an architect,Hybrid a missionary, and their Beauty improbable desires

Newell Platten Contents

Introduction viii Part one ......

1 Marnoo to Modernism 3 2 The grand tour 14 3 Settling down 37 4 Dickson and Platten: the early years 51 5 Greece 62 6 Dickson and Platten: the later years 91 7 Town planning, citizens’ campaign – and Monarto 107 8 The South Australian Housing Trust 117 9 Interlude 129 Part two ......

1 Ancestors 135 2 The Jewel of the Pacific 143 3 Land of childhood dreaming 169 4 Southern sojourn 197 5 Volcano bride 204 6 Prelude to war 220 7 Rabaul: a town no more 233 8 Last music 253 Part three ......

Epilogue 270 Acknowledgments, bibliography and photographs 282 Index 287 Map of Bismarck Archipelago

Introduction

y father’s final moments in a church before a handful of mourners, none of whom had prepared a eulogy, left me with a profound Msense of anti-climax, almost distress that a life that had been lived in exotic places, had been idealistic, adventurous, selfless and in many ways exemplary should pass so unremarked. On retiring from my own professional career I wanted to make good the omission and give voice to his silence, so I have spent many hours tapping out the story of his life. Perhaps not wanting to suffer a similar if more appropriate exit, I wrote my own memoir. Kind people read them, making various suggestions. One friend told me everyone was writing schoolday stories; no one wanted to read about missionaries nowadays, but perhaps, a document on my years as an architect, and his in the mission field, might work if I identified the necessary unifying themes. This idea accorded well with my wish in both accounts to understand the connections between inheritance, happenstance and performance.

viii I am after all my father’s son, so unifying themes were not difficult to find, despite the differences in our lives. Firstly there is Methodism, which for my father was belief, vocation and lifestyle. For me it was harness to a set of principles, then a lifestyle burden to be shrugged off, and finally purveyor of a fairy tale. If you ask what I believe in, I respond: atheism with leanings to a form of pantheism, in which the devil is capitalism, an insidious operator who by showering us with riches has seduced us into debasing the source of our spiritual wellbeing; that is to say, nature. However, it is practical Methodism that is relevant here, particularly issues of social justice and reform. Methodism is inherently a religion of reform. I happened into architecture at a time when two reform movements – Modernism and town planning – were at issue. My father wanted nothing less than to reform a society.

y father and my mother lived their most fulfilling years in the islands of New Britain and New Ireland, the two largest of Mhundreds of islands forming the Bismarck Archipelago, stretching like an arrowhead from the northeast coast of New Guinea to the equator. These are steamy mountainous islands, subject to earthquakes and volcanic upheavals, clad for the most part in dense rain forest. Humans might have entered the islands over 50,000 years ago. Coastal areas supported hunter–fisher–gardener lifestyles. People shaped domestic tools such as hoes, scoops, mortars and pestles from stone, bone, shell and wood. From forest trees they made canoes, and from reeds, leaves and bark they made baskets, nets and mats. Also, from these natural resources they shaped the spears, axes, shields and clubs of war. As basic needs of food, clothing and shelter were easily satisfied, people were able to create rich spiritual lives, which they transmitted down the generations through speech, dance, music and art. Cultures were based on animistic beliefs in spirits that lived in nature. These spirits could be harmful if offended or munificent if approached correctly: sorcerers and sorcery supplied the medium between humanity and spirits. People believed sickness and death were caused by sorcery; treatment involved counter-sorcery or rituals to root out guilty persons and take revenge. Life was never secure and usually short. The first Methodist missionary in New Guinea was a wiry, whiskery, missionary–adventurer named George Brown. He arrived at Port Hunter in the Duke of York Islands on a mission boat named John Wesley in August 1875. With him were a photographer, a naturalist, five married Fijian missionaries and their wives, three single Fijian missionaries and a boy from the islands, as interpreter. Equipment included a steam launch named Henry Reed. Brown purchased land at Kinavanua, on Port Hunter’s western headland, from village elders and began building a house.

