|
After Macquarie: Conserving Heritage Places: Clarendon, Tasmania, 2010 THE COLONIAL CONTEXTMiles Lewis We are accustomed to think of early colonial architecture in Australia as a subset of the British Georgian (or the Georgian and the Regency), which is true, but also potentially misleading. My main purpose today is to point out that the British Georgian tradition to which we belong is not that of the great buildings and the textbooks with which we tend to be familiar – not that of Chambers, Dance and Soane, not that of Sir John Summerson’s Georgian London, nor that of the work of Robert Adam and his followers. We belong to the Georgian not of London but of the provinces, of Scotland, and of British colonies in India and elsewhere. We do not belong to the Georgian of the great country houses, but to that of the farms and villages. We do not belong to Georgian of the great architects but that of the spec builder, the engineer, and the emigrant’s manual, Once we understand these things our architecture becomes so much more comprehensible. In Tasmania we can well start with John Lee Archer (1791-1852). Archer was appointed to the position of Civil Engineer for Van Diemens Land and arrived in 1827. And he was not an English Georgian architect but an Irish-born engineercum- architect, which makes a big difference. It is true that he served articles with the London architect and surveyor John Beazley in 1809-12, but he then worked for the engineer John Rennie in 1813-18, and spent eight years in various works in Ireland, especially around Dublin and Tipperary.
In looking at Archer's work it is always well to think about what was current in England, and especially in Ireland, in the years just before he came out. One of the important Irish houses of the time was 'Rockingham', by John Nash, of about 1810. The general form of a two-storey block with a projecting circular section skirted by a verandah finds an echo in Archer's earliest important design in Tasmania. This connection is not definitive, because there were a some prototypes in England as well, but not many. Now if Archer copied major houses in Ireland rather than England that may not seem to be of much consequence. But it goes beyond that.
Archer's Ross bridge, which is one of the most beautiful structures in Australia, was built by convict labour in 1830-6. This was where Archer’s engineering background became important, because it reflects his experience in Rennie's office. His use of the straight parapet, low segmental arches, and of outer voussoirs lengthened to equilibrate the arch, derive from Rennie's design practices.1
The bridge has curved flights of steps sweeping down from each corner, the outer side terminating in a wonderful stone newel block. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these, but it is certainly nothing in the mainstream English Georgian. Nor is there an English Georgian precedent for the stone carving, which was the work of two convicts, James Coldbeck, a burglar, and Dan Herbert, a signwriter, both of whom were rewarded with conditional pardons despite their continual drunkenness and criminal activities during the work. The west span on the north side especially has a bizarre keystone, and a representation of Governor Arthur (in a hat) on one of the voussoirs.
So what I am advocating is a little more ingenuity and lateral thinking in interpreting our colonial architecture. Professor Bernard Smith took this approach when he surmised that the first government house in Sydney was derived from the farmhouses in Arthur Phillip’s native New Forest. I’ve never tried to pursue that question, but I go even further and say that the first government house was not the two storey brick building to which Smith referred, but the temporary structure which Phillip brought with him and put up immediately and occupied until the brick house was finished. He referred to it dismissively as a ‘canvas house’, but in fact it was a cutting-edge prefabricated structure consisting of a timber frame clad in oilcloth, manufactured by Nathan Smith, the inventor of oilcloth. Oilcloth was made by mixing rosin, pitch, Spanish brown, and beeswax in linseed oil, applying it in a molten state to canvas, and rolling it in. Oilcloth structures were also used in some other colonial and quasi-colonial situations, such as Sierra Leone. But you won’t find them in England, except for one odd example, an ornamental garden tent originally in the garden at Montagu House, Whitehall.2
In a Macquarie symposium I must obviously say something about Francis Greenway, and the most important thing to say is this. In his home town of Illustrated in Country Life, CXLIX (4 March 1971), p 429; and George Mott & S S Aall, Follies and Pleasure Pavilions (London 1989), p 38. Bristol Greenway had been a Regency architect, designing buildings clad in stucco, with pilastrated facades. In Sydney, where lime was scarce, stucco wasn’t an option, and he was forced back in to a red brick Georgian mode. But in fact he did manage stuccoed pilasters at the Hyde Park Barracks. This is something which my Sydney colleagues have chosen to ignore. And should anybody think that stuccoed pilasters are unlikely, they should look the Greenway building opposite, St James’s Church (begun as the courthouse), where John Verge’s extension politely matched up to the Barracks.
