9. Alice Springs

I drove our MG magnet sedan car to Port Augusta where I put it on the train to Alice Springs.  The trip on the Ghan, in those days, took about three days, give or take a day.  When in Alice Springs if you rang the railway station and asked what time they expected the Ghan to arrive they would say”: Tuesday”.    

Our household belongings had been despatched by a removal company and I would be there to receive them.  I arrived on about July 4th, 1966 and stayed in the Hotel Alice Springs which was owned by one of our clients, the notorious, Ly Underdown.  He put me in a room with three other men.  I slept with my wallet in my pillow case and on the advice of the hotel staff, tied my shoes to the bed.
The furniture arrived.  I moved into the house at about 12.00 noon and at about 12.10, a guy from the Apex club arrived and said “come to our meeting tonight, you get dinner there, I’ll pick you up at 6.0 O’clock”.
Our social life in Alice Springs had begun.          
         
Heather arrived three days later by air, pregnant and Peter still a baby in napkins and two other children, Matthew and Anthony.

The house at 10 Mueller street belonged to the partnership and the office was run from there.
I was straight into work, clients had been awaiting my arrival.
Immediately we had settled Lance Burton came down from Darwin and organised a ‘Welcome to Alice Springs’ party to which all of our clients and the professional people of the town were invited.

Central Australia had just come through a long drought, about seven years the locals said, but it had rained in early 1966.

There had been a world conference of Agronomists in Alice Springs in either late 1965 0r early 1966 and I read the report on the findings of this conference in a large centre spread of the Saturday Advertiser.
Basically the conclusions were that because the drought had been so long there would be no seeds left to germinate after life giving rain when the drought finally ended.  Central Australia would therefore be left barren, without any grass, bushes or trees, everything was dead.  Even if seeds could survive for seven years there had been some small rains during the drought and the seeds would have germinated and died because of the lack of follow up rains and there would be no nutriments left to feed the seedlings.
The concentrated knowledge of these Agronomists from all over the world decided that they could, after the drought was definitely over, sow the whole of Central Australia with seeds of native plants from aircraft.
They would get some confectionery making machines and make lollies of suitable fertilizer with centres of seeds and spread them from bombers.

Until then I had never known such a team of world wide experts to be so wrong.  If they had asked some locals that had spent their life in central Australia they would have found the truth.
We went for a drive out bush two weeks after our arrival and the entire country was covered in wild flowers.  Some areas as far as you could see had all yellow flowers, others all blue, some all white and some a mixture of colours.  Flowers even grew on the bush tracks and you drove along with flowers scraping the bottom of the car.  The tough mulga bushes that appeared to be dead were sprouting new leaves from their base.
The drought had certainly broken and the country was recovering without the assistance of the Agronomists.


In a letter Heather wrote to her friend, Marlene Wigzell in Adelaide on August 5th 1966 she said

“It’s been raining here non-stop for three days and I am sick of the rain,

Then on December 12th
“Our river is flowing again, everyone this side has to walk to town and the railway line has been washed away.
Then again on February 14 1967
 “It was pouring with rain when we arrived back from Adelaide with Peter and Baby Andrew and didn’t stop for three days.

 
      Heather crossing the Todd in her Mini Moke
 Dave Pollock MP used this photo to convince the government that a bridge was needed.

 Heather had gone to Adelaide in early January and stayed with her sister Fay to await the birth of baby Andrew who was born on January 24th 1967.

Alice Springs was a busy town with tourism starting to become a serious part of the economy and oil search was huge in the mid sixties.
On weekends large numbers of oil search workers came into Alice.  The bars were packed and the crowded drinkers were extremely volatile.  Every weekend there were fights and often huge brawls involving maybe fifty men.

Two consulting engineers, Howard and Jack, were visiting Alice Springs and after work I said “I will take you to the Hotel Alice Springs for dinner, they have a band and dancing on Wednesday nights.  Its comparatively civilized and they don’t have fights there”.

Sitting at our table on the edge of the dance floor the table next to us occupied by two young men suddenly erupted.
We got out of the way and watched while these two rolled on the floor amongst broken glass punching at each other.
Bouncers quickly arrived and escorted them out while other staff cleaned up the mess.
We decided to leave and had to make a detour around another scuffle.
When we reached the car park two men had another against a car furiously punching into him.
As I was dropping them off at their hotel Howard said “thanks for an interesting evening but I’m glad that you didn’t take us to a hotel where they do have fights”.

Santos (an oil company) found the Hermannsburg gas and oil fields in around 1965 or 1966 but the commonwealth government would not let them sell the gas and oil until the early eighties after aboriginal land rights were in place.  Roger Vale was the local manager of Santos and he stood for election for the first Northern Territory state like government in order to try to get these oil and gas deposit available for the Australian market.
The government had a secret agenda;  They would not allow the gas and oil field to be tapped until laws were in place that would give aboriginals the right to claim royalties on this resource.
That was a good idea but it’s a pity that white Australians can not get royalties from gold , coal, oil or gas that is found on their land.

Heather thought Alice Springs was an expensive place to live.  She wrote to her friend Marlene on November 13, 1966.
Andy decided to use some of his expense account last Thursday and we went out to dinner taking a young lawyer (Paul Everingham) and his wife with us.  It was only a two course meal and cost $3.00 each.  I chose a liqueur parfait for desert, which turned out to be three scoops of ice cream in a parfait glass with a table spoon of cherry brandy dribbled over it, costing 90 cents.  Something you could make at home for less than 20 cents.  All the restaurants and hotels seem to be real ‘takes’ but going out to dinner has to be one of the main entertainments here.

I had just settled in when I had to go to Tennant Creek, 500 kilometres to the North, to do a final inspection on new modern rooms that had been added to an old hotel.  The old rooms where I stayed were divided from each other with partitions that were only two metres high and had a gap of about 200 mm at the bottom.  You could stand on your bed and look into the next room or reach under the wall and steal something, if you were so inclined, from the next room.

While Heather was in Adelaide I had to again visit Tennant Creek and had to find someone to mind Anthony and Matthew.  Ian Barker and his wife, Nell, who already had six children, offered to take them and they loved staying there.

      

Matthew Anthony    Peter and Heather holding Andrew.  Alice Springs  1967

I was supposed to get all drawings produced in the Adelaide office, but often for simple small jobs it was less trouble for me to knock up the drawings at home.
The draughtsmen in Adelaide would often misunderstand or ignore the client’s instructions that I had sent down.  I think they often thought that they knew better.

Alice Springs had a lot of special problems associated with building such as:.
Extreme temperatures.
Although a dry climate, rain when it did come was often extremely heavy, tropical strength.
Availability of some materials and some skilled labour was often difficult and so were better to avoid.

Paul Everingham, a young solicitor, later the chief Minister of the Northern Territory, had just moved to Alice Springs and I had fitted out his office for him.

