Chapter 18. THE END OF A PERIOD

Early Australian Architectural History

FOR the convenience of historians, history seems to choose particular points in time at which to make changes, to alter the current of events, and to start new trends. In Australia, the year 1840 is the centre of the time which saw the end of the true Colonial period and the beginning of an entirely new development. Just as we are suddenly conscious that a boy is no longer a boy but a man, so, about 1840, with equal precipitation, Australia was no longer a colony but a youthful, self-respecting, lusty nation. True cohesion and full self-government of the various sections of the country were not to come for sixty years, but they only confirmed the nationhood that had started in 1840. The big indication of change was the Order-in-Council issued in England on 22nd May 1840, abolishing transportation of convicts to New South Wales. Tasmania and Norfolk Island continued to receive them, and, more by accident than design, Melbourne, which was then still part of New South Wales, took delivery of others-about two thousand-till 1849. Western Australia was to ask for resumption of transportation and received convicts until as late as 1868. The important land squatters opposed discontinuance of transportation, naturally, and a lot was said for their point of view. Governor Gipps reported officially: "No new Community (unaided by the accidents of War) has perhaps ever made such rapid progress in private and public wealth as the Colony of New South Wales. That this has been mainly the effect of Convict Labour is hardly to be disputed. . . ." The bulk of the people, however, had come to hate the system as something distasteful in itself and foreign in origin. They publicly denounced "the introduction of expatriated villains from the gaols and penitentiaries of England". The Australian, as against the Colonial, set of the wind is abundantly clear. By 1849 the Melbourne settlers went so far as to call for concerted action "to repel by physical force any other attempt to land convicts on our shores". Three years later, when Earl Grey as Prime Minister attempted to re-introduce transportation, the citizens of Sydney petitioned Queen Victoria for Grey's dismissal, hinting that his actions were driving them to thoughts of secession from the Crown . Although New South Wales, which included Victoria until 1851, continued to receive trickles of convicts for a number of years, free immigration had been established as a policy as early as 1837, when Governor Bourke had advised the people that the Government was offering bounties on the introduction of free labourers and mechanics into the Colony: "His Excellency is instructed to point out to the Settlers generally the expediency of their looking for the future to Immigration, rather than to assignment, as the source from which they may obtain requisite labour for the cultivation of their lands and for other purposes. "Other purposes, of course, would include building. From 1838 on the wise and competent Governor Gipps was aided in his legislative duties by a Council of fourteen members-seven government officers and seven private citizens. Meetings were open to the public, and debates were published in the Press, so that a sense of participation in government was felt by the people, even if their role was only supervisory. The brilliant Robert Lowe, "who descended on Sydney in 1842, [and] flamed here as a meteor for eight years", began, for the first time, to develop the entirely new idea of a partnership of Australia and Britain in "one mighty confederacy, confident against the world in arts and arms. By 1841 the Governor could report that "a rapid improvement in the Social and Moral condition of the People is very evidently taking place. The old distinction between Free Settlers. and Dersons who have been convicts or are of convict origin, is still presented, but the virulence, with which it was formerly marked, is very happily subsiding." The sense of being primarily Australians was beginning to override mere social distinctions, which would appear to have been fading in any case. However, the Governor further reported and sadly, that "drunkenness, the fruitful parent of every species of Crime, is still the prevahg vice of the Colony". In 1842 an Act was passed by the English Parliament establishing a partially elective Council for New South Wales; this provided the first real measure of self-government. Significantly, an electoral district for southern New South Wales was defined as being included within "a straight line drawn from Cape Howe to the western source of the river Murray, and thence the course of that river to the eastern boundary of the province of South Australia". The future State of Victoria was thus delineated, although it was not to obtain separation from the parent Colony until 1851. The Government Treasury was, in 1841, replete with the sum of £651,487 IS. 4d., the sale of Crown lands having accounted for some £300,000 of that amount. The need for public works was so great that even this