How recycled plastic, community co-design, and a question about heart disease became 389 products across eight communities, and why this is just the beginning.
A Question That Changed Everything
In 2018, Nicholas Marchesi sat in a health conference audience and listened to Dr. Bo Remenyi, the 2018 NT Australian of the Year, describe something that shouldn't exist in a wealthy country.
She was filling out death certificates for children.
Not from accidents. Not from rare diseases. From Rheumatic Heart Disease, a condition entirely preventable through basic environmental health. The pathway is brutally simple:
No washing machine means dirty bedding. Dirty bedding means scabies. Scabies leads to skin infections, then Strep A, then rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever becomes Rheumatic Heart Disease. And RHD kills children.
A washing machine interrupts the cascade. Clean bedding breaks the scabies cycle. A good bed can prevent heart disease.
Nicholas had spent four years at Orange Sky Laundry, where he'd co-founded the organisation in 2014 and watched it grow to 280 shifts a week, washing 1.2 million kilograms of laundry and creating 207,000 hours of genuine human conversation. A third of Orange Sky's services now operate in remote communities. He understood, viscerally, that dignity lives in the details, that clean clothes aren't just practical, they restore something essential.
But Dr. Remenyi's talk reframed the question entirely. This wasn't about charity. This wasn't about comfort. This was about infrastructure. What can we actually build that makes a difference?
Why People Sleep on Floors
Before we talk about solutions, we need to understand the problem, and we need to hear it from the people who live it every day, not from reports written in city offices.
Ivy, on Palm Island: "Hardly anyone around the community has beds. When family comes to visit, people sleep on the floor."
Alfred Johnson, also on Palm Island: "Having a bed is something you need; you feel more safe when you sleep in a bed. It's different than sleeping on the couch or the ground. You can't just go down to the store and buy beds. It's a big muck-around. You have to bring them on the barge, pay for freight, and still, not everyone gets one."
Carmelita: "The freight is very, very dear. Sometimes family don't have extra mattresses. Kids sleep out with family."
The statistics confirm what communities already know. 55% of very remote First Nations homes are overcrowded. 54.6% have major structural problems. A mattress costs $1,200 or more in remote areas, twice the city price, and it lasts weeks, not years. In Alice Springs alone, $3 million worth of washing machines are sold to the dump every year. 59% of remote homes lack a washing machine entirely. Of those that have one, only 38% can wash regularly due to power and detergent access.
This is not a cultural choice. Community voices are unambiguous. People sleep on floors because there is nothing else.
Designing With, Not For
In October 2022, Nicholas and Benjamin Knight, who had joined Orange Sky in 2016 and spent four years alongside Nic during the remote community expansion, founded A Curious Tractor. The name comes from Nic's farm: a tractor's power take-off provides drive to other implements. ACT brings the drive; communities take the keys.
From the beginning, one principle was non-negotiable: we don't design for communities, we design with them.
The first beds were Basket Beds: collapsible baskets held together with zip ties and foam toppers. Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, each tested in community, each redesigned based on what people actually said.
"We want to move it around"so it got lighter and more portable.
"We want it high off the ground"because of snakes, flooding, and safety. Every community mentioned snakes.
"We don't want the foam"because foam can't be washed, and it breaks down in heat and humidity within weeks.
"We want a MAD bed!"community members wanted something innovative, something that felt like it was designed with pride.
140 deployments of those early versions generated the feedback that became the Version 4 Stretch Bed, the product that changed everything.
But the co-design went deeper than product specifications. In Tennant Creek, Elder Dianne Stokes, a Waramungu and Warlmanpa woman who returned to her ancestral land 23 years ago with nothing but her car, sat around the fire with her family refining the designs. She named the washing machine "Pakkimjalki Kari" in Warumungu language. She received one bed, and within two weeks returned requesting twenty more, offering to pay for them herself.
In Alice Springs, Fred Campbell, a Western Arrernte youth case worker at Oonchiumpa Consultancy, brought the perspective of someone who sees the daily reality: "It's essential. The families right now... the beds were on the ground. It's a safety thing... a lot of snakes, so everyone wants to be off the ground."
He also understood the cultural dimension: "In Aboriginal culture, we tend to move away from the places when there's a death in the family. They just chuck their swags on the ground. Now they know they can just chuck that in." A bed that's portable, washable, and indestructible isn't a luxury, it's infrastructure that respects how people actually live.