ix Once established at Port Hunter, Brown explored places the Henry Reed could reach at a rate that left him rarely still, putting ashore at villages, meeting chiefs, handing out cloth, beads and tobacco, talking to people through interpreters and arranging the stationing of teachers where he deemed the prospects good. During four years of active service he visited villages spread along more than 500 kilometres of the New Britain coastline and over 200 kilometres of that of New Ireland, and he crossed the latter island twice. He studied the region’s flora and fauna, faced death many times on land and sea and took part in a reprisal expedition that saw him charged with manslaughter. He arrived in a country where no man walked around without a bundle of spears; when he left in January 1881, 2000 converts worshipped in twenty churches. Some 500 men from villages in the islands he had visited assembled to say farewell. These achievements cost him dearly, two of his children dying at Port Hunter and his own health wrecked. Colonisation began in 1884, when Britain and Germany resolved competing interests in the eastern end of New Guinea with an arbitrary east–west line through the central highlands. Britain took the section close to Australia, while Germany declared the Bismarck Archipelago and the northeast portion of mainland New Guinea a German protectorate. In 1906, Britain named her colony Papua. The privately owned New Guinea Company ran the German protectorate until 1899, when the Imperial German Government took over and moved the administrative centre from Finschhafen, on the mainland, to Herbertshohe (now Kokopo) at the northern end of New Britain, soon after appointing Albert Hahl governor of the new colony. Hahl persuaded the government to build a new administrative centre at the foot of a group of volcanoes, both active and extinct, at the sheltered innermost reach of Blanche Bay. He drained mangrove swamps, established a botanic garden, laid out broad tree-lined streets and named the place Rabaul, meaning mangrove, in the language of the Tolai people who lived there. In 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, Australian forces occupied Rabaul. In 1919 Australia was granted control of the colony under a League of Nations mandate. Rabaul’s subsequent short history of occupation and dispossession, war, violence, bloodshed and destruction is so tumultuous, its presence so powerful that I think of Rabaul as a femme fatale, a bewitching beauty with a demonic heart. Every attempt at possession ended in catastrophe. Today most of the twice-built town is an ashen waste after a devastating volcanic eruption in 1994, Kokopo again the administrative centre. Yet the original inhabitants drift back in defiance of governmental neglect. Tavurvur volcano smoulders away. Tourist ships call to soak up the magic.

x Rabaul harbour 2013, Tavurvur on the far right

y parents went to Rabaul in 1927, my father to serve a Methodist Mission that was fifty-two years old, its books recording 313 Mchurch buildings, eleven ministers, 277 indigenous pastor–teachers, 509 lay preachers, 9,875 scholars in day schools, and 39,020 members and adherents of the Church. The Mission could also boast of its role in providing rudimentary health services and eliminating intertribal enmities. However, these achievements had come at a cost. In spreading Christianity, most missionaries did their utmost to eradicate pre-Christian beliefs and practices connected with social magic and sorcery, not realising they were ‘ripping cogs out of working social mechanisms’. For want of ‘positive substitution’ (my father’s words), the indigenous people, already suffering government-sanctioned commercial exploitation of their land and labour, lost confidence in their old traditions, with debilitating consequences for village life. My father’s missionary career became distinguished by his capacity to recognise the ensuing malaise, understand the reasons and seek solutions. Unusually among missionaries he devoted much of his time to documenting the vanishing cultures and ways in which they equipped the natives in their struggle for existence. In a post-war article he expressed the hope that ‘the best in our way of life will blend with their way of life so that there may yet emerge a thoroughly Christian culture of a hybrid beauty and vigour all of its own and which will blossom abundantly in the waste places of New Guinea’. To find beauty by blending traditions with the new: this became an ideal I shared with my father as my architectural thinking evolved. Modernist architecture is mostly associated with the International Style’s plain boxy office buildings built in the second half of the twentieth century. My own work, as developed in collaboration with architect Bob Dickson,

