INSIDE Downer’s quiet community centre is the not-at-all-secret headquarters of a small group of hackers.

Their “hackerspace” is cluttered with electronic devices, circuit boards, tools, woodwork and metalwork equipment, theatre props and piles of half-built or half-dismantled devices. A 3D printer, built from a kit, sits in a handmade plastic box beside a few computers. Empty garbage bags gently bump around at roof level, filled with helium because one member had some left over from the night before.

There is a kind of ordered chaos in this suburban skunkworks; a row of lockers here, a set of shelves there and a few hundred neatly arranged empty bottles that once contained Club-Mate, a high-caffeine South American tea drink that is apparently the choice of hackers worldwide.

The space is called “Make, Hack, Void” and its members don’t spend their time trying to penetrate secure computer systems, steal credit card numbers or anything like that.

“There’s a huge amount of history around the term ‘hacking’,” says MHV president Adam Thomas. “But it’s about taking everyday resources and remaking them into something new, repurposing them, tinkering with stuff to find out how it works and why it works, and making it do something that it wasn’t ever intended to do, but that’s more useful to you, or just fun or silly.”

Groups like MHV claim a broader meaning of the word from the “crackers” or “black hats”, who break the law, and the “white hats” who try to stop them.

“We prefer creating stuff and a lot of the ‘black hat’ hacking is very destructive,” says Adam. “Occasionally it is really interesting when people come up with amazing ways of breaking [secure] systems, and sometimes that involves a whole lot of ingenuity, lateral thinking and just building stuff in the way we build stuff. That’s still hacking because there’s a lot of the same skills involved, but the justification behind it is often questionable.”

Hackerspaces like MHV are a relatively new phenomenon in Australia, which give members of this quirky subculture a place to collaborate, create, have fun and learn. Their guiding ethos is “open source” development, a way of working collaboratively through free, open access to basic blueprints and fundamental technology, which started with computer software in the early ‘80s.

“We’re not restricted to electronics and computing – we all branch out and do other weird and wacky stuff – but that’s where the focus is, because a lot of people come to the hacking community from a programming or an electronics background, so they bring a lot of that history and culture with them,” explains Adam.

MHV members use the hackerspace to freely pursue whatever creative interests they have and anyone is welcome to casually drop in, which means the workshop has become a valuable hub of home engineering and fringe culture.

Chris Wolfe uses the MHV space to make special effects and props for theatre and movies, and enjoys large-scale battles using foam swords on the weekend. Another member, Lachlan Horne, works on computer vision by day and indulges a passion for souped-up Nerf guns in his spare time.

Adam is particularly proud of a pedal-powered cinema he helped build for the ANU Food Co-op with members of the Rat Patrol, a group of local oddballs he occasionally joins to build and ride bizarre bicycles. He says viewers have since pedalled their way through films at the Falls, Corinbank and You Are Here festivals.

But Adam credits the top achievement of MHV regulars to Canberra UAV, a team of amateur inventors who won $10,000 last year in a national competition, by building the world’s first non-military drone aeroplane that could successfully find a dummy bushwalker.

Unfortunately, the building is slated to be demolished in October and MHV has to find a new home as soon as possible, but its president is philosophical about the reasons why.

“There’s part of me that says this is horrible – they’re destroying something that I absolutely love – then there’s the other part of me that says: ‘Wow! Medium-density housing in the inner north!’, because that sort of needs to happen.”

More information at makehackvoid.com