Originally this story began with the following sentence: “Igloo house. Dome house. Boob house. Ice cream house. Spaceship house.” So it wasn’t necessarily deathless prose.
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It was going to be, essentially, a local piece on a local landmark – the admittedly unmissable three-storey vinyl-coated concrete and steel dome not far from the railway line in Ballan.
The house became a talking point among residents in the small town just east of Ballarat after it was built in 2008.
“Alien house,” they said. “Hippies.” An earlier proposal to build several of the monolithic domes nearer to the centre of Ballan was rejected by council after 200 objections.
Round pegs in square holes, it seems. Although a later submission to convert the round pegs to square to appease opposition was still knocked back.
So it was likely to be a story about how a determined builder overcame neighbourly and council resistance to a radical design and built a strikingly unconventional home.
Then I met the builder.
Anthony Lowan Clarke is about as removed from being a hippy as is humanly possible. He’s been a member of the Liberal Party in Victoria since 1971; a computer coder in the infancy of the business; an immigration agent; a justice of the peace – and treasurer of the Victorian Priory of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Knights Hospitaller.
But he’s also a 40-year practitioner of homeopathy and a believer in the principles of biodynamic farming as espoused by Alex Podolinsky.
1: A short background
Clarke, by all accepted measures, should be a pillar of the establishment. His father joined the Liberal Party at the personal behest of its founder Robert Menzies, and they remained close associates in life.
“Menzies would use Dad’s office in Kew during elections,” says Clarke.
“It led me to immigration work; at first with Greeks and Italians, then Vietnamese. I could write you see, and they would say ‘go and see young Tony Clarke, he’ll get the family out here!’ Xavier education, you see.”
He estimates he’s helped 3000 to 4000 people to emigrate to Australia from around the world.
A master builder who became an estate agent, Clarke’s father had served in the Middle East during the Second World War, where he converted to Catholicism and later walked the Via Dolorosa.
One of ten brothers who grew up in the prime minister’s Kooyong electorate, Anthony Clarke’s childhood memories are of moving from one big house to another, usually bigger, one somewhere in Kew. He says most of them survived the trend to demolition because of his father’s willingness to subdivide the land they were set on – the tennis courts and garden plots that the family had no use for.
“When you throw Dad in, we had a cricket side,” he laughs. But none of us were much into sports...”
Clarke Lived in such houses as 75 High Street Kew and the imposing 100-square Carnegie House, now 4 Cameron Court.
His mother was a descendant of First Fleeters, an amateur painter who had known members of the Heidelberg School. In photographs she appears with her three brothers who served in each arm of the services in World War II.
He’s a little over middle height, with the wardrobe of a man who doesn’t really see the need to accede to fashion. The cord of his iPhone earpiece is secured to his lapel with a bulldog clip; his suit coat doesn't really match his blue jeans. His shoes are slightly battered. But then, he’s also a man in the middle of packing up an extraordinary lifetime.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know the builder of the many-monikered house had more than a few facets to his personality.
I’d seen photographs of him in his Hospitaller’s red and white cross-emblazoned cloak standing outside the dome that rises from the Ballan soil like a massive mushroom.
I’d seen him with his metallic blue 1954 Peugeot 203, which remains his day-to-day car 25 years after he purchased it from a deceased estate, and despite a paint job by which he is still underwhelmed.
Still I wasn’t prepared to meet a man who has advocated for the use of hemp industrially for 20 years and had help develop a processor to prepare hemp flax economically and ergonomically.
Nor to meet someone who has an intimate and passionate knowledge of the railway systems of the world, and had travelled lines all around Australia recording them to video with a musical soundtrack.
A man who developed a deep love of the live music scene in Melbourne in the 1990s and made it his purpose to record as much of it as possible on his own film camera while obtaining desk feeds of the gig and saving them with meticulous detail.
2: The dome as home
Technically, Clarke’s home in Ballan is not a geodesic dome, although it is often mistaken for an example of the revolutionary polyhedron-based building design popularised by the American architect and polymath R. Buckminster Fuller in the years following the Second World War. And Clarke with two of his brothers had built a geodesic dome previously, in Beech Forest, but found it had shortcomings with leakage and noise.
Rather it is an example of a monolithic design – one of the earliest forms of shelter design in history.
(Here we throw in a short history of the arch and the dome)
The realisation of the inherent strength and load capability of a dome structure dates back to the very earliest civilisations of homosapiens. Structures made of mammoth tusks, wattle and daub and corbelled stone have been discovered across continents dating from prehistory.
Cultures through time have adapted and enhanced the dome, from the Etruscans and Persians through to the Greek, Chinese and Roman civilisations and onto the great Middle-Eastern and Eastern domes of the Byzantine and Islamic temples of worship.
The Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne is an example of a building capped by a dome (inspired by Il Duomo di Firenze, the Cathedral of Florence).
Because the thrust of a dome spreads out and downwards equally, it is natively stable. It has the enabled the construction and existence of such magnificent buildings as the Pantheon, the Hagia Sophia, the Dome of the Rock, St Peter’s and St Paul’s and the Great Stupa of Sanchi.
