Six months have gone by since I last wrote about living in our tree house. Marion’s birthday went by a few weeks ago. She would have attained the ripe old age of 150 on Valentine’s day had she managed, in some magical combination of obstinacy and vegetarianism, to defy death. There are some noises being made out there about “celebrating” her life. So far nothing has even come close to revealing the Marion I have come to know. I had better get on with this.

In addition to the usual excuses — the pandemic, a broken wrist, too much chocolate — I blame my lack of progress on a mental block concerning the topic that is up next. I cannot go any further in telling you about Marion’s life until we talk about her mother, and mothers in general. Mothers. I am still not certain I understand the concept, even though I had one and I am one.

So. It’s the one thing we all have in common, this experience of having been part of someone else. Unless we’re living in the Matrix, every single person in this world, even the Son of God Himself, got here thanks to the body, blood, sweat and toil of a woman. A child, who begins in a blending of bodies, finally leaves the body of the mother and becomes other. There is something that happens there, some imprint, some connection that is unique in all the world. Your mother shapes you in so many more ways than just your body growing in her womb. Your mother leaves a psychic imprint on you, a special kind of birthmark, so to speak, that has the power to shape your whole life.

And Marion had an extraordinary mother. It’s really not possible to understand what kind of person she was without a glimpse into this relationship. Although she adored her father, Jeremiah, he died when she was just eleven. (More on him later, because it’s an interesting story.) But the upshot was this: Marion’s development as an artist and a human being took place in an environment saturated with strong, progressive, intellectual women.

This is what Marion has to say about her mother, Clara Mahony, writing, as she often did, in the third person about herself:

“Her father was an Irish poet, journalist and educator; her mother the most democratic of human beings, a mother who never dreamed of dictating to her children and a rambunctious five they were.” (MoA IV, p. 130a)

In fact, Marion turned over some 13 pages of The Magic of America (MoA) to “notes jotted down by my mother – Clara Hamilton Mahony.” So let’s take a look into Clara, and what made her the kind of mother who would never dream of dictating to her children.

Clara’s father Augustus Perkins and his bride Mary Lovejoy migrated to Tremont, Illinois, from regions eastward, and there Augustus set up a practice as a country doctor. Illinois, then, was still the frontier west (think Little House on the Prairie), but Clara‘s world was far from a gun-slinging, rough, hardscrabble existence spent dodging Indians and fighting off wolves and bears. It was full of interesting characters, progressive politics, community building and mutual support. In her words:

“Tremont became the county seat so the brilliant men of the county, like our great [Abraham] Lincoln, Judge [David] Davis, [Stephen A.] Douglas and others were often entertained by our good people though they could not claim them as residents. My Mother told me that when the court was in session she often from our house on the hill could hear the men in the court house roar with laughter at the stories they were telling at two or three o’clock in the morning. All know of Lincoln’s gift of storytelling and my father could almost match him.

The ladies were noted for their refinement, intellect and good cooking. Folks from the neighboring cities flocked to our town when an entertainment was given for they gave us credit for knowing how to entertain after the grand manner. Let me describe one of the banquets: Daniel Webster was reported on his way West and that he would stop in Tremont. All went to work. The Town Hall must be decorated. One of the residents was an East Indian sea captain. He had silks and tapestries that he kindly lent and the ladies used them in the decorating. All who had cut glass or silver lent it. … The ladies saw to it that the tables were loaded with tempting food and they were dressed in silks and satins that they had brought to the wilderness in their chests.

[…] Mr. Lincoln was a frequent visitor at our house and my mother he admired and honored. When he was made president he remembered his friends of old Tremont; Mr. Davis of Bloomington he made a judge of the Supreme Bench. John Albert Jones, who used to walk five or ten miles before breakfast and drank from ten to fifteen cups of tea at the parties, he made judge of the Court of Claims, and my father, Brigade Surgeon in the Civil War.” (MoA IV, p. 91-3)

Clara’s father traveled far and wide, up to 70 miles on horseback, to see his patients, and would be gone for days at a time. “In his thirty or more years he never lost a mother or a child,” Clara recounts. He was somtimes paid in produce, which was a bit awkward when it came time for him to pay his own bills.

He was the life of every gathering and the amusement of the young folks when he danced, as he kept perfect time and danced on his toes. His horse he always petted and would talk to it. If he fell asleep the horse would always stop when it came to the gate of a place where somebody had been sick, and father would open his eyes, look, and say “Nobody sick here now, Pomp, go along,” and the horse would move on. I used to love to drive over the country with him, and sometimes he would say, “Daughter we shall probably take dinner here and they will possibly have a simple meal, just bacon swimming in potatoes, but eat as though you enjoyed it.” (MoA IV, p. 95)

“Many tied their wagons around father’s yard, went to church and knew they would be invited to dinner. Father was a fine provider and mother a tip top cook. ‘I would drive 15 miles to get a piece of your lemon pie,’ was heard and I myself still think they were the best I ever tasted.” (MoA IV, p. 100)

Several in the community could act well, and they had “a fine Lyceum.” The Lyceum movement flourished before the Civil war, involving lectures, debates, discussions, and talent productions. I find it fascinating that the ideal community Marion and Walter were creating in Castlecrag echoes so faithfully the ethos of the Lyceum movement, which she would surely have heard about from her parents and grandparents.

Clara’s sister, Myra, was a very fine performer on the piano, and “added to her lovely self, that attracted the young people.” She gave piano lessons her whole life, and Marion adored her. Apparently, everyone adored her. I have wondered mightily why she never married, but MoA doesn’t divulge.

There was much good cheer and good feeling but much work, but no one of us ever heard our mother speak angrily or even impatiently, and we were no models. […] Mother was called Queen of the West and when she was arrayed in her yellow satin which set off her marble white skin, black hair and stately figure she looked it every inch. (MoA IV, p. 100)

So Clara was raised by an extraordinary, intelligent, charming woman and a kind, intelligent, entertaining and generous father.

When the Civil War broke out, Augustus went to Virginia to serve as a Brigade Surgeon, and Clara applied for and was assigned as a teacher in one of Chicago’s public schools. That’s presumably where she ran into Jeremiah, who no doubt through the force of his personality and his outstanding wordsmithing abilities swept this bright young lady right off her feet.

Clara and Jeremiah (aka Jere) had five children, of which Marion was number two. The year Marion was born, 1871, was the year of the great Chicago Fire. They fled with Marion and big brother Jerome out of the city, eventually setting up house in “the loveliest spot you could imagine, beyond suburbia — four houses and no others within a mile in any direction.” This was Hubbard Woods:

Such a wonderful place for children to develop, God’s university. All the wonders of the wilderness and yet so convenient to the city that both father and mother slipped into the city for their daily work. […] We children were safeguarded by a grand Irish housekeeper, and educated by that greatest of teachers — Mother Nature — and in her loveliest mood. (MoA IV, p. 131)

On the weekends, Clara and Jere’s legions of friends would take the train out to the house in Hubbard woods for gatherings – this was when Marion was called upon to exhibit her barefooted tree climbing skills. Again, this was definitely no Little House on the Prairie. I imagine these parties, as the French so aptly describe, would have been bien arrosées.

Katy Tully, the Irish housekeeper, was far from a stodgy governess. She took the children outdoors on “adventure after adventure.” Upon reaching school age, the Mahony kids would troup a mile up the road to the Winnetka schoolhouse. All was paradise until an accidental fire burned the house to the ground. They lost everything and had to move back into the city. Things took a downhill turn at that point, it seems.

It’s not clear from MoA, but Jeremiah, true to his Irish roots, did like his drink and the fire undoubtedly put them into financial difficulties. Perhaps managing five children, a husband teetering on the brink, and suddenly changed circumstances precipitated it, or perhaps it was with Grandfather Augustus on his deathbed and Grandmother Mary and aunt Myra needing help, but Marion was bundled up and sent to Tremont for a year.

