PORTICOS IN A PRISTINE LAND...
Michael Hall admires a definitive history of Australia's first houses.
Architecture arrived in Australia on May 15, 1788, when the first governor of New South Wales, Captain Arthur Phillip, laid the foundation stone of a house for himself, four months after he had landed in the colony. Its simple five- bay form, made imposing by a pediment, would have sat virtually unnoticed in any English village, but in the new port of Sydney, as James Broadbent writes, an extraordinary poignant sight, ‘a proud, pathetic, stoical assertion of European culture in a pristine land'.
Dr Broadbent's magisterial and magnificent book is an architectural history of the houses of New South Wales in its first half century, before the economical crash of 1842 brought building to a temporary halt. It is an extraordinary story, absorbingly told. Dr Broadbent draws on a profound knowledge of the rich documentary evidence, from the colonists' letters home to the first topographical drawings and photographs.
Architectural links with Britain were close, thanks in part to pattern books. When a new governor's wife, Elizabeth Macquarie, arrived in 1810 she brought with her a copy of Edward Gyfford's Designs for Elegant Cottages & Small Villas, published four years before. As a result, this obscure collection of designs became the colonies Vitruvius, with a surprising influence on the development of its architecture. Dr Broadbent reveals how important the use of published material remained; by the 1840s, designs published by J.C. Loudon were fashionable in Australia as in England. It was possible to see in the colony versions of houses by Decimus Burton or copies of lodges in Windsor Great Park soon after their originals were built- following, as the author writes, an ‘already firmly established tradition of plagiarism in Australian architecture'.
More original work was done by immigrant architects, of whom the best known is Francis Greenway form Bristol. A pupil of Nash; he was transported for forgery in 1812. Four years later he was government architect, responsible for important government buildings as well as houses. Perhaps even more significant for the development of domestic design was John Verge, a London builder- architect who emigrated in 1828 and in the course of a long career proved a accomplished designer, responsible for the most celebrated interior in early Australian architecture, the beautiful oval staircase hall of Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney.
However, the liveliest chapters are devoted to the careers of amateur architects- remarkable women such as Mrs Darling, Lady Parry or Mrs Lowe, who turned to building to escape the dullness of colonial life, or tragic John Macarthur, whose career was ruined by madness, or idealist such a George Wyndham, who in 1829- 3 designed and built Dalwood, a Greek Revival cottage in the Hunter River Valley. Wyndham had left his family home, Dinton Park in Wiltshire, with dreams, influenced by Godwin and Shelley, of founding an ideal community. Nothing came of that, but Dalwood's massive baseless Doric columns, set in the virgin bush, movingly embody a new country's ideal: a democratic European civilisation imposed on an alien wilderness.