When architects Mat Hinds and Poppy Taylor were asked to design an extension for their friend's 1950s' Hobart home, something caught the pair's eye.
"Our first look at it we thought 'well, it feels like someone's had a hand in this', like ... there's been an architect involved," Poppy recounts.
"And so we asked them and they said 'yeah we've got plans actually from the previous owner' and then they got these drawings out and we had a closer look and then it became clear that there really was some exceptional work done here."
The plans from 1958 were signed by Edith Emery — someone neither Poppy or Mat had ever heard of before, prompting them to look into the mystery designer.
"The drawings were a really powerful indicator for us that there was something here that needed to be understood and drawings, if you read them as an architect, you can see a lot of intelligence in a drawing," Mat told Tim Ross for ABC TV's Designing a Legacy.
But, as Mat and Poppy would discover, how Edith came to be designing houses in 1950s Australia is a tale that could fill the pages of a Hollywood movie script.
Fleeing the Nazi regime
Edith Emery, born Edith Wellspacher in Austria in 1909, spent her teenage years studying at a fine arts school under the guidance of painter Franz Cižek.
As well as exploring a wide range of art techniques and being introduced to socialism, the classes also brought a young Edith her first opportunity to dabble in classes on architecture and theatre.
But a career in the arts wasn't on the horizon. Instead, she set out to become a doctor and was accepted into medicine at the University of Vienna in 1928. She indulged her creativity in life-drawing classes and made costumes for dancers she met through her then-boyfriend.
By 1934, she had qualified as a doctor, specialising in gynaecology, but her medical career was relatively short-lived, when she was forced to resign after refusing to support the Nazi Party and Hitler after Vienna was occupied in 1938.
In her personal life, Edith had fallen in love with a fellow doctor named Max.
But the pair became separated when he was arrested and later taken to Dachau and then Buchenwald Concentration camps.
Serendipitously, it was around this time that a school in Hobart was seeking a Cižek-trained art teacher, and after securing the job, Emery left Europe for Tasmania, arriving in August 1938.
"I would, of course, have gone anywhere to get away from the Nazis — and as an enthusiastic traveller would have found matters of interest; but the fact was that Australia had never even crossed my mind," she wrote in her autobiography.
Her voyage to Australia, however, introduced her to her future husband and would ultimately delay her life in Australia, and bring her back into the grips of Hitler and the Second World War.
A return to 'the Lion's den'
After meeting aboard the ship that took Edith to Tasmania, she and Englishman John Emery, who was catching a ride from Marseilles back to his posting in Sudan, exchanged letters for months on end, nurturing a long-distance romance.
Less than a year into her time in Hobart, John proposed. Edith was racked with guilt after promising to marry her Austrian love, Max, if he survived his time in Buchenwald.
After a period of emotional turmoil, particularly after discovering Max had indeed survived, she agreed to marry John.
He sailed to Tasmania, and the pair wed, with plans for both to travel back to Sudan.
"There, less than a month after getting married, I found that I was pregnant," she writes in her autobiography.
But Edith's first time in Africa was short-lived and on the advice of medical staff in Sudan, she travelled to Paris to have her first son, Michael, in 1940, less than two years after leaving Vienna.
As she described it herself, she had "returned to the Lion's den" and while the war felt a world away while she was in Tasmania, Hitler's troops had now closed in on Paris.
Because of her marriage to an Englishman, Edith and baby Michael were packed up and taken to a camp in the city of Besançon in the east of France.
Instead of being interned at the main camp, Edith and her young son were detained in the town's hospital where "the French nuns were nice and the food more easily digestible".
There, any idea of creative pursuits was put on hold while she acted as a translator, often putting her medical training to good use helping the other women and children through various illnesses.
Edith and Michael spent two months in Besançon before they were allowed to return to Paris, still under the watchful eye of the Gestapo.
It wasn't until 1942 that Edith was able to leave Europe and return to her husband in Sudan, under a kind of people swap — she, as an English woman, was exchanged for German nationals held in Palestine.
A new life, a new career
Edith and John welcomed their second son, Peter, in 1944 and decided to relocate the family permanently to Tasmania in 1948.
But, as is the experience of so many migrants, her medical qualifications weren't recognised in Australia, so she decided to change careers and tap into one of her earlier creative passions.
As Mat Hinds and Poppy Taylor discovered, she applied to study architecture against her husband's wishes in 1952 — a reflection of her fiercely independent spirit.
"She studied at [the] School of Architecture here and became an architect and became the first qualified sole practitioner female in the state," Poppy says.
Dr Stuart King from the University of Melbourne School of Design said he, like Mat and Poppy, was surprised to learn about Edith Emery and her work many decades later.
"Her training, entry into the profession, and advocacy in the 1950s make for a compelling architectural career," he said.
Dr King thinks there's likely a number of reasons her work slipped through the cracks including a lack of research on 20th-century Tasmanian architecture, very few records on her work and time with acclaimed architect Esmond Dorney (more on that later), and that her designs weren't for flashy or prominent buildings that would garner attention.
"And frankly, our histories are very much dominated by men and I think we do need to open them up to recognise other people within those industries and I think this is a really interesting instance of that," he said.
Edith, as a sole practitioner, was breaking new ground but as she noted herself in her book, faced discrimination and uphill battles as a result.
Many of Edith's plans were for modest buildings, mostly houses, for herself or friends or those in her social networks, but as Dr King says they show the deeper considerations she had as a designer.
"Certainly her own house … she pays careful attention to relationships between inside and outside, she's thinking about the structure and materials that make up the building," he said.
"There's a fairly clear logic about how to make the building and how that gives her a form of expression.
"You see certain devices such as the butterfly roof, which you see in other buildings at the time, so she's obviously looking at what else has been designed around her."
Dr King also pointed to elements of her other designs that show how they are "underpinned by a strong set of social ideas", particularly for other women in her social circles, like the layouts and eventual cost of the buildings.
In her autobiography, Edith notes she "did not build very many houses and most of the people I built for had little money" and that enabled her to bring a number of her passions together.
"Architecture was then and always remained to me an exciting mixture of the creative and the practical, of imagination and science," Emery wrote.
Working with a Tasmanian great
As Mat and Poppy dug around for information on Edith they made an interesting discovery that she had, for a period of years while she was studying, worked with renowned architect Esmond Dorney.
"I thought it was a short stint. It turned out that it was a decade and it coincides with a series of seminal houses and it does put questions around sole authorship," Mat says.
"There is clear evidence that Edith drew some of the houses. That’s a fact in the archives.
"Her contribution is hugely significant because at the time Tasmanian architecture was just breaking away from the earlier colonial insecurity it had and the work was starting to mature.
"I think what ended up happening with Edith's work is that she caused a leap to occur but anonymously."
But how big that leap was, and exactly how much of Edith's input ended up in Dorney's work, may always remain a mystery, with little to no information about that period, even in her own autobiography.
What is clear, however, is that her core values and beliefs of equality and social progressiveness, the ones that saw her sacrifice her medical career instead of support Nazism, remained a constant throughout the rest of her life — be it in Sudan, France or Hobart.
As the back cover of her autobiography aptly says:
"It is as much as one could hope to squeeze into a single life."
Edith Emery died in 2004, aged 94.
Watch Designing A Legacy tonight at 7:30pm on ABC TV, or on ABC iview.
