Sydney Architecture- Early Australian Architectural History

Chapter 13. THE GOLDEN THIRTIES

Early Australian Architectural History

IN 1838 Strzelecki found gold ore at Hardey, thus establishing scientifically for
the first time its existence in Australia, but since his discovery was small it was
almost washed away by the tide of history which roared across the country
in the fifties in the form of the great gold rushes.

However, for the Colonial period generally, and for Colonial architecture in
particular, it was the ten years of the 1830s that were golden, in the picturesque, if
not the mineral, sense. The very air was thick with the dust of growth, progress,
and the production of wealth. Architecture exactly reflected these developments as
the Colony bred and expanded. Brisbane Town had been settled in 1824, and thus
were laid the foundations. of the State .of Queensland, and it was the thirties that
saw first Perth, then Adelaide and Melbourne come into being as the continent
began to take on its modem form.

In 1829, with the annexation of what was called the Colony of Western Australia,
the whole of Australia became British territory; New South Wales still
occupied all the land east of the 129th meridian of longitude, which had replaced
the 135th meridian as the boundary in 1825.

In Sydney, Sir Richard Bourke, who assumed the governorship of New South
Wales in 1831, found himself quarrelling continually on questions of governing
power with his Executive Council, the members of which were also involved in
the great current struggle between the emancipists and the exclusives, who were
deeply engaged in attempts to control the increasing masses of wealth which were
pouring from the land.

By 1838 the richness of the land was recognized abroad, for Governor Gipps, in
reply to the address of welcome presented to him after arrival in the Colony, stated
that England now looked upon Australia as a country of wealth and importance
soon deserving of free institution. The convict colony was giving way
to an increasingly self-reliant nation. Charles Darwin, after visiting Sydney in 1836,
wrote of New South Wales:

“. . . on the whole, as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained. . . , but as a
means of making men outwardly honest, converting vagabonds, most useless in
one hemisphere, into active citizens of another, and thus giving birth to a new and
splendid country-a grand centre of civilization-it has succeeded to a degree perhaps
unparalleled in history.”

Justice was getting more even-handed. When twelve white men massacred
twenty natives at Myall Creek, seven of the murderers were sentenced to death.
This was the first time in Australian history that such a penalty had been imposed,
to the vast surprise of the criminals, who thought it extremely hard that white
men should be put to death for such a trivial cause." Indeed, we need not be
astonished at their resentment, for in the past the aborigines had been considered
less than animals, fit only to be shot, sometimes in batches, for sport. According to
one authority, not a few settlers, as a matter of habit, used to answer the aborigines'
requests for food by giving them cakes made from wheaten flour with a portion of
arsenic added to sweeten the mix!

Punishment for smaller offences was still harsh. When some "out and out
dreadnought youngsters' were brought before a district court, one of them gave
an impudent answer to a question in cross-examination. He received a reward of
fifty lashes-"very properly", according to the contemporary historian. However,
the jury system was established in New South Wales in 1830, so that the
administration of law was gradually to become less arbitrary.

It was indeed an age of virility and progress. When the local postmaster heard
of the proposal that stamped envelopes should be used to carry mail, he adopted
the idea straight away and the New South Wales Government Gazette of 14th
November 1838 announced the sale of stamped envelopes at IS. 3d. a dozen. This
was the first use of stamps in the world, since England did not adopt the system
until 1840.

Tasmania was sharing in the great increase of wealth that New South Wales
was enjoying. In Hobart Town by 1828 the ofice of Colonial Architect had been
incorporated in the Engineers' Department when the joint office of Civil Engineer
and Architect was taken over by John Lee Archer, a man who was appointed in
London while Lambe was still in office, and who was to become almost as important
to the island's architecture as Greenway had been to that of the mainland.'
In 1829 Archer had in progress in Hobart Town a female factory, military
barracks, a new jail, and extensions to the Colonial Hospital. At New Norfolk,
higher up the Dement River, he was building a parsonage house, whilst Launceston
and Norfolk Plains were both gaining churches designed on his drawing
board. At Newtown his group of orphan school, arcades, and church fixed on
Australian ecclesiastical architecture the curious design elements of the Gothic
Revival some ten years before the first examples appeared on the mainland, at
Sydney. In 1831 he commenced building his great causeway over the Derwent
River, and the first stones were laid for the Customs Quay, both of which were to
become conspicuous buildings, effecting great changes in the appearance of Hobart
and ensuring the endurance of Archer's fame, even without the help of his own
conscious efforts in the latter direction.