There while Aunt Myra went to the surrounding districts on her horse Lucy, and to the neighboring towns giving piano lessons, the wee girl went to school and managed so to ingratiate herself to her teacher that they became lifelong correspondents in spite of the fact that she told a lie to her when asked if she was chewing gum. I had the habit that year of telling lies — when Aunt Myra asked me if I had brushed my teeth or Grandma asked it I had been sliding on the ice – wearing out my shoes and so forbidden. […] My present philosophical analysis is that I was quite consciously rebellious of this to my mind quite unwarranted assumption of authority on their part, especially in things that Mother would never have dreamed of opposing — but mostly just a general stand against authority. (MoA IV, p 133)

And then Augustus died, and Marion was sent back home again, to where the only playground was the streets and a “pocket handkerchief” back yard. She was of course no girly-girl, mentioning a penchant for hitching her sled to passing wagons in the winter. When Clara took her aside at one point, gently suggesting she stop being such a tomboy, Marion was crushed but did her best to comply. Not long thereafter, Jere died. In MoA Marion says “Angina Pectoris” but it was likely a laudanum overdose, or maybe a combination of alcohol and laudanum. I suppose that will stop one’s heart. We will never know. Like I said, I will write more about Jere later. So with five children, the youngest Leslie only four years old, Clara was suddenly a single mom.

The whole responsibility in every field on her alone, economic, domestic, educational, social — and how she filled them all, and her loneliness without her beloved only on the rarest of occasions becoming visible to the rest of us.

[…] for some time [Father] was principal of one of Chicago’s schools. His teachers adored him. one night not long after his death, Mrs. Young came in with a box which she handed to Mother. Mother said, “It feels as if it were filled with gold,” took it to the mahogany table, opened it and in truth it was filled with gold – a shining thousand dollars to give all the thrills of a miser to one who was furthest possible from being one, collected by the teachers who knew and loved them both, as an expression of their affection. (MoA IV, p. 136)

This Mrs. Young was the principal of the school attended by all the Mahony children at the time — Jerome, Marion, Gerald, Georgine and Leslie — and she expected her teachers to “make all Jere’s children shine.” She also coached Clara for the principal’s exam, and this is how Clara ended up principal of the Komensky School, an elementary school in one of Chicago’s tougher, working class neighborhoods, a job she held until she was 76.

In a letter from 1917, Marion broaches the topic of Clara’s retirement with her. (Clara, born in 1841, would have been 76):

I do think you should resign and see no reason why life shouldn’t be just as full of interest and enjoyment out of school as in it. I certainly could keep you busy if you were over here, and know the thousand things you will be interested in if you stay where you are. (MoA II, p. 196)

In a birthday letter to her sister Georgine in February 1917, Marion writes:

As I have been thinking back we must be just about the age of Mother when she was plugging for the principal’s exam with Mrs. Young at which time a new career began for her and for Chicago schools under her influence, with her whole school as an art gallery and the music unbelievable to the Superintendents and her continued courses with her teachers, initiating what afterward became University Extension courses. She certainly has done a splendid life’s work since then so after I get a good rest I am going to start to emulate her. (MoA II, p. 194)

(Fun story about Ella Young, as an aside … “Mrs. Young, interestingly enough, when thrown out of her position (as Superintendent of Schools) by a political mayor catering to job seekers who resented a woman’s holding so remunerative a position, was reinstated through the uproar of “public opinion,” this time the women of Chicago who in the midst of the turmoil had received the franchise.” (MoA IV, p. 136) (NB: Illinois ratified the 19th amendement in 1989, and the League of Women Voters was announced in Chicago on Marion’s birthday in 1920))

The year after Jere died, Aunt Myra and Grandmother Mary came to live with them, “and from that time formed an integral part of the family.”

The fact that Aunt Myra lived with us during the years after Father’s death meant we all had a second mother and a wonderful bosom friend. A pianist and teacher, she too was a natural educator and took lessons of all the great pianists who came to Chicago in those days. (MoA IV, p. 145)

These were also the early years of Hull House, and both Clara and Ella Young were connected to this influential and progressive network of women. Hull House, for those of you who, like me, are ignorant of important American social movements, was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams (the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and founder of Social Work movement in the US, among other things) and her college friend and paramour Ellen Gates Starr. I could tell you more but Wikipedia does it very well so here you go:

In the 19th century a women’s movement began to promote education and autonomy, and to break into traditionally male-dominated occupations for women. Organizations led by women, bonded by sisterhood, were formed for social reform, including settlement houses such as Hull House, situated in working class and poor neighborhoods. To develop “new roles for women, the first generation of New Women wove the traditional ways of their mothers into the heart of their brave new world. The social activists, often single, were led by educated New Women.^[12]

Hull House became, at its inception in 1889, “a community of university women” whose main purpose was to provide social and educational opportunities for working class people (many of them recent European immigrants) in the surrounding neighborhood. The “residents” (volunteers at Hull were given this title) held classes in literature, history, art, domestic activities (such as sewing), and many other subjects. Hull House also held concerts that were free to everyone, offered free lectures on current issues, and operated clubs for both children and adults.

Clara almost certainly offered art classes at Hull House, as she also did in her own home on the weekends. Many of Chicago’s wealthy, progressive women donated funds and volunteered there, including Clara’s friend Mary Wilmarth, a reformer and suffragist whose daughter, Anna, became Marion’s lifelong friend. Anna funded Marion’s university education at MIT, and Mary coached her in French for the entrance exams. (Another remarkable resident of Hull House was Frances Perkins, appointed in 1932 by FDR as Secretary of Labor, the first female cabinet member in the US.)

(Fun story about Anna Wilmarth, as an aside: she married a University instructor in 1897, and then divorced him twelve years and two children later. In 1911 she married attorney Harold Ickes, who later served for 13 years as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, responsible for implementing the New Deal. Anna herself served in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1929-1935. She was a passionate advocate for Native Americans, and was killed in a car accident in Velarde New Mexico in 1935, on a research trip studying the Navajo and Pueblo. Marion writes: “She didn’t do her work from the outside but became an intimate friend of the Indians and was admitted to their very secret ceremonies. She learned to know their reality of their different way of thinking and never spoke of them in the light manner so customary with the rational thinkers.” New Mexico? Whoa. By the way, Harold remarried at 64, to a 25-year old. One of their children, Harold M. Ickes, became Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff.)

I hope you are beginning to see how dialled in Clara, and by extension Marion, were to the progressive, feminist cirles of pre-war Chicago. Both Marion’s mother and her Aunt Myra were single professionals. Most, if not all, of the people they hung out with were advocating for the franchise, for women to attend university and have careers, for women’s and immigrants’ rights, for peace and equity. Marion would have been encouraged to stand up for what she wanted, to go after a university education, to develop herself as an intellectual — without any need for a man.

In fact there is exactly zero mention, anywhere in Marion’s writings, that she had any interest whatsoever in boys. She had some intense female “crushes,” but I’ll save that for another post.

Carl Jung once wrote, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” Clara lived life to the full, and spared Marion the burden of her unfulfilled dreams. She was free her to follow her own, and she did, halfway around the world. What better gift can a parent bestow upon a child?

One last anecdote, before I close this very long chapter, that reveals what an exceptional soul Clara Mahony was for the time and era:

After the baby period passed, Mother took her roistering family [including Myra and Grandma] back to Hubbard Woods for each summer long vacation. […] Mr. Merriles had started building houses west of the tracks and then, I suppose in the pinch of some depression (such an absurdity these depressions) had left them all in their various stages of completion. For years we just chose the best one of them still left and camped therein for the two months. They were gradually disposed of the best one each year being occupied the next year, so we passed down the line, but always so long as there was a roof, a floor and a few walls, it suited us perfectly. We bothered with no furniture. Mattresses on the floor were luxury enough and when extra guests arrived a blanket on the floor was perfectly satisfactory. There must have been some sort of cooking arrangement though I have no recollection of it, so little was cooking a part of our life, except that when we went out early in the morning for the day’s adventure Mother always had one cooked dish.

No one ever had more wonderful holidays than we. As we started on the trail, sometimes we would be joined by neighbors or sometimes by city folk who came out for a lark. (MoA IV p 148-9)

The whole area, to Marion’s extreme chagrin, was eventually sold up and public access lost. Later, in the ideal Sydney suburb she and Walter designed and built in Castlecrag, they made sure that the lower levels of the valleys and ravines remained public property, a kind of park system, giving everyone accessibility to “all its pristine grace and majesty.” That ethos can be traced directly back to these fabulous summers and to the gift of having had a mother like Clara.

