Graeme Gunn

Yeah well like everything to do with the law these days it’s become money oriented one way or another hasn’t it? I’ve just for instance been at VicUrban where I’m titled the principal architect and I really consult, so I’m not really a staff member, but the issue is this ‘salt’ program which is about behavioural approach to work, work programs and also company law in terms of the ACC, harassment. All the things that ok if you're a reasonable person forget it, but they have to answer those questions and truly headed by look this is serious stuff, because you'll end up in the legal position and you'll bear a fine to pay and you could lose your job. And once you start becoming negative, as distinct from positive, everybody runs the other way and protects their butts and that’s why if you look we’ve just been trying to get a planning permit for that and we went for a minor amendment to move the buildings two metres to get a bit more proximity between them, and it’s taken two months. And it’s just bizarre. So we’re started?

Oh it has and again it’s tailored to groups like Slater & Gordon who make money out of it, who set up mechanisms that a public servant or an institution member has nowhere else to go, you’ve got to follow those rules otherwise you're in default. And someone’s there aware that you’ve not followed the rules, so you're going to be dobbed in. And that’s also not just demeaning, it’s also time consuming.

And you must know if you’ve tried to get rid of a staff member or staff members wanted to get rid of you, the process is just unresolvable, it’s an unresolvable program.

I had a few strategies at RMIT though; they weren't all negative.

No it looked more attractive on the other side of the fence.

Well yeah you could actually, because the most productive one was Bill Nankerville and Bernie Joyce and they’d been at RMIT for years. And Bernie of course was always a rebel and you couldn’t constrain Bernie, but he was also a wonderful communicator. Not necessarily lucid, but a wonderful communicator. You had to listen, because when he rambled and digressed and got into his pseudonyms and things like this. Like Peter McIntyre he was referred to as Jesus Christ, because Peter said I’m coming again Bernie, I’m coming again. And he always had a name, he loved a name…

Peter got worse at the Last Laugh. That was John Button’s comment.

They were both there.

1975/6.

No I went 72.

Gough was thrown out just after I started, but it was very clear; let me go back a bit, we did things which were a bit unusual I suppose. I being raw to academia and I wasn’t an academic anyway, but this job had been sitting around and I’d been on the institute council for months, they couldn’t fill this position. So Dennis, whatever his name, has died, I just talked around a bit and said what do you think and they said yes go for it, so I went for it. And I of course didn’t have a qualification. I had no academic qualification either, so that made it difficult?

No I stopped after three years. Didn’t follow that through and so then the first thing I did when I got in there which was to meet all the stuff in an interview position one to one and then said we’d go away for a long weekend and we’d have some students. And I got also Barry McNeil came over and a couple of facilitators and we thrashed it out for three days, reconstructed the philosophy and then they spent another year hammering out the course. But in that all process it turned a lot of people off, particularly the one where we decided that, probably wrongly in retrospect, to have advisers. So students had an adviser, one adviser might have five students and they could live together virtually, but they didn’t; staff quality or at least the skill and the staff wasn’t there perhaps to manage that process, so there were a few floundering kids I think.

No all the students.

Well that changed.

I would have thought 300 in all the courses.

No, interior design, there was building, interior design and architecture in those daytime courses. So I did realise we had to do something about staffing and of course getting more money in those days, because when Gough went everything went. The Razor Gang got into all that.

And it seemed to change the tenure.

I think there was a bit of that and I travelled overseas at the time of the student riots. The first thing I did. That was the other thing I did initially was just go around the world and went to Mexico first and then up North America and then across to England.

Yes I saw Baragan in Mexico; that wasn’t very academic, but it was very good.

Yes, in fact he signed something, I showed him my work, and he liked it. And then ended up at the AA with what was his name? Boravanski?

And I took along a bottle of Scotch, well we drank it, that was our interview. It happened to be Vacation time, but he was under threat then, he said.

No it was a while before he went. And then Stern at Yale, went there, Kenneth Frampton in New York. Corrigan was in New York then, so he was helpful.

No he was working, ostensibly working, but you never really knew, he never talked about who he was working with and he’d been sacked at Rudolf’s.

Yes must have been. So he might have been in transit, but anyway getting back to that RMIT thing, it was about just increasing the quality of the staff, so then we developed all these strategies for A, making money, and B, keeping people off tenure, because some of those people had been there when I was a student 30 years before. It seemed 30 years before, it wasn’t, but it was 15 years, but people like Bruce Williamson, a couple of others, they weren’t really contributing, they were just staying around. The other thing then you got out of the whole institute was I’ve only got four years to go and I’m retiring, I’ll be 55, this is what I’m doing, so don’t want to put anything under threat, or threatening people, or do anything new. So it was really a malaise I thought about that, so we had a lot of fun. So any new staff came in on contract, but that was it and some really beaut young people starting arriving.

Yeah he came over, because I’d seen him in New York I said it would be good if he did come in. But Ian McDougal and what was his mate’s name?

We didn’t have the money to pay them as staff members and what they wanted to do was pick up Transitions and get that going.

Yes it was, so we put them on as staff members, to do Transition and then we started the Practice Group which John Baird ran with Doug Pattenden. And even then it was generating up to $100,000 a year.

Yes so it was both exciting, and there weren’t enough regulations there to impede you, there was enough scope to do the things if you just did them. There were some sort of calamities, there was a whole group of kids who didn’t move. They jumped the next year without completing the previous programs, so we had to at one stage scramble a whole lot of them through the process, which is probably not…

Yes.

That was Gunn Hayball, at the start of that.

I was 39 when I went to RMIT.

No Len’s younger, I’d say by about six years or something.

Well Gunn Hayball got to about 25.

No was about 12, 13.

Yes, it was a big office when you bought furniture, and we moved a couple of times and they were expensive. You forget how expensive those things are before you start them. They did. But we were galloping along with the notion of actually buying property to house ourselves both domestically and to the office. So there was Milswyn, which was the residential component which Andrew Reed, Ross Ramos, Gene Miller, who was a builder, and ourselves.

So we didn’t have money, we borrowed the million to buy it, and borrow the million to build it, so we were always behind the eighth ball. But again it was a pretty exciting and funny stuff. And that was a time when interest rates really went up to about 20%, so we were out of that; it was a pity, because it was great living. We also at the same time moved to Shelley Street, which was a revamp of an old warehouse and that was a really great space.

Two floors, and we let some to Andrew Reed and another builder, and we had the top floor and it introduced, through Ross Ramos, we had the high-tech components coming out of England where he’d worked.

No, I don’t think so.

He was working for us. But we had all the cabling coming down in those days. Innovating though, because you couldn’t get the SEC then work with Telecom to put them in the same tube, and that was a struggle. It was all about the moveable office, in a way token gestures where everything is movable, but you never move them.

Then we had moved on and bought whilst there; I can’t remember why but Len said we’re not doing well, we have to sell this building, so of course the next thing we did was bought the Salvation Army building, the property next to ICI, which ran from Victoria Street to Albert Street. And we were with John Scrogie, who were hydraulic engineers, who I did a house for and so they were…

Yeah, so Andrew Reed and John Scrogie and Gunn Hayball then bought that for another million dollars.

And we just completed the front section onto Victoria Parade, which is still there. It’s rather bizarre and ecclesiastical, sort of institutional, but behind that there were two courtyards with the living quarters, and the Salvation trainees. We actually had the chapel as the working office, with also going through to the front ground level. Scrogie’s had them next door around the courtyards round the front, and Andrew had just the top front. And we’d been in a fortnight when we got this call to say it was on fire. It was really great.

We didn’t lose everything; in fact it wasn’t so bad and fortunately we still had, Len had an apartment in Milswyn Street, he hadn’t sold it and he was struggling with that, so we rang the neighbours and said do you mind if we move the office in because of the fire. They were very good; we stayed there for two years mind you, in a residential area with the office.

No that would be late 70s.

You didn’t offer help, go around and…?

Come and use our computers.

But then we had, actually we didn’t get them until we moved with insurance, we did the design for the car park, had trouble getting a permit; really pressured Evan [Walker] on that one to get a permit for car parks, because Melbourne City Council was trying to reduce the car parking. And this was the monty, there was a hospital just by and they had no car park, or they had some but not enough. Eventually got a car-parking permit and then sold it to a developer named Tony Bryant, so he built the car park. The other building he’d taken that over and let it out, and we took the old printing office, which still exists on Albert Street, and that was the three firms moving into there.

No that was after; having had the fire we then got enough insurance to redesign this portion and do the drawings for this. That’s the Albert Street side and then we were able to move in after we’d sold the property on.

The design ideas for?

Milswyn Street was interesting, and so too was the office. The office was very much about the new technologies being exposed, that was Shelley Street, so there was obviously duct work exposed, and the cabling, the connections, electric connections. And there weren't computers then.

