camp dog christmas, card…
Thank you for your support, care and generosity this year and, for being a part of our jam-packed journeys, adventures and lessons, you play an important role in them! We hope you have a lovely holiday season and start to 2024.
2023 for us has been a fast year, and a slow year too - so here’s some of the bits in review…
From ‘finishing’ building a house, moving to the center of the world - Mparntwe (Alice Springs), setting up a company, Bobbie finishing masters (finally), to us both starting in a new place with new friends and gigs… what a year!
You might realise that we have a new website, welcome, we quietly started our own company as Dogspike Design…we will talk more about that another time however.
We started the new year camping at a block of land we bought in feb 2022 and are now stewards of - halfway between Blackheath and Lithgow, NSW. It’s a rugged, south-facing, vertical 35 acres of burnt slopes & rock, swamps, birds, re-growth, cloud speckled sunsets and moody weather. We’re hoping to design something for it in the new year, a challenging prospect but something that sounds pretty familiar - steep site, bushfire, off-grid, not much cash…where have we heard this tough brief before..? This year we got a good deck and roof around the caravan to make it an easier place to be.
In February we joined a great crew at the Australian Institute of Architects Emerging Practice Symposium in the Dorney House, Hobart . We presented alongside an incredible line up of other contemporaries from all over the country.
February also saw an adventure with old and new friends - we rock hopped our way up one of the creeks/ bush bashed in the Capertee Valley. We set up our tents that night in the sandy creek bed high up the slope, of course it started raining…hard! We thought we would be ok being so high up but of course we awoke to the shouts of GET UP! GET UP! GET UP.. THE WATER IS COMING! and managed to roll out of our sleeping bags and lift the tent off the ground just as the newly formed river rolled over our feet. Ephemeral waterholes and waterfalls appeared overnight with glow worms in their depths. A perfect weekend!
Up to May saw us put the ‘finishing’ touches onto ‘Can’t Break your hip house’. We say ‘finished’ because the to-do list seemed to go on and on, so we did the important things you could see and then threw the list out…‘Can’t Break Your Hip House’ was designed and built for Owen’s parents to live in as they age. However they are still nimbly bimbly so it will be rented out until it is required. We’re pretty proud of the final result and we think it has a generosity in delightful, small ways. It is fully accessible and fits into 102m2, including decks. A nice anecdote that came out near the end of the build was when one of their friends could come over for a cup of tea with her husband who is in a wheelchair. This was a big deal since they hadn’t been able to visit many friends since access is rarely good enough. It’s good to remember that an accessible house is not just for the occupants but enables more connected communities.
A lovely finishing touch was the beautiful sliding fabric doors to the bedrooms Bobbie sewed. These are made from possibly the only 100% Australian Cotton supplier, grown and manufactured in Australia. The coloured sections are offcuts from ikea curtains and Bobbie’s sewing box. They are a beautiful piece of art built into the building’s everyday… it’s beautiful to see them gently flutter in the breeze.
We had a final dinner to celebrate the official ‘end’ of construction in the house. Big thanks to Wayne, Jen, Michael, Chriss, Cam and the list goes on.... We literally couldn’t have done it without you all! We commissioned Damien Milan, a local photographer to take some photos of the house to have a record of it fresh. We think he did a great job. The house and Damien’s photos will feature in an article in Green mag in January 2024, so keep your eyes peeled - Here are a few below:
As we ‘finished’ the ‘Can’t Break Your Hip House’ we prepared to make our way out to Alice Springs to live and work for the next foreseeable bit. As part of this move we wanted to deconstruct The Grand Section exhibition - Girthy: with Slim Edges and return the items in the exhibition back to where they came from, putting the exhibition and that chapter to rest in a re-connected way. To kick this off we ceremonially burnt the display boxes in a catharsis of flame. It was nice to let something so precious and profound go, rather than them collecting dust in a cupboard somewhere. See pics of the reunion with a place below…
On the way north we caught up with one of our old university teachers Brit Andresen. Brit was the first female recipient of the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal, the highest accolade available in Australia. We managed to twist her arm enough to invite ourselves to her house for a couple of days on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island) just out of Brisbane. Finally seeing the house we have both admired for many years, it was SO. FUCKING. GOOD. It’s construction system is simple, frugal, lean and delightful. Twinned hardwood posts, sandwich plywood sheets to form single skin walls that work to provide privacy, block winds and aid structural bracing. The private spaces are minimal and feel scaled down holding you in the ribs of the building. Communal spaces are scattered through the building offering opportunities for different weathers - you can choose between filtered light, sea views, garden screens or full sun. It’s made with intelligence and love. Thanks Brit for putting up with us, and continually checking in on us throughout the build in Blackheath.
