This is Climate Conversations. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Yiradhumarang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo. Hello, friends. My name is Rae Johnston. I’m a Wiradjuri woman but I was born and raised and currently live on Dharug and Gundungurra Country. That’s where I have responsibilities to community and Country. And it is a great honour to be here with you today on the Unceded land of the sovereign Gadigal and I wish to pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, for the great sacrifices that they have made so that we can be here today having this very important conversation. Now, as we do begin today’s conversation, it is important to remember and acknowledge and respect that the world’s first scientists and technologists and engineers are the First Nations peoples of this continent from the world’s oldest continuing cultures, despite all attempts to erase them. Now, in my everyday work, I am a STEM journalist and a broadcaster, and I have the opportunity to speak to some really incredible people that are working every day to help the planet. Today is number 75 of 100 conversations that are happening every Friday, and this series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Now, before this was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station and it was built in 1899. It supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. So in the context of this architectural artefact, we now shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. Now, Dr Simon Quilty is a specialist physician who is working to understand the impact of extreme heat on health. The focus of his research is how to better provide vital services in the remote Northern Territory, where he’s practised medicine for almost two decades and is investigating the connection between heat and mortality and how remote communities can prepare for a warming climate. Simon is currently a visiting fellow with the Australian National University’s Research School of Population Health and we are so thrilled to have him joining us today. So please join me in welcoming Simon. Now you actually first started out in engineering before taking on medicine. What made you want to become a doctor?

Well, I guess firstly, what made me want to become an engineer, and it was pretty simple. So, I grew up in Western Sydney and I wanted to make my car go faster. It was as simple as that and mechanical engineering. And I got into mechanical engineering. And as a young kid, I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in really remote parts of Australia. So, my parents would take us on these pretty Leyland brother adventures out into the central desert and up into Northern Territory before Kakadu was a national park. And I had these childhood experiences from three or four years of age up ’til about 11, where I was exposed to First Nations people. And, growing up in Western Sydney, where there was complete silence about First Nations in the school that I grew up in, it just made me realise what we were all missing out on. So I got halfway through engineering and realised that I was setting off in a life that wasn’t really– well, at that age, I couldn’t really see that I had much of a role in remote Northern Territory where I wanted to live. So I finished the engineering degree and worked for a biotech startup and worked with a few doctors and they started mentioning the possibility and the flexibility of being a doctor to work wherever you want and it made sense. And so I did medicine primarily because I wanted to live and work with remote Indigenous people.

Now you have dedicated much of your career to researching the impacts of heat on health, particularly in remote communities. Can you talk us through what those impacts are?

Yeah. So, obviously the Northern Territory is a very hot place and when I first went up there as a medical student in 2000, it was apparent that the environment shaped culture and society completely. And even in those early days, even back in 2000, when I spent nearly four months at Gapuwiyak in east Arnhem Land, I was hearing stories from some of the Elders about how the climate was getting hotter and how it was interfering with the signalling of different ecosystems and timing of when you’d harvest food. So I remember particularly an old lady, called Djaypila who explained to me that the flowering of the turkey bush, which is this beautiful pink bush up in Arnhem Land, normally symbolised the time when people would move to the bottom of Arnhem Bay to harvest oysters, but that that had been disrupted about five or 10 years before. And so Djaypila and her family were very aware that things were getting hotter. So, working in the Northern Territory, you kind of hear these two stories. You hear a First Nations story that is extraordinary in its depths of understanding of ecological knowledge and climate. And then you hear the Western scientific story of why it’s happening. And so it’s my experience of understanding how climate affects health has come from both of those sources. And so, from a very basic kind of perspective, heat– too much heat obviously kills anything. We all start to cook, we’re all made of proteins. Eventually–

We’re all made of meat.

We’re all made of meat. And it does cook when it gets hot enough. And so there’s these threshold temperatures above which no body will survive. But in the Northern Territory, where you can have weeks above 40°C. The way that it manifests is complex and we’re all biological entities, which is something I think often Western people forget, that we are actually a part of the ecosystem. We’re not separate from it. And so if you have the capacity to shelter from heat, then it’s not a problem. If you don’t have the capacity to shelter from heat, then it can be a problem. And so the way that it affects human bodies is complete. So a very hot day will have effects on your psychology. You’ll have effects on your kidneys, you’ll have effects on your heart, and it will also have an implication for what other illnesses your body might be carrying.