Yes and it was again as I said it was all dexicon furniture made up and put together.

And moveable chairs and moveable cabinets with rollers. And then Grazia, my first wife then, she’d been very much interested in the arts and things and she’d been an artist anyway, she said we’ll do the colours and they were all based on one of the Italian masters paintings, it was that sort of flavour. So it was all again just open and there was no hierarchy. Or not much hierarchy of who was sitting where, although Len and I did have a space, which is interconnected. And we had a good library then, we had a librarian, a tea lady.

We didn’t have a conversation pit, we used to sit around the boardroom, which was pretty open anyway.

Yes. They appeared in houses and offices.

Is there?

Should be able to walk into them rather than slide into them.

Yeah, but it didn’t seem like it. We had two kids, Grazia a lot of the time she’d been in either Sydney with the Council for the Arts when that started or just after it started. Then she went to Monash University with Patrick McCaughey, to start a gallery there. Then she went with James Mollison to Canberra to start the Australian Gallery. So she was away and I was fortunately then the kids were in boarding school the two kids, so I was life was just in the morning right through to late at night. So there was none of those you might call family responsibilities that one normally has, like get home and cook the dinner and have you picked up something yet? But it was highly active, and Grazia had all these artists, we just met some wonderful people from overseas, they’d always be coming into the place. There was a lot of bubbles around in those days.

After it started, Mollison, yeah they were…

It was there.

I may have met Col Madigan once and it was in Canberra and I was with Patrick McCaughey, because we used to go to Canberra a lot, we were working up there before Fraser cut us off at the throat. It’s an interesting story if I can remember it. I never forgave him for that, and he never forgave me for something. But where was I? With Patrick and Patrick said oh there’s Col Madigan I’ll get him to come over. So Col came in and I said, hi Col how are you, and he said hello how are you, and we departed. Patrick said I can’t believe it, there’s two people who are very interested in architecture and have some reputation, and all you can say is hello. Whatever happened?

I don't know.

I would have thought that any progressive architect was left-winged, I don't know of any architects that weren’t. Some might have been agnostic, not either party, but…

Oh very right-winged.

I would say it was conservative.

Yeah highly modernist, but very good.

I’d put him in the same bracket as Phillip Johnson. Wealthy. and his money came out of association and jobs came from people that were totally aligned to the right, well at least Liberal politics.

David was an enigma, he was different, I think he was a real person aside, you never know where he was. Well he married into money.

Yes she was a Grimwade?

Well, I was probably the first - dare I say this - the sort of star architect in the celebrity version of the New Idea with Merchant Builders, Home Beautiful with Eric Wilson who was a lovely man, took us under his wing and promoted us and started to see for him also there was a whole new program other than what they’d been doing at that stage. So architecture for the people became through this journal the Home Beautiful and translated well to what Merchant Builders were doing.

Well, and then me, and then Merchant Builders started calling me the award-winning architect. So all that sort of generated a spiral which in the end as you know you become a celebrity becomes…

Yes.

Who said that?

That’s Judy Trimble I think, yeah. We certainly dressed differently.

I wouldn’t do that. It no longer applies.

New Idea was just a metaphor, a journal metaphor for celebrities.

Oh yeah very, getting me work, because people would ring up and the first job I probably; the first one came through friends that I’d known who they weren’t university friends. Some of them were at the Lorne Surf Club where I went to when I first came to Melbourne. And the Richardson House came out of that, then another friend who I got to know, all coming from different areas that I’d not grown up with got me two jobs, the Shoebridge House out in Doncaster, and the Dawson Grove house, he was a journalist. That was the little house down on the Peninsula. And then the Irving Rockman came in, for a house in Walsh Street.

Irving Rockman.

He was the mayor. Not at the time, he became with his stunning young 21 year old wife who turned out to be quite a significant lady in her own right after they all split.

Oh yeah; well it wasn’t the start of Graeme Gunn, actually when working with Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, it was really good, because I got that before I finished this course in architecture.

No the last two years of the course I was working, so I was working full-time and studying full-time.

No, because they had part-time courses, so you did your full-time course and then you did your part-time, worked and then part time. But I was doing full-time/full-time sort of, but I remember that last year the third year it was start at nine o'clock, work till 10, because I was getting paid by the hour, that was the good thing, it was the first money I had in Melbourne really. And then go home and do the school work till three o'clock, but fortunately for Benzadine and those sorts of things you could keep going.

Yeah, but I had not completing that, went to Grounds, Romberg and Boyd after I’d finished the first three years, did the remnant, not the remnant, but it was a series of exams, a registration exam, which were there not for academic purposes, but for the rehab guys coming back from the Second World War. So I was able to get into that, in my way and did that examination, so became registered. Because you already picked up I’d been calling myself an architect, which I did on the Richardson house, so I was reprimanded for that. So no, I didn’t get an academic qualification after that honorary. So I went to RMIT as head of school and dean without any qualification. You couldn’t do that today.

Yes.

Yeah it was a turnaround too, because Reg Grouse was then the president. Robin had been present, Peter McIntyre had been president, there was a bit of a new broom going through. What prior to that had been something run by the major firms of Melbourne. It was what do they have now the big…?

The large practice forum, well they ran the Institute and the Registration Board.

Yeah, or did he follow Reg Grouse? He might have.

Yes Peter is 88.

Is that all? Neil Clerehan, how old is he, 80…?

Kevin was a lecturer when I was at RMIT. I didn’t much take to Kevin, I just thought he was …. Tried to be too much one of the boys, was always mate or… I didn’t realise he was genuine.

Yes that’s possible.

No, the only students I remember that probably mean anything here, Harold Murphy who had great skills in drawing and very adept at doing things very quickly.

As a kid at 17 he was doing work in drawings and getting work. But he also then went to Hawaii and America and worked with some groups. Came back, he was actually working with Peter McIntyre jointly on the Melbourne Plan, that first attempt. Billy Ryan, Billy and I were the same age and we’d both done the same thing, fathers had been builders and he served time with his father. Bill had a much more structured approach to life than me.

No, Melbourne. Daryl [Jackson] and Evan [Walker] were a year ahead of me and Jack Clark must have been; he’d been there, so he moved on.

Has it?

A lot of Asians then who were in the course.

Yes.

Malays.

Yes it would have been. And then my best friend there was Peter Batt and Peter was one of those really unique characters, was totally different from other people and his parents, older parents had a guest house at Healesville which was a time warp and we used to go up there occasionally. And then after the third year he just loved Asian people and he loved Asians and he loved gambling, was always sitting up with the Asian kids, and just buzzed off to Thailand and didn’t come back. Ended up with I think Pan Am as some sort of construction executive around the world. I know he’s still alive.

Doug came to RMIT when I was there as a lecturer.

That’s right, Jason had been in the course with me yes.

Yes and Jason of course was a lovely drawer and also very again a strange person I thought in terms of what he didn’t do and what he could have done.

Yeah I think so.

Is he still there?

He’d be younger than I, because I was 22 when I started. Billy [Ryan] and I were 22.

No.

Oh yeah there was obviously that sort of stigma attached to RMIT as the working-man’s college, very much so. We were academics up here. George Tibbets - I got on well with George, but we never really; that’s not quite true, because when the Housing Commission saga was on and we were agitating through the Institute to stop all that and Andrew McCutcheon and myself and a couple of others would go up to see Jack [Gascon] who ran the housing commission. And argue and yes boys yes, but you don’t understand boys and this is a good thing, you’ll know one day how good it’s been. That’s when Harry Parsons got involved wasn’t it?

Yeah. But George was a great advocate for retention of Carlton fabric and that’s where we did start to meet.

Yes and that’s when the politics started to get into the institute where you had to make a stance. You realise you were working against institutions that were government bodies and therefore anybody in his right mind would not do that, which included potential work, and you would lose potential work. You’d be blackballed - probably were.

Not the ad in the paper.

That’s Queen isn’t it or Williams?

South-east you're right.

Yeah he would be and also doing history as well and getting a lot of that done.

Yes. I don't know who else, who was the head of the school then?

No it was Robertson, Charles Robertson.

He was yes.

So Charles must have been; he was there when I was at RMIT. That’s right we got on reasonably well, but I don't think they liked living in Australia, he and his wife.

Scottish.

Yeah probably.

Yeah at the time of the Razor Gang and we were working in Canberra and we were just embarking on this whole range of new houses. We’d be doing something like 350 houses a year. That was the program.

No the firm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was split with Ken Woolley and his firm and ours were introduced into the whole housing program. Prior to that was I’m not sure if it was…

Government housing oh yeah.

No I think he was Ken Woolley. So we launched all that and had this whole program of standardisation of plans and colours and God knows what, and then it just stopped like that.