A new motel, Zedena, was under construction but was behind schedule.  The owner had committed herself to a tour company to have it ready by April 1st 1967 and was so concerned that she briefed Paul Everingham to force the builder to put more resources into the project.
Paul called a meeting at his office and said “right, what’s the main hold up.”
“The fibrous plaster manufacturer and fixer has a monopoly in this town and ignores our complaints about them not being on site.  Many trades can not progress because that work is not even started” I replied.
“What can be done about it Andrew?”.
“A man called Billy Hill owns the business and I have tried all the usual threats, informed him that he will be charged penalties for late completion and the owners of Zedena motels will probably sue him for loss of profit etc. it is difficult when you are one thousand eight hundred kilometres from the next plaster board sub-contractor and he knows it” I replied.
“What can you do?” he asked.
“The only thing left is to terminate his contract and import a plasterboard sub-contractor from Adelaide but will the budget cope with the extra cost?” I said.
“We will pay the extra cost “ said the Zedena representative.
Paul handed his phone to me and said “organize it.”
I requested an Adelaide phone book and decided instead of ringing around all plasterboard sub-contractors to phone CSR plasterboard manufacturers who know all sub-contractors and who would be able to recommend someone who needed work now.  They said that they would phone me back with a name.
The meeting closed and as I entered my office door the phone was ringing.  “It’s Billy Hill here, I am in Adelaide and I have been talking to CSR, I am their agent for Alice Springs.”
“Here’s trouble” I thought.
Hi Billy we have just been talking about you”
“I know you bloody have you bastard.
What do you mean by trying to get me sacked from a job.
You can’t do that!”.
 “I can and I will have to unless your men are on the Zedena job tomorrow and stay there until completion.  You have had enough warning about this.”
“You are just a bloody rotten standover merchant.  You won’t last long in Alice Springs, I’ll see to that” he threatened.
Then I lost it as I can do if pushed too far “I shouted into the phone.
“You are the bloody standover merchant.
All I want to do is get a job done and you are obstructing it” and went on shouting about how he had stuffed up every building schedule in Alice Springs because he has a monopoly and now it looks like you have CSR in your pocket too and much more aggressive abuse.
Heather heard the shouting and had come into the office and was trying to get the phone off me.
She said “you can be fined for swearing on the phone.”
When I ran out of steam I hung up and phoned CSR .
They explained that they had to ring Billy Hill first because he is their Alice Springs agent but they didn’t think he would abuse me like that.
Then they offered to help by keeping Billy Hill as the sub-contractor.
His main problem, they explained, was that his factory can not meet the demand so if you will change your specification to CSR plasterboard we will despatch sufficient to do the job by truck tomorrow which means you will have it in two days, and, we will send two men to help.
The plasterboard arrived and so did a case of apples from Billy Hill with a card saying “I am sorry.”
 I was very popular with the local builders for finding a way around inevitable delays caused by Billy Hill’s inability to keep pace with the rapid increase in building activity in Alice Springs.

However, that was not the last time I had problems with monopolies in Alice Springs.  There was a man called Ted Smith who owned the local quarry, the only brick and concrete block factory and the only concrete mixing plant.  He also owned 51 percent of Billy Hill’s plaster works.
There was no ‘Restrictive Trade Practices Act’ then.        
         


After twelve months with Bullock and Burton, Lance Burton was offered a partnership by a large firm of architects from Perth who wanted to get into Darwin.
Lance’s  leaving automatically dissolved our partnership and Jim Bullock and I did not want to form a new partnership.
Jim offered to relocate my family back to Adelaide and he wrote to all our clients saying in effect that I was no longer with them and he would be moving to Alice Springs to take over the practice.

The partnership agreement I had signed contained a clause that forbid me to practice in Alice Springs for a period of five years should I leave the partnership but I considered that I had not left the partnership, it had been dissolved.  I took legal advice from Paul Everingham.      
Paul advised me that there was no legal reason to stop me from practising in Alice Springs.

The practice, through me, had just received a commission to design a new catholic church and I organized a meeting with the local priest, Father Dwyer, and his building committee.  I explained that the partnership Bullock and Burton no longer exists and it was for them to choose who they want for their architect.  Jim Bullock, I believe has made himself available and I now want to offer my services.
I didn’t expect to get an answer on the spot but did.  “We want you to be our architect” they said.  We exchanged appropriate letters.  Had I not got that job I would not have stayed in Alice Springs.

I rented a large space from Ansett Airlines in Todd Street, the main street, for $20.00 a week which used to be their freight warehouse but, more recently had been a car sales showroom that had gone bankrupt.
It had a street frontage of about 15 metres which had been turned into a glass shopfront by the car sales agent.

Then I had to quickly find a house.
The house I found was on the East side of the Todd River,  3 Wallis Street, had been used as a workmen’s billet for a building company and therefore needed renovations.  The price was $7,000.

Locals advised me to try the Northern Territory Administration housing department for a loan to buy the house because they liked to encourage young professionals to settle in the Northern Territory.  They approved my application but said that they will lend only 75 per cent of their valuation.  They valued the house at $9,500 so lent me the full amount of $7,000 at three percent interest.

A local builder with whom I had been working gave me four modular office partition panels left over from a job which I set on stacks of Besser blocks and used for drawing benches.

I needed a draughtsman and a typist but could not afford both so advertised for a typist.  While interviewing applicants I found the wife of the local agronomist, Aya McKonnocy, could type and draw.  This was an amazing piece of luck.

 I opened my office on July 1th 1967 with one employee, one drawing board, a portable typewriter all sitting in a huge warehouse with no ceiling and no wall lining.  Working weekends I gradually made the warehouse look more presentable with Hessian wall lining, aluminium foil ceiling and sea grass matting.  I got the local joiner, Hans Karner, to make a reception desk and an executive desk which I had designed to make use of left over materials that he had in his workshop.  To order new materials from Adelaide would take too long.  I built an office for myself which doubled as a conference room in the South East corner of the warehouse.  I was also having a new kitchen built in the house I had just acquired.

While all this was happening I was designing and preparing presentation drawings for the Catholic Church and Aya was drawing small ‘bread and butter’ jobs as well as doing the typing.  When we started the contract drawings for the church I had to employ a draughtsman and a typist/receptionist.

Bullock and Burton had asked me to bank with the ES&A bank although I had always banked Commonwealth.  When I applied to the ES&A for a loan to build a new kitchen for the house it was approved but when I asked for an overdraught facility to pay wages until I could get fees in, they said “no, perhaps you should redirect the $2,000 loan you already have”.
So I went to the Commonwealth Bank who were very happy to provide the money for the kitchen plus a $5,000 overdraft facility to pay wages.  Three years later, in 1971, they gave me a $30,000 loan to buy an old house in the town for an office.  The Commonwealth bank and I have had a good relationship ever since.



