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The canvas dome is covered with exuberant dots and curves depicting a water snake.
An aerial view of the dome reveals five squatting figures and on the side is Isaac's totem,
the eagle. It recently won a commendation in the National Dulux Colour Awards.
The company provided weather-resistant paint to render the dome's cotton calico covering.
"It's guaranteed to last 10 years," says Gibbs. "And if someone puts a foot through the
canvas, you patch it by simply painting over the tear, which then sticks together.
It's rather like the old wheatbags and whitewash."
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Gibbs, who is also an unconventional designer and author of a book on the traditional Malay house
( Phillip Gibbs.,"Building a Malay House" Oxford University Press 1987),
developed an active interest in Aboriginal housing problems after visiting fringe camps
around Perth. Born in the NSW Riverina, he grew up on a farm whose perimeter included
the town tip. " One day I discovered there were Aboriginal people living there. Fifty years
later, coming to Western Australia I found things hadn't changed much."
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Isaacs has a different connection with Aboriginal housing - with his wife, Joan, he ran one
of Perth's first hostels for Aboriginal people visiting the city. In the mid-1980s the couple
moved back to Isaacs' birthplace at Wilson's Patch, a bleak and stony terrain 80km north
of the remote mining town of Leonora.
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The couple wanted to set up an alcohol-free settlement
in which their nine children, their families and others could live isolated from the destructive
influences of city life. They took with them a few elderly relatives. Then they salvaged
building materials from abandoned mining sites and rubbish dumps and built huts.
Running water and telephone were connected in 1990 and last year the WA housing authority,
Homeswest, provided two portable dwellings.
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Cyril Bodney
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Over the years Isaacs has accepted requests to house a small number of juvenile offenders,
parolees, petrol sniffers and a few Aboriginal patients from Perth's psychiatric hospital.
In 1990 the couple obtained a 50-year lease and, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Commission assistance, drew up a five-year plan to run a hostel on the land.
Isaacs has met some opposition, not least from a local Aboriginal group which objects to his
use of tribal land and which publicly protested when Joan Isaacs, a non-local Aborigine, was
buried at Wilson's Patch after her death in 1990. Adverse publicity of another kind followed
last year when the Burdekin inquiry into the rights of people with mental illness criticised
the primitive conditions for the psychiatric patients. Urgent improvements were needed, yet
the community had few resources and only modest government subsidies for
its care of welfare cases.
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When Isaacs met Gibbs, they explored the idea of Buckminster
Fuller-designed geodesic domes, which Isaacs had seen in Korea. Gibbs designed a 10 metre-
diameter dome, standing six metres high at the apex, that proved comparatively cheap to erect.
Gibbs found a Perth manufacturer to make the 165 struts and 65 special joints, and the dome was
erected by four men in a day. "When the last pentagon was slotted in, the whole structure
suddenly locked rigid," said Gibbs.
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The Traditional Wilja of the area is a domed structure
made by intertwining sticks and covered with spinifex grass.
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Unbleached canvas was sized by painting lengths of cloth on the dusty ground before they were
stretched over each pentagonal plane. The dome was dubbed a "wilga", a local Aboriginal name
for a beehive-shaped canopy traditionally made of natural materials It cost about $6000 for the
frame, $4000 for the canvas and another few thousand dollars for paving and brickwork.
The eye-catching water snake motif, painted by Isaac's son-in-law, Billy Dean Moody, is fitting:
the dome covers the ablutions block.
Wilson's patch is now an incongruous group of serviceable but ugly shanties huddled around the
rainbow-coloured structure. Isaacs' plan is to build several dome clusters, big and small, to provide
families with sleeping areas and a community kitchen. "The idea is that this structure will be
repeated many times around the community, just like the traditional wilga canopy shape," says Gibbs.
European-Australian culture, he says, "focuses unashamedly on the isolation of the single family unit,
[but this] may have little relevance to an Aboriginal family living in a remote settlement with
complex inter-family relationships".
The airy, open dome structure contrasts with the grim failure of many purpose-built Aboriginal
housing projects. Gibbs and Isaacs point to flat-topped tin sheds or shacks with small louvred
windows, made of indestructible panels that, says Gibbs, "are the pride of housing authorities
because you can't put your boot through them". It's 50 degrees in the shade in places like this.
Try to live in one of these boxes with a flat roof and by six in the morning they are unbearable."
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Isaacs is convinced the dome structure is the solution: "I have spent two years of time and effort
working with professional people to come up with a building that the community wants".
WA's building industry training body, the PPISTC Skills Centre, calls it "a brilliant... practical and
low-cost" building solution for semi-skilled communities.
But money is the major obstacle. While $163,000 has been allocated for construction at Wilson's Patch,
Homeswest Aboriginal Housing Board spokesman Bob Browning says further funds cannot be released
until problems of "long-term durability and design" are addressed. Gibbs and Isaacs have been told
the wilga dome does not meet health regulations - for example, food preparation under a dome
would not meet sanitation by-laws.
Gibbs says Homeswest "appears to have a policy that Aboriginal housing must be visually
indistinguishable from mainstream housing, [meaning] Aboriginal people end up living in a
garden shed."
Isaacs is equally disillusioned. "Homeswest may feel that it will lose some of its control,"
say Isaacs. "Our experience is that it enjoys having control over our lives."
The Bulletin, November 15, 1994
During the past three years Yebble has persisted with his plans. Two more Wiljas have been
built and another is fabricated ready on site to be put up.
Postscript from Yebble
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Billy Dean Moody's designs for the decoration of the dome
were exhibited at the Australian Heritage Commission, National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Art Award 1994/95.
The work was acquired by the Aboriginal Studies Unit and forms
part of the Australian National Museum collection Canberra, ACT.
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CORRINGIE COMMUNITY
via LEONORA
Western Australia
Email to Yebble
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West Online - Internet Services
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© Copyright CORRINGIE COMMUNITY, 1996
All Rights Reserved.
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Victor Isaacs is an unlikely champion of architectural innovation.
He saw active service in the Korean War, joined a travelling boxing
troupe to become Victor "The Butcher" Isaacs and spent
many years odd-jobbing around Western Australia's wheat belt.
But in the past two years he has waged a quiet campaign to change
ideas about remote Aboriginal housing, partnered by Perth-based
architect Phillip Gibbs.
The result is a radiantly hued space
dome erected amid the stony undulations north of Leonora in W.A's
desert.