Vision and naivity, weakness as strength, success from loss. Paradox is the hallmark of South Australia’s most successful home builder. Profile by Chris Bowe.

DEVELOPER Alan Hickinbotham has been a groundbreaker driven to succeed on his own terms. It is this attribute, though – which he describes candidly in his recently published memoir From the Ground Up as stubbornness, impatience and an opinionated and blunt manner – that Hickinbotham concedes has made enemies and derailed his progress at various stages of his life. He sees the flaw as a strength, his failures equipping him with the insight and determination to clear obstacles that would have discouraged others and prevented him from becoming a significant figure in the history of residential development in South Australia.

One such obstacle was Adelaide’s notorious “plastic” clay subsoil. Its constant movement – shrinking in summer and swelling in winter – took its toll on the lighter-weight post-War houses, especially in the newly developing eastern fringes, in the 1950s and 1960s. The mounting concerns of homeowners, insurers and financiers led to Hickinbotham lobbying his industry peers to develop more effective footing designs to cope with the reactive soils. The builder’s own experiments were fast-tracked in 1963 when his Foxfield development at Athelstone struck a particularly unstable soil profile. The solution, developed with consulting engineer Phillip Fargher, was a grillage (grid) concrete raft system that was introduced in 1964. In 1967 it was patented as Grill-a-Raft but made available to other builders free of royalty. Adopted across the metropolitan area, it became a standard.

Alan Hickinbotham built South Australia’s largest project home company on the back of the 1950s construction boom. He contributed to the partnership of public policy and private enterprise that set out to provide family-friendly housing for all in a climate of post-World War II insecurity. In the process he also contributed to a legacy of urban sprawl, car-dependent lifestyles and community-subsidised infrastructure that endures today. Until 2002, when then planning minister Di Laidlaw put the Urban Growth Boundary fence around the greater metropolitan area, there had been little concerted effort to stem the flow of generic housing estates into the countryside, or make any defining improvement in their design efficiency and consumption of resources. Hindsight can be an unfair yardstick, and government expediency a fellow culprit, but the true socio-economic cost to the community of promoting urban sprawl has been known for decades.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Hickinbotham houses were at the pointy end of housing design, incorporating advanced design elements from overseas, mainly the United States, including the low, flat-roof modernist style with large eaves for sun protection in summer and solar gain in winter. Leading architect Newell Platten was responsible for a number of prototypes. For Hickinbotham’s new-age development of Foxfield he designed a radical form of cluster housing – a “patio village” – with no enclosed yards but properties opening directly onto a wooded reserve and creek. It was too far ahead of its time and was opposed by civic authorities. Today it is embraced in a simplistic form as the ubiquitous “courtyard home development”.

Foxfield is Hickinbotham’s favourite project, a bushland setting where buyers could choose their own builders and architects under controls designed to maintain a consistent amenity and ambience. A number of the homes were architecturally designed, including the Telethon House (the first lottery home promotion was a Hickinbotham idea) by a young John Andrews. And Foxfield was the first private housing estate to put its power and phone services underground. A recent visit revealed that little of the first stage survived the bulldozers of the next generation of home builders. How different suburban Adelaide might have been had the “patio village” been adopted 30 years ago.

Other examples of Hickinbotham design innovation included adapting the Spanish Mission style to project housing, its reflective walls, thermal mass and small windows ideal for Adelaide summers. A Hank den Ouden-design home did away with eaves and gutters, collecting water run-off in shallow drains. Hickinbotham engaged architect Gerhard Schurer to design an underground home for his family. Set into a Clarendon hillside, it was a challenging venture and an insight into the owners’s interest in building science. Schurer also contributed the Mezzanine House as a contemporary design for the company’s 1980 catalogue.

Around this time, Newell Platten, a force in residential design for both the SA Housing Trust and Hickinbotham, and who with Robert Dickson formed one of Adelaide’s most influential architecture partnerships, designed a heritage-style home for the Hickinbotham range that, for the first time, looked back instead of forward. From the Ground Up attributes its genesis to the original two-storey Adelaide Town Acre design. It was copied and quite possibly sparked the proliferation to this day of various “reproduction” styles throughout the housing industry, and the corresponding decline in architectural sensibilities. The cash-cow range of large “Georgian”, “Victorian” and “Tuscan” assemblies of the past 20 years have little relevance to the practicalities and challenges of living in modern Adelaide. Most are awkward proportionally, especially when squeezed onto courtyard sites, and light years away from the ethos of Foxfield. Alan Hickinbotham’s 1960s/70s exploration of the “whole designs” philosophy of architect Robin Boyd, plus his interest in recycling wastewater and increasing metropolitan housing densities to support an efficient public transport system, seem incongruous in this context.

Such contradictions have never tamed Hickinbotham’s zeal for backing his own hunches on better ways to promote and service his developments – to provide them with a marketing edge. To incorporate a school at the Woodend estate he convinced the authorities to let him build the first privately-owned public school in Australia, which was then leased back to the government. At Andrews Farm, he engineered the establishment of the first-ever joint school, St Columba College, incorporating an Anglican school and a Catholic school on one campus. Drawn to the concept of recycling water since he discovered on a 1976 visit that it had been done in the US since 1913, he developed Andrews Farm so stormwater run-off was returned to the natural aquifer, a process he considered more practical than creating artificial wetlands. He was to further his interest by leading the establishment of the Paringa wastewater treatment station in the Riverland.

A further paradox in the Hickinbotham story is that, if government uses the Urban Growth Boundary to halt the invasion of the housing estate, one of his most advanced and environmentally correct community-creation projects won’t go ahead. What he calls the Munno Para Arc plan is a proposal to develop a series of semi-rural villages, increasing traditional suburban density and providing a more eco-efficient amenity, including wastewater processing and other best-practice sustainability measures. Higher densities allow the balance of the land in each “village” to be utilised for intensive horticulture. The proposed locations, however, sit outside the growth boundary. The concept is ahead of the times but maybe too late for times that are changing.
While Alan Hickinbotham has been a winner, it is loss that has had the greatest influence on his life. In 1949 a brilliant State and VFL football career was ended when he broke his leg badly while playing for Geelong against Melbourne at the MCG. The shattered young man left Melbourne and found his way to Mildura without career or direction until, after joining a real estate firm, he bought and sold his first block of land. Ten years later the sudden death of his father and business partner Alan “Hick” Hickinbotham, Australia’s first wine-science lecturer and patriarch of Roseworthy College’s rise to an institution of international repute, generated a similar cloud of deep loss and doubt. Both setbacks ultimately served to galvanise his self-reliance and will to succeed in the face of difficulty or convention. He is philosophical (read as grateful) about his naïve attempt to win selection for the Liberal Party in 1968 when he never stood a chance against the establishment families. His missing out on the development of Golden Grove in the 1980s, and an involvement in the “disgrace” that was the SA Water tender process in the 1990s, were lessons in the failure of due process and the futility of competing on an uneven playing field.

Hickinbotham is fond of quoting Robert Kennedy on the individual’s responsibility to the greater good. His personal philosophy is that “Life is about family, contributing to your community and doing something worthwhile”. Like the genuine footballer he was before fate intervened, he has run hard and straight, eyes on ball, the goals clear in his mind. Every team needs one.
®From the Ground Up. The Memoirs of Alan Hickinbotham, Lythrum Press, Adelaide.