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

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

One Sunday, Alistair Knox and his wife Mernda rode up on their bikes from Heidelberg to Eltham, to find Matcham and ask him if he would work for Alistair and show a couple of chaps how to make mud bricks. One of his clients, who had been a soldier in the Middle East, had been impressed by the earth buildings he had seen there and wanted a small cot... See more

It started for me in 1946 when I enrolled at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to study. The Chifley Government provided free tertiary training for every ex-serviceman who would apply for it.

Enrollment day at the RMIT saw about two hundred applicants crowding into the Architecture School to be assigned to their study groups. I had done pa... See more

The discipline of limited finance immediately started to produce an aura of inspired improvising that enabled the amateur builders to move into the problem with a new awareness that they were beating the system once more. For the past ten years I had, to a considerable degree, let go the primitive architectural character and produced over a hundred... 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

Margot and I were very happy at this time, especially because I had become the acknowledged leader of the movement. It was still in its infancy, but it was turning Eltham into a class of its own when it came to creative building. There was only one cloud in this otherwise brilliant sky. The use of natural material is always more difficult than that... See more

From his earliest days Alistair was very keen to inspire others to build in mud brick. His son Hamish suggested that Alistair was far more interested in helping aspiring do-it-yourself mud brick home builders than talking to paying clients. Amongst his unpublished papers is a book he was preparing called 'The Home Builders Manual of Mud Brick Desig

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Alistair Knox was a designer, builder and advocate for an alternate lifestyle. Between 1946 and 1986 he designed over 1,000 houses, a number of churches, schools and other buildings. The job numbers reached 1266 of these he built about 350. He is best known for his mud brick output of about 300 buildings. These were built in two periods: before 195... See more