sum was insufficient and, in addition, the political machinery was too small to cope with the demands. A very important Act created municipal corporations with powers to deal with a large portion of this question, and thus local government was brought into being in Australia? Coincident with these developments was the exploration of the hinterland as the inhabitants began to seek knowledge of the whole of the continent. The squatters, who in the old meaning of the word were unauthorized occupiers of land, were pushing out into the unsettled districts. "As well attempt to confine an Arab within a circle traced in sand", wrote Governor Gipps in 1840, "as to confine the graziers and wool growers of New South Wales within the bounds that can possibly be assigned to them." The flocks and herds were growing so rapidly that the total of 41,000 bales of wool shipped to England in 1840 was to increase to 138,000 bales by 1850. In 1843 John Ridley invented the first, imperfect, harvesting machine to gather the plentiful harvests of South Australia, and thus began the era of mechanized farming which gradually was to replace the old peasant hand methods. In 1845 the great Burra Burra copper mine was discovered in South Australia, and it was to yield £400,000 in six years. Altogether the Australia of the forties was a different place from the mere collection of settlements that it had been previously. Physically, too, Sydney was changing. From a mere town it was undergoing metamorphosis into a metropolis, and it was by this term that the inhabitants described it. In 1836 a proposal to light the streets by gaslight had been greeted ironically by the Australian: "We cannot but lament thus, as Sydney may in that case lose its present reputation of being the very worst lighted town in Christendom."' The street lamps at that time were oil-burning and gave but a feeble glow-when they were not smashed by mischievous boys. On 25th May 1841 the Australian Gas Light Company lit the Sydney streets with gas, which was welcomed as a great improvement, especially by the boys who saw in the lights much better targets. A cross-harbour punt was plying between Miller's Cove and Blue's Point. Edward Knapp produced his scheme for a "floating bridge" to Balmain. This was to be a steam punt pulling itself along on a great chain lying on the harbour bed, counterweighted in large pits at the Sydney and Balmain ends. The punt was to be 50 feet broad and 60 feet long, the prows decorated with bunches of carved acanthus leaves. The drawbridges at each end, together with the tall chimney stack, would have created something of a comic-opera atmosphere on the surprised waters of Port Jackson. Near by, in Sydney Cove, the great stone arc of the semicircular quay was nearing completion, making the water-door of Sydney a thing of controlled engineering, instead of the rough shelving beach, relieved only by one or two wharves, it had been previously. The position of the architect in the community was still not established as well as the profession could have wished: . . . the Colonists generally speaking regard the Architect as little more than a kind of overseer and appear scarcely to know whether he or the mechanic employed upon the building is the more important agent in producing the generally effective or defective result, as the case may be. The want of discrimination may certainly be excused, as it is undoubtedly engendered from the positive inexperience of the majority of architectural professors (save the mark!! !) of Sydney, whom the public know one day as Jeni, Jack, Mike, &c., carpenter or the mason, and the next, (when by a touch of the magician's wand, they burst on the deluded Metropolitans), as Mr Brass, &c., Architect: . . . . Whatever people may say of these "Arch-itecks", these Austral Pecksnit, they could not fairly be charged with being desperate men. As we look upon the buildings of the forties we can see that the last remark penetrated deeply towards the core of truth. The Church of St Mary Magdalene (116) at St Mary's, a few miles west of Sydney, was the product of some such "arch-i-teck" who had a brief look at Greenway's churches, thought he would Gothicize the design a little, and produced an alleged piece of ecclesiastical architecture. The church is still in good repair, so there is no complaint about the building technique, as such. But although the materials are good, the proportions are bad, the details crude, and the design awkward. The foundation stone was auspiciously laid in a ceremony jointly conducted by Bishop Broughton and Samuel Marsden. The building was consecrated as a church on 23rd April 1840, but architecturally it would always be beyond redemption. A contemporary church, and a companion in ugliness, is St Bartholomew's, Prospect, whose hunch-backed bulk crowns a hill a few miles to the eastward. Genera1 taste in architecture was in a state of confusion; the public, the "arch-itecks", and the architects were all being influenced by the decay of the fine principles of design that had guided Georgian