Government housing.

It was certainly done through the government.

Federal government in Canberra, but I’m not sure now, I’ve forgotten how they were sold on, picked up and delivered, not sure. Anyway back at RMIT I get this call and I can’t say it was from big Mal except that the guy on the other end said I’m speaking on behalf of you know who. You have a student at the school named Phoebe Fraser. I said yes. He said well she’s failed her year and I said yes. You hear those things and he said we’d like you to address this problem. And so I just said well we’re not going to do anything about it. But I’d known I think I’d known Tammy, because they both came from up near Hamilton, that’s where their farm was.

Balmoral. Not now, but he was always probably a very shy man.

She didn’t get through, she then joined I think Care Australia.

Yeah, so she would have done three years I suppose, maybe even earlier, but no one said it’s me speaking, or anything like that, so it could have been anybody. I’m bloody sure it was. He hasn’t spoken to me since.

No the last time I saw him I did meet him before he became Prime Minister; David Yencken's brother’s place, that’s right. It was interesting, because David certainly left leaning, but his brother very right. He was part of the Liberal Party and that’s where I met Mal the first time. And then later on, years later a friend in the country John Fenton and he’d been very important for my life, because we’d been since we were kids, dreaming and doing things and he’s marched on. He’s now left the farm, but he’s produced this book and this is up near Hamilton, and he spent 50 years just revegetating and habituating, and doing this property.

He’s a bit like Peter Andrews, he’s almost as eccentric as Peter Andrews too.

No he hasn’t, he may never, because he doesn’t have that gregariousness in the public sense, to the point where he pushes his own barrow.

Oh yeah.

Yes.

He’s an honorary doctorate of RMIT, because what we did after a while when I started the course in landscape in RMIT and then Jim Sinatra came out, I took Jim up to John’s place so he could see the country and Jim fell in love with the whole of Australia of course, but they’ve been on great terms every since. Jim used to take the students up; they’d have workshops up there for a week.

Yeah.

No, he’d actually lectured Steve Calhoun at TRACT.

That was Sazaki Walker.

And Peter Walker is now doing the New York landscaping for the Towers.

Yeah ground-zero and he’s still a dynamo, Peter Walker. He must be in his early 80s.

Merchant Builders started in about 65. Just before my son was born we started them and probably about 15 years, so that would be 80, it sort of… David would have left by then I think.

I think he was out of it. Johnny Ridge was running it and it certainly had lost its leadership in terms of doing innovating things. And I was so tired, well the houses I could only stand for about it was a maximum of 10 years, because at least one day a week you're interviewing clients, talking about the same tiles you talked about last time. Mind you it was very funny and totally different to the way things have occurred since, because we were adamant there were to be no changes. Materials were the same and on the basis that if you made changes it would just stop the whole process and you would be spending your time wasting a lot of energy. But it was very rigorous those few years; it altered after that, they relaxed things.

Oh I think so yeah. It was quite passionate, they were dopey little houses really, but they were quite passionate about it.

Totally different.

Well it’s interesting, there’s a guy who keeps ringing me and I met him a couple of time and he did work on Merchant Builder houses about 20 years ago, 30 years ago and he said I’ve got the name back. I said you can’t have the name back, because it had been through such a progression of layers down, in the end it was bought by Jennings to close it.

I don’t think he knew. It went from David and John to David Marriner, Thomson Land who went through, then another devotee who saw a great future in it was Tom Hudson who was from a reasonably wealthy background and thought he was an entrepreneur. We did work together and tried to get it going, but he just wasn’t committed in the same way, didn’t have that breadth of experience or knowledge, or perception where something like this ought to be going. And then they just sold it to Jennings.

Squashed it, so how he’s bought the name back I don’t know.

I certainly think there's a place for it, but it depends on what land is available and obviously land is being turned over now in terms of the value of old places and good higher priced pieces of land. But then you’ve got to talk about affordability, which is what they were aimed to be reasonably costed houses for not a mass market, but certainly a more discerning market that didn’t have a lot of money. It’s very difficult to pay architectural fees; even now few people have the cash to pay an architect’s fee.

Yes that’s what it was attempted to do. And I think I don’t know why, but it would seem to me in terms of those fees why you can’t lump the fees with the construction cost and borrow?

They put the money yes the fees were embedded in the house cost.

You're right yeah.

Yes I think that’s the fault of architects as well, but when you're as you know talking to David he’s a unique fellow, there aren’t many people that have that sort of a perception of what you can do and have enough nous about how to go about it and passion about it too I suppose and commitment. The number of times I’ve been involved with people and developers of that ilk who have said look we’d love to do this, here’s the project, you do those here, but just in case they don't work we’ve got these other houses we want you to use over here. You just can’t do that.

And the graphics and it was all intellectually-based too wasn’t it?

Art based as well as intellectually based.

Yeah he’d let you run with it and you had to come up with the idea. There were two things we differed on in the early days of Merchant Builders, one was we talked about doing modular housing, because it seemed rational to have it that way, because you could build and ultimately probably you could see that computerisation that wasn’t there then, but at least component housing could stem and move on and extend itself from the modularisation. And then the drawings of course we worked out was easier to do those, because we just used to have the whole sheet was gridded and we started off just doing the wall relative to the grid line, and that meant you didn’t have to do all the dimensions. Of course that fell foul of the building surveyors who said no we can’t work this out, give us the dimensions. But when we started doing it and I’m struggling with we got the design of the house right, I couldn’t get the mathematics to work on this modular. David did that, he worked it out, he came round and said here. So he did that. The other one we were close to departing was they said having seen the Pettit and Sevitt work, they said you’ve got to do this, we think it should be bagged and painted white. I wrote them this letter, I don’t know where it is, but it was critical, I said well I’m leaving if I have to do that, because it was more about the integrity I thought of the process. We’ve subsequently done, painted things, but it was all about that. So they said ok just use natural brick. We didn’t use natural brick, we then got made bricks, went to the brick companies to get definite colours, but we wanted…

The greys, and then there were coffees, and then we had taps made and door knobs made with the groups.

Yeah we started Merchant Kitchens which then it was Nexus. David and I started that and we had a little boning factory up in Toorak Village behind one shop back from the butchers on the street and it was a lovely little I think old stable, but it had been used as the boning annex to the butcher, covered in grease, fat and stinking and just piled high with papers at one end just chucked over there in a pile. And all the girly photographs around the walls when we took it over and steam cleaned it. And we employed a guy to make these cupboards; they were all modularised, that was the idea with those, no one else was doing that at the time. But they were ultimately surpassed by what everybody else was doing, but we did go to another factory which was a larger one and then it was taken over, but we took Sid Spindler who was a painter and a politician. He came into it and we started doing a couple of developments and that didn’t work out very well. Sid did better out of it than we did as it turned out.

No.

He was a Democrat. Jeanine Haynes and he were partners at one stage. He only died last year I think.

Yep.

Yeah. Oh yeah would have been.

I think I put it into Gunn Hayball. Yeah I did.

That’s Merchant Builders?

72.

Oh yeah they're still there. Just trying to think if that was I think the first of the townhouse.

Yeah after the individual houses yeah. That sounds it might have preceded Winter Park.

Yeah.

See the gestation period for that would be longer, because of the planning permit was difficult to get.

Yeah that’s right.

Yeah. And it was actually adapted to Strata Title Act, where you have to keep a piece connected and sell the bits off.

No that’s Fairmont Park. [END PART 1] [START PART 2]

That’s a very interesting question. I suppose historically my father was a builder. In fact we come from a long line of builders.

Yes but my maternal ancestor was a carpenter on the Sirius, and my paternal…

The first.

Yes.

Yeah.

He was the ship’s carpenter.

Yeah there’s actually a book done by one of my relatives that I didn’t know until the book was produced. But [my maternal ancestor] she’s in Tasmania where they went, and she was a convict on the third ship. So they ended up down out of Hobart. But then that was my mother’s side. Then my father’s side they were Scottish and went to Sydney, and then Port Fairy and then to Dunkeld, which is near Hamilton. And they were builders and coffin makers.

Yes and we didn’t really know any of that, as we’d grown up in Hamilton you see. I was born in Geelong and after three months my father got this job in Penshurst which is near Hamilton again. That’s where he’d grown up in Penshurst and he got his merit certificate and then went down and worked with his uncle Bob. And Bob did pretty grand houses around Geelong as Bob was much older than dad. Then at the time of the depression he built a house in Geelong, working with Bob during the day and built the house and then the bank took the house off him. So he never borrowed again. Not that he taught us about money, all hopeless, not all hopeless, but pretty unstructured.