During the first twelve months I had spent in Alice Springs I noticed that the local builders, even the one man building companies, were very good at concrete work and the local ready-mix concrete company (owned by Ted Smith) operated a professional service.
This came about, I later discovered, by the action of the chief engineer of the Commonwealth Government Department of Works, Kevin Sweet.  Before tourism became an economic force in the nineteen sixties, the only work for builders was Commonwealth Government projects.
When Kevin Sweet first arrived in Alice Springs he told me that he said to all of the local builders something like:
 “your concrete work is totally unacceptable.  I am going to run an adult education course on concrete manufacture, placement and curing.  Any builder who does not attend those classes can not expect to ever get their concrete work passed by me.  That in effect will mean no work from the commonwealth government”.
By the time I reached Alice Springs, all of the local builders were experts in concrete work, better than any I had met in Adelaide.
This encouraged me to specialize in ‘off-form concrete’ construction in Alice Springs, a very suitable building method for the desert.    

Off-form concrete using fine grained timber for the formwork, I decided was the thing for the Catholic Church.  I designed the church so that the structure is the architecture.  The walls and ceilings fit into the structure without encroaching on the lines of the frame but still reflecting them.  I also designed the structural frame so that it could be precast in sections on the ground and lifted into place but the builder chose to cast it insitu.  The reason for running the beams at an angle to the walls is to make the frame self bracing.  Too many times a clean structural concept is ruined by the bracing necessary to stabilize it.

When prices were received ( all close to $180,000 ) they were all above the budget.  I said to Bishop O’Laughlin, the Bishop of Darwin, that the price could be brought back to the budget by changing the material of the roof from copper to copper coloured colourbond steel which would last for one hundred years in this climate.  The Bishop said “we do not build for one hundred years, we build to last for ever!”.

Two young German carpenters, Paul and Peter Sitzler had formed a building company, Sitzler Brothers, and they were selected to build the church.
The picture shows Father Dwyer, (dressed up for the occasion) Peter Sitzler and I in my office at the signing of the contract.  The picture on the wall is one of the perspective drawings I did for presentation of the design so it can be seen that the built design had not changed.

Father Jim Dwyer was a pleasure to work with.  At our first meeting I told him that I was not Catholic and in fact was not connected with any church at all and did he mind.
“Andrew, I only care about your ability as an architect”.
I said “I need to study how you work so I can design the building to suit.  Do you mind if I come to church on Sunday?”.
“That is a good idea, Andrew, but I suggest that you come with a catholic family”.  I went with Les Loy and his family.
The next day he said “well, what did you think of our service?”.  I replied “I think it was excellent theatre” and this amused him greatly.  He told the other priests and nuns my description of their religious service and they were all amused.  “Come Andrew, and I will show you what happens behind the scenes.”

He was good at helping with the ergonomics of the design of the pews, kneeling ledge and confessionals which he agreed was most important.  Too many churches are uncomfortable.  I had the pews made of Queensland maple which we imported directly from Queensland instead of the usual process of ordering it from an Adelaide timber company who would get it from Queensland.
Similarly I had the Japanese floor tiles imported directly from Japan reasoning that it must be more efficient than getting them from Adelaide via Sydney.

     
  Father Dwyer (dressed up for the occasion), Peter Sitzler (left) and myself.
      Signing the contract for the construction of the Catholic Church – Alice Springs

After a long meeting he would say “let’s go to the pub for a drink”, where we would usually join a group of other drinkers.  Father Dwyer, called Father Jim by many, mostly wore shorts and an open neck short sleeved shirt and the only indication of his religious connections was a little gold cross he wore pinned to his shirt collar, In contrast Father Morrissey, his assistant, always wore the full black robes and clerical collar.
Having a drink with us was Bill Westlau, manager of Ansetts, and a couple of others.
Bill Westlau said to Father Dwyer jokingly “why do we never see Father Morrissey drinking in the pub?”.
Father Dwyer said in a confidential voice “of course you know what’s wrong with Father Morrissey don’t you?”.
We all put our heads closer and wide eyed said quietly “noo!”.
“He’s religious!” was the reply.

Father Dwyer, although he had leukaemia, had been preparing for the construction of his church for many years.  He owned a quarry from which he had already prepared a good stock of central Australian red sandstone and he had been running an Australia wide raffle by post to raise money.

I had appointed Kinneard, Hill, DeRowen and Young (Now called ‘Kinhill’) as structural engineers and Rider Hunt and Partners as quantity surveyors.  Kinhill at that time were a group of young engineers who were very professional and innovative who I had worked with on many occasions in Adelaide.  Rider Hunt was an international practice and I had worked with the Adelaide director, John Hemmett who pioneered the practice in Adelaide.  I commissioned Rider Hunt to prepare a specified bill of quantities which can form a part of the contract (unlike an ordinary bill of quantities) and which helped me because I was just setting up my practice and did not have the time or equipment to produce the specification although I still had to write the technical clauses to be included.
I dealt with Howard Young of Kinhill who wrote a finely detailed section for the specification describing in detail for the builder how to produce good off-form concrete.
Jim Hart, the young commonwealth government architect, helped me price the bill of quantities to compile the pre-tender estimate.  He had access to the latest labor and materials price lists.

The assistance and instruction these Kinhill specialist consultants gave to Sitzler Brothers, eventually made them the best builders in the Northern Territory.

The concrete I specified was made using Brighton Light cement, a cement made by the Brighton cement company near Adelaide, it was almost white but one quarter the cost of white cement.  It is a high-early strength cement which is ideal for off form concrete work because the forms can be stripped days earlier and the product wrapped in plastic to ensure good curing and protection from getting dirty and stained.
It is a mistake to try to hide joints in concrete work, they always show up as unsightly patches, so I designed the frame to make the joints part of the architectural design.

The building of the Catholic Church was a great success and I believe it established Sitzler Brothers as quality builders and for myself a good reputation as an architect.
I became good friends with the priests and nuns and sometimes had dinner at the presbytery when Heather was away.

       
Catholic Church Alice Springs - Built  1968

 
Photos taken - 2006

In the year 2017 the Northern Territory Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects awarded this church the best in the catergory of  'The Most Endurable Architecture'.


Santa Teresa, a Catholic Mission some 150 km’s South-East of Alice Springs, managed by Father Clancy, needed a new convent for the accommodation of their nuns so I drove out to see them.
The old convent was in an old house on the side of a small hill but the concrete floor at the back was slightly below ground level.  When it rained the nuns had to open the back door to let the water run down the corridor and out the front door otherwise it would pile up against the back wall and penetrate every room.
So I designed them a new convent with the floor level well above the ground and a separate room for each nun.
Father Clancy was another charismatic and high achieving priest and he held popular barbeques at Santa Teresa which became a wine connoisseur’s night.  Once a year he would hold a fund raising wine auction of surplus bottles that people had brought to his barbeques.

