Launch of the 21C drop slab hut
The ImLal hut provides a practical demonstration of how eucalypts and other native timbers can advance habitat creation, while offering sustainable resources for human use. Standing in a clearing within the 15ha ImLal biorich plantation, the drop slab hut will be a focus for meetings, shelter and storage. It was launched by representatives of the sponsors in front of an audience of 62 people on Friday 26 March, 2021.
In building the hut, Ballarat Region Treegrowers and wood craftsman Lachlan Park followed three organising principles, which we call “going local, slow and carbon low.”
Going local
Let’s start with the timber in the hut. We have sought to connect to our patch, seeking indigenous trees that possess a local provenance. So, while many Australians may still prefer culturally to look elsewhere for, say, oak from Europe or teak from Asia, we pivoted to focus on sourcing locally. We sought timber for the hut from largely unsung common native trees, grown by local farm foresters.
So we have sugar gum that makes up the hut’s frame. Planted throughout the Western District’s shelter belts, it turns out to be a Class 1 naturally durable timber, perfect for exterior work. What a pity it’s almost exclusively felled for firewood.
Messmate stringy bark sits comfortably in the drop slab walls. The Wombat Forest’s dominant eucalypt, it was extolled as “the most useful” of trees by gold digger and author William Howitt back in the gold rush era. It splits easily and was always a natural fit for the drop slab walling in miners’ huts.
Black wattle burnishes beautifully to a fashionable wavy-red, ideal for floorboards and the hut’s rolling doors. It once covered the plains, but was spurned as “rubbish” from the get-go, only fit for tanning. It’s an untidy tree, which possibly goes part way to why it’s been overlooked.
Increasingly, there’s a recognition that going local brings a comparative economic advantage. A place-based approach offers authenticity and a chain of custody back to the provenance of whatever you are producing.
Going slow
Making authentic local products demands in many ways a return to craftsmanship. The birth of the industrial era 200 years ago heralded the arrival of mass production and long distance external value chains. Both deadening to individual expression.
With wood, the old, slow ways involved felling a tree and working with it green on the spot to craft a boat, barn or Japanese temple of beauty. All done alone or in a small team with mostly inexpensive tools and without a battalion of expensive middle men. Pegging posts and beams together allowed for movement and shrinkage.
Like the artisans of old, our hut builder Lachie Park is a highly skilled and dedicated craftsman who chooses to work on his own with green wood. He came to us with the idea of updating the uniquely Aussie invention in hut building, the drop slab hut. I hasten to add, that he is not seeking to replicate the old miners and cattlemen’s huts of the high plains. Rather, he is bringing his full range of skills and modern technology to bear in reframing the drop slab hut technique, so that it’s updated and fit for purpose for the 21st century.
Going carbon low
This flows as a consequence of the slow, place-based approach. When combined, these two constraints ensured a minimum of energy was expended in the hut’s construction.
Choosing unprocessed natural products – like the wood and the granite foundation stones – further reduces embedded energy. In a paradoxical way, the granite foundation stones help our drop slab hut sit lightly on the earth. Unlike concrete, no energy-sapping processing is involved, nor ravaging of the world’s river sand deltas. According to a 2013 estimate, there’s now two and half tonnes of concrete for every man, woman and child on Earth – a heavy carbon footprint, indeed.
Recent research published in Issue 90 of Cosmos science magazine points out that the year 2020 holds another dubious distinction. It marked the moment when the human-made, anthropogenic mass exceeded for the first time all of the living biomass of Earth’s plants, micro-organisms, people and animals. And processed construction materials like concrete and steel comprise the vast bulk of this human-made mass. Wood, I noted, is not on the list of anthropogenic objects. Trees are natural and renewable, clothing the Earth, offering gifts of habitat and succour to all Earth’s creatures.
Both temporary and transportable, our small and beautiful hut demonstrates how we might marry conservation and production, the only pathway we have to a truly sustainable future. We like to think that when taken together, the hut and its surrounding biodiverse habitat offer a glimpse of how we might connect people to their place and to other than human species. The hut itself we see as a small practical example of how we might redirect our cultural values and use our hearts, heads and hands to live in a way more suited to the rhythms of the earth.
