Susan Duncan, author of the memoir Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life and its upcoming sequel The House At Salvation Creek, is interviewed in "The Sydney Morning Herald".
If you catch the ferry across Pittwater from Church Point on Sydney's northern peninsula, you'll probably notice a house on the hill at Lovett Bay. It is a striking, rather grand classical-revival home among the gum trees, with fat columns and a deep wraparound veranda and it stands above, and slightly aloof from, the dwellings that cluster around the shore. It looks like a house with a story -- and Susan Duncan has written it....
Up close, Tarrangaua is beautiful, with lovely proportions and a sense of grace and grandeur. "I think the veranda is the key to the whole house," Duncan says. "We live on it in summer; sleep on it in summer." The house was built in 1925 for Dorothea Mackellar, who wrote the poem "My Country" 100 years ago. But its story doesn't end there.
Duncan's new book is a kind of whodunit about the house. Word-of-mouth had always said that Tarrangaua's architect was the classical-revival master Hardy Wilson, but when experts pooh-poohed that, Duncan went looking for evidence. The unfolding mystery of the house is the thread that pulls the reader through anecdotes about life in Lovett Bay, of neighbours, nature, dogs, boats, ageing, good food, friends, fun, mothers and daughters, cancer and cake.