As we traveled towards Alice Springs we stopped at places from The Grand Section putting our exhibition fragments back to where we found them, re-reading our writings, re-seeing our drawings, reacquainting with people and reminiscing from that time. It was nice to know that your touristy stint into a town for a week can create longer term relationships. A really lovely re-grounding into what was a life changing experience, and a nice entry back into the red center and our new desert life.
We drove slowly (still too fast for our liking) north to Bundaberg and then eventually west towards the red center. It was great to see this country again, knowing a little bit of its nature, its animals and plants. It was like seeing an old friend again. A key feature we added to the car was a chair (an iconic QLD Squatters Chair) to the roof for stargazing or to enjoy the sounds of desert while one of us would drive along. Best seat in the house!
We made it without any real hiccups to sunny Mparntwe (Alice Springs) on May 28th and straight into a house that we had arranged via text message - a nice intro into the beautiful ways of Mparntwe. It’s a beautiful old style Alice Springs house with a concrete floor, concrete block walls, big roof, big eaves and a beautiful garden. It’s situated right near the Todd river with views of Spencer Hill and near the heart of town. Meaning we can cycle most places with the car at the ready for our remote work trips.
We kicked off our time in Alice by heading out on Bobbie’s first project for Healthabitat as a project manager on June 1st. So.. we unloaded the car into the house and loaded it back up again to head 4 hours west of Alice to a community to kick off the week’s work. Over the past 6 months we have been privileged with this remote work - working in beautiful places like out at the WA border, calling into Uluru on the way, The Barkley and Finke too - https://www.healthabitat.com/what-we-do/housing-for-health/. It is a dream job, focusing on improving the living environment to improve health alongside the community and licensed trades.
Owen was still working remotely for Incidental Architecture in Mona Vale, NSW and began the job hunt for a local firm to ground himself here. After a bit of sniffing he ended up landing a job with Susan Dugdale and Associates who have been doing great work in the center for about 20 years. He is working as an Architect there on a range of projects from commercial office fit outs to remote art centers and everything in between. It’s a great mix, but he misses his remote hammock office from home and staying with the phenomenal Sandra Meihubers on the Northern Beaches every week - https://www.dugdale.com.au/
Bobbie continued to work on her Masters of Architecture remotely once arriving in Mparntwe and produced a very pragmatic piece of work called ‘cool living’ which looks at how to make housing in NT Aboriginal communities cooler without using electricity, in the face of climate change. Trying to establish a data-driven hierarchy of what you do first and what you do last, she created a robust package of work/ tool-kit that housing organisations or house tenants can pick up and implement or advocate for house modifications in a targeted way to improve cooling - it feels like this is only the start of this project! Bobbie graduated (with distinction) in December!! All this info is in a website too - https://www.coolliving.info/
All in all, Mparntwe life is interesting. We’re enjoying the simplicity of a small city and the freedom of the expansive desert. It’s a town where lots of people choose to live so it makes for an amazing melting pot of ideas and opportunities. In all its complexity, it is beautiful, and although it is the center of the country, it really does sit on the edge - of culture, justice, understanding, racism, power and time. In November the dry Todd River flowed after rain from a cyclone in WA made its way down, a powerful re-realisation of how interconnected our places are! We have booked into an Arrente Language class (local language of Mparntwe) in March 2024, and plan for the year ahead to be filled with desert camping, waterholes, star-gazing, desert walking and learning about the complexities of this place...
Love, OK and BB
