David Malouf

And so the idea of inner and outer is very, very strong in a Queensland house because of the verandas and the nest of rooms at the center.

But also the idea of above and below is very strong because those houses, because the terrain is hilly everywhere, those houses were built on stumps that were often maybe two or three feet high at one end of the hallway of the house and 18 or 19 feet high at the other end of the hallway, which would only be...

a few meters, so that there was a huge wedge of space underneath the house, which was, of course, of the same dimensions as the house above.

But because the house above was familiar and had its uses and was lived in and the space below was empty, that space seemed much larger and much wilder to kids.

than the house above so you know when you got down there and you stood at one end of it and you're at a place where it's maybe 18 feet high and what you see not very far away is stumps that are only three feet high if you think of that as a forest it's a big forest and it's a place that grown-ups very rarely venture into but it's

It's like a secret world of kids down there, isn't it?

All the stuff that falls between the floors.

Well, that's where you could go to sell gore.

It's where animals went to die, for example.

One of my very, very earliest memories is my mother had a little dog and we had an old stove down under the house because that's where everything that...

you no longer had any use for was abandoned.

So down there there were old stoves, old bathtubs, old buckets, old bedsteads, all those iron bedsteads would go down there.

And the dog went to die underneath the stove down there.

So I always associated that place with the death of that dog.

But, you know, it's where children went and played.

They went and played doctors and nurses, and it's where they had mostly their first curious discoveries of sexual difference and all of that kind of stuff.

So Under the House is not just a secret and dark place.

It's a bit like Freud's notion of the unconscious.

And, you know, in a different style of house...

where all those unwanted objects go is into the attic.