Australia Network - Nexus - English Bites

Darwin's a wonderful place to live - but the hot sticky weather calls for some creative housing solutions - let's find out exactly what makes a good tropical house.

Today English Bites is all about tropical living. Listen to what makes a good tropical house. There are 4 main elements.

The basic elements of a good tropical house is (sic) getting as much cross-flow breeze through a house as possible, having walls that are able to be opened and allow breezes to move through - hence reducing any build-up of heat within a house, to provide appropriate shade. To start to create shade around the house, the buildings have been shaded. An important aspect is to lift the building out of the ground and to provide an elevated platform so that the house can access those breezes very well, and to build in lightweight materials so that the house doesn't retain heat.

There are 4 main elements of a good tropical house.
- get cross-flow breeze.
- provide adequate shade.
- provide an elevated platform
- build in lightweight materials.
These are quite formal phrases. In conversation, you'd probably say 'The things that make a good tropical house are
- catching the breeze
- having enough shade
- being off the ground
- using light materials.
Here, light and lightweight mean the same thing. Lightweight is more technical. Notice the spelling. It's pronounced 'lite wait'. It has lots of silent letters!
Listen for some important features.

Essentially, the house becomes a breathable (sic), living organism, almost. So, the common elements that we use are louvres. Louvres are fantastic because you can open up complete walls with louvres and you can tilt the blades so that during a storm the water still remains on the outside of the building.

Louvres are the common element. Look at the word louvre. It ends in an 'uh' sound. Most words that end in an 'uh' are spelt '-e-r', but this one ends with 'r-e'. It's a hard word to spell. - l-o-u-v-r-e
Listen for 2 more words that end in 'uh'.

The elevated floors are usually made of timber. Fans are used to supplement those times when, particularly this build-up, humid times of the year where often it's quite still. So fans you'll find everywhere in Darwin houses. They're just part of the furniture.

In a lot of work we do, the internal walls we create as three-quarter height walls or we create them as louvre walls, so that we can, so that the walls to the bedrooms don't block out any of that breeze access through the house. So that's very important.

There are elevated floors made of timber. We don't say timber, we say 'timbuh'.
And the internal walls are three-quarter height.
Quarter.
Height.
It means how high something is.
We've also had weight, how heavy something is.
Height and weight. They often go together. They are both spelt 'e-i-g-h-t'. But they are pronounced differently.
So silent leters, different pronuncations. They're easy words to get wrong.
Height.
Weight.
Go to the website for more on light, height and weight.
Listen to Greg finish. There's another tricky word - h-o-u-s-e

There's always some loss of privacy within that but I guess it's something that Darwin people have learnt and grown up with - is that kind of loss of privacy. And that's not only within the house but it's also through the louvres to the next house to the next house to the next house.

In a tropical house, there's a loss of privacy. It's is pronounced 'howse', with a 's' sound, when it's the noun that means the place you live. But when it's a verb meaning to give someone a house to live in, it's got a zz sound - house. And listen to what happens to the noun when it's plural.

So, often people talk about the old days, being able to see what someone's doing three houses across, through those louvres. It's just part of living in Darwin, to know people's business

Houses. It's got a zz sound.
one house
two houses
to house
In Darwin houses, with all those louvres, you know people's business. By business here he doesn't mean what they do at work, he means what they do at home, in their own houses. So if you like know your neighbours very well, it sounds like a good a place to live.
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