Lawrie lives and works in Sydney but likes to retreat to the family estate north east of Tailem Bend in the Mallee country in South Australia to indulge in his passion for traditional watercolours and oil on canvas painting , to seek succour from the land, and to visit his aboriginal nanny. He intends for these traditional Art methods to provide an antidote to his more esoteric artworks that seem to consume his artistic endeavours.
He harbours long term plans to establish a utopian society in the Mallee region near the family estate using the mallee root as the basic building block of the new architecture. The Utopia will be powered by perpetual motion machines made possible by Lawrie's invention of an anti-friction device. It is intended that these machines will eventually be used to provide the solution to the revitalisation of the Murray Darling River system. Part of this revitalisation is the construction of a high-speed maglev train system linking Tailem Bend to Alice Springs.