David Yencken

Well I hate to think what it looks like now, I never go in.

Everything from the outside has, I mean it’s surrounded by all these shocking buildings which destroy all the lovely appropriateness for a bush setting, I can readily imagine what they have done to the inside.

It's a problem. I know with my house that really is a problem.

no, not so much termites, but when you're dealing with a post and beam construction - which of course wasn't the case with the Black Dolphin, or only very slightly - and the bottom of the poles start to rot, then you really do have a problem with what to do about it.

Hmm very expensive...

I would have thought they were Stringy Bark, but I'm not sure.

Well we've talked about some of the earlier places and the parts, probably, we haven't talked about which I think are relevant to you are Merchant Builders, and I think about what we tried to do in the Ministry of Planning and Environment, and possibly some of the things that I was working on in the university, when we had much stronger environmental policy focus.

Melbourne University, yeah.

No, to the Heritage Commission, while I was still at Merchants. The Heritage Commission wasn't a full-time job.

Federal, and ah, that was an initiative begun in the Whitlam years, and it began by, I mean it’s related to Merchant Builders in a way because of the fact that Merchant Builders work became extremely well known, and also because I’d done some work, sort of consulting work in, South Australia for the South Australian Housing Trust. All of this was feeding into what people were thinking about in Canberra when the Whitlam government came into being.

Well it was the beginnings of Tract.

So it was actually work predating Tract, and it was to some significant degree that I thought there were two forces that brought Tract into being. One was that it struck me that if I was going to do consulting work, which had to be done in spare time and all the rest of it, that it would be more appropriate to do it in a more formal way and with staff that could support me. We did a couple of things - one for the South Australian Housing Trust and one for the National Capital Development Commission. So that was one of the forces bringing Tract into being. The second force was the need to find a replacement for Ellis Stones because Ellis was getting on in years, and so I then set about trying to find appropriate landscape architects. And I concluded that there were none that really appealed in Melbourne at the time, for the work we wanted to do, so I set out a search to find other people who had had a better landscape training in North America, and that's how I learnt about Rodney Wulff and contacted him, and in the meantime, Howard McCorkell. Do you know Howard?

Well Howard is a town planner, so Howard is the first person who came on board and then...

As part of Tract. And then after that it was Rodney, ‘cause Rodney, who is Australian, had a sequence of degrees which eventually gave him a PhD at Cornell and I got in touch with him and he seemed to be interested. And then I got to know Pete Walker, of Sasaki Walker, when I had been on trips to San Francisco, and that began in a rather lovely way. I was walking in Sausalito on the far side of the bridge, it was then a pretty little village and I wanted to go and look at it and as I was walking along I saw a sign that said Sasaki Walker. So I thought, that's interesting, and I went in. And they were lovely, you know, they welcomed me, I might have had some stuff about Merchant Builders with me, and ahh anyway, the long and the short of it was I formed a strong friendship with Pete Walker. And he came out here, and on subsequent occasions I even think he thought about setting up a branch here, and I then wrote to him and said is there anyone in your office who would like to come out for a year as a learning experience and so on, and so Steve Calhoun came and stayed for a rather extended year.

He came to Tract and so did Rodney.

Well, it started off with me.

Howard was the planner, and then Rodney and then Steve.

They both had masters degrees from Harvard.

Yes.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Not exactly. As I say, there were these dual forces, one was that I was already doing consulting work and thought to myself if I'm going to be asked to do this kind of work and it was fun, then there are better ways of doing it than trying to find 5 minutes in between all the other things I was doing all the time. So I thought it would be rather good to try and get a more professional backing for that and find people who had had landscape experience and Howard had worked in England for Colin Buchanan, and I don’t know if you remember him? Really important.

And the other one was the need to find a landscape group and landscape people to replace Ellis Stones, because you have to recall that at the time that we started Merchant Builders and we asked Ellis if he would like to be involved, he was already 70, and in a quite significant sense we gave him the largest range of work that he had experienced in his lifetime. It really is an incredible tribute to him that between the ages of 70 and 79 when he died he was able to contribute to the level that he did.

Oh yes, he was certainly there, I don’t know if I’ve still got them but I have these marvellous photos of him pointing to where rocks should be put.

