Sydney Architecture- Early Australian Architectural History

Chapter 1. IN THE BEGINNING

Early Australian Architectural History

HE was his Sovereign's Trusty and Well-beloved Arthur Phillip, Esquire,
officially granted powers to mete out justice, to control public moneys,
to raise forces for defence and to repel pirates, to found towns, and to
appoint fairs and markets. He was Captain-General and Commander-in-Chief of
the territory called New South Wales, reaching from Cape York to Tasmania, and
from the Pacific coast inland as far as the one hundred and thirty-fifth degree of
east longitude, 1,300,000 square miles of it, together with "all the islands adjacent
in the Pacific Ocean", and all the towns, garrisons, castles, forts, erected upon the
said territory.

But the castles would have to wait for a while; and the building of towns, fairs,
and markets was secondary to the need for shelter, no matter how primitive.
As he tramped over the shimmering sandhills or pushed through the arid scrub
of Botany Bay in the heat of midsummer, the Captain-General could have found
very little consolation in his position and titles, even though, in principle, these
were grand enough.

His little fleet of ships met on the waters of the bay in January 1788, bringing a
tiny expedition which had come not only to form a penal settlement to contain
the reject people of a nation, but to enter up011 and, impudently, to attempt
colonization of a territory larger than the whole of their native Europe: a few
ships against a continent; a handful of convicts and their guards to create a new
country.

The story of the founding of Australia, with the important events that led up
to it, has been told many times. To the commander of the expedition, the
Governor of the Colony-to-be, all these major social and political considerations,
which had sent him and his ships halfway round the world, would have been
dimmed by the immediate pressing needs of existence, of food and shelter, and of
security.

Although the primary object was to set a penal colony on the shores of a land
deliberately chosen because it was as far removed from Great Britain as any the
globe could provide, nevertheless the contemporary records are f d of the
principle of settlement and planning, of rehabilitation and development, and of
building; ideas that are constructive rather than punitive and destructive.
The most cursory examination soon revealed that Botany Bay would not do,
despite all the favourable descriptions of it made by Captain Cook and Joseph
Banks, who had discovered it nineteen years earlier. It was too exposed to give
secure anchorage to the ships, and the land was unprepossessing. The countryside
did provide a little water, it is true, for Captain Cook's chart of 1777 showed small
streams at Yarra, at Point Sutherland, and elsewhere about the bay. The indefatigable
explorer even recorded the tiny perennial soakage trickle at the head of
Pussycat Bay.

Excepting the fresh water there was precious little else. No arable land was
found, no grazing, and there were only scanty building materials, that second
essential to the sustenance of human life. Man needs food first, and shelter second,
although the priority of these needs is often difficult to assess. Some members of
the expedition had examined the rock formation of the headland and pronounced
it good sound freestone eminently suitable for working into building blocks; but
there was no clay for brickmaking and the timber was poor, "fit for no purpose
of building or anything but the fire".2 Phillip's dispatches do not mention this
deficiency of building materials, but circumstantial evidence shows that it had its
due bearing on the determination to look for a more suitable site elsewhere.
Phillip, with Captain Hunter, went in the ships' boats to examine the "Boat
Harbour" of Cook's chart twelve miles to the north, and discovered that Port
Jackson was of such depth, width, and scope that he wrote exultingly of its ability
to give shelter to no less than a thousand ships of the line. Could a seaman's praise .
reach greater heights than this?

On the southern shore of Port Jackson, one cove, called by the natives Weetong,
had a run of good fresh water. Between the rocky headlands, n quarter of a
mile apart, there was deep anchorage for the ships, and the ground at the head of
the cove was covered with a stand of what appeared to be excellent timber, growing
on the good soil of the little valley. Here at last was a promising site for a settlement,
and Phillip hastened back to Botany Bay to bring the Fleet round to what
was to be Sydney Cove, his capital.

He found on Point Sutherland that the first steps that were to lead to an
Australian architecture had already been taken. Trees had been felled and sawpits
framed ready to cut them into beams and planks those first raw materials of
building, but this feeble little seed of architecture was not to take root in Botany's
sterile soil. The frames of the sawpits, the result of much labour, were taken up
into the sloops for removal to the new site.

Before the Fleet had weighed anchor, history provided one of its astonishing
coincidences, for to the eastward appeared two sail obviously bound for the
mouth of the bay. They proved to be ships of the Frenchman, Monsieur de La
Perouse, bound on a scientific expedition to the South Pacific. Thus, on empty,
lonely, and forlorn seas stretching over half the world, the only European ships
afloat met on the waters of Botany Bay.

A natural alarm had been aroused by the appearance of the strangers, but this
subsided when the nature of La Perouse's expedition became known. Formal
civilities were exchanged before the English ships at last sailed for Port Jackson
where they anchored on 26th January 1788, stores and gear being landed the
next day.

