Outside, people were walking their dogs and sipping lattes at pavement tables, enjoying the sunny Saturday afternoon. But I had a hollow feeling of foreboding in my gut at the thought of meeting Marcus again. The area we wanted lay to one side of the main road, on the rocky bushland hillside dropping down to the bays of Middle Harbour. It’s a place unlike any other in Sydney, laid out in the 1920s by the two American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had previously won the competition to design the new Australian capital city at Canberra. They were inspired by the dramatic site at Castlecrag, and must have seen some poetic metaphor in medieval castles, for they gave its narrow lanes, winding along the contour lines between rocky outcrops, names like The Rampart, The Bastion and The Bulwark. The Griffins designed a number of the houses in their subdivision, too, and if you think of the quintessential Australian house as being lightweight, open to the landscape, with sunny decks and a tin roof, then these were exactly the opposite—solid cubic bunkers embedded into the hillside like refuges for trolls in a strange land.
