David Yencken

Would it be helpful if I, since this is another kind of interview, as I am not an architect and I wasn’t trained as one, if I very quickly went through and told you the different areas in which I worked. Some will be quite irrelevant to you but others may be of use and interest you?

I did a history degree and I did it in England, Cambridge, and I came to not expecting to stay here but then somehow…

No, but my father was an English diplomat. He was Australian and my mother was Australian but for some unaccountable reason… Well they are accountable reasons, they both spent a long time in England. He joined the British foreign service after having left Cambridge, after having done four or five years in France in the First World War. And she got stuck on the trip to England. My grandmother and mother and my aunt couldn't get a boat back to Australia, so they had to go to school in England for the duration of the war.
Anyway, so I came out here not intending to stay at all. But I had always been interested in painting so I went to quite a number of exhibitions and had some discussions with somebody who had some spare space and was interested, and I started a small gallery. It was a tiny gallery but it was devoted to Australian painting and it was started at the same time as the Australia Galleries.

At that time we were the only two galleries in Melbourne. That was a tremendous education, it was a huge one.

It was called Brummels because it was… and the little cafe was called Brummels down below, so it was just Brummels Gallery.
Then on the way out to Australia I migrated to Canada just to see the world and came across a number of strange things; like three minute car washes, and motels. Things of that kind, and then having arrived here. There was a trip around Australia with a Canadian friend who’d been to Cambridge with me. We stayed in country pubs and put up with hammock beds and eggs for breakfast swimming in lard and all that. We decided that what Australia needed was motels. He very sensibly went back to Canada but he left me with the silly idea. So I spent quite a number of years trying to make it happen. Eventually through a series of trials and errors, some serious blunders, but some of the blunders were completely miraculous the way they ended up with some good results. So then I bought some land in Bairnsdale, because I had at the time had trouble finding something on the Hume Highway. I had originally, before that, I bought a site in Warrnambool and immediately after I bought it realised that it was absolutely totally wrong.

It was along the Princess Hwy and I thought there was actually more traffic on the Princess Hwy than in fact there actually was. But it was a great start, so that turned out fortuitously as the Catholic Church then came and offered to buy it, and so I was able to emerge from that stupid error with enough money to put a deposit down on the next phase and do it more seriously. So I bought this piece of land in Bairnsdale and then I was able to borrow, God knows why anyone would lend me money… [Laughing]

Yeah. No earlier. 1950s… Would it be useful, I have got a kind of record of all the dates and so on, but you can have that later if you want.

And then there was the question of how to choose an architect. I talked to one architect and then somebody suggested I should talk to John Mockridge. And talked to John Mockridge and having met John Mockridge and seen what he had done I realised immediately that John was a much superior designer than the other one… I can't even remember his name.
Although he wasn't at all pleased when I told him I wasn't going to go with him. And then we set about this extraordinary experience for me, from working with an architect, learning about architecture, learning about building. I knew nothing about building, absolutely nothing, and also trying to manage the process. So in order to keep the cost down we built everything on site. We made all the concrete blocks on site, I worked with a labourer and also subcontracted everything. I made a terrible error in subcontracting all the plumbing, fittings… by the time I’d worked it out, recovered from the shock of trying to deal with all of these male and female connections.
And by some absolute miracle it was built to budget, and in that time I was teased mercilessly by the people who were working on the site. They had said it was a crazy idea but they were very good natured and great people and I got a lot of confidence from doing that, but also learnt an awful lot about building. Working with John, it was very terrific. He was very tolerant of my ignorance and stupidity and there were constant disagreements between the foreman and John. He was a good foreman, but argued with John, so I was called upon to adjudicate between them, which I didn't feel particularly well equipped to do. And then we eventually got the thing open, which was such a relief. To get it built to budget, that I never gave a thought, never had a worry that it wasn’t going to work. It was a very, very nice design - very simple, very elegant. Alas it’s not there anymore.

It was very, very nice. And it I think served its purpose beautifully. I have written a few chapters about some of these experiences, I have written a chapter about motels which I have called ‘An Introduction to Design’ and then a whole series of comments. If you would like a copy of that I will print it off and give it do you?

Yes.

Yes exclusively with John.

Oh yes he came down. But I couldn't afford to have him come down too often. He was extremely tolerant and gave me as much time as I could ever possibly want.

No he didn't know anything about motels in Australia. There were none.

But I had bought lots of books about motels and formed a view which I still hold, that when laying out a room, a motel room, it’s a travesty if the main window opens off the car park. It should open the other way, onto the garden, even if it is a tiny garden, a tiny little Japanese garden of something. At the first one there was quite a long list of issues at the Mitchell Valley Motel and so I gave that information to John and I also gave it later to Robin.
It’s the case that I feel a huge debt of gratitude to John, really huge.

Yes, yes I was.