The main body of convicts, both men and women, had not been ashore in
Botany Bay. The extension of their confinement in the overcrowded ships must
have been all but insufferable once the smell of land filtered into the holds with
whatever ventilation there was. However, at last they set foot on the shore in
Sydney. After the long physical and mental confinement of the voyage from
England, the sense of freedom burst all possible restrictions, far beyond any hope
of control. When later the women were landed from transports, the quest for
relief from boredom caused one scandalized officer to write that he thought the
introduction of the institution of marriage would be a Very Good Thing.'
After the landing, a camp was soon laid out and the building of a town commenced,
providing almost a laboratory specimen of architectural development.
Australian architecture began from nothing; there was no architect in the expedition,
no one skilled in the organization and integration of building techniques. Men
from all walks of life had to adapt themselves as best they could to a set of circumstances
that could scarcely have been worse, for not only was there little or
no architectural skill, but implements and materials were of poorest quality.
It is notorious that the supplies brought out in the Fleet were ill-chosen and
inadequate. For years Phillip was to send endless requests to the Government in
England for tools and yet more tools. The expedition was so badly equipped that
spades were used for frying pans in those first few years of scarcity. Almost every
sort of building tool seemed to be lacking. In his first request for stores Phillip
listed house-axes, carpenter's axes, pit-saws, set-saws and crosscut-saws, files, gimlets,
augers, chisels, gauges, nails, paint, trowels, lead, and glass. As he did not ask
for hammers we may assume that whoever had equipped the First Fleet had at
least included a few score of that most necessary items.

In response to numerous entreaties a small trickle of tools did arrive from
England from time to time, but nearly two years later the Governor wrote to
London in exasperation that "bad tools are of no kind of use so we suspect
the clerks in England had at last, and with relief, found somewhere to dump all
the inferior equipment that will persist in accumulating in supply depots.
As long as four years after the founding of the settlement, Phillip was still
plaintively asking for saws and axes, adding that many tools were being made
locally since those received from England had worn out? l As a desperate expedient,
some tools had been made from scrap iron in the blacksmith's forge, with
results ranging from indifferent to farcical. Just as prehistoric man had to invent
and make his own tools when first he built shelters in an attempt to adapt nature
to his needs, thus beginning with small steps to cover the long road to civilization
and to architecture. so the settlers had to invent and adapt. Trial and error was L
man's first method of learning building technique, and so it was in Australia.
Although, as we shall see presently, substantial buildings were commenced straight
away, the majority of shelters were so primitive that it was only after several
attempts that they could be trade to stand up at all. Ignorance of the most elementary
principles of building caused disaster after disaster until the rough lessons were
leamt.

Nearly all the early buildings were formed of timber frames, showing the
influence of the carpenters employed. There were twelve of them amongst the
convicts, and Phillip hired the ships' carpenters as well.

The great trees in the little valley at the back of Sydney Cove were cut down,
the trunks being trimmed into logs that were rolled on to the frames of the newly
dug sawpits. These were laboriously sawed into beams and planks by two men,
one standing on the log, the other below, pushing the saw to and fro between
them. For the man in the pit, exposed to the summer sun of that February 1788,
and with sawdust sticking wetly to his toiling body, conditions must have been
all but unbearable.

For huts and barracks, the posts, cut with so much labour, were erected with
their lower ends sunk into the ground, and walls were framed up with studs and
rails in between them. Roofs were formed with rafters, in pairs, leaning against
each other, the ends of the roofs almost invariably being of the "hipped" type.14
Wall panels were first filled in with cabbage-tree trunks cut to suitable lengths
(I). For some of the early buildings the settlers were 1mky indeed that the moist
gullies running down to the harbour all had stands of cabbage-tree palms with tall
straight trunks forty and fifty feet high. They were soft in texture, easy to fell and
to transport, and of a uniformity of girth that obviated much labour in fitting
them to their purpose. The outside of the wall was plastered over with clay to
exclude wind and rain.

However, within three months of its first settlement there was not a cabbage
palm left within a dozen miles of Sydney Cove, so alternative methods of walling
had to be exploited.

Slab walls and bark roofs were soon in use. Sometimes the slabs, which were
obtained by splitting lengths of tree-trunk with wedges, were buried two or three
feet in the ground to give them stability. At other times the slabs were ingeniously
fitted into grooves in the wall plates, and the whole house could thus be erected
with the use of only a handful of nails.

Another system of wall construction was to fill in the panels between posts and
rails with mats of twigs woven together, or wattled, and then plastered over with
clay, giving the nickname wattle-and-daub to the type of construction, and the
permanent name of wattle to the beautifully flowered acacia, the twigs of which
best suited the purpose. For lack of glass, wattle twigs were also called into service
for making lattices to fill the window openings.