I had taken Mathew with me to visit Santa Teresa, it was July, very dry and the temperature was below freezing at night.  The road was extremely rough with pot holes that were filled with bull dust so you could not see them.  Bull dust is so fine, like talcum powder, that when you drive through a patch it sounded like water splashing onto the bottom of the car.
On the way home at about five in the afternoon I hit a bad pot hole with a great thump but the car fortunately bounced clear of the hole so we were not hopelessly bogged.
The motor had stopped.
We were enveloped in a cloud of grey dust.  When the dust settled and I could see which way to go I tried to start the car but it was dead.
I checked for all of the obvious loose wires etc but found nothing amiss.  Using a piece of electrical wire that I always carry in the boot I established that electricity was getting to the ignition coil but none was coming out.  So the coil was apparently broken.
Night was approaching, there would be no more traffic on this road until tomorrow, no one travels at night on roads like this, we were 75 km from anywhere, it was going to be freezing.  I had six year old Matthew with me and I was getting pretty worried.
The ignition coil is a sealed component so there is nothing I can do to repair it but I thought “if a big bump made it stop working maybe there is a million to one chance that a big bump might make it work again???.
So I got the hammer from the boot, gave the ignition coil a sharp hit and it worked.  I drove very carefully home desperately avoiding every bump thinking myself very lucky.

I designed a new convent for the teaching nuns in Alice Springs and turned the old convent into accommodation for kids from remote cattle stations.  At the end of the dining room was the stair well and therefore a two story high wall which had old, rough and uneven plasterwork.  The best way to make such a wall look good was to paint it a very strong colour and because they were Catholic I chose a strong bright green.  Naturally I was a bit concerned that the nuns wouldn’t like it so the day it was painted I said to the young painter up on a high ladder “has sister Noel seen this colour?”, he said “yes she was here a few minutes ago”.
“What did she think”
“She loved it so much that she nearly creamed her jeans” was his reply.

The catholic primary school was very popular and they badly needed to expand.  The Commonwealth Government was offering financial assistance to private schools because they believed in diversity and it was cheaper for the government than if they had to educate these kids.
Getting approvals from the Catholic education council, the Northern Territory Administration (government), the Department of Works, the minister for education as well as town planning and the usual building authorities and the Fire Department took two years of manoeuvring.
The requirements of one government department sometimes conflicted with that of another.  To get over this I had to carefully document the conflicts and respectfully ask for a resolution because if you upset the head of a government department you will never get their co-operation.

To retain sufficient playground I designed the school with three stories using off form concrete.
Later I designed a Library to be built over the assembly hall using pre-cast concrete columns and wall panels so as to minimize the on-site time for the builder and therefore the least possible interruption to the school.

   

  Catholic Primary School  -  Building with pre-cast concrete

There was a civil engineer, John Ferrari, who had a road construction company but he wanted to get into the building industry as well.  When he won a road construction contract in a remote area he purchased mobile ‘rock crushing’ equipment to avoid the cost of carting gravel from Alice Springs.
 Later he won a contract to build a small supermarket but when he ordered ready-mixed-concrete for the footings, Ted Smith, who owned the concrete batching plant, refused to supply him with concrete because he claimed John Ferrari was competing with him in quarrying and rock crushing.”
So John Ferrari opened a quarry and a concrete ready-mix plant but when he ordered concrete blocks he found that Ted Smith also owned the concrete block and brick factory and wouldn’t supply him.
So John Ferrari started a brick and block factory.  I thought this was good, getting some competition in the town.
I had a job to design and get built a shop and warehouse and had approved the use of John Ferrari’s blocks.
The walls were half built when the commonwealth Engineer and Architect came to see me.  They had a politically based problem.
These Commonwealth government officers had rejected the use of John Ferrari’s bricks and blocks on commonwealth jobs because they did not conform to the standards set by the Australian Standards Association and they had been convinced by test information given to them by Ted Smith.  Now John Ferrari had gone political and politicians were asking questions because if private buildings can be built with these blocks, why can’t government buildings?
I showed them the test results that were given to me by John Ferrari and pointed out that the only item that did not conform to the Australia Standards was that the size of the blocks was outside the tolerance specified in the Standards by a mere plus or minus two millimetres and since the walls were being rendered it would not matter.  The strength and durability was OK.
They agreed with my decision and went away happy but immediately they left I thought “shit!, I had not checked with the testing authority that these tests were authentic” so I rang the testing laboratory hoping to confirm the results before the commonwealth guys got back to their office.

Luckily the laboratory confirmed the results but if they had not, the walls would have to be rebuilt at my cost.  My advice to young architects is to always confirm any such important information, on which you base your decisions, from the source.  I am not saying that John Ferrari would have given me a false set of test results but you can not take that chance.



The ANZ Bank had been designed by Hassell and McConnell.  They had put a large flat roof with only a one and a half degree slope.  They had also installed two large evaporative coolers on this roof with large air-conditioning ducts penetrating the roof in about six places.
Those of us with experience of building in Alice would never do that because in our experience this type of roof with large penetrations always leaks, probably due to the extreme temperatures that a roof is subjected to in central Australia.

The ANZ Bank asked me to get the leaks fixed so I inspected it and got the best roofing contractor to have a go.  I reported to the bank that in my opinion this roof would leak again.

After I had got it fixed for the third time, the manager phoned saying that the roof was leaking in six places.
I said “the only thing I can suggest you do now is go down to Woolworth’s supermarket and buy six plastic buckets and put one under each leak, otherwise something major has to be done to improve the basic design of the roof.
This was a sticky problem for me because I had to be careful not to imply that Hassell and McConnell were incompetent.  They would be able to demonstrate that they had used numerous roofs of this design in Adelaide and Melbourne which did not leak.

A few weeks went by and I got a call from the ANZ Bank manager who said “I have the South Australian State manager and the National manager in my office, can you come to my office now?”
I thought “shit, I wish I hadn’t been so flippant about their roof leaks.  I wonder if I am in trouble?”

I went to their office, a three minute drive, thinking “I’ve got till I get there to think up a scheme to solve this problem”.  Trying to look efficient as I was shown into the manager’s office, I was introduced to these top men.
“Sit down Mr. McPhee” the national manager said indicating a chair opposite his desk.
Leaning forward on his desk, looking into my eyes, he said “Now Mr. McPhee what we want to know from you is (pause) what colour plastic buckets do you recommend?”
That broke the ice.

I recommended that they construct a new roof over the equipment, in effect, to build a plant room with metal louvred walls.  They commissioned me to design and build this which was quite successful.

From then on I was their architect for Central Australia.

I was commissioned by the ANZ Bank to design and build substantial extensions to their bank and to design and build new staff quarters, both in Tennant Creek.
I appointed John Ingram (usually called Jack) to do the mechanical and electrical designs.

Jack Ingram was an officer in the British Navy during the Second World War and is a gentleman.
Whenever we went out to dinner he would insist on everything being ‘just right’ and would usually harass the poor waiters.  I tried to tell him that he should not do that in Australia because they will probably spit in your food before bringing it out.  He replied “you have to carry on a bit and maintain an attitude of superiority and then you will get good service”.

