Download pdf - Guidelines for Entering Houses in the Queensland Heritage Register

Guidelines for Entering Houses

in the Queensland Heritage Register

Report to Queensland Heritage Council

Peter Bell Historical Research Pty Ltd

December 2002



Report to Queensland Heritage Council

Peter Bell Historical Research Pty Ltd

December 2002

Cover illustration: the Queensland house at Federation; Weinheimers' house in Ravenswood, built c.1900.

(Photograph courtesy Mrs Weinheimer, Townsville)



Contents Project 1 What is a House? 1 Consultant 3 Background 3 Criteria 6 History of the Register 7 Analysing the Houses on the Register 8 Discussion of Historical Significance 12 What Houses are on the Register? 18 History of the Queensland House 28 Regional Variations 79 Previous Methods of Classification 82 Typologies 89 Constructing a Usable Typology 90 Recommended Typology 95 Guidelines for Applying Criteria 98 Discussion of Recommendations 104 Draft Survey Brief 116 Recommendations 119 Further Research 122 Bibliography 126 Acknowledgements 137

Queensland Houses: Executive Summary The project brief calls for:

(a) an identification and evaluation of houses presently in the Queensland Heritage Register,

(b) recommendations on how the Register could better represent Queensland’s

housing stock, (c) priorities for further studies relating to houses, and (d) guidelines to assist the Heritage Council in assessing houses for the Register.

This report :

• defines what is meant by a "house" • examines the process by which the Queensland Heritage Register was created • analyses the houses which are in the Queensland Heritage Register • provides an overview history of the Queensland house • points out regional variations in the Queensland house • sums up typologies which have been used to categorise the Queensland house • proposes a workable typology for the Queensland house • proposes guidelines for the entry of Queensland houses in the Register • makes recommendations for the assessment of the Queensland house • suggests ways in which the present representation of the Queensland house in

the Register could be improved • recommends a more systematic process for the identification of historically

significant houses • suggests greater cooperation between the Heritage Council and local

government • recommends amendments to Queensland heritage legislation

The report's recommendations are set out on the following pages.

Queensland Houses: Recommendations 1 That the Queensland Heritage Council define a house as: "a building purpose-built

as one separate, self-contained dwelling". 2 Section 23 of the Queensland Heritage Act be amended to remove the double test

of cultural heritage significance, replacing the words "The place may be entered in the Heritage Register if it is of cultural heritage significance and satisfies one or more of the following criteria" with the simpler test: "The place may be entered in the Heritage Register if it satisfies one or more of the following criteria".

3 Section 23 of the Queensland Heritage Act be amended to allow buildings to be

entered in the Register for their architectural merit by that name, instead of relying on some combination of aesthetic, creative or technological values.

4 Consideration be given to amending the Queensland Heritage Act to enable

precincts of houses rather than individual examples to be entered in the Register, in keeping with practice in other states.

5 That the terminology, periods, styles and definitions in Apperly, Irving and Reynolds'

book Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture (1990) be consistently adopted in describing houses under assessment for the Register, with some modifications suggested below.

6 That the following periods be used in classifying types of Queensland houses:

Victorian Period c.1840-c.1890 Federation Period c.1890-c.1915 Inter-War Period c.1915-c.1940 Post-War Period c.1940-c.1960 Late Twentieth Century Period c.1960+

7 That the following floor plans be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:

two-roomed cottage four-roomed house four-roomed house with asymmetrical facade

8 That the following house forms be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:

single storey house two storey house highset house grand house (take many forms)

9 That the following roof forms be used in categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:

simple gabled simple hipped pyramid short-ridged hipped multiple gabled U-shaped plan

10 That the following relationships between core and verandah roofs be specified

in categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:

stepped straight break in pitch at core perimeter

11 That the following verandah forms be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:

none front verandah front and one side verandahs front and two side verandahs verandahs all round two-storey house with one-storey verandahs two-storey house with two-storey verandahs

12 That house forms not be used to describe twentieth century Queensland houses

because of their much greater complexity and range of types, but that they be described by reference to their styles and types.

