Urban Peasant

It deals with true migrant stories. Following long years of Nazi occupation and a bleak outlook in post WW2 Groningen (Netherlands), this encompasses the exciting six-week travel to the Great Southern Land via the Panama Canal, with exotic pit-stops on the way, unorthodox education of a newly-arrived child, pioneering days in Oxford Falls and the discovery of
cosmopolitan
Manly. This is followed by close encounters with pigeons and adolescent exploration on floating old mattresses upstream on the toxic Curl Curl Lagoon. Follow the author through his university days and further adventures here-and-there in the
sixties . Read some behind-the-scenes stories of the world of architecture: The Stockman’s Hall of Fame, including arm-wrestling with R.M. Williams and a personal encounter at the extravagant opening of the author’s building in Longreach by Queen Elizabeth, who flew in especially for the occasion. Read about Bouman’s collaboration with Ted Mack in their quest for some urbanity in North Sydney, travels with Ted Egan on the road in the real outback and difficulties with Sir Garfield Barwick as co-designer and supervising architect of The High Court of Australia, Canberra. Then, return to the old country with Bouman, on a re-discovery of his mother tongue as an adult. A time to check out what his contemporaries in Groningen had been up to during his casual 60-year absence. It is a chronicle, only mildly haphazard; a kind of memoir.