Derham Groves

  • Tree change to sea change!

    Late last year (2014) we sold Linton and bought a boat shed on the foreshore at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula. It’s a great spot! Looking forward to many happy days by the sea. Yesterday (Sunday the 3rd of May) I launched my handmade timber Canadian canoe (below). Capsized it only once! Read more

  • Barber Shops in Melbourne

    Preface   One of the areas that my Master of Architecture history/theory course, Popular Architecture and Design, which I teach at the University of Melbourne, looks at is “everyday architecture”. In previous years the students who did this course have researched kebab shops in Melbourne (2011), launderettes in Melbourne (2012) and painted garage doors in… Read more

  • Hoon, Tiang, Thiaw and their Dad

    My wife, Tiang (who I call Ping), found the negative of this photo in some things she had stored at my parents’ house. It shows the three Khoo sisters and their father at Central Padang in Kuching in the 1960s. The surreal perspective has almost turned their father into a Ken doll. Weird! And Hoon… Read more

  • Darwin 2014

    Last week I spent two days in Darwin to attend the opera I was involved with at the Darwin Festival. It was one of the most incomprehensible things I’ve ever seen! Never mind. It was enjoyable all the same. William Boyd/Hopalong Cassidy visited Darwin in 1954. However, if he came back to life and visited… Read more

  • Derham’s first grandchild — Amazing!

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  • Hopalepidopter almost takes Darwin

    Danius Kesminas recently asked me to write a libretto—in the form of a story board for a comic book—for the fourth part of a science fiction/surreal/punk opera, to be performed by the Lepidopters (Punkasila et al) at the Darwin Festival in August 2014. I had to more or less continue the storyline of the first… Read more

  • Relaunch of June Wright’s MURDER IN THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

    Three suspicious-looking characters: me, Stephen Knight and Lucy Sussex. (I only got back from the USA that morning, so I wasn’t quite at my best!) In between us is the cover of the new edition of MURDER IN THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE by June Wright, which was first published in 1948. Following is a press release… Read more

  • Chicago and Los Angeles 2014

    CHICAGO The Jay Pritzker Pavilion by Frank Gehry, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect. No conflict of interest there. S.R. Crown Hall (the Architecture Department building) by Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT by Rem Koolhaas with Mies van der Rohe watching the comings and… Read more

  • Melbourne’s White Night Festival

    On Saturday night, Ping and I went to Melbourne’s White Night Festival. I can’t recall seeing such a big crowd in Melbourne. It was a bit scary. Being an old postmodernist, the lighting up of the buildings reminded me of the importance of surface. Sometimes the most interesting architecture is only a quarter-of-an-inch thick. Read more

  • Another Peaceful Day at Linton

    The simple pleasure of barbecuing sausages on an open fire while watching kangaroos eat apples in the “backyard”. Not bad. An antidote to “seeing red”. Red shoes, red chair, red table, red ute. Read more