architects. We have seen Mortimer Lewis's curiously bad design of the Customs House. James Hume, never a powerful designer at any time, sank to a level of complete architectural incompetence when commissioned to design the first Synagogue for the Jewish community of Sydney. In seeking to give this building an "eastern" flavour he had to forsake his bookish Gothic style and rely on his own aesthetic ability. The result was disastrous (117). The fact that the design was well reviewed in the Press is an indication of the general decadence of critical standards in architectural matters. The cost of this frightful building was £3600. Smaller town buildings, and these would have been designed by the less self conscious and more conservative builders, showed a carry-over of Georgian principles. A cottage in Bourke Street, Sydney exhibits almost the complete range of late-Georgian details, from the formal gable-end to the etched veranda posts, the valance board, the fine sash-bars, and the neat six-panelled door. More pretentious houses such as Watson's Bay House gracing the shore of that lovely cove of Sydney Harbour, perpetuated the simple but delightful elements of the earlier period, when good material and studied proportion produced designs of satisfying excellence. The building survives, and, though much altered at one period, still carries unspoilt parts of its old self: Macquarie Field House one of the finest examples of early Australian domestic architecture, belongs to this period. Situated not far from John Verge's Denham Court, it replaced an earlier house facetiously known as Meehan's Castle. The history of the present house is somewhat obscure. It has been established that John Hosking, the first Mayor of Sydney, bought the estate in 1843, and almost certainly the house was built for him. The designer has not been identified although he was obviously an architect of ability? The design is one of the latest examples of the Regency style in Australia, with its brick walls finely plastered over, and the regular procession of the cedar columns to the broad verandas. A purist might quarrel with the way that the pedimented porch interrupts the horizontal sweep of the lines of the design, but everything else is broad and satisfying. Thus represented the full flowering of the country house, designed with the refinement and restraint that marked the era which immediately preceded, and overlapped, the dark period of architectural decadence. In the inner parts of Sydney such tiny terrace houses as those in Woolloomooloo (124) showed the simple and honest directness that has been stressed when similar work has been considered in other parts of this book. Although the designers held on to the basic principles, small town houses of this period obviously had a character quite different from that of their earlier counterparts. Soon, even these minor bulldings began to yield to the so-called "romantic" influence, as the illustration of a cottage in Fitzroy Street, Sydney, shows. The small out-of-town house settled down to being a si-ple veranda-type, built in any material-brick, stone or weatherboard-but always with the same quiet, pleasing elements. Junction Cottage, so called because it once stood at the junction of the Old South Head Road and the New South Head Road at Vaucluse, near Sydney, was a perfect example of this unpretentious domestic form, whch, with minor variations, has been and is still being repeated throughout New South Wales. The plan had a central hall or passage running from front to rear, with rooms opening off it on each side-an uncomplicated arrangement that has found favour for a century. Much more elaborate is Bronte House, the partially erected walls of which Robert Lowe bought from Mortimer Lewis and finished off as a wholehearted Gothic essay. Small portions of Lewis's work show through, the central round-headed doorway, for example. Romanticism had a full flowering here, for not only were the formal lines of Lewis's plan altered so as to be as casual as possible, but quadruplet round towers, one of which may be seen in the sketch, were added to the corners of the building. The house still exists and has been acquired by the Waverley Municipal Council, which cares for it. The forties, with the great increase of free population, brought a large proportion of architects on the immigrant ships. Three or four of them had previously seemed a great number, but now they began to crowd in so thickly that it would be Herculean labour to trace them all. In Tasmania, W. P. Kay became Colonial Architect in 1846, a position he was to hold for a decade, although he could have produced little effective work during the early period of his office when the island was in a turbulent state. With the virtual cessation of transportation to the mainland, Tasmania became the dumping ground for convicts who overran the settlements, which had been made architecturally beautiful by the erection of the Lady 'Franklin Museum, a wealth of great houses, finely designed churches and minor Georgian work scattered throughout