This Merioola is a strange old house. There are rooms and passages and west wings and surprising hidden courtyards that one comes on accidentally: there are customs and ceremonies, peculiar rites and festivals that have grown up with the habit of the characters who live here. The artist, Donald Friend, diarised these comments in 1946 just after renting a room in Merioola, a colonial mansion in Sydney’s Woollahra then operating as a boarding house. Its tenants were dancers, designers, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers and other creative types. In the 1940s it was the centre of the city’s bohemian life. But for eighty years prior to Merioola’s phase as an ‘artists’ colony,’ it was already famous for the prominent people who lived there and their legendary fetes and fashionable balls. This is the story of Merioola and its residents and their triumphs and tragedies over all the years of its existence.