What kind of psychological impact can heat have?

Well, from personal experience, living in Katherine for eight years in really hot parts of the year, but on really hot days in those hot parts of the year, it can feel a little bit like Armageddon, particularly 2018 and 2019, which were the two hottest years ever recorded in the Northern Territory. And living with two small children in the Northern Territory, my partner and I would often– it would be a time of tension where tempers flared and where you just feel agitated all of the time and you can’t sleep as well at night, so you’re bit sleep deprived. So it starts to make you a little bit impulsive. And I presume for a lot of people it’s also now, combined with this existential fear of this is just the beginning of climate change, so anxiety. And this is just from my own personal experience, so I don’t have any expertise in psychology, but that’s just my experience of it.

Now, I think heat can impact the human body in ways that people don’t expect, and that’s one element of it, right?

Absolutely. A really important element. So in the Northern Territory, it’s called ‘suicide season’ or of ‘mango madness’, and it’s that really hot time of the year. And it’s called ‘suicide season’ for a reason. In a town like Katherine, it was absolutely notable that you’d have people that you knew that would decide that it was all too much at that point. And I’m sure it’s the impulsivity of it and that sense of anxiety that comes with not knowing when this extreme heat is going to finish.

It’s horrific. Now, how is the housing crisis in remote communities compounding these impacts?

It’s a really interesting question. So, in the Northern Territory I’ve had the amazing privilege of particularly working in Katherine as a specialist and over time getting to know the Elders of almost every single community in the Katherine region through either their health problems or their family’s health problems. What a lot of people don’t recognise for First Nations people is this issue of housing and colonisation. So Mr Jupurrurla’s family, who you’re going to speak to later on today for instance — he’s probably only fourth generation away from the first time his ancestors met white people. And I’ve definitely met a number of old people who can remember the first time they met a white person on their country, particularly out in the Tanami in the Western Desert. And so for those people, the first question has to be what happened to them in this transition from pre-colonial ancestral ways to post-colonial oppression. And housing is part of that oppression. And so people were forced off their land and over, you know– if you understand the history of colonisation in the Northern Territory — it kicked off about 1870 with the Overland Telegraph line, and then there were gold rushes and pastoralism and people were pretty rapidly dispossessed of their land mostly, and forced to live in these communities. And, when you understand how the communities were formed — and there’s 73 remote communities in the Northern Territory — you get a real appreciation for the diversity, not only in First Nations culture, which is just extraordinary and so rich and deep, but also in the way colonisation shaped that individual community. And so they’re all contemporary now and they’re all really fascinating places but they are all, apart from that delightful, endless cultural richness that I’m fortunate enough to have been privileged to see and have explained, they’re all very impoverished. So to give you an example, to make it clear how poor these communities are in New South Wales here, there’s 4111 suburbs listed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the ABS rates every suburb in Australia by the index of relative socioeconomic disadvantage. In the Northern Territory– so there’s 4111 suburbs here in New South Wales, five of which are in the bottom 1%. In the Northern Territory there’s 255 suburbs, 73 of which are in the bottom 1%. Every single one of them is a remote Indigenous community. And so to understand the impact of heat, you really have to understand the impact of material poverty, because it’s definitely not cultural poverty, it’s cultural richness and material poverty. So, to give you a really good understanding of what I mean by the day-to-day reality of that poverty in a town like Kintore, which I have spent a bit of time in, the average adult income is $166 per week. On average there’s one child per adult in Kintore, so that money needs to be split between two people. The average contribution to a rental property is about $25 each and then the average contribution to the electricity bill is up to $15 or $20 per person, because the houses are so poorly, thermally constructed and designed. And so that leaves you down to kind of $130, $120 a week. The price of a litre of milk in Kintore is $9 and fuel gets up to $4/litre. And so all of a sudden you realise that what is $100 in Kintore is the equivalent of about $30 in Alice Springs and people are beyond the breadline. And particularly the last two years with the impact of rising inflation, it has really pushed people below the breadline probably for the first time in 50 years. And on top of that, the Northern Territory is experiencing more and more really extreme heat. And to give you an example, in those two last years that were in Katherine from 2018 to 2020, on average, there’s six days a year in Katherine that are above 40°C. In 2019, it was 56 days.