Another point of style is Greenway’s use of a deep, cardboardy Tuscan pediment, which seems at first sight to relate back to Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s, Covent Garden – in which case it is English Renaissance rather than Georgian. But it’s not as simple as that. Greenway doesn’t just obsessively use the Tuscan pediment. He divides the wall below into three, using pilasters. And he puts something into the pediment – a clock or whatever, and if possible something on top as well. And there are in fact contemporary English examples of the same composition. It’s just that they are so minor that you don’t find them in the textbooks. Christ Church, Brixton Road, is not so relevant, because it’s not a deep pediment, it’s in London, and anyway it dates from after Greenway’s departure. Stockbridge Town Hall, though, is close to Bristol and dates from 1812. It’s so much like Greenway’s Australian work that you’d have to wonder whether he might have designed it.
But the point I really want to make about Greenway and the Hyde Park Barracks is one with a strong link to Tasmania. In medieval and traditional English framing, in buildings where the walls were thick it was common to put a vertical strut from the inside face of the wall to the rafter, thus reducing the structural span substantially. This strut is known as an ‘ashlar piece’ and it is also found in many early Australian buildings, such as the barn at Caoura, near Goulburn, of the late 1830s. And the barn at Clarendon, though much later in date, still shows it.
At the Hyde Park Barracks the base of the pediment is of course structurally meaningless, and it consists simply of short lengths of timber cantilevered out from the wall. The interesting thing about the roof structure inside is that it does NOT have the ashlar piece. And as the roof does not rest directly on the side walls, there are short cantilevered beams to support to at the edge of the eave. The inner ends of these beams would of course tip upwards if they were not restrained by a longitudinal beam running between the bottom chords of the trusses. This is an extraordinary indirect way of supporting the load. The same thing occurs at ‘Throsby Park’, Moss Vale, dating from before 1828, though I have not seen it and am relying upon Rachel Roxburgh’s description.3
And I believe that the same thing occurs in a later building of very similar construction to the Hyde Park Barracks. This is the flour mill, later a brewery, at Goulburn, dating from 1836. At the west end the bottom of the pediment has gone, though there are traces of it left, but at the east end the framing for it remains. A fourth building in this group is the barn at Old Wesleydale, Tasmania, possibly also dating from the 1830s. It has a hipped roof, and therefore no pedimental end, but the detail inside the eave is the same as at the Hyde Park Barracks, and the joints are mortised and trenailed.
Surprisingly enough, I have not so far been able to find any English source for the eave detail used in these buildings (though it is rather reminiscent of the idea of the jettied-out upper floor in the traditional English box frame). But the complete eaves joist system, just as used in Australia, is found in the later eighteenth century Maryland, USA (a stable building dating from some time between 1755 and 1795 at Thomas Owings's property, 'The Meadow', Owings Mills4). And in Maryland there is evidence of how it evolved in 17th to 18th century buildings. At Cedar Park the principal rafter runs straight from the top of the wall, but because the roof surface flares out the base is extended with small joist-like members. At Ocean Hall the principal members are curved at the base, so that a small horizontal piece is needed.
It seems that the detail first arose as a result of setting the roof slope out from a curved principal rafter, which also uses small horizontal members. Curved principals are found in both England and France, but the flared profile is more characteristic of French roofing, and both elements occur in this illustration. This curved rafter in turn is a hangover from the elbow of a cruck frame, and therefore must be of European, if not necessarily British, origin.5 In Britain the derivation from the cruck is absolutely clear. So we have an Australian structural form which has evolved from the medieval cruck, for which there is no evidence at all in Georgian England.
1. Ruddock, Arch Bridges, pp 177-8. 2. Illustrated in Country Life, CXLIX (4 March 1971), p 429; and George Mott & S S Aall, Follies and Pleasure Pavilions (London 1989), p 38. 3. Rachel Roxburgh, Colonial Farm Buildings of New South Wales (Rigby, Adelaide 1978), p 9 4. My information is from Roger Lee Katzenberg of Kann & Associates Inc of Baltimore, who has kindly provided illustrations: letter of 15 December 1992. 5. Charles, Medieval Cruck-Building, p 4, noted the fact that structural roof forms which had probably developed out of the cruck were found in some parts of England, like the south-east, where crucks themselves were unknown.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Introduction
