I'm Su Dennett and this is my partner David Holmgren and we're here at
Melliodora in Hepburn in Central Victoria.
Melliodora is situated on the edge of Hepburn Springs, which is a very small
town of a few thousand people, so we're effectively in a suburban street, but on
two and a quarter acres, just under a hectare of land.
In building this house, for me the thing that I was most passionate about was
passive solar design, the idea that houses can largely heat and cool
themselves in southern Australian climates without the use of much in
the way of augmented heating, and no mechanical cooling. Building with natural
materials was also for me a given. So mudbrick as a material: very little in the
way of embodied energy, great thermal mass, not such good insulation, but a
great structure to hold up the roof. And the other was of course timber and my
passion for trees, sustainable forestry. So designing the house around those
materials, with passive solar design and to minimize the use of electricity,
certainly no use in heating or water heating, and also to build in wood as the
secondary form of energy for cooking, for hot water and back-up space heating.
The kitchen was an important place for me because I have a focus – very strong
focus – on food. So the kitchen for me was really good in terms of having a
wood stove that gave me the possibility of learning how to use the wood that we
had locally and that we could gather ourselves. And I found that a very
lovely family process to go out and collect wood a couple of times a year.
Another feature of the kitchen was the cool cupboard, instead of a big refrigerator
– The cool cupboard draws air from underneath the house in contact
with the ground, which then rises by convection up the column of the cupboard.
And so it's a very simple technology; it's not a fridge but it means it's much
more suitable for storage of many things and so we just have a small under-
bench fridge and that's been adequate for us all these years.
Living a lifestyle like we do, a self-reliant one, means that you do many many things and
so you get pretty good at cutting the corners off, if you like.
In building with the permaculture design framework we took it for granted that
the area immediately around the house would be intensive food production: the
primary vegetable-growing areas, high-value trees, maybe trees that
actually need a special micro-climate like kiwis and other things that will
help the micro-climate of the house and also that need a lot of attention, that
are close to where you can see them. That also has the spin-off that that creates
an environment which is naturally fire retardant and it's also part of the
micro-climate modification, so the grapevine arbor on the north side is a
critically important part of the shading structure, which is there in the summer
and the autumn, but not there in the spring and winter – so works with the
passive solar design.
The main feature of Zone 2 is an extensive orchard of mostly drip-
irrigated deciduous fruit and nut trees.
And it's where the animals range too: the geese that lived in that orchard,
converting a lot of the grass to manure and eating a lot of the fallen fruit and
helping control pests. It's also where the chooks get out from their deep litter
yard on the edge of the Zone 1/Zone 2 system and get out to free-range. And
also where the goats, they can be in some parts of that at times. All of that
animal activity is managed from sort of a hub of the small farmyard, which is on
that interface between those two zones, which is really Su's department.
Animals are my department, his department is plants and of course you can imagine
there are tensions between those two. So it's nice; I advocate for the animals and
he advocates for the plants. Animals that are giving you a service, you must also
provide a service for them. It took me a lot of years to actually learn enough
about goats to feel that I'm relatively on a par with what they give to me I can
give back to them.
So right from the beginning we identified there should be two houses on
this piece of land. The second house, which took till after the turn of the
millennium to actually start thinking about implementing, was variously called
the cottage or the studio. The motivation for actually then building that was my
aging mother coming to live with us.
The other building on the property we
call the tea house... – After the Japanese tea house style and size. –But it's also a
tiny house if you like. Brenna Quinlan, the illustrator of our 'Retrosuburbia'
book, is actually the resident there currently. And so yeah, there's now three
semi-autonomous households sharing the gardens and sharing the facilities.
So as well as the very early and substantial earthworks for the house we
did earthworks building two dams on the property in the natural gully that ran
through it, and that was critical for irrigation in the summer. So those dams
and the construction were very early in the design process – in a lot of ways they
proceeded the house earthwork design because they are determined by the shape
of the land.
One of those things about choosing this property is that it was surrounded by
strips of land, road reserves they're called. All those areas just grew
blackberries and weeds and we took on the job of managing those areas, of
slashing them so they were fire-safe, planting trees.
I spend quite a lot of time with
the goats doing fire vegetation management. That's a great, pleasurable
thing to spend that time with them to make sure that you have a fire-safe
environment in your primary fire sector.
The blackberries were sort of 12, 15 feet
high in some places and the whole gully was full of them.
And it's much more park-like now.
That aim is to try and create a canopy of
fire-retardant trees that will shade out the blackberries and allow ecological
succession to move along and to its next stage. – We don't distinguish greatly
between the public and the private and it seems that you shouldn't think that
you have to own a piece of land to feel that you're part of it and to feel duty
towards that piece of land; to try to understand its needs and how they work
in accordance with your needs.
I think the biggest changes that we're seeing in permaculture now is the focus
on people and people interactions, so the social side of permaculture. At the
present time we have fossil fuels as our slaves and so we're not dependent so
much on interaction. And I think for me the most important thing is the
behavioral adaptations not the physical adaptations of buildings etc.
We don't need huge numbers of people to change the behavior to make a big impact.
That, I think, has been always underestimated.