Category Build

Much is being made of hemp as a superfood, and its sibling, medicinal cannabis. But little is known about the health benefits of buildings constructed with hempcrete.

Industrial hemp is a variety of the Cannabis sativa plant species that is grown specifically for a range of commercial purposes including paper, fabric, clothing, biodegradable plastics, paint, insulation, biofuel, food and animal feed. It’s typically found in the northern hemisphere and is one of the fastest growing plants. Its use as a fibre dates back 10,000 years when it was originally spun into textiles.

Hempcrete is a hemp-lime composite consisting of the chopped woody core of the industrial hemp plant, a lime based binder and water. This mix is then poured into moulds or ‘formwork’ fixed to a timber frame to act as a replacement for conventional insulation products.

Jodie Lyn Brown’s ‘Cob Heart House’ sits at the top of a hill in Maleny, Queensland, surrounded by a garden full of fruit trees, herbs and vegetables. This beautiful hybrid home (half cob/half timber) is made even more special as it was built by Jodie herself with the help of a natural builder friend and a team of enthusiastic volunteers.

Jodie’s path to her cob house started when she separated from her husband and was living in the small town of Imbil. She’d purchased a large town block in an affordable area and had a house built for her. With four young children she had no plans to build her own home at that time.

Not long after she was drawn to the Crystal Waters Eco Village, where she ended up living for six years. It was at Crystal Waters that she was introduced to earthen homes and natural building. She found the perfect house to rent there, one made using rammed earth construction with the walls having a soft, earthy and nurturing feeling. Jodie was able to visit other earth homes, including rammed earth homes, a strawbale house and many which had been designed using passive solar design principles.

When I first came to look at the property we now call home, the house was far from ideal. It faced south, had small dark rooms, the kitchen was poky and a wide verandah ran down the length of the north side, preventing any sunlight from finding its way in.

The soil was lush though, the house had significant potential for improvement, it was two minutes from town (Pambula, far south coast NSW) and the local school, and it had a certain charm. It was also set back off the road, surrounded by trees and farmland. All the infrastructure was already in place, it had power, a 130,000-litre water tank, a dam, ponds, a half-converted barn, a four bay work shed, an onsite caravan and two and a half acres to start living the dream life we had always wanted; growing fruit trees and vegies, having animals and providing a beautiful life for our children.

Having just sold up and moved from Melbourne, we were ready to buy when it was available. The price tag was relatively low compared to what we were used to in the Melbourne market. Looking at the property, we really had to have vision to see what we would be able to do to make the house more solar passive and user-friendly. We spent six months in the house while we did up the barn, then we moved into the barn while we did up the house.

With the help of family, friends and our wider community, my partner and I built a passive solar strawbale home. Building a home is an incredibly rewarding, exhausting and empowering thing to do. It’s an opportunity to implement ethical principles, learn and practise skills, build community, and create a space to live in that is truly reflective of your personal aesthetics and philosophy.

Our house building journey germinated many years ago when as a 15-year-old, I visited the home of a woman who had built by hand her own tiny mudbrick home. From that moment on I was somewhat obsessed with the idea of building my own home. It was very early on in our relationship when I declared my intentions to my partner, Genevieve. Luckily she came onboard, and in the last six years we have hand-built a strawbale tiny house (which we lived in for five years) on our property in the Bega Valley, while we prepared for and built our larger family home that we moved into in March this year.

Nestled among gums in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills lies an elegant home, made largely of rubbish – old car tyres, glass bottles and recycled cans. Such unconventional materials are key to constructing an Earthship, the now global ‘radically sustainable’ building technique pioneered by renegade American eco architect Michael Reynolds since the 1970s.

It was a visit to Adelaide by Michael himself that sparked this project at Ironbank, one of the first official Earthships to be built in Australia. Michael had popped by to speak at UniSA in 2009 at the behest of Martin (Marty) Freney, an industrial design lecturer there. Afterwards, the pair headed up to Ironbank with a few students for a hands-on lesson in creating the Earthship’s fundamental building block; tyres ram-packed full of soil, which they casually arranged into a U-shaped wall. In the years that followed, Marty gradually realised he had the makings of his own small Earthship and after gaining council approval he launched the project in earnest.

