WestWyck News

WestWyck features in a short documentary made by RMIT students.


WestWyck from kltie ietlk on Vimeo.

The Cape Paterson Ecovillage is Australia’s first zero carbon housing project championing biodiversity, sustainability and community. Like WestWyck, Cape Paterson has faced delays due to planning issues, but it is finally happening.

The Cape Paterson Ecovillage has just undertaken a 'zero carbon study' commissioned by Sustainability Victoria which excitingly shows that sustainable technology has reached a tipping point where the financial benefits of building and living in environmentally friendly homes now far outweigh the costs. At last we can begin to be confident in saying that financial and environmental objectives go together.

The study assessed the performance of concept homes designed for the Ecovillage against conventional new homes and a pre-existing Victorian home. The study deliberately avoided assuming government support for sustainability features would be available. In brief, the study’s major findings (using the Cape Paterson Ecovillage as a model) include:

• Thanks largely to more efficient in-home technology, onsite power supply and electric vehicles, investing in sustainability features could realise up to 10% after tax returns per annum over 20 years;
• Continued improvements to house design, a bulk construction program, bulk buying program and delivery model innovation will drive down costs and further improve the financial proposition for residents;
• Extra investment in sustainability features is easily offset by energy and water savings that allow faster mortgage repayments.

You can read the full detailed study on the Cape Paterson Ecovillage website.

The WestWyck Christmas party proved a good time to divvy up the garlic grown during winter.

Fiona and friends admire the crop prior to
the great share-up.

Shoukry and Magda Sidrak from the GreenTown Arabic-speaking program bring members from their community group, The Butterfly Club, to Westwyck  in July 2011 to learn more about sustainable house design. GreenTown is a sustainable living program run by Environment Victoria and funded by the Victorian Government Sustainability Fund. GreenTown works with culturally and linguistically diverse communities across Melbourne, training community leaders to be home sustainability assessors.

This year WestWyck was once again open for the Alternative Technology Association’s Sustainable House Day.
WestWyck P/L and the WestWyck Owners’ Corporate are proud to host this event and put the WestWyck development model on display as it stands as a national and international leading example of medium density, quality design sustainable development and as such provides a challenge to the broader community.
Given that WestWyck had nearly 400 visitors in 2010, we beat the bushes to drum up volunteers to cope with anticipated large numbers. However, grey skies, high wind, a bit of rain, Essendon and Carlton playing a life and death footy game and the increased numbers of sites open in 2011 combined to reduce the numbers of visitors for Sustainable House Day in 2011.
While WestWyck was disappointed to be able to host only 150 people, ATA has reported to us that numbers were generally down to this extent right around the state.


We finished up with a fine bevy of helpers, tour guides and lunch-makers who made major contributions to the success of the day. The feedback was as usual extremely positive and the questions showed we had some pretty informed visitors, people who had been thinking about how to reduce their personal footprint for some time.

One perverse benefit of having lower numbers was that we had more time to engage in more in-depth discussion with the visitors.


The photo shows one of our volunteer tour guides, Ed Cotter, at work with a group.

And we noticed that blogger "idontwearblack" was impressed by a visit to WestWyck on Sustainable House Day.

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