Oh yes I was down there all the time being on the site.. and buying things, except when I had to come up with other problems like getting stuff which I had to bring down which I had forgotten to order or something. It was a great experience.
And it then happened that Robin Boyd heard about the motel and he came to visit. I got to know him quite well and we started to talk about a whole host of other things. He was aware of opportunities in Canberra. Sites were going to be released for motels. Motels at the time were all the current thing just emerging and I had a look but it was quite beyond my means to get involved with that.
But two things then happened. One, a small motel chain which was just formed and they offered to buy the Mitchell Valley Motel, and secondly I was approached by some people that used to stay at the motel who asked if I would be interested in coming in and managing a motel at Merimbula. I'd always liked Merimbula, always thought it was a lovely place, not so lovely now, but really was beautiful when it was unspoilt. So I said yes, I would be very interested, and then these two things sort of meshed very nicely because I was getting out of one thing and then free to do the others. So I would choose the architects and appointed all the people while the motel was being built, in this instance, I wasn’t going to try and build it myself ‘cause there was more money and people. So I did that.
And so then I left .. but unfortunately there were certain problems. One, there was a flaw on the title. There was a solicitor on our board and it was supposed to be unimportant, and also there was also a credit squeeze and the lender properly relating to both these things refused to provide the large loan and that threw the whole place into turmoil. So it was really really hard work when I came back from Hong Kong to turn that around, really hard work.
I worked with Robin on the design of the motel. I suggested to the other directors that Robin would be a very good architect and Robin produced a terrific design. It pains to say that John was very appropriate for me at that moment. I was not really attempting to make a statement about the way in which a building could fit into the Australian landscape because back then there was nothing on the site anyway, and so I have no criticism of what was done there even though perhaps I might do it differently. He probably would too if he was still alive. Whereas, with Robin right from the beginning we had a site with no other buildings, there were mahogany gums all over it, it was a wonderful setting overlooking the lake at Merimbula. So, a piece of architecture that was a real reflection of Australian bush which fitted into it and so on, which was the aim from the beginning. The problem was when I got back the place was nearly bankrupt and all of the struggles over finding the extra money caused people not to pay attention. You know it’s a very familiar story and I think that in the piece that I was going to give you I describe the sort of things we were going to do to get across these ideas.
One of them was a very simple thing. To put a piece on the back of the doors describing what the motel was trying to do, and that amongst other things that this had been voted one of the ten best built in Australia, in the last year. It had an extraordinary impact because there were people who had been absolutely adamant it was the worst piece of architecture ever been seen. This was the common view in Merimbula and in the surrounding areas and probably a view shared by my fellow directors. In fact I am sure it was. But when that piece went up all those people started to move up a step and then you got a lot of interesting things being said by people, like, “When we arrived here we didn't like the place but having been here for two or three days it is very easy, comforting and comfortable; very much belonging to its surroundings and so forth…”

We are talking 60, early 60's.

I think it was 1960 the credit squeeze.

I think that’s right .

I think there was never any disagreement about it. I would like to claim all the credit for it, but I think it was instinctive agreement about it because the site was so strong, and the trees so fantastic and so on. So I don't think we needed to debate it at all.

Oh yes.

I would guess he was ten years older than me. I might be wrong.

The idea of that was that the party walls had to be soundproof so the building approach had to be the opposite of brick veneer house. With a brick veneer house you put the brickwork on the outside. So at the first place, and also the Black Dolphin, the brickwork was concrete blockwork or brickwork in the second instance formed a party wall and then there was the timber cladding or a window wall on the outside. So it was reversing that process.

For the first one it seemed to be a lot cheaper.

Ahh yes that’s right. We had other people helping of course and we had some fun with the structural engineer who was working and he asked for… his name was Davey I think. Does that ring any bells…?

No I don't think, we were only small at that time.

Anyway John nominated them and they requested that a sample of concrete block be set up for testing, and that was duly done. I might have delivered it myself to them and there was a long delay before he came back and I got a telegram, this was the days of telegrams. “Inadequate structural strength. Destroy all concrete blocks.” We had finished making the whole lot. [Laughing]

So I quickly drove out to Melbourne and went to see him. I made some childish calculation of the weight of the all blocks and what that would and you know mean and he said, “You have to make allowance for wind uplift”… “So what should I make an allowance for then.” And he told me something, so we added that in and I said, “By my calculation the margin of error is flawed by 150 to 200%.” He said, “Oh, I think your right.” Anyway…

You mean people around Australia?

Mine wasn’t absolutely the first one but the first eight motels were all conceived of, in the same year.

There were one at Oakleigh that was finished a little bit before the one at Bairnsdale. I think the first one actually built was a very small motel at Bathurst. But it was really interesting, that it seemed that people recognised that the time for motels had come. So all over Australia people were starting to build motels. There were quite different characters and…

..all independently. Think about it. No one knew anything about it, I certainly didn't. It was only afterwards that we started to come together. Some sort of associations were formed and you started to learn by what other people did.

But also, I think that was the positive thing. But the negative thing, which was highly influencing motels, was the appalling standard of country pubs.

No good alternative. I make the observation in this chapter that today it is the reverse, really. That the superior accommodation is in the renovated pubs or half pubs half motels, or something like this, whereas for the most part the motels built are inferior in quality. It is just interesting that that has happened.

