Macquarie's Fields of Dreams–so Picturesque, so unprotected

Colleen Morris

Lachlan Macquarie was the longest serving governor in 19th century New South Wales, when governors wielded significant power, and the second longest serving in the entire history of the office.1 Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth formed an energetic and visionary duo who shaped Sydney and beyond at a critical stage in the colony's development. When they departed in early 1822 well-planned townships with town squares that would evolve to parks had been established along the Hawkesbury and at Liverpool. Sydney was left a botanic garden within the Government Domain, a gracious setting for Sydney's first Government House, and buildings that were picturesque embellishments to the landscape of Sydney Harbour.2

In Van Diemen's Land Macquarie had directed that the streets of Hobart, too, be marshalled in a regular plan and Australia's second oldest botanic garden commenced.  The town of New Norfolk, which Macquarie named Elizabeth Town, often overlooked when the list of Macquarie's towns is recited, was established. For it Macquarie chose a site by the Derwent and Lachlan Rivers on land 'quite clear of timber' from which there was and beautiful and extensive view.'3 A chain of place names through the Tasmanian Midlands is the legacy of the travels of Macquarie and his entourage.

In Sydney, as early as 1811, the Macquaries began transforming the garden around the first Government House. From 1812 Macquarie began defining the grounds around Government House as ‘field’, ‘park’, ‘lower park’ and ‘lower field’.4 This ‘pleasure ground’ is clearly marked in Cartwright’s beautifully rendered 1816 plan of the Macquaries’ ambitions for a grand estate. Between 1812 and 1814 prominent colonists presented the Macquaries with about twelve well-advanced Norfolk Island pines to embellish their improved grounds.5 Mrs Macquarie shaped the surviving indigenous vegetation, bringing it into relationships with buildings, drives, walls, spaces and views.

The construction of new buildings and the remodeling of Government House at Parramatta also provided Elizabeth Macquarie with the opportunity to indulge her love of architecture and garden design. She introduced new plants and bulbs into cultivation and she awakened Sydney and beyond to the possibilities of landscape design. The approach of the great 18th century English landscape designer Capability Brown resonated in Parramatta as Macquarie restructured the town to form a domain around his house and created a dam to provide it with a suitable setting. The government farm around the house was changed to picturesque parkland with plantings of stone pines and oaks.

The impact the Macquaries had on how our cultural landscapes were perceived, named and shaped cannot be underestimated. However as we celebrate the bicentenary of Lachlan Macquarie's arrival, one recent newspaper article stood out for me–not for its relevance to historical events two hundred years ago but for its connection with what has occurred and is still occurring across the landscapes of the Cumberland Plain that Macquarie traversed, named and described in the manner of the traveller well-versed in the Picturesque. 'Macquarie's Field of Dreams'6 celebrated the achievements of the local high school in a disadvantaged suburb in western Sydney. 'Mention Macquarie Fields and a picture of a suburb plagued by housing commission homes, high unemployment, social disadvantage and an infamous riot usually spring to mind', wrote Jodie Minus.7 This is the antithesis of Macquarie's vision for NSW and the landscape that celebrates his name.

In 1810 Mrs Macquarie described the beautiful prospect from the top of nearby Bunbury Curran Hill on Dr Townson's property Varroville, prompting Governor Macquarie to ascend the hill from which there was a 'noble extensive view' of the surrounding country, a view that takes in Macquarie Fields.8 Progressive assaults in the gentle topography of this landscape and persistent incremental change – the most recent the proposal for a large scale truck stop on part of the former Varroville– one of the last clearly identifiable pieces of colonial landscape next to the motorway between Liverpool and Campbelltown, have rendered the landscape almost unreadable except to the most acutely trained eye– eyes that scan the view for araucarias, the signature plantings that provide evidence of colonial houses and their carefully planned siting.