Also worth noting is the familial lack of interest in cooking. It was later remarked that Marion’s idea of cooking was slicing up some potatoes, covering them with milk, and putting the dish in the oven. That awesome lemon pie? Not going to happen. The myriad intellectual, artistic and community-building gifts Mary Perkins passed along to Clara and then to Marion apparently did not include a taste for domestic and culinary skills.

There is no mention in MoA, as far as I can find, of Clara’s death. The notes she wrote for Marion were done in her 84th year. The public record lists her date of death as April 21, 1927, at the age of 85. (The same year our house was under construction). The correspondence back and forth across the Pacific must have been copious, but Marion includes very little of it in MoA. Her death would have hit Marion like a ton of bricks. She had moved to Castlecrag two years earlier, alone, in 1925, after enduring years of frustration, loneliness and heartbreak over the Canberra project with Walter. She had just been introduced to the writings of Rudolph Steiner and her life was starting to shift from architecture into education and theatre. I cannot help but believe that Clara’s death and the years of separation from her family were contributing factors to the split she made with Walter in 1930, when she hightailed it back to Chicago and her sister, Georgine. Of course, more on that later, too.

This passage in a letter to her niece ten years earlier, during the war when no one could travel by ship because it was too dangerous, really tugged at my heartstrings, especially now, during this COVID pandemic, when I am also stuck down here in Australia, homesick and unable to see any of my own family:

December 20, 1917 – Dearest Clarmyra, […] I have had an attack of the collywobbles and Walt has been away for ten days and won’t be back for four more and I want my mama and my sister and my baby child. However I don’t want them enough to risk their being mined, so we’ll have to make the best of it. But the days don’t go swiftly when one has been sick and is alone and has been terribly disappointed. My what a lugubrious letter I am writing. […] (MoA II, p. 203b)

As far as I know, Marion never did see her mother again.

Images copyright New York Historical Society

Sometimes late at night if I can’t sleep, I walk out onto the deck and look up into the branches of the big gum tree in our yard and watch the tips of her long, fingerlike branches bend to catch the passing breaths of air. Her latin name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, is much more dignified than the common one, river red gum. She’s leaning at a seemingly precarious angle, but it’s understandable when you look towards the street and see the massive dead trunk of another eucalypt that must have been lording it over this spot when she was just a baby. She had to grow sideways to catch the light. Once the big boy next door had died, she was free to stretch back upright, reclaiming the sky for herself.

Her kind are known for dropping limbs at random when under stress, hence another common name: widowmaker. The January day we began the restoration was hot, and the workers showed up to find she had shed a big branch during the night. It had missed the house, but I worried. Would the next one punch a hole in the roof? Andrew, the foreman, told me if it were him, he’d cut the tree down. In the end I had an arborist do a check-up; he pronounced her healthy and strong. What a relief. Not a day goes by now but I look up into her branches and send a silent greeting. I have a feeling she is glad we have removed the paving that had cut into her base and kept the rain from reaching her roots and that we have freed her from the ivy that had been choking her lower limbs and trunk.

This is another thing that Marion and I have in common: our love of trees. Love is not quite the right word — perhaps it’s more accurately described as reverence and kinship. I have read so much about trees and forests, have even written upon occasion about these fellow beings. The deeper I go, the more I am fascinated. Anyone who shares my obsession is by definition a soul mate.

In fact, the first thing that really struck me when I started reading Marion’s memoir was something she wrote in a letter to Walter, who had just left for a long sojourn in India:

14 October, 1935, Castlecrag : Dear Walt, This morning I climbed the gum tree and sawed off the parts that were contacting the four telephone wires. They were growing so beautifully it seemed a shame but the tree doesn’t look bad now and the widespreading branches will soon put things entirely to rights I am sure. It seemed like old times to be climbing trees. I was famous for that in my childhood, climbing trees the boys couldn’t climb. […]

MoA, P. 15

Now I myself am not, nor have I ever been, a tree climber. I do, however, have an imagination and the thought of shimmying up a gum tree at my advanced age of 55 is a bit daunting. Marion, at the writing of this letter, was nearly a decade older than me! Here’s another passage, in another letter written a week later:

21 October, 1935. Castlecrag — the little Chinese rug is a constant joy and I love to tell everybody that it was your parting shot. A having a great thrill feasting off our own loquats. Every morning I gather a dozen big ones. So far my eating expenses are nil. The girls bring out so much Sundays when they come to rehearsals that I live on it the rest of the week. Went to the dentist yesterday. Though I haven’t been for over a year he didn’t find anything to do except clean them. With an air of resignation he said they were strong teeth and would last me my lifetime. I fancy he may not have counted on that decision of ours to live for a hundred and fifty years – only way to get through what we have undertaken. […]

MoA, p. 18

The combination of these two passages was the turning point for me, the moment that I said to myself, I have to write about Marion. Here she was, living alone, Walter off in India, and she just gets up one morning, sees the branches and the telephone lines, and climbs up in to the tree and deals with it. She’s taking obvious joy in her independence, her thriftiness and good health.

I’ll tell you more about her childhood tree climbing prowess later, I promise. But I wanted to lure you in with that scene so you could begin to see what kind of person she was.

I may have mentioned that Marion was famous for her architectural renderings. She pioneered a presentation style that included a drawing of the house in its landscape setting, with the floorplan and/or various elevations set out beneath it. Here’s the drawing for our house, which I can’t be certain was from her pen but you get the general idea:

Now look at this drawing of a house in Castlecrag:

Look at that tree, compared to the house and the plan! It dwarfs everything. In the text, she writes […] This tree too, an Angophora Lanceolata, loving the spectacular, chose the edge of a precipice thus dominating the gully. “Loving the spectacular,” indeed!

You’ll note the No. 6 at the top of the picture. In fact, this is the 6th of 24 “Forest Portraits” that Marion drew, all of which are included in the Magic of America. To see all of them you can go to the digital version – it’s a bit dated, so this link will take you to the front page, and then you will have to navigate in the menu on the left down to section III, the Municipal Battle. Each chapter (Numbers 1-24) in that section is headed by a forest portrait. (Navigating through the pages within chapters is done with the arrows at the top of the menu, in case you want to read more of what she has written.)

I will write about more of her Forest Portraits later, given my tree obsession and the fact that they were very important to her, a major part of what she wanted to create. And they’re just magnificent. But let’s take a moment now to just let that title sink in: Forest Portraits. These are not pictures of trees. They are portraits of forests. You don’t paint a portrait of a thing, but of a being. I think that says it all.

To me, this drawing perfectly captures Marion and Walter’s basic philosophy of nature: magnificent, powerful, beautiful. They were diametrically opposed to the idea that to build housing, one must subdue, tame, and control everything and then install cookie-cutter human habitations and plant non-native vegetation in a way that evoked “home” (read: England). Instead, their way was to work with Nature, adapt to her contours, leave the trees alone, and blur the edges with native plantings so that the house would not be a simply a house, but a part of the landscape. Like it is supposed to be there.

To me, it’s the difference between a building and a place. A house that is nestled into the contours of the land, built with natural, preferably local materials and surrounded by native vegetation becomes an organic part of the landscape. The humans living in it are thus connected to the land and feel at home. It is restful in a soul sense. The house and its inhabitants are rooted, like a tree, to this place, which is so much more than just four walls and a roof. It’s the birds in the bushes, the wind in the trees at night, the rocks and moss and bugs and creatures invisible to the eye working their magic in the soil.

Contrast this with the typical manner of things — flattening contours, chopping down trees, removing rocks, and erecting a series of chock-a-block clones in an attempt to remind its inhabitants of another place entirely. How can that be good for the soul? How can people be properly connected to a place if they’re pretending it’s somewhere different? Or just any generic place?

The third thing that convinced me that I was fated to write about Marion was the coincidence that an image of the interior of our house, Salter House, is positioned in the Magic of America in the midst of a text describing the Angophora.

[…] In these trees we seem to be seeing muscles extending and contracting, the trunk pours itself out over the rocks seeming to attach itself to them by viscid masses — and here’s the picture of the interior of our house — and even in the leaves we find the type of water in manifestation, the waves, the half or crescent moon, a type of leaf which we find nowhere else.

An odd kind of juxtaposition, if you didn’t know that I was obsessed with the shapes of Australia’s gum trees, or that I was friends with the one in our yard. As I am learning by studying Indigenous knowledge, time is not linear, but circular. Thanks, Marion! I’m on it!