And the university trip up from the West of Melbourne was brought out by David Saunders and they were brought up to look at the architecture and reflect on it. Make comment. So he took them all around and then in the driveway where all the colonnades, the tree trunk columns, were to be seen. He said, “Ok, what do you all think?” And one young woman, after some long silence, said “Well, I think the tree trunks are rather overdesigned,” and David walked up to one of them and put his arms around it and said, “Dear God, don't do it again.” [Laughter]
It was a really great comment. Because one of the great problems was trying to get people to come, because we had a trial run with some advertising groups. It was disastrous. I talked to one of them and said I feel like doing something quite different ,and I showed him the sorts of things that… [Papers being unfurled. David is showing the ads and brochures that were used in the campaigns for the Black Dolphin.]

The ad agency? I wrote all of these!

I got an ad agency to write the first one, and they wrote ads about the romantic charms of fawning in the moonlight. Those type of ads. And they were disastrous. Not only were they disastrous because very few people came, but they were disastrous because the people who did come, came with all the wrong expectations, and they were bitterly disappointed. So I had to really think again because we were in trouble, and that’s why I started to think about doing these ones.

I think I made a terrible error with the logo. It was done by someone called Max Robinson a graphic designer and Matcham Skipper, do you know Matcham?

A jeweller up at Mount Eliza, he really took me to task about the logo and Max got stuck in. It’s really terrible - slick and terrible. He showed me all these very old designs of dolphin. I asked Robin about it and Robin didn't seem to be concerned but I know absolutely for sure that Matcham was right. The artwork graphics were very poor because it wasn't at all representative of the Dolphin. It’s a huge distortion of the Dolphin.

Yes, I expect it did work.

But as an incipient environmentalist, I came to feel quite badly about it. It kind of taught me a great lesson that we then tried to apply to Merchant Builders about the great importance of integrated design, of finding absolutely the best landscape architects, interior designers and graphic designers all to work together.

Yeah, I think it was. One of the really good things about John Mockridge’s office was that he had a resident or semi-resident landscape architect, whose name was Beryl Mann, and she did the landscaping for the motel at Bairnsdale. So there was that linkage and integration there. We didn't use a landscape architect at the Black Dolphin because the site was so strong and it didn't really need any.

Yeah, that’s really more about siting the buildings well and effectively around the existing trees.

Yeah, untouched in a significant degree.
Now, it is interesting to think about these ads because I showed them to Graeme Davison, you know the historian. He is writing a book about the motor car [Car Wars] and he devoted two pages to the Black Dolphin and also to the ads. Which you know was something he really liked, but he argued that in fact I can find the precise word… [Des and Bruce continue looking through the ads while David looks for an article]

These ads, when I came back I found this all in a mess and we tried to go through the first method with an ad agency. So they would have started probably about the middle of 1960.

The first one got us into Nation Review and then the next series, which was smaller into the Haughton.

To me this was very interesting. He talked about Mitchell Valley [Motel] and the Black Dolphin and he said ‘that the Black Dolphin was clever to appeal to an intelligencia, newly awakened largely thanks to Boyd, to the aesthetics of austerica… But he continues "The advertisement highlighted the vision between Yencken and Boyd’s commercial and educative purposes. They have sought to elevate the general standard of architectural taste but they have concluded by reinforcing a division between elite and popularist standards.’
I would say that I think in these ways, but it made me think, and I think he is entirely wrong and I think he is entirely wrong in a number of ways. Yes he is right that the Black Dolphin didn't influence other motel groups, so you don't see really fine pieces of architecture, at least I am not aware of any, you may be, but in other places. The standard of motels probably did revert back to most of the things that Robin most despised but nevertheless the Black Dolphin was extremely influential. It was influential in educating the taste of all the people that stayed there, and I'll talk to you about some of the early responses. The folks who went became more and more attracted to it. It became exceptionally well known. The Black Dolphin was used in many, many advertisements and trade advertisements overseas. I was invited to take part in the advertisement for a craft event and the elementary people were the matron of the Melbourne Hospital and the Managing Director of a very large hotel chain. It does say something about the prestige of the place. They wouldn't have put something that was quite crazy in there after all, they are trying to sell very widely, aren’t they? Then, and I also say that later on I bought a house which Graeme [Gunn] designed and he used… I don't know if you have seen it have you?

It’s a terrific house. It’s a pole house and you all know post and beam houses. All the posts are vertical peeled logs and all the beams are horizontal. It’s a very simple idea of a… what was then a nine foot grid in every direction. There was extraordinary variety and richness of form by having a split in the lower levels, and having different roof forms and countless cantilevers and so on. It really is a great house.

That is just north of Merimbula.

Just north of Tathra, and I’ll just comment that with everybody who worked on that house, or has seen it, I have never received one word of criticism about it, and I think it was in large measure because there had been something like Black Dolphin built beforehand and so people got used to it. And the final point I make is that it’s entirely consistent with what was happening in the way in which new ideas are disseminated. They often require acceptance and adoption by an elite, and then they are spread more widely. But you know what was really good about his comment was it made me really think, is he right?

