David Malouf

Yeah, you could do that.

But that suggested that they were not permanent and that there was a kind of makeshift quality about the houses.

And we had all, as kids, we used to love to sit on the front lawn and watch a whole house go by on the back of a lorry.

And later on, I went with a friend who had been born there in 1933 to Chilago in North Queensland.

And when we got there off the train, there was nothing in sight.

It was just lawyer vines and a pub and a butcher shop.

But that had been, when he was born there in 1933, it had a population of 11,000.

And all the houses had been taken from Chilago to create the town of Mariba, 101.

miles away.

So you could actually pick up a whole town and translate it somewhere else.

That gives you a quite strange notion of what permanence and impermanence are.

And I think that's pretty rare, if anywhere, but certainly rare in Australia.

I'm thinking the exact opposite, because you're really alive to the differences between Australian cities.

So Brisbane is Adelaide, Adelaide where all the houses are very heavy and made out of stone, the older houses I'm talking about.

And they seem to be permanent and immovable.

I know you think that different houses tend to produce different habits of mind and activity.

I just wonder, you know, maybe Brisbane people are more likely to be breezy and portable, where Adelaide are solid and immovable and respectable and all those things.

I don't quite know how far that goes.

But certainly I think that as little people...

We begin to map the world in terms of the first domestic spaces we encounter.