This wattle-and-daub method lasted for at least five years as Sydney's first
church was built thus in 1793, even though bricks and tiles were readily available
by that time. The Government refused to help the settlement's pastor, the Reverend
Richard Johnson, to build a church for the settlers. In desperation he tackled the
job himself, using, because of his shortage of funds, the cheapest construction
available. His church was respectable in size, being IS feet wide, T-shaped on plan,
73 feet in one direction and 65 feet in the other. The roof had gable ends, thus
differing from the hipped form of the majority of the early buildings. Johnson
later claimed the cost of the structure from the Government, presenting a bid for
the extraordinary sum of £67 12s. 11d.

The church, and many earlier buildings, had roofs of thatch for which grass or
reeds were cut in swampy places. Most of the reeds were gathered in a small bay
to the eastward of the town which became known henceforth as Rushcutters Bay.
Even the gentle occupation of rushcutting had its dangers, for in May 1788 two
thatch-gatherers were found dead, one with four spears in his body, and another
lying some distance away without a mark on him, apparently having died of
fright.'

This thatch was not durable, but fortunately it was found that the native sheoak
would split into admirable shingles, and these were used extensively. Roofs
were battened so that the shingles could be fixed by pegs, since nails were too scarce
to be used for this purpose.

The clay walling was an ingenious expedient, but by no means an unmixed
delight. When the first winter rains came, much of the clay was washed out from
between the cabbage-tree logs and the lattices of wattles. Those people who had
formed the roofs of their huts with wattle-and-daub were chagrined to find the
whole structure disintegrating into a disheartening sticky mess under the beat: of
the rain, so that they had to build anew?'

First attempts at Australian weatherboard construction fared no better. Trees
of "amazing size" about the cove were sawn up into planks and the walls of the
storehouse were sheeted in with this material. The planks, being red-gum, soon
warped and split to admit the weather as though there had been no w d at all. In
November 1788, just a few months after completion of the buildings, an officer
wrote that "two storehouses were bungled up and are now in Tottering condition".
Phillip referred to the buildings as useless, so that the great labour put into their
erection was completely wasted.

Very early the settlers were learning that Australia was a most difficult place in
which to build; a deceptive climate, especially in regard to extremes of humidity,
and indifferent natural materials, offer many obstacles to builders, particularly if
they are poorly equipped. Eight barracks were first projected for Sydney Cove,
but the number was reduced to four "and even these, from the badness of the
timber, the scarcity of artificers and other impediments" took many months to
build, those for the soldiers taking a full year.

Difficult as it was, building was to prove easier than agriculture, for one man
fervently expressed the wish that the granaries could be filled as readily as the
houses could be built. In earliest Australia the need for shelter was certainly satisfied
before the need for food.

Convicts, who built snug little hovels for themselves with alacrity, on public
works barely "exerted themselves beyond what was necessary to avoid immediate
punishment for idleness", but rations were short and labour could not be
enforced on hungry men. One officer commented that their behaviour was better
than one would have expected in the circumstance.

Two months after they had finished building the barracks in April 1789, a
future Governor of New South Wales was cast adrift with eighteen of his crew
in the Bounty's launch near the island of Tofoa and had to make up his mind on
future action. He decided to risk a voyage of three thousand miles to Timor rather
than steer to the nearer Port Jackson, because he had but little hope that the struggling
settlement would have succeeded in establishing itself. William Bligh's assessment
of the position was almost completely accurate, because if he had steered for,
and reached, Sydney he would have found but little to encourage him. The guards,
for lack of clothing replacements, were mounting duty barefoot; a sorry travesty
of an army. Everybody was ragged and hungry, and longingly looking for the
relief.

When the Lady Juliann did at last arrive in June 1790, she brought more convicts
but no stores. Her consort, the Guardian, had struck an iceberg, jettisoned the stores,
and limped back to the Cape of Good Hope, a circumstance that greatly increased
the threat of actual famine in the settlement.

However, one item of stores did arrive safely in 1790. Although no architect
was to set foot in Sydney for nearly a generation, in that year the first work of an
architect was to arrive in Australia. This was the prefabricated hospital which was
to replace the miserable collection of tents that had previously served as the sick
bay. The hospital had been designed by no less a person than Jeffry Wyattville, a
nephew and assistant of the great English architect, James Wyatt. Thirty-six years
later Wyattville was to become Sir Jeffry when he had extensively remodelled
Windsor Castle, heights to which he could not possibly have aspired when he was
designing his patent hospital for transportation to a mere convict colony.

The hospital, which was set up on the west side of Sydney Cove where George
Street North now crosses the site, was the second such building to arrive in Australia.
Governor Phillip had bought a prefabricated house for £125 in England,
and it came out amongst the stores of the First Fleet. This was more a rigidly framed
tent than a real house, for it had numbered frames covered with canvas, and certainly
showed more of the tent-maker's than the builder's craft. It was erected on
the east side of the cove where it served as Government House until a more
substantial building was completed.

This section is based on the excellent book Early Australian Architects and Their Work (Angus & Robertson, Syd, 1954); Herman, Morton, (1901-1983). Illustrated and Decorated by the Author.