Ahh yes, very badly injured at Gallipoli.

The other guy is finished.

What's that?

He became a landscape architect because he had building skills. He had some bad times after the war, I think he probably suffered very greatly firstly from recuperating from his really serious injury, and secondly, just from what was then called shell-shock, post-traumatic tension, and so he went to live in the country. I think he was possibly married by then and when he was there he started building and particularly building with stone, and so on, and he became very expert as a stone mason, and one day, so the story goes - and I’ve recounted the story many times so I hope it’s not too boring - Edna Walling had a job and she advertised for people to come and do some stone work, and Ellis applied and Edna, who was a very brisk lady said, “what makes you think you can do it, do this kind of work?”, and so he said, “well I do know how to do it”, and she said “well I’ll come and have a look tomorrow and I’ll tell you if you can go on”, and she came back the next day and said “you're a natural. Put away you're tools and do this kind of work forever more.”

He was doing work for a very distinguished landscape architect and that relationship, I expect, she taught him an awful lot.

Well, I got to know somebody called Hugh Stretton in Adelaide...

...absolutely, yep.

He didn't actually head it up, I don’t think he was the chair, but he was a very powerful active force in there. And it was he who organised that I should go across, and he asked me to do a survey of the work he had done at Elizabeth, because Elizabeth township was a product of the Trust. And so I did that and he then tried quite hard to persuade me to take a job at the Trust as the deputy director with the possible intention of taking over the Trust later on.

With the survey?

It was an analysis of the success or otherwise of what had been done.

City, the complete [project].

But they weren't involved, in the work I did. I did that by myself

One of the tremendous pleasures I have is that Tract and Nexus have developed in such a wonderful way, long after I ceased to be involved. I think it has been absolutely terrific. It’s really nice when that happens. And sometimes it is quite the opposite and the Black Dolphin is a good example of the opposite. And there have been other occasions in my life when you have to take a deep breath, turn your back and just walk away, and say, “ok, well I did my best”, and what I tried to do there doesn't seem to be picked up by the next people in any way whatsoever.

Not in my day, that was after I parted company with them and they went off on their own, but they were emerging. That was just terrific, and they had skills that nobody else had because they had a training that nobody else had.

Something that I recognised that was familiar and well-loved because I had been out here during the war for two and a half years. Evacuated from Spain where my father was a diplomat, and so it has had a tremendous imprint on me, which I wasn’t aware of until driving through it.
The other influence was the period I had with Brumbles, the small gallery, because there I was introduced to Australian landscape painters. And they had a very big influence on my perception of the Australian landscape, such that when later, the journal, I think it's called Landscape and Australia, had a series where they asked people to nominate the books which they said had had the greatest influence on their life, I did what I was asked to do, but said none of these books have had half the influence that the painters have had.

I just read the ones that were current you know like McCarg’s Design with Nature and so on, but the powerful emotional hit came from the paintings.

Ahh impossible,

Painter or Painting?

Well I’ve got a Harold Herbert, which is of a place where my mother grew up in and that was in our household right throughout my growing up period and what’s the name of the guy who, Joseph Arnold is it? I have this terrific collection - Joseph Brown - well he came to my house a long long time ago and he tried incredibly hard to buy it. He wanted it, he said, because Harold Herbert had been his teacher or mentor or whatever when he was young. So I had that and then there are others that probably had some influence from the early days, the Heidelberg School and so on. But I suppose I became more interested in the movement that began with Sidney Nolan, what he started to try and do, to break away from what had been established as a kind of stereotype by the Heidelberg School and by Hans Heysen, and then how that led to work that Arthur Boyd did, and others. I got to know Clifton Pugh rather well, and Cliff helped me to see aspects of the bush, just by the fact that he had a very emotional response to the bush. So when spring time came all his paintings would have bush flowers in them. And that, of course, is a Clifton Pugh up there, and then ...

That's a Whitley, and that one’s a Fred Williams, and that's a Brett Whiteley.