Wow, that’s a big jump.

It’s unbelievable. And unexperienced — from my discussions with the Elders of First Nations people — possibly ever before. And so the remote communities themselves have really poorly constructed houses. And even the brand new buildings, in the Northern Territory Government’s building for up to $1,000,000 a piece, are incredibly poorly designed and the Northern Territory Government has the lowest requirement for thermal efficiency for housing of any state in Australia.

How does that make sense?

You’ll have to ask the Northern Territory Government that — it doesn’t make sense. And so, the impact of that is that the way that the new houses that they’re building works is that they’re made of Besser brick corefilled, so they’re solid concrete walls with small windows and no kind of cultural considerations to the flow of the house. There’s no outdoor living areas and there is no need for landscaping. So they compress the earth around the house so that you can’t grow a blade of grass. And they’ve already knocked out all of the trees on that block. This is what is happening today in the Northern Territory. And so that house on a 49°C day — they do have eaves, but they’re not really adequate — the house, the house’s walls will get above 50°C because they will all get a bit of sun on them. So the inside of the house will get to above 50°C and the only way to keep it cool is to pump your air conditioning. This is where it gets even worse. So the Northern Territory Government also has a policy that remote Indigenous housing above the humid zone, which is north of Elliott, is not allowed to come preinstalled with air conditioners, only ceiling fans.

Why? It’s just a rule that they have for no good reason?

In the Northern Territory remote Indigenous housing guidelines. Air conditioning is really problematic because you’re talking about people with no money having to have their air conditioner pumping all day to stay firmly safe. So I’m talking about the new houses. I’d like to talk about the older houses and the very old houses as well. So the older houses like Mr Jupurrurla house. I didn’t quite understand this until my family stayed with Norm and Serena on the 2nd and 3rd of January 2020 — it was 45°C each day, and it’s 40°C before 9.30 — and the eastern facing wall of his 45-year-old house has no eaves on it. And it’s a solid brick wall, and the sun beams down on that brick wall from 6.00 in the morning until 12.00. So by 12.00, if you put your hand on the inside of that wall, it’s almost too hot to touch.

It’s a bit like you’re in an oven.

Correct. It’s like an oven. And so the only way to keep it cool is to crank the air conditioner. And so Norm had one of his good mates and his family down and, you know, the doctor and he wanted to look after me. And so he had the air conditioner cranked all day. And I already understood that Aboriginal people in the Katherine region really struggle to pay their power bills, and I’d often help purchase a power card. But for Norm that day I realised every half an hour he’s going out and looking at his meter to see how much electricity he had left on his prepaid metre because he didn’t want to disconnect. And suddenly I realised the implications for my own family of what would happen if the power disconnected. So you run out of food. In the middle of summer, those houses, even the new houses, people don’t wash in the shower in the afternoon because the water that comes out of the cold tap comes out scalding hot. So they have to wait for the sun to go off the earth for that water to cool down. So everybody showers in the morning. That is, if you’re lucky enough to have running water. So there’s houses in Tennant Creek that don’t even have running water.

So, how does energy insecurity– you’re mentioning you’re counting down to see how much power is left. How does that intersect with the lack of adequate housing there?

So, I was part of the COVID response team in Lajamanu. When COVID first hit the Northern Territory, there was great anxiety about how COVID would manifest and particularly Lajamanu was the most anxiety-provoking. So Warlpiri people don’t trust Western medicine and I completely understand why. And Lajamanu is one of the most remote towns in the Northern Territory, and there’s about a thousand Warlpiri people that live there, and only about 30% or 40% of them are vaccinated. So when when COVID arrived in December 2021, it was in the context of low vaccination rates and not really knowing how COVID would manifest in the community and the health service, really understanding that resource capacity was limited. And what happened during that week for me was one of the hottest weeks ever recorded in Lajamanu. So I was walking around swabbing people and you could see a house disconnect from power and there was a whole lot of other stuff that went on. For instance, an initial refusal to allow people to leave their house so they couldn’t buy power cards. But when a house disconnects and it’s that hot inside, you can’t stay inside. Like it was a poorly designed and insulated house that’s 20 years old, might not even have insulation in the ceiling, and so it might get to 60°C plus inside. And so you have to move out and so you move into another house and there might be 15 people living in one house and they might move to their family’s house down the road that might have 20 people in it. So all of a sudden you have 35 people living in a three-bedroom house.

