Gestation

Even though I was living 4000km away from my hill I knew that somehow, sometime I'd build a house there. It seemed improbable when I was living in Fannie Bay and working for Top End Arts, but life has a way of working out...

I'd moved out of my Troppo house to a nice but boxy (with peach-coloured walls) apartment. The landlord knocked off some rent in exchange for me re-painting and I did my best to make the place my own.

While I was living here though I kept adding photos of my hill to the collection of shots on my fridge, semi-conscious of my 'one day' thinking...

Remnants of the charming peach 'pon the cupboards & drawers

I kept thinking about my Troppo house and how well it suited its environment, kept thinking about how to adapt those ideas to a temperate climate, kept thinking about how there wasn't an abiding architecture suited to southern Australia. When I pictured Gippsland's hills in my mind's eye the buildings that seemed most endemic to those rolling green vistas were corrugated iron sheds... Thinking, thinking...

There was a friend who lived out of town - out beyond Batchelor - who sold her photographs at the markets in Darwin on the weekends. Which meant that her house was empty on saturday nights. Part house-sit, part holiday house, she often had people stay there while she was away. The first time I saw her house many of the ideas I'd been toying with coalesced - I wanted a cold-weather version of this house!

I wanted a house that used open spaces filled with light to overcome the long Gippsland winters. I wanted a house that had high ceilings and fans for airflow in the hot Gippsland summers. I wanted a house that was based on the archetypal farm sheds which dot the Gippsland hills. I wanted to clad the house with corrugated iron so that it looked like it 'belonged' on the hills, that it sat as easily in its environment as those sheds.

I came away from my weekend in this Batchelor house with a vision of my house, of what it would look like, how it would sit 'in' the hill rather than on it. Problem was I was living in Darwin and had no money to speak of...