When I came back from overseas, I had no choice but to get involved to run it and saving it. I was so exhausted at the end of that year. It really was very close to bankruptcy, and running a motel was a 24 hr job, and so I really did get very tired but we made it and marvellously. I learnt an awful lot about myself. Like for example you walking in and me stopping myself from saying “I like that garment or I don't like it.” Rather than that, saying “I’ll do my best to make you feel good, and happy here.” And you know it is a tiny thing, but it’s very important. Learning how to deal with angry people because something has gone wrong and well it is entirely your fault. There are all sorts of fascinating things about the way in which angry people respond if they are very well looked after.

Black Dolphin? When it was first built - I certainly have a drawing, probably 20 to 30 rooms.

Remembering, we reasonably quickly added another 6 and then the people that bought it - Ansett Hotels bought it - and they built a two storey addition, and I got very cross because they refused to use Robin as their architect.

Well not the accommodation part, only the restaurant and all the rest of it and the reception and so forth.

We served breakfast.

…for the most we just delivered it.

It is very interesting how motel owners regularly used to come. They actually used to get quite angry because they heard about the place because, it really was quite famous, in its way, and they’d say, ‘we can't see anything very special here you know, in fact we think it’s awful”. I think the influence of American thinking about motels is very, very strong and so people wanted to go down that path. Then when serious architecture started to be introduced into this kind of accommodation that we have been discussing, it more often related to refurbishments and better linked developments where they were part motel, part refurbished hotel.

I think also they didn't feel they knew how to do that. And then again, reflecting on that period or chapter I learnt then that was another thing reinforced by the subsequent period with Merchant Builders, that to make these things work you really have to have total commitment to all the elements, all the design elements, and you can’t really get the thing to work unless that is there. One of the illustrations that I often give is, moving forward a bit, is with the Cluster Housing Schemes, things like we did with Merchant Builders. We used to offer local real estate agents the opportunity of selling houses at full commission and they never ever managed to sell more than one or two because they absolutely didn't know how, and they didn't know how to project what were the benefits and the qualities of the place they were trying to sell.

That’s right.

I think there really would be a lack of confidence in handling it. Choosing one talented designer, and two, handling really talented designers. It would be looked at rather mechanically, I think, by people. They might choose an architect but it would be with a rather utilitarian approach in mind, not trying to mix the two.

No, just…

I had just migrated and took on any work. I couldn't afford to stay in them myself because I was just working on different kinds of jobs. Working on a farm, railway company, adding up what was the likely expansion of oil, I worked on pipelines and so forth. I was given a lift by some people I ran into for part of the journey and they stayed in motels, so I was able to take quite a good look at it.

But I absolutely had no notion that I was going to go down that track so I didn't really look at them terribly carefully. But what I did do later was to get a lot of books and I tried to get all the books that seemed to be the best books. Then many things from those books which would be terrific, like for instance, some of the layouts of the rooms. There are other things which in retrospect proved to be entirely wrong. The reason why I didn’t build on the Hume highway was because a consistent message on these books was that one of the things that you have to be careful about is not being bypassed by a freeway. And I thought to myself of one place absolutely certain to be bypassed by a freeway and that was Albury-Wodonga. I found it very ironic to think that 50 years later and they are just doing it. Another thing was that the assumption that motels wouldn’t be built in the downtown areas. You know, if the road did bypass the place or something like that, well that could be totally wrong too.

I probably didn't develop that sense. [interview interrupted by phone call]

I think I was probably more influenced by what seemed to be appropriate for the site rather than a specific sense of having to be a reflection of Australian landscape. But later on I came to believe that very strongly, and was greatly helped, as I say the site at Merimbula, with those wonderful mahogany gums and the outlook over the lake and so forth. I don't think or recall any discussions with Robin about that, it just seemed so natural and I feel that in many of my relationships, the best ones, with architects there was very little debate about it. There were some key things we seemed to reach a very a quick agreement about. I don't recall endless discussions about many things. There was lots of things we did have lots of discussions about with architects but not some of the important things that were instinctual in a significant sense.

Way after. It was accidental in the first instance. I was certainly not equipped to make a good judgement. All I have achieved [with the Mitchell Valley Motel] was that I end up with two architects that I had talked to. And that John was, as far as I could see, the vastly superior one but I hadn’t done an extensive piece of research. And then the next step was when Robin approached me.

Yes.

That’s right, and then we looked at some other sites in Canberra and nothing much happened until the opportunity arose, and by this time I got to know him very well. And then I met Graeme [Gunn]. Graeme worked for Robin on the Black Dolphin but I didn't really establish a strong sense about Graeme at that time because there were other people working there and what was highly influential was that Graeme and I found ourselves down at the Chinese classes at the [Tafe?]. I'd spent some time in Hong Kong and wanted to try and go on with the language. Graeme invited me back to his place for dinner and there were some photographs on the wall and particularly of a house called Shoebridge House.

Yes we tried to but not very successfully. We had problems with people copying. Individuals and those who as soon as we finished just asked people and we paid them. And we tried to deal with copyright with…. but I suppose it's the ultimate compliment isn’t it to be copied.

Oh, people began to see that it was successful.