Siting the colonial house

Many of the houses on the estates visited by Governor and Mrs Macquarie were sited according to the well-accepted practices of the 'Beautiful' of the 18th century English Landscape School. The convention was that the houses were designed to be seen and to convey the importance of the occupants and their property, as a “gentleman’s seat.”9   Set part-way down a slope or on a knoll overlooking the river flats, houses were sited so that they commanded a prospect, a view of a bend in a river or had as their focus a distant geological landmark. Macquarie’s journals of his tour in 1815 recorded his visits to a number of colonial properties and he commented in a favourable tone on houses that are situated using these principles.10  

Loudon in his Encyclopaedia of Landscape Gardening, first published in 1822, illustrates these well-accepted principles based on Humphry Repton’s Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening  (1803) and Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening  (1806) writing,

In hilly countries, or in any country where the surface is varied, the choice is neither made in the bottoms (Fig a) nor on the summits of the eminences (c), but generally on the south-east side of the latter (b), on a raised platform, the rising grounds behind being planted both for effect and shelter.11  

The early NSW nurseryman Thomas Shepherd in his lectures from the 1830s recommended two ideal settings which were either “in an open valley between two hills or high land, on a gentle swell with a base of large dimensions” or on a “flat piece of land upon the steep side of a hill.”  For over 50 years the increasingly urgent challenge has been to recognise the importance of the siting of the house, of the traditional view lines to and from the estate, of maintaining the broader setting around the houses on colonial estates, and to plan for their long-term protection. Without its gardens and the cultural landscape it was designed to command, the important colonial house is bereft of meaning and its significance is compromised.

The relentless destruction of colonial cultural landscapes in the Cumberland Plain12

Architect and aesthete William Hardy Wilson, the great grandson of Thomas Shepherd, was born in Campbelltown, a town on the Cumberland Plain of NSW in 1881. Hardy Wilson was a rare man; he saw that objects of beauty but no utility fulfil a certain role in humanity and he recognised the patterns in the landscape of his youth. In 1920 Hardy Wilson published The Cow Pasture Road when the early to mid 19th century gardens he romanticised were already mature. 90 years on, Wilson still influences how we think and feel about colonial gardens. His evocation of the gardens he loved is unsurpassed. His word pictures conjure up the qualities of light and shade – of flickering shadow – and the fragrance of old colonial gardens on a sleepy, hot western Sydney day.13

The plants that survived in the historic gardens Wilson saw and recorded were not the only ones planted: they were the ones that withstood the years of neglect. Time had wrought changes, trees were gnarled and shrubberies softened with age: changes that resonated with Wilson and other people reacting against Federation gardens. The publication in 1924 of Old colonial architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania was met with acclaim in the Sydney Morning Herald and Art in Australia.14 Wilson gave his drawings of buildings an eloquent context:

No less beautiful than the tree-shaded buildings are the surrounding gardens. At Greystanes, prolific oranges and olives, luxuriant oleanders, and laurels side-by-side with pomegranates flourish on the crown of the hill. Around the countryside cottages there are stone-flagged paths, bordered with box, and rows of China roses; tall camellias in stately pairs, and violets in their shade; the bushy tree-box like sentinels, at the corners of wild-paths overhung with pomegranates, old Saffrona gnarled and fragrant before windows and sweet-bay close beside the walls. There are blue periwinkles in the shadow of the olives over by the fences, and oleanders reaching out from the olives for sight of the sun; and at their feet the long grasses, where purple flags and oxalis blooms…15

He was similarly lyrical in his descriptions in The Cow Pasture Road. ‘In pioneering days’, wrote Wilson, ‘these homesteads resembled small villages … In the kitchen gardens flourished artichokes, and luscious melons and bountiful crops of commoner nourishment. Blacksmiths, carpenters, shepherds and vignerons, congregated in outbuildings’.16 Outbuildings were often the first elements of estates to disappear, bestowing the places where they survive – such as Horsley, the 1830s bungalow built for Charles Weston – with exceptional significance. In The Cow Pasture Road, Wilson also outlined the principle that he saw as central to understanding and conserving colonial gardens: ‘Never an ancient stone or tree is uprooted that can be spared … There is nothing grand, nothing ornate.’17

Wilson’s friend, the publisher Sydney Ure Smith, continued to foster the conservation of Sydney’s colonial heritage through his 1928 publication, Old colonial by-ways. John Fairfax produced Then and now,a series of historical tours, in 1937, reprinted as Historic roads round Sydney, but the splendid avenues along the Cow Pasture Road had disappeared by then, and ‘the graceful winding drives have been ploughed into the soil of common fields … no rich abundance of orchards and vineyards’18

As the colonial houses and gardens began falling to ‘progress’, the tranquillity of Wilson’s time, with its seemingly golden afternoons, was smashed. Bungarribee at Eastern Creek, its garden precisely surveyed by Edward Knapp in 1832, was demolished in 1957; Leppington, built in the 1820s, was destroyed by fire in the 1960s; Subiaco, designed by John Verge, was demolished to make way for a car park in 1961. Horsley and Denham Court survive but are bereft of the paddocks ‘they were built to survey’.

