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After Macquarie: Conserving Heritage Places: Clarendon, Tasmania, 2010 Colonial Furniture and FurnishingsWarwick Oakman “All the improvement you require, is a better race of people’. i wrote newly arrived Augusta Maria Scott to a friend in Bath in 1833. The development of interiors in Colonial Tasmania was as imprecise as social improvement. To some superior observers, like the diarist G.T.W.B. Boyes writing in Hobart in the early 1820s, ‘Colonial Society’ was a contradiction, and a transported society was more than an oxymoron.ii While the vast majority of the convicts to Australia were English and Welsh (70%), Irish (24%) or Scottish (5%), the convict population had a multicultural flavour. Some convicts had been sent from various British outposts such as India, China and Canada. There were also Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from the Malaccan Straits and slaves from the Caribbean. How did the anti- transportationists kit out their homes? What was made for barrack rooms, tents, lock ups and soldier huts?.
Arriving brim full of confidence in December 1811, Governor Lachlan Macquarie his entourage included Surveyor James Meehan. Government House was a leaking varnished canvas tent – similar to striped plywood, and he was forced to stay in a cottage similar to Surveyor Harriss’s - that of Captain Murray. Faced with at best ‘pretty little cottages’, inducements for improvement were necessary. In December 1811, Standing orders were given: If one were to build a two storey house, 40’ x 16’ in brick or stone, properly glazed, with a roof, within two years of the order, one would receive a town allotment of 100 feet in front and 132 feet in depth. Subsequently, the earliest surviving structures that can be reliably dated, and conform to these sizes, with evidence of joinery skills and decorative paint history are from 1812 – 1814. Amongst the earliest dateable intact survivors - still with evidence of the original are Pitts’s Farm (1812) and Ingle Hall (1814) – both built as responses to Governor Macquarie’s standing orders of 1811 for the forming of dwellings, and The Infirmary, Anglesea Barracks (1817). So what was happening in the houses of the convicts made good, the merchants, and the civil officers? The first newspapers and printed broadsides begin to appear in 1810, though advertisements for household furniture do not appear until 1814. The first panoramas and house portraits begin to appear from this date. Similarly, arrivals of convicts – artisans amongst them - were to increase four fold in the period of 1814 – 1820, brought on by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. The earliest unpublished reference to a suite of locally made furniture is the account of the Auction of Lieutenant Andrew Geils, at Restdown on the Derwent, in May 1814. The sale included two bedsteads, two tables and two wash hand stands of huon pine, sold for a total of £19iv. Soon to follow was advertised “An elegant assortment of household furniture, consisting of chairs, tables, sofas, bedsteads, bed furniture, etc.”v . No mention is made of materials from which the furniture was made, whether it was local or imported. The same issue advertised ”for sale @ the warehouse of Mr Ingle, small quantity of long cloth, calico, check.” The same Mr Ingle as Ingle Hall. From at least 1814 onwards, cloth and calico were commercially available. The source of these, whether from Europe or India, is unknown. The first truly informative sale notice by auction occurs on 30th August 1817 in the Hobart Town Gazette. Mr Lewis, at his house in Liverpool Street, advertised for sale, “An elegant bureau with a bookcase, a large elegant mahogany table, cane-bottom chairs, a large washing stand with drawers, a large sofa with furniture …..”vi As the bookcase and the dining table are referred to as “elegant” one may guess that the sofa was not, the material of the bookcase is referred to as “mahogany”, so can therefore assume that the sofa is not. The same Mr Lewis was to advertise later in the year, the remains of the valuable cargo imported on the Brig Jupiter, from Bengal, “Patna chintzes, ready-made cloths of different sorts, real Scotch gingham, Sydney-made long cloth, gimp, ribbons and tapes …” From this advertisement, we can conclude that Scottish-manufactured cloth, English and Sydney manufactured cloth, gimps of unknown origin and Indian fabrics were all being used and offered simultaneously. The first illustration of a house, with interior described occurs in 1819vii This image of a merchant’s house backing onto the Hobart Rivulet could just as easily have been from London or the Midlands of England from any decade of the 18th century. It is by no means a fashionable residence. It ably demonstrates the need for social dating of design rather than stylistic.