13 That the following style names be used in classifying types of Queensland houses:

Victorian Georgian Victorian Regency Victorian Classical Victorian Italianate Victorian Gothic Federation Bungalow Federation Queen Anne Federation Filigree Inter-War Californian Bungalow Inter-War Old English (or Tudor Revival) Inter-War Spanish Mission Inter-War Functionalist (or Modern) Post-War Brisbane Regional Late Twentieth Century Australian Nostalgic Late Twentieth Century Post-Modern

14 That Queensland houses which do not conform to these typological categories be described as house types, adopting locally-understood names such as Inter-War Queenslander as considered appropriate.

15 Whenever a house is under consideration for entry in the Register, the Heritage

Council should take the analysis of houses already in the Register into its deliberations.

16 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register, the assessment report should

contain a numerical analysis of how well that type of house is already represented in the Register in terms of its location, form, materials and age.


Council should adopt a conscious bias toward under-represented house types. 18 Some house types at present under-represented in the Register and which should

receive special consideration are:

Twentieth century houses Recent houses Rural houses Small houses Primitive houses Ordinary houses Timber houses Corrugated iron houses Northern houses Western houses

19 Whenever new houses are entered in the Register, the Register analysis be

updated, maintaining a current picture of the relative representation of house types. 20 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register under the criterion of

demonstrating the "evolution or pattern of Queensland's history", the assessment should (a) state precisely what aspect of the evolution or pattern of Queensland's history that house demonstrates, and also consider (b) how many other houses or other places demonstrate that particular evolution or pattern equally well, and (c) how many other places already are, or might be, entered in the Register for that reason.

21 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register under the criterion of close

association with a prominent individual person, a group of people, or a company or other organisation which played a significant role in Queensland’s history, the assessment should not only (a) state the nature of that role and why it was significant, but also consider (b) for how long was that house associated with that particular person, group or organisation, and (c) how many other houses already are, or might be, entered in the Register for the same reason.

22 An ongoing review be undertaken of all the houses entered in the Register as a

result of their inclusion in the Schedule to the 1990 legislation, to see if they conform to the criteria subsequently adopted in the legislation of 1992.

23 A systematic program of heritage surveys be implemented, with the aim of

recommending houses for entry in the Register.

24 This program of heritage surveys be both (a) geographical, ensuring a balanced

coverage of houses from different regions of Queensland in the Register, and (b) thematic, seeking out under-represented forms, materials, styles and chronological periods.

25 Research be undertaken on a number of topics where present knowledge of the

historical development of Queensland houses is deficient, leading to difficulty in assessing heritage significance.

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 1

Guidelines for Entering Houses in the Queensland Heritage Register Queensland Houses: Project The project brief calls for:

(a) an identification and evaluation of houses presently in the Queensland Heritage Register,

(b) recommendations on how the Register could better represent Queensland’s

housing stock, (c) priorities for further studies relating to houses, and (d) guidelines to assist the Heritage Council in assessing houses for the

Register. This report considers individual detached houses of all kinds, - urban and rural, large and small, sophisticated and primitive - built in Queensland between 1842 and the present. It does not deal with precincts or subdivisions, attached houses, row houses, blocks of flats, hotels, motels, apartment buildings or institutional quarters, clubhouses, nursing homes, convents, residential colleges, purpose-built boarding houses, hostels or barracks. All of these are excluded from the brief, and would expand the topic beyond a practical scale. The study of shearers' quarters or canecutters' barracks alone could make a report as large as this one. What is a House? It is not always as simple as it may seem to define exactly what a house is. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the primary meaning of house as "A building for human habitation; esp. a dwelling-place. b. The portion of a building occupied by one tenant or family." However, it goes on to give about 16 other meanings, including some excluded earlier - convents, colleges, boarding houses - as well as usages as diverse as churches, theatres, taverns, business premises and parliamentary assemblies. The Macquarie Dictionary begins with the same very broad primary meaning: "a building for human habitation", but then goes on to give 19 more senses of the word which broaden it even further, one of which is "a building for any purpose". There follows an entire page of usages ranging from "house of God" to "house of ill repute". It is clearly a word buried deep in our language, most likely coming from the ancient Indo-European word root hud, meaning something like "shelter", which has probably also given us English words such as "hut", "hood", "hide" and "huddle". (OED) Most architectural and building dictionaries do not give a definition for "house', apparently regarding its meaning either as self-evident or too hard to explain. However, Briggs' Concise Encyclopaedia supports the broad interpretation, defining a house as "a dwelling; a building for human habitation. The term therefore embraces every form of dwelling from a palace to a peasant's hut." (Briggs 1959, p. 164) Standards Australia's Glossary of Building Terms narrows this to something more useful, defining a house as "A building used as one separate, self-contained dwelling." (Milton 1994, p. 128) In defining what a house is for the purpose of this project, a variation of this narrow