Waiting for the power to run out because you can’t get out to buy a power card. Correct. Oh, my gosh.

Well, well, you know, you might not even have the money to buy a power card.

Yeah, if you can. Yeah. You’ve spent years of your career raising the importance of recording temperature on death certificates. What would the significance of that be?

We did a study a couple of years ago looking at all of the death certificates for 10-year period in Australia from 2004 to 2014, I think — I’m pushing my memory back now — and what we found was that there were only about 400 deaths in Australia recorded as being from heat.

That doesn’t add up.

No, it doesn’t add up at all. So we do know– my research at the moment is looking at heat-attributable mortality. So we know that on a very hot day, wherever you are in the world, that your risk of dying goes up quite substantially, up to 1.2 or 1.3. So we know that more people die in hot weather. And so there is this incredible discrepancy, I think it was almost 1000-fold unrecording of deaths on death certificates from heat. And this really, to me, goes back to the sense of Western people that we live separate to our environment. So you can imagine in Alice Springs, I’ll give you an example. I recall a lady who came in with third-degree burns on her, the side of a face in her arms, after she had an epileptic seizure and fell on very hot ground. So nobody’s fault, but the ground is, you know, over 100°C and it will burn you quickly. I realised that nobody was actually identifying heat was the cause of the entire thing. So it was also almost certainly contributing to the reason that she had a seizure, because she has a tablet called sodium valproate to stop the seizures. Sodium valproate denatures if it’s exposed to warm temperatures even just once.

So that wouldn’t have worked.

So the tablet looks perfectly normal. Looks like it’ll work. You take it, but you don’t– you might not realise that you left it on the seat of your car in the sun shone on it for too long and it’s now completely denatured. And so, when you’re working in a hospital like Alice Springs, it’s very– well, when you work in any hospital, actually, they can be really intense environments. But in Alice Springs it was really prominent because we’re in this community that experiences heat all the time. But as a doctor in 21°C all of the time and what you see is a burn and someone that had a seizure, but you don’t really attribute the environmental causes of heat to that presentation. And so we were suggesting not that you put climate change on the death certificate, but we now have quite sophisticated ways of inputting data to understand why people die and none of it is environmental at the moment. So the way you fill in death certificate at the moment, you get this big sheet of paper, you fill in the patient’s name — it’s usually the most junior doctor’s job on the team to do — and you handwrite the cause of death and that’s it. In this modern day, where we have most hospitals have electronic records, it would be very sensible to have a much better understanding of actual causes of death so that we can really start to understand what extreme weather is doing to healthcare services, for instance. So that the whole reason of recording this is to have a better understanding from a societal point of view of what we are all vulnerable to. And we now have powerful computational tools behind us that would help us. Instead, people are just handwriting on old pieces of paper.

And you have researched about how a shortage in healthcare workers in the areas, that climate change is exacerbating and contributing to a shortage of healthcare workers in these areas, where people need it the most. What is happening exactly?

Yeah. So, in regards to that research, all of my research comes — and I think in big part inspiration from people like Norman Frank Jupurrurla — comes from an acknowledgement of my own personal experience and the importance of incorporating my own experience into how the way I develop research. And what was becoming very clearly apparent to me in the Northern Territory was that as record temperatures were being set and as there was a more profound acceptance of the reality of climate change in our society, from about 2015 onwards. Around the dinner table, if you invited doctor friends and nurse friends over for dinner, the conversation of real estate values and where you were going to move to to escape climate change was becoming more and more common. And I saw lots of people leaving the Northern Territory to go to Tasmania for the purpose of future-proofing, which is a tremendous privilege, right, to be able to do that. There’s a lot of people that don’t have that option and a lot of people that will never leave their land, particularly their Ancestral Lands, but it leaves the town really vulnerable. And so we did some research. We sent out a survey to all doctors in the Northern Territory in 2021. We had an incredible response rate, and that is important because it shows that people were engaged with the research. So as a professional, I get emails at least a couple of times a week asking me to participate in the survey, and I rarely do. We had about 30% of all doctors responding, so it was a good sample size and we found that 98.5% of doctors understood that climate change was a real risk to human health and 0.5% believe that climate change was a hoax. So there’s a couple of–

Medical doctors believing climate change is a hoax?