the island. In Sydney, Henry Ginn was busy with his design of Holy Trinity Church on Jack-the-Miller's Point;21 James Houison was laying his church plans before the Executive Council, and was using hts watercolour box to tint his exquisite drawings of smooth-walled Regency houses; Mr John Storck Duerurbane, polished, fresh from London and Cuba-was responsible for four equally polished houses in Pitt Street. A sensation was created by the erection, near by, of the Victoria Theatre, designed by Henry Robertson, "many structures from whose hand ornament the Metropolis", according to a contemporary reporter. John Verge's old pupil, John Bibb, was at work in his own right. In 1839 he commenced the Union Bank, inevitably in Pitt Street, that paradise of architects in the forties. The bank, long since disappeared, stood on the south-east corner of the Hunter Street crossing, and was a good, cleanly designed building, in which columns were attached to the wall in the conventional, decorative way. Bibb's studied Classicism of design showed itself very clearly in the Congregational Church in Pitt Street, a building that still admirably serves its original purpose. The foundation stone was laid in 1841, but the church was not opened for service until 1846. It has an interior unusual for Australia, with two galleries that run round three sides of the "nave", making the building virtually three storeys high. The result is more of a "meeting house" than the usual church, and is very effective. The pulpit is approached by a winding stair, itself a fine piece of design, set in the heavily panelled elliptical end of the church. The joinery is of cedar, in excellent preservation, and the internal walls are decorated with delicately modelled Corinthian pilasters, added later (8). The simplicity of the Colonial column was indeed passing away if the flowery capitals of the Corinthian order were being used as ornament applied to walls. Even the fourteen iron columns supporting the are "fluted Ionics, cast by Dawson of Sydney". The exterior elevation shows how far architectural thought was now breaking with earlier ideas. The Colonial facade was composed only of structural elements, beautifully proportioned, finely detailed, but all essential. At the Congregational Church the whole design is a composition of non-functional elements arbitrarily applied in the best pedantic late-Georgian English manner. The execution of the design and the craftsmanship are excellent, hut the building is not an example of Colonial architecture: it is one of the first examples of the new architectural movement that was expressing Australia's changed status. The end of the early Colonial period was hastened by three specific factors. These were: depression, expansion, and the discovery of gold. Governor Gipps in his valuable "Report on the General State of the Colony in 1841, which has been quoted liberally before in this chapter, had significant things to say about social conditions. Some of his observations still have force, over a hundred years later. The great and very rapid increase in population had caused not only a forcing up of rents as a temporary inconvenience, but a fear for the future. The dryness of the climate and the comparative poverty of the soil led Gipps to the opinion that it would probably be difficult for any part of Australia ever to support a dense population. He also reported: "During the latter part of the year 1840, a considerable degree of Commercial depression, the consequence of excessive speculation, prevailed in the Colony; and this, following so soon after the discontinuance of Transportation, may, it is feared, lead to serious results, though on the nature of them it would be as yet premature to peculate." By 1843 a drought so aggravated conditions that a severe depression shook the whole economic structure, with consequent large-scale unemployment. John Dunmore Lang in September of that year petitioned the Legislative Council to seek some means of relieving the lot of "the unemployed Artisans now in Sydney". Two mouths later, four thousand citizens made a similar petition as in times of financial stress, building and architecture are the first into a depression, and the last out of it, and so it was at this period. We have seen in an earlier chapter how James Hume's work on the Sydney cathedral was brought to a stop. The foundations of John Bibb's Congregational Church had been laid in 1841, but work was completely suspended until October 1844, when the general economic picture showed signs of improvement. This interruption of building work occurred throughout the architectural field, causing a pronounced break in the continuity of design thought. When work did resume there had been a snapping of yet another link in the chain that had joined architectural technique to the Colonial days. Australia was still, of course, politically and to some extent economically a colony of Great Britain, and was to remain so for many years; but the relationship was to become more and more a nominal one as time passed. Distinctly, the