xi took a direction that combined the theories and practices of Modernism with the crafts and ambiences of rusticity, a hybrid that became recognised as a short-lived but identifiable South Australian style. My other claim to fellowship with the hybrid is more abstract, for it relates to a desire that cities should somehow unite our contemporary, machine-assisted lifestyles with the human scale, vitality and atmosphere found in old- time towns and precincts. That desire took me to Greece to work with a famous urban planner, and so often distracted me from architecture that I sometimes wondered where my true path lay. These high aims, both my father’s and mine, met with muted success, frustration and failure to various degrees. This is not an account of resounding achievements – or failures – but it is, I dare to hope, a story of two lives lived with good intentions during an era of rapid change, which already looks so far away.

ne lives a life, then reflects upon it. Examining my father’s life was part of my own reflective process, so his story appears second in Othis account. My sources were mainly some exercise books of cuttings and copies of articles he wrote for TheMissionary Review and his albums of black-and-white photographs. There was once much more, but it disappeared during the Japanese occupation of New Ireland. Another valuable source was my mother’s short memoir for my niece Chilla Bulbeck’s book Australian Women in Papua New Guinea. When quoting directly from her words, I use a different font, to give my mother her own voice.

The author in Mango Avenue, Rabaul, in 2013. The greenery to the left covers the site of the former Methodist Church. Behind the roadworks ash pile is the still operating Rabaul Hotel. (See p. 145 for Mango Ave in 1927.)

xii Murin-an, Kyoto

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. George Bernard Shaw 1

Marnoo to Modernism

aking houses and loving gardens, and sometimes making and loving houses and gardens, came to consume so much of my life Mthat I often wonder how much I owe my grandfather; a grumpy train driver who built a garden around a house named Marnoo in Mile End. To the street, Marnoo presented rectitude: there was a Methodist Sunday morning look to its stolid bluestone façade, its two prim squares of buffalo grass set within borders of roses and carnations, its white gravel path leading to an L-shaped veranda and a front door that no one ever opened. The bitumen side path led past fruit trees to a small yard from which a back door opened into a large kitchen with an adjoining breakfast room. A dim passage, papered with dun-coloured fields of fallen leaves above painted wood-grain dados, connected the kitchen to closed-off bedrooms and the never-opened front door. One door opened into a darkened musty lounge room, revealing a piano in a corner, sombre armchairs squatting in the gloom. Enamelled-plaster dairymaids and shepherd boys stared with solemn eyes from pedestals and ledges, like museum effigies. Stairs off the passage led to a cellar storing home-made preserves and jams, labelled and dated. By custom established in times of a larger family, the oldest were eaten first. Jams so old that the ingredients now resembled geological phenomena: a top stratum of sugar to be chipped away, revealing coloured liquid for dribbling onto buttered bread in a runny puddle only hinting at fruit. We always ate in the breakfast room, really a little living room fitted with a fireplace, a train photograph above the mantlepiece, a rocking chair before the hearth, my grandfather’s chair. He sat there often, a short pudgy figure in braces, gently rocking, reading and grumbling. Much annoyed him: Catholics, Jews, the Victorian train drivers who ran late for his shifts on the Overland, drinkers, gamblers, people who danced and