Our house. I will never forget walking into it (her? him?) for the first time that fateful September day in 2017. Even with the faux-Toorak landscaping, even with the blinds drawn over the windows, I had the feeling that this was a place. Not just a house. Often when people come in they remark that it feels like a cabin, or a lodge. They might physically be in Melbourne’s poshest postcode, but they feel as if they’re out in the bush on retreat. It’s restful.

I have come to the conclusion that we are living in a kind of “tree” house. You see, the Griffin’s Magic of building houses that from the outside appear rooted within the natural landscape is only half of the story. The connection also goes the other way, from the inside to the outside. In most of their houses, the windows feature a geometrical pane pattern, the joinery stained (or painted) brown. I think each house’s pattern is unique – so far, at least, I haven’t seen the same pattern repeated in any of their other houses. I read somewhere that this is designed to make you feel like you’re looking out through branches of a tree into the green of the garden beyond. You’re not in a house at all! You’re in a tree!

Welcome to my magical tree house. I can’t think of a better place for me, tree-obsessed writer that I am, to be living during what feels like the end times of the world. The house, and Marion, are feeding my soul.

The electronic Version of the Magic Of America is Copyright © 2007 The Art Institute of Chicago.

So far, I do know this: She was frustrated that people did not share her view of the world, a struggle echoed in structure of the memoir, which is divided into four separate “Battles”. She hated the Australian bureaucracy, thought the people were uneducated and short-sighted and didn’t appreciate beauty. She was pushy, opinionated and dogmatic, a lifelong teetotaler and vegetarian. She did not suffer fools. She commanded respect and made strong, lasting friendships (e.g. Miles Franklin, Vida Goldstein, Anna Ickes).

Marion was unashamedly herself. In a world where women were supposed to be wives and mothers and defer to men, she didn’t properly fill any of those roles. She didn’t wear the right clothes, she didn’t say the right things, she didn’t have children, she didn’t like to cook or keep house. Her relationship to Walter in some respects seemed more like that of a colleague, a PA, or a PR manager than a wife. She had enormous faith in education as the solution to all the ills of humanity. And not education as in schooling, but education as a way of teaching people to think, to connect to nature, to trust in their own artistic and creative instincts. She had such faith in creativity as the solution to the world’s problems. She had such faith in Beauty. She was an idealist.

In that sense, we have an affinity, the two of us: We’re both idealistic misfits. I can’t get it right either, filling the role that society thinks I should as a mother, wife, and woman. I get so frustrated by indifference to nature and beauty, tolerance of injustice, celebration of excess and the superficial, and our collective inability to challenge and change the status quo. I often feel like I was born in the wrong century. Finding Marion has been a balm to me, a revelation, a relief. Her struggles and passions resonate with me, as does her process of working through them into the realization that in the moment, what matters is not the fact of our particular existence but our connection to everything else.

Humans always have been keen to celebrate success, and up to now the definition of who gets to bear that label has been largely limited to a certain demographic. But things are finally changing, and I think this explains why we get so excited now about finding unsung people like Marion. We can affix the appropriate labels at long last. We can call attention to and celebrate them, and bemoan the fact that they were overlooked during their lifetimes.

But I also think that we have to be careful as we look through the lens of history. Let’s not just transplant her into the soil of the 21st century and see what happens.

The way I see it, pretty much everything about the time in which we live is focused on attention. The VERY last thing you want to be in our world today is an ordinary person. That’s the kiss of existential death. If you haven’t done extraordinary things, been successful, ticked off your bucket list, if you haven’t gotten heaps of attention for what you have created and produced and directed and managed, the money you have made, the property you have accumulated, the likes and retweets and page views, then what has your life meant? The metric we have grown up with, like it or not, is that attention plus money equals success. So it makes perfect sense for us to resurrect the heroines of the past and feel outraged that no one compensated or paid any attention to them, or — worse — that a man took credit for it all. We can imagine no worse fate than a lack of attention, because that (and the money it brings) is what we value above all else. LOTS OF ATTENTION. (Are you paying attention?)

Marion most likely didn’t get proper credit for all the work she did. A few laudable efforts have been made to set the record straight. But I’m a little troubled by something. The “record” — the Magic of America — has been there all along. And the story it tells is this: what mattered to Marion at the time — the only thing that mattered — was that the work she did with Walter got out there. That ugliness and convention was kept at bay just a little longer. That the beautiful and the harmonious, right alongside the ordinary and the useful, were simultaneously made ascendent. That the buildings were constructed, the plays produced, and the ideas were debated and considered. She wanted the world to be a better place. She wanted a world in which the architecture, the education, the every day lives of people reflected the very best of human ability and ideology. She and Walter dreamed of the perfect democracy, where people lived in a perfect utopian balance of freedom and civic responsibility. It wasn’t about them. Neither she nor Walter had outsized egos. They didn’t bother hobnobbing with the rich and famous. They never even built themselves more than a one-room dollhouse. They were down-to-earth and simple, broke most of the time, valuing intellect over money, ideals over expediency. There was nothing she loved more than teaching children how to unleash their innate creativity. That was the ultimate contribution. Not the architecture, not the drawings, not the legacy. The children.

She did the work, shared in the creation, but she didn’t, anywhere that I can see, fret that Walter claimed all the attribution – as long as it wasn’t Frank Lloyd Wright, who she hated with a passion. I suspect this was largely pragmatic: She was smart enough to realize that in Australia in the 1920s, no one would pay good money for anything designed or managed by a woman, so it made sense for Walter to be the public face of their partnership. I imagine she would have welcomed attribution if it meant more commissions, but she had learned, from painful personal experience, that wasn’t the case.

She did care, and deeply, that their life’s work have meaning. I imagine her back in the US after Walter’s death. What had it all been for? A life spent chasing a dream with Walter, just to have it all sink into oblivion? Hence the compulsion to gather it all together, to shine it up, to pull it into a huge, expansive tome – the work of two lifetimes bound together in a work of struggle and battle. This was what she would leave to the world. On the surface of it, it is a tribute to Walter, the most incredible architect ever. But really, it’s not. Even the name — the Magic of America — has nothing to do with Walter. It’s about a dream. Two lives, devoted to the idea that the world could be a more beautiful, more harmonious, more spiritual place.

That is something so foreign to our way of thinking that it hardly even computes any more. So the scholars search in her work for figments and facts, trying to piece a life – those two lives – back together, to figure out who did what, who was the genius, who deserves the credit, what happened. Who should get the attention? They declare that her architectural efforts were simply the execution of Walter’s or Wright’s ideas, and lump the rest into office work and ”decorative” additions. The rest of her life, including the memoir, are dismissed as simply eccentric. These so-called scholars are incapable of reconciling the facts and details she so painstakingly documented with the writing in which she soars over their heads into a world of ideas, ethers, fairies, and forces that cannot be seen. They pick out the verifiable facts, like so many nits on a head of lice-ridden hair, and then give up on the rest of the tangled mess, uninterested in the mind beneath it all. 

And then here I am, captivated, caught in the thick of it. For so long I found myself paralysed. I started out looking at it from our time’s “me too” mindset, thinking that people need to know about her, how amazing she was, what she did, how she didn’t get any credit, how she ran everything but how Walter is the one whose name is recognized and who has been canonized in the scholarly annals of architecture. 

But as the months ticked by and the words didn’t flow, I gradually realized that I don’t think that’s what she would have wanted. I imagine her, looking at Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and feeling nauseated at all the attention-grabbing and self-aggrandizement. I wonder what she would think of all the architecture websites and instagram accounts, their owners busily inventing hashtags, totting up likes, trolling for good reviews with clients. The absurdity of the real estate market, in which advertisements tout such tautologies as “architect-designed” — as if most houses are just pieced together willy-nilly. The soulless housing developments, the boxy edifices and lifeless, gridded streetscapes. I think she would be in despair. Everything she and Walter believed in — the democracy of housing, of life, the importance of the natural world in the lives of ordinary people, the idea that everyone should be basically equally able to live well and be treated with justice – is no closer at hand than it ever was – and very likely even farther out of reach. 

What would she think, then, of a book that fitted nicely into the mindset of this attention-polluted age, a book that focused solely on identifying and rectifying her individual achievement? A work that drew attention to the unfairness of how she has been treated by the historians? 