Norman Frank Jupurrurla, Warumungu Law Man, founder of Wilya Janta, and a man who sits on the boards of Anyinginyi Health, Julalikari Council, and Central Land Council, put it plainly: "I want to see a better future for our kids and better housing for our people. We don't want to live backwards like how we grew up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s."
After his daughter tried a Stretch Bed, Norman called requesting three more. In maroon.
The Stretch Bed
The Version 4 Stretch Bed is what happens when you listen to 140 deployments' worth of community feedback and engineer for conditions where everything else fails.
100% recycled HDPE plastic legs. Galvanised steel poles. Heavy-duty Australian canvas. 26 kilograms. 200-kilogram load capacity. Assembles in five minutes with no tools. Every component individually replaceable. Entirely washable with a garden hose. UV-stabilised for the Australian sun. Designed to last ten years or more.
Each bed diverts 20 to 25 kilograms of recycled plastic from landfill.
The verdict from those who use it: "These ones are the best so far... in terms of flexibility, ease of use and reduction in skin disease stuff."
The design evolution matters because it tells you something about the process. This isn't a product designed in a Brisbane office and shipped to communities. It's a product that was argued over, tested, broken, rebuilt, and refined, in Tennant Creek, on Palm Island, in Alice Springs, at the kitchen table, around the fire, in the red dust.
And the Tennant Creek Foundation Board, which had reservations about the V1 beds, received the V2 Stretch Beds positively. The product earned its place.
Pakkimjalki Kari, The Washing Machine
If the Stretch Bed addresses where you sleep, the washing machine addresses why children get sick.
The base unit is a Speed Queen AWNA62, commercial grade, the machine that runs 70% of Australia's commercial laundry market, built for 10,000+ cycles. Standard machines in remote communities last one to two years. The Speed Queen is built for ten.
But a commercial washing machine dropped into a remote community still fails. So Goods modified it, what Nic describes as "what a bull bar is to a four-wheel drive":
The entire machine is wrapped in a recycled plastic case for damage protection. The control panel was reduced to one button, because community members said "we don't know what all these buttons mean." The glass top is protected or removed. A customisable language panel can be swapped from community to community. Built-in telemetry, GPS and power monitoring, means the machine knows when it breaks and can report it. The water cycle is simplified.
Five units are deployed in Tennant Creek with Wilya Janta and Anyinginyi Health, with four more quoted.
Patricia Frank, an Aboriginal Corporation worker from the Oo Tribe, White Cockatoo clan, connected Goods with language groups across the Northern Territory for naming the machine in different languages. She understands what it means: "They truly wanna a washing machine to wash their blanket, to wash their clothes, and it's right there at home."
The health economics are stark: for every $1 invested in washing infrastructure, $6 is saved in healthcare costs. Remote laundries have been shown to reduce scabies by 60%. The East Arnhem Spin Project audited roughly 500 homes and found that half of all washing machine faults could be fixed on the spot with basic servicing, but there's no one there to fix them. A machine that doesn't break is worth more than a thousand repair programs.
Making It, The Production Facility
The production facility is where theory becomes physical.
Two shipping containers. One hundred thousand dollars invested, $80,000 from The Funding Network's pitch event, $20,000 from ACT.
Container One is the shredding and collection unit. A plastic shredder and community collection point processes waste plastic into raw material, filling 200 tubs of processed HDPE. This container stays in community between production runs, because collection is ongoing, community members bring in bottle lids, waste plastic, anything that can be shredded and reused.
Container Two is the production unit. A hydraulic press heats shredded plastic at 180 degrees Celsius and presses it into sheets. The sheets cool overnight. A computer-controlled router cuts the components. The same facility, with different moulds, can produce beds, washing machine casings, and eventually refrigerator components.
200 tubs of plastic makes 200 beds.
The model is called circuit deployment: arrive in a community for about two months, produce roughly 30 beds per week, then move the production container to the next community while the shredding container stays behind. The 2026 planned circuit runs Alice Springs to Tennant Creek to Katherine to Darwin.
Communities may pay around $5,000 per week to host the facility, creating local employment in collection, shredding, pressing, cutting, and assembly. Palm Island Community Company said "we'll buy it" when they saw it, not the beds, the production facility itself.
Oonchiumpa Consultancy in Alice Springs is confirmed as the Central Australian manufacturing partner. Warehouse options have been assessed: starting at Kristy Bloomfield's property for the pilot phase, moving to a commercial shed on Ghan Road for scale-up, then a full operations hub by 2027.
