Robin Boyd has kindly drawn my attention to an error of interpretation in my recent review of his book Australia’s Home (Meanjin, V. 11, No. 1). I read the sentence ‘The nation was built on the principle that for every family there should be a separate house, and for every person there should be a separate room …’ as referring to the English nation, while in fact it referred to Australia. I was, I think, misled by the preceding paragraph (page 3) which, after having mentioned the ‘physical and artistic maturity’ of English domestic architecture for the privileged, runs like this:

‘But all of them (of the new settlers) had the acquired English taste for privacy, and it was this taste which remained a prime motive through the subsequent generations of home-building.’