Australian_House_&_Garden_2017_02

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78 | AUSTRALIAN HOUSE & GARDEN

<“That’s not basil, Duck, that’s asthma weed,” said Mum.

All the wind went from my sails. And the next day a

slick of oil, brown as mud, leaked from some guilty ship

and streaked across Mort Bay from one side to the other.

Things did get exciting again, though, when the

building started. Mum and I loved to look at the architect’s

drawings of how it was all going to look. I found lots of

old glass bottles buried in the yard and cleaned them up.

Some looked like medicine bottles from an old-fashioned

pharmacy. I would put them on the windowsill in my new

room, I thought.

But then the builders started digging around in the

foundations and they also found some unexpected

things: termites. Not the kind of collectables that anyone

would want to put on their windowsill. And there were

Singer/songwriter Holly

Throsby recently released

her debut novel,Goodwood

($29.99, Allen & Unwin),

a portrait of a country town

torn apart by rumours and

mystery after two of its residents

go missing in separate events.

HOME LIBRARY

We asked Holly to name her top five recommended reads. Spanning genres and

decades, her eclectic list reveals a keen love of modern classics.

multitudes of them, a vast empire, fat and full from

eating away all the important structural components

of our new house.

Mum exhibited a distinct lack of excitement at

that point. There were some sombre times. But the

resulting demolition of the entire house made for

a good photo opportunity, even with the dirty water

and much asthma weed visible in the background.

I remember looking at that photo when the house was

finally finished. Mum had it framed and hung it on

her bedroom wall.

Don’t worry, the house turned out beautifully in the

end. Full of light and the sparkle of the harbour. But

I still like to look at that photograph. How full of

possibilities is an empty block of land, in a nice position,

covered in dirt and weeds. #

Photograph by

Scott Hawkins/bauersyndication.com.au (bottles)

. Books available from Dymocks; http://www.dymocks.com.au.

The Easter Parade

by Richard Yates, $22.99,

Vintage Classics.

The Member of the Wedding

by Carson McCullers, $19.95,

Penguin Modern Classics.

The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver,

$19.99, Allen & Unwin.

Flush

by Virginia Woolf,

$4.99, Penguin Classics.

As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner,

$14.99, Vintage Classics.