settlement and told that there will not be a meeting today.
The story as told to me was “last night a woman wandered too close to a ‘secret men’s ceremonial area’ and so they cut off her nose.”
The woman’s family and friends have formed a faction (approximately half of the community) and want retribution. The other half of the community had formed a defence faction, there will probably be a big fight (a civil war) and you don’t want to be here when that happens”.
So it was back to the air strip and back to Alice Springs and glad to be out of it.
Warrabri Women
Warrabri Warriors
Warrabri Children
During 1975, commonwealth public servants who we had been dealing with suddenly disappeared and their replacements had no idea what we were talking about when we contacted them about unpaid accounts or unfinished business relating to aboriginal housing.
Without telling any of the consultants who had been looking after their aboriginal housing program the commonwealth government caved into the pressure of aboriginal activists and changed their policy.
The money for housing simply went to the aboriginal activists to do what they want.
I was lucky to have picked up the political vibes and got out of aboriginal housing just in time. But I will never trust a government again.
When visiting my office in Cairns in 1975 Frank Wearne and I went to a pub for a drink after work. In the bar was the senior public servant who we had been dealing with in the Northern Territory.
One of those who had disappeared.
He was a friendly man and we had had a long and professional relationship with him. He had been unexpectedly transferred to Cairns.
When I asked “What’s going on?. The person who has taken your place knows nothing about how we have been working together for years. They can’t help us with unfinished business or outstanding accounts?”.
All he would tell me is “We don’t do it that way anymore.”
So what about aboriginal health problems????. Apparently forgotten!......
That was in 1975. Soon after those doing work for the commonwealth government were having trouble getting paid, and, so I heard, public servants wanting to charge fuel to their employer, the commonwealth government, were being refused credit and had to pay out of their own pockets to put petrol in a commonwealth government car.
Because the Senate had blocked the supply bill the commonwealth government had no money to pay their bills.
The Liberal party knew that the labor government had got Australia into deep debt and that Whitlam was trying to borrow four billion dollars from the Arabs to keep going.
Because the Liberal party had a majority of members in the Senate they could block any law the government wanted to pass.
It was near time for an election so the Liberals tried to force the Whitlam government to call an election by blocking the ‘Supply Bill’. The Supply Bill is a law that has to be passed so that tax payers’ money can be given to the government so they can do their job.
The Whitlam labor government refused to call an election as he was bound to under the constitution so the government ran out of money and therefore could not pay their bills or govern the country.
The Governor General, sir John Kerr, using his ‘reserve power’ under the constitution therefore sacked the Whitlam government in order to force an election.
An election takes some time to prepare and to happen so the Governor General asked Malcolm Frazer to form a caretaker government so Australia would not be without a government during that time.
When the election came the Australian people elected the Liberal party with a large majority lead by Malcolm Frazer to govern Australia.
If the people of Australia had disagreed with what the Governor General did they would have re-elected the labor government.
The recession that followed caused the population of Alice Springs to almost half and half the business premises and half the houses were vacant for about eighteen months. When the economy started to recover Alice Springs was re-populated with a different type of person. Business men who wore T shirts and jogging shorts to work and appeared to me to not have any idea how to run a business.
The type of person I was able to get for staff had also changed.
Graduate architects did not understand the process of building nor even the language of building construction. I would say “use truss and purlin construction for that roof” The graduate would ask “what’s a purlin?”.
I had always run an office where the people who worked there were assumed to be trustworthy and honest and until now they had always respected that and behaved in a loyal manner. This ‘new breed’ of Australian thought that if a boss was stupid enough to trust them then he deserved to be taken advantage of and be lied to, stolen from and deceived.
My attitude always was that if I trust someone and they steal from me they have lost their credibility and all I have lost is a bit of money.
I had to terminate the employment of three members of staff over a period of about six months, one for getting work done for himself at the cost of a client, another for not complying with building regulations even though instructed to do so and another for not processing a payment to a builder by a deadline and telling me that she had which cost the builder thousands of dollars in interest.
If I was to terminate the employment of anyone today (2007) for dishonesty and not report it to the police I would be fined and be made to reinstate them, but I would not want to report them to the police.
So as long as the existing ‘unfair dismissal laws’ exist I refuse to be an employer.
On aboriginal settlements there appears to me to be an ingrained local force maintained by the white people employed there that prevents any positive improvement to their living conditions. Anything introduced that might work is resisted and if it can not be prevented from being introduced because of government insistence it is “white anted” and therefore fails.
Often things fail because of the incompetence of the white people employed to do jobs that tribal aboriginals could not be expected to do without lengthy training.
One example I remember happened at a place called Yayayi which is about 26 kilometres West of Papunya. Papunya is a government aboriginal settlement established to provide help to tribal groups of that area West of Alice springs. It was a settlement of much aggression, a lot of fighting and many killings. During the seventies the government decided that the reason behind this aggression was because they had placed together a number of different tribes whose cultures were not compatible. The last tribe to come in to Papunya to live was the Yayayi people who had lived close to the West Australian boarder. The big drought of the late fifties and early sixties forced them to seek help from the white man’s settlement at Papunya.
So during the mid seventies the government decided on a ‘plan to decentralize’ Papunya.
The Yayayi people were the first to be moved back to their traditional country. The government decided to provide them with electrical power and water and just a large roofed area for a community shelter. They could do what they wanted, if anything, about housing.
A friend of mine, Dave Bottrell, used to work for the Northern Territory Electricity Commission but had recently set himself up as a consultant for electrical engineering projects. He designed and had built the power and pump house for Yayayi which cost about one million dollars.
This facility was established on the water bore about four or five kilometres from the new settlement where the storage tank was.
The young white man employed to operate and maintain this facility started the brand new diesel engine to run the water pump. He then drove the four or five kilometres to the tank and waited about ten minutes but no water was running into the tank. He then drove back to the pump house and speeded up the diesel engine to it’s maximum number of revolutions allowed by the governor. The governor is to ensure that the engine does not exceed it’s maximum number of revolutions. Back to the tank he drove but still no water. So back to the pump house, disconnected the governor and speeded up the engine then drove back to the tank. He waited about another quarter of an hour but still no water so back to the pump house to be amazed to see the whole pump house and power station ablaze. The new diesel engine because it was over revving had blown up and set alight the entire electrical and water supply facility which had cost the tax payer about one million dollars. No matter what this young mans qualifications were he must have had little or no common sense.
Anyone with a rudimentary education should be able to workout that a pipeline four kilometres long probably 100 milimetres in diameter would take about an hour to fill with water before it would start to run into the tank.
This is just one example of many such things that go wrong on aboriginal settlements. The aboriginal people must think that white men are stupid.
Every few years some dignitary makes a public comment on how terrible is the living conditions of fringe dwelling aboriginal people, how bad is their standard of health and how there is a disproportionate number of them in Gaol.
Meetings are held and politically correct statements will be made:
Yes it is terrible.
We should be ashamed of ourselves,
These issues must be addressed immediately.
Discussions will be held about how the aboriginal people must be involved.
As the delegates make their way home from the meeting they say to each other “well that was a very meaningful meeting”
Nothing further will happen and they will all believe that they have done something towards the improvement of the sad situation of aboriginal fringe dwellers.
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