The most rewarding new building in Australia confounds expectation. A small cottage hospital built of mud bricks, timber and tin can be found in the floodplain town of Wilcannia, some 600 miles out of Sydney, along the Barrier Highway. Founded in the 1860s, Wilcannia was proclaimed the future "capital of the west", and it is a mark of its Victorian ambition that the small town still boasts a number of dignified public buildings. Among them is the white sandstone hospital, designed by Cyril Blacket (architect, with his father, Edmund, of St George's Cathedral, Perth) and built in 1879. Although added to in the 1950s and listed by the National Trust, the hospital has long been outmoded. But now it has been renovated and, in the process, spawned a new genus of architecture: Aboriginal Australian.  The team of architects behind it, Merrima, came together in 1995 and work under the umbrella of the New South Wales department of public works. The practice, led by Dillon Kombumerri, Kevin O'Brien and Alison Page, is staffed by indigenous people, "committed to the struggle for self-determination through cultural expression in the built environment". The venture is believed to be the first of its kind in Australia.  The newly reopened hospital for the Far West Ward Aboriginal Health Service, on the banks of the Darling river, is an expression of Merrima's concern. In bald terms, it comprises the restored Victorian clinic, minus the 1950s additions, and a new, lightweight residential block gathered around an internal courtyard and built mostly of timber, corrugated metal and locally made mud bricks. But what was clear at the outset of the project was that the new block should reflect Aboriginal concerns and beliefs.  Despite its grand ambitions, Wilcannia never survived the arrival of the roads and railways that bypassed the town. Today its population is about 1,000, two-thirds of whom are descendants of the Barkindji people, the original inhabitants of the area. And this local population, says Kombumerri, has a strong affinity with the hospital building - "even though they were originally segregated from non-Aboriginal patients and treated in tents at the back".  More importantly, Kombumerri says that from the earliest consultations it was clear that "the proposed redevelopment must address the Darling river, which has spiritual and cultural significance for the Barkindji people. This generated an idea to insert a new building into the story of the river landscape. If the building was going to somehow belong to the river, then we believed it had to be seen to have evolved from the river. Its design and structure were extracted from an understanding of the river's 'living' qualities. So, for example, 'walls' and 'roofs' become 'skins' and 'fins'."  The new building has an organic, almost animal-like quality. At first sight, it appears to have wings fluttering from its sides; on closer inspection these prove to be timber shutters. The surrounding landscape is big, bare, scrubby and scorched for much of the year, but the building is designed to keep the fierce afternoon sun at bay, so it feels cooler and shadier here than first-time visitors might expect. The internal courtyard provides shade in summer and sun-drenched areas in winter, and is so welcoming that it has become a meeting place for local people, who like to hang out there. The building needs very little artificially generated energy - sunlight falls into offices, surgeries, bedrooms, kitchen and laundry, while mud bricks offer excellent heat insulation - making the clinic a more healthy organism than the average air-conditioned hospital.  If the building was to belong to the local people as much as to the health authority, it was felt that they needed to work on it. Instead of importing building materials, Merrima encouraged the production of locally baked bricks and set up a training scheme for labourers and craft workers. The result, says Kombumerri, is materials that are "low maintenance, high performance as well as being appealing to the community".  The Merrima story is a remarkable one. To date, only six Aboriginals have obtained a tertiary degree in architecture, and two more in interior design, across the whole of Australia, according to Kombumerri. He is a descendant of the Kombumerri tribe from the Gold Coast, Queensland; O'Brien is a descendant of the Meriam Mer peoples of Murray Island in the Torres Strait, and Page, the team's interior designer, is a Tharawal woman from La Perouse. "Aboriginal people today can maintain their essential difference while still embracing modern technologies," Kombumerri argues. "It is our aim as indigenous designers to achieve a culturally sensitive response through understanding this synergetic fusion. Our approach to architecture is about coming to terms with the realities of modern society shaped by multicultural influences."  In the past four years, the practice has been on a roll in New South Wales, designing and building a wealth of cultural, domestic and academic as well as health, welfare and prison buildings and interiors. Kombumerri's first design was the recently completed Girrawaa Creative Work Centre for the indigenous inmates of the Bathurst Correctional Centre, a remarkably gentle-looking and lightweight building that, according to its architect, presents "a positive response to deaths [of indigenous people] in custody. The building provides opportunities for the men to develop skills, build self-esteem and strengthen Aboriginal pride." The team is now working on the Aboriginal Health and Research Centre, a residential healthcare building overlooking the ocean at Little Bay, south Sydney that promises to be striking, urbane and environmentally sound.  Significantly, Merrima is not hooked on the idea of a search for a true Australian identity in architecture - because no one knows what that is. Glenn Murcutt, one of Australia's most celebrated architects, recently said that "if we set out to design an architecture that's Australian, we're in trouble. All we'd end up with is [the equivalent of] people riding bicycles with kangaroos on them. The important thing is that we address the issues, the landscape, the brief, the place; if we address these things, and do them rationally and poetically at the same time, then we'll be getting somewhere."  Merrima addresses these things, but at the same time makes clear that it is also an architect's responsibility to address the building's local community, its sense of identity. It is the architect's job to give physical expression to that sense of identity and place without resorting to "neo-vernacular" whimsy or kitsch folksiness - design pot-holes that Merrima has skilfully avoided. Not surprisingly, its characterful and caring Wilcannia hospital has already picked up design, environmental, health and heritage awards in New South Wales; when better known, it should win universal admiration. As in fact, should all the practice's buildings: each one expressing a new architecture, involving local people, that is expressive, confident, mature and decidedly Australian.
This award-winning hospital in New South Wales heralds a new style of building design: Aboriginal Australian. By Jonathan Glancey.