The component costs tell the scale-up story: steel frame at $27 per bed from DNA Steel Direct, canvas at $93.50 per bed from Centre Canvas, and recycled HDPE legs sourced from community waste, essentially free. Current production cost at small batch runs $550 to $650 per unit. At scale, 5,000 units per year, the cost reduction pathway brings that to approximately $350, with the single biggest saving coming from CNC cutting time optimisation: from four hours per bed down to two.
389 Products. Eight Communities. Over 1,000 Lives.
Here is what exists in the world right now, tracked in real-time through a digital asset register with QR-coded lifecycle monitoring for every single product:
Palm Island (Bwgcolman Country, Queensland): 141 beds deployed. The largest single community deployment. Ebony and Jahvan Oui, future manufacturing leads, are training with Defy Design in Sydney for on-country production. Jahvan visited the factory. Future-CEO training.
Tennant Creek (Wumpurrarni Country, Northern Territory): 139 beds and 5 washing machines. Where Elder Dianne Stokes co-designs around the fire. Where Norman Frank Jupurrurla advocates for better housing. Where Patricia Frank connects language groups across the Territory.
Alice Springs homelands (Mbantua): 60 beds. Where Fred Campbell watches young people like Xavier build beds and sees their energy change: "He just was so proud showing them that he can build it... his energy was a lot more higher."
Maningrida (Northern Territory): 24 beds. Homeland Schools Company requested 65 beds for kids.
Kalgoorlie (Ninga Mia, Goldfields, Western Australia): 20 beds. Where Chloe, an Aboriginal homeless fringe support worker, sees the daily need: "So many people are sleeping on the floor or on old, unsuitable mattresses. Something as simple as a good bed makes a huge difference — it improves their health, helps with mobility, and gives them dignity."
Utopia Homelands (Northern Territory): 24 beds. Centre Corp Foundation has approved 107 more for the communities there, the single largest order to date.
Mt Isa (Kalkadoon Country, Queensland): 4 beds in testing. Tracy McCartney, a support worker: "The new mattress design is not just about comfort — it's about dignity and health."
Total: approximately 389 tracked assets. Over 9,225 kilograms of plastic diverted from landfill. An estimated 1,000 or more lives directly impacted.
And the demand dwarfs the supply. From the Groote Archipelago alone, a single community, came a request for 500 mattresses and 300 washing machines, valued at approximately $1.7 million. NPY Women's Council, working across the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara lands: "Always looking for beds." The constraint is never demand. It's manufacturing capacity.
Community Voices, They Hold the Pen
Goods on Country doesn't tell community stories. Communities tell their own.
Through the Empathy Ledger platform, purpose-built ethical storytelling infrastructure, 33 storytellers across seven communities document their own experiences. Each storyteller has a structured profile including cultural background, community affiliations, and elder status. Every story requires explicit community consent before publication, with elder review where culturally appropriate and cultural sensitivity classification built into the system.
Content flows automatically from Empathy Ledger to the Goods on Country website via API. Communities write, approve, and publish their own narratives without Goods' intervention. This is not marketing. This is accountability infrastructure. Communities hold the pen.
Jacqueline, a Western Arrernte and Pertame woman from Top Camp in Alice Springs, said it simply: "From the waste, plastic. Perfect. That's really a perfect idea. Because it's very expensive buying bed — it's like three, four hundred. But with this here, it's so amazing. With just waste."
And: "In the shops when they go and buy, it's easily to break 'cause it's too soft. But this here, it's look like it's really gonna stand like that, not break."
Linda Turner, in Tennant Creek: "We've never been asked at what sort of house we'd like to live in. We're setting this up for our kids and grandkids... independence, being in charge of your own destiny."
Brian Russell, heart attack survivor: "It's gonna be home for me now."
Zelda Hogan, who moved her family from a tin shed to a house: "A good night's sleep is important... from a big day from work."
Jimmy Frank Jupurrurla, Traditional Owner and co-designer of the Weave Bed concept: "Our strengths is our culture, our country, you know, and our language. Imagine if you could weave a bed?"
These aren't testimonials gathered for a grant application. These are people describing their own lives, recorded on their own terms, published with their own consent.
The Partners Who Make It Possible
No one builds this alone.
Oonchiumpa Consultancy in Alice Springs, 100% Aboriginal owned and operated, named after the Central Australian corkwood tree that represents resilience, nourishment, and connection to country. Kristy Bloomfield, Tanya Turner, Karen Liddle on the board, Fred Campbell on the ground. Two years of co-design. The confirmed Central Australian manufacturing partner.