I just think that people would have perceived it as too difficult to do.

But you were asking me about the selection of architects in Merchant Builders. There was a point after we started off with Graeme [Gunn] that there was an active search for other designers. And some came like Terry Dorrough because they won a competition and we became involved with him as part sponsors or something like that, and others because as… we wanted other architects to come on board. That, and in another instance because we tried to give somebody else on staff the opportunity to try and express themselves so we worked with Peter Carmichael. Peter Carmichael renovated the back bit of this house.

I have an active engagement with bridges designed by Peter Carmichael.

I was head of the Ministry of Planning and Environment when that was done. Of course the Ministry was very accurate. I do say in some of the things I have written that it always astounds me that people don't take more trouble in looking at the previous work that architects have done. Because that is going to give you such a good indication of what you are going to get. Not because they are going to repeat what they have done before but because there will be a signature, for sure, on that building, and although in the instances of some of these people I engaged with and care about and… I went to look at all the things they did. So for instance, I went to look at anything that John Mockridge did recently build - the boathouse and the extensions at Melbourne Grammar and the… site, churches, things like that. So I look very carefully. And that is what I was about to say about that fateful evening I went to dinner with Graeme [Gunn]. He had this photograph of the Shoebridge House, a timber house in Doncaster and I said that house is beautiful. And rather rudely asked who designed that, and he said, “I did”, and so then I started to take a lot more interest in Graeme. And he by that time he had won an award for the Essendon house. I don't know what it was called, probably got another name, but anyway it was a house in Essendon. And then he showed me a drawing of another house that was totally different in character and so I really did begin to take a lot of interest and I tried to think about working with him. People often asked me why didn't you go on working with Robin and I could ask the same question about John Mockridge, and I think the answer was I had some kind of instinct that people who design project houses… they are required to produce their best effort at an architectural idea in the simplest possible format for it to be successful. And it is very, very difficult to do it 2 or 3 times over. If you have done it once it is very hard to change. In the same way that if you have got something in your head too early then you don't necessarily get the best answer. If people are not given the right brief, or they are asked for something that is then drawn up too early before it has been properly thought out and so on, it’s very hard to get that out of the designers mind. I have an instinct that Robin would have found it difficult because of the work he had done with contemporary homes and the other work that he was doing at Appletree Hill for Lendlease - which I didn't particularly like - to come at the sort of things that we wanted to do. You had to be fresh. New designers would work much better. And I've really come to believe that.

It was Grounds Romberg and Boyd. When I first decided to work with him he was Romberg and Boyd. The split was just taking place. Grounds turned up at the motel, when I happened to be there and he came in and in his - I don't know if you knew him?

He was very emphatic so he came in sniffed the building, sniffed the air, and wafted around, came back demanded telegrams, letters and telegrams, and he dictated telegrams - "congratulations Robin. It’s the best thing you have ever done". And then he put the telephone down and said to me, "at last Robin has become mature". Which I think was rather insulting.

Oh no. I think quite a bit older.

Very different.

Yes.

Nice.

Well Graeme didn’t last very long with the Chinese. I did. I continued on and completed a Masters Preliminary, but I had a year gap from my time in Hong Kong. So I really wasn't in a state to do that but by this time there was quite a serious beginning of discussions about doing something different. I found exactly the same ideas that were employed in the building of the motels, the designing and building the motels, applied in a different sphere in housing. By this time I had learnt a lot about what was needed to get buildings built. I could actually build cheaper than local builders could with that kind of design. Mostly because I think they were frightened of it, and then they put a big premium on it, When we started with Merchant Builders we gave the first plans for a house - the house was called the Terrace House - to a quantity surveyor to take off the quantities, and give us a price. He came back with a price, if my memory is right, of 5000 pounds. We built if for 4000 pounds. Not so much because he was wrong but because he was assuming that this would be the way a typical builder would respond faced with an architects design, specifications and drawings.

Merchant Builders. And my experience certainly had been that in order to do what we wanted to do we had to build ourselves. Neither John [Ridge] nor I were builders, but this experience I am talking to you about had really made me feel strongly we wouldn't get what we wanted, and we wouldn't get it for the price we wanted. We needed to build it ourselves. In much the same way when we were trying to sell things that were very different, like the Cluster Houses, we had to employ the salesman and teach them how to sell them.

John Ridge. John Ridge was someone I had known for a very long time.

He owned a timber company.

And he put a little bit of money into the Black Dolphin Motel. Not an influential sum in any way. He was a silent shareholder, but he was engaged and interested and so on. I had met him in my gallery days. He was a Polish Jew and there was a coterie of Jewish people who I was introduced to, and I found very interesting. And he was, I suppose, interested. He just said to me if there was scope to make an investment he would be delighted to do it. We were very, very different which was in the end a great thing. And in the beginning you don't necessarily find it like that, but when we settled down to appreciate one another and recognise that we could trust each other completely. It was really helpful that we were so different and that we could pay attention to different things. So that was a very fruitful relationship, but the first year we barely spoke to each other. It was so difficult because we had both done our own things and he was ten years older than I was, so I suppose he had fairly firm views about how things had to be, and then at the end of the year we both… I certainly did came to my senses and I realised that he was a good man and I really could trust him. When things got absolutely all over the place he would be in there fighting as hard as he could to make it work and I think he felt very much the same about me.