I took him to Tennant Creek to do a final check on and to commission the air conditioning and electrical services in the ANZ Bank jobs.  We had to fly from Alice on an Ansett Fokker and spend the night there.
At dinner at the Tennant Creek Pub the waiter said “would you like a couple of beers?”
“Would you bring your wine list?” replied Jack.
The waiter said “Wine!, …wine?, ….I think I know where there is a bottle”.  He disappeared and came back with a bottle of Riesling and showed it to Jack and said “a salesman left this for us to try”.
“Have you got a bottle of red?” asked Jack.
“This is the only bottle of wine on the premises, mite ” he replied.
“I suppose it will have to do” Jack said and the waiter put the bottle on the table and left.
When it was obvious he was not coming back with a cork screw Jack called him over “can you take the cork out?”.
“OO!, it’s got a cork has it?, I’ll see if I can find a cork screw”. (in those days only the cheapest nastiest wines had screw tops).
He came back and said “we don’t seem to have a corkscrew on the premises, shall I break the top off for you?”
I said “can you get a screw driver and push the cork in?”, no probs mite.
This was so outside of Jack’s experience that he made no complaints.

The next day we spent checking the buildings and making lists of defects.  We had until four O’clock when our plane left for the Alice.
At about two o’clock Jack turned off the air conditioning in the bank to make adjustments and it was very hot.  I had finished my work and was leaning on the bank counter when the bank staff, all men, suddenly ripped their shirts off and went on with their work.  I looked around and saw that someone was locking the door, it was closing time and the bank staff were hot.

The bank manager said that he would run us out to the airport.  “Wait in the white falcon station wagon out the front, I won’t be long” he said.

Jack and I grabbed our luggage, were let out of the bank and headed for the manager’s station wagon.
Parked next to the manager’s vehicle was a delivery type of van with two men in it.
One poked a gun out of the window at us and said “stay where you are!”
We looked back towards the bank door.
The manager was coming out as he was pushing a long barrelled 38 revolver into his belt.
He shouted at the men in the van “it’s OK they are with me.

We raced out to the airport in close convoy with another security vehicle.  The manager explained “it’s a shipment of gold”.
We checked in our bags and waited outside in the shade of the verandah while we watched men unload boxes of gold bars and put them on the airport trailer next to our cases.
There were four alert looking guards standing around with automatic rifles and another with a gun on his hip counting the boxes.
When the unloading was completed, the man counting the boxes got the Ansett man to sign something and all of the armed men got into their vehicles and drove away.
 Ansett were apparently now responsible for the gold.
Jack looked at me and I looked back saying “this would be a good plane to hi-jack but where could you go from here.”

****

In about 1982 the Marist Brothers established themselves in Alice Springs and they asked me to design a catholic high school for them.  I had to go through the same process of government approvals but all the government personal had changed since I designed the primary school so it was still a painful process.
I designed this school so it made maximum use of passive sola energy to minimise the running costs.


I joined the Alice Springs Rotary Club in 1967 and experienced two district conferences in as many years.  The club belonged to district 9550 (basically Queensland and the Northern Territory) and the year I joined they held the district conference in Alice Springs.
The club then changed to the South Australian district 9500 and they decided to immediately have their district conference in Alice Springs.

I was officially appointed the Harbour Master of Alice Springs by the Northern Territory Port Authority for 1972 and again in 1976 for the purpose of running the Henley on Todd Regatta which raised about $30,000 each year for charity.  I actually un-officially ran the Henley on Todd Regatta a third time when the Rotarian (the commander of Pine Gap) who had been elected to run it found the job too hard and resigned so I took over.
The organization of each Henley on Todd took nearly a year so the Rotary club formed a special independent committee that spanned two Rotary years.

In 1972 I designed a building in Parsons Street for the NT Housing Commission but they were building it mainly for the NT Tourist Bureau.
I used precast off form concrete main structural columns which enables interesting profiles and the Central Australian red sandstone but no one in Alice seemed to appreciate the finesse of this building.  The suspended floor slabs were ‘waffle slab’ construction supported only on the external perimeter so that internal walls could be moved about at will making maximum flexibility for future use.
The ABC television rented the top floor and installed the first TV station in Alice.  We got yesterday’s news today and all other programs a week later.  They broadcast from a video machine and the tapes were flown up from Adelaide.
Since leaving Alice the building was sold to PKF Accountants and they have put ‘bull nosed’ verandahs across the front to ‘Australianize it’ and it now looks totally kitsch.

   

 The NT Housing Commission Office Building




I designed the Anglican Church in Bath Street in 1982.  Because it was a small church on a relatively small block of land, to give it ‘presence’ I designed it with a tall tower like roof constructed using the principles of a hyperbolic paraboloid.  Although it has curved surfaces it is constructed using all straight structural members.
 

   
                                          Anglican Church  -  Bath Street,  Alice Springs

*****

Our friends Frank and Mignon Wearne had an unpleasant marriage break-up.
Frank had fallen in love with Val and even though Mignon had at last presented Frank with a son he left her for Val.
Heather and I were unhappy about the break-up because we liked both Frank and Mignon and thought they made a dynamic couple but we took the ‘no fault’ attitude.  Val turned out to be really good for Frank.

 Frank came to Alice to see us and to look for business opportunities but decided he could not make enough money in Alice to keep two families.  Val had two daughters.  They went to Paraburdoo to work for about a year.

In late 1973, because I liked going to Cairns, I looked at the prospects for opening an architectural practice there.  It seemed to me that Cairns was about ready to start a building boom so in 1974 I asked Frank if he would like to manage my office in Cairns.  Frank and Val met me in Cairns, we assessed the potential and decided that Cairns was probably on the verge of a building boom.  We looked for a property where Frank and Val could live and have the office.

Frank bought a house on a slope and built an office and flat for me under the house.  My practice rented the under-croft space.  Frank being a qualified builder with a keen appreciation of architecture had the ideal qualifications to manage the construction of the buildings that I designed.  Val was a well qualified stenographer and accounts clerk.  They were a good team.

The Cairns office started off well in spite of the Cairns people being wary and suspicious of architects.   Apparently architects used to fly up from Brisbane, ask a few questions, take a few notes then send up a glossy proposal with a big bill.  They saw it as a rip off which it was if the proposal did not meet their needs.
I flew to Cairns, usually on a DC3 which took nine hours, every month and worked in the Cairns office for a week.
During 1977 the big Australia wide building crash came so I closed the Cairns office, Frank and Val sold their house at a modest profit and went back to Adelaide to live where Frank could see his children more often.  After selling the Cairns assets I made no profit but covered all of my costs and had many pleasant trips to Cairns.

