This house featured in Home Beautiful; the pictures of my daughter and I probably mark some kind of high water mark in my life; I still had my strength; I felt promise, optimism, respected, sadly, it wasn’t to be.
House called ‘Tranquility’
Waverley Creek – 1969
The Massy Huts were erected on thin slabs of hand mixed concrete that are still there forty-five years later. There was a big Mess Hall and an Ablution Block with canvas showers on ropes and thunderbox toilets.
My First Building: Regent Street
I was very proud of it; not simply my workmanship, but the conception; it fitted and appeared as natural in it’s location as if it had been built that way in 1870. I planted a multitude of trees.
The Origins of the film script ‘The Parisienne’
I spent a few days location scouting when I sold the Limited Rights to my short script. Scouting conjures up all kinds of ideas; I found scenes for films I hadn't even thought of writing, or wished I could write.
Christmas in the Carnarvons – 1966
A missing finger indicates death of a child. On a cave wall in The Basin a whole line of hands show missing fingers; these are among the last hand stencils made, still sparkling fresh after 150 years.
Quadboxes, Roadrangers and Thermodynes
When I was sixteen we got a tandem drive Diamond Reo but what sorted the ‘men from the boys’ on this truck was it’s quadruplex transmission. A Quad box was two gearboxes in tandem.
Bettridges Bridge
In these slides most of the workers can be seen wearing Army Surplus clothing; many of the men had not long been demobbed; some even knew Dad from the airstrips he'd built during the war.
Carbine Creek
On a later visit the engraving had become ‘known about’ and targeted for vandalism and graffiti; not long after this steel cages were welded over the engravings to protect them.
Bali: Surfing before the ‘fame’
With hindsight I’d give quids to have some 8mm footage of those days. It was the same time that William Eggleston was producing what would become his signature work.
Paris 1989
I'd had the pleasure of going to the screening of an original print of Jean Cocteau's 1946 classic La Belle et la Bete; the nascent shimmer of the silver halides off the print.