3 those who enjoyed their Sundays. He rarely smiled, his jowls sagged, he combed what hair he had across a bald scalp, leaving a tidal line above his ears. His favourite reading seemed to be pamphlets denouncing alcohol, or Catholics in lurid tales of priestly shenanigans. If this was all I had to say about my grandfather he might be dismissed as a bigoted old misanthrope, as I dismissed him for years. But he had another side, seen behind a screen of vines and a white picket fence, in Marnoo’s backyard. An arched canopy of grape vines over a broad bitumen path divided the backyard. In summer the vines – red prince, black prince, lady’s fingers – formed a green vault of dappled light, in autumn their sticky bee-luring pendants smelt slightly of wine. In gardens on either side, hardly visible through the vines, fruit trees pruned like inverted umbrellas opened out to the sun. Between them, corn, lettuce, beets, beans, peas, rhubarb and tomatoes grew in squared plots bounded by narrow earth paths. More vines sheltered an outside laundry and a separate water closet, where squares of torn newspaper hung from a nail. Two kookaburras, each with one wing clipped, flopped lopsidedly here and there amongst the greenery. At the back of the garden were a garage, a fowl house and a small yard where my father’s youngest brother, who sold fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon, would sometimes pen his horse. The entire back garden was a collection of spaces complete within themselves, revealed to each other only in narrow vistas and momentary glimpses. You never saw the garden as a whole, which added mystery and disguised its limits; when young I thought the garden very large. Later, long after my grandfather had died and someone else owned Marnoo, I walked up the back lane and looked over the fence. It took some time before I was sure I had the right place, for the vines, fruit trees, horse yard and fowl house had disappeared; in their place couch grass spread fence to fence. I was surprised to see how small a space it was. Marnoo’s garden was for my grandfather a resource, a place for recreation and a haven. The main path and its trellis made a summerhouse, a cool tunnel of seasonal murmurs, rustling leaves and insect hums. My grandfather often sat dozily there on Sundays in a deck chair, Bible on his lap. On other days he stooped amongst his vegetables, pruned his fruit trees, fed his chooks. I think he gave to his garden a love he could not give his fellow men. His purpose in making a garden was to feed a family that included seven children; his achievement was a thing of beauty which represented much that his Methodist convictions stood for: the unity of the spiritual and the utilitarian, the morality of industry and the grace of manual labour. Unwittingly he had created a garden that, in my mind, had affinities with other gardens that symbolise aspects of religion, such as the paradise gardens of Japan, Zen gardens, and the Garden of Eden.

4 ost of my visits to Marnoo were made between the years of 1937 and 1942. I was taken there by aunts who presided over my brief spells Mfrom the savagely authoritarian boarding school in which my parents had placed me, so that my father could continue missionary work in New Guinea. This mostly drab but sometimes tropical and colourful chapter in my life has little direct relevance to the present account, save mentioning that in school subjects where graphic invention or illustrations were required, I showed some facility with design, drawing and watercolour. Also that, as a lonely boarder, I often amused myself by drawing objects that interest small boys: Spanish galleons, clippers, battleships and, after the beginning of the Battle of Britain, graceful Spitfires shooting down deadly Messerschmitts. To gauge the import of this pastime we need to move forward to year 1944. I was sixteen years old, in the second-stream leaving class at Unley High School. The door to the classroom opened and in walked the headmaster and a small man in a grey suit. The class rose, sat down again. The headmaster introduced his companion. He would talk to us about architecture, the headmaster said and left the room. The man in the grey suit explained that architects occupied themselves designing buildings and supervising their construction. They drew a lot, sometimes pictures of buildings they have imagined and, at other times, technical drawings for builders. He showed us some watercolours of imagined buildings: renderings he called them. He explained there was a university course you could do to become an architect. This was astonishing. I knew nothing about architecture, had never known or met or heard of an architect, was barely, if at all, aware that such a profession existed; now I was hearing you could earn a living by drawing. Everything seemed to fit: I was doing the right subjects and the making-of-buildings part aroused within me some slumbering creative instinct. I thought I could see my hitherto obscure future clearly lit and resolved to become an architect, almost while the man spoke. Two years later, thanks to a Commonwealth Government scholarship, I began first year studies for a degree of Bachelor of Engineering (Architecture) at the University of .

n 1946 the university was bursting out of its pre-war envelope. Ex-servicemen had invaded every course and from the old cricket Iground concrete buildings sprouted, their rough grey faces bristling with wires ready for brick coverings that would take years to arrive. In first year architecture mature ex-servicemen outnumbered naïve school leavers about three to one. The university had never been such a serious place of learning.