******

By 1972 the practice was doing well and I decided that a good investment would be to buy an old house on the edge of the central business district and turn it into an office.
I found an ideal house in Hartley Street which was for sale for $40.000.  While negotiating the purchase with the owner the commonwealth government acquired it then demolished it and built the new post office on that site.
I found another smaller old house on the corner of Bath and Parsons streets (No. 7 Parsons St.) which was not for sale but I got the real estate agent to show the wife of the owners a new larger well equipped modern house in a residential area that she could own for $27.000 and offered her $30,000 for the old run down house.
It turned out that the wife was the owner and she agreed with a great deal of excitement.

My best two draughtsmen at the time were also good at renovating old houses so I paid them to help me tear down walls, install new windows and doors and patch and paint the old place.
We needed a large room for the drawing office so we built one out the back with all glass walls and a tensile roof made of canvas and the old hemp rope.  The synthetic sail type roofs and synthetic ropes now used were not available then.  I had to make the supporting ropes adjustable because as they got wet in the rain they stretched so much that the roof came down from being five metres high at the apex to two metres high.  The centre of the tent roof had a wheel that the ropes were attached to and a beach umbrella to cover the hole which could be raised to allow hot air to escape.

 

The Drawing Office with a Tensile Canvas Roof. – John Webber, Architect
 

In about 1976 Alice Springs had a freak storm that caused a lot of local damage and blew a tree onto my canvas roof destroying it.
Brian Evans, my long time draughtsman, and I quickly erected some timber rafters and put a corrugated iron roof on, working in the rain.  Because wet roofing iron is very slippery we could fix the sheets only along the top and bottom and it was three months before the rain stopped long enough for us to install the rest of the fixing screws.

 

Office at 7 Parsons St. Alice Springs

 

During the seventies the practice was doing well and I wanted to devise a system that would enable the employed architects to take an invested interest in their work and also take responsibility for their own work.  I found I was being a full time administrator and I wanted to get back to being an architect.

My company structure allowed me to appoint associate directors so I made the four most experienced of them, associate directors.
I devised an agreement where the only income that the associate directors would receive was fifty percent of the profit that they made, the same situation they would be in if they had their own practice.  The other fifty percent went to the company for development and tax.  Today this could be called a ‘work choice agreement’ but more flexible.

The scheme worked well and productivity increased dramatically.  The more efficiently they worked the more money they made.
Only one amendment had to be made and that was the method of calculating how much each associate director contributed to the over-head costs of the practice.  At first we used a time basis method so that each contributed the calculated over-head amount for every hour worked on a project.
One of them quickly realized that if he did not record all of the hours that he worked he would not have to contribute to the over-head costs for the unrecorded hours.
We simply changed the method of calculating the contribution to over-head costs by making it a percentage of their dollar turnover.
They made such good money that they all went on an overseas trip after one year.          

*****

Although Alice Springs was on one side a rough and brutal frontier town it also had a very good cultural side
The local amateur theatre group were very talented and in one year won the Australia wide amateur theatre competition with a play called ‘The Lesson’.  The male star was George Smith, the local jeweller, later to be Mayor, but I can’t remember the name of the actress who played the school girl.  This was the most talented and dramatic performance I had ever seen and it was all done in a tin shed called ‘The Totem Theatre’.
The best performance I have ever seen of ‘The Pirates of Penzance, I saw in Alice springs put on by the local theatre group.  In the scene when the pirate apprentice was singing ‘who will have me’ and the chorus was singing sweetly and ordinarily, lovely tall slender Helen Short, wife of a local accountant, burst onto the stage singing “I will, I will”, with the purest, most brilliant uplifting voice I have ever heard.  Her voice sent shivers up my spine right to the top of my head.  I have never heard a soprano since who moved me so much.  I was so disappointed that I never saw her in a lead singing roll again and when I asked the Theatre group why?, they said “because everyone has to have a turn at being the lead singer”.  I think they should have capitalized on her talent.
Jillna Conway, wife of the District Officer and the first Lady of Alice Springs was also a good actor.  She was such a lovely person, everyone loved her but In one play where she played the part of the baddy she was so convincing that during the play everyone hated her.  That in my book is good acting.

There was and still is a large and talented visual arts community in Alice which now includes a lot of traditional aboriginal artists.

The federal government recognized the cultural talent in Alice and commissioned Hassell, architects to design a “Cultural Centre” which was to be built on the old Connellon Airport and was therefore called ‘The Araluen Cultural Centre’ after the old airport.  I was the local consultant for Hassells on this project during the design stage and worked with their young architect, Lee Graham, during the construction stage.
The ‘Cultural Centre’ consists of a substantial Art Gallery, a state of the art five hundred seat theatre which can do both stage and movie theatre, work rooms for artists and meeting rooms.  The old aircraft hanger was changed to an aircraft and motor museum.  The whole project cost four million dollars, which converts to about twenty million today, in 2007.
The Alice Art Prize was started by a group of locals and is still a great success every year.  The ‘prize’ acquirers some of the entries each year and so has built up a large collection.

 Lee Graham moved to Alice with his beautiful wife, Esther, for a year for the construction stage and they stayed with us for some of that time.  I liked Lee, we got on well and worked together very amicably.

About a year after Lee went back to Adelaide, Heather and I went to Adelaide and organized a barbecue
 so we could see all of our Adelaide friends.  When I rang to invite Lee and Esther there was an embarrassed silence then Lee Said
“You apparently don’t know that Esther and I are no longer together?”
This was such a surprise to me because they were such a close loving couple and I said “oh no, I thought you and Esther would never split.”
“Yes, we still love each other very much but soon after we got back to Adelaide we discovered that I was gay!”  We still see each other quite a lot but we each have a new partner.”  I replied “will you come to the barbecue and bring your new partner and would you ring Esther for me and ask her and her new partner”

*****

Prior to 1972 education in the Northern Territory was run by the South Australian Education Department and government schools were quite good.
 When the Whitlam labor government gained power in 1972 they took over education and brought in teachers from all over Australia and some from overseas.  In my opinion anyone who supported labor got a job whether they could teach or not.
The philosophy of the new Labor NT Education Department was that children will learn at their own pace, which might be true, but the teachers interpreted that to mean ‘children will learn anyway’ so why bother to teach.
The result was that kids were reaching High school stage unable to read and write or to do arithmetic.

At the Alice Springs High School in the 1972  matriculation exams (HSC) only five out of twenty seven passed.
I knew the principal of the high school and he was one of my friends but his answer to this problem was: ‘from now on he would allow only those students that he thought could pass to sit for the exams.’

Using this method he got a ninety percent pass for the matriculation exams, which looks much better on his record.  Out of the thirty five year twelve students in 1973 only ten were allowed to sit for the exams and nine passed.  That in fact is really only a 25.7 percent pass which I suppose is an improvement on 18 percent achieved in 1972.

Andrew, our youngest, we discovered after a whole term, was not going to school but playing with the aboriginal kids who lived in the dry Todd River and the school never informed us that he was not attending.