First, I think she would be briefly flattered. She is only human. She would appreciate the recognition. Then she would shake her head. That kind of self-centered ego-worship is what she despised in Frank Lloyd Wright. She, of all people, knew that a building – or any piece of work, like a play – required many people, many levels of different expertise, in order to be realized. It is a collaboration. Each person brings their skill set to the table, and then, if you’re lucky, the thing gets built, the play comes off. So Walter was on stage. So she was in the wings. That’s the way it was. Architecture is still like that. Granted, now computers do a lot of the work that humans had to churn out by hand back then. My unprofessional hunch is that less raw artistic skill is actually needed, now, in architecture. But there’s still plenty of marketing, money management, project management, personnel management and networking. All of those were tasks that Marion shouldered. But she was uniquely gifted in her ability to take the idea of a building and translate it into a two-dimensional drawing that would capture the client’s imagination. She knew that. It won them the Canberra competition, after all. She knew that she was an indispensable part of the enterprise. She didn’t need everyone else to tell her that.

So what would she want me to write?

The answer is, I’m still not sure. The job is to stay true to her faiths and to who she was, to resist the lure of a simple linear recounting of her life as an underappreciated architect and partner to Walter. Now that I think about it, it’s the same thing that happened to her when she decided to write about Walter. The thing grew organically, unable to stay in bounds. Their achievements in architecture turned out to be like so many mushrooms, the occasional fruiting bodies of a vast underground organism of thought, conviction, passion and belief. How could you possibly write about one without the other?

It doesn’t matter that Marion and I are separated by a century or more. This is a joint project, and we will do it together in this house that she designed. It has to be a weaving together of everything that I am with what I have learned about her. We are partners. I have to trust her. She has to trust me. I am the actual physical person who is going to do this thing, at this moment in time, but the thing that will be born will be something that both of us have to say. We are, somehow, uniquely positioned, and uniquely combined, to take this moment and make something of it. 

Picture this: You’re in a bookstore, and you see the cover: the Marion Chronicles. Marion? Sci-fi? You pick up the book, turn it over and read the blurb to decide whether or not it’s worth the effort. Except we’re not in a bookstore, and there’s no back cover. Therefore I don’t have to follow any of the rules about how long it has to be. This is the why you should read the book blurb.

Marion Mahony was born in Chicago in 1871, the year of the Great Chicago Fire. She was the second woman to graduate in architecture from MIT and the first licensed female architect in the US. She spent ten years, on and off, working in the Oak Park studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, and her exquisite architectural renderings helped launch his career. By one estimate, more than 50% of the drawings in Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio were Marion‘s work.

While in Wright’s studio, she met Walter Burley Griffin, five years her junior, a fellow architect responsible for landscape design and client mollification. Wright was a bit of a pain, to put it mildly, and before long, the “imperturbable” Walter had jumped ship and set up his own practice in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Marion and Walter’s common interest in philosophy, nature and their antipathy to Wright had made them fast friends, and one day on a canoeing adventure, Marion offered to come and work with Walter. Gobsmacked and delighted, Walter accepted, and not long thereafter they eloped, launching an epic professional and personal partnership.

Together they entered and won the international competition to design the capital city of of the world’s newest democracy, Australia. With stars in their eyes and hope in their idealistic, Emersonian hearts, they took off for the Southern Hemisphere to create Canberra, the perfect democratic city.

But politics are a bummer, and Australia was (and still is) no exception. In the midst of what can charitably be dubbed the Canberra Fiasco, they set up an architecture studio in Melbourne and designed some fabulous buildings (including our house). Then after Canberra was over and inaugurated (without them), they invested in land on a promontory in Sydney and set about designing and realizing another dream: the ideal suburb. They had some splendid times, Marion directing theatrical productions in the open-air theater and organizing seminars on her new obsession, anthroposophy, but the Great Depression did its best to rain on that parade, too. Luckily – maybe fatefully – Walter got a paying gig in Lucknow, India, which in turn led to heaps more Indian commissions, including a world’s fair type expo. Things were looking up. Marion had just joined him there when his gallbladder ruptured, peritonitis set in, and he died.

Insolvent, she returned to Chicago, where she lived out her days as “chief cook and bottle washer” for her niece Clarmyra, working on a memoir. This started out as a recounting of her and Walter’s lives and work for posterity, and soon evolved into something else entirely – a voluminous compendium of letters, anecdotes, philosophical ramblings, newspaper clippings, drawings, diagrams and architectural commentary. At 1400 pages not including illustrations, The Magic of America is an extraordinary window into the mind of an extraordinary woman.

Despite all her efforts, Marion never managed to find a publisher for the Magic of America. It was just too weird, too unwieldy. The two physical copies she produced are housed in archives at the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia University. In 2007 it was scanned, digitized and put online. I printed out the whole thing (minus the illustrations) at Kwikopy for a little over $100.

I feel an affinity for Marion. We’re both tall. We both love being in nature and reading philosophy. We’re both attracted to the spiritual, the mysteries of the world and the universe, all the “woo.” She believed in reincarnation. In fact, she told her friend William Purcell that if Magic wasn’t published by 2047 “I shall follow it up in my next incarnation.” Her name was Marion Lucy, mine is Mary Lucile … need I go on?

A few random facts to titillate you: She only allowed herself to be photographed in profile. She climbed trees long into her 60s. Also in her 60s, she taught herself German so she could translate Goethe and Rudolph Steiner for Walt. She set up an independent architectural practice in Melbourne, but a client ripped her off, and when she took him to court, she lost. She and Walter were vegetarians and teetotalers. The only house they ever designed and built for themselves was a tiny, one-room “dollhouse” on somebody else’s property.

Marion died at the age of 90, outliving Walter by 24 years and Frank Lloyd Wright by two. A friend went to visit her in the 1950s, and asked Marion how she was feeling. Fine and dandy! She responded. They can’t kill me, I’m a vegetarian!

Marion was long dismissed by the architectural establishment as a mere “delineator” and somewhat helpful, if eccentric sidekick for Walter, and that’s when they were being generous. Her memoir was judged “incoherent and naive,” despite the fact that those same architectural historians routinely plumbed it for their research on Walter.

Recently there’s been increased interest in the legions of unheralded, erased women who have played pivotal roles in the story of “Mankind.” Marion was, without a doubt, one of these women, and The Marion Chronicles is my attempt to illuminate her life, her contribution, and her spirit so that she can take her rightful place in history.

On top of that, it’s just a really great story. So many twists and turns, so much intrigue, so much drama and heartbreak. It would make a great movie, if someone were so inclined.

For months, I have not been able to focus, much less write anything. I finally read some books a few weeks back, and it was nice. Then it stalled again. Sometimes I get out my yoga mat. I go running. Lately I’ve been juggling between compulsively doomscrolling, worrying about my blood pressure (it’s a risk factor!), trying to get my exercise and diet sorted out once and for all, and binge watching sappy TV shows. Last night I decided enough was enough.

I better write something on the blog right now before I completely lose track of who I am and/or die of COVID-19.

I know. Pretty heady stuff.

For the past two years – at least – I have been meaning to write about Marion, life partner and professional sidekick of the famed architect Walter Burley Griffin, designer of Canberra and co-arch-nemesis of celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Ever since we bought our house piece of Irreplaceable Australian Architectural Heritage, the story of these two and their dramatic/tragic Australian adventure has fascinated and obsessed me. And because I, too, am an American on an Australian adventure, I felt as if I was fated to find this house, to run headlong into their story, and tell the parts that still need telling. It is my purpose!

The problem was that I didn’t know how. Should I write a book? Maybe a biography of Marion? It would be timely, what with the Me Too movement. Marion was arguably the smarter and more talented partner in the couple, and she has been routinely dismissed and belittled by the architectural history cabal. Problem is, there’s a lot of missing information. Plus, someone already did one and it wasn’t very good. My impostor syndrome — no PhD in history or feminism, no expertise or even broad appreciation of architecture — was also a major problem. I’m not even a design buff! Who am I to write a Feminist biography of a famous architect? I’m a blogger, which means that I have zero — correction, less than zero — cred in any circles that count, be they history, architecture, feminism or publishing. Writer’s block is a walk in the park compared to what I felt when I thought about the biography project.

