DWELLING ON THE PAST...
A country's history is reflected in its buildings, as James Broadbent shows in a new book that brings colonial architecture to life...
He talked to GERALDINE O'BRIEN.
James Broadbent gives an unusual interview. Authors promoting their newest book are not supposed to volunteer that the first few chapters are "totally boring". Nor that some of the theories expounded in the book have been suggested by earlier writers. Nor yet that a book that was years in the making is really only a "preamble" to another book altogether - one not yet written.
But Dr. Broadbent can afford a degree of lèse majesté : The Australian Colonial House, to be published next week, will probably, despite his disclaimers, come to be regarded as the definitive book on the subject.
The story of Australian domestic architecture up to 1842, it was written by someone uniquely qualified for the task, academically and in practice. An architecture graduate with an honours degree in Fine Arts and a doctorate from the history department at the ANU's Research School of Social Science, Broadbent has a long record in curatorship of some of Sydney's finest historic houses, he lives at Mulgoa in an 1810 cottage, and knows and is respected throughout the heritage professions.
The way he tells it, the story of his life seems a series of fortunate happenings: he had never been to a history lecture in his life but "Joan" (Professor Joan Kerr) suggested in the early 1980s that he do a doctorate at the ANU (which, with "revisions, adjustments, and additions", has now become the book published by Hordern House).
Before that, when he was still studying Fine Arts at Sydney University, "Clive" (Lucas, the leading conservation architect) was working on the restoration of Elizabeth Bay House, and "I'd go there to see what he was doing and we'd take paint scrapes and chat and then suddenly it became a museum and Clive must have said ‘I know this fellow, he'd be all right to look after it'. So I became probably the first professional curator in Sydney".
Since then, Broadbent has continued working for the Historic Houses Trust, staging exhibitions and writing or contributing to a number of books, notably Gothick Taste in the Colony of NSW with Kerr, and finally producing his "big book".
So thorough is his immersion in this era of Sydney history, so wide-ranging his knowledge, that he talks about the houses, their builders, architects and owners, and about the existing literature, as one might talk with a friend about common acquaintances.
It is, he agrees, "really the first history of domestic architecture". Until now, there have been "bits and pieces" published by writers such as Hardy Wilson, who doesn't produce a full history but "beguiles people" nonetheless, or Nelson Griffiths, whose works on certain NSW homes are "wonderful period pieces of the ‘40s and ‘50s".
Then, Broadbent continues, there was "Rachel Roxborough, who did an extraordinary lot of work, and the National Trust books of the ‘60s on homesteads. But they're more chronicling the houses, not discussing them in any comparative way, not looking at domestic architecture as a whole".
Of course, he adds, "Nelson Griffiths was very good at people: all the ladies were gracious and the gentlemen all were gentlemen. But we know better".
His history begins, logically, with First Government House, with Arthur Phillip laying the foundation stone four months after the First Fleet's arrival. It was not, he writes, a sophisticated building but a "proud, pathetic, stoical assertion of European culture in a pristine land and a desert jail".
Like many of its successors or variants, it was little more than "an elaborated cottage or farmhouse, a ubiquitous vernacular type onto which tokens of a more polite architectural vocabulary were grafted to raise its status". The designer was "presumably Phillip himself, possibly with the practical assistance of [James] Bloodworth", a brick-layer convict.
In early examples of one-upmanship, merchants and others among the small non-convict populace later began building houses to rival the Governor's - people such as lieutenant William Kent, Hunter's nephew, and James Underwood and Simeon Lord, convicts-turned-merchants. Kent's house, Broadbent records, qas both dwelling and offices and was "the best house in all Sydney none excepted", set on his land on the western side of the Tank Stream, thumbing its nose at Government House on the other side.
Even in 1800, it was valued at more than £ 1,500.
The houses built by Lord and Underwood set the pattern for "the ostentation, rivalry and vulgarity which were to become recurrent themes in the history of domestic architecture in colonial NSW".
At the same time, the more modest vernacular tradition of the hipped roof, single-storey cottage with veranda was evolving, but it was not, as the book shows, "as consistent or ubiquitous as is often assumed". Elizabeth Farm, Experiment Farm or The Cottage at Mulgoa may be superficially similar, but prove to be of "greatly differing origins, influences and structural details".
