University of South Australia (UniSA) Media Release
An ambitious housing project led by the University of South Australia, the SA Government and industry partners is making homes in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands more comfortable and energy efficient.
The APY Lands Energy Efficiency Retrofit Pilot, part of the national RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre, is improving energy efficiency in desert housing, where summer temperatures soar above 45°C and winter nights plunge below freezing.
Since launching the pilot in December 2023, the project team has installed energy monitoring devices in 12 households and completed retrofits on six homes in an APY community. The homes are managed by key project delivery partner, the SA Housing Trust.
The trial retrofits are targeted solutions to reduce air leakage, increase insulation, and reduce thermal bridging – where heat or cold bypasses insulation through the steel building frames.
With 15 project and industry partners, the team has assessed 20 homes, interviewed residents, installed monitoring equipment, built two test rooms in Adelaide, and modelled over 100 retrofit scenarios.
In addition to the retrofit work, the team has produced household energy efficiency and trade training education materials in consultation with the community, to ensure residents know how to get the best outcomes in their homes. Local trades will take part in rolling out the retrofits to remaining APY households.
Lead investigator, UniSA Sustainable Engineering Systems researcher Professor Ke Xing, says the project combines scientific rigour with practical on-the-ground training.
“This pilot is not only improving living conditions in one of the toughest climates in Australia; it’s also creating a blueprint for future upgrades in remote and regional communities across the country,” Prof Xing says.
“In the past year we have collaborated closely with the community, local maintenance workers and our industry partners, all of whom have shown an extraordinary commitment.”
Key findings so far show that addressing uncontrolled air leakage delivers the greatest improvements in thermal comfort and energy efficiency.
Currently winter – more so than summer – is the most uncomfortable period for APY communities. Households rely heavily on inefficient electric radiant heaters, with some resorting to ovens for warmth – an unsafe and costly practice.
Upgrades so far include new bulk insulation in the roof and adding continuous insulation to external walls, self-closing exhaust fans, evaporative cooling dampers, and sealing common air leakage points throughout the homes.
Local tradespeople were trained on-site, supported by custom training resources and guidance from retrofit experts.
Importantly, residents themselves are noticing the difference.
“Common feedback from residents was that their homes were cooler this summer, due to the retrofits. That anecdotal feedback supports our early testing, and we are in the process of conducting full evaluations over the 2025 winter,” says Prof Xing.
UniSA researchers partnered with the SA Department for Energy and Mining, the SA Housing Trust, and community focused organisations such as Healthabitat and Nganampa Health Council. They worked closely with the Iwantja Community Council and local residents, including Aṉangu Energy Education Workers supported by MoneyMob Talkabout.
The project also involves organisations with technical expertise who have provided knowledge and product support, including the Insulation Council of Australia and New Zealand (ICANZ), Kingspan, Sika Australia, Powertech Energy, Efficiency Matrix, and the Air Tightness Testing and Measurement Association (ATTMA).
Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation in the Attorney-General’s Department has also partnered and contributed to the project, and TAFE SA, CodeSafe Solutions and Pointsbuild have contributed the development to the trade training program.
As part of the Pilot’s legacy, trade training programs have been developed to support a broader rollout of housing retrofit skills in remote communities. A “train-the-trainer” event was held in Adelaide in 2024, involving TAFE, SA Housing Trust, Renewal SA and Building Contractor (Furnell’s) staff. Local TAFE students were provided with Net Zero Energy Builder Scholarships to support energy efficient construction in the APY Lands.
The next steps include re-testing the retrofitted homes and expanding the model to other APY communities.
“Ultimately, we want this project to inform national guidelines for remote housing upgrades, tailored to the needs and voices of Aboriginal communities,” says SA Department for Energy and Mining Project Manager Lynda Curtis.
“Aboriginal people have lived in Australia’s desert regions for tens of thousands of years, but temperature extremes have become more pronounced due to climate change,” Ms Curtis says.
“With broader climate extremes and overall hotter summers predicted for the future, how people are living and maintaining healthy communities on Country is of growing concern, and we are invested in providing solutions to those challenges.”