5 Over a period of three years, in the company of future designers of dams, silos, cranes, bridges and multi-storey building frames, we studied geology, chemistry, physics, mathematics pure and applied, the strength of materials, and design of structures, beginning with beams and posts and progressing to concrete slabs, retaining walls, roof trusses, structural frames in steel and concrete, and the ultimate horror – bridges supporting rolling loads. Mastering each subject to pass level became an anxious marathon of concentrated study that turned off, or defeated, not a few otherwise talented architectural students. Complementing these rigorous and time-consuming demands were the skill-based subjects we tackled at the School of Art, then in an old building on the south side of North Terrace, and at the School of Mines. In our first year at the School of Art, under the tutelage of Jacqueline Hick, we took up 4B pencils and on cartridge paper made drawings of ornamental mouldings in Classical and Gothic styles, complete with shadows. In another room we copied these same mouldings in clay, made wax moulds of our work and then plaster casts in the moulds. In the School of Mines woodwork shop we learned how to sharpen planes and chisels, and make, in model form, frames for L-shaped, hipped domestic roofs complete with every rafter, ridge, tie, purlin and fascia. When we had finished we could stand on them. We learned a little about first aid (at least we could knock up a splint), how to survey land, and how to draw the shadows that a building casts upon itself.* Study of the history of architecture began in second year and continued in third year. Lectures followed the course set in a book named A History of Architecture – On the Comparative Method by Banister Fletcher. Our lecturer was Gavin Walkley, a small precise man whose studious air and dry delivery belied an adventurous nature, giving no hint that he had actually seen, in the course of a youthful yacht voyage, many of the classical ruins whose former glories he so impersonally elucidated. Using an epidiascope in a stuffy darkened room, Gavin projected Banister

* Architectural education in was institutionalised for the first time in 1906 when , a partner in Adelaide’s largest architectural practice, established a part-time diploma course at the South Australian School of Mines, where he was already lecturing in mechanical engineering and conducting classes in architecture with a group of colleagues who, effectively, were teaching each other. Over following years the course split into two: the original diploma course, and the other conducted by the Faculty of Engineering in the , which conferred the Bachelor of Engineering (Architecture) degree on students who completed it after, notionally, three years of full-time study followed by two years part-time. The two courses converged at the School of Mines for subjects about architecture and peripheral practicalities, and at the School of Art for a few subjects dealing with representation.

6 Fletcher’s neat drawings of venerable monuments onto a wall and reeled off pertinent information regarding dates of construction, features and the like. Our task, save not falling asleep as he spoke, was to memorise this information and, later, copy the drawings in our own clumsy hands.* First year covered Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome and Byzantium; second year covered Romanesque, Mediaeval, Gothic and Renaissance periods in Italy, France and England. There architectural history ended. Apparently aspiring architects need learn nothing of the Industrial Revolution and the origins of the exciting new architecture that had emerged in Europe in the movement known as Modernism. Strange though it might seem, this was entirely consistent with the tenor of the school. Most lecturers came from the conservative office of Woods, Bagot, Laybourne Smith and Irwin, bringing with them a fondness for symmetry and classical details. Roy Wilson, who guided our first explorations in architectural design, excelled in the Inter-War Georgian Revival style favoured by the upper middle class, who thought it good taste. Classicism and its derivatives pervaded the course; almost everything we read about, drew, modelled or measured took us back to the eighteenth century and earlier. In the only field trip I can recall, Laybourne Smith took students to see St Patrick’s Church in Grote Street, a handsome example of the Academic Classical style, designed by . We became familiar with furniture by Hepplewhite and Chippendale, woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons and plaster ceilings by the Adam brothers: Late Renaissance figures all. In another instance, in an agonisingly slow process, we rendered in ink wash a composition of classical elements, known as an analytique. As taught, architecture was history and style; the tsunami of Modernism, although belatedly disturbing the waters of Gulf St Vincent, was not to be taken seriously. Laybourne Smith dismissed Modernism as a passing fad; Wilson radiated condescension. Students and course deliverers seemed to inhabit parallel universes, for when students expressed their own ideas about architecture, they turned to Modernism almost without exception (one notable exception being when Wilson pulled us into line by making us design a church facade in the Gothic style, complete with tower and spire). This schism coloured not only student life but also the early professional lives of many who studied at the time, a subject I shall revisit.