As well as Donald Trump. But to me firstly what that states to the Northern Territory Government and to the Australian Government is that people that are educated in sciences understand the dire significance of climate change, and if you don’t take that seriously, then you will lose your workforce. So I think it was 30% of doctors reported that they were in the process of or planning to leave the Northern Territory because of their concerns about the impact of climate change. And this is a real problem for every industry in the north of Australia. People don’t see a future there.

You’ve mentioned a number of times your working relationship and personal relationship as well with Warumungu traditional owner, Norman Frank. Now, in some of your upcoming research with Norman and other collaborators as well, it’s investigating how social and cultural adaptations of Indigenous communities are critical to preparing for hotter climates. What are you finding is happening there?

Yes. So, once again, from that really personal experience, I remember when I first met Norm. He was so impressive in his deep intellect. And he talks about this thing called gwarda, which is the Warumungu word for for listening, for hearing. It’s a deeper listening, a deeper awareness. And if you sit with Norm for any time, you realise that he’s picking up on all these things that I, as a Westerner, that has forgotten my ecological roots because this is the way that our society lives, I just don’t pick up on it. And it’s, it’s awe-inspiring to see Norm do these things that I didn’t learn as a kid. I saw the way that he lived and I’ve lived and worked with lots of First Nations people in the Northern Territory, and life revolves around the ecosystem and the environment and the climate. And the whole way that society operates, still to this day, is deeply connected to the environment. And I remember I’d run my pushy home from work and it would be blistering hot and you’d run through a puddle after the rain in Katherine and the 45°C heat would be burning down on the puddle and that would be turning to steam and you’d ride through the puddle. You felt like you couldn’t breathe. And I remember looking across, sitting under these trees were some Warlpiri people that I knew and they were just shaking their head, going ‘Look at that crazy whitefella warunga– that warunga kartya riding his bike home in the heat. Why would you do that?’ And it’s because I don’t have– I’m learning to have more gwarda. I hope. A lot of my research, particularly in the last four or five years, has been inspired by and with Norm to try and understand how our communities in the north of Australia can adapt. And we’ve got some really interesting research on mortality that’s coming up soon that demonstrates the absolute imperative of cultural and social adaptations to climate change. And from a Western point of view, we’re all familiar with the siesta. And I remember as a young fellow, I went to Spain and it was the thing to do back in the late 90s. Everybody did it. And you know, down in the south of Spain, cities would shut for those three or four hours and it just had this lovely fluidity. If you go to Spain now, that has disappeared.

Really? No more siestas?

And nobody is documenting why it disappeared because it makes sense. Western cultural– absolute priority is money and economy.

Capitalism. Capitalism ruins siestas.

Yeah, probably. Well, I mean, nobody’s talking about it. So, if you look into the literature, there’s a couple of papers that suggest that maybe the siesta was good for you, or maybe it was even bad for you, but hardly anything and very little academic or intellectual discourse about what just happened. That this cultural institution just disappeared like that.

We’re going to be chatting with Norman a little later about the first trial, installing solar panels on a Northern Territory public housing rooftop. And that was actually Norman’s rooftop. What learnings did you take from that experience?

