Jessica Lillico

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

Building this house was the re-birth of the original organic concept of the immediate post-war beginnings. It involved a return to first principle devising from what was on hand. Earth for walls, negation of concrete slabs, brick and stone paving direct onto the ground, and the employment of non-professional builders. It recaptured those early days... See more

I met Margot Edwards during 1948 in Matcham Skipper's Studio behind the Russell Street police station, and it was only a short time afterwards that I became her lover and a constant visitor to her in a loft in Ivanhoe. Margot was only eighteen years old and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. She had done an art course at the Royal Mel... See more

His ability to maintain his opinions against all assaults won his pupils' unswerving allegiance and their frustrations, at the same time. He demonstrated his building and design ability every day as the work proceeded, irrespective of the observers' personal opinion of it. It could not be denied. He encouraged the rich to become patrons of his grea... 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

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