My family lived in New Guinea and we had to leave very quickly at the outbreak of the Second World War. The Japanese were already bombing Port Mosby and my father had invested in waterfront property around Sydney Harbour. It was so important to him to see the beauty of the landscape of Sydney Harbour. As children we would talk to respect nature but not just to respect it to love it. When you look at nature and for me in architecture nature has a beautiful story. You look at the strengths of our flora but also look at the delicacy at the same time. So there's a strength and a delicacy. I have endeavoured in my career to try and understand this landscape of ours and be able to integrate these elements not in a determined way but in a very relaxed way. I want an architecture that's quiet and the more you start to see it the more you start to understand it. The roots of architecture remain relevant. If you go beyond the roots of architecture about space, about order, about structure, about understanding nature and structure so there's this cultural history, there's typology, there's morphology, there's materiality then there's the understanding of the topography. So you're going to get buildings going up a hill like this that are in a high density area or moving like this down a hill. These are the sort of things that you're dealing with and in portraiture there's got to be that centre of interest, a balance, a balance that's got to be light, a quality of light. Depending upon whether it's required transparency or solidity these are the sort of things that we as architects work in a certain way, painters that don't work in another way. Endone has known me for a long time and he observes the minimal nature of a form and tries in a very economic way to describe that form in single line. For me that is very much the way I work because I'm also looking at a very economic way of developing spaces. For the 45 years I've been in practice it has been a sole practice without staff. I've recognised that if I want the standard and the level that I want to achieve then I can do it rather quickly. I don't want to have to deal with personality clashes in practices. I don't want to have to deal with having to chase money. I don't want to have to deal with all those other dreadful aspects. I realised that I could get through an enormous amount if I was dedicated. If the work is bad, it's my responsibility if it comes up well, thank goodness it's very pleasing. And so I was minimising the risk of doing terrible things. I am very happy at the age of over 80 now still practicing like mad and still enjoying it as I did as a young architect.