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So happy to read this. Nice to get a good news story!
A wonderful story ….. financial funds being spent for the benefit of Aboriginal communities rather than fat cat desk jockeys resident in North Darwin suburbs. However, I digress from the known but unwanted bureaucratic truth …..
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About 50 years ago I built my first farm house from locally manufactured concrete blocks made with a machine that produced at least 4,000 blocks per day, sufficient for a 200+ m2 house. This machine was portable between sites but remained at one central location for convenience.
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THe NT desk jockeys assert that the high cost of building housing for Aboriginal communities is the freight to convey components from Darwin to the build site.
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OK, so what if the build used concrete or hempcrete blocks produced on site or locally close using local clay deposits as required?? Naturally there would have to be a training programme for the Aboriginal community to learn how to make the blocks, further empowering them to build a better future for themselves.
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Our local machine vanished into Indonesian East Papua decades ago, but are likely to be still available from European manufacturers.
A story that was very pleasing to read.
NEC, a good response.
Much of the housing stock in Oz, particularly in inner urban slums, outer urban and the regions and outback is old stock from 1850s through 1920s. It was mostly poorly built with scantly available materials and was utterly inappropriate for the Oz climate. The parliamentary elite did not care, it was mostly interested in levying taxes and exporting Oz resources to Britain.
After the 1890s recession, there was no stop to the massive immigration, while housing stock remained low, still nothing was done – with urban planning being almost non-existent or ad hoc. From there right through WWI, the 1930s depression and WWII, the Oz housing situation went from crisis to crisis. Not until the 1950s and 60s was there any effort to meet demand, and this was by urban sprawl led by private developers, with still the houses being inadequate for the Oz climate. Yet still the appalling old-stock houses remained as crumbling edifices still needed to meet growing demand. Still the parliament didn’t care, so long as its land barons and foreign-owned material suppliers could maintain their high-cost stranglehold on development. It was business as usual – levying taxes and suppressing imagination and innovation.
With the advent of the CEBS (Commonwealth Experimental Building Station) in the late 1940s and of CSIRO building research & UBRs (Uniform Building Regulations), the focus was on new housing & innovation pointed at notions of owner-occupied nuclear families in the urban sprawl, and remained that way through to the 1990s – it was a nonsense – and largely remained that way until the current crisis.
The old-stock remained, and the govt and researchers still ignored it. It was left to the poor and the burgeoning non-nuclear-family occupiers to attend to them, all the while the neoliberal / neoconservative stranglehold deepened with costs going through the roof. Seems the govt may as well have considered that growing proportion of the population as ‘fringe dwellers’ – and as such they now have a financial nightmare and a housing, health and demographic mess on their hands.
It appears that govt persistent neglect of the realities the citizens face have been squashed by their interference through ideological BS, stifling over-regulation and complacent inaction. Such govt interference has resulted in Oz suburbs and big cities becoming self-choking zones of waste and castles in the air. It’s been a long history of recurring crises and costly and simplistic rearguard actions.
Oz has the bucks, the skills and tech. Academics, scientists and activists have been warning about it for years, yet those ‘fringe dwellers’ are now ubiquitous, increasingly with nowhere safe or healthy to dwell or escape to.
Oh dear. When the parliaments stops just serving their wealthy pets, we might get somewhere properly productive.
The SA Government has form when it comes to this area of government-funded & supported housing development. In the post WWII years, the SAHT (South Australian Housing Trust) commissioned plans for low-cost housing; my architect grandfather was the chief government architect on this project and became responsible for the project to construct homes across 3,000 acres of what was to become the satellite city of Elizabeth to the north of Adelaide. Elizabeth and its adjacent township of Salisbury subsequently became the locus for thousands of British migrants who ultimately became the feedstock workforce for the GMH plant which operated from 1963 until its demise in 2017 courtesy of those business wizards within the Morrison government.
The SAHT could be seen as an exemplar of what is possible when governments take the responsibility for low-cost affordable housing seriously.