definition has been adopted - a building purpose-built as one separate, self-contained dwelling - for many other types of buildings and structures as diverse as churches and packing cases can be used as houses, but they are not like houses in design or appearance. In defining houses here, both form and function have been considered; a shop with an attached dwelling has not been included, because the building does not take the form of a separate house. Residences on the Register associated with schools and post offices are included, as are rectories, manses and presbyteries if they are clearly free-standing dwellings, and there is sufficient information in the database to describe them. Some buildings are included because they were built as houses, although they are now restaurants, business premises, boarding schools, museums or churches. However, some of these judgements are very fine, because for example, purpose-built boarding schools are excluded. There are buildings on the Register such as rural hotels, banks and telegraph stations which are nearly identical in form to houses, but because of their original function they are not included. Conversely, there are many buildings which have been converted from other functions - including hotels, banks and telegraph stations - to become houses in recent times, but they too have been excluded. The report also concentrates on assessing the heritage value of the fabric of the houses themselves. It is not concerned with historic interiors and furnishings, or with historic gardens and landscape settings. While these may sometimes raise issues affecting the assessment of a house's heritage values, they also arise in relation to many other types of buildings, and are specialised fields of expertise beyond the scope of this study, possibly requiring detailed guidelines in their own right.


Queensland Houses: Consultant The consultant for this project is Peter Bell, who has extensive experience as an architectural historian and heritage consultant throughout Australia, has carried out detailed studies of Queensland houses and published widely on the topic, assisted in drafting the criteria in Sec 23(1) of the Queensland Heritage Act, and has prepared assessment guidelines for South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and other heritage agencies. Queensland Houses: Background to Historical Study This report includes a historical overview of Queensland houses. This was not specifically called for in the project brief, but is an essential background to any discussion of the heritage assessment of Queensland houses. The evolution and pattern of Queensland houses has been a process that has taken place over 180 years from the 1820s to the present. In that time, well over a million houses have been built in Queensland. Those houses have been subject to many geographical, social and economic forces, taken many diverse forms and been built of many materials. There have been times when Queensland houses evolved into distinctive local forms, not built elsewhere, and other times when Queensland house-builders were content to adopt standard, universal house models from outside the state. For much of Queensland's history, there have been significant differences between the houses built in the north and the south, and between the coast and the inland. The assessment of Queensland houses as heritage places obviously must be informed by knowledge of these events. yet, despite all that has been written on the subject of the Queensland house, there is no single account in existence that can be adopted as a reliable and comprehensive history of the houses of Queensland as a whole since settlement by Europeans. Some are very brief, others are concerned with particular regions of the state, with particular types of houses, or particular periods rather than with the whole story. Hence this project includes its own historical summary. From the late nineteenth century onward, travellers in Queensland frequently recorded comments recognising distinctive features in the local building stock, that is, that Queensland houses were different in appearance from those of the other Australian colonies. Not all of these were admiring comments. However, no serious study of the history - or any attempt to assess the heritage value - of Queensland houses was undertaken until the inception of the National Trust in the 1950s. Then the early studies tended to be preoccupied with the homes of famous people and formal architectural values, resulting in over-representation of grand and exceptional houses on the National Trust register. As a result of the heritage legislation of 1990 and 1992, many of these houses are now on the Queensland Heritage Register. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of writers on Australian architectural history commented that the Queensland house had distinctive features (Boyd, Freeland, Lewis, Newell), but did not pursue these qualities in detailed studies. The first serious study of the Queensland house was Ray Sumner’s survey of a sample of North Queensland dwellings, principally rural homesteads, done from a geographical viewpoint. She concluded that environmental factors were not the principal determinant of the distinctive forms of Queensland houses. (Sumner 1974 & 1975)