Yes.

No, I think that is probably right.

Absolutely. So I used to take responsibility for the design side of it, the marketing side of it and the financial side. But not the commercial side if you can understand the difference. I dealt with managing the financial part, proper accountants and things. And he looked after all the free contract work - dealing with clients and the construction, and seeing the building is handed over properly. And he did it very carefully. He was always there at handover himself, and he did it personally and it was important, very important.

Well he was a strange background because, of course, he was a refugee from Poland, and Jewish. He escaped to England and he came out here just before the war. And then he was interned, or half interned in Tasmania, and then he married a Tasmanian woman and I am not quite certain about his timber business, but I think he set that up after he came to Melbourne.

No retail timber - and it might have been wholesale, but no, I think it was mostly retail.

Boston Timber.

There was a particular reason for that. Right at the beginning we went about looking for the very best landscape architect, the best graphic designer we could find and the best interior designer we could find. We started off with Ellis Stones as the landscape architect. He did all of the early work and then we looked incredibly hard for graphic designers. It was extraordinary because Graeme had heard the name of Alex Stitt, and I came across some drawings that he had done in a graphic design manual. We linked the two together. We were walking together in South Yarra and there was a sign saying ‘Alex Stitt’. So we went in and we absolutely got the right people. I liked him. I liked what I had seen of Bruce Wetherhead. The designs were not clinical, they were Bauhaus type designs, but they were very warm and so on. I gave Bruce these ads and his wife wrote some fantastic copy. And he did his own ones which really were wonderful. In this one the graphics are greatly superior.

That was fun – they both [Bruce and his wife] wrote all of those and then he did the graphics for them. I didn't know his wife had written them until she told me when I ran into her a couple of years back. They were lovely ads and they worked really well.

A bit later Faulkner came on board. At that stage Jan [Faulkner], Graeme and I started a little company called Nexus. We had the idea that we would try and make kitchen cupboards, furniture and so on which was modular and contemporary.

Yes she was an interior designer but none of us had the time - I certainly didn't and Graeme certainly didn't - to make it work. Jan Faulkner went on, and turned Nexus into a great business. And then Ellis was not a young man. When I first got to talk to him he was 70 years old and he had botched the scope work for Merchant Builders. Then it was clear that he was getting old. We needed to do something and so started to think about what we could do. I was also getting a lot of personal invitations to do consulting work. And not landscape consulting work, mostly planning and things of that kind, and, I thought to myself if we are going to do something it would be better to set this up properly. So I started to look for landscape architects around the world and came across somebody called Rodney Wulff who was then doing or completing a Phd at Cornell, and in the meantime, I got to know very well Pete Walker from Sasaki Walker in the United States. A very big and very dominant firm. Pete had was also later the head of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and is now I think doing landscape work at Ground Zero. So he is very, very good designer. And I got to know Pete in a rather lovely way because I was in San Francisco and I went across to Sausilito and I was walking along the road and I saw a sign saying landscape architects so I just walked in…

As you do. They were terrific. They were really lovely, and I can't remember whether I had anything with me, showing the sort of things we did. It might have. They were so interested and interesting that bit by bit we started to think about other things and I got to know Pete really well. And he came out a couple of times, and I think at one stage he talked of setting up a firm here. I can remember very well Pete going into the School of Landscape Architecture at Melbourne University, which had very very recently formed, and he came out shaking his head saying very low energy David, very low energy.

And then I wrote to him and said, “Pete you wouldn't have anyone interested in coming out here for a year or something like that?” So he asked around and Steve Calhoun put up his hand, and Steve came out with the intention of staying here no more than a year - and now how many hundreds of years has he been here…

Yes. I looked around here and didn't honestly find anybody.

Well they were a bit like… but I didn't really like what he did. He did a little bit of work for Black Dolphin, tiny bit of work, I never really thought he was up to it he was a sort of pale imitation of Ellis.

Oh no, Edna would have been… I would have been very respectful of Edna. I have seen plenty of her gardens and I think she is very good.

Howard McCorkell joined. He actually joined first. Howard came on as a planner, and so the business was set up as landscape architecture and resource planners. 1:30:14

Yeah. Rodney [Wulff] sort of spanned a bit of each. Steve has always been a designer but Rodney with his PhD and so on was sort of active in other aspects of landscape practice. And you know it has just been lovely to see how both Tract and Nexus have flourished… I was very fond of all those people. We regularly meet and you know it is very nice.

Oh yes.

Yes it would be good.