With a sense of publicity almost equal to that of Greenway, he wrote copiously
of the many buildings erected to his designs during the ten very active years
in which he had charge of the island's public works.

By 1830 the whole of the settled parts of Tasmania were developing so rapidly
it could be reported that "at every turn may be seen the hand of industry converting
woods and wastes into enclosures, while churches, houses, barracks rise as it were
by magic". Most of this work was, and some of it still is, of high architectural
quality. A number of the buildings such as the still-surviving bridge erected at Ross
in 1834 were very decorative, being strangely ornamental for Australian Colonial
work.

Except in Tasmania the convict system was dying and, even at the start of the
decade, it was being replaced by immigration. As early as 1824 Governor Brisbane
had asked for free artisans, and Governor Darling was to repeat the request. John
Dunmore Lang, the Scots churchman who figures so prominently in Australia's
history, brought out a whole shipload of tradesmen and their families. In this way
the year 1831 saw Sydney receive a considerable addition to its building-labour
strength in the form of nineteen stonemasons, seventeen carpenters and joiners,
four cabinet-makers, and three plasterers. Two years later, when the worth of these
men would have been proved, Governor Bourke informed the Colonial Office in
London that Lang had done an excellent service in introducing "useful and respectable artisans".
In the years 1832 to 1836 a total of 7524 assisted and unassisted
immigrants amved in the Colony.

The town was expanding rapidly along its unpaved streets, which were not, in
themselves, an unmixed blessing, for we know that 1st February 1836 "was a
delighdul day in Sydney-the sun not much hotter than a furnace, while an agreeably
strong and warm breeze from the northward raised clouds of dust that were
very diverting.

Another scheme was advanced for a new Government House, and James
Chadley, an architect who combined land-surveying and even a little auctioneering
with his practice, exhibited a cardboard model of his proposed building, the
"dirninuate formation" of which excited admiration, as did the accompanying
sketches, which promised Sydney one of its noblest edifices for fifty years to come;
but the design was to remain a project only.

In 1835 Governor Bourke reported to London that he had the almost embarrassingly
large fund of Lgz,3513 s. ofd. in the Colonial Treasury, and that since there
were more builders available he intended to spend his surplus on public buildings.
The Bigge era was manifestly as dead as it could be. Bourke wanted to get on
immediately with jails, courthouses, and one other urgent item-"a lunatic asylum
is an Establishment that can no longer be dispensed with. In this Colony, the use
of ardent spirits induces the disease called delirium tremens, which frequently terminates
in confirmed lunacy." Rum was obviously still king, and his rule demanded jails and
courthouses as well as the asylum.

Besides reporting his, for those days, bulging treasury the Governor said that the
pockets of his subjects were also in a satisfactorily heavy and rotund condition,
"and accordingly there has been in the last two years a considerable expenditure of
private capital in Building'.

As early as 1832 the Sydney Gazette in a leading article complained of the
shutting up of the Government's quarries, stating that "immense capital is being
sunk in the erection of houses, shops, stores &c, and it is surely not unreasonable to
request of Government every practicable facility for undertakings so enterprising
and so useful". The inhabitants were so busy with their building projects that at
one stage the Government could not get tenders for public works at all.14
In the year of Greenway's death there were ten architects in Sydney, if we
include Ambrose Hallen, who, however, was so busy with his activities in new
fields that he no longer considered himself to be, or described himself as, an architect.
Standish Harris, by now an "Architect &c" was attempting to carry on his
practice from the Rose and Crown Tavern, with indifferent success.
Of the ten architects, the activities of eight will be found to be described in this
book. The other two, Francis Clarke and Joshua Thorpe, remain obscured by time
and history. William Bradridge, who once presumed to call himself an architect,
and indeed so signed a sketch of St James's Church that has come down to us, had
returned to his original sphere and honestly described himself as a builder?s
Roads, too, were expanding. The old tracks and cart roads could not carry the
greatly increased traffic. New routes spread like a network across the land, and
bridges and culverts multiplied.