My own research in 1978-82 took this finding as a starting point, and looked at a large number of houses in the northern towns - Charters Towers, Townsville, Cairns, Herberton, Cooktown, Ravenswood, Croydon etc - most of which were founded or developed by mining industry. This was almost exclusively a study of timber houses, and devoted some space to investigating the origins of Australian building techniques. I concluded that economic and social forces accounted for the historical development of houses in the region. The conservatism of the building industry was a far more powerful determinant than the tropical climate. (Bell 1982 & 1984) Simultaneously but quite independently, Donald Watson was also researching the Queensland house for the National Trust, concentrating on the South-east of the state. (Watson 1981) His report findings largely reinforced my own conclusions about the origins of Queensland construction techniques, although differing in detail. Watson tended to stress the importance of individual architects in the process, while I was more inclined to point to the influence of timber merchants and builders. By the early 1980s, the historical development of early houses in both the north and south of the state was becoming well-understood. Bob Irving’s The Australian House (1985) was a landmark national publication, and Ray Sumner’s chapter emphasised the distinctiveness of Queensland houses, summarising the work that had been done to that time. Balwant Saini’s book of the same name (1982) actually focused throughout on the Queensland house as the archetypal form of the Australian house, and sought to return the emphasis to environmental determinism. To this time, with the exception of Watson’s work, almost all of the research done on the Queensland house had been in the north of the state. From 1985 the Brisbane History Group was actively publishing on the history of the Brisbane house, spearheaded by Rod Fisher’s research. In the early 1990s, the Queensland Museum entered the field of architectural history with the publication of both Watson and Judith McKay’s extremely useful directory of Queensland architects (1994), and Fisher and Brian Crozier’s The Queensland House, a collection of essays on a variety of topics exploring technical, social and literary themes (1994). In this Fisher himself offered a typology of Queensland house types, which was later expanded by Judy Rechner in Brisbane House Styles (1998). The Fisher/Rechner work is a very valuable contribution to the study of houses in Brisbane and the South-east, although it leaves the reader largely unaware of the strong regional variations evident within Queensland. Their concept of style also appears at times to overlap with that of house-form, and needs to be defined more clearly. One of the distinctive features of Australian mass-market houses over many decades is that builders could build two houses of almost identical form in quite different styles - Tudor and Californian for example. The rise of heritage consciousness throughout Queensland in the last two decades has seen a proliferation of heritage surveys and other studies. Robert Riddel has studied Robin Dods and the Queensland timber tradition, and several useful theses have been written on aspects of the history of the Queensland house. The National Trust commissioned a number of local heritage studies in the 1980s. More recently, since heritage and planning legislation have encouraged local heritage conservation programs, councils have funded studies in Brisbane, Ipswich, Townsville, Toowoomba, Maryborough and other places, usually done by architectural firms. Many private house


owners have also undertaken or commissioned studies of their own houses. There is now a wealth of unpublished and semi-published information in existence, although not all of it is easy to find. The 1990s also saw a plethora of books on specific aspects of Australian housing: conservation, restoration, cottages, verandahs, interiors, gardens, the Federation era, the inter-war period, Californian bungalows, fibro and the post-war decades, among others. All of these works contain some reference to houses in Queensland, and are useful for their comparative observations in the national context. The most recent work, The Queensland House by Ian Evans, published last year, is a historical synthesis of what is known, concentrating on conservation advice. Don Roderick has completed a monumental work, “Malaria, Miasma and Mosquitoes” which goes much further than any previous writing in investigating the origins and history of the elevated house, but has not yet found a publisher.


Queensland Houses: Criteria Houses considered for entry in the Queensland Heritage Register must be assessed against the criteria set out in Section 23 (1) of the Queensland Heritage Act 1992 (as amended 1995).