* Gavin was, in 1935, a founding member of the Eros Club, a club of South Australian expatriates who meet on the steps of Piccadilly’s famous statue, on a certain day in every year. Later, he revealed Modernist sympathies and exceptional modesty by commissioning Robin Boyd to design his family home in .

7 With Modernism missing in the curriculum, students gained knowledge from each other in an osmotic process. It is unlikely that many of us came to the course pre-informed. I certainly did not. My previous experience of buildings and their impacts had been predominantly negative, as in my grandfather’s gloomy house, even gloomier manses and a boarding school whose bleak Victorian Tudor façade eloquently expressed life within. On the other hand I had spent my early childhood in beautiful places where buildings in timber, bamboo and palm abounded, and in later years had grown fond of country towns distinguished by the consistency of stone and slate or iron, like Willunga and Terowie. These latter influences gave me, I think, an early feeling for material and texture, but that apart I was an architectural innocent and revealed as much in my first design project: a clubhouse for lifesavers, which I drew in something approaching the Inter-War California Bungalow style, only because I was familiar with the stripped-down version seen in many ordinary houses in the southeast suburbs of Adelaide. How I progressed from there to being an enthusiastic Modernist remains a blur, but I know who led the way. Brian Claridge had form. His father, Philip, was in partnership with Colin Hassell and Jack Hobbs McConnell, the architect responsible for some of Adelaide’s earliest modern buildings. Brian was articled to the firm, so by background and day-to-day experience had an advantage over most of his fellow students. Brian’s gift was his eagerness to share; to pass on to anyone who was interested the insights and knowledge his advantage gave him. It was this gangling, crinkle-faced, passionate and evangelistic student who first told me about Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and most assisted my stumbling progress into the world of modern architecture, as revealed in books and magazines, and by word of mouth. I still have a copy of An Introduction to Modern Architecture by J.M. Richards, a Pelican book published 1940, its pages yellowing but sound. I grow nostalgic just looking at the blue cover with its aerial perspective drawing of a working-class housing scheme. A pink sixpenny tram ticket acting as bookmark directs me to where the author attacks the London City Council (L.C.C.) for building flats in a ‘modified Georgian style’:

Large blocks of flats, which constitute a considerable proportion of the L.C.C.’s architectural work, look particularly absurd when small Georgian- paned windows, tiled roofs, cornices and cupolas, all of which are adapted from small country buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are piled into towering structures five or more stories high.

His chapter titled ‘Some Modern Buildings’ includes the plan of the first floor of a house at Garches, near Paris, by Le Corbusier and Pierre

8 Jeanneret. Within a stubby L formed around a terrace, a living room flows into a dining room past a curved screen, overlooks a large stairway void to an entry hall below, and extends into an unnamed space leading to a second set of stairs: an arrangement that is open, spacious and unlike any traditional floor plan. On another page a photograph shows the house to be a crisp, three-storey, cubic yet sculptural composition in which windows join in horizontal bands and the terrace rises through two storeys to a flat roof. This building and others like it showed us where we might go if we heeded the call Le Corbusier trumpeted in his 1927 polemic, Towards a New Architecture:

The history of Architecture unfolds itself slowly across the centuries as a modification of structure and ornament, but in the last fifty years steel and concrete have brought new conquests, which are the index of a greater capacity for construction, and of an architecture in which the old codes have been overturned. If we challenge the past, we shall learn that ‘styles’ no longer exist for us, that a style belonging to our own period has come about; and there has been a Revolution.