Towns no longer started as a few bark huts scattered along a track. Town
planning had been introduced as a policy of government as early as 1829, when
Governor Darling's regulations were submitted to the Executive Council and
adopted." The town of Maitland, now known as East Maitland, was formally laid
out. It is interesting to compare the regular plan of East Maitland which came into
being under supervision, with the vague, haphazard, and unsatisfactory plan of
West Maitland (now known as Maitland) which grew up in a more casual and
disinterested age.

The official town-planning regulations had nineteen articles, the most interesting
of which were that building blocks were to be one chain wide and 5 chains
deep (an extraordinary depth, apparently for stock); main streets 100 feet wide,
with 80 feet of carriageway; secondary streets 84 feet wide, with 66 feet of carriageway,
and building lines in all streets 14.feet from allotment frontages, although open verandas
were allowed to project beyond this line. Door steps were to be one foot above the crown of
the road, and occupiers were expected to maintain the
footpath in front of their properties, and also to connect their buildings to any
public sewers that might be available.

The regulations very wisely provided a discretionary
clause, so that where the "grid-iron" plan contemplated in the regulations
could not be applied because of the natural configurations of the site the
Surveyor-General could vary the plan as needed.

An almost perfectly preserved example of a town plan laid down under these
regulations is provided by Raymond Terrace, which was founded in 1837 on the
left bank of the Hunter River, between Maitland and Newcastle. Although several
periods of development are discernible in the buildings of Raymond Terrace, the
original town plan has survived in its entirety, except where two streets at the west
end of the town have been interrupted to allow a sports ground to be formed in a
natural and suitable amphitheatre.

The pre-planning of towns has one general drawback in that arbitrary assumptions
have to be made in compiling the plan and natural factors are sometimes
overlooked. At Raymond Terrace the planner intended that William Street, which
serves the cross-river punt and is the main artery out of the town, should become
the focal point of the plan, the main street. However, since the river provided the
best and cheapest method of transport, all the mills, stores, and shops gathered close
to its banks, so that the narrow and physically unimportant King Street became,
and remains, the social centre of the town. It is to be noted that anything in the
nature of a civic square or a market place was not even contemplated in the regulations,
and towns in Australia ever since have sadly lacked the amenities that such planning would
have provided.

Dignified and consciously architectural town planning was little valued in
early Australia. William Dawes's and Greenway's efforts in this direction had been
swept aside at Parramatta and Sydney. Newcastle, too, was to lose its admirable
and monumental plan which had been set down soon after 1800 when the little
settlement on the banks of the Hunter River went by the name of Kingstown. A
great civic square was laid out, facing the harbour and the sun, reaching from the
river bank to the hill now crowned by Newcastle cathedral, with all the principal
streets leading neatly and conveniently into the great open space. If Kingstown's
square had been preserved for Newcastle, the modem city would have gained
immeasurable architectural benefit.

With the regulations of 1829 and, a little later, with the laying out of the new
capitals of Melboume, Perth and Adelaide (although it has a few early buildings,
Brisbane belongs to a later era), town planning again achieved importance, but in
all these cases the surveyor's hand lay more heavily on the plans than did the
architect's.

Architects were very busy during the thirties, and the names, lives, and work
of conspicuous men can be traced in detail. The important architects are treated
fully in later chapters, but there were also numerous lesser men at work, most of
them unknown. They contributed a wealth of beautiful architecture to the
country, some of which has survived. Not by any means were all these designers
architects; many a house was designed by a builder who was quite unconscious of
the fact that he was applying the principles of architecture. He was working at the
end of the Georgian period, by which time hundreds of years of fine buildiig had
so established good principles within the craft that to provide an excellent design
became an almost automatic reflex. It was not so much a matter of self-conscious
good design, as an absence of bad. There were, of course, some rotten apples
amongst the fkuits of architecture, as there always will be, but the general level was
"good”.