Heather and I decided that we had no alternative but to send our four children to school in Adelaide.
We had sent Anthony to Scotch College to board for 1972 but he hated boarding so much, he wrote three letters a week, for the first term, pleading to be brought home.
We promised that if he stuck out the year he could come back to Alice Springs for 1973 if he still wanted to and he did.

During the 1975 school year Heather semi moved back to our house at Rostrevor and Peter and Andrew went to the Rostrevor Primary school while Anthony and Matthew bussed over to Scotch College every day.  I was travelling to Adelaide a lot and the family came to Alice for the holidays.

In 1976 we sent Anthony and Matthew to boarding school at Scotch College, Peter and Andrew went to school in Alice Springs.

We decided that all this travelling and changing of schools was not satisfactory so on one of my visits to Adelaide I looked at an old renovated house at 20 Lochness Avenue, Torrens Park.  It was coming up for auction.
This house was on the same road as the entrance to the Scotch junior school so the boys could walk to school.
I couldn’t stay for the auction so I got Anthony to bid for me.  I told him not to go above $48,000 but he went to $50,000 and got it.  I wondered how high he would have gone if the bidding hadn’t stopped at $50,000.
So Anthony and I had bought this house without Heather seeing it.  “You are a brave man” said some of my friends, but the previous owner had been a landscape architect and Heather loved the garden.
I built a large family room and two more bedrooms on the back which cost another $16,000.

I sold the Rostrevor house for $29,000, which was bigger and better than the Lochness avenue  house which demonstrates how much more you have to pay for ‘location’ in Adelaide.

While Heather was in Adelaide she got a little Silky Terrier Puppy which she called Katie and we had her until she was eighteen years old when I had to have her put down in 1998.because she was blind and very arthritic.


I had five draughtsmen, a stenographer and an architect working in Alice as well as Frank Weane and his wife in Cairns in 1975;
It’s 1976 and I have no staff in Alice Springs and can cope with all the work by myself with Heather doing the typing most mornings.

In 1977 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
The Australian economy is looking very sick, building throughout the entire country has all but ceased.
By the end of 1977 I had closed my office in Cairns and had no work prospects for the new year in Alice Springs.
I said to Heather “we will move to Adelaide in January, all the boys can go to Scotch as day students, I will come back to Alice, wind up the practice and sell up the properties and move to Adelaide”.

Heather was quite happy about that because she liked Adelaide but I was concerned about work, Adelaide was probably the most poverty stricken place building wise.

In a letter Heather wrote to Marlene on 13 December 1977 she said ‘:
We will see you in the new-year sometime because we are coming to live in Adelaide again, possibly permanently, although we are telling ourselves it will not be.  Andy will surely be lucky to find work in Adelaide, if he can’t he will have to stay here because we have to be all fed.

We sold the Alice Springs house in January 1978 and when the family had settled in Adelaide
 I moved into the office where I would live and work until the last job was completed.

David Fish (Bardius Goldberg) had an unusually intelligent little black terrier of unknown breed that he and Mandy called Puddy and I liked her a lot so he mated her and gave me a pup.  This pup was a beautiful little dog that looked like a black Maltese which I called Haggis.  Katie and Haggis were inseparable friends and we took them with us whenever we went to Adelaide or to Cairns.

   

      Katie                         Heather              Haggis

In February 1978 I received a commission to design, document and get built new council chambers for the Alice Springs council for the cost of $1,200,000.
That was the only job I had for that whole year and while living and working in the office I produced all of the drawings, specifications and contract documents myself with a casual typist when required and then did all of the contract administration working alone in an office that could and had accommodated ten staff.
By now I had established that the most economical method for construction of roofs in Alice Springs was by using light-weight, cold-rolled steel and having it transported to Alice in factory lengths, doing any necessary fabrication in Alice.  Transport costs for un-fabricated steel was half of that for fabricated steel.  The use of these materials enabled me to also design the buildings so that the roof can be built first.
I would support the roof structure on small (50 x50) steel columns, that had to be temporarily braced, and have the roof completely covered so that the brick layers and other trades could work in the shade.
I found that tradesmen were not very productive when working in the sun in temperatures of above forty degrees.  These small columns were encased within the brick or stone piers or walls where they became the ‘holding down’ structural member.  I used this method of construction on the Council Chambers and the Library.

The whole project took all of 1978 and was completed by February 1979.

In February 1979 I received another commission from the council to design and get built a new town library.  The building industry had begun to recover in the Northern Territory but not in South Australia.

     Alice Springs Council Chambers  -  Built 1978

The ceilings were raking to follow the roof slope and lined with timber battens spaced about12 mm apart with thermal and acoustic insulation above which gave excellent acoustic and thermal performance.
When the additions and alterations were done in 2005 the Adelaide based architect put flat plasterboard ceilings throughout which has destroyed the ambience and the good acoustics of the original interior.

   

The council meeting chamber

         

           Local sandstone quarried by Bardius

           

Council meeting chamber - Viewed from the South

We met a teacher at Scotch who had just divorced her husband and she and her 10 year old daughter needed somewhere to live.
Heather struck a deal with her; she could live in our house at 20 Lochness Avenue for free but she would have to board Andrew in exchange.  Heather would move back to Alice and we would build a new house.

During the school holidays Heather and the boys came to Alice when the Northern Territory were having their first ever ‘over the counter’ land sale.  Vacant land was all owned by the Commonwealth who normally subdivided and sold the lease for blocks of land by auction.

I queued at the crack of dawn when the temperature was minus six degrees to buy a block of land and Heather took my place in the queue at 9.00 o’clock so I could go to work.  I was about ten from the head of the queue because some people had slept there.
We bought a block at the end of a cul-de-sac called Andrews Court for about six thousand dollars.
The Northern boundary faced a park which would be ideal for a glass wall which would let in a lot of sun during winter but would be blocked out by a roof overhang in summer.
Our address there was 7 Andrews Court.

That is where I built the pyramid house which was designed to take maximum advantage of passive solar energy.  ( see photos ).  The roof which is the largest of the external surface was built of light weight cool room panels. Inside, the concrete floor with slate covering, concrete block walls and first floor 200 mm thick slab worked together as a thermal mass that served to level the extremes in temperature.
The solar hot water unit had a tiny 60 watt pump that circulated the hot water from the sola absorbers to the storage tank in the plant room at ground level.  When temperatures in the solar panels reached close to freezing a thermostat instructed the pump to circulate some hot water from the tank back to the solar panels to prevent them from freezing.  Manufacturers of solar hot water units had tried a lot of different methods to prevent the solar panels from freezing and bursting but this was the only one that worked in Alice Springs consistently over the years, and the water used to prevent freezing had been heated by the sun.
I kept records for a while and when the outside temperature reached six degrees below freezing the inside temperature of the house never went below eighteen degrees and that wasn’t until about four in the morning.
We needed no heater in this house.