That's very interesting because for me, Australian Collaboration, we have prepared some 35 or more fact and issue sheets, and they are written, for the most part, they're all written by academic researchers or people of that kind, people who had some qualification in that area and just yesterday I was working on the review of a sheet that has been written on Australian social values, and one of the things I said to this young woman, this extremely bright young girl, “I would like to see one of the values be the land, our country, for indigenous people, because of the incredibly powerful associations that they have with the land, and the spiritual relationship they have with it. And for other Australians, the way in which this extraordinary different, unique landscape, that different landforms, and different species, and whatever else and so on, has impacted on people.”

I haven’t got a reply back yet but I’m going to insist she does.

In the way that we all become like our dogs.

Absolutely.

It did indeed, because they continued to paint in a tradition that they had brought from other places, and I think it’s very nicely exemplified by a story told about [John] Glover. And when we look at Glover - I don’t think we, and certainly I don’t see him as especially Australian in his approach to his depiction of the landscape - but one commentator said of his work that it was painted with hideous fidelity to nature.

I know. It’s been lovely working with people like Graeme [Gunn] and with Robin, and John, and many other landscape architects such as Steve and Rodney.

No no no no, it was just his painting. But he, of course he talked as well, but it was the details of the painting, ‘cause he lived in a bush setting and he was very imbued with the feeling of the bush

Oh absolutely.

I don’t think I have had that type of jump. I think the paintings all help to give insights into the landscape, of different ways of looking out. And the fact that there were so many different painters, painting in different ways and depicting it in their different ways, that was very enriching, because you weren't just getting one view of it you were getting many.
It's funny, I may have said this to you earlier, I was very idealistic when I first started the gallery and I was really quite profoundly shocked at the way in which people brought pictures. And ahh...

Yeah, and the way that people who had good collections brought them. And I really had a big reaction. And on that account I decided I wouldn't collect them, which was probably a great pity because I could have had a fantastic collection of those early paintings - and then later on I realised that that was silly and my view was silly. That motives are incredibly complex and you simply can't judge people at first blush because they might arrive and project a particular kind of motive but when the picture is back in their house it may have all kinds of other effects on them. And they may have anyway seen that earlier on. But I certainly had that view.

Well I didn't go on for very long, but Cliff was in the early group, a piece of sculpture by Clifford Last - which I sat and looked at and thought, “it really is a beautiful piece of sculpture”. And Eric Westbrook... I think I did tell you this story.

And then Sally Herman had an exhibition, and a group of painters who had been invited on a cultural mission to China. That wasn't a very big exhibition but there were a few painters in that. and it wasn't at the gallery to begin with. I was able to capture all these people. But there was one painter from Sydney, a woman…

What?

No.

No, anyway, I can't recall. There were quite a few, at the opening exhibition, which was the next exhibition there were quite a few well known painters and what it did was cause me to look at many others who weren't necessarily exhibiting in the gallery.

It was 1956. I brought this along because I knew you were going to ask me dates and things.

Yep.

Yeah 1956.

Yep.

Well I had a terrific run in the public sector because I was invited to become a member of the Committee of Enquiry into the National Estate. Which was an absolutely fascinating enquiry because we carried out the first national survey of the natural world heritage of Australia. And so we were looking at again, not only the landscape but also the built heritage of Australia, and the prehistory of Australia, and Aboriginal history of Australia.