Okay, then, why not turn it into historical fiction? I could follow the current fiction-writing formula: write like it’s going to be made into a movie. It would be a page-turner, for sure, because they had some crayzee times here Down Under. But every time I started down that path I was blocked. I couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m superstitious, but I just know, deep down, that Marion doesn’t want me to make up stuff about her life or put words into her mouth. I respect her too much to do that.

So, faced with the impossibility of either penning a boring biography or a falsified fictional account, I did the only rational thing: nothing. Whenever people asked me the inevitable question “So what do you do?” I lied and told them I was working on a book about Marion. I felt like a fraud. But maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe I have been working. Maybe it’s just that my wheels, such as they are, turn excruciatingly slowly. I have done a ton of reading about Marion and Walter. I had her 1400 page memoir printed out so I could make notes on it. I have been thinking. I eat a lot of dark chocolate. The ways of inspiration are a mystery to the best of us.

And so it was that last night, after watching the very last episode of season 13 of Heartland and contemplating my unlikely future as a horse whisperer, it came to me: You can write about Marion. Just write it like you write everything else. Tell it like it comes to you, what impression it makes upon you, how it connects with everything else that’s going on in the world. Put it in the blog. What happens with it after that is another story, one that’s not important right now. Especially since you’re probably going to die of COVID-19 soon anyway.

So here goes nothing, folks. Welcome to the Marion Chronicles.

You can see the professional ones done by the good photographers at the Design Files. Those are amazing, much better than anything I could take.

I have a policy of only putting my own photos up on this blog — very long story involving a copyright troll operating from underneath a bridge in Las Vegas — but I’ll make a small exception here to include some publicly available real estate photos so you can see what changed. Keep in mind they used a wide angle lens, which I can’t reproduce.

Our architects also had someone come in and “stage” the house. It was 44 degrees out that day, the AC was unable to keep the house cool, and I felt bad for the team. But it wasn’t my idea to move all the furniture around (I thought we had placed it nicely) and take all the books off the shelves (why bother with bookshelves?) and replace the books with forgettable objects. Never mind. Design is a thing, now, and it’s the domain of those under forty. You can see the shots they took on Jane Cameron’s website.

Here are a few Before/After of the same basic shot. So, front of the house:

View of the house from the side:

View from the front door down towards the driveway:

The inner courtyard (zen garden impossible with constant leaf litter):

The back deck (note the aluminum wall which became a brush fence):

Of course the photos don’t do it justice. The garden is a dream. It’s private, peaceful, all native, soft edges, full of birds (and fish!). I told Sam Cox to do whatever he wanted, as long as it didn’t involve an expanding budget. He is basically an artist who uses a backhoe and spray paint in place of a paintbrush or pen and paper. He didn’t draw up any plans, didn’t give me a computer rendering, didn’t plan out all the plants and zones. He and his team showed up with a backhoe and huge boulders, which he expertly placed so it looks like the house is nestled into its surroundings.

Over the course of the next few months, they tore out and gave away the bluestone tiles, box shrubbery, and tropical plants, built a new deck out of spotted gum to replace the painted and rotting jarrah deck, a brush fence to replace the aluminum wall, a storage bin and platform to replace the rotting cupboards (that the possums had been using to get up onto the roof), a bike shed and brush fence and gate down on the driveway for privacy, and poured a concrete pond in the front. Dean, his expert slate layer, spent backbreaking hours laying acres of Castlemaine (local) slate on our patios and building a rock wall to replace the purple pool equipment hiding wall (See below) and I think he might still be suffering a little PTSD from the experience.

Another major project was to cover the pool with a slab of reinforced concrete. The picnic table is now sitting atop a 27,000L water reservoir. The rain that falls on our roof is pumped in, and then another pump runs an irrigation system out. Here’s the before and after of that:

And of course at the back of the house, where the water issues had resulted in a mould issue, the patio had to be torn out and re-built with the right drainage, with an extra “aggie” drain run underneath. They transplanted the rare Yuzu tree, which was sitting in an odd well-like structure (below), out by the deck. It’s thriving and recently hosted some Dainty swallowtail caterpillars.

Not long before Christmas, we had a brief discussion about plants — me basically saying “whatever you think will work and maybe some kangaroo paws” — and now it is a thing of beauty and a true oasis. You must come and visit. In the pond, five tame goldfish and oodles of little invisible native fish (to keep the mosquito population under control) endlessly entertain me. Little scrub wrens and wattlebirds hang out and chatter all day long. The native plants are starting to fill in and wander around. When it’s warm enough, I spend all my time outside. I’m sitting at the back table as I write this, listening to the whispering of the breeze in the gum leaves overhead.

So that’s the house, wrapped. Looking back, I can’t believe we actually did it. If I had known at the start what would be involved, we probably wouldn’t have taken it on — we’d have been too intimidated by both the scope and the price. So I’m glad we didn’t know.

I like to think that Marion and Walter would be pleased to see the care we have taken to try and stay true to their intentions, particularly with respect to the garden. We love the simple lines of the house and its practical layout. It has lived up to the sense I got when I walked in the door that very first time: This is a place that can become a home.

So let me reassure you. There were many, many things that were going well. Sure, the completion date was moving away from us at a fairly steady pace and our starting budget was only a rosy memory. But with Jane and Christopher on the scene, we were spared the majority of the minutiae.

They designed the new bathrooms and chose a tile scheme, for example. Have you ever gone into a tile showroom? It’s a complete nightmare. If you haven’t, then don’t. Fake stone, real stone, shiny, matte, bumpy, skinny, wide, retro, contemporary. It’s all there for you to put into the great bathroom in your imagination. A decision is impossible. Unless you’re an architect with a decent sense of style.

The choice they made was perfect. We simply said great, love it! and we all moved on. Same with the door hardware, the lighting, and so many other details. They’d pass it by for our approval, and we’d pat ourselves on the backs for having been able to foist yet another difficult decision into such capable hands.

We also got a huge boost around this time: At the request of Jane and Christopher, Sam Cox, Melbourne’s best native landscape architect, had come by to see the house, and he agreed to take us on. This was so exciting! The surrounds of old Salter House had been rigidified over the years in an attempt to keep up with the neighborhood. In Toorak, original homes are continually being flattened and replaced by faux-french palaces and boxy edifices of gargantuan proportions to appeal to the riche, the nouveau riche, and the wanna-be nouveau riche. (Paling house, another Griffin gem, sadly met that fate in the 1990s.) The pool, the bluestone slate pavers, the box hedges, the tropical plants… But like a nerd at a pep rally, Salter house was never going to fit in. It needed to be in a native habitat, as we were certain Walter and Marion would have wanted. And Sam was the man who could make that happen.

The other thing keeping me sane was the presence of my brother Rob, who had come over to do some hiking and biking with me. We escaped the mayhem with three wonderful adventures — hiking the Rees Dart track in New Zealand, the Overland Track in Tasmania, and a six-day guided trek on the Larapinta Trail in the outback. We also did a 145km bike ride on the Great Ocean Road. Maybe I’ll write about those some other time.

So it definitely wasn’t all bad news. It also wasn’t all house, all the time, which was good both for me and for the architects. I’m guessing that meddling, angst-ridden clients aren’t a whole lot of fun.

Back to the worms. Where were we? Right, the laundry room-to-be. Stuart had removed some bit of a wall and discovered the thing you really, really don’t want to discover when you’re looking at wood: termite damage.

It wasn’t extensive, basically just one small board, but I didn’t know that at the time. Predictably, I freaked out. Termites! We’ll have to fog the house with toxic chemicals!

Why is it that I always assume the worst?

A termite inspection was thenceforth conducted, and no further damage was found. Andrew explained that in that crappy post-war period a board would sometimes be sold with a termite or two in it. They’d munch away, but in the absence of a queen, the problem stops there. Sweet relief!

The fireplaces were up next. Or maybe they were up before, I can’t remember. I have to impose a chronology for the sake of a narrative. In reality, a lot of this stuff was happening simultaneously, in waves. Nothing for a while, then one thing after another.

The living room fireplace was ostensibly functional, but the mortar between the bricks was disintegrating, there were moisture issues, and it would have to be re-built. The other two fireplaces — one in the TV room and one in the dining room — had been boarded over. The dining room flue was filled with rubble and the guts of the HVAC system. We could never use it as a fireplace, but it could be cleared out and an insert placed inside it.