Yeah this is all made from scratch though. Anyway, we get into Hamilton and everywhere there’s always building materials, so I just accessed those and I’m about these things up here and my first houses [At this point Graeme refers to a small framed drawing on the wall in the study/office of his house]. And there were tools there as well, because the workmen all left their tools and if it was raining they’d come and make windows in the sheds and things like this. So you don’t realise just how beneficial that all was. We’d make toys out of materials, as there were Western red cedar shingles lying around. And then growing up I was reasonably good at school, loved sport and then at about 15 finished the fifth year, had this long unconsummated relationship with a girl, which we stayed up talking a lot. And then just fluffed through on the leaving certificate in those days, and the next year back at matric I wasn’t really focusing at all. My father said after the first term where the results weren't very good and they were quite critical of my endeavours and behaviour, and the fact that I was not always discreet in my actions, those sorts of things, he said you better leave school. So I said, oh well, because my mother died when I was 12, so there were five boys, not that there was ever pressure to do anything, except that he was a Victorian, came out of Victorian age and he had all of these jingoistic statements they all belonged to in those days. And Hamilton was pretty class conscious with squatters and tradespeople. Anyway I said yes well I’m going around Australia, that’s what I’ll do. I had no clue where I was going or how I was going, I had no money to go anywhere. So Monday morning came and … Somehow he’d retired about 41, he said he had a hernia which he did have, but any physical labour he just used to run the jobs and he had about five men. The men we called them. And his bedroom was over where the truck was, so he was able to issue daily instructions from the bed to the men before they went off in the truck. It was an old Bedford truck and the only way you could get it going, you had to crank it, we had it since 1936 and we’re now in about 1951 and you had to take the carburettor top off, get a little bottle, put it in the tank, charge the carby and crank. Very time consuming all that stuff, but it was ritualistic as well. And then I just said to him I’m going, he looked at me and he said, get out on the job. So I jumped on the back of the truck with the boys and stayed there for six years, but I really didn’t like it.

Did they?

There was another young lad starting at the same time though, he was 16. And the men sat in the front of the truck. The boys sat in the back with the gravel and the shit and the bits of timber, and the rain. But I did things like National Service came up and I got out of Hamilton and I went to Puckapunyal and I became a bombardier which was equivalent to a corporal, in that program. And then coming out of there I became a sergeant; that got me off to various schools, so I went to Sydney to North Head and then I became an officer which got me other sorts of moving around and doing things differently. So certainly though I wasn’t doing what I wanted to be doing and just found it was all very difficult in this town and then I met John [Fenton]. And we started dreaming and talking about how to turn dreams into reality. They had the property, his father died young as well and when he turned 21 he took control of this treeless property. But we used to plan things around that and I guess talk about the environment, spaces and I was always interested in these things. And the houses my father was building they were known as ‘Gunn bungalows’, because they were always California, all out of the pattern book I suppose. And not very interesting. It always intrigued me some of the older larger houses which we occasionally worked on in the country, without much sense of different sort of space. The craftsmanship was all different; all of that probably worked at me. But there was one architect in town and he was no great shakes either, so it didn’t come through that, I don't think I got the sense there was a whole career there waiting for me or certainly not a passion about it. And then there was another friend in the country, he was the son of a garage owner, he ended up making a lot of money in Hamilton. In fact we just completed a house for his wife who’s been widowed for about four years. And she’s been one of the most amazing of clients at 77.

Yeah. She’s quite extraordinary. And he was about drawing and architecture and he had great skill with graphics, just picked it up and he’d actually been interested… We were all doing things of spurious nature I suppose. He was designing and building his own car, the actual panelling, all of that which he did do. We got into underwater diving; this is way before it was happening down here and because we had access to all the garage equipment and things, we made an underwater camera - which didn’t work. We just imported these; we’d met Hans Haas who was the first exponent to write about underwater diving, he was a German, and Jacques Cousteau was just coming up at the time. Anyway Haas was the model on which we favoured ourselves, we bought a couple of spear guns we could get then and the flippers and the snorkels and we’d been down to the coast a few times. Then we decided we ought to have aqualungs and one of the technical journals he got from the States had the conversion of these airplane air valves into aqualungs. So, we bought these valves from the States, we had them and then just by chance I noticed in The Age, I think it was Robin Wallis Crabb -one of the Wallis Crabbs - anyway, he was giving a lecture on underwater diving in the Town Hall in Melbourne. So we headed down and went, and he’s starting to espouse the future of it and its potential. And then by the way, he said that no real aqualungs had been developed that make sense at the moment, whatever you do don’t take up that system, because your guts will just come up the pipe and you’ll just be spewing out. So just by reading something it changes your whole life; you might not have had a life after that. So it was really about then dissatisfaction and there was another girl came up from Melbourne, she was teaching and I met, started to meet with some Melbourne people, starting to get this extension to parameters through contacts and start talking with a girl who an older teacher from South Africa. And I started reading and she was helpful, and talking. Then I came down to Melbourne with this girlfriend and her friends and we just spent a weekend down walking around. And for some reason I went back and we all talked about what I ought to be doing and you're wasting your time, because they all thought I had some talent apart from football which I loved. So then I went up and came back and said my mate with the aqualungs and the house, the ultimate house that I did for his wife, he persuaded me to buy this old MG which had been in a fire, because he had all the garage equipment we were going to strip it down and put it together again. But they kept telling us in the garage that it’s destructured itself, the steel wasn’t going to handle it as it had been burnt, but we pursued it and I again bought the carburettors. They were 40 pounds in those days. So I’ve been collecting all these bits and when I decided I’m going to Melbourne, he said oh sell me the carburettors. I said fine, they're 40 pounds. No, no, no, he said I can’t pay you, but I’ll give you 20. So that was the story of my financial life. So that floated me into Melbourne without any money and again another friend I’d been to school with was down here, he was a good cricketer, he was playing for the state squad. He was living in this washroom in South Yarra, and that was there as accommodation, but that was going to be two and a half pounds a week shared, so he had a friend in, and he was going back to Perth. My friend was going back to Perth, so I could stay there for a short time, but the other guy was moving on. So I’m suddenly left with five pounds a week and I did want to live on my own, I didn’t want anybody, so I cut myself off from Hamilton. I went to RMIT and saw Harry Winbush in the morning and said I’d like to get a job during the day and do the course at night. He said you can’t and I knew they had the course at night. He said no you can’t do that, so this is very funny, because there was a column in Harry’s office, we’re looking around this, but he’s on one side and I’m just this kid from the country trying to tell him what I wanted to do and he’s saying you can’t do it. And I went off and I walked around Melbourne for a couple of hours and came back after lunch and saw Max Freeland, who was the…

Yeah. He was the head of the course under Harry. And I just said well I’ve decided to do it full time, he said that’s terrific. He was very good, so I started the course in architecture. And the first year was really, I had to catch up on matriculation, so I did nine subjects including the ones in architecture. And I didn’t do one and that was maths 1B, but all the others I did. In fact the chemistry one I didn’t touch it during the year, but stayed up the whole night before the exam, with the Benzadine of course, and sort of selected the questions – with which you took a risk - I just did three areas, or four areas and just passed that, so I didn’t fail it, I just didn’t do well. So the next year was into architecture proper.

Well that’s the whole point, I don’t know that it was just that I’m going down to do architecture. I had no introduction to it at all.

I didn’t. See what we had in matriculation were things like the Taylor’s little book of studies that got you your selection subjects for tertiary education. Architecture must have been there, but they would have put down high maths and other sort of qualifications, which I probably didn’t have. Forestry was one that I was interested in, but by that time I think I was just fed up with the study at school and being rather irreverent of my teachers I suppose. It wasn’t working out, but there was no ultimate decision to say I’m going to do architecture. What I did decide was I’d go down and try to enrol in architecture.

Yeah Max was there with the course.

He went to Sydney didn’t he?

He suffered badly from migraine, I remember.

No, I remember that somewhere I read you had to be interested in lots of things, even holes in the ground, so I used to walk around Melbourne when there was a hole being dug.

I must have been translating this into some architecture imagery; very creative period in my life. I was also destitute, so I really was up against the wall, very close to doing myself in. I sometimes didn’t have money for the tram fare home and I’d get across the bridge at the Yarra and look over the edge and say well that’s one way to finish it.

This is 56.

Yes, the Olympics were there, but I couldn’t even get a job cleaning up on the stands, I tried, but didn’t pass. So they must have all known beforehand who’s getting the jobs…

No. I don’t remember being very… I talked a lot. I know that. Much more than the other younger kids. I felt I discussed…

Yes.

They were way through.

And Peter Mc was in talking about his architectural life and career. Yes, he was a guest speaker. Robin Boyd, I don’t remember Robin coming to talk.

Daughter.

Yeah he would be. I’m sure he’d be 88 now.

Don’t think so.

Reg Grouse certainly was. Reg was a navigator on Lancasters, I think.

