architecture
EUGOWRA HOUSE If you’re reading this publication, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here if I presume you’ve had a few Australian farmhouse fantasies in your time. There’s an enduring romance to the idea of the Australian homestead and, from what I can see, the lure has never been more appealing. Being a kid of the bush suburbs I’ll never forget my first visit to a relative’s sheep farm in Western Victoria. They were hard-working folks who had roast lamb for lunch every day and talked out the sides of their mouths with a long slow drawl. The house sat on the top of the hill and at night they would sit on the wraparound verandah and recount the story of my city-slicker grandfather accidentally leaving the gate open and the flock making their way halfway to town. It was a story they never let him forget— it’s made me paranoid about closing gates to this day. And then there was their mound of tea leaves. Decades of emptying the teapot behind the hydrangeas had created a two-foot high pyramid. Etched in my brain is my great aunt slinging the leaves over the bushes and then waddling back into the kitchen, an apron around her waist, and absentmindedly farting like a Clydesdale jettisoning lunch. A farmhouse is about context and I romanticise their
connection to the Australian landscape. I don’t need pots of lavender and a French cane basked stacked with designer gumboots. I want to sit on rickety wooden boards, nurse a beer, watch the sun go down through the gums and the dappled light touch the orangey hue of Australian clay. An Australian farmhouse that moved me deeply came surprisingly out of the 1980s rather than the 1880s, but the essence of its success certainly comes from an earlier time. I was taking a trip to Orange in central western New South Wales to film an interview with John Andrews, a retired architect who is respected internationally for commercial architecture. I was fascinated by how a young man who grew up in an outer suburban house in Sydney ended up studying architecture at Harvard and designing a slew of acclaimed buildings across North America, including the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. I was curating an exhibition of his work and made the journey out to make a small film with him. Now in his eighties, John is confined to a wheelchair but still possesses that straight-talking knockabout Aussie charm that made him so successful. When I asked him why he wanted to be an architect he dryly replied, ‘Because they said I couldn’t fucking do it!’
It was a priceless response and I quickly came up with a name for the exhibition—The Practical Outsider—which summed up his pragmatic, no-nonsense and very Australian take on architecture with a nod to his success as a foreigner in North America. In the mid 1970s, John returned from Canada and purchased a farm at Eugowra, an hour west of Orange. Determined to get his sons to have a relationship with what he calls ‘the real Australia’, their weekends were spent rounding up sheep, cutting up wood and smashing themselves up on motorbikes. In 1980 John decided to add to the property with his modernist take on an Australian farmhouse. He designed the whole house from steel, which was quickly assembled on site and clad with corrugated iron. Practicality made sustainably a no-brainer for John and he situated the house in a position with window openings designed to capture the breeze from any direction. He also added what he called the energy tower on the roof that boasted a water tank and a solar water-heater. When I’d gone to visit John— who no longer lived in the Eugowra house—we’d also organised to go and visit the house and its new owners. John hadn’t been back for 15 years and had originally shown little
Words Tim Ross Photographs David Moore/Powerhouse Museum Collection: gift of John Andrews, 2009. Opposite page This modernist farmhouse has a fairly traditional exterior appearance (apart from the ‘energy tower’ on the roof), but inside it is anchored in the twentieth century by a 360 degree fireplace that dominates the room. 76
