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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.

interest. As we were leaving, he suddenly changed his mind and before we knew it, he’d pulled himself out of his wheelchair and into the front seat and was quickly giving directions.

The return was one of mixed emotions; a concern that the house had been changed and memories of his herd of deer that had been cruelly poisoned.

Those concerns quickly disappeared as we approached the house down the long and winding driveway, with the sound of tyres on gravel welcoming him home.

The house was magni cent, initially presenting as a typical homestead with a wide, welcoming verandah, but on closer inspection the real magic of the house became apparent. The steel formwork pulls the house into the twentieth century and delivers a very sophisticated piece of architecture. The house is anchored around a large lounge and dining room, divided by a 360 degree replace that dominates the room. The bedrooms are placed around the sides; the real conversation starter is a circular transparent shower that sits out from the main bedroom and gives 180 degree views in and out of the wash space. Certainly not a place for a wall ower.

John soon found himself e ortlessly talking to the new owners, their respect well and truly evident, and he felt that his old family home was safe in their hands. I walked around and fantasised about living in the house. If it had been on a smaller parcel of land, didn’t have three other houses on site and was remotely a ordable, I would have moved in and started a pile of tea-leaves in a heartbeat. n Tim’s documentary Designing a Legacy is on ABC iview.

HOME FREE

Sharing love and laughter around the kitchen table is a privilege we can sometimes take for granted in a happy home. Laura McConnell knows that sometimes all is not as it seems.

I grew up sitting around the kitchen table in a fundamentalist Christian family, with a tightly controlled, narrow view of ‘the world’ that existed outside our home.

My home now is a place of healing, of growth and of knowledge. I run an online space for women who are leaving, or who have recently left, the group known as The Truth.

I left this group as a naive 19 year old and found myself alone in a city and world I knew nothing about. I spent 20 years working out how to ‘fit’, how to dress, how to speak, how to get an education. I had to learn how to wear jeans, cut my hair, wear jewellery and make-up. My kitchen table is now a place to support other women on their journey out of fundamentalist Christian groups.

I was raised as a fourth generation Truth member, on farms in far western New South Wales in a triangle between Nyngan, Bourke and Brewarrina. Many of the community I grew up in live on rural and remote properties where they can keep to themselves, within their families and communities, without drawing too much attention to their beliefs and way of life. You might have seen them at the supermarket or in your primary schools. They are identifiable as the women who wear long dresses, never cut their hair, never wear make-up or jewellery, have no TV or radio. The community is seen mostly as ‘harmless’ Christians, who keep to themselves. Fundamentalists like The Truth—and there are a few different groups, such as the Brethren and Jehovah’s Witnesses—rarely discuss their beliefs or way of life.

They may appear harmless, but the harm occurring in these communities and in our homes is real. Women in my family have experienced sexual grooming and abuse; they often leave school and marry young and have no concept of the world outside their Bibles and community. We are naive. We believe those outside our religion to be ‘worldly’ and to be headed to a fiery end in hell, while we are the only ones who will be saved. The Truth, in particular, believes in a strict conservative strain of Christianity and a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Women have little power or autonomy. Family groups tend to congregate together in rural communities, where they can worship together in family homes. Often large families are sustained financially by a multigenerational family farm. The structure results in women having little or no financial independence. With inadequate education, no skills—outside of sewing dresses—it’s easy for these women to be trapped in abusive and coercive families. Many women do not have access to friends or colleagues or know anyone outside our community. Thus women’s lives can be devastatingly lonely and isolating.

I was raised in this remote community, surrounded by first, second and third cousins. I had countless aunts and uncles, and wonderful hardworking grandparents who ran the farms with my parents. The first eight years of my life were blissful: I was unaware that I was different. It wasn’t until I was in Year Three at a tiny school on the road between Nyngan and Bourke, Coolabah Public

School (now closed)—where I was one of just five kids in my class— that I realised that other kids didn’t live like us. I had no idea that other children had TVs and radios; that other girls my age could wear trousers and cut their hair.

For me, from the age of eight to 17, the years were lonely and tumultuous. I wanted a different life to the women around me. I loved our farm; I loved my large family; however, I never quite felt that I fitted in. I was active and loved running, swimming and being with my father on the farm. None of those things are acceptable for a Truth girl. Truth women stay home: they keep house, they sew dresses. I flashed my knickers too many times, I loved swimming, I laughed too loudly and I had a big imagination. I did not fit in. I still wonder if I’d have made it inside The Truth if I’d been a boy. But I was never going to make it as a girl.

Leaving a fundamentalist group like The Truth is difficult: when you leave you are excommunicated, shunned and cut off from your community and family. My journey out started when I was 14 and decided that I’d like to finish high school. Two of my older cousins had recently left school and married. I did not feel comfortable making that decision. So my first step was to finish school. That set me apart from others in our community, and then I decided, ‘If they think I’m weird for finishing school, maybe I’ll go to university like the other kids.’

It was leaving home to go to university that finally led me out of The Truth and lost me my place in our family and community. I was shunned. I had relatives who would cross the street to avoid me. I plunged for years into a deep depression, which I now realise was PTSD: the after-effects of losing my whole identity. I was no longer welcome in the community I had loved.

The loss of family, connection to my community, land and identity is what drives me to run The Kitchen Table and to offer advice to other women leaving, or contemplating leaving, The Truth. I want other women to leave with power: to leave with money, identity and a place in the local community. I want them to be able to stay on the land they love, to raise their children in rural communities and not be shunned and shamed out of town.

My love of rural Australia runs deep, and I know farm life can be a romantic, beautiful experience. I miss the beautiful sunsets, the red sand, and the dry heat of the far west. But the reality for women in my community is that rural life is a lonely, isolating and sometimes abusive life. Beyond the romance is sometimes financial abuse, coercive control and religious shaming; and, because of the rural isolation, women in my community do not have the luxury of a support structure that urban women can access.

So when you gather at your kitchen table, think of the women who gather at mine. The women who leave family farms with nothing, who’ve never had the freedom to dress the way they choose or pursue an education. Think of the women who have experienced sexual abuse, grooming and gaslighting. I have a duty to speak up for them. n lauramcconnell.com.au. If this article raises concerns for you or a loved one, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.