So it was an unbelievable learning experience for me and it wouldn't have been if I’d been given the opportunity to work in a particular area. I probably would have actually chosen housing because I was so much involved with that, but as it turned out it was the perfect thing to do, and then to my genuine surprise - because I didn't have a special role in the committee of enquiry - I was asked to be the chair of the Interim Committee. And the Interim Committee had two roles. One was to take responsibility for the distribution of quite large sums of money that Tom Uren had managed to get allocated to his department for the national estate, and the second one was to draft legislation which had, in the committee report, had been recommended. And then so I had those two activities and a very solid minister. About 3 years ago, somebody who was then supposedly writing up a history of the Heritage Commission; found a series of marvellous memos that were written by people in Tom Uren’s department, and the tenor of the memos was that David Yenken is totally out of control. He is causing us enormous problems with the States, he is running far ahead of what he should be. And it didn't faze Tom at all, but it did absolutely phase the department and the head of, the two heads of the department. At the time that the Heritage Commission was coming into being, they tried really hard to stop my appointment, and they wanted to set up an interim body. Whereby one of them would be the chair of the Commission, and the other would be deputy chair, which would of course mean that it wasn't independent at all. I suppose I had one, apart from just tremendous interest in this exercise, thing that had helped a great deal, and that is that I happened to be going overseas at the time of the preparation of, or leading into the preparation of the Committee of Enquiry report. I went to England and I thought, “well it's not much good looking through examples in countries that have unitary forms of government, you really have to go look at countries that have federal governments.” And that wasn't going to be terribly easy to get that information from European federal governments like such as Germany or Austria, and whatever. So I decided to come back through North America, and I went to see Heritage Canada. Which was helpful, and they’ve got some great people and they were lovely, and they said you absolutely have to go down to Washington and see the Advisory Council of Historic Building Protection and Preservation. So I rang and made an arrangement, and so I got a stack of material which all related to historic building protection only, but it was extremely interesting as a way of looking at a particular problem. So I fed that back and then Tom Uren... I spoke to him this morning, just to see how he was. Tom Uren often said to me that one of the things he is proudest of is the fact that he was persuaded by me that the Heritage Commission should not come under the direction of the minister. So far as the creation of its main task, or the creation of the register of the National Estate which was its main task, to accomplish the creation of the register was the sole responsibility of the Commission, and the minister could not direct the Commission about what should or should not go on the register. Except in one particular set of circumstances, and that’s when a formal enquiry had been carried out under another act, such as was carried out at Fraser island, and at Kakadu, and the conclusion of the enquiry was, amongst other things, that the place should go on the register of the National Estate. And that only happened once. So, for 23 years the commission operated on that basis, and I think we pushed it to the limit. And that was an entrepreneurial activity of high order.

Yes, it started in the Whitlam years and continued into the Fraser years. And Fraser was, you know, really supportive too.

We stopped at Howard. What do you expect?

The next step was, I left the Chairmanship of the Commission. I was still working with Merchant Builders, and spending a lot of time with Merchant Builders, in so far as was feasible, as the Heritage Commission role was a very demanding one, even though it was supposed to be part time. And because it was so political, not just with the states. It was political enough there with [Sir Johannes] Bjelke-Peterson refusing to put anything in Queensland on the register, and Charlie Court in Western Australia having difficult views about many things. But the other parts of the politics related to vested interest groups, like the mining lobby or the timber lobby or whatever. Or the development lobby, building development, property development companies. So, you know as I said it was a very demanding role. But I finished with that and said “I don't want to go and do another job with government” and I thought to myself, “well what do I want to do?”, and I thought, “well I’d like to write. Write about some of these experiences and different attitudes.” I got a contract from McMillan’s to write a book, and was just working out what to cover really, and at that moment Evan Walker came to talk to me. He said, “well I think we are going to win this time around.” He had spoken to me about 3 or 4 years before that and I said “Well surely, I can’t see any purpose in doing anything with the leader that you've got ‘cause he is never going to win an election”. When John Cain was elected as leader it became very, very different, and so then he said, “Are you interested in heading up the ministry?”, and I thought to myself, “Well I didn't really want to do this but if you ever are going to do it this surely is the moment”. After 23 years of conservative government, and with a government which really wants to make changes. So it was a very fertile period for people who had ideas. All those things change remarkably quickly in government, so by the time I left in 5 years from then, I could see that everything was going entirely differently. I may have told you this story, of the woman who was in charge of executive search, who I had asked to come to my farewell dinner but couldn't, so I went to have lunch with her. She told me that at the time that I was appointed, what the government was looking for was people with ideas. By I time I left what they were looking for were people who could deal with damage control. Now that's a huge shift.

Oh, well...

I think the problem really is that reformed governments try a lot of different things and inevitably some of them don't work, and politics is extraordinarily unforgiving of things that don't work. Now in private enterprise everybody knows that of the many ideas you might have, many issues you might take on, some are not going to work. Some will be failures. And that's no concern provided that there are going to be others that are great successes. Whereas in government it's not like that. There is the most intense scrutiny from the opposition and from the media and any perceived mistakes are really hammered.

Performing governments.

Yes, but there were changes.

Changes from past practice. Very, very significant.

