Spring Creek Road Farm House

BACKGROUND: The project is a house on a remnant of a sheep farm on the edge of the western district and Victorian Volcanic Plains. The property, divided between protected native landscape and cropping fields, is Wathawurrung country. The title deed would have originally been given for little or no cost on the basis that the holder demonstrated improvement of the land that it described. Here that meant removing the trees and “improving” the pastures, erecting fences and excluding those who had dwelt on this land from the beginning. CONTRIBUTION: The project was submitted to the AIA in the category of residential new. This is not an extension, that would mean that we have sought to maintain or continue the current situation of dispossession or illegal occupation. It may be an alteration, as we have sought to remove fences, to stop grazing the land and to remove “improvements” from the land. We might think about this as an unsettling. Through the use of covenants and agreements that have been fashioned in the models used by financial institutions we have effectively diminished its value, it is now worth less, and our program is to continue to diminish the area used for farming until there is no value in the property and the relationship with the land is simply one of care. SIGNIFICANCE: Architecture and Design Awards. Sustainability - recognized by our peers and the profession and by the Landcare stakeholder groups: CCMA, GLN, TfN, DEECA. Property Law – through the use of the covenant towards the unsettling of the land.