The Abdallah House project began in May 2008 in suburban Seymour, central Victoria, with the purchase of a three-roomed bungalow, with bathroom/ laundry tacked onto the side, on a 584 m2 block. The project is driven by permaculture practitioner Richard Telford with support from his partner Kunie, and children Kai and Sen.

In mid-2005 I decided on a tree change, and moved to Common ground Co operative, a small intentional social change community in Seymour. While I liked the idea of building a place at the community, there were downsides, for example if we wanted to leave our home in future, we couldn’t reinvest that energy into a new home.

In May 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, I attended the auction of a deceased estate, curious to find out how much ’the worst house in Seymour’ would sell for. The place was passed in with no bids. As I was about the leave the property I thought to myself, ‘Why not just offer them what I have in savings?’. I made an offer and, after negotiation, agreed on a purchase price of $53 000. We now owned a place of our own: a derelict shack on a small piece of river flat.

It was a younger Phil Gall, writing for Source in 1971, who set out into Victoria’s East Gippsland to report on a monumental natural farming conference. He came back with a prophetic glimpse into holistic agriculture that informs his design work today.

Phil is a youthful seventy-five, living and working in Bermagui on the far south coast of NSW. As an architect, landscape designer and specialist in water management, he sees himself as a problem solver.

Phil is renting an old holiday shack, brought down and reassembled from the Snowy Mountains, looking out over Wallaga Lake. ‘The place is cold in winter and hot in summer,’ he says, but it is surrounded by the beauty of the landscape, and he is enjoying a sweet and simple life there.

Never Ending Food is a permaculture demonstration and education organisation working to help address malnutrition holistically, improve children’s access to healthy food and promote food sovereignty. It’s led by Stacia Nordin (a dietician) and Kristof Nordin (a social worker) who have been in Malawi since 1997.

Photos courtesy of projects

The Nordins moved to Malawi to help with HIV prevention through the US Peace Corps. They learned quickly that to address malnutrition they would need to improve the quality and diversity of food, and to do that they needed to improve soil fertility. That’s when they came across permaculture. They now help to teach permaculture across Malawi, supporting communities and schools to set up abundant and sustainable food systems. Their own house is a demonstration plot, where people can visit to learn about their approach. The Nordins believe that permaculture has great potential to benefit nutrition and health, increase income potential and make a significant difference to living conditions.

Given Malawi’s year-round growing season, access to water and large genetic base of local food crops, the local people have seen how permaculture can help to create abundant gardens with a diversity of food. And how permaculture farmers have, on average, better food security, a more diverse diet and higher crop yield than conventional farmers. By making simple and affordable improvements to family farms, Malawian families can increase their overall household food security significantly.

In 1988 Bill Mollison stood on top of a swale at Crystal Waters Eco Village and declared: ‘Permaculturists want to be property developers’. While the job description for a property developer might conjure up images of housing market bubbles, and terribly-designed boxes squeezed onto ever-diminishing parcels of urban land, in many ways Bill was on the money. The desire for a patch of one’s own has led many a permie down the garden path of property ownership. But what if there was a way to create a living out of ethically and sustainably developing land for the future.

Why Become A Property Developer?

The need for more environmentally-sensitive housing is a no-brainer. But is that argument enough to make you put your energy into becoming a property developer? Permaculture teacher and property developer Ian Lillington certainly thinks so. He and his partner Marita went into the business to create sensible, sensitive subdivisions, and to help people move out of big metropolitan areas and set up a good life in a smaller town.

Rob Scott and his family of five own a 180 hectare organic farm in the Macedon Ranges, just outside of Melbourne, Victoria. The family has a huge passion for organic farming, permaculture, animal husbandry, alternative building and holistic living. Rob started out building ‘tiny houses’ at the farm eight years ago as extra bedrooms for his children. He now runs workshops in tiny house building and builds custom designed tiny houses for clients.

What is a tiny house, and why do you build them?

A tiny house is a dwelling small enough to put on a trailer or a truck. I was always building cubby houses as a kid. And when our third child arrived we eventually needed another room. I had an old Dodge truck, and I thought building a room on that was the easiest option, out of necessity: no plans, no foundations.