The cottage was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, possibly from ballast from a ship sailing over from Perth.

Bullaparinga
Cottage

Delamere, South Australia

View from the living room towards the back of the house. The laundry is tucked into the hallway, behind the doors at right.

Around South Australia you see ruins. I’ve been taken on a couple of drives by people who have wanted to show me ruins.

People who have felt strongly and passionately about these basic houses, of stone, doorway in the middle with a window on either side, no roof, with fragments of a life inside, maybe, but more likely grass and vines and a struggling tree. Sometimes just the outlines of rooms and the remnants of a cimney are all that’s left of life and death, of the passing of seasons. Symbols of drought and dashed hopes; of settlers, from greener places, unaware of the harshness of the land; of misunderstood marginal holdings unable to sustain whole families.

Liz Forsyth, an artist and interior designer, was one of those people captivated by ruins – if she saw one, she would have to stop the car and explore. She wanted to save a ruin. How she found one is one of those common stories, too banal for a crusader – a trip to the beach one day about twenty years ago, a look in the local real estate agent’s window while her husband (now ex-husband) was having a beer, a picture of a dump, albeit a pretty one, and a not-very-high asking price. It had dirt floors, stringybark beams and its ceilings were of sacking, hanging down in ribbons. She bought it on a whim.

The cottage, with its hectare of land down near where mainland Australia ends and the Southern Ocean begins, hadn’t been lived in for some years. Restoring it, she thought, would be a simple matter – she knew the roof would need replacing, and reckoned that would take about a day. Then she’d quietly work on the inside.

Listening to the story of getting Bullaparinga Cottage into a livable condition, I can’t help thinking about the television show Grand Designs. But even Kevin McCloud wouldn’t have the time to chronicle the making of this modest house. It took seventeen years, ‘with great periods of doing nothing’, from the day the roof was taken off to get it into shape. In her job as an interior designer, she says, she’s built mansions in a fraction of the time, and with less effort than this took.

The stone cottage, almost derelict when Liz Forsyth bought it, has been carefully restored using traditional methods. The furniture is a mix of junk shop finds and pieces from a previous house, while the sculpture on the shelves by the fireplace includes Buddhist and Khmer bronzes.

The cottage was built in about the 1860s, Liz Forsyth believes, out of stone used as ballast from a ship sailing over from Perth. The area, south of Adelaide on the curved finger of land that leads to Kangaroo Island, was first mapped in 1802, with Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin both travelling the coastline. Flinders called the whole region Cape Jervis, a name now confined to the tip of the landform. The Frenchman came up for a name for it, which has stuck – the Fleurieu Peninsula, after the French explorer and politician Charles Pierre Claret, Comte de Fleurieu.

William Light landed at Rapid Bay, a few miles from the cottage, in 1836 and there was talk of a major settlement developing nearby, on a part of the coastline where, on a stormy day, the clifftops look like the backs of a herd of elephants. But with no decent source of permanent fresh water, the settlers eventually moved north, to the Torrens River, and it was here that the city of Adelaide had its beginnings.

Bullaparinga Cottage is close to the end of the Fleurieu Peninsula, near Second Valley – for some reason that has religious connotations to me, but its name actually came about as it was the second part of that coastline Colonel Light stopped at. Nowadays, even though it’s worth stopping to explore, the area is largely overlooked, as tourists rush through it on their way to nearby Kangaroo Island.

Industry of various types developed in the region during the middle of the 1800s – mining of uranium and other minerals, farming, timber milling, flour milling and tannin production from wattle bark. And with that industry came transport – today, the trip down to the Fleurieu Peninsula is only an hour or so from Adelaide, especially when the expressway is open in the right direction. South Australia is the only place I’ve been to with a reversible one-way freeway – north in the morning, south in the afternoon, and closed for a few hours a day to switch the road signs.

When the cottage was built, getting around the peninsula with its hills and rough tracks was obviously much tougher. It was the home of perhaps a farmer or forest worker but was used for many years as a Cobb & Co way station, a place where travellers could stop and have repairs made on their wagons, and maybe a drink. ‘There were a series of places along the way where people could have things mended – they were constantly getting broken, the roads were so hard,’ says Liz Forsyth. She points out the spot, under an almond tree, where a forge once stood – for years the soil was turning up old bits of metal. ‘What I love about this area is that the settler part of it is so apparent when you know what you’re looking for,’ she says. ‘It’s only one layer down.’

View from the living area back towards the dining area and kitchen. Doorway to the right leads to the two bedrooms. The stone carving on the side table is Indian; the bronze, Carcass Carrier, is by Tom Bates.

View along corridor at the back of the cottage, to spare room; doorway, with traditional architrave, in main bedroom. Cabinet is from Rajasthan.