By 1814 Macquarie had established Government Lumber Yards in Sydney, Parramatta, Hobart and Launceston. The NSW lumber yards were shut down by free trade in 1832 and the Launceston yard by the Bigge Commission in 1822 (being known by the locals as the Slumber Yard). Hobart’s survived until the end of transportation in 1853. In Hobart, timber brought to the Commissariat Yard at Sullivan’s Cove was sent either to the Upper Davey Street workshops contained in the Anglesea Barracks or that above Hunter Island. It would appear that artisans, who were also convicts, were used for the production of Government joinery and furniture. From the very beginning, authority was given to punish artisans by work on Saturdays for officers.viii It is by this ‘after hours punishmet’, that the earliest progress was achieved for individuals. The surviving products of the lumber yard, though rare, tend to be marked with the stamp “K Furniture was variously made at Macquarie Harbour from timber sent from Hobart and the local Huon pine, for Government House Hobart and the Anglesea Barracks. Of the dozens of references to payments, the two remaining identifiable survivors are the pulpit of old St David Cathederal ‘s Hobart, paid for in 1821, now at St Mathews, Rokeby and a large and complicated cedar desk, tendered by Architect John Lee Archer in 1835 for the Commandant in Hobart, still at the Anglesea Barracks, Davey St. Lieutenant George Arthur arrived in Hobart 1824 and was recalled in 1836. This period marks a golden age for Tasmania. Two previous Governors had been successfully undermined by the merchant nabobs and self aggrandizing Officer class. Arthur was more able and aloof – earning the undying hate of the Vandemonians. Nonetheleses during Arthur’s period Van Diemens Land was to be transformed from a dumpy colonial outpost to an enviable place place for investment, military sinecure or pastoral success. Within a year Van Diemen’s Land had cut the ties with NSW, achieving an Independent Legislative Council, and freedom from the bottlenecks of the NSW Commissariat, so often running dry during Governor Macquaries term . Two years later, London-trained engineer-architect John Lee Archer appointed to as Civil Engineer and taste arbiter. Favourable rates of return were advertised to Colonial and English investors, at a higher rate of return than anywhere else. The Scot’s 500 – prove you were worth 500 pounds and you received 500 acres – developed the midlands of Tasmania. Cronies on half pension from the Penninsula and Napoleonice Wars soon took up post - Commissary General Affleck Moodie, GTWB Boyes, Claudius Thomson of Morningside. Ticket of leavers got grants, shops and worked their trade. By 1830 all manner of imports could be had – from a sympiesometer to a real 17th century Gobleins tapestry.In 1827 Lieutenant Governor George Arthur wrote that he was replacing worn out furniture with several items including two couches and a drawing room table. The returns for buildings erected and finished in the year to 31st December 1827 included ‘Officer’s Messhouse and Quarters for one Captain nearly completed’ixThe new building was the largest and most fashionable venue to date. The Hobart Town Gazette reported on 30th June 1827 that, nothwithstanding recent additions at Government House,
By 1837 his successor, Lieutenant Governor Franklin, always one to keep up with Colonial Jones’s, was to find the furniture at the official residence, with few exceptions, so inadequate that it was necessary for him to refurnish every room. xi Similarly, from 1827, the first villa of Hobart was being erected for Penninsula War friend and Assistant Commissary-General, Affleck Moodie. Heathfield was built at the same time as the extensions to the Officers’ Mess in Anglesea Barracks were being carried out – and sports the same machine cut timbers to its very bones. It is located below the officers Mess, above the town, on the largest allotment that could be given. In many ways it is symbolic of the shift of authority of 20 years before from the military It is the first departure from the old fashioned form of town dwelling illustrated in Patrick Millers’s advertisement of 1819. It is a villa in the true Regency sense of the word, looking to the town at 70 Davey Street, Hobart, above St David’s Park. Heathfield was reportedin the Hobart Town Courier of 1829 as;
And so begun what were to be the third generation of permanent habitations – a rash of villas, town houses and upmarket farms designed by amateurs and professionals. The Kings Yard got with the fashions, and started to produce furniture from the latest London pattern books. Gulfs of fashion tended to be tyrannical rather than timely. With pattern book furniture came pattern books houses. The locally produced was, despite the claims of the local manufacturers, still skew wif compared to the original . Those that could, chose imported marble mantelpieces from London, imported suites of drawing room and dining room furniture - be they from England, or copied in India, the Malaccan straits or locally by cabinet makers such as William Hamilton or James Whitesides . At Hythe, Woolmers, Clarendon and Westella, the furniture came from the likes of Seddons of London and Gillows of Lancaster. Chat About slides. In Major Errington’s drawing room at Port Arthur, we find imported China matting, India muslin, ships chairs, an imported forte piano. The table and dwarf bookcase may have been made on site. The only thing almost certainly from the Port Arthur lumber yard is the mantelpiece – marbled blue. It is the drawing room of one unlikely to be connected to Arthur and his factions – a regular room of the day.