The place may be entered in the Heritage Register if it is of cultural heritage significance and satisfies one or more of the following criteria: (a) the place is important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of

Queensland’s history; (b) the place demonstrates rare, uncommon or endangered aspects of

Queensland's cultural heritage; (c) the place has potential to yield information that will contribute to an

understanding of Queensland’s history; (d) the place is important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a

particular class of cultural places; (e) the place is important because of its aesthetic significance; (f) the place is important in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical

achievement at a particular period; (g) the place has a strong or special association with a particular community or

cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons;

(h) the place has a special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland’s history.

These criteria make no mention of houses, but simply establish tests which must be applied to historic places as diverse as woolsheds, mine sites, lighthouses and cemeteries. The intention of this project is to focus the assessment process laid down in the legislation, and apply it to the task of assessing houses. One specific aim of this report is to provide guidelines which will assist in interpreting these criteria when houses are under consideration. But first it will be necessary to consider the history of the Queensland house, and see how the many different types of Queensland houses can be classified into categories which will simplify the processes of assessment. Although these criteria have formed the basis for the assessment of places for entry in the Register since 1992, a great many of the houses in the Register were entered there without reference to them. To understand this, we should look at how the Register was created.


Queensland Houses: History of the Register This project was initiated because of perceived imbalances in the houses represented on the Queensland Heritage Register. To understand how this situation came about, it is necessary to look briefly at the creation of the Register. Most heritage registers in Australia have evolved over a period of years, fed by both public nominations, which tend to be erratic in their content, and systematic heritage surveys designed to achieved balanced representation. Although other states had initiated heritage registers as early as the 1960s, Queensland lagged behind the process and had no register until 1990. The register was created by the Heritage Buildings Protection Act which received Assent on 15 June 1990. The Act was an urgent response to an unauthorised demolition of a heritage building, and was remarkably brief, defining a heritage building as "any thing listed in the Schedule". There followed a Schedule 30 pages in length, listing hundreds of heritage places throughout Queensland. In 1992 that Act was superseded by the Queensland Heritage Act (Assented 27 March 1992), which transferred all places in the Schedule to the newly-established Queensland Heritage Register. The Schedule of 1990 which became the Register of 1992 was created by taking most of the places on the National Trust of Queensland's Classified List, and adding places which were entered in the Register of the National Estate for their historic heritage value (as opposed to environmental or Aboriginal heritage value). The National Trust Classified List had been compiled since the 1950s, and was a list of architecturally and historically notable places nominated by the public and assessed by a committee. The National Trust had no statutory powers to preserve the places on the list, and it was never intended to serve as a State heritage register. It tended to reflect the interests of the early decades of the Trust, and buildings of high architectural merit and the homes of notable people were strongly represented. It also reflected the fact that the Trust had been particularly active in the metropolitan area, and Brisbane houses were prominent in the Schedule. The addition of places from the Register of the National Estate was unlikely to correct these imbalances, as when it was created by the Australian Heritage Commission Act 1975, its compilers had begun by re-assessing the places on the National Trust Classified List, and although it also reflected the recommendations of some commissioned heritage surveys in the years since it was created, much of its content simply reinforced the National Trust's earlier assessments of what was significant. The Queensland Heritage Register is thus unique in Australia in having been adopted ready-made from another source rather than built up through a process of assessment. This means that it has never been shaped by a vision of what its content should ultimately be, and many of its entries have never been rigorously tested for their significance to Queensland's heritage. Some of the places on the Register are expressions of the architectural tastes and historic and social values of past decades.