Well, it was probably a year and a half, and then with the Committee of Enquiry it was probably a year and a bit as the Chair of the Interim Committee of the National Estate, and then I had two appointments of three years each as chair. In fact I was the only person who was re-appointed in the whole history of the Commission. I don’t know that that is particularly to my credit, I think it is probably a good thing to have turn over, but that was the way it was. It was probably good at that stage because we were doing a lot of new things and it was good to be able to bed them down a bit and for continuity.

At the time, in Victoria? Well it’s the most prominent, and it’s interesting. When I listen to people like Joan Kirner and Wes Matthews, people like that, they didn't have anything to do with the Ministry directly. Joan who has a strong social agenda, a good one, when they say that the work in Southbank was the most important thing in the Cain years, I don’t think they're right. I think that it has had such an impact because it's incredibly visible, because it was transforming a dead part of the city, and bringing it to life and connecting it properly to the city. Because water is always so important in cities, it's meant that other things that the Ministry tried to do have been neglected. So for example, because both Evan [Walker] and I were members of the Faculty for Planning and Building at Melbourne University and on the plaque at Southbank, I think the faculty decided that they would do an interview with both of us to get a piece written about the contributions we had made. The young, youngish, lecturer who came down to talk to me was very pleasant. He was absolutely amazed at all the other things we did, and I didn't really get the opportunity to go over all the other changes we were trying to make. I think one of the reasons is too, that the work we did at Southbank can't be undone in the short term because it would be very expensive to do that, whereas the other things we did were very quickly undone. For example, trying to completely restaff the Ministry so it was able to do a lot more things and was therefore much better equipped in a whole range of other areas. Like the Western Suburbs Actions Plan which was an attempt at a process which was the exact opposite of the river bank work. That was to seek the views of the people of the west by a whole range of really good devices, and ask them what they thought, and then feedback to them the interpretation of these thoughts and information. Then set in motion some of the things they had asked for. We produced very late in my time a metropolitan strategy that is just seen as part of the sequence of metropolitan strategies. We produced an environmental strategy, and it's important because its there and it's going to stay there.

Yes, yes it was done. But often, some of these things get done not quite in the way you'd want. And other issues get involved, because the land that Melbourne Central is built on was land that was under the control of the transport ministry, and I don’t think that probably we would have built that tower there at all. You know, they thought that that was the best way to do that at the time.

The things that we tried to do to ensure that sites that were of real significance in the city had adequate architectural design skills applied to them. That was at the time very significant, and it all really began with the Tennis Centre, because John Cain, and the then president of the Tennis Centre announced that the Tennis Centre was going to be built, where it is, and then announced the architect at the same time, and I got in touch with Evan [Walker], and said “I think that doesn’t sound good at all, I don’t think that architect is honestly capable of producing the design that is needed there”. So we agreed that what we would do is that he would go and talk to the Premier, and I would go and talk to the president of the Royal Melbourne Tennis Association. Well the president of the Royal Tennis Association was not pleased at what I had to say. I was as diplomatic as I possibly could be and I said "well, that it's really important that when you are approaching design and architectural practice, that it is looked at in exactly the same way as engineering is looked at. For a major structure you need a structural engineer, you need a mechanical engineer, and these other engineers and for an effective major building you need to have an architect, of the calibre you have chosen - and I think you have chosen extremely well - but you also need to have someone of outstanding design capacity." So, anyway we won, and then I didn't think it was a good idea that the choice should be made by us as a planning authority, so I went to talk to John Devenish, who was then the State Architect, and we set up a system whereby John had the power of finding designers. So when a major protect popped up the idea was that he would organise a process of finding a person to try and work on it,so that's how, Philip Cox came to be the designer of the tennis centre.

Yeah, we tried to do that in rare instances, and when Pete Walker was most recently out here we went for a walk along the Yarra with Steve Gardener and we decided to talk about these things. I said “It is really is extraordinary how effective practices get forgotten with the flux of time, and people try and reinvent the wheel. So why don’t we arrange a meeting with Geoffrey London when you're next up Pete”, because he had started to talk about the things that he had been involved in that were similar kind of attempts, and I told him about what we had been doing. So, we'd arrange a meeting and go and talk to Geoffrey and discuss these kind of ideas and sort of try and bring them back into currency. So, what I am trying to say is, yes the river at Southbank is important, but far from the only thing.

Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more, because I had quite a lot to do with Allan Hunt, and primarily because we were struggling to find a way to build the cluster housing developments, and the town housing developments, in a way that was workable. We had to work with the Strata Title Act which was ok for our townhouses but a bloody nuisance when you came to cluster housing where houses were sited separately and didn’t need to be connected, and we had to connect them because of the strata system. Initially I had to start this conversation with Dick Hamer. I can't really remember if it was Dick Hamer or Allan who set up the committee, anyway he agreed to set up a committee that I chaired, to look at legislation, revisions of legislation. I got a pretty good committee - Richard Searby, who is fairly highly regarded QC and would've gone onto the High Court if he hadn't decided that it would be better to be a chairman of News Limited. And he was on it. And Allan (Hunt) was always supportive, interested and so on. He was very courageous. He did lots of things that were really quite different from the sort of things that his colleagues were doing.

No, he was a lawyer.

And his son is now the Environmental shadow minister in the Federal Parliament.

Correct.

Build the first motel.

Only because it gave me so much confidence in trying to do new things. First of all because, you know, I was most deeply uncertain about whether I could pull it off, and my family were absolutely certain I couldn't.

And it just was a great experience to have gone through it, and to learn something through experience, and meet the sort of people I had to work with and to get to work for me, to handle them. To have it built with a budget, can you believe that?

And I had a very, very limited budget. And to do all the things myself, like act as a labourer and so forth.

...it is, probably in other ways too, because you're making something, it’s rising, coming out of the ground. And yeah, and so it really is... I always give that answer. Not because it was the most significant to other people, but because it…

...but it was the most significant for me. And it was the foundation for all the other things I did. It created the opportunity for all the other things, and although it may seem I have worked in an extraordinary range of disparate areas there’s perhaps a logical reason why I move from one thing to the next. Because opportunities have arisen, as in the heritage thing. People come to talk to you because they’ve heard about you in quite a different context. Hugh Stretton, who came to talk to me because he was able to perceive that what we were doing was very imaginative and what he wanted, which was someone to go and look at Elizabeth, and to ask a question, “how could this kind of work be done more imaginatively?”, which is really why he asked me to do it.

Well he really wanted a response about the way in which the work of the South Australian Housing Trust could be made more imaginative.

No, no I think he was very clear-headed about the strengths and weaknesses of Elizabeth, and he always had a very, very strong social focus and deep concern about finding good equitable outcomes. I think that the South Australian Housing Trust was a really admirable body. A splendid body which did remarkable things. Far and away the best public housing body, far and away, and also one that had a much wider reach than any of the others; but, he just was on the lookout for different ideas and things. I think that's why. But as I said, now all of these things have quite normal and natural links, and that's how I got invited there, and that’s how I started to think about having a consulting arm. And that's what brought people round from Tom Uren’s office to talk to people in Melbourne before the first election when Whitlam was elected. And although there was no talk at that stage about membership of the committee of enquiry, as it eventually became, I think that probably I was an interesting mix of developer on the one hand and conservationist on the other.

Yes, because you know I was an active member of the Australian Conservation Foundation. I sat on committees in Melbourne related to historic preservation as well, and whilst not a particularly powerful committee it was nevertheless very interesting, and so on.

Oh, absolutely, it was extraordinary. At the beginning of the committee of enquiry Bob Hope the chairman went round the room and asked people how much time they could devote to it and [unclear] said 5 days a week. Reg Walker, who was the head of the National Trust of Australia, the overall body, said four and a half days a week, and my jaw dropped. And I knew that I couldn't spend more than half a day or at the very most one day. But when I became the chair I had to travel a lot more, but even during the committee of enquiry I travelled a fair bit.

Oh, yes, I was very active at Merchant Builders.

What's that?

Oh, very good. A very good friend of Tom Uren.

Yeah

And he was Minister for Planning after my time.