Um, I am really sad that nobody has sort of picked up that mantle. Seriously, and it’s in the young students in the building course. At one stage someone got very interested and I said, “Well I'm not going to go into it with you but if you do decide to go into it I will give you every bit of help that is possible.” But it didn't happen. I think that the young woman that was interested would have been really good. I guess that it is tough to walk away from some of these places and see them desecrated afterwards, and I felt that very much about the Black Dolphin. I can barely contain myself as you drive past. I never want to go into it because it’s really has lost… Successive owners have felt that they have to play with it in order to make it fit what they thought was going to be necessary to make it a commercial success, and of course in doing that they have lost all the things that did make it a commercial success in the very beginning. Then other things have been built around it so it’s not at all the sort of place that it was before, but I guess you just have to turn your back on these things and so forth. Too bad, and also it’s unfortunate. I spent a long long time on heritage programs in parallel with Merchant Builders and the heritage regimes weren't there related to contemporary architecture. And that is true about the house that Graeme designed for me just north of Tathra. And I gave the land to the National Parks Service, but you know in the back of my mind and in the back of other people’s minds there is deep concern that when all the land - I have a lease over it where the house is for another ten years, and my family have as I may not be here to enjoy it in ten years time - but after that they will pull the house down because they will consider it too high, too big a maintenance problem, and won't know what to do with it. So I have been having lots of discussions just recently with kindred spirits and so forth, but it’s always harder to do these things because you have got to work through another State system. If it was in Maldon it would be very easy. Unfortunately the national regime was changed in the [John] Howard years so that a Register called the Register of the National Estate, which would be ideal to put this house on as a first step, no longer exists. It was capped at a particular number - 30120 places. There are no other places allowed to be listed on it.

There is another national list but you couldn't get that house on that national list because it has Sydney Opera House types, and it only has a tiny number of places. So, it’s a real problem in how to preserve contemporary buildings. How to protect them from a sort of desecration. This is particularly true of commercial buildings. It’s easier for houses because people understand the value in a house, say a Robin Boyd house.

Well just in the dying days of those… seriously talking to Graeme of the Motel when I went up in the… end… up in wherever the grounds… and as you say you have got to go and talk to…

The architect firm… Ancher…

Yeah, an architect called Woolley. “You absolutely must go and see him some time”, and I thought, well I will certainly do that. While I was there [Black Dolphin] there was a family that came down to the swimming pool and were very pleasant - man and his wife and children - and I talked to them about… They were occupied with other things, they were having a holiday so they were there for a whole week. And then on the day they were leaving I just happened to be in the reception area and I saw an account made out to a ‘K. Woolley’.

So I said to the receptionist, “Ask him if he is an architect. And if he is an architect, don't let him leave.” So that is how I got to know Ken, and he organised to show me what Pettit and Sevitt had done. So we got a sense of what was done there. But long before that my brother had bought a Robin Boyd ‘contemporary homes’ house so I knew the sort of thing being done there. We realised, of course, that you had to have a suite of houses which were suitable for different sites. And you used the first house would be built which was designed… which was a rectangular house, which was called ‘the Terrace House’. We went through an exercise where Graeme and John and I tried to site this house on as many different sites as you could imagine possible to be sure that it would work. And then when we got our first commission which was to build a house for Peter Hollingworth ex…

He wasn't a Bishop at that stage. He was very young and a druid father or whatever at the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. So we were given this site and so on, and there we were faced with a permutation that none of us had thought about… Laughter

So it was easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that we needed to have houses similar to the rectangular house which is probably going to be the cheapest to build. And a ‘Split-level House’ too, which was a significant form. And a ‘Courtyard House’. And that is what we started off with. Those three. 1:40:41

We had a great reception right from the beginning. Great reception. We were fortunate because… a man who Graeme knew… he was running one of the architectural magazines. He was really interested in promoting architecture, and design, and project art was really, really interested. And he gave us a great run.

Yes he did.

They don't look wonderful now. They got a bit neglected. They are just off Springvale Rd.

Yes. No, no. Glen Waverley.

Yes, there was a display site up in that area too, and we had several display sites in different places.

I am not great - I will give you all these dates. I went to some pain to write everything down. Just to remind myself. I would have thought it was around about 1967 or…

So it must have been before that then.

Yes. I think it was Graeme’s idea. He said why don’t you call it Ellistones. So I thought it was a lovely idea. I was driving along with Ellis and I said “We would like to call the development Elliston”, and he said, “You really want to do that?”, and I said, “yeah”, and he said “That is just marvellous.” It was good. Really nice.

Well it came… It wouldn't be my preference, I wanted to call it Domus but they… my partner Johnny was extremely superstitious, and there had been a building company called Domus which had gone bankrupt, and he thought this would be sending the wrong signal to all the people who supplied goods to us and things like that. So I was quite unable to persuade him about that and we struggled with different names. I didn't want to have a name that was similar to Yuncken Freeman, or Yuncken or anything like that. There were too many Yenckens and Yunckens and so on around. And so we didn't go for Yencken Ridge, or Ridge and Yencken, and we settled on Merchant Builders as a generic name. I don’t know if that is a great name but…

Well it is a generic name in the States, so I think that’s how we eventually settled on it. Naming things is horrific isn't it? The endless amount of time that’s spent debating names.