Interestingly, Broadbent suggests that the bungalow with veranda, commonly traced back to the British experience in India, may as possibly have been inspired from America, where Major Francis Grose, the Lieutenant-Governor, had served for four years before being posted to NSW.
Within a year, a veranda had been added to Government House, probably by Grose, since it was after Phillip's return to England but before the arrival of his successor, Governor Hunter.
The Macquaries - and Mrs. Macquarie's famous pattern book - also left their mark on Sydney architecture, but when the pattern book was abandoned ("perhaps the expense of designs one and two had made the Governor wary of using [it] again", Broadbent writes), a "diluted form" of 18th-century English Palladian architecture became fashionable.
"Clearly influenced by the ubiquitous Palladian style of 18th-century English - and Scottish - country houses", a series of projects began with the Female Orphan School at Parramatta (now part of the University of Western Sydney campus). "The form typified solid, landed wealth and status", appropriate for a growing colony.
In its mass of research and accumulated detail, The Australian Colonial House shows how, far from being an unbroken continuity, colonial architecture was entangled with, and changed by, fashion, taste and whim.
That indefatigable diarist and viperish commentator, Lady Franklin, provides Broadbent's book with a Greek chorus of observations charting the rise and fall of fashionable styles. In 1839, she visited Windsor. Francis Greenway's work did not escape lightly: "She described his rectory as an ‘ugly red brick house'. It was said, she commented, to be the best parsonage in the colony but she thought it ‘probably the ugliest also', and she held the design of St. Matthew's Church in equal contempt".
While Broadbent is modest about his skills as a historian, he argues that the built form or material remains provide us with the most direct evidence of the past. "People will argue over the theories I've put forward but the built evidence is there for them to draw on. The value lies in the fact that for the first time we are setting up those theories: how and why people built, who built what. It‘s acceptable now to talk about taste and class; I'd love to see a big book on class, taste and society in NSW... I suppose this book is really the preamble to a book like that".
His time frame runs from settlement to 1842, when "the great depression struck overnight, people panicked, the whole economy just disintegrated". According to Ludwig Leichhardt, the colonists, mostly unaware, "went on living with the extravagance they had been able to afford when they had unpaid convict labourers... goods in immense amounts were imported from England and all the warehouses were full".
Between 1842 and 1849, almost 2,000 residents were declared bankrupt under the Insolvency Act of 1841. There was one important exception, the money-lender Thomas Burdekin, whose 1842 house in Macquarie Street (now the site of St. Stephen's Church) was an "opulent, newly completed town house, ‘the most splendid mansion in Sydney', [which] stood as an open insult to the gentlemen with tottering fortunes debating in the Legislative Council chamber across the street".
But by far the bulk of Broadbent's last chapter is devoted to the said, unfinished architectural relics of that depression, vividly underlining his claims for the value of material evidence.
In this case, it is also supported by a forceful letter from Robert Scott in Sydney to his brother in the Hunter Valley (these Scotts being ancestors of David Scott Mitchell, benefactor of the State Library).
The Scotts, says Broadbent, "are one of my favourite families, so cultured and interesting", hosts to Ludwig Leichhardt and keen amateur architects who designed a number of houses in the Hunter region.
Robert Scott wrote to his brother in 1842, urging him vehemently to rein in: "One third of Glendon is mortgaged... the whole of Dalkeith is mortgaged... we have, no doubt, very large assets, but we cannot realise upon one of them, & there are some large debts due to us... every species of improvement must at once be put an end to, & every man discharged except such as are alone necessary to keep things from going to distruction [sic]... Pray get rid of McCourt & the whole of the quarry men & stone Cutters... Hart & all Carpenters etc - fencers - well diggers - clearers etc..."
But, Broadbent writes, "nothing could avert the collapse. For the Scotts and their like the glad, confident colonial morning was over. Their dreams of villas and mansions and gardens were broken, their days of generous hospitality, of racing and hunting were ended and the stench of the boiling down for tallow of their flocks and herds filled the air at Glendon and extended over most of pastoral NSW".