Jessica Lillico

Clifton Pugh: Portrait of Margot Knox 1958

I met Margot Edwards during 1948 in Matcham Skipper's Studio behind the Russell Street police station, and it was only a short time afterwards that I became her lover and a constant visitor to her in a loft in Ivanhoe. Margot was only eighteen years old and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. S... See more

The New Art movement - at whose birth I had been present thirteen years earlier - was, however, in healthy condition, even if its members were beset with financial difficulties. Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Sidney Nolan, David Boyd, Neil Douglas, Bert Tucker, Matcham Skipper, and others who have become part of Australian history were on the threshol... See more

It was six years since I had seen him last, but he made it seem as though it were only yesterday. What I wanted to ask him was who owned the land that Margot and I liked nearby, but what I uttered was quite something else: 'Eddie', I said, 'I don't want to muck you around. Will you sell me some land?' Eddie was the largest landholding farmer in the... See more

I was now using slab construction, a method I believed I had invented until I discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright had been employing it on his Usonian houses for well over a decade. The curved walls of the house and the three-levelled flat roof were a good example of contemporary design that received a great deal of notoriety , thereby elevating hum... See more

Building this house was the re-birth of the original organic concept of the immediate post-war beginnings. It involved a return to first principle devising from what was on hand. Earth for walls, negation of concrete slabs, brick and stone paving direct onto the ground, and the employment of non-professional builders. It recaptured those early days... See more

Our first son, Hamish, was born in April, and we went to live in the farm cottage, where he quickly became the special object of Mrs Fabbro's concern and penetrating voice. I was working by the wood-fire stove one evening after dinner when a knock at the door announced the presence of two policemen. They had come to inform me that Mernda had been k... See more

Apart from the work of Ellis Stones and Edna Walling, there was practically no original landscaping in Australia before the late 1950s except for that of Burley Griffin and the pre-First World War Guilfoyle, who was responsible for the Royal Botanic Gardens. There was, however, a growing awareness of Australia's indigenous flora, but the practice i... See more

His ability to maintain his opinions against all assaults won his pupils' unswerving allegiance and their frustrations, at the same time. He demonstrated his building and design ability every day as the work proceeded, irrespective of the observers' personal opinion of it. It could not be denied. He encouraged the rich to become patrons of his grea... See more

There were no regulations in those' days for slabs because there wasn't any slab work being done. It was also before the days of mobile concrete-mixers. In this case two men mixed the whole slab by hand in a single day, a fifty-two bag job, which meant some ten tons of screenings and about seven tons of sand. They scorned a mechanic.al mixer. Men w... See more