A Revolution! Out with the authority of history, the dictatorship of style and the shackles of symmetry. In with freedom to invent, to explore new technologies and advances in engineering, to open houses to light and views, to build for everyman. How could such a revolution be resisted? Added to Richards’ rational voice and Le Corbusier’s emotional appeal we had Sigfried Giedion’s monumental Space, Time and Architecture and, seen in magazines, seductive photographs of works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Oscar Niemeyer and others. Against such heavy artillery the local scene, with its tired Georgian gestures, simply was no challenge. We were also inspired by a conviction that modern architecture would make life better, as Le Corbusier explained:

Nevertheless there does exist this thing called ARCHITECTURE, an admirable thing, the loveliest of all. A product of happy peoples and a thing which in itself produces happy peoples. The happy towns are those that have an architecture. Architecture can be found in the telephone and in the Parthenon. How easily could it be at home in our houses! Houses make the street and the street makes the town and the town is a personality which takes to itself a soul, which can feel, suffer and wonder. How at home architecture could be in street and town!

9 Design Examination: I am fourth from front on the left-hand end of the desk. Brian Claridge is one row back, just over my left shoulder.

o it came to pass that Modernism prevailed. To be fair to the school, lecturers who presided over design classes in my later years did not Scondemn or resist; indeed some like Reginald Steele and the gorgeously bow-tied Gordon Beaumont Smith could seem genuinely encouraging. However, I’m not sure how deep was our understanding of this thing called Modernism. I think we recognised that it was a social as well as an artistic movement, but our concerns were primarily about architectural form. We had a few guiding principles: buildings should be truthful, that is, express their purpose and manner of construction; decoration was passé, although artists’ inputs were welcome; planning should be spacious, free and open; roofs should be flat or single-pitched and space should flow inside to outside through walls of glass. These made a useful foundation but did not ensure convincing creations. Years would pass before I could put together something like a working design philosophy. An architectural student was expected to find employment in an architectural office on completing three years of full-time study. This was a critical moment in an architect’s development since a career could blossom or stagnate, depending on the quality of, and dynamics within, the employing office. In 1940s Adelaide only two or three individual practising architects

10 and a couple of partnerships were known to show interest in modern architecture; of these the partnership of Claridge, Hassell and McConnell was held to be the most proficient. McConnell, a -educated, solid man, who had earned money in boxing bouts during the Depression, was of the hard-living, hard-working approach to life, and I suspect a well-lubricated lunch might have had something to do with his late arrival for his eagerly awaited talk to students and the content of the desultory remarks he aimed at some dimly projected black-and-white images. He seemed a man deeply uninterested in what he was doing. At the time I was disappointed but since have wondered if this brief and rambling exposition reflected his attitude to the school and those who ran it. When, years later, I asked him what he had thought of the local architects when he arrived in Adelaide in the late 1930s, he replied, ‘I thought they were mad’. Jack Cheesman gave the next talk. Jack was a partner in Lawson, Cheesman and Doley, the other firm known to be receptive to Modernism – even if it never achieved McConnell’s control. Jack had worked in America and travelled to Europe before the war. He turned up sober and enthusiastic, talked about work and the value of travel, showed coloured- ink sketches he’d made of buildings and landscapes: free, happy drawings, quickly done. They were charming, Jack was inspiring, and it was on his door I knocked when the time came to get a job. I showed him some of my design renderings. I was an impatient water-colourist, favouring a free technique that produced a bold-looking result, when it came off. Jack seemed to like them and called in his partner Maurice Doley. They took me on.

