Dragon Photo: Supplied What is your strongest memory of your childhood home?
In Taumarunui (New Zealand) it rained lots of the time. After a few weeks of solid rain we would to put long builders planks onto brick piers to get into the house because the front and back yard became a large pond.
By the back door there was a water tank above a little room where the coal man dumped the coal to heat the house in winter. He would carry the coal in on his back and empty it in with a huge noise and throw the coal sacks on top of the coal. How Dickensian is that?
After primary school I used to walk across one of the bridges and sit in there and watch the rain. It had one of those stable doors where the top and the bottom doors opened separately and was the perfect place to escape a house full of rambunctious boys. I would be out there for hours reading Beano, Biggles and Disney comics and watching the rain.
Dragon Photo: Supplied
All it takes now is for me to see expanding ripples from rain drops on a puddle and I’m back in the coal shed in Taumarunui.
Todd Hunter of legendary Aussie rock group Dragon – second from left. Photo: Supplied
What do you recall about buying your first home?
Finding beautiful wooden floors after ripping up the flea ridden boarding house carpets and dragging them through the house, and throwing them out a first storey window into the back yard.
Have you ever house shared with flatmates, when you were younger or a student?
We shared a band house in Penkivil Street, Bondi, in the mid 1970s just after we moved to Sydney from Auckland. It had a downstairs kitchen and an upstairs one.
The bottom one became so disgusting that we nailed the door shut and only used the upstairs one.
The band was set up in the living room and each day we would get up and wander into the band room like zombies, pick up our instruments and keep playing from wherever we had stopped late the night before. It must have been hell for the neighbours and the people living in the house that weren’t in the band but a lot of songs got written there.
Do you have any tips for organising your home?
Always hang your keys by the back door and everything orderly will flow from that. The time you spend now ratting through the house looking for your car keys, glasses, wallet etc will be yours to do whatever you like with.
What is the worst piece of furniture or household item you have ever bought?
In the early 1980s I bought a grey, high backed modular couch from an illustration in the Sydney Morning Herald. I got it delivered, Johanna [my partner] came home and said “get that ugly piece of shite out of here” and I couldn’t have agreed more. I talked the shop into taking it back and when the delivery man came he said ruefully, “Ah, she wouldn’t let you keep it, eh?”
Do you have a favourite room?
A glassed in verandah where I sit from 5am most mornings and watch the sun come up over the escarpment. Different every day but eternally beautiful and will be so long after we have all gone.
If you could in a dream home, anywhere in the world, where would it be?
In the foothills of the mountains on the South Coast, protected from the wind but high enough to look out over the Shoalhaven and the sea beyond.
Photo: DJBarrett