In a remote town in central-west New South Wales, the design team and the community have overcome the tyranny of distance, working together for five years to realise their ambition for a modest but elegant and invaluable facility

Wherever you are right now is probably a long way from Murrin Bridge. You are likely somewhere along the coast of the continent, and somewhere close to a large city. Murrin Bridge is nowhere near those places; it sits at the edges of Australia’s population distribution pattern. However, the small community and its new preschool is, for a select group of Australians, the centre, not the edge.

Added to this already large team is the complex Venn diagram of the community, 

The Murrin Bridge Preschool Community Hub – with its aim of expanding the capacity of the existing preschool and creating a facility for other community services – has had a long journey to its recent opening. It began with an academic from UTS, Allan Teale, discovering he had family connections to the Indigenous community in the Murrin Bridge area, which led to a number of personal visits. Housing was the initial topic of discussion. But, as often happens in these remote communities, it soon became evident just how much needed doing, and the project became about expanding the existing preschool.

The design team engaged deeply with the cultural needs of the local community to ensure the design created a safe and appropriate setting.

A victim of its own success, the Murrin Bridge preschool was outgrowing the capacity of its existing building. A team of academics from UTS (including Campbell Drake, Urtzi Grau, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Saskia Schut, Louisa King, Jack Cooper, and Eduard and Deb Shapiro) ran a number of participatory design workshops involving students and the community, eventually developing a DA-ready design. Andrew Daly of Supercontext generously agreed to help with the documentation, tendering and construction phases.