Aldinga - new settlement in an old landscape

Stephen Poole is realising his dream. It's been a long-time dream, over a decade to date, but it has survived the disappointment of a false start. Now it has gone from promise to reality. In doing so, Stephen's dream might just show us a better way to live.

Stephen is not a stereotypical business director. He isn’t tall, doesn’t wear a suit and wears his hair long to his shoulders. Nor does he drive a prestige car: for Stephen, his 4WD ute is more appropriate. He could easily be mistaken for one of the surfers who patrol the Gulf of St Vincent shoreline in search of the perfect swell. Catching waves is something Stephen does on occasion, but his prime motivation these past few years has been getting his pet project off the ground.

Originally, the dream was a shared one. It began well over a decade ago when a group of like-minded individuals, wanting somewhere to settle, got together and talked about the possibility of developing an urban-like settlement in a rural area. Practical people rather than dreamers, they wanted the advantages of urban living with space for a little primary production.

A town called Burra, long since past its heyday as a mining centre, looked promising. Burra offered the advantages of cheap land reasonably close to Adelaide.

Plans were drawn up and the project was publicised - attracting interstate interest. This new village was to be an example of how people could live on the land while improving it and, for some, deriving at least part of their livelihood from it. The idea was to create a new type of settlement that brought together the advantages of a village with the best in modern environmental design.

But Burra was not to be. A new government introduced policies which ended plans for the village.

Learning from experience

Swiss-born Max Lindegger used to talk about combining rural living and village life back in the 1980s. He espoused much the same ideas as Stephen and like him went on to create it. By late in the decade, residents were starting to move into Crystal Waters Village, near Canondale, in the hills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

Environmental design was an important criteria for the planners and architects behind Crystal Waters and other similar developments, hence they soon became known as “eco-villages”.

The next development of its type was Kookaburra Park, near Bundaberg. Jalanbah followed, a smaller development near the northern NSW town of Nimbin. The eco-village was at last an Australian reality: a new way to enjoy rural life that was substantially different to life in a country town.

By the time the Burra project began there was already a number of ecovillages planned or in existence around the country, and there was much to learn from their experiences. This Stephen Poole did.

Finding Aldinga

Although Burra failed at the hands of political policy, and although they were disappointed, they weren’t completely discouraged. Stephen and his team decided to persist with their dream and search for an alternative site.

Eventually, they discovered Aldinga. They approached council with their idea for a village only to learn a group of artists in the area already had a similar idea. Council thought it might be worthwhile talking to the artists. This they did. The outcome was the Aldinga Arts Eco-village - the “Arts” in the name recognising the presence of the artists.

The place

The highway from Adelaide passes through countryside the colour of dried grass. Most people describe this as flat country: others, noting the land’s rise and fall, might call it undulating. Whatever description, a low range parallels the highway through this part of the Fleurieu Peninsula. It forms a natural boundary separating the coastal plain from the lands beyond. Here and there the range is topped with open forest but the coastal plain along which the road takes the visitor has a paucity of trees and gives the impression of land cleared long ago to make way for grazing animals and walnut orchards.

The Fleurieu Peninsula is a long finger of land that projects southwards, and it is here where the turnoff to Aldinga Beach is, about 45 minutes from Adelaide. Aldinga is one of a series of coastal towns stretching back towards Adelaide to form a ribbon of development along the foreshore of St Vincents Gulf.

The road to Aldinga Arts Eco-village passes through the undistinguished looking town and leaves it via a long, straight road that passes a new subdivision. Here, Stephen slows the ute and explains how the streets have been constructed with no regard to the free solar energy readily available in this mediterranean climate. It will mean years of high energy bills for residents.

It's a different story when we reach Aldinga Arts. Here on 34 hectares of north-sloping land the streets follow the contours of the terrain, allowing houses on the 152 lots to be aligned towards the sun. A total of 16ha is devoted to residential development and about 44 per cent of the site is set aside as community land and common facilities, including the small pocket-parks with young fruiting fig, quince and persimmon trees.

All the houses have solar water-heating - reducing the cost of most energy consumption. They must, according to village by-laws, store a minimum 10,000 litres of water to cope with hot, dry summers and with drought. Sensibly, most houses store about twice that volume.

There is a diversity of housing options to suit Australia’s changing demographic. Lots of 650 square metres for larger families, and 450 and 200 square metre lots for smaller households, will soon be complemented by the construction of the village's first townhouses.

