I have a wonderful day job, working in the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, looking after our John Curtin collection and the other special collections of Curtin University Library. An upcoming highlight of my job is a rare opportunity to guide tour groups through the Curtin Family Home in Cottesloe. John Curtin, prime minister of Australia from 1941 to 1945, and his wife Elsie had the house built in 1923 and four generations of the family lived on there until 1998. It was purchased by the government and is looked after by the National Trust of Western Australia. Most of the year it is available to stay in as an Airbnb – but as part of the Australian Heritage Festival, it will be open for tours on 18 and 19 April.

The house retains much of the feel of how it would have been in John Curtin’s day. ‘Shangri-La’ was an earthly paradise in the Himalayas in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933). The Curtin Family Home isn’t that even in a metaphorical sense; the subheading of the Women’s Weekly article above is more true than the headline – ‘Mrs Curtin has made a true haven of their modest bungalow home’. The modesty of the house speaks to John Curtin and his prime ministership. He was a true believer with a vision of a better world who lived simply in accordance with his beliefs. He led by example in the austerity drive through the Second World War with Elsie as the face of the campaign and people knew of his sincerity and integrity. Yet being prime minister was difficult on the family, and some of the complexities show through in the depictions of life in the Curtin Family Home left by his children. Our tour uses oral histories, photographs, objects and contemporaneous glimpses in newspapers and letters to create a picture of a life both typical of the 1920s to 1940s in many ways and atypical in some important ways. It will give a sense of an ordinary extraordinary family and the strangeness of a prime minister hailing from this suburban house in Cottesloe.

You can book your free ticket here.