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Sharing Plans for Aboriginal Housing
Timothy O’Rourke

In 2016, the parlous state of housing in the remote Aboriginal settlement of Santa Teresa led part of the community to a threat of legal action against the Northern Territory Government.1 Santa Teresa is just one example of a widespread and persistent crisis in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing, beset by problems of both quality and supply. The quality of Aboriginal housing is a design problem, although shifting political imperatives and uneven procurement strategies frequently marginalize the contribution of architects. In contrast to nationally embarrassing reports of failure, a small group of practitioners and researchers has made a significant and noteworthy contribution to identifying particular problems and testing solutions for remote Aboriginal housing for the last fifty years. The accumulated knowledge and expertise and the resulting design work need to be more broadly shared with the profession and policy-makers.

Anthropologist and architect Paul Memmott outlined the intractable political and architectural problems associated with remote and regional housing for Aboriginal people in Architecture Australia in 1988 and again in 2004.2 Research literature also partly covers this ground, although climate change, predicted thermal stresses, and energy poverty add to the challenge of building healthy, cost-effective, and culturally supportive housing in remote areas. We might add to this list the neglect of housing in major metropolitan areas, where 35 percent of the Indigenous population resides.

In the early 1970s, architects used the Royal Australian Institute of Architects to galvanize a nascent interest in Aboriginal housing, initiating a community of practice with an enduring legacy. Through a combination of research and experimentation, architects with experience in the field drew attention to the necessity of informed consultation, construction detailing and specification for health, and the importance of the delivery process. In Memmott’s book Take 2: Housing Design in Indigenous Australia, a number of these practitioners describe their overlapping approaches. In examples of carefully considered housing, the plans reveal a programmatic response to Aboriginal social and cultural domestic practices. Such informed departures from convention—or mainstream social housing type—can significantly improve the social and cultural lives of the occupants.

The published evidence of Indigenous housing projects is meagre. In the few available sources (including unpublished reports), numerous projects illustrate how careful, skilled practice has produced culturally responsive plans for Aboriginal housing delivered within exacting environments and delivery regimes. What appear to be quotidian material and servicing decisions often mask the complexities of construction programs and the extent of accumulated knowledge specific to places and communities. The architectural moves may appear modest, but the improvement on mainstream social housing is worthy of national recognition and sharing with a broader international audience. (This architectural nous has application in other parts of the world, as the Indigenous housing expert and architect Paul Pholeros demonstrated.)

Alice Springs–based Tangentyere Design has made an enduring contribution to Aboriginal housing, and its practitioners and practice have influenced the field since its inception in the late 1970s. Beginning with Julian Wigley, the practice has designed a portfolio of houses based on perceptive consultation, project evaluation, and incremental knowledge. Despite Tangentyere Design’s reputation, director Andrew Broffman describes the difficulty in providing even basic consultation under recent funding and procurement regimes.3 Thorough consultation is hampered by remoteness and cost and the deficit in housing numbers: the shortfall in new Aboriginal houses is estimated at over 2,000 in the Northern Territory alone.4 Without discounting the value gained from consultation and attention to place, can a broader distribution of successful precedents be used to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing?

Cultural and social practices vary considerably across the continent, and certain preferences can be conspicuous in remote areas. In the Great Victoria Desert, Iredale Pedersen Hook’s (IPH) designs for community housing in Tjuntjuntjara were informed by extensive experience and thorough consultation, with a team that included an anthropologist. The plans describe a variety of spaces for living around the house, with relatively large covered spaces that can be occupied seasonally and extend shelter to transient visitors.5 Culturally responsive architecture recognizes the preference for outdoor living and use of external spaces that are still a consistent pattern in many parts of the country.6 External shelters and landscape treatments can be very useful for outdoor activities, but covered areas designed into the plan are more likely to escape an expenditure review. In suburban Kununurra, IPH integrated the carport into the plan as a tactic to provide flexible outdoor social spaces that permit surveillance of the street.7

Across the country, a variety of intensely held spiritual beliefs and culturally derived avoidance behaviours present particular architectural challenges. Architect Shaneen Fantin has documented these effects on housing in Arnhem Land, and Troppo Architects, among others, has adjusted planning in an attempt to reduce incidences of stress. Earlier this year, architect Kieran Wong described the cultural influences on CODA Studio’s design for a recently completed super clinic in Kununurra. Although it is not specifically an Aboriginal medical service, awareness of culturally significant avoidance behaviours influenced the planning of the entry and circulation. In this case, previously arcane knowledge about culture has moved through the profession, from Aboriginal housing to a mainstream health care building.

After fifty years, Aboriginal housing is still in crisis, and there is clearly a role for architects to play. And while there is no adequate substitute for the types of processes advocated by practitioners such as Geoff Barker and Broffman, a more consistent public record of well-informed housing designs could serve the profession well. The schemes need an explication of the design intentions, situated within a context of place, people, and policy, and, ideally, different forms of evaluation. In the information age, politicized funding agencies seeking new ideas tend toward a cyclical history of forgetting. Knowledge developed through experienced practice and tested solutions is, at least, an antidote to the oft-repeated mistakes in Aboriginal housing.

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Timothy O’Rourke’s argument holds that accumulated Indigenous knowledge specific to places and communities in relation to architecture should be recognized as having an influence on building practices beyond Indigenous populations. This is not simply a recognition that imposed colonial models of suburban housing and neighbourhood planning propagate poor living conditions and the poverty of Aboriginal people in Australia; rather, O’Rourke makes clear that this design problem reaches beyond Indigenous populations to all populations in colonial nations. The approach of the Indigenous-led not-for-profit architectural firm Tangentyere Design revolves around process, consultation, and situational understanding. There is no one solution to resolving housing scarcity, but the principles with which this firm approaches the problem offer some beginnings for mending it. As O’Rourke points out, the architecture field’s slowness to adapt to the basic principles of community engagement and to become more culturally adaptive and responsive—which means increasing knowledge of the people who will use a dwelling as well as knowledge of the geography and climate conditions of an area—continues to create substandard living conditions that largely affect Indigenous populations.

This slowness to embrace Indigenous practices can be tied to the historical suppression and assimilation of Indigenous people and cultures. It is to the benefit of colonizers to relegate Indigeneity to the past—positioning Indigenous cultures as never changing or adapting, static in their practices and principles. The essay “Architectural Deception and the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal” by Courtney R. Thompson uses a significant international event to draw out the willingness and need to represent Indigenous culture as authentic, even if unrealistic, and as something that has already transpired. As Thompson shows, this relegation to history enacted at Expo 67 created a nostalgia that manifested caricatures of Indigenous cultures that have little reference to actual lived experience.