Well, that goes back to what I was telling you about before the night I slept next to the wall — and so I realised the absolute dire consequences for a family living in a house like that. And so, that started Norman and I having another conversation. So our initial conversations when we first met 20 years ago were around housing, but then it was this issue of electricity. Norm came to my house, which was a rental, and he said, ‘How’d you get those solar panels on the roof?’ And I explained to him that, you know, I was renting the house and presumably the previous owners had a government subsidy, probably worth $5000 or $6,000 to put the panels on the roof. And Norm said, ‘Why can’t I do that on my roof?’ And I said, ‘Well, good point. Let’s have a crack at it.’ And that also led to Norm and I doing some other research which found that First Nations communities in the Northern Territory the most energy insecure in the world. So on average, a house will disconnect from power every fourth to fifth day. So, to put it another way on that really hot COVID-infused day in Lajamanu in 2021, probably one in four houses were disconnected from power at any one time, for 10 hours at a time. So, you can imagine what that does to people’s budgets and the fridge spoils. It just goes on and on. So, we had this paper published, but I was like, ‘Well, it’s not just do academic research for academic’s sake’. There’s too many academics that do that, particularly in the Northern Territory. It’s all about publication of PhDs and it’s not about action. You don’t need science to tell you that rooftop solar saves money.

We’ll make your power more secure.

Exactly. Yeah. So, Norm and I just cracked on with it. And then thanks to the amazing support of the guys at Original Power and a particular call out to Lauren Mellor, who heard about it and she said, ‘Simon, Original Power’, which is a First Nations renewable energy organisation, ‘came along and said, “Do you want a hand?”‘ And I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I just don’t know how to deal with the bureaucrats’.

That’s what I was going to ask, how do you go through all those loopholes to be able to get this across the line when you’re dealing with housing rules that don’t even let you install air con or build houses so that they’re properly suited to the climate.

It’s insane. So I put panels on the house that we bought in Alice Springs and I’ve got a $6,000 rebate and all I did was fill out an online form and it was done. And I made one phone call and the panels on my roof. For Norm, I started and I’m like, Well, you know, this Northern Territory house how do we ask permission? And so then Original Power came along and I said, ‘Can you please make sure you document every step of this?’ Because this is really important to understand the barriers. We need to understand the barriers so that we can replicate this achievement. And that’s very much the Norm and my approach, that if we can demonstrate it for Norm, then we can demonstrate it for others. So the first thing that happened was, you know, I, as an educated Western person, acknowledged that I didn’t have the capacity to deal with the bureaucracy because I didn’t know how to do the paperwork. Original Power, which is heavily invested in this space said “we’ll take it on for you.” And the Department of Housing said that you couldn’t do it because they couldn’t guarantee the structural integrity of the roof. Where else? And so we had to pay for an engineer to verify that Norm’s roof had structural integrity.

You couldn’t dust off your old engineering skills?

I could. They’re a bit dodgy. It was focused on the back wheels of my car.

If someone needed to do their car up it would have been a different story, wouldn’t?

Exactly, yeah I’d be happy to help there. So, then the second problem was dealing with power and water. Northern Territory Power and Water Corporation. It was pernicious. There wasn’t just no help. There was hindrance. Complete hindrance. So, back to housing first though, so housing then said, ‘Yeah, you can put the panels on the roof providing you sign this waiver that when you leave the house, you pay for all of the removal of all of the equipment’. And Norm said, ‘Why can I just leave it there?’ And they said, ‘You have to sign the waiver, otherwise we won’t let you do it’. So, then we were allowed to proceed. We put the panels on the roof and were committed to dealing with the institutions that were going to put barriers in the way. And Power and Water refused to accept that the smart metre that Norm had at his house would accept or be safe with solar. And so I rang the manufacturers in Germany of Liberty 120 smart meter and said, ‘Can you put solar on? Because Norm tells me that it’s got a plug on the side that says solar input’. And the manufacturer said, ‘Of course, you know these pre-purchased power metres are made for low-income people, of course they’re solar compatible’. I took that back to Power and Water and it went on and on and on and eventually one day– so, they installed it and Power and Water came and put a lock on, a bolt padlock over where the solar input would go so Norm couldn’t plug it in. So it took about six months for a resolution which turned out to be Minister Paik, who was at the time the housing minister, coming to celebrate panels. And so Norm got his angle grinder out–

Yes!

–and ground the bolt off and plugged it in. And then Power and Water came to the party and Jacana Energy became a bit more helpful. And then so the electricity is going from the roof to his house, but then there’s this argument about whether he gets a feed-in tariff like I do. And that was finally negotiated, but it was– certainly I, as an individual, couldn’t have beaten bureaucracy, and it was the power of Original Power to just stand steadfast and continue to push for rooftop solar as a solution. So, we’ve done some research that’s recently been published with Norm. It disconnected 12 times in the year before and Norm’s a well-to-do Warumungu person. And in the 12 months after that, he didn’t disconnect a single time.

