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solids, and that our houses in the tropical and sub-tropical portions 

 of Australia should be constructed on the same principle as dairies, 

 in which an equable temperature is secured all the year 

 round. It is curious, but I have noticed it frequently in 

 my Australian travels, that while a good dairyman will take all 

 sorts of precautions to ensure his milk being kept sweet and cool 

 in su miner and warm in winter, he himself lives, year in, year out, 

 in a construction of iron, wood or brick, stifling, stuffy and smelly in 

 the hot weather, and cold and draughty in winter. Obliquity of 

 economic vision must be responsible for this. The milk represents 

 so much cash, thinks the dairyman, totally ignoring the fact that 

 his brain, his bone and sinew, his flesh and blood, and his good 

 sound physical and mental health, all rolled into one, is the biggest 

 cash asset that there is on the farm. Australian farmers are a 

 healthy lot because they live so little in the houses they build for 

 themselves, while Australian farmers' wives, so far as my experience 

 goes, are, as a class, anything but robust, because chiefly they live 

 so much in these fearfully and wonderfully ill-constructed houses. 



Some years ago, before the age of butter factories and creameries, 

 I lived in the northern part of Victoria, near a very large home- 

 built dairy, and I often visited the place. I made up my mind 

 then that if I ever built a house in Australia it should be on the 

 plan of this dairy on the principle that what is good for milk is 

 good for man. The time for the fulfilment of the self-imposed 

 promise came some four years ago, and it is this house, in which I 

 am still living, that I propose to briefly describe for the benefit of 

 the settler who has not too much money to spend on buildings and 

 yet desires to make himself as comfortable as possible. 



I should like to say that I never built a dwelling house before, 

 and that I had no assistance but that furnished by an unskilled but 

 handy laborer, and that I was not a millionaire when I started the 

 contract. I mention these facts, not for my own glorification, but 

 merely to show that any one of ordinary intelligence who can use 

 a hammer, saw and chisel, can do likewise. We are all very wise 

 after the event, and I can see lots of little mistakes in construction 

 that will be avoided in the next house I have to put up. 



The house originally consisted of four rooms (it has now 

 twelve) ; is built of two native materials, wood and mud, or pug, or 

 adobe, or whatever one likes to call it ; and this is how it is con- 

 structed : I bought a couple of truckloads of slabs (face cuts), some 

 round jarrah poles for corner posts, and the necessary sawn timbers 

 for the roof, floor joists and uprights. I first put up a shed 40 x 20, 

 that is, I put the necessary uprights in the ground and put the roof on 

 top of them. Then I covered the sides with slabs, leaving spaces for 

 doors and windows, trenching the slabs into the ground at the bottom 

 and nailing them to the wall plate at the top. The openings between 

 the slabs I closed with the thin ones, nailing them well on each side. 

 The next work was to put down the floor joists and lay the floors, 



