On the pavement table outside the picture theatre ice-cream parlour, Michelle Renshaw put down the book and picked up the cup. Broken Signs. Flat white. She smiled, amused by the fact that the Walter Burley Griffin designed “atrium villa” had found its way into the murder mystery story. Michelle had told the author about Griffin’s Castlecrag during a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Oak Park, Chicago.

She shoved the paperback into her jacket and finished the coffee. It was about time that she, too, inhabited an architecturally designed space, Michelle decided, and took the long way home in order to think on it.

The idea of a modernist box rising up out of the basement flat of her heritage listed cottage took form more or less immediately. The two storey extension she conceived of would complement the exquisite L-shaped corrugated steel structure that had replaced an ugly 1960s brick apartment a few doors down on Blackler Street.

I was the first person she phoned, Michelle said, to tell of the building plan. Reading my book about the 1997 Boyd murder had been the catalyst, she went on, and painted a canvas of space and light.

We only ever see things from our own point of view. That she’d not read my magnum opus when it was published in 2003 was news to me.

Within a year of its conception, the architecturally designed Blackler Lane extension was at ‘lock-up.’ Then, on December 16th 2008, the local Planning authority ordered that the metal cladding which it had approved be removed.

Port Adelaide-Enfield Council had approved the use of ‘corrugated galvanised steel.’ There are numerous products which meet that criterion and the house on Blackler Lane had been clad with one of them, Zincalume. It being a straightforward matter of fact, Michelle fully expected the Planning authority to acknowledge as much and close the case. A reasonable person would not do otherwise, surely? But the local Planning authority is not a person. To persist with the notion that the question turned on a straightforward matter of fact was to step across the threshold into a Kafkaesque nightmare where a ‘reasonable person’ should be ignorant of the fact that Zincalume steel sheeting is both corrugated and galvanised. Michelle soon learned that having paid attention during science class, that knowing the meaning of the verb ‘to galvanise,’ was her undoing.

According to the Judge at the Renshaw versus City of Port Adelaide Enfield trial, a reasonable person should never have expected the Planning authority to know that the product known as Zincalume sheeting is in fact corrugated, galvanised steel. ‘Technically,’ Zincalume is corrugated, galvanised steel, according to Judge Trenorden of the Environment Court, but objectively it is not.

You wouldn’t read about it. Normally you wouldn’t, no. But you can, here.