Construction Reinstruction

SHELTER know-how ... a grass-clad dome house in northeast South Australia

Read Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley, the first book to detail Australian Aboriginal architecture, and you’re bound to learn a thing or two.

Put together by Professor Paul Memmott and published by University of Queensland Press (UQP), the book turns on its head the belief Indigenous people were devoid of houses or towns when Europeans first reached Australian shores. Now the Director of the University’s Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC), Professor Memmott’s interest in the area began while working with Indigenous communities in northwest Queensland during the 1970s.

“At that time, most councils in the region were bulldozing fringe camps but we saw that they had something important to say in how people organised their residential activity and patterns of behaviour,” he said. “I realised that these last self-constructed camps were like field stations in which to study Aboriginal kinship and housing design, to understand how much of their residents’ lifestyle was based on traditional customs versus westernised behaviour.”

After completing honours studies in architecture, Professor Memmott pursued a PhD that bridged into anthropology so he could study the link between Indigenous peoples’ cultural landscapes, their buildings and their behaviour. Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley is the result of his extensive research in the field since then, taking 35 years of “detective work” to assemble information from oral histories, explorers’ diaries, paintings, photographic collections and 100-year-old newspapers.

Including contributions from Aboriginal authors as well as fellow AERC staff and postgraduates, the book is written for both academic and general readers and includes hundreds of photos, maps and illustrations – many of which haven’t been seen outside the archives before. Professor Memmott said the myth Indigenous Australians lived only in makeshift huts or lean-tos began because early explorers often made their observations in favourable weather, when people were mobile and needed only nocturnal fires and windbreaks.

However, research shows a repertoire of different shelters were built in different styles in particular regions depending on the climate – a good example being the durable dome structures found throughout the country. “In the rainforest area up around Cairns where there was heavy rain for much of the year, people built domes out of lawyer cane with palm leaf thatching,” he said.

“If we go to the west coast of Tasmania, we get reports of domes there, with triple layers of cladding and insulation. And then in western Victoria, there’s a classical case of circular stone walls of up to a metre or so high and then dome roofs over the top with sometimes earth/sod cladding.”

It is also known missionaries drew on Aboriginal technology for buildings, namely in the use of bark for roofs and walls, and grass thatching for gables. This finding links with a new $770,000 ARC research project led by Professor Memmott to examine the ecological and physical makeup of spinifex grass and its potential use in buildings for Aboriginal people.

Story author: Cameron Pegg

Photo: courtesy Professor Paul Memmott

• FUNDING: The University of Queensland School of Geography, Planning & Architecture, Paul Memmott & Associates, and University of Queensland Press
• RESEARCHERS: Professor Paul Memmott, Carroll Go-Sam and Shaneen Fantin
• EMAIL: p.memmott@uq.edu.au
• WEB: www.aboriginalenvironments.com

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