Legend has it that the living room fireplace originally held another Griffin invention — a trapdoor system through which the ashes could be dumped directly into the crawl space under the house. That innovation was apparently deep-sixed when the house nearly caught on fire.

Did I mention the windows? The mechanisms for working them, another Griffin innovation, had all been coated in layers of paint. They were dipped in acid, hung out to dry, and then I sanded them all down. They worked again!

From here on in, most of the worms that were going to come out of the can had done so, and the rest was just little stuff. The fascia around the courtyard was rotten, and would need to be replaced. The roof pointing was sub-par, and should be replaced. The plumbers stepped on the fragile knitlock roof tiles while installing the gutters or flashing the chimney or some other such thing and broke a few of them, causing a leak. The bathroom tiles got held up at customs, pushing the completion date back another couple of weeks, which meant we had to find yet another Air BnB as the one by the Botanic Gardens was booked for August. The bathtub that arrived wasn’t the right size for the spot it was supposed to go into. The stormwater drainage was completely blocked. The usual kinds of things that happen when you’re renovating or building.

On August 24, 2018, we moved in to Salter House. The final engineering works for stabilizing the front wall had not been completed, and the outside painting was not yet done. I’d be getting up before 7:00 every morning until Christmas to welcome the landscaping crew (and Jim’s adorable dog Indie). But for the first time in fifteen months, we were not living out of suitcases. Correction: I was not living out of a suitcase. Marc was traveling. So the first few nights, I was alone in the house. I wondered briefly about ghosts, but nothing came to disturb me as I slept in my mother’s bird bed in the guest room (our bed being backordered). Home sweet home at last.

Me being me, I periodically went over to inspect the front wall, to see if the crack had gotten bigger since the last time I had looked at it, say, fifteen minutes earlier. It didn’t ever change. I know the contours of that crack like a London Taxi driver knows his A to Zed. I am happy to say that now, more than a year later, it still hasn’t shifted an iota.

And so we come to the end of The Can of Worms. The landscaping was great fun, and I’ll share that story next, along with many more pictures. Thanks for coming along on the adventure!

The good news was that the floorboards did not appear to be rotten. The bad news was that the floor had been butchered in order to install the AC duct. The odd thing was that even with the cut to the floorboards, the ducting was still kind of squashed.

More investigation revealed that the floor had been laid directly on the ground, and the space between the joists filled in by what appeared to be a layer of pumice.

Stuart said he’d never seen anything like it. The same thing was true in the west bedroom, except there wasn’t any pumice, just dirt, and the joists were rotting. The study was farther down the natural slope of the site, so it had a normal floor.

Meanwhile, I had been racking up the hours reading up on the Griffins, and I found this, in Grand Obsessions by Alasdair MacDowell:

As a cheap and thermally efficient alternative to traditionally framed floors, Walter devised a method of laying timber directly on the ground, providing termite – and damp-proofing with thick layers of bitumen under and between the joists. As a detail that defied convention, this prompted a predictably obstructive reaction from building inspectors.

I can only guess that somehow Walter sneaked this by the Toorak inspectors during construction. He’d had to do battle to get the knitlock approved; maybe he just did this without mentioning it.

In terms of damp-proofing, we weren’t convinced. (Remember the mould?) Since the floors were going to have to be replaced anyway, (ka-ching!) Stuart advised that we excavate them and add subfloor ventilation. That would also make it possible to put the AC duct in without squashing it. So Andrew and his crew got their shovels out, removed the bitumen, and tackled the rock-hard clay beneath it.

We left the floors of the hall closets resting on the ground the way Griffin had wanted, and I have to admit that in the heat of summer, they stay cooler than anywhere else in the house. Wine closet!! Maybe he was on to something, after all.

Meanwhile, Stuart had been doing some digging of a more informational kind, and discovered that the water that was constantly oozing out from beneath the garden wall on the southeast corner of the lot (near the MBR) wasn’t coming from water-wasting neighbours, but from a natural underground source. Our mould combat efforts would have to take this into account.

This, along with the subfloor ventilation, gave me hope that we could eventually win the mould war and get that worm back in the can. Never fear, there were plenty more.

Part of the renovation was to replace the ducted heating with a hydronic panel system, which is a much more efficient, never mind more pleasant way of keeping warm in the winter. To do this we needed to get rid of the huge hot water tank outside the master bedroom and replace it with a smaller, more efficient on-demand, wall-mounted unit.

In the process of doing this, a test of the gas system was conducted, and lo and behold — something was not adding up. Worm Number … ? Where are we? I’ve lost track.

The diameter of the gas line at the street was 35mm. At the house, it was 50mm. Somewhere between the street and the hot water heater, gas was going AWOL. The whole line would need to be replaced.

On the bright side, at least we’ll be living in a house with updated gas and electric. The insurer will be happy.

I’m sure you’ve been thinking all along about how much fun the architects and Stuart were having breaking all this news to us. Not again!

Our budget, once so reasonable, was now becoming a distant memory. Especially since we decided the time had come to address the elephant in the front room — a huge vertical crack which had been conveniently hidden by a bookcase. When you stood in the room for a little bit, looking out the windows, you gradually started to realize that the whole wall was gently bulging outwards. You can see the crack in this photo of the front room, sans bookcase.

When I’d gone through the garden with the previous owner, he’d waxed poetic about how the house looked like a ship plowing through the waves of box shrubbery beneath.

Stuart, in the meantime, had discovered that some of the stumps (that’s a technical term for things that hold up the floor) were being inappropriately supported by remnants of the knitlock blocks. He was in the process of correcting this. Our confidence in the state of things was not high.

We had been hemming and hawing over it for a month or so, but Marc finally insisted that we get a structural engineer in to make an assessment. We needed to know what was going on, and whether or not to worry about the wall collapsing around us as we were watching Aussie Rules Football.

The report came back:

I consider the wall to be structurally unsound, and would recommend it to be demolished, and rebuilt incorporating a steel framework, or similar.

Come again?

It was at this point that I found myself, now thankfully out of the minuscule and noisy Air BnB by the station and into a two-bedroom Air BnB near the Botanic Gardens, lying awake at night and berating myself for having had the idiotic idea that buying this house would be a fun adventure.

We could be comfortably moved in to some nice boring contemporary box by now! I could be sleeping through the night blissfully unbothered by collapsing walls, rats, possums, electrocution or gas leaks!

Jane and Christopher, realizing their mistake in hiring an engineer who knew nothing about heritage architecture, were quick to reassure us that no one was going to knock down the irreplaceable knitlock wall. They secured the services of a different, better qualified engineer, and this one arrived carrying a book about Walter Burley Griffin. That’s more like it!

He reiterated that no one was going to demolish anything. He’d come up with a plan for stabilizing and reinforcing the wall. Andrew who, like the rest of us, had become something of a Griffin fanatic by this point in the project, suggested the idea of putting steel rods followed by epoxy down the hollow knitlock blocks. In the end (much later) the solution indeed involved the rods and epoxy, along with massive steel posts sunk into concrete beneath the floor. These were used to brace the wall so there was no way it would move even another millimeter. Two hardy Ukranians spent one very hot day underneath the house digging pits in the the rock-hard clay.

Meanwhile, back in the house, where Stuart was removing a wall so we could put in a proper laundry room, he saw something no one ever wants to see when looking at a piece of wood …

But that’s enough worms for one day.

Stay tuned.

Well, morning arrived and the house was still ours. We went by to meet the project foreman, Andrew. During the night a large branch from the gum tree in front of the house had broken off. These eucalyptus trees are known as widowmakers, for their propensity to unexpectedly shed branches at random moments and kill people. Fortuitously, this one missed the roof and it happened at night, so no one got hurt. Was it a sign? As in Yes this project is going to be full of scary surprises but no one will die.

Here it is:

Later, I called in an arborist to assess the health of the big red gum. Although it‘s leaning at quite an angle over the house, it’s healthy. The angle was due to the presence of another tree (since removed); it had to lean away in order to access light. So that was a potential Worm, averted.