Wow. The barriers that you had to overcome to get that to happen. And I’m sure Power and Water sees it as a success story now.

Yeah. I mean, well, look, that’s what we hope, because I don’t think these bureaucracies have malintent. And I just don’t think they see how hard they make people’s lives. And I’m talking about every bureaucracy in the Northern Territory — these really simple rules that are insurmountable.

Yeah. So you and Norm have a new initiative that you’re trying to get off the ground. So this is aiming to address the remote housing crisis and you’re actually co-designing housing with the community and making sure it’s resilient to those high temperatures. Tell me about this project. How did it get started?

This is so exciting for all of us. When I met Norm, I was 30 and he was 31 and I got a job out at Utopia as a doctor. And my partner and I went out there and we were given this three-bedroom, architecturally designed, beautiful little cottage that was air conditioned. It was fully serviced. We didn’t have to pay for power or anything. It was just the two of us. And Norm was my neighbour and he lived maybe 100 metres — so, the community at the clinic in Utopia has about 10 houses and he was my next door neighbour — and his was a tin shed that was no bigger than the space of this stage, and it had a single power point and it had a tap outside that Norm had hooked a hose onto so that he could have water inside, and it didn’t have any insulation and he was in that tin shed with his partner and five children.

Wow.

And it was outrageous that he was in these circumstances. But this is just the truth of lots of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, even today. And I acknowledged it, I said, ‘This is outrageous, Norman’. We talked about swapping houses and of course the health service did get a bit upset and we’ve been talking about houses ever since. And Norm’s a very gifted jack of all trades or Mukunjunku, a smart man, and he has his own solutions. So, even that old house in Utopia, he built this beautiful bow shed and planted it with the native vine, and he just had all of these clever solutions around him that he’d come up with. And it was actually quite a beautiful house. I know it sounds a bit dire, but it was such a happy house. And Norm’s had some health problems that have really interfered with his strength, with his physical strength and when we talked about the solar panels on his roof, there was an absolute acknowledgement that the problem isn’t just the solar panels, it’s the structure of the house and the design of the house. And so one of the things that Norm has explained to me is that the cultural design of the house is really important. And so we had all of these discussions and then Norm said a couple of years ago, ‘Hey, would you help me build a house? And I’m like, ‘Norm I’d love to, that sounds like so much fun’. And so, he went ahead and secured a 47-acre parcel of land. So, Tennant Creek is surrounded by 10,000 hectares of Warumungu land trust land and there’s only a couple of houses built on it. And yet there’s all of these Warumungu people that want to move just out of town on a five- or 10-acre block. And with space around them and in their own way. And so Norm’s the first person to agree to try and do that. And, and there’s a lot of Warumungu people getting behind him. And we’ve got a bunch of architects and engineers, who are also really committed. We have a legal firm giving us pro-bono advice to figure out land tenure because even just to secure that 47 acres is really challenging. And Norm has these beautiful descriptions about the way that he wants to live. And when you think about Norm’s ancestors and the way that they have been forced into houses, he calls it being chucked into houses — the new houses they’re building look like prisons. And they’re anti-cultural, oppressive of culture. I’ll give you a couple of examples, so Warumungu people sleep east-west. They have to or otherwise they have the sense of being warunga or unsettled or crazy. And so if a house isn’t east or west, if it’s north-east or south-west, then everybody’s furniture inside has shifted and it spoils the flow of the house. Then the other thing is for all First Nations communities in the north of Australia, there’s these avoidance relationships that are absolute. There is no questioning your absolute commitment to avoid– so for a Warumungu man, your mother-in-law or your daughter-in-law, your son-in-law, you’re not allowed to be in the same room as them. So, the new houses that they’re building in Tennant Creek, for up to a million bucks a house in remote NT, have a large living area with a kitchen down one end and three to four bedrooms along the side and either one or two bathrooms down that end of the house. And so, if your mother-in-law is in the living area, which turns out to be a bedroom when it’s 25 people living in it, you can’t enter and you can’t necessarily get to the toilet or to your bedroom, which is the surrogate house for your four family members, who also live in that house. So, the structure of the house is oppressive of culture. And then the structure of the house is ignorant of environment. And we have these wonderful architects that we’re working with from Office and Troppo and Professor Paul Memmott, who are really getting behind this idea to try and build some demonstration display homes to show the Warumungu people what living in a beautiful home can be like.