The village is financed through the sale of lots - Stephen says about 30 per cent of total sales were made before work started on the village. Infrastructure development has been made in advance of housing construction and in the three years since building began, many of the lots in stages one and two have been sold and built on. Stage three was recently released and already two houses have been built and occupied. There is a market area and according to Stephen, markets will eventually be held more frequently than every quarter.

Conserving water in the landscape is a priority and a drive through the village discloses wide drains lined with rock known as rip-rap. These take winter's rainwater to storage in the small dams seen throughout the village. As the weather warms through the summer, the dams become muddy wetlands, the water being held in the soil.

Aldinga Arts is two kilometres from Aldinga Beach - the sea can be glimpsed between low headlands from the higher parts of the village.

At present, a 12 hectare area accommodates the village's sewage treatment system, the treated wastes to be used to irrigate a wood lot. Eventually, the farm area will house an education centre and livelihood opportunities, such as the planned community kitchen. Already, one family is planning to make use of the kitchen as part of their livelihood mix. They hope to purchase organically certified produce from local farmers and process and bottle it in the community kitchen. Their market will be specialty retailers in Adelaide.

Another resident is planning to take advantage of passing traffic by developing a site at the entrance to the village as a cafe and bar. Stephen explains that the village will also feature artists' studios and performance space.

Demonstrating renewable energy - the Heij hut

Elizabeth Heij, with her husband, bought a lot at Aldinga Arts and built a state of the art, modern house of modest size. Upstairs is Elizabeth's office - she teleworks for the CSIRO. In her front yard is a vegetable garden that yields fresh, organically grown herbs and vegetables for the household. The side yard conceals two buried 10,000 litre water tanks. Water is also harvested from the garage and greenhouse roofs and stored in above-ground tanks.

Not only is the home's roof insulated against the hot South Australian summers, so too are the walls which consist of what Elizabeth calls a “reverse brick veneer”. On the outside is rendered blueboard; inside which has air-cell insulation - it's like bubble wrap mounted on rigid panels. The hollow-core concrete bricks, rendered in a pale yellow reminiscent of the dessicated-looking countryside seen through the window, are on the inside. With the exception of those carrying conduit, the hollow cores have been infilled with concrete to increase their thermal mass and hence their ability to insulate the interior of the house from the heat of the summer or cold of winter.

Utility rooms, such as laundry and bathroom, have been placed on the western side of the house, further insulating the main living areas from late afternoon sun in summer. On the sunward side, the eaves are of just the right width to admit warming sunlight into the interior as the season moves into winter. There, the heat of sunlight is stored in solid, thermal mass floors which release the heat energy as the evening cools, reducing the need for supplementary heating.

Elizabeth's house is no McMansion - it is of modest-size and is a high-performance dwelling suitable for two. Whether in the heat of summer or the cool of winter her house is comfortable, and unlike those unfortunate homes in that subdivision closer to Aldinga, Elizabeth's attracts much lower energy bills. In fact, the energy authority pays her for power derived from the array of photo-electric panels on her roof. Elizabeth is data-logging the thermal performance of her building to assess its year-round performance.

A compact melange of homes

Aldinga Arts Eco-village is a compact melange of architectural styles but common to all is energy and water efficient design. As well as reverse brick veneer, houses are made of building materials such as timber plank, galvanised iron, timbercrete - a sawdust and concrete brick - and the economical, but durable, rendered straw-bale. Architecturally, they are of modern design, reflecting the type of people who live in the village - middle-class professionals and service workers, artists and tradespeople.

The eco-village is close to job markets, specialist services and the big-city amenities of metropolitan Adelaide including the suburban train network which terminates only ten or so kilometres away at Noralunga Centre. Aldinga Arts is also close to Aldinga township and the beach. It demonstrates in a most practical way that affordable, energy and water efficient housing of differing size, suited to the full range of modern Australian families, does not need to result in urban sprawl but can offer the benefits of private home ownership in a village-like atmosphere.

For Stephen Poole it has been a long journey from Burra to Aldinga, a move away from the drylands to the sea. But Stephen is not yet ready to move onto his lot in the village - he still lives in town.

Every now and then, though, when driving through the village, he stops his ute at his vacant lot, gets out and, fittingly for someone who likes to catch the occasional wave, looks towards the blue waters of St Vincents Gulf, just over a kilometre away.