What can I say? No they're post construction.

The 38 one is the first one; see that was a pile that came from a job lot. My father would have demolished a house, left it in the backyard, and I was attracted to it because it had this timber dunny-seat, and that was the entrance to the hut inside.

Yeah they're all huts that we constructed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The other one to the right at the top, this came out with just the felling of a tree and it was an eucalypt, and it’s all there piled up and suddenly it was just imagine the space, so we reconstructed it with the hole in the centre, but the point about the little annex at the side was the five boys didn’t always get on. So one was a pain in the arse to the others, and we had these fruit trees that this place was actually a small farm two miles out of Hamilton centre. And we had the ubiquitous cow, and the pony, and lots of fruit trees and we used to take the plums up into there. We’d sit in a little annex and we could see in, but they couldn’t see us. This was the way that worked. So that was a secret space.

I think the notion of space. Yes, very much so. The more I reflect on this and try and get my act together to write something of myself, it’s certainly is intrinsic, no doubt about that, because I do think about space first, I suppose.

No. I used to design places in my mind at night - to the point where you’re so re-iterative that you go stupid following a thing round - and I’ve got this line of separation which defines one space, and how that ties in with the component which is going to control the other space and how they come together. And of course during the day they don’t work at all - never have - but you get some sort of semblance of how that might happen.

I thought of that, David. I used to have a board which came around in front of you and you sat up and worked on it. It does get very involved when you start to focus on it, because no matter how simple it seems, when you start, and how much it seems even when you do the first drawing, and even these models. You know when you get inside and start to craft the interiors, there are many different ways you can go with it.

Really? Soft in the sense of…?

Yeah I guess I’m very much humanistic in that sort of way and I don’t particularly like vapid spaces which are just about volume, with no sort of control and intimacy. And even tactility I think is a factor of space. And this is one of the things that upsets me so much down at Docklands. Most of the architects don’t think about surfaces and control of space. They still orient it towards the object, how it’s going to look. Don’t know how you use it.

Probably not.

It’s more evident, because there’s more of it and because I’ve been working so closely with it much more. I think on the other hand if we’re talking about architecture and what they do, there’s some brilliant architects around. Some of the young kids. A lot of that comes through the technological innovation to be able to translate something, even to manipulate it and therefore decide on what you're going to use.

I don't know.

I notice there’s a long haul from what's produced on the screen to actually producing the built work to satisfy that initial objective.

Yeah I know. I love being in here.

By?

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah. I mean that space out there is different again, because it’s got the vertical and then it’s interconnected; very few people accept that as a way to live, where we both hole out into the… There’s no doors on the bedroom on ours. Lucy demanded doors, but we don’t have doors.

No.

Oh it’s one of those. That bottom one.

Yes that was apparently for David Marriner that one.

He had Merchant Builders.

Yeah, and they were the Four Seasons.

Oh, he bought one?

He hasn’t had that for long then.

More than that, 20 years ago now, that’s right, the other person had it, we did some work with, not down there, but another job.

Yes they were initially very much organised around a spatial content related to cost and articulated definition. That was a …what's the term I’m looking for… a cartographic approach. So they had everything defined by the beams initially. And they at the time worked with the sizes we had to the ceiling heights, because you had 150 and then the base of that was… They had to be 2400 to the top of the exposed rafters and you come down your 150, and then you had your 250 beam, and then it was door head height, the standard door head height, so they were all mounted on that. And I think it fell foul when they went to metric, it didn’t quite work out that way.

That was John Ridge.

He had the timber company, Boston Timber.

It was very gregarious, wasn’t it? It jumped at you.

It’s always a dilemma, you do have these dreams which are fantasy and often personal and subjective about the star building. And then you have to cut it back, and think about what you're all about. There’s always that dilemma.

I think I’ve got to be honest in the end, so it is about producing a humanistic form of architecture that you can relate to. I mean, so much is to do with this out here, this integration of spaces. That is the external room as much as this is a room.

When I first re-met David, I only met him once before at Robin Boyd’s office, because Robin was doing the Black Dolphin. But we met when we were doing Chinese together, and I didn’t have any work and I thought I better exercise what little brain I had, and he was doing the year ahead. Because he’d sold his motel and made enough money to go and live in Hong Kong for nine months and learnt sufficient Chinese. But then when we met we talked about, had lunch and just talked about what we’re all doing. I just bemoaned the fact that you couldn’t - I don’t know why it occurred to me at that stage - that you couldn’t get architecturally designed houses for the right figure, and all you had was this Jennings stuff. And I suppose that came out of people talking about those as the houses - Jennings houses. Architects being away over here, the architect-designed houses being so expensive that you couldn’t get near them. It was just too expensive. So that’s when he proposed - he was winding up the Black Dolphin, it sold, and there was money - let’s do this project. Then he saw, I took him to the Richardson house, which was completed. He wasn’t married then, he and Rosemary, they went down and saw that and liked it and then he said look I’ve got this house I bought in South Yarra, a double fronted Victorian house. He said would you do it up for us, so that’s when Rosemary had been living in Tasmania, following her separation from her family in Sydney, her marriage. That’s an awful thing too, because she was married to one of the Darlings, and David and she hit it off and she left the family, but she was not allowed to see the children again. Imagine what that does to you? So we did that house for them in Domain Street in South Yarra. By then we are talking about; that wasn’t a great piece of landscaping adventure, there was nothing much done in that. Then going on to Merchant Builders and I had; coming out of all this well into the love of the landscaping. How to get there is another thing, but this guy here [John Fenton] when I left for Melbourne I’d come back and he was planting pines in line and I’d say what are you doing for, for God’s sake, let’s do it differently and think about it all differently. I didn’t know how to do it, but he eventually sorted that out.

Getting a natural landscape coming out.

Oh definitely Australian.

Australian is something you grow into, because when you start off when you're very young, you don’t know who you are or what you are, and even now I’m still mostly a 10 year old. That’s probably you feel you are 10 years old again, always. But as to who you are, it doesn’t really occur to you until you’ve lived through a lot of things like your own history coming to you out of all the sources that we are now getting of where your family had been and what it meant to them. And what they were doing, where your real thrust is coming from. You look at your kids as you get older and you see a lot of the habits you have invested in them, much to your distress. But this notion of being Australian is part of also going back to that sort of environment around Hamilton, which is… we’d go to the state school which is in the main street of Hamilton. You’d look down the end of that main street and there’s the Grampians. Every day it was there, and then when you get closer there's these wonderful red gums, which is park like, the serenity of it all.

Because my notion of the Australian bush, well we grew up with Tarzan and I was always doing a Tarzan thing somewhere and the Swiss Family Robinson…

Oh yes.

No, no, no. But my brother two years older than I was a great story teller when we were younger and he fabricated all of these translations from the Swiss Family Robinson for instance. So we would spend two days on the weekend with the whole of this body of people, a caravan of people moving down the side of the house and little bits of pegs or little blocks of wood or little stones and they all had their names, and we’d move slowly along, and there’d be episodic things happen along the way. And all of these were just fantasy images, but the notion of the bush, when I was 15 for instance went with a friend out to Nelson on the Glenelg River, and that was the first time I had that what I considered a balance between bush and traversable bush, it wasn’t scrubby and it had an elegance about it. It was really fantastic and there was a distribution of plants and open spaces. I still remember it as being totally different. So it’s not your Mallee scrub I’m talking about, there’s a statuesqueness about the trees - a real sense of volume. I suppose it’s very Gothic.

No I’d say that more is the landscaping there, but that’s hard landscaping I think you’d say and the built form oozing out and not being prescribed by the tight boundary, so it’s that integration and that morphing of one form into the natural environment.

Well I got hold of Ellis, because Ellis had been to see us at Robin Boyd’s and there was a 60 year old man who came in, and I was the only one who would talk to him, and I said what's all this about? He said I’ve got these slides here I’d like to show you. And Ellis is always passionate; if he wasn’t talking about the Yarra River and the shit in the river and how to get rid of the trees and what to do. Yet he was mild mannered, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he was just passionate.

Lovely man. With this calliper on his leg from the First World War. You know that story?

When he arrived in the office there and later on I’d used him for; I didn’t use him for the Richardson house, because I didn’t think he could do those sorts of spaces and very few people could in those days. But he worked on another couple of houses that I did and then when Merchant Builders came up I said to David look let’s look at this guy.

Yes, so they hit it off. But Ellis went to Gallipoli at 16 and he didn’t get any further than the beach. He and his mate were both shot up, and his mate lay across him all day and acted as a tourniquet for Ellis’ injury. So he then was sent back…

Yeah, dead. And that’s when he came back and got mixed up with Edna Walling.