awson, Cheesman and Doley Architects occupied rooms on the top floor of Edments Building, in what is now . George LGavin Lawson had designed the building. The façade features patterned red-brick spandrel panels, an indication of George’s interest in the decorative potential of a humble material, which he further explored in his Tudor-style houses, where he used over-burned, often fused-together clinker bricks in external walls and internal fireplaces. This, as far as I could see, was his one enduring contribution to the design vocabulary of the practice. In 1949 he appeared to be an irascible old man on the edge of retirement, spending many hours on a golf course, ostensibly winning clients. Initially, I was disappointed to learn I would be working for Maurice Doley, not the man who had attracted me to the office, but I soon understood that Maurice cared for the bigger proportion of clients while Jack Cheesman, who had joined George in 1932, was in the middle

11 of a two-year time-consuming term as Federal President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. I also began to discover what a special person Maurice was, how much humour, warmth and integrity his flintily ironic personality disguised. Jack and Maurice might have timed their run at architecture more adroitly. Not only was the Adelaide of their most creative years insular, conservative and self-satisfied, they had been hit with two long periods when building activity all but ceased: the Depression of the 1930s and the war. In New York, Jack had worked for York and Sawyer, a firm well known for Beaux-Arts, or neo-Renaissance-style bank buildings, and had studied at New York University, which followed the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design curriculum. Neither of these pursuits could have brought him close to modern architecture; this he observed when travelling in Europe, in the work of the Bauhaus and the Dutch architect, Dudok. Maurice, who had lived on a farm near Willunga during the Depression, had not travelled at all. Given these backgrounds it is remarkable, and greatly to their credit, they were so interested in Modernism and so open to ideas and experiment. That said, little was happening in 1949 to encourage them. Adelaide was only slowly recovering from its wartime hiatus. Imaginative clients, money, building materials and labour were in short supply, and to spread resources as widely as possible the Playford Government had placed limits on the size and cost of a house that any one person could build. Jack, building his own house at Port Noarlunga, eased the impact of these restrictions by building a shell that he then furnished with polished plywood cupboards that were also door-high room dividers. Bedrooms, fitted for every conceivable need and cabin-sized for the children, opened off the living room; dark-stained timber boards supported on saw-cut rafters and purlins floated overhead; a stone wall with a fireplace comprised one end. Sweeps of plate glass looked out to sea. It was an adventurous and friendly interior that offered a glimpse of what Jack might have achieved had he spent more time at a drawing board. Instead, he and Maurice both entrusted most design work and documentation to six inexperienced assistants, something I welcomed at the time but now think was dangerously generous. An analysis of works from this period would list a number of minor successes but no substantial achievement, and might be passed over entirely but for the discovery of Solomit, the trade name given to panels of wire-bound straw made in a factory in the South Australian wheat-belt town of Freeling, using machinery imported from Europe. The panels were two inches thick, four feet ten inches wide and any length. A small brochure in the office showed how panels, held up

12 with steel frames and plastered both sides, could be used to make cool rooms. Some houses had also been made this way. As far as I know, an architect named Andrew Benko first used the material, unplastered and painted, as ceilings in a split-level, open-planned Modernist house he designed for a friend of Maurice’s, named Les Wright. I first saw the house while it was under construction and like others in the office was struck with the ceiling’s insulating properties, quiet acoustics, and good looks. Apparently, Ratsak dealt with mice. Soon it was the preferred ceiling. Not many clients had the stomach for it, but two who did were Graham Steen and Gunter Niggemann, young men who had formed a company named Functional Homes, believing a market existed for small, low-cost and well-designed houses in the modern idiom. Maurice was their chosen architect. I did some sketch designs; a draughtsman named Ray White prepared technical drawings. The result of these combined efforts, realised in a prototype under red gums near Montacute Road, was a steel-framed rectangular building under a low-pitch gable roof; its sidewalls glass and timber, ceilings straw, floors waxed cork on concrete, and end walls rugged stone. It was an attractive, practical, well-made, sunny, quiet, warm and friendly house that nobody wanted – Adelaide, as ever, a relentless rejecter of the new. Gunter went home to Germany. One more Functional Home was built: by Graham, for himself. I remember seeing an article about it published somewhere. By the end of 1951 I had graduated and saved enough money to travel.

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