He had a lot of portfolios. He was Attorney General at one stage, but, I’m sure he was Minister for Planning, but that was… it was Evan [Walker], and then it was Jim Kennan, and then admittedly after I had left there was…

Ah yeah, yeah that's right. Roper, and then I think Roper was succeeded by Andrew [McCutcheon].

I was there for 5 years.

I was at the university [Melbourne University].

Ah well I could see the way things were going and I didn’t much like it. The University was fun. It was extraordinarily difficult. It was a small group in the centre for Environmental Studies and there were some able, talented people amongst them but, they seemed to be very much at each other’s throats and … it was not a nice atmosphere and there was absolutely no money to bring in new people. So, I decided the only thing to do was that I would go out and do some consulting work. I did that. I did a really big job - well not big by nowadays standards, but a big job - on the Multi-Function Polis. I did the social impact study for that. I also did a study on the connection of the City into Docklands, how the rail tracks would be bridged, and also for a terminal for Spencer Street which should be a multi-use terminal. I got Daryl [Jackson]involved in that and so I earned about $200,000 which I put into the University and I used that to bring people out for periods of time. I told them that they also had to earn their keep because I wanted to have the money replenished, if possible, so I could ask somebody else later. And for the most part that happened, and that was good. It was also excellent because each of these things is a new learning experience and it’s not a pushover, and you have learn how to be an effective lecturer. I had given tons of talks and I had to learn that lecturing is not the same as public talks, you have to think about it in a much more structured way. You know, you had to think about the sequence of lectures over the whole, so you have to, find the appropriate form of repetition. I don’t need to tell any of you any of this, you know extremely well, but I am just telling you the things that I had to learn. You had to learn to be engaging in a quite different kind of way when you were talking, and that was good, and I think I managed that pretty well by the time I had finished. I wasn't so great at the beginning, but by the time I had left I got the highest rating in the faculty as a lecturer and I also had to learn to research, and particularly how to get ARC grants.
Nobody told me that the absolute fundamental mistake to make in applying for an ARC grant is to ask for money for literature research. You are supposed to have done that before you start, and secondly, that far and away the best way to apply for an ARC grant is to have done half the work. You know, so having learnt that, I became reasonably successful at getting them. And that lead to three books after I left the University.
It's also good you have to go much more deeply into things. I guess amongst other things, that has really driven me throughout my life. In fact, curiosity and interest in learning new things, and I’m happiest when I am learning rather than... And learning does come from reading books as you rightly say, but it also comes from doing, just as much as reading or listening to other people.

Well, I mean you certainly would hope that there are people who see you putting that energy in that is of real significance, and have felt that a good product is a reward itself. It doesn’t have to be a reward in other ways.

Ahh, Ellis Stones used to tell me that he learnt how to place rocks in the landscape as if they had been always there, and just had emerged from the erosion of soil and things around them, by going up to somewhere near Echuca sitting, and looking at rocks in the landscape, and the plants that grew naturally around them, and the way in which they emerged there. And reflecting on just those things and asking himself “well, you know, if you are trying to replicate this, just how do you do it and how do you make a landscape, a made landscape, look like this?”.

Yes.

Are you talking about all 60 Aboriginal languages?

Interesting.

Um, I think for the best. I think the position has improved. I think that there’s much more recognition of the role of architects than there was certainly when I was beginning, and I think, I feel that from conversations I have with people I know. And I suppose that people have had more exposure to fine buildings, that perhaps the work that we did in housing had altered people to the fact that there were other ways in which houses could be built. And, you didn't have to go to the most expensive architect to get a decent building.

No, I think you're right. I think that it's been pleasing that there’s been some really good work done in the apartment field, but there really has not been any continuation, in any serious way, of the work that Merchant Builders did in the outer suburban lot type.

Laughs. I don’t know how to answer that, ah I can't say I’ve really thought much about it. What’s my favourite building? Anywhere in the world... or in Australia?

I think that buildings from other periods, like Chartres Cathedral, are absolutely beyond words…. wonderful, ahh...

Yeah. I suppose that's probably because of my heritage history. It was the very first of the main cathedrals that was listed on the World Heritage list. I mean, many other cathedrals have got similar qualities, but I think Chartres is probably the best of that bunch, I’d really have to think about it. I don’t think it's a question I’ve ever really put to myself.

Really?