But I took him up here to this place [John Fenton’ property] - years later after we’d started Merchant Builders - and he had this calliper which was like a dumb iron device with knuckles at the knee and we walked over these sand hills. John had bought a property down near Portland in Discovery Bay and it was large, but it ended up towards the beach on about at least half a kilometre of sand dunes. And these were not easy to walk to. So we all decided we’d go to the beach across the sand dunes. And Ellis is struggling and we get back, we had to come back of course and get home and he came up the next morning and he said oh wasn’t a good day yesterday, my leg really hurts. But he said I found out why. And I said why does your leg hurt? He said I had the calliper on back to front, whatever that meant.

Very crude device. Shall we have some lunch? [END PART 2] [START PART 3]

Richmond boy.

So he was 57 when he died. SB 52.

How do you know he drank?

Who could he be? SB The uncles were Martin, Arthur, Merrick, although Martin never had kids, Arthur, Merrick, Penleigh was Robin’s father, and then there was Gilbert, and he died when he was 12, and there was a girl. So the four boys and two had children and all Arthur’s kids, but if he had a Boyd surname.

We’ll take that on notice.

I actually met Jack Dyer.

Yeah. When I was at Hamilton playing football. Fred Fanning, you know Fred?

Fred still holds the record for the most goals kicked in a match. SB It’s almost as bizarre as the butcher knowing Robin.

It was 18 goals he kicked. And Fred left Melbourne at 27 and went to Hamilton, because he’d fallen in love with the local bicycle and side car motorcycle guy and also got paid by the Hamilton Football Club, too. He caused a disruption in the town, because it was the same time the Democratic Labor Party was started. And our previous coach had been a Catholic and he got the boot when Fred came in, so they started another football team called the Imperials. But Fred used to bring these old footballers. There was Alan Ruzlin come up for a weekend and go to training for one night and go through the process, and Jack Dyer was one who came up and tried to teach us how to do the drop punt.

And no way; he had it all wrong. In theory it was right, but the execution was wrong.

No Jack Dyer, in the sense that the ball was held up and you kicked the bottom half of the ball, whereas the real one that’s eventuated and evolved is the ball is down just like a drop kick. What you're now doing with a drop punt is eliminating the contact the ball had with the ground when you kicked. So you eliminated the process and you got that much more accuracy. Its just foot on ball. Previously it was ball, ground, foot, which is a pretty remarkable…

Yes, but pretty remarkable execution and to…

It is a lovely kick, but that’s why Jack Dyer came up.

He certainly started…

No he had the wrong principle.

Yeah for kicking for goal.

He must have. At the same time I came down to Melbourne to play footy after that for six months, we also national service went down…

I came down to play with Melbourne, then didn’t really make it, went back, but when I returned to Melbourne to study architecture I played with Preston, which got me money, five pounds for a win and three for a loss, which paid for rent. And that’s when I played in, what was it called, the carnival, the national carnival. So after four games I was selected to play.

For the VFA yeah. And I stayed out every night till very, very late; it wasn’t a really good performance.

No no no.

That one?

But you used to do that, you’d cut so the arm wouldn’t get you.

And I played against Mopsy Fraser when I played VFA.

Yeah that was actually quite a sluggish tournament the VFA. Was a bit rough.

But they were so slow when I played them.

Well it’s all passed.

You mean all over?

There were buildings I haven't seen that I’d love to see, that I would probably call my favourite buildings and Ronchamp is one.

No. Aalto’s building is another one.

Yeah Aalto’s work.

No Aalto work.

See I didn’t leave Australia until was 40, I’d never been out of Australia, like all the other people went overseas and I didn’t. So that rooted me; there are probably reasons for that, one I felt I ought to be here.

Rooted as in growing, and nurturing, and being part of the osmotic process.

Yes. And because I’d started…

Yes.

Well it’s true, but I had, I wouldn’t have called that a very structured thing, that was more intuitive, whereas in fact it would have helped me had I probably… I don’t know… it would appear that it should have helped me to have gone overseas and looked at what was happening, but I might not have been able to take it in anyway.

But it was really experiential, rather than a focus and saying I’m here because I have to be here to do these things and these are my objectives.

It’s true.

I think it all relates to your intellectual capability and often with finances as well and just often maturity that you’ve decided early enough on that that’s what you need to do and you’ve got a plan and you’ve got a strategy and then that’s how you would go. I had no capability in any of these areas and so it was more or less as I said by osmosis, and it’s strange how things happen. You know when you're becoming a piece of humus, when you haven't tried to do something. And the moment you attempt to do something how much else happens in concert with it? And you get energised by doing those things, and other people get energised. It’s bizarre because the real I suppose characterisation is one in which if you don’t do anything you just do atrophy, you just drop off and it gets worse and worse. Your capability to do anything diminishes accordingly. So whilst it seems a struggle you have to keep jumping into the frying pan.

Well as far as I’m concerned that’s probably the way it’s gone.

The complex with the low buildings and the square in the middle and went up.

What is that?

Because again it’s that one that relates to promote the space and containment.

Well let me go back to Frank Lloyd Wright. So my two heroes were probably Corb and Wright. Wright was always there, so three years ago I did a tour with Dimity Reed to most of those buildings.

All of them, it was a big trip, and the houses stand out and there are a series of churches, which in a way don’t stand out. As you would expect there is an inconsistency about the quality of things.

Yeah that’s remarkable, but then for somehow for all of that and its intricacy of spaces, it wasn’t to me that satisfying. You spent a lot of time walking up the back stairs it seemed to me. Without being part of the space.

But there’s no doubt that Fallingwater was really as a building and landscape and its association with the ground was by far the best experience. And, then also Taliesin West.

Yes, great.

Yes there’s a bit of manicured lawn in all of this, it’s not as raw as it might first seem, but that’s a bit disconcerting. Its as if you're suddenly part of a commercial complex, and as you go around the lawn and get a bit of water.

Taliesin East is good, it’s what you’d expect.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a bit like that Neil Clerehan said to me, Harry Edquist’s book on Desbrowe Annear. And he said you know - and this is Neil and Neil’s one of the great purveyors of stories about people, I didn’t say gossip, I said but they had some stories. That Desbrowe Annear, with his thriving practice had an affair with Dame Myer, and after that he was blackballed and did not get another serious commission. But he said that’s not in the book.

She should have found out.

It’s true, but then I wasn’t studying Desbrowe Annear.

That’s how you make a snowball.

I know, but he’s pretty deep rooted in terms of family.

And the other thing as I said before as history comes up and confronts you, you change your own position, your relativity to where you are, who you are. And talking about my maternal ancestors, also my paternal ancestors were Vikings, so they went to north of Scotland and this is Wicke, right up at the top. And when you start learning about that history, your whole complexion of your own being changes. And I don’t know whether I’m a Scot; I certainly don't feel the other side as much as strongly as I am a Scot. I’m Norwegian by extraction.

Rape and pillage, was what we were about early days.

Well you could look at the fact that the English were really on top of things here, so they're making it and this is their program, they’ve executed it, therefore they own it. The Irish never really…

I’ve written that forward in that book, which I’ve forgotten.

Yeah, have a look at it, but read that, because it’s very short. But it was about a bit of us when we were younger.

Oh it’s too long. Ok apart from the 6000 birds, which everybody says it’s a lot of bullshit flying over one night, I counted them. This is what is written. John Fenton and I had grown up in Hamilton, the centre of productive wool growing area in the western district of Victoria. We had known each other but did not establish a friendship until 1954 when we were in our early 20s. Both keen to leave our mark on the world, but without any apparent skills. At that time I was impressed by self-effacing eccentricities and in principle and romantic approach to finding a worthwhile position for his own life. This is us, in answer to my questions about where he had been and what he was currently working on, he described his time away at boarding school in Geelong, his next education adventure Longeranong agriculture centre in central Victoria and his removal from there with others for mining, and drinking misdemeanours. He then told me of his most recent job as a jackeroo on a significant grazing property in central Victoria. When asked what his tasks were as a jackeroo he replied ‘picking up sticks’. I thought this both very funny and engagingly self-deprecating. We became solid friends and over the following 50 years have assisted each other in our extended families, intervened in each other’s lives and generally had a lot to talk about while extending each other’s knowledge. I will remember in those early days in Hamilton how high, and sometimes naïve our aspirations were, and in retrospect what little personal substance we had to realise them. During this early period while we were both in Hamilton I had a burnt out MG car, which I bought to hopefully restore to its proper state of glory. We spent nights grinding, scraping and sanding metal frames and panels, interspersed with the application of self-generated philosophical graffiti to the walls of the shed with fingers dipped in gelatinous grease. The resurrection of the car succumbed to other pressures. I traded the carburettors I had bought to fund my move to Melbourne to study architecture, and John focused on the embryonic farming property he had inherited near Branxholm, a small hamlet some 25 kms from Hamilton. John had inherited the property from his father who died when John was young and his move into farming was consequently different from that of most of his peers. They had grown up on established grazing properties, working under parental regimes and conservative farming practises that gave little credence to land care, conservation and the benefits of integrated environments. John started with a windswept grassland property generally void of trees and endowed with some rudimentary structures, two small cottages, a small shearing shed and a small antiquated grain and tool shed. A row of semi-mature pines lines the northern frontage of the property, but these together with the small stand of sugar gums near the sheds were not a great defence against the prevailing cold south-westerlies that ripped across the paddocks to chill the spin and rock the cottage. There were some advantages in taking over such an undeveloped raw canvas. John faced a lot of changes, but these could be met without the trappings of established conservative practises and hierarchal authority. The dreams of creating a farming enterprise that balanced good farming practise with conservation and environmental programs to enhance the rural landscape were part of a distant horizon. But they were personal dreams possible of being achieved without interference. This rather lonely pursuit while not easy, developed in John a strong independent characteristic that was assisted in the balance by his lovely suitably rational soul mate, Cicely. I have spent many hours at Lanarc over the years on my return trips to Hamilton and saw each of the innovative transformations, which applied to this one bare portion of rural land. It was always a delight to see a new water body or a new plantation, initially as habitat and shelter, and later as part of the farm’s productivity program extending the landscape and realising the dream. Do I go on?

