The house I built for my parents, about a year after it was finished, it won the Sir John Sulman medal for architecture, and that really gave me a great boost in terms of suddenly becoming known. Both this interest in the buildings that I was doing and the fact that I was having success – and one must remember, in those days, it was terribly difficult even for an architect of Breuer’s standing to get jobs in New York, to get a house to build and here I was almost swamped with opportunities – and that’s one of the things that really endeared this country to me. Elsewhere in the world, I think, one has to have grey hair before anyone trusts you with their money to build them anything. And here was a man in his early twenties and people were wanting me to actually build things for them and I thought, ‘Well, how marvellous, how outgoing for these people to have this sudden trust in somebody obviously young and inexperienced’. I think it was probably that, and, of course, the marvellous climate and the easy way of living that, you know, made me love this place.
What did upset me very much though were the obstacles that were put in the way of my work by the authorities. Almost right from the start, every time I designed a house and submitted it to local council it was refused on the grounds of design. The term was, it was disallowed ‘in the public interest’, and it did not fit into the pleasantness of the neighbourhood or the amenities of the area, and so on. That just made me see red. And the only recourse was to a court of law in those days, you had to go to Land and Valuation Court. And that became quite a routine.
The almost embarrassing thing was the amount of press publicity given to it and I started to have a, you know, the reputation of somebody who fights councils more than builds houses. There is something, of course, in the Australian make-up that cheers when an individual can stand up successfully against authority.
