David Malouf

Even if you were in the bathroom, the door was left ajar.

Even in the bathroom?

Even in the bathroom, yes.

How is any kind of privacy maintained then?

Well, you learn not to look and you learn not to hear what you're not supposed to see or hear.

And, you know, there are conventions about that.

Of course, you do see those things and you do hear those things, but nobody ever mentions them.

It just seems like another world, doesn't it?

It's so different from, I think, to other cities, other Australian cities with different kinds of houses.

It wouldn't be very different, I suspect, from the kind of life that people live in most of Southeast Asia or in India, for example.

The Brisbane houses of tin and timber, you said they were more like tree houses than houses, like cubby houses almost, and very open in that way as well.

Was there a sense of shame sometimes attached to these old Brisbane tin and timber homes that were there in place?

I think until very late there was, and that was because they represented a kind of poverty.

You know, rich cities build in stone and stone is permanent.

And Brisbane was a city made of wood and of local wood, which was cheap.

And people didn't necessarily see those houses as beautiful.

They saw them as convenient, except that there were architects here, Dodds, for example, who realized that those houses could also be beautiful.

But mostly they were just pretty functional.

And portable too.

You could put them on the back of a truck.