The following was my contribution to the John Graham Memorial at The National Gallery.
John and his partner Deirdre and their son Walter, have been lifelong friends since John designed our house in Balmain.
When I left art school in 1972, I was fortunate to have the use of the old fish markets in Paddington as a studio. It was a vast half open area that overlooked the quarry in Cascade Street. It was the ideal studio. It was the best studio. One day, the builders for the owner arrived to occupy the space and I was completely devastated.
I was so traumatised by the loss of it, I was determined to find a place I would not lose again.
We found a bird seed factory in Balmain which was affordable.
David Earle introduced Jacqueline and me to John. David thought John could help us convert the factory into somewhere we could live.
The age in which we found ourselves then, was the age of The Revolution.
The time for change was not only a political slogan. It was a universal theme and everything we did was political before it was ‘useful’.
You would think we would outgrow such a notion of being the children of the revolution but we then became the adults of the revolution.
Many of us here today are the adults of the revolution.
We can paper over it with comfort, wealth and experience, but it cannot be erased.
Our house, the house that John built, with the enormous assistance of Bruce, thank you Bruce, I never thanked you enough, became one of the hubs of the revolution.
It was uncommon then, to conceive of living in a factory. That would mean you were what you did. A home that divided work from leisure was untenable. It did not exist.
At Golden Cob, the use of a hand saw was the consequence of a lack of funds to buy a circular saw on the one hand. It was also the means of restraining the pace of construction to let the material yield its voice. There were no power tools to overwhelm the sound of discussion and laughter. The background for the contemplation of detail when needed, was silence.
There was no un-tuned radio turned right up, to drown out the screaming power tools of today’s building sites. We built before build was a noun.
We straightened nails from timber extracted from demolition sites to use again. Recycled hardwood was virtually free-wood. We grew the house.
Being that we started with a limited budget there could be no budgetary constraints. As the budget entirely disappeared, the building process became more abstract.
Those endless days only lasted seven months but the outcome of what we built, was and remains the best house in Australia.
How can that be said? Just ask everyone.
The house that John (and Bruce) built has provided Jacqueline and me with a platform on which to build our lives over nearly fifty years.
Artists are fortunate when they find the world a welcome place. The advantage we had to have a home quite young meant we have been able to commit to a life in art which is often thankle$$.
In order to keep the world alive, in order to even build on the voice you speak, is to undermine the voice with which you spoke yesterday.
The only light there is the light that emerges from darkness.
This is the nature of continuous revolution which our time advocated.
That wasn’t a gold rush of ideas out of which the Golden Cob was furnished.
That was the state of play that remains our challenge.
This recognition of John today serves to bring us back to ourselves.
Thank you.