During the 1950s and early 1960s sheep farming in the western district reached a peak, aided by the Korean War and developing international markets. Then the following major drought in 1967 and the advancing competitive quality of synthetic fibres, the wool industry suffered a dramatic decline. The damage caused by the drought and the slowness of landholders to adopt more appropriate techniques to land management had been significant. The Fenton’s early reintroduction of water bodies surrounding their farmhouse helped to generate a new approach to drought proofing, fire protection, stock sustenance, all integrated within an evolving natural landscape. Their farm developed in response to a new sensitivity and a perception of land use that will be necessary for the future wellbeing of the land, for farming practises and also for those involved in the process. That the Lanarc experiences occurred without major support from government authorities remarkable and signifies the character and personal resource of the whole Fenton family. It has not only been the lack of external funding that marks an experience in the Fenton family. For many years their different and innovative land practises were ridiculed by a sceptical local farming community and the adage of a prophet not being accepted in his own country could well apply to John Fenton, and his family. The benefits that have accrued due to the Lanarc experience have proved far more reaching than just the Fentons and the environment they helped create. An extended group of experts and interested bodies have added to, and taken from the Fentons and their program. The acceptance of visiting students and academics who have shared regularly the unique teaching qualities of John Fenton have left Lanarc more aware and better prepared to deliver their own environmentally infused projects. John’s work in this field culminates in his receipt of an honorary doctorate of landscape architecture from RMIT University. The Fentons belong to a small group of innovators who through their perception, integrity and persistence, have proved there is a better more productive way of balancing modern farming practises with conservative and environmental objectives to affect the more sustainable rural Australian landscape for the benefit of all. That’s it. So that’s where we started.

Yes.

Well this is man’s intervention, the built environment with the natural and therefore we either decide that the natural environment and all its ecosystems are important to the way we develop and evolve. If they're not, sure it doesn’t matter, you just go to a hard-built solution everywhere, which is a totally different symbolic graphic condition, it’s a symbolic… Well we’re extracting from our past, from our intrinsic - after all we’re only animals, intrinsicness - we’re extracting all the things that made us animals, continue to… We will always be animals and we’ll always be part of an ecosystem. If we’re not it’s a totally different world entirely. So I don’t see how you can avoid that, therefore I think that the excuse for it being different is purely about greed and advancement of technology to the point where it’s not aligned to those sort of objectives.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure so. I think when I talked about us dipping our fingers in tar there are all these homilies around the walls, which are basic and probably unpoetic, although they attempted to be poetic, but they were about encapturing dreams.

Yes.

Except when they're said by people that don’t belong to that cliché. Anyway John’s a great friend, and I reckon he’s a great person.

He has that sensibility.

I think he’s probably or maybe has learnt to be more political aware than John for instance, who’s often his own worst enemy. He has had visitors, federal government agricultural expert come by. The first thing he’ll say to them, well you guys know nothing about what really happens.

Just to ask you for funds next week. But he’s also a great teacher with the kids. When he talks, in fact when John talks no one else gets a chance, but he’s very good with the students. And that part of him hasn’t really been explored.

For my mind Frank certainly was heads up with Fallingwater, but then there was a whole pattern of residential work and again this integration with landscape. The thing that surprised me was just the intensity of the craftsmanship. You couldn’t in any way produce that today. So that’s a timing thing, that’s a political history, of an economic history.

No.

I just think at all levels. As entertainment he also stands very high. That book of the journalists Many Masks, do you know that? You won’t put that down, because he did sit with Frank at the end of his life and he’s just so compelling. How there’s this stream, this river of activity, and yet there are many life things that happen in contradistinction to that, which he ignores completely.

In the modern period?

I suppose the only ones I’ve had any close association with have all been in Italy. And again that has to do with the space and the puncturing of surface. The transitional zone between built form. But then there’s no doubt about it that there are things in classical architecture, which are just so revereable. But that’s not to mean that they're useable or that they perform other roles, which I think are terribly important. You compare that with the Opera House.

Yes I think it is. Things can transcend their initial purpose, and I think the Opera House has done that. I’ve always argued that it doesn’t work. I don’t know enough about it, but I know that it doesn’t work for what its purpose was initially intended. But there’s no doubt it just has become a statement of tremendous significance.

A great meeting ground for culture.

Yes wouldn’t he? A sheltered region.

I don't know, in Florence and Brunelleschi’s Dome, just you get a series of buildings that work together. So more about the intriguing thing to me is more about the spaces and the way in which a building addresses a space.

Yeah and just the language, the dialogue between the space and the building, which is vastly different from often modern day buildings of the corporate kind, or the institutional kind, where they set themselves up as imposing modernist examples of what, I don’t know, of modernism I suppose. But these other buildings that we’re talking about in more ancient times were really about having a discussion and actually reading. There’s a story there in every building. There are no stories in; well there’s a danger that modern architecture doesn’t have a story.

The narrative of buildings I think is very important.

The Plumbers and Gasfitters really about real for instance a butchiness in what unionism was supposed to be about.

It was a tough building. And then down the hill was the AMFSWU, which was again a tough building, but it did have these social implications of how people worked more so than the Plumbers and Gasfitters.

Yes, both had initially, as you’d imagine, an objective to have a democratic workspace, where there were no gradations, but both were intrinsically ensconced in non-democratic processes, because the Secretary of a union is a very powerful man. And John Halfpenny who was a visionary…

No, that was George Crawford. John had AMFSWU and that was the first building we did, and we had stepped the building back, but it was also stepped to have decks, and I said this is where the staff will come out, this will be their space looking onto the street. And sort of umbrellaed over, shaded. And he said, no fucking way mate, that’s my space. That’s where the three key offices go, forget the ….

That’s how it ended up.

There is a balcony still there.

The three offices behind.

I think so much depends on how you invest that such to buy into who you are as an architect and who is going to commission you to do a job. And I reckon mostly if it’s not perfunctory and non essential, like as a client we want an architect who do we get, I know him they're very good, or they do it at low cost, or they won’t cost as much as, or these have a better system of building. If it was the other way where there's a more idealistic approach to what a client expects from a job and a searching approach to what do we want to find out about this to add to this brief, so that an architect who we think ought to be able to respond to that brief and therefore we’re going to question this architect about what his response might be. There’s a totally different program.

Yeah.

Oh look I’m going through some programs down at VicUrban and they are developer oriented on the basis that it’s a residential building, or it’s a commercial building. Very few of them talk about essential component, what is the building for and what's it mean for them or what’s it mean in the public realm, what is the building adding to the public realm. And it’s a very hard one, and it’s exacerbated this problem, because initially Dockland was invested in five major developers, so that means that you don’t get the intricacy and the articulation of built form related to smaller packages, for instance.