How was the dome house constructed?
Some would describe the process as papier mache reversed, but the diagrams below explain it with clarity.
Tony Clarke says the building of a monolithic dome is a relatively simple process.
“This big fan keeps the air pressure inside the vinyl form to 2lbs per square inch, and this pushes the polyurethane and the concrete you've sprayed up against the form and keeps it there,” Clarke says.
“You build it up in layers: polyurethane, steel, concrete. And you’ve then got your structure that will withstand your tornadoes, earthquakes, bushfires.”
Despite local opposition, Clarke said he had an epiphany crossing the Ballan railway line one day, and he realised the fight could be better taken to another site.
The dome house is the result.
3: Hemp, Kennett, Bracks and the decorticator
Anthony Lowan Clarke is about as removed from being a hippy as is humanly possible. He’s been a member of the Liberal Party in Victoria since 1971; a computer coder in the infancy of the business; an immigration agent; a justice of the peace – and treasurer of the Victorian Priory of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Knights Hospitaller.
When Sir Joseph Banks sailed with Cook in 1769, he carried with him the seeds of the hemp plant, fully intending for the new colony to be based upon the cultivation of the cannabis plant which supplied the Royal Navy with raw material for its uniforms, sails and ropes. Rot-resistant, 80 tonnes of hemp would be used in the fit-out of one ship of the line.
By the 1840s, the north coast above Sydney was a major hemp-producing region. After the decline of sail and the rise of cotton, hemp production dropped to almost nil, despite its application in many industries being proven.
Tony Clarke and his older brother Adrian, now deceased, saw an opportunity in the resumption of the use of industrial hemp, including as a self-insulating building material. While his brother designed and built a hemp decorticator, a machine which breaks down the hemp plant for use, Clarke advocated for the re-legalisation of industrial hemp through the Studley Park branch of the Liberal Party and the State Council, achieving his goal under Jeff Kennett.
“Then Bracks got elected, and you couldn’t get a licence for 10 or 12 years under Bracks and Brumby,” he says wryly.
“I did it mainly because Adrian wanted to get that done. The decorticator he had designed was probably the best in the world. It decorticates green hemp in half a second, no retting. But you need to understand how to plant hemp as well, to get the best from the crop.
“I’ve put a lot of money into hemp; then Adrian died. He was only 67, so that put me in mind of retiring. It’s why I’m selling the dome house.
“It’s all incongruous isnt it? It’s like I’m like left wing and the Liberal Party. But I’m not really. I just do things.”
As if to demonstrate, Clarke shows me his solar energy plant housed in a shed built from hemp mix. The entire property produces its own electricity from wind and solar – schemes introduced, he adds, by the Howard government.
4: Melbourne’s music scene in the 1990s
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Clarke developed a fascination with the Melbourne music scene. To that end, he bought a top of the range (for the time) video camera and set about recording what is now a valuable archive of live performances in venues around the city.
“I’ve got about 500 hours of the stuff… the Mavis’s from Ballarat; the Warner Brothers, Kirsty Stegwazi, The Lucksmiths…
“It really started because when I was in England in 1974 to 1977 I recorded a lot of a radio program called Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It. It ran all this stuff… Van der Graaf Generator, Traffic and King Crimson that your grandmother would now like. I have about 60 of these tapes that were recorded in the backblocks of Bovingdon, about 30 miles from London. And some were recorded in the centre of London.
“From there I started to build my record collections.(Clarke has a vinyl collection of well over 5000 LPs) And these people I had comer to know in Melbourne, the Warner Brothers – I saw no-one was making any videos of them, no-one was keeping any record of this – so I thought I’ll go and get a camera and I started videoing the Warner Brothers and Dan and Al, and other associated acts.
“And then my cousin asked me to start videoing a show he had started up called the Melbourne Songwriters Club. And there were lots of bands, about five or six of them every Sunday at the Palace in St Kilda, which has since burnt down of course.”
5: Train (line) spotting
The great tradition of train travel is another of Tony Clarke’s passions. He’s recorded thousands of trips around the world, often with a soundtrack composed from music he’s recorded earlier.
His passion extends to restoring lines across the state of Victoria.
“I realised that a lot of train lines were going to get closed, so I’d go out and sit on the trains – book and set out a whole program of where the trains were going – over half of the United States and throughout Europe and all over Australia, up to Cairns and recently over to Perth.
“The first was the Melbourne to Sydney train, The Spirit of Progress. And I have footage of the train going up to Byron Bay and Murwillumbah, which of course is long gone, but for a three-mile section they are thinking of keeping alive.
I’ve got a map of just how many lines we’ve lost, and I’m putting a letter together at the moment to send to the Liberals who are asking for policy ideas, saying we should reopen all these lines!
“The reason is: in the 30s and 40s and 50s – wait. In the 1930s a QUARTER of all the people in Victoria worked for the railways. It was the most socialised place in the world. But there was a problem with costs of of running all the steam trains, which is why Sir Henry Bolte started building all the roads everywhere.
“Now with these diesel trains that only need two people, they could easily be running lots more train services right around the state.”