The first thing to do was take the blinds down off the windows. All the incredible paned windows were hidden behind horizontal slats. Once they were gone, the light streamed in, and It felt like the house could breathe again. Many of the windows were painted shut, which I had expected, given the blinds. The ones that weren’t had locks installed, but no keys. An insurance thing, probably. By the end of the project, the windows nearly drove Andrew over the edge, between fixing them and painting them. Here’s a picture of blinds versus no blinds. (Note the fireplace that’s been blocked off and the ancient outlet. We’ll get to those later.)

Next, the crew got to work tearing down the bathroom tiles, and found them full of leaves and other various rat nesting materials, damp with rot, badly built and generally in a very sad state. Andrew told me there was a rat corpse in the ceiling (later he confessed there were multiple corpses but he didn’t want to freak me out). I freaked out. A rat infested bathroom! 

It’s important to note here that these bathrooms are not in the original design. The house started out with just one shared bathroom, accessed via the hallway, and at some post-war point was bumped out to make a master suite and a second bath. Stuart thinks that the shoddy construction was most likely a function of poor manpower and materials in those years after the war. Here’s Marion’s original drawing:

Anyhoo, it was definitely a Worm, and Stuart said that the whole shebang should really be torn down and re-framed, and the ceiling completely removed and replaced. Yes, we said. Do it. Here’s a shot of what we were dealing with:

You can’t really see the leaves in the walls here, but the state of the ceiling is pretty evident.

By that time, Andrew’s crew had also erected scaffolding around the outside of the house to begin the job of replacing some obviously rotten timberwork on the eaves. Initial assessments had been optimistic – it didn’t look too bad. We stopped by for a site visit one day and Stuart entertained us by climbing up, grabbing a piece of the fascia, and crumbling it between his fingers. It looked all right from the outside, but the wood was completely rotten. All the fascia would have to be replaced.

Andrew also showed us some convenient possum or rat hideouts in the beams along the fascia, full of leaves and detritus, which the previous owners had attempted to make unpalatable by means of chicken wire.

Here I must digress to address the issue of Australians and possums. These cute nocturnal marsupials have adapted splendidly to the human invasion of their habitat, much to the chagrin of the humans. They’re kind of like deer in North America, except that deer don’t scamper around on (and occasionally take up residence in) your roof. Possums are territorial, so getting rid of them is a futile exercise in whack-a-possum. If you remove one (which is not legal) then another one will just come and take over the territory. They eat all the tasty plants in your garden and if they set up shop in your ceiling, the smell and noise can make your life miserable. The best case scenario is that they find a tree or some other place to live and so only occasionally wake you up in the night when they’re “courting,” and your biggest headache is sweeping up the pellet-like poops on a regular basis. Australians pretty much have a hate-hate relationship with possums. The previous owner was no exception. I knew it was something we’d have to reckon with. Indeed, the landscaper woke a huge brushy-tailed fellow the day they tore down the hideous aluminum wall separating us from our neighbors, exposing a nest in the gap between the fences. I’m happy to say the possum moved back in once the new brush fence was installed. Now, every evening when dusk deepens into night, he emerges on top of the fence and waddles off into the trees. I’m quite fond of him.

Next up, the electrician. I had asked the seller, in the interest of being on the up and up with the insurance company, about the state of the wiring. It was supposed to have been done within the past 40 years. He seemed surprised. Of course! The panel looked newish. All the light switches and outlets looked old, probably even original. But I took him at his word.

Turns out that there was no ground at all to the electrical system in the house. All the wiring was ancient, wrapped in burlap, and it was nearly impossible to sort out which wire went with which outlet in which room. The whole house would need to be rewired, this time with a ground.

There was just one teensy issue: A neat trick of Griffin’s knitlock construction is that the wiring for the celing lights runs up through the hollow concrete blocks, so it’s hidden. The problem with that is in order to change it out, you have to have access to the ceiling. That was a can of worms we were unwilling to even contemplate. God only knows what would be lurking up in there. Dead possums? Live rats? So we compromised, using only low voltage lighting in the ceiling lights (which don’t need a ground anyway). The other down side is that the knitlock is too shallow to accomodate a normal electrical outlet box. Andrew and Stuart managed to solve this problem, and the result is amazing. The plus side of this Worm was that we got to choose how many outlets to have, and where to put them. Compare this to the outlet on the bottom right of the first photo.

The “demolition” phase also involved pulling up the carpets in the bedrooms. Aussies sure like to carpet bedrooms, but I personally can’t stand wall-to-wall. Especially in the presence of neurotoxic mould. It had to go. And that, my friends, was where we found the next Worm.

Stay tuned.

You don’t open a can of worms, and not expect to find any worms in it…

In September 2017 our Australian Real Estate Adventure came to an end. We had signed the papers for Salter House, negotiating a long settlement (January 15) in exchange for fifty grand off the price. That gave us lots of time to think about what we wanted to do. 

Me: We need storage. Usable closets. Get rid of the carpet in the bedrooms. Take those blinds down off the windows.

Marc: We need a toilet next to the kitchen.  Redo the bathrooms (see photo).

One of us is more or less ruled by his early morning digestive situation.

We also didn’t know much about the Griffins. I did some initial research and it became apparent that we had unwittingly bought a piece of Australian Architectural History. Anything we did to it had the potential for being a Horrendous Travesty.

I also learned that Victorian era architecture is much more heavily protected than mid-century or early century architecture. Australian anglophilia in action. We could do anything we wanted to the inside and no one could say anything. This was at once so, so wrong and absolutely terrifying.

What have we done???

We didn’t know any architects or any builders. No worries, mate!  We plugged “Heritage Architects in Melbourne” in Google and it spat out a few possibilities. I asked real estate agents for recommendations. One problem was the scope of the project — we weren’t going to be spending vast sums. (Right!! So funny!!) One Big Shot heritage architect shunted me off to a junior associate. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but I was a bit miffed.

We interviewed four architects, all of whom were excited at the possibility of working on a Griffin house, even with such a small budget. They were all adamant that we would not be able to live in the house while the work was being completed, which was an enormous relief to me and a disappointment to Marc.

We went with a woman who brought a colleague along to the meeting who was also a lecturer on Australian architectural history and was very knowledgable about the Griffins. In retrospect, choosing a female architect with a historian-architect sidekick was brilliant. At the time, we were just excited that they had a builder who was willing to start right away.

The next hurdle was getting access to the house, before settlement, to draw up plans. Eventually the estate agent did his job, and we eked out an hour here and there, the unwilling vendor lurking in the corner at his computer while the architects and builder walked and measured, trying to assess what needed to be done in lowered voices.

Later, our builder Stuart said that he’d seen a lot of coverup jobs in his career, but nothing that came close to this one. Just as well we didn’t know that at the start.

In Australia, Christmas is a serious vacation. Workmen, known here as “tradies”, are not available until at the very earliest mid-January. This is summer. People pack their kids into their caravans and utes, fill up the Eskys (coolers) with beer and sausages, and head for the beach. Nevertheless, Jane and Christopher worked around the clock in December to get their plans ready and a “budget” drawn up so that come closing day, January 15, Stuart and his crew could start ripping up carpets and knocking tiles off the bathroom walls. Tentative completion date: May 22.

Marc and I took off hiking in New Zealand for a couple of weeks (see photo), and in early January we moved into Monash House for a month, our fourth abode in Melbourne since June. We’d move into three more before finally inhabiting the house.

A week before closing, I discovered two things: first, we should have insured the house in case anything happened during the settlement period. We had a 20% stake in it, after all. And second, I was supposed to schedule a walk-through in the days before closing to make sure that all was as promised when we signed the papers. I scrambled to correct my negligence.

I suppose we lucked out on the first: nothing had happened. No tree limbs on the roof, no floods, no fires. But when I did the walk-through of the empty house, I was dismayed to find traces of black mould in the bedrooms, which the sellers had hidden with strategically placed furniture. Their agent, in the room with me, was clearly a bit uncomfortable.

Me? I was freaking out. What have we done? 

Jane and Stuart managed to back me off the cliff when I called, later, in a panic. Happens all the time. We’ll get it sorted.

That night I lay in bed, in the blissfully air conditioned mansion on the Monash campus, wide awake and fretting. I was not going to live in a house full of neurotoxic mould. Why hadn’t we done a proper inspection? But we were in this, like it or not, and so we’d have to figure out how to deal with it.

Little did we know that the mould was just worm number one.