Hardy Wilson’s Old colonial architecture was reprinted in the 1970s, bringing his aesthetic to the attention of a new generation sympathetic to the conservation of colonial houses and gardens. Architect Clive Lucas wrote impassioned letters to newspapers. James Broadbent, who had documented the historic gardens of western Sydney for an Australian Heritage Commission survey in 1978–79, contributed a chapter on ‘Gardens’ for a publication that accompanied an exhibition on Hardy Wilson coordinated by Wilson’s great-niece, Caroline Simpson. Broadbent identified Wilson as the first to recognise and appreciate the characteristic mid 19th century style of gardening in New South Wales: ‘The old colonists sited their houses skilfully or boldly and in this mild climate delighted in stocking their gardens with plants that at home were coddled in greenhouse … Theirs were early Victorian shrubberies as exotic as the conservatories of English horticulturists’.19

Heritage planner Helen Proudfoot wrote a guide to colonial properties from Liverpool to Appin for the Macarthur Development Board (1977), guides to historic buildings of Windsor and Richmond (1987) and outlined the history of properties along South Creek as part of the assessment of the potential for that area to be developed (1990). All Proudfoot’s work highlights the value of the places she visited and documented. Another study completed in 2000 also documented important gardens and cultural landscapes and made recommendations for their protection.^'20 Despite endorsement from the Heritage Council of NSW only a handful of State Heritage Register listings and recommendations arising from that study have been adopted.

Conservation orders have been used in desperate bids to save fragile properties, not always successfully. Bernera, built in 1856 at Prestons near Liverpool, was home for many years to Olive and Ward Havard, fellows of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Following its sale, the house burned down in 1986 after an interim conservation order had been gazetted in 1985. Its garden remnants, including a towering araucaria, were heritage listed but to no avail. Significant gardens and trees can be swiftly removed with a chainsaw, particularly when substantial profit can be gained from subdivision in an increasingly populated area. Architects, landscape architects, planners and historians continue to document remaining colonial gardens and landscapes, urgently seeking solutions to save them in some recognisable form as new suburbs envelop them.

In 1972 the hills between Campbelltown and Camden were 'preserved ' by Campbelltown Council as a scenic protection zone. In the past that foresight has prevented many an attempt to develop them. This included Varroville where Dr Townson established a vineyard, the traces of which can still be seen, and a later owner, the explorer Charles Sturt, constructed dams in each paddock of the property. In April 2010 local Council and community members were fighting a proposed gas plant in their 'Scenic Hills' on the green heights of Raby and Varroville. Under the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, the state government has the power to approve the application without council's consultation.21

The early colonial gardens and cultural landscapes that Hardy Wilson and James Broadbent wrote of with such poignancy are exceptional for more than just their beauty. Collectively they demonstrate the interaction of the European settlers with the Australian landscape. Topography, climate, soils, and early to mid 19th century horticultural taste came together here to create an outstanding expression of the hopes and aspirations of Europeans living in Australia. The tall araucarias that characterise these gardens are colonial songlines in the landscape. It is almost inevitable that one day we may wake to find the  ‘most important contribution to the art of gardening’ in New South Wales has almost entirely disappeared, conserved only at a few treasured estates like Denbigh at Bringelly, at Camden Park and Brownlow Hill near Camden.

What relevance does this have for Tasmania? Tasmania has such a wealth of substantially intact cultural landscapes that it is difficult for many to imagine that what has happened in NSW could be repeated in Tasmania, with its landscapes so Picturesque.

Picturesque Tasmania

The Picturesque, a landscape aesthetic with its increased emphasis on the roughness of nature and the importance of mental associations in the appreciation of scenery became more fashionable in the 19th century. This is a notable aspect of Macquarie's appreciation of the landscapes encountered in NSW and Tasmania. In 1811 Macquarie described his first view of the River Derwent  'the lofty beautiful hilly banks of which are extremely grand and picturesque, the breadth of the river being nowhere less than two miles all the way up to town'.22 However it was to Launceston that Macquarie gave his highest approval:

The grand view and noble picturesque landscape, that presented themselves on our first coming in sight of Launceston and the three rivers, and fertile plains and lofty mountains by which they are bounded, were highly gratifying and truly sublime, and equal in point of beauty to anything I have ever seen in any country.23

The South Esk River was described in similarly grand terms and the country he named the Breadalbane Plains he considered a most beautiful situation.