I mentioned in the chapter that I am going to give you, that I called the first motel the ‘Mitchell Valley Motel’ because it was near the Mitchell River, but I realised that was a big mistake because people remembered the motel as being the Murray Valley, the LaTrobe Valley, the God knows what. They could never remember them. So I thought the next one had to have a memorable name, and I can remember at one board meeting when I suggested the Black Dolphin one of the directors said “I think we should call it the Gay Dolphin”, and I said to him “Do you know what you are actually saying that would signal something…”

No I don't - I am really not sure. It might have been my name. Or… I had a marvellous woman who worked for me for - she came to work for me at the time at the gallery, and then she worked with me at the first motel, and she worked with me at the Black Dolphin, and she was the first employee of Merchant Builders - direct employee, rather than sub contractor. And then I got the job as head of the Ministry of Planning and Environment - she also worked for me there until she sadly died of a heart condition.

Yeah. She was really terrific. And in a fairer world I felt that probably we could have easily changed places. It is possible that she came up with the name, I am not sure and but I would certainly agree that we were playing around with names like that.

Well I thought they are sort of shiny black when they are covered in water and things.

Anthea Stably.

Absolutely.

Yes, it is actually. It’s fun to reminisce and reflect back on some of these things.

Well it is nice to have it.

No. I kept the gallery because I was doing it in conjunction with the person who owned the cafe down the bottom, and when I got more seriously involved in the Dolphin Motel then I ceased to be directly involved. Then I decided I didn't really want to have any particular engagement. You know, there were some particular issues that I didn't want to have to buy into you know.

We had a mixed show to begin with and Duncan Kerr was one of the Eltham artists like Clifton Pug. But there was a piece of sculpture by Clifford Last. I remember that Last one very well because I sat in the gallery and I kept looking at it, and I thought that really is lovely. And so I rang up Eric Westbrook, the then director of the Gallery [NGV]. He understood how old I was appreciated how important it was of him to see me. Anyway I took this piece of sculpture in to show him, and he said, “Well, we'll have a look at it and come back to you.” He said, “Come back in three weeks time or whatever”. So I went back in three weeks time and he talked about the weather, he talked about the test match that was running at the time, and he talked about everything under the sun. You know I started to sort of shrink, you know, and seeing this offending piece of sculpture on the shelf over there. So then when he finished with this conversation, having not said a word about the sculpture, he said “Well it’s there so you can pick it up and take it away”. So I slunked across the floor and picked it up, and slunked towards the door. He said, “Oh, by the way, when you put it back in the gallery, put a sign on it to say it’s been bought by the National Gallery, will you.”

They took it over after the show was done.

Well, I just got out because they were incredibly influential. When I was at Cambridge I bought those three books over there which are books about modern art at the time.

The three ones on the right. They just deal with different periods of painting, and they have been incredibly influential in opening my eyes to what was happening. And I still love them. People will have written better maybe now, but they just were fantastic. And I remember when I was at Cambridge I went to Italy with a friend and my idea was to go and look at painters of the Italian Renaissance, and on the way back we stopped at a place on the south coast of France where there was a Picasso pottery. And much to my friends horror I said I wanted to buy a piece. And these were copies, these were not the original, and that is the one I bought [gestures to shelf].

Now, you have to tell me what you might like me to copy and give to you?

Let me just explain some things that I do have. I started to write up the story of my time at the gallery, and I have also written up a chapter - An introduction to Designs for a Motel. I have written quite a long piece on the National Estate Program in the Australian Heritage Project which I was involved with for quite a long time. Something like 7 or 8 years whilst still engaged with Merchant Builders.

Would you like all of them? 1:56:38

And then I have written a number of papers at different times. For example, Robin [Boyd] asked me to write a couple of pieces for Architecture at the time. So I wrote a couple of pieces. Then I was asked to give a lecture on architecture - God knows why - and a serious one at Monash at which Robin was speaking, and Seilder was speaking at. So I have got the paper that I wrote then. And there were a few other things that might be of interest.

But I don't want to burden you with that which is not really going to be relevant to you.

It’s been interesting for me to reflect back on my life, and reflect on the situations and the people I have worked with which to me have been the richest, and the most fun, and the most satisfactory in all kinds of ways. And in every instance it is because of the people who were deeply committed to what they were doing. And one of them would be undoubtedly Merchant Builders, with people like Graeme [Gunn] and people like Stephen [Calhoun] and Rodney [Wulff]. People like Jan Faulkner we continued with. I say it was a very long, a marvellous friendship. Another one was the group that I worked with at the Australian Heritage Commission. They were very… unbelievably talented. They gave up opportunities to get promotions in other areas because they were deeply committed to helping with that. So they all worked immensely hard. They were lovely to work with, and I worked with another group… for National community organisations. These were for the most part people involved in activist roles like Australian Conservation Foundation or, ACOSS, Australian Council of Social Service, CHOICE, the Australian Consumer Association and so on. And they are deeply committed to making a better world. You know, I mean, making a better society, and it is so easy to work with people like this because their egos are strong. Of course to be able to express themselves properly and stand up to the pressure, but they aren't expressed in an aggressive or competitive way in this sort of environment.

Would you… what is the best way of getting this material to you?

That would be lovely. I have enjoyed it very much.