Revisiting Prime Minister John Curtin’s house as an intimate Australian domicile

Abstract

John Curtin was the Prime Minister of Australia during WWII and died in office in 1945. In the early-1920s he designed a modest family home in Western Australia with a wide verandah so he could rehearse speeches and recite poetry while perambulating its perimeter. It was a seaside respite far away from the slings and arrows of political and public life in the capital of Canberra. This study reexamines a seemingly ordinary house with extraordinary historical associations to unpick how national narratives and personal domestic materialities collide in the domicile. In a nation preoccupied with personal home ownership, and the commodification of housing stock, such intimate histories of dwelling are surprisingly few. Although the site does not carry the weight of international significance as found in Despina Stratigakos’s account of Hitler’s homes, or say Churchill’s Chartwell House, Curtin’s house provides another space for re-thinking images of domesticity cultivated by men in power during the catastrophic period of WWII. In fulfilling my long-term project of sleeping in heritage houses and recording their affective atmospheres, I spent a weekend alone in the home. Few original artifacts remain, so creatively explored other ways of staging domestic intimacy. This was carried out through re-interpreting the historical biography of the house and experimenting with visual techniques to draw out the hauntings of prior occupation. The images accompanying the text capture the micro-time of my own domestic rituals and set them against the longer duration of historical narratives—situated within the spectral shadows of the Curtin Family Home.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Interiors Design Architecture and Culture, 2026 · DOI ↗