Gwenda Sheridan, a consultant with a deep knowledge of Tasmania's cultural landscapes, has made a committed and sustained stand for them. Sheridan has observed:

Landscape terms such as the Sublime, Picturesque, Beautiful were hotly debated in Europe for over a hundred and fifty years, this to create the 'ideal rural landscape and Tasmania was settled right in the middle of the debate. Free land holders set up country estates, from the 1820s these were surrounded by pleasure gardens of exotic trees, flowers and shrubs imported from the other side of the world.

Sheridan used the example of Panshanger, built by Joseph Archer. In its transplanted Arcadian image of far antipodes, beauty was at the centre of it, and in Van Diemen's Land the structural forested mountain backdrop became its framework; the Sublime juxtaposed against the settled Picturesque/Beautiful. Again and again in Tasmanian colonial art this is the image that you will see and there is a considerable archive of it.24

There are a number of colonial estates throughout Tasmania, which were designed to be Picturesque in the early 19th century sense. In Tasmania they are perhaps taken for granted, they are the landscape that people have grown up in, part of the everyday. They also form a local community's sense of place. However colonial landscapes that are still identifiably 'Picturesque' are rare beyond Tasmania. The Tasmanian examples are significant on a national level. Brickendon and Woolmers now have National Heritage Listing, recognition they well deserve. However Sheridan's recent analysis of the state of heritage planning in Tasmania has demonstrated that important cultural landscapes in Tasmania have little legislative protection.25

In addition to large estates established on Picturesque principles there are important rural cultural landscapes from the Macquarie era, which are worthy of recognition and protection. In 1999 the assessment of the cultural landscape of Castlereagh an area of early land grants on the Hawkesbury River in NSW found that it was of national importance. The area has since been mined for gravel, a course of action determined decades prior to the event, the patterns in the landscape obliterated although the history of the landscape was extremely well-documented in the process. The two areas found to have comparative landscapes to the contiguous land grants at Castlereagh were the 1794 grants at Pitt Town Bottoms also on the Hawkesbury– these are of prime national significance–and the early land grants at New Norfolk and along the South Esk River near Longford.26  

Conclusion

The experience in New South Wales has been that the battles to prevent development in our important cultural landscapes has been far more difficult where there is no legislative protection of those landscapes.

While we wait for legislative protection what can be done in a practical sense?

• Undertake a Conservation Management Plan for the garden and landscape of an estate. This should identify the important attributes that distinguish the Picturesque landscape, views and vistas and write policies to guide their management.

• Apply a disciplined approach based on sound archival research to ensure that the colonial character of the gardens surrounding our significant properties is maintained or reinstated. Tasmanian archives hold records of early plant lists to inform the gardener of a possible plant palette and archival research should inform the reinstatement of an earlier layout.

• Provide adequate support and incentives to landowners who undertake good cultural landscape management practices. The Tasmanian National Trust's exhibition 'Tasmania's Rural Cultural Landscapes' emphasises the importance of this threatened heritage.27

A patterning of the landscape in NSW and Tasmania emerged during the Macquarie era that included regular towns with market squares, large estates with orchards, vineyards and gardens and rows of contiguous small grants on alluvial soils to settlers and farmers. Sydney and beyond has witnessed the inexorable destruction of many of these significant colonial cultural landscapes. Macquarie's legacy in Tasmania is precious, it is still there, it demands recognition and it demands protection

May 2010

Biography

Colleen Morris specialises in the fields of garden and landscape history, cultural landscape assessment and conservation management. She has prepared conservation plans for some of Australia's most significant historic gardens, including the botanic gardens of Adelaide and Sydney and Sydney’s Government House and Domain and is the author of Lost gardens of Sydney (2008). She was instrumental in devising the Colonial Plants database for the Historic Houses Trust of NSW and has undertaken studies of colonial landscapes across the Sydney region. Colleen was the National Chair of the Australian Garden History Society from 2003-2009.