View down narrow corridor, with laundry off it, to the main room.

When Liz Forsyth bought the cottage, most of the windows and doors had been stolen. She replaced them with salvaged ones. Curtains are of fine French linen with machine embroidery.

She heard about the house being a way station from a local, Graham Cole, who had lived there as a boy. He told her that one of his jobs as a kid had been to look after the horses and wagons. He left his mark inside the cottage, on the door leading from the living room to the bedrooms. What is now a single room with living and dining areas plus kitchen used to be two rooms divided by a corridor. When Graham Cole and his brother were little, their mother would put them into the corridor with their tricycles and close the doors, to keep them safe from snakes. Scratched at little boy height in the door are shaky Union Jacks, signs of a different time.

It was a long time before Liz Forsyth noticed those mementoes on the door. Twenty years ago, when the roof came off the house, rather than it being a simple matter of replacing it, she was told the walls would have to come down and the whole place would need to be rebuilt. She has photo albums of the whole process – she takes them out of a trunk in the bedroom and goes through them. Unfairly, there’s scarcely a picture of her working – she’s almost always behind the lens.

She and her then-husband, Andrew, would come down on a Sunday from the house they were living in in the Adelaide Hills and work for three hours, ‘and I’d say “I can’t bear it, I’ve got to go home”, it would hurt so much.’

Originally, she says, she had plans to extend out the back ‘to get the house to a normal size’, but then realised she couldn’t do it, as ‘the whole point of it was to preserve a bit of our history’. She refers to it as ‘our history’, but in fact, she was born in England, studied at art college and didn’t come out to Australia until she was in her twenties. The cottage was less than 150 years old at the time – not old at all by English standards – but that was irrelevant to her. It followed a long tradition, being built in ‘the simplest, simplest form of architecture. It’s built like a Cornish or a Welsh cottage, and built from people’s sweat and labour. The history just got to me – it’s just wrong that our vernacular cottages are disappearing.’

And so, gradually, she and her husband plus various friends and tradesmen were putting the cottage back together again. Eleven years ago, she had to go back to England when her father died, and rang Tom Bates, a sculptor she’d lived with in the West Country for three years from the age of twenty but hadn’t been in touch with since. ‘I was very young and couldn’t cope with it and skedaddled.’ He was living only a few kilometres from where they’d lived together thirty years earlier. They had lunch in a pub; she came back to Australia, wrote to him and he got on a plane for the first time in his life and joined her. Trunks, big enough to hold a double-decker bus, arrived later with all his work.

Indian cupboard in the kitchen is filled with preserves made from home-grown fruit and vegetables.

Kitchen stands at one end of the main room.

View of the Fleurieu Peninsula, around Second Valley.

Tom Bates has a new studio, designed by Liz Forsyth, behind the cottage. It looks out over the gentle, grass-covered hills, and up to the cemetery on the next rise. The simple country cemetery with gravestones bearing inscriptions with details such as ‘…arrived in South Australia on August 19th 1854 on the William Prowse’ or ‘Wife of James Tarran, a colonist of fifty-one years’. When Tom Bates first saw the cottage, weeds up to the roofline, he knew it was where he wanted to live. It was with his help that the cottage was finished, with a bathroom with underfloor heating, and two bedrooms in the lean-to section at the back. He also helped start the garden, a lovely mix of coastal vegetation with fruit trees and vegetable patch. Bartering is already underway – the snapper we had for dinner was swapped with a local fisherman for some tomatoes.

Windows and exterior doors for the house were bought second-hand; some of the interior doors, including the bathroom, were put together out of old floorboards the carpenter had in his shed. Unsanded and unfinished, the nail holes and joist marks are still visible.

Liz Forsyth has used her experience of working on boat interiors (she has been commissioned to do a few multimillion dollar yachts as part of her interior design business) to scale the inside of the cottage, working to the last millimetre to fit everything in. Corridors that would have seemed too narrow for humans work brilliantly; hidden away behind traditional-looking doors in the hallway is a laundry. She also used her design skills to create a whitewashed interior that’s a mix of antique shop finds, Tom Bates’ sculptures and pieces made by friends, with subtly extravagant fabrics by Nobilis used for curtaining.

She designed a simple and traditional kitchen, cupboards with panelled doors reaching up to where the walls meet the ceiling beams. Open the doors of an old Indian timber cabinet tucked in near the front door and the top two shelves are filled with jams, pickles and preserves for the colder months, home-made, with much of the produce coming from the garden.

‘That’s how we live,’ she says. ‘Every penny we get goes on casting, framing and art supplies – we live from the garden because the food tastes better, but also because it saves us so much money.’