In a less distracted age than ours knowledge of architecture was an accomplishment,
an additional polish, which brought extra pleasure to life, so that the
building owner often had sufficient architectural competence to be his own
designer. Willandra at Ryde (76) is a house of this type, its formal Georgian lines
showing all the expected details. Like many a Colonial house, Willandra has a
superb site, being set on the southward declivity of Ryde Hill, whence it commands
wonderful views up and down the Parramatta River. The house is now somewhat
mutilated, and closely hedged in by suburban development, which has not, however,
destroyed the grandeur of the site. The south front, except for the inevitable
paint, is unspoiled and the fine stone columns have survived in almost perfect condition.

These are only 8 inches in diameter at the base and are turned from one
single shaft of stone. The veranda, with these fine columns, and the interesting
valance board, runs round three sides of the house.

The joinery throughout is of high quality, the entrance (Frontispiece, 77) and the
hall screen beyond being very rich. The house is remarkable in that all the timber
used in it, even for rafters and ceiling joists, is first-quality cedar. The brickwork
beneath its modern paint is, inevitably, of a beautiful soft-toned sandstock brick.

Bligh House (78), which was for some years called Holbeck, on Miller's Point,
Sydney, is very similar to Willandra." Both houses have coupled columns at
the entrance, and Bligh House has them coupled at each end of the veranda as
well. The columns at the latter house are of wood and have a neat and simple pad
for a cap, the necking being grooved into the shaft. In the semicircular hall of the
house the internal doors follow the curve of the wall, and it speaks much for the
joinery of these curved doors that they are still in very good condition. The roof at
Bligh House has an internal valley-a hollow roof as it was once called- so that rainwater
has to be carried inside the building, across the ceiling, by means of a large
lead-lined box gutter. The french doors at Willandra and Bligh House have many
points of similarity, and both houses show the traditional classical balanced facade.
Another house with all these features, but of one storey, is the old cottage which
still survives in Kent Street, Sydney (83). We have seen in an earlier chapter that a
drawing made in 1830 gives us an accurate idea of its date of origin. This one small
cottage gives us a tiny glimpse of what early Sydney must have been like when it
was still a growing town. The bases of the veranda columns have rotted away, but,
if the early drawing is to be believed, they were exactly the same as the caps, which
are, curiously enough, an exact "attic" base used upside down-an original idea in
an otherwise stereotyped architectural formula.

Roseneath, in O'Connell Street, Parramatta, just north of the river, is a very
typical one-storied Colonial house, with a three-sided veranda included under the
main roof (82). The original entrance door, in a single leaf, was 3 feet 5 inches wide,
with a fine traceried elliptical fanlight and typical Colonial side-lights. This beautiful
entrance has now been spoiled, as usual. The great success of the design of this house
comes from its simplicity and its satisfactory proportions. These again depend upon
the horizontal effect given by a roof which has only one ridge to the front but
which shows three hips to the rear, and upon the fact that the floor is almost at
ground level.

The thirties were the period of the nice little house, simply planned, unpretentiously
designed, and conceived in quiet good taste. Even the most humble houses
delight the eye as single units, but when they were set out in whole streets, with
lovely materials, beautiful colours, and no worrying ornament, the overall effect
must have been superb (79). Even in detail they showed the same intelligent simplicity.

A cottage at the comer of Hunter Street, Parramatta (80), survives to show
us the treatment of ordinary building details in smaller work. Corrugated iron has
now covered the old wood shingles of the roof of this house, and coats of paint hide
its lovely brickwork, but the original design can still be appreciated.

The unpretentious town house also followed a simple pattern of quiet excellence,
and had a distinct English cast to the style of its architecture. The old terrace,
now destroyed, in Kent Street, Sydney, was a typical example. The facade
presented nothing but a wall punctuated with openings, success pending entirely
on proportioning and selection of detail. The corrugated iron on the roof
inevitably concealed the original split-wood shingles.