Cooling was by an evaporative cooler which was positioned on the Eastern side of the house, at ground level for easy maintenance, where it caught the East to South East prevailing breeze.  On hot days we had only to leave the cooler water pump (60 watts) running and the house was gently cooled by the breeze blowing through the wet cooler pads into the house.
I had also installed a two metre diameter spa pool in the living room, partly under the spiral stair, which was also sola heated and would contribute to the thermal mass of the interior.  By switching on the air blower in the pool you could add humidity to the air in the house which was often necessary in the winter when the relative humidity of the outside air was zero.

Since about the year 2000 the emphasis on building design has increasingly been on the latest cliché called ‘sustainability’.  Nearly all advertisements for building materials now include the adjective ‘sustainable’ without giving any evidence on how it is sustainable.  Some materials have been classified as more ‘sustainable’ than others but it is impossible to determine how this was worked out.  For example timber was immediately classified as being more sustainable than steel presumably because timber production costs less energy than steel plus while timber grows it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.  This example is probably true but how do they compare the two?.  Weight for weight or by their comparative performance in structures.  Although steel is much heavier than timber steel can do a lot more work in a structure and so only about one third of the number of bits of steel are required to do the same job as timber.  Are they comparing apples with apples or apples with oranges??.

Building awards are being given to architects and designers for ‘sustainability’ and for ‘energy efficiency’ but on what criteria?.  I have seen photos of buildings that have won awards for energy efficiency but it can be seen from the photo that sun penetration and exclusion has not been considered.  Apparently energy efficiency has been calculated on the ‘R’ value only.  That is how good is the insulation in the roof, walls and floors.  A well insulated house will be hotter in the summer than a poorly insulated house if the sun is allowed to penetrate through the windows.  (The greenhouse effect) There has been recorded lately some concerns that the selection of building materials has been primarily based on ‘sustainability’ ignoring other more important considerations like structural soundness or permeability.  What is the good of a ‘sustainable’ building if falls down in five years time

       

        The Pyramid House – Alice Springs    -   1980

 

The pyramid house, Built 1980.

The master bedroom with ensuite and walkin robe was 5.0 m by 5.0, had a balcony overlooking the park and a 2.4 m by 2.4 m perspex pyramid at the apex  which had an aluminium foil faced blind to reflect the heat out in the summer.   You could look at the stars while lying in bed.

          PLANS OF THE PYRAMID HOUSE

  Inside the Pyramid House

Peter and Matthew had taken up apprenticeships with Alice Springs electricians.

The office started to be busy again but now instead of employing draughtsmen I engaged a draughting service to do drawings other than those I could do myself.

Because of the new conditions that the labor governments had encouraged and inflicted on employers, it became much more viable to do less work and, as much as possible, do it yourself.

Until the mid seventies the cost of employing someone in an architects’ office was double their wage.   Now, in 2007, it costs more than three times their wage.
In addition, the attitude of employees had changed.  They wanted to be paid top dollar but were not interested in working nor taking responsibility for their work.  They cared nothing if they made mistakes that cost the office thousands of dollars, they were not interested in a profit sharing agreement because they knew that they would have to actually work efficiently to make the equivalent of their wage.
If I complained they would say “Andy, get a life”.


In 1979 I purchased my first computer which was a Tandy model two with RAM boosted to four kilobytes!.  With this tiny ‘Random Access Memory’ I was able to do word processing, spread sheets and run an accounts program.  It was a temperamental machine, I had to frequently unplug and re-plug the cables connecting the various parts because the manufacturers had not yet started to use gold plated contacts.  On dry days, even though the room was air conditioned, I had to spray the carpet and the typist with fabric softener to prevent static electricity from sending it haywire.
This machine cost me $4,000, I could have bought a more reliable Hewlett Packard PC for thirty thousand dollars but they could not provide the programs to do what I wanted.

Anthony had completed his third year of Architecture at the Adelaide University and, had to get one year of practical experience before proceeding with fourth year.  However architects were still poverty stricken in Adelaide and no one wanted to take on students so I gave him a job.  During his year with my office he wrote two programs in Tandy basic computer language that we could use to:
1. do all the necessary administration procedures for running an architectural practice and;
2. for the administration of building contracts.

The next year I upgraded to a Tandy model three which at the time was a great improvement.
Writing these programs gave Anthony good knowledge of ‘professional practice’ and he passed that exam easily.            

These programs enabled me to run a lean mean but very professional practice for the next few years.  Unfortunately before long Microsoft dominated the PC world market and the language of Tandy basic was not used in new personal computers.

Working in such a remote area as Alice Springs often presented a challenge especially when the railway line was often broken by heavy rain.
Paul Sitzler phoned one such time and said “I have twenty men to employ and we can not get on with any of our projects because of the lack of materials.  We have a yard full of materials left over from past jobs and we need a large shed and workshop at our yard,.  Can you come around and design a building that will make use of zese materials? (all in a German accent of course).  That’s an interesting architectural exercise which I will be happy to undertake“ I replied”.

Another challenge was when a local entrepreneur phoned on Tuesday and said “I can get Leo Sayer here to give a concert next Saturday if you can get five hundred seats installed in the casino amphitheatre by 5.00 pm on Saturday.”  The Araluen Theatre had not yet been built.
“Let me make some phone calls and I will get back to you.”
One advantage of living in interesting places like Alice Springs and Port Douglas is that when building supply companies send a sales person it is always the Sales Manager so I knew the sales manager of Sebel furniture in Sydney.
He offcourse had to discuss it with his staff and rang back with a plan to truck the seats across country from Sydney to Alice using two drivers, one driving while the other slept.
Sebel needed two days to manufacture the seat mountings so the truck left Sydney on Thursday evening.
I quickly drew a seating plan and got verbal approval from the building inspector and fire chief and air express mailed it to Sebel.  There were no fax machines then.
The casino amphitheatre was an earth grassed bank for the audience but with a proper stage and back of stage facilities.

Sebel sent a paper profile which I had made into a timber one with holes at the exact position for the pipes for seat supports to be driven into the ground.

I devised a system for rapid installation.
The seats would be mounted in banks of five on a steel beam with two 75 mm pipe legs welded to the beam.
While waiting for the seats to arrive from Sydney we would drive 60 mm diameter pipes into the ground at the correct spacing.  When the seats arrived all we had to do was drop the banks of seats over the pipes in the ground.

The seats arrived on Friday night and it took only two hours on Saturday morning to install them.  
Leo Sayer was a great success and they had many more celebrity concerts using those seats.


Neighbour and Lapsys, Architects had designed a two hundred and fifty two room Hotel for Alice and Sheraton Hotels were to be the operators.  I was their local consultant during the design and documentation stage and their site architect for the construction phase.  Construction was completed in 1984.

One of the last jobs to be completed by my Alice Springs practice was the Tennant Creek Council Chambers.  This project was funded by the then new Frazer Liberal government.

           

   

            Malcolm Frazer, myself and the Mayor of Tennant Creek looking at the plans of the new Council     Chambers

     

      The Tennant Creek Civic Centre.

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