It can be a real city, because all you're doing is we’re fighting hard with the public realm, and I must admit with the assistance of Melbourne who have come in now, council, to get those spaces working. And now to look at how we do address that, and a recent case is one which I won’t mention, can’t mention, but where we’ve turned it all around and there’s been a real thinking process applied by the client, the developer, and the architect. And it’s going to be interesting, because it’s looking very different from…

Yeah often the best things that have happened that you can actually tabulate probably are with clients at the residential scale. They're the ones that come to you because they think they need you. They're the ones that come to you, because they think they're going to get on with you. We take them on because we think we’ll be compatible. And you ought to sort that one out very quickly, because there’s nothing worse than a disparate client/architect relationship in a residential building. It’s the worst thing possible. But the other things that have happened, for instance Prahran Market, which we did over a period of five years, started off as a political football. You had stallholders there who didn’t want to change anything, because it was money for jam, and they were worried if things were built they’d lose that control over the income stream and a lot of that as you probably would be aware would be cash. So any sort of exposure was dangerous. So they spread the insidious vibes through the community that they were going to lose their market, and it would become a supermarket. Well, we said totally different things. And then it went through a process of really surveying the market attendees over three or four weeks and getting all that material in and having a feel for it. And then building something up again also around a community square - one of the first protected squares in Melbourne - and then taking it through the point where it did work. What was missing is they had that opportunity when we started to limpett it with a lot of community facilities and housing and they didn’t do that.

They did the market.

Council.

No, the state had nothing to do with it.

Moonee Ponds was private, that’s Gandles, and that was really about a façade as much as anything, where it was a nice interpretation. The housing was there before and the corner store, old shop, that kind of thing. They were emblematic in what they were presenting, but the market behind was just a stall, so it was a bit of a façade.

Yeah, not the market, the market was Gunn Hayball.

Yeah.

Yes.

I don’t have it yet.

I think the building I loved most was the Scrogie house, which is no longer there.

It was bastardised by Metier3 when it was bought by Steve Bennett, and they put another floor in to the two storey courtyard.

Totally, the whole character. It’s interesting, because I think there’s more than a building that you're assessing here and making a comment on in terms of preference. It has to do with the client and the relationship and how it all happened. I don't know, if you had a birth and you got a beautiful kid and you said this is wonderful, but your wife died in the process, it’s not as good.

But that was lovely at all areas, because they were beaut people and we just had fun doing it. You have clients who test you because they think they have to. Clever clients like teachers and lawyers. They're clever clients and they have great difficulty in working collaboratively.

Yeah as if it’s necessary. It’s ingrained in them.

Oh I think through their training, but then they're in there training, because…

Well worthy means what’s it contributed to in society, I’d say.

See in terms of they’re all different, because they have a different base for becoming, whereas Prahran Market was a great community success, it did something, it achieved something that hadn’t happened before and it was done in a modern age. And it really did reintroduce this notion of community and collection and interaction in a protected space around the heart of the commercial activity. I think Portland Airport was a great sort of transition from a theme and a recognition of a very peculiar function, and operation, into built form. Interesting enough they’ve now advertised to alter it, and extend it, and add to it; we weren’t even invited.

Well and get shafted by some of your ex-staff. We did the…

Well if you take Royal South Yarra Tennis Club, which we did under me and then later on ex-partners got involved with that, and eventually went to Smrekar. We didn’t even know that they were interested in doing anything to it.

Yes.

I thought that was a lovely building, its first phase of resurrection.

Well it was, you came down the hill, it really was. It sort of symbolically establishes its position of one of those conditions, societal conditions not really found in Victoria or Australia. And that was the symbolic building that related to a class. Bit like the Melbourne Club, but exposed with the lawn court coming out and this wonderful white building at the end of it. Not Manhattan, but north New York stuff.

Yes, I think I’ve been totally irreverent for most of my life of the status quo if it’s seemed to be buffoonery, and that’s something that has never stopped me from doing anything. But I think there probably is an intrinsic acceptance of the fact that there was an order there.

Yeah probably.

Oh yes there’s no doubt about the fact that it was one of the if not a hurdle, again the ultimate levels of contradiction that you know you have a skill and you know that’s what you love doing, but if it was done to the point where it was advertised to beyond the building performing at a social level, that was a no no to me. And it’s a bit like growing up and I grew up in a culture of no bragging. You were really cut off at the neck if you were a bragger, and it’s always been a dilemma to be in a position where you do have some recognition, and I just feel very uncomfortable with that.

Ok more about the aesthetic?

I think there was that, but also it probably was all done for you, in the sense that when you talked about design in - when would it have been - probably in the middle 60s and if you talked about design as a levener for human comfort or aspiration, you are a real prick, smart arse prick. And what you really should have been talking about was how can I solve the social aspirations for people. And that’s when the whole body of social experts rose to the top and the design component of architecture was downgraded.

He did, but he was regarded at that time as out of kilter, and I’ve always said to Robin at the time that he wasn’t interested in those social aspects. We went on the other way. We went overboard about it. I think I took the line that yep it’s right, architecture is not a performing art.

Well he said the same about Portland Airport, because he opened that. He said I don’t know why I’m here, because I don’t like this building.

I think that’s true, but he might have also had an adviser saying, look Jeff it is good.

Yeah I don’t know him at all actually to say. He would like to be known as a person who is avant-garde.

Yes he was. So was Rupert Hamer, but Rupert didn’t do that much for the arts, except encourage the arts themselves, the performing arts.

Oh yeah, that was about “housing for the arts” as distinct from providing “arts as housing”.

We did a lot of buildings like that, because when Eric Westbrook left that he had a position of head of Arts Victoria.

Yeah before that.

And then when he left we did a few buildings in regional Victoria related to the housing of the arts.

David are you driving? Who’s driving out of you two?

You're out.

Mine?

I thought I did qualify that.

Actually proud is a term which is outside my comprehension.

You're asking me that question or you're telling me what they are?

Well I’ve had to answer that question recently, because the only way I could do that, what gave me the most satisfaction, or what appeared, because it appeared to give other people satisfaction in my work. So there were a few houses. If I could find a public or an institutional body to say something laudable about me, I don’t know they could find one, anybody.

But I don't know, see I don’t know that level of satisfaction that people have …

Oh, what's influenced me?

Look there’s no doubt that Corb’s works, Wright’s work.

I have a very limited educational background, and not having been a great student I tend to read things and apply the substance, rather than get into the actual, if you like rationale, of it all.

How many are Corb?

I just think he’s one that wrote best about architecture in those years, more so than Wright who was really flamboyant, and flowery.

Yes I just found his preciseness and again it’s a thinking base, it comes off a thinking base.

Probably not so much.

Yeah. Its formal. I just think the massive housing thing had a great intent in its social base. I’m not sure whether it’s realised, and its become so monolithic, that was the other problem.

No, that’s what I’m talking about.

Yes, I heard that. But then the worker’s housing that he did I thought were really great, and they probably haven't stood up, because they’ve been adapted and altered.

But it’s interesting, that sort of component of how people take something that has some recognised quality, and peer recognition, and even public recognition, and if you look at Edna Walling’s Bickleigh Vale I’m not sure whether it’s still covenants, but I imagine that’s relatively held its line in terms of its quality. Winter Park they have the same sort of protectiveness. In fact if you go in there you get attacked. That’s not a good thing necessarily either.

Yeah, well it’s theirs.

Yeah.

Yes I am and yet again it’s a thing done in the past and it looks like it’s done in the past. I think it evolved out of some standard housing, which were put together in such a way that it proved a point beyond what was traditional standard housing, for which those houses were designed. They were never designed to be grouped in such a way. The fact that they could be grouped in such a way I think was very fulfilling. To actually create spaces that worked at lots of levels. I think that’s correct. It’s just that you move on with character, and you move on with buildings, and materials. And part of it is just what you’ve grown up with, what you are comfortable with. Whether in fact you appreciate new materials coming in and get excited by those. By default you're going to say well those ones there were done a long time ago no longer appeal as much.

Always. As I said the next building is hopefully a lot better or different from the last in terms of what it’s searching for.

Yeah I’ve been through a number of partnerships and sizes of offices, so the one we currently have there’s a young girl of 35, there’s my partner who says she’ll run the business, but she’s a very good designer, so she sticks her nose into that. And I get involved with certain projects, but we sort of work in a collaborative fashion. There’s an appreciation of the other’s contribution. We’re still working at it, we’ve only been going for a year or two, but it’s been good for me, because we’ve got an office that works, as distinct from me getting the jobs trying to get the design out and getting the backup material going and then having all of that interaction with clients and builders is another task again. You do need the office machine to actually handle that, and I believe we’ve got a team that’s reasonably relaxed and has a frank approach to how to handle those sort of interactions with builders and clients. So it’s straightforward. If you like it’s honest; if you’ve got a problem you admit you’ve got a problem.

They are, which is why I do try and invest things with humour. It’s humour that; I don’t know whether it is humour actually.

Well I’ve been through enough stress I think to understand there are certain things you don’t need to do, your life doesn’t need it and you don't perform any better, in fact you destroy everything and everybody.

No they’ve all happened for a reason. None of them have been a real break up. I think the only one that was; well there’ve only been three, four…

Gunn again, and Gunn Dyring.

Well they're jobs. Architectural projects are Vic Urban and Merchant Builders.

Oh yeah they…