Fabrications issues

33.2 (2023)

In Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light (2011), the last in his trilogy of novels focusing on the life of internationalist, bureaucrat-diplomat protagonist Edith Campbell Berry, Edith finds herself in a new position in Canberra in the early 1950s. Occupying a Department of Works office in a modest weatherboard building in Acton, Edith decides to elevate her circumstances by purchasing her own furniture and redecorating her workspace. She removes the standard departmental furniture and, we learn, on the advice of Brian Lewis contacts Fred Ward in Melbourne to obtain a quote on the design and making of new office furnishings. In her note to Ward, she mentions a Douglas Snelling chair that she has seen in magazines in Sydney and on Ward’s recommendation orders a Frances Burke desk lamp. Her follow up conversation with Ward on the telephone includes mention of Sam Atyeo and Cynthia Reed and Edith briefly contemplates painting the walls of the office in a bold colour, a possible reference to the work and sensibility of Marion Hall Best. Moorhouse intends, of course, that this roll call of interwar and mid-century Australian designers should underline Edith’s self-conscious cultural sophistication. But it is also striking the degree to which this list overlaps with a canonical group of Australian designers circa 2011, when the book was published.

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