A Visionary Housing Project In Warumungu Country

Tennant Creek is a town located on Warumungu Country in the Northern Territory, approximately 1000 kilometres south of Darwin, and 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs.

When the township was first established in the 1920s, the Warumungu people were forcibly relocated. They were finally allowed back into Tennant Creek in the 1970s, but by that time, their ancestral lands had been given to white pastoralists and miners, leaving the Warumungu to re-establish their communities within town camps on the town’s periphery. This story of systematic land theft and dispossession is shared by Aboriginal people in almost all remote communities in the Northern Territory.

Today, most Aboriginal people in Tennant Creek still reside in these town camp areas, occupying a mix of very basic, rundown dwellings built and owned by the state government.

The hot season runs from October to March, with an average daily temperature above 34°C. Despite this, most government homes in Tennant Creek fail abysmally in thermal performance and are totally devoid of cultural considerations.

There’s also a chronic lack of maintenance, often resulting in substandard sanitation.

The poor design of these homes makes them inefficient and expensive to run, and power outages are frequent. Perhaps most unbelievably, none of these homes have solar power.

As Dr Simon Quilty, a specialist who’s been working in remote NT since 2005, observes — these houses make people sick. Overheated homes with poor ventilation, coupled with overcrowding, have contributed to the highest rates of streptococcus, renal failure, and rheumatic heart disease in the world.

Simon is one of those people who has an infectious sense of optimism and a rare knack for getting things done. Having held various roles in hospitals and medical centres across the NT over the past 20 years, he’s worked with Elders in remote communities for much of his life, but his meeting with Warumungu Elder Norman ‘Norm’ Frank Jupurrurla was the start of a very special friendship.

Norm was Simon’s neighbour.  ‘My partner and I were given this three-bedroom, architecturally-designed, beautiful little cottage that was air conditioned,’ Simon recalls of the home he rented while running the local medical clinic in Utopia, NT. ‘Norm was my neighbour… and his house was a tin shed.’

The house had a single power point, a tap outside — but no running water inside — and it didn’t have any insulation. ‘He was in there with his partner and five children’ Simon adds.

This eye-opening encounter started a lifelong friendship and sparked many conversations about housing, energy, health, and the ways in which they intersect — especially in remote communities. Together, the two men hashed out ideas for improving homes in Norm’s community, with Simon even spearheading a campaign to install solar panels on Norm’s tinshed roof.

After wading through red tape for more than two years, they finally did it — making Norm the first public housing tenant in the NT to get solar power.

Still, there was more to be done. Norm dreamt of building a better house for his family, and in Simon, he had found the perfect collaborator. A few years ago, he asked his friend to help him with this dream — that was the start of Wilya Janta.

Literally translated to ‘standing strong,’ Wilya Janta is an Aboriginal not-for-profit founded by Simon, Norm and other Warumungu community members and Elders that aims to facilitate the construction of better housing in Indigenous communities.

Aboriginal-led collaboration is central to Wilya Janta’s approach. Seeking to reinvent the current model for remote housing, Wilya Janta puts the tenant (or homeowner) at the centre of the design process, with the key goal of building culturally-appropriate homes that also stand up to the climate.

Norm’s house is the pilot project, or ‘Explain House,’ for this new housing model. It’s Simon’s ambitious hope that Norm’s house will become the exemplar for Wilya Janta, demonstrating that when Aboriginal people are involved in the design of their own homes, the results will be beautiful, functional, culturally safe, thermally efficient and climate resilient  — ultimately leading to better community and health outcomes.

In 2022, after reading an article about Simon’s experience installing solar panels on Norm’s house, Melbourne-based architect Simon Robinson and landscape architect Steve Mintern of not-for-profit architecture firm OFFICE were inspired to reach out and offer their services. A month later, Simon invited the pair to Tennant Creek.

‘That first trip was just about listening and seeing,’ says Steve. ‘The biggest thing for us was to visit some of the Waramungu Elders’ houses and to see the poor living conditions. That was extremely confronting for us to see, firsthand, houses that didn’t have running water or electricity.’

Simon and Steve have since visited Tennant Creek five times. Through forums involving the whole community and small design workshops, they have designed a beautiful home with Norm and his family. It’s been an iterative and highly collaborative process. So much so, the architects prefer to attribute the home’s design to Norm and his wife Serena, rather than take credit themselves.

‘They’re designing, we’re [just] helping them through the process,’ explains Simon.

Indeed, the Melbourne-based design team had a lot to learn from Norm and Serena. One key consideration was culturally appropriate spatial planning and sleeping arrangements.

‘Waramungu people sleep with their head to the east, feet to the west,’ Simon explains. ‘Norm says if you don’t sleep that way, you wake up crazy.’

There also needed to be multiple entries and exits to rooms to maintain Aboriginal avoidance practices, plus additional space to accommodate visitors for extended periods during cultural events and ceremony.

The design is therefore highly flexible, incorporating three bedrooms, two living spaces, and two kitchens — one internal and one external. Two large verandahs at the northern and southern ends of the house enable outdoor living and foster a greater connection to the landscape.

‘The focus for Norm and Serena is that it’s culturally appropriate first,’ Simon says. ‘Their idea of what a good house is [focuses on] how it supports culture for them, rather than it be a shiny thing… so we’re trying to embed it into a landscape and make it feel like it’s a part of the country.’

Another central design feature driven by Norm was the placement of a firepit to the east of the property — a request that initially had Simon and Steve baffled: ‘We knew there was a strong wind that would blow the smoke directly into the house, so we thought it was a poor design choice, but didn’t question it directly,’ recalls Steve.

Later, they learned the placement of the fire on the eastern side of the house would deliberately enable smoke to blow through the home and cleanse it of spirit. ‘It always comes out that Norm is always right!’ Steve says.

Although the design is complete, the house is yet to be built. It will be prefabricated in South Australia in modular sections and transported to site by truck. This approach is efficient, but also ensures the model can be replicated in the future.

The design for a second Wilya Janta home is already in the works, and the plan is to start rolling the model out more widely once the concept has been proven. In this way, Norm’s house is set to be a gamechanger not just for his family, but for future generations living in remote Indigenous communities.