From Anna Maria annotations, we know that the Gothic bookcase and Grecian sofa were of huon pine, and made by their cabinetmaker Bayley, the organ case was damaged, but remade by Bayley in Blackwood. The rest was imported.The art hung piecemeal on the walls was a feature - a real Turner and old Masters. Of the contents of this room, the organ and its case, in altered form, has recently entered the National Trust’s Collection, the plaster busts remain at Nixon’s home Runnymede in Hobart, the globes of the world in The Tasmanian Museum. The houses of two anti-transportationists – Sir Valentine Flemings’s Holebrook (1846) in Davey St Hobart and Thomas’s D Chapmans Sunnyside in New Town (1845), were both built after the end of the assignment system. Slavery by any other name, assignment was a grace and favour arrangement of assigned servants, that came to an end in 1844 . If one were to build well after this time, one was truly over achieving. NSW was in financial crisis and bankruptcy was the fashion. These houses celebrate the hope of a Utopian, patriotic Tasmania –with golden drawing rooms of huon pine – as rare then as it is now, with furniture made to match. The contents of these houses were amongst the items sent by the Royal Society to the Great Exhibition of all Nations, in London in 1851. Few of the items came back Discoveries of gold on the NSW, Victorian and Californian goldfields in 1846 – 50 heralded the nadir of the golden age. Captain Swanston of New Town Park, Director of the Derwent Bank, took down in the words of GTWB Boyes ‘ a moiety of the island’ with personal debts of £100,000. His elegant villa was sold in 1849 for ¼ of the land purchase price of 1829. He committed suicide at sea, coming back from the Californian goldfields, broken and bankrupt. Claudius Thomson of Morningside never received his furniture, rented out his Edinburgh villa, and became the police Constable of Campbelltown. The private bank of the Archer clan – Archer Gillies & Co went bust. The promise of Australia Felix – Victoria – called. .All able bodied men from around the planet downed tools and headed off overnight to the greatest tent cities ever seen on the planet. The gentry who could avoid their creditors, took up vast tracks of land in the Western districts of Victoria, politely feeding the goldfields boom. The gentry that stayed, such as the Cox’s of Clarendon – where they could - lived on in their farms and didn’t revamp. In southern Tasmania, where the farm lands were much less productive all but the biggest went bust, unable to pay back the extraordinary rates of interest that had led to the boom. Auctioneers in Hobart advertised tradesmens tools again and again – there were no buyers, until the auctioneers themselves went bust, unable to pay the advertising. The newspapers thence went bust. The Colonial past had become a foreign land by a generation after the end of transportation. The field photographer, JW Beattie was to lead the Colonial revival from the 1880s onward, with his Museum of Convict history, above his studio in Elizabeth St. What survived the clearing sales, the shacks, the bushfires and the embarrassments of the past is what we have to work with today. Warwick Oakman. i. State Library of NSW. Scott papers. 1833. |
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Y”. Only one example is dated. What has been identified of these tends to be of the most functional nature. The “blue books” contained within the Tasmanian Archives have references relating to the Government Lumber Yard. These cover from 1814 until the end of the Arthur period in 1836. 