So how will the co-design process work?

I don’t really know that it’s a co-design — I reckon it’s Norman Serena design — and we just have some really terrific architects that know how to listen deeply to Aboriginal people and really incorporate culture into structure.

So talk me through what these new designs look like. How different are they?

Firstly, the block of land is the best block of land in Tennant Creek. It’s a beautiful block of land with these escarpment hills and these white gum trees and spinifex around. And Norm’s always dreamed of having a house up there, partly so he can see the big triple lorries roll into town and partly so you can see over Tennant Creek and partly so he has the best view on firecracker night.

Very important.

Very important. So, it’s a beautiful block of land. The house will be a standard look from the outside, but it will have really big verandahs because the verandahs then– if you have family visiting, the verandahs are the perfect place for them to stay. We will be aiming for an energy efficiency rating of above eight, which is highly energy efficient, and we will have the roof covered in solar panels with a battery so that Norm never has to deal with Power and Water again. It will have water tanks and you know, you can have a chat with Norm about it, but it also has a couple of things. So, it has a fire pit on the eastern-facing wall so that the smoke will keep the spirits out of the house. It has an outdoor kitchen down one end and an indoor kitchen down the other. So if your mother-in-law’s in one end you can cook down the other end. And it has bathrooms on either side. Once again, for privacy and to make sure that we honour the cultural obligations of the residents.

Sounds beautiful.

It’ll be a beautiful house.

So, what’s your message for other researchers coming from a Western science perspective who are wanting to learn from traditional owners and knowledge holders?

I think, firstly, you have to put skin in the game. I’ve seen too many academics in vulnerable places like the Northern Territory come and develop strong portfolios and leave without any change. So I’ll give you an example of rheumatic heart disease. And my grandfather died of rheumatic heart disease at 44 years of age. He grew up very poor in Sydney in an overcrowded house and I know, from my personal experience, I’ve probably diagnosed more rheumatic heart disease in the last 10 years than any doctor probably in the world. It’s a devastating diagnosis to give to a little kid, and it is a disease of overcrowded houses. So, that is what causes rheumatic heart disease. The streptococcus is allowed to spread through those houses because there’s 25 people in the house. If one person has a bit of strep and they sit on the lounge chair, then the next person to sit on the lounge chair will have that on their skin as well — so people are constantly colonised in the streptococcus. And, there has been a tremendous amount of research, money spent on understanding rheumatic heart disease. And no progress. In fact, in the last five years, there has been an increase in the rates of rheumatic heart disease in the Northern Territory. And it’s simple, you don’t need to have academia to do the maths. You just need to know your community. And so all that money spent on rheumatic heart disease research and the rates are going up and there is not nearly enough advocacy, courageous advocacy. So, one of the problems with academic institutions at the moment is that academics have to be really careful how they speak out or they will lose tenure or they’ll lose future research opportunities. And you can see that so clearly in climate science, how terribly it was politicised by previous federal governments and how much that retarded progress in that space. So, I think for future academics they need to be courageous. They need to speak the truth and they need to really learn how to have more gwarda and to sit with Aboriginal people and be humbled by their the knowledge that is non-Western academic in nature, but nevertheless extraordinary.

Do you have hope for the future that we can turn around?

Oh absolutely. Yeah, I’ll invite you to the housewarming at Norm’s house.

Oh, I’d love that.

Yeah. Look, I absolutely have hope about this, that the issues in the Northern Territory are entirely resolvable. We just need to give the agency to communities themselves, and we need to deeply recognise the oppression of colonisation that is still going on today, that can be seen in the architecture. You can actually walk into these houses and you can see for yourself if you want to devote time. All you need to do is drive to Tennant Creek and drive into Village Camp and be quiet about it and respectful and you can see in three seconds what the problem is.

Thank you very much for your time today, Simon. It’s been fantastic to speak with you. Please join me in thanking Dr Simon Quilty, everyone. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.