You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown – Did I actually see this during our ~1969 home leave? Maybe with my mother in San Francisco (what were we doing in San Francisco?)
Indian Ink – Art Malik and Felicity Kendal, London 1984
Little Shop of Horrors – London 1984
On Your Toes – London 1984
Cats – Broadway, 1985, just before going to India.
Les Mis – Kennedy Center, probably with my dad, 1988 or so. Maybe London also.
November 13th will always be a happy anniversary for me: I became an Australian citizen.
My path to citizenship was easier than many, because I married into it. Brendan is Australian and we always knew we would eventually move here. We had originally planned to leave the US in late 2021, but the pandemic made us anticipate that by a year, so I arrived in Australia as a Permanent Resident in December, 2020. I then had to wait four years (everyone does) to apply for citizenship. With the help of my excellent immigration attorney Valerie da Gama Pereira, I submitted the application in January, 2025, knowing it would take at least six months to process. On July 29th I received by email my Approval of Citizenship by Conferral.
During one of my winter vacations from Woodstock, when my dad and stepmother were living in Bangkok, my dad and I did a scuba diving course. Dad had started diving during our year in Hawaii (1966), and I’d been hearing his stories about it for as long as I could remember. Getting certified together sounded like a fun father-daughter activity, and it was.
Our instructor was “Dusty” Rhodes, who had served with distinction in the US Navy during the Vietnam war, and had then settled in Thailand. I did not realize until years later that the preparation he gave us went far beyond typical scuba instruction.
In my many moves around the world, I have brought with me a few items that remind me of specific times, places, people, and adventures in my life. This painting is one such.
While we lived in Thailand, my parents acquired some interesting pieces of original and local art, which moved with us and formed a familiar backdrop to our homes from Bangkok to Pittsburgh to Connecticut. We did not take much when we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, most of it went into storage. Sometime while I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, our household goods were moved from storage in Connecticut to my aunt’s property in Texas, where our old dishware may still be languishing in a disused falling-down barn full of rattlesnakes. I later rescued a few items, including the above which had been painted by our family friend Irma, an artist who owned a Scandinavian design shop in Bangkok.
This build is based on the Australian Federation style of architecture dating back to the turn of the last century. Many Sydney neighborhoods feature rows of charming little cottages in the Federation style, though if you look at the aerial view in Google Maps you can see that most of the original small homes have been extended at the back to add more rooms. For this build I stuck to the original footprint. However, Lego interiors end up much smaller than their real-life counterparts, so what was probably a two-bedroom house in real life is now a studio apartment inside.
Nonetheless, I’m happy with this build. Features include:
The typical asymmetric front (the living room sticks out with a sort of bay window), as seen above.
view through back door of minifig having coffee in her yellow armchair
Windows with colored glass panels top and bottom, shown above. And fireplaces.
close up of front porch with characteristic curved roof
Above: Many Australian homes (from multiple periods) use corrugated tin to roof their front porches, with a characteristic downcurve along the front. The supports for these roofs often feature filigree fretwork which is hard to reproduce in Lego.
close up of murphy bed, closedoverhead view of murphy bed, open
Above: Absolutely nothing to do with Federation architecture, but it made sense for trying to make this into a “liveable” space for a minifig: I built in a working murphy bed. It was too flimsy, however: it broke in a way I can’t fix without tearing down most of the wall. I’ll design it better next time.
low angled front and left view
Above: The red roof is made of sloped bricks that were originally intended to be used to build Lego roofs, but are considered old-fashioned now and not used much in modern builds. I happen to like them and own a lot of them, and they work pretty well for the complex roofs found on many Australia homes.
underside of roof unit
However, modern Lego builds tend to be “modular”, meaning that you can remove roofs and levels to access the interior of a building. Modern builds are also done with narrower bricks (1x instead of 2x studs wide), but I own many of the classic white 2×4 bricks. Building with these meant I could step in the walls at the top and then build a roof unit with an overhang so that the roof fits securely and stays in place, but is easily removed. Most of the interior photos were taken with the roof removed.
Full gallery:
* MOC = “My Own Creation”, in other words a Lego build you invent for yourself. Some Lego creators sell MOC designs.