There are many houses and cottages such as these still in existence. A cursory
search in the older parts of towns founded in Colonial times will reveal a great
number of them, mostly in a mutilated condition but still having enough of their
former selves left to allow a lover of architecture to obtain a sound insight into
Colonial methods of design. Little is known of their individual origins, and in
most cases it is impossible to trace the designers; but these unknown men contributed
much to what is now realized to be a cultural asset of national significance.
Above this substratum of good vernacular design by smaller men, in the 1830s
there was an increasing overburden of fine work by conspicuous men. Architects
were becoming more important figures in the world than they had been for a
hundred years. In England, the noble patron with an almost-tame architect in his
retinue had nearly disappeared, so that architects were no longer Bunkeys but self
respecting professional men. In 1834 the Institute of Architects was formed in
London by these men who had begun to feel their quality, and in 1837 their association
received a Royal Charter to become the Royal Institute of British Architects.

This was too remote from New South Wales to have immediate effect, but it shows
the new background that was to give architects firm social confidence.

The age of colonial expansion found the men it needed: explorers, legislators,
planners, designers, and builders. One figure who stands out was Major Sir Thomas
Mitchell,

"a great explorer, a fine practical surveyor, and engineer of no mean order;
author, poet, sculptor, artist, engraver, inventor, and exquisite draftsman, the chosen
cartographer of Wellington's battle-fields, afterwards . . . Knight of Hanover; such was
the man under whose direction came the whole of the survey and public works of
New South Wales; a man of tireless energy, with whom difficulties only existed to
be overcome?" 19

It is no wonder that the architecturally ineffectual Ambrose Hallen had come
under the censure of such a man. The fact that Mitchell could tell the gold from the
dross in the people about him is shown by the fact that two of his protégés, Mortimer
Lewis and David Lennox, were to be amongst the most prolific designers of
Colonial Australia.

Mitchell himself was extremely active, and besides carrying out his purely
exploratory work, which was considerable, he surveyed all the existing roads. By
1833 he had laid out a system of roads for the whole of the Colony, though he
added, "when they will be made God knows".

Early in his period of office as Surveyor-General he had completed a cart road
connecting Sydney with the Hunter Valley and Newcastle. By 1823 a road of sorts
which ran from Richmond, on the Hawkesbury River, to Wallis Plains, and then
eastward down the Hunter to the Newcastle settlement was in use. However, this
was only a bridle track, and a long one too, for it reached far to the westward to
avoid the thousand-foot mountains and the swamps along the coastal strip.

The settlers soon began asking for a cart road, and as early as 1825 a practicable
route was found by crossing the Hawkesbury River at Solomon Wiseman's punt,
pushing across the backbone of the ridges, and so down into the lovely vales and
valleys that form the system of the Wollombi. The year 1829 saw the road open,
and all sorts of products began to roll down its length, not to Sydney, be it noted,
but northwards to the Hunter and so to Maitland, which was fast becoming the
capital of the plains.

Major Mitchell, the surveyor and designer of the road, journeyed along it with
considerable satisfaction in 1831. Not only did his road provide communication
between parts of the Colony, but, according to the major, its being there served to
banish to remoter regions "the bushrangers, of the sub-genus banditti", who were
making their presence felt in Australian life.

But this road, so much the pride of his heart, was already doomed by the
presence of a little hussy with the saucy name of Sophia Jane, the first steamship to
ply Australian waters. Such was her influence on coastal trade that in 1855 Mitchell's
Report upon the Progress made in Roads and in . . . Public Works in New South
Wales said that the road, "the most elaborate public work in the Colony, had been
allowed to fall into disrepair, and, strange as it may seem, without having ever
been much used by the public".

Mitchell was active in Australian affairs for more than thirty years, and his
political interests even involved him in a duel with the man who was to become the
first Premier of the New South Wales Parliament, Stuart Donaldson. This duel
occurred in September 1810 and was the last known to have been fought in
Australia. In the best tradition of all Australian duels it was, of course, quite harmless
to all parties concerned.

As Mitchell's roads increased and multiplied, the need for heavy flood-proof
bridges became acute, and since it was the golden era of the 1830s there was
naturally a man available for the job, the perspicacity of Mitchell soon bringing
him from his obscurity.

Mitchell has left a specific record of his discovery of David Lennox; he was
working on a stone wall in Macquarie Street, Sydney, and, after learning of his
experience in bridge-building, Mitchell had him officially appointed as builder and
designer-in-chief of bridges.

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.