Wilya Janta in Tennant Creek, founded by Norman Frank Jupurrurla and Dr. Simon Quilty, who has spent 20 years in Northern Territory health. Housing advocacy and the demonstration home where the first refrigerator prototype will be tested.
Palm Island Community Company141 beds on the ground and a community that said they'd buy the production facility itself.
Defy Design in Sydney, Sam Davies leading the recycling and manufacturing training that's turning Ebony and Jahvan Oui into the future of on-country production.
Anyinginyi Health and Miwatj Healthtracking health outcomes and exploring fleet deployment of washing machines across East Arnhem's eight clinics. Jessica Allardyce at Miwatj: "When we visit homelands, the beds are often the only furniture that has survived. Everything else is broken. These beds are still there, still being used, still in good condition."
Envirobankrecycled HDPE supply partnership in development, aligning Indigenous-led supply chains with circular economy manufacturing.
An advisory board of 13 members spanning cultural leadership, social enterprise, manufacturing, industry, health, and community services. Monthly check-ins. Real governance.
And the funders who saw it early: Snow Foundation ($193,785 across multiple grants, Sally Grimsley-Ballard travelled to Tennant Creek), The Funding Network ($130,000 raised in a single pitch event), FRRR ($50,000), Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation ($50,000), AMP Spark ($21,900). $445,685 in total philanthropic investment that said: this is real.
What's Next, Manufacturing on Country, at Scale
The containerised manufacturing model is ready to scale. Three facilities over three years.
Year One (2026-27): Flagship facility operational on Jinibara Country in South East Queensland. 1,500 beds produced. Six direct manufacturing jobs, with priority for First Nations and disadvantaged workers.
Year Two (2027-28): Second facility deployed to Central Australia through the Oonchiumpa partnership in Alice Springs. Combined output: 3,500 units. Twelve jobs.
Year Three (2028-29): Third facility to the Top End or Torres Strait. National output: 5,000 units per year. 125 tonnes of plastic diverted annually. Eighteen manufacturing jobs. Revenue of $3.5 to $4.2 million.
Each facility is a self-contained production unit housed in shipping containers. It can be transported to regional centres, accepts locally-sourced recycled plastic as feedstock, and employs local workers. This is not a factory that ships to communities, it is manufacturing infrastructure that communities own.
The community benefit model is being co-designed, not imposed. It may include community-owned enterprises with 100% local profits, employment and wages for manufacturing roles, equipment and infrastructure investment, training and skills transfer, or hybrid models. The philosophy remains constant: "We don't license — we transfer. Communities receive full training, manufacturing capability, and documentation. They keep 100% of what they make and sell. Our goal is to become unnecessary."
The Numbers That Matter
Products deployed
389
Communities served
8
Lives directly impacted
1,000+
Plastic diverted from landfill
9,225 kg
Verified community storytellers
33
Communities documenting their own stories
7
Video testimonials recorded
9
Advisory board members
13
Philanthropic investment received
$445,685
Outstanding receivables
$498,750
Production facility invested
$100,000
Demand backlog
3-5x current production capacity
In Their Words
We'll close with the voices that matter most, the people this work is for and with.
Fred Campbell, on what recycled plastic beds mean to Central Australia:
"That's something Central Australia need — just something so simple, especially coming out of recycled, and is turning into something so unique for our mob in the bush or on the communities."
Chloe, support worker in Kalgoorlie:
"Something as simple as a good bed makes a huge difference — it improves their health, helps with mobility, and gives them dignity."
Simone Grimmond, from the Groote Archipelago:
"We are on an island — literally. Therefore anything we purchase is so much more expensive due to freight."
Jessica Allardyce, Miwatj Health:
"Essential goods are difficult to get out as everything comes on a barge and they are expensive. There is also a lot of scabies and this often leads to Rheumatic Heart Disease, so washing machines are essential."
And Nicholas Marchesi, looking five years ahead:
"In five years time, our dream is to have the best products in the world made by and with the communities themselves. We want to not be seeing our washing machines ending up in landfill. We don't want to be seeing our fridges empty and not impacting the people that are purchasing them. Most importantly, we want to see people having amazing nights on beds that are appropriate for the communities."
The ultimate measure of success is simple: "When someone asks 'Who makes these?' and the answer is 'We do.'"
Goods on Country is operated by A Curious Tractor Pty Ltd, co-founded by Nicholas Marchesi OAM and Benjamin Knight. Community stories are published through the Empathy Ledger platform with consent-based storytelling protocols. All quotes are from verified community storytellers.
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