division between colony and nation began to appear about 1840, architecture exactly reflecting this division. Not that Colonial influences were not to remain in architecture for decades- it would have been unnatural if this had not occurred- but a new concept was already manifest in architecture, as shown by Bibb's work. Another factor that influenced architectural development in the forties was plainly and simply geography. Previously, Australia had been composed of two well-established colonies, New South Wales and Tasmania, and a collection of more or less embryonic settlements scattered round the coasts of the continent. By 1840 the embryos had turned into lusty infants, as instanced by the fact that in that year Melbourne had become the home of over ten thousand people and that other centres had developed proportionately. The old cohesion, the old unity, had gone and architecture was no longer dominated from Sydney. Architects were at work in what were to become other States, their numbers were to increase steadily, and they were working in the new spirit. The towns, as they grew, looked different from old Sydney, which still carried a faint air of belonging more to the eighteenth century than the middle of the nineteenth, whose different spirit was creating the new capitals of Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. The term Colonial architecture, in its strictest sense, could not continue to encompass what was happening in building all over Australia. The economic depression was scarcely over, and Australia had barely resumed a more or less placid growth, when the gold fever struck, causing an illness that not only precluded all normal activities, but brought about great changes in architecture. When building was resumed, a new class of people had money. They had different ideas of architecture, mostly in much worse taste than their predecessors', but they were very firm ideas? The new building owners were aided to achieve their wishes by the fact that, with increasing industrialization, manufacturers could produce cheaply, and in great profusion, poor copies of good architectural details. The foundation of Peter Nicol- Russell's iron foundry in Sydney ensured that cheap cast-iron railings and columns would be available in quantity. Other foundries were soon established to swell the flow of castings from the furnaces. The ideal house became the one that could display the greatest variety of ornamentation, no matter how badly designed the individual elements might be. In their own sphere, the architects of the forties were happily busy at their profession, unaware that they were the interpreters of an architectural transition between two ages. Their work still had a community of spirit that made a street a continuous row of related units, quietly well-mannered and pleasant to see. A town had not yet become, as all towns were to do, a bedlam of different styles "before which even the strongest might blench". By 1845 the new Government House in Sydney was, by Lewis's efforts, ready for the vice-regal famly. Sydney was entranced with this new crenellated palace, which, on its beautiful peninsular, backed up by Greenway's equally crenellated stables, so clearly dominated the harbour and the town. The architecture might be dull, inconvenient, and imitation Gothic, but Blore had given it a character that fully deserved the expression "noble pile" that was so frequently used to describe it. It also fully expressed that sentimentality, that romanticism, which was to become the hall-mark of the Victorian age. The bulk of the building, its nobility, gave Sydney's citizens a sense of pride. Its battlements, its sham towers and turrets, its multiplicity of carved stones, all impressed upon them that the austerity of Colonial days was past, and that they were entering upon an age of richness and and decorativeness, alluring in its promise for the future. It was with satisfaction-that the noble Governor entered his noble carriage to wend his way to his bright, new, castellated residence amid the vociferous cheers of his subjects, many of whom attended, enchanted, the warming of the house on 26th June 1845. Behind him he left, scorned and unwanted, Bloodsworth's old design, the first house in Australia. It had managed to hold together long enough to serve the whole succession of Australian governors for all those years, but now no one cared if it stood up any longer. Symbolically, it was Colonial, of the past, dead. Soon, with a few tired sighs, it slid to the ground to give the remainder of its wormy timbers to the white ants, and to mingle its old bricks with their native clay, after the resplendent Governor had quitted it to ride off to a new palace and into a new era. And Australian architecture? It was to enter upon an orgy of ornate taste and often rich vulgarity, from which it was slowly to emerge with throbbing head, shaking legs, and uncertain steps, exactly one hundred years later.

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.

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