In building the hut, Ballarat Region Treegrowers and wood craftsman Lachlan Park followed three organising principles, which we call “going local, slow and carbon low.”
Going local
Let’s start with the timber in the hut. We have sought to connect to our patch, seeking indigenous trees that possess a local provenance. So, while many Australians may still prefer culturally to look elsewhere for, say, oak from Europe or teak from Asia, we pivoted to focus on sourcing locally. We sought timber for the hut from largely unsung common native trees, grown by local farm foresters.
So we have sugar gum that makes up the hut’s frame. Planted throughout the Western District’s shelter belts, it turns out to be a Class 1 naturally durable timber, perfect for exterior work. What a pity it’s almost exclusively felled for firewood.
Messmate stringy bark sits comfortably in the drop slab walls. The Wombat Forest’s dominant eucalypt, it was extolled as “the most useful” of trees by gold digger and author William Howitt back in the gold rush era. It splits easily and was always a natural fit for the drop slab walling in miners’ huts.
Black wattle burnishes beautifully to a fashionable wavy-red, ideal for floorboards and the hut’s rolling doors. It once covered the plains, but was spurned as “rubbish” from the get-go, only fit for tanning. It’s an untidy tree, which possibly goes part way to why it’s been overlooked.
Increasingly, there’s a recognition that going local brings a comparative economic advantage. A place-based approach offers authenticity and a chain of custody back to the provenance of whatever you are producing.
Going slow
Making authentic local products demands in many ways a return to craftsmanship. The birth of the industrial era 200 years ago heralded the arrival of mass production and long distance external value chains. Both deadening to individual expression.
With wood, the old, slow ways involved felling a tree and working with it green on the spot to craft a boat, barn or Japanese temple of beauty. All done alone or in a small team with mostly inexpensive tools and without a battalion of expensive middle men. Pegging posts and beams together allowed for movement and shrinkage.
Like the artisans of old, our hut builder Lachie Park is a highly skilled and dedicated craftsman who chooses to work on his own with green wood. He came to us with the idea of updating the uniquely Aussie invention in hut building, the drop slab hut. I hasten to add, that he is not seeking to replicate the old miners and cattlemen’s huts of the high plains. Rather, he is bringing his full range of skills and modern technology to bear in reframing the drop slab hut technique, so that it’s updated and fit for purpose for the 21st century.
Going carbon low
This flows as a consequence of the slow, place-based approach. When combined, these two constraints ensured a minimum of energy was expended in the hut’s construction.
Choosing unprocessed natural products – like the wood and the granite foundation stones – further reduces embedded energy. In a paradoxical way, the granite foundation stones help our drop slab hut sit lightly on the earth. Unlike concrete, no energy-sapping processing is involved, nor ravaging of the world’s river sand deltas. According to a 2013 estimate, there’s now two and half tonnes of concrete for every man, woman and child on Earth – a heavy carbon footprint, indeed.
Recent research published in Issue 90 of Cosmos science magazine points out that the year 2020 holds another dubious distinction. It marked the moment when the human-made, anthropogenic mass exceeded for the first time all of the living biomass of Earth’s plants, micro-organisms, people and animals. And processed construction materials like concrete and steel comprise the vast bulk of this human-made mass. Wood, I noted, is not on the list of anthropogenic objects. Trees are natural and renewable, clothing the Earth, offering gifts of habitat and succour to all Earth’s creatures.
Both temporary and transportable, our small and beautiful hut demonstrates how we might marry conservation and production, the only pathway we have to a truly sustainable future. We like to think that when taken together, the hut and its surrounding biodiverse habitat offer a glimpse of how we might connect people to their place and to other than human species. The hut itself we see as a small practical example of how we might redirect our cultural values and use our hearts, heads and hands to live in a way more suited to the rhythms of the earth.
IFA/AFG, Eucalypt Australia, Lal Lal Wind Farms, Lal Lal Catchment Landcare Group, SUVO Minerals Australia, Responsible Wood, HVP and crowd funding via GoFundMe