Queensland Houses: Analysing the Houses on the Register An important element of this project is to establish just what sorts of houses have been entered in the Register to the present. In other words, it is necessary to go through the Register, count the houses, and describe what sorts of houses they are. But how should they be described? A typical Register assessment report gives a number of kinds of information about the house. It says where the house is, gives a description which usually embraces its form, style, materials and construction, outlines its history and its historical associations, summarises much of this information into a statement of significance, and sets out which criteria apply to it. Some of this information is easy to categorise and compare, but much is not. Historian Graham Davison is the principal Australian author to address these issues, setting out the distinction between the different types of information which can be gathered about a house in his 1986 paper "What Makes a Building Historic?" Davison distinguished particularly between architectural and historic values:

The underlying assumptions of the architectural historian's approach are similar to those of an art historian or literary critic. The individual building is placed, like a picture or a poem, within a taxonomic framework of authorship, style, period and so on, and then ranked according to its relative importance. Connoisseurs will sometimes differ in their ranking of individual buildings, but everyone accepts the assumption that such a ranking is, or ought to be, possible. But no such consensus has yet developed for the critical assessment of historic significance. .... When architects appraise buildings ... they implicitly adopt the standpoint of a connoisseur, grading buildings according to a scale of relative excellence. But when historians say a building is historically important they are not giving it a rank amidst a range of other possible candidates, but making a judgement of its significance in relation to a wider context of social, political or intellectual history. The architect's method of assessment is primarily intrinsic and comparative, relating to the specific qualities of the building or structure itself; the historian's is primarily contextual, relating to the society of which the building is a physical relic. When architects wish to argue for the significance of a building, they are inclined to locate it in a taxonomy of styles - Georgian, Victorian, Federation, etc. When historians argue for its significance they are inclined to tell its human story or to locate it in its past social and geographical context. (Davison 1991)

Davison went on to discuss three ways in which we view buildings historically: as an antique, as a shrine or as a document. As an antique we value the building's difference from those of our time - its period charm - and so tend to be preoccupied with buildings from the distant past. A shrine is a building we associate with historic events, or more often, historic people. Davison noted that hero-worship is not a strong force among Australians.


Few of our prime ministers have memorials like the Lincoln memorial, the Washington monument or the Kennedy memorial and their birthplaces are not hallowed like those of Disraeli, Gladstone and Churchill. The only prime minister's home which has become a museum is Ben Chifley's - a simple wood railwayman's cottage on the wrong side of the tracks in his home town of Bathurst.

Davison pointed out that people sometimes claim links between person and building which prove to be tenuous or superficial, but even in cases where the link is verifiable, the building may in fact be of little interest:

Even when the association between the building and the great man is more enduring, it may still be quite uninteresting. As Sir John Summerson, the British architectural historian, once remarked, 'the objective fact that a certain man did live in a certain house is of purely subjective value'. The connection becomes more than sentimental only if the historic personage and the building somehow help to interpret each other.

This leads to Davison's third category, the building as document. By that he meant that the building contains information which tells us about its subject matter, the events which occurred there, or more commonly the historical occupant.

What really makes the house of a great man or woman historically important is what makes any building historically important - namely, that it throws light on a significant aspect of the lives of people in the past. It is not just as an antique, nor as a shrine, but as a document, as a piece of vital evidence about the past society that created it, that the building deserves to be regarded as 'historic'. (Davison 1991)

Hence in summary Davison's view has two parts; first that a house's historical significance can only be considered in the context of its times and the society that created it, and second that a significant house should be a document which provides information on those times and that society. Davison's analysis of historic value has been widely accepted by Australian heritage practitioners. Even architect Miles Lewis, who wrote dismissively of most historians' contributions to heritage assessment, approved of his approach. (Lewis 1986, p. 7) The Burra Charter takes a similar view, arguing that the historical value of a place depends on its ability to provide evidence of past events:

A place may have historic value because it has influenced, or has been influenced by, an historic figure, event, phase or activity. It may also have historic value as the site of an important event. For any given place the significance will be greater when evidence of the association or event survives in situ, or where the settings are substantially intact, than where it has been changed or evidence does not survive. However, some events or associations may be so important that the place retains significance regardless of subsequent treatment. (Marquis-Kyle & Walker 1992, p. 73)

Having established what is meant by historic value in a house, we can see whether those qualities can be described and measured in the houses at present on the


Queensland Heritage Register. We soon discover that broadly speaking, the categories of information which Davison described as architectural are more readily described than those he identified as historical. The location of a house - where it is - can be described quite objectively. To list the number of houses on the Register in every city and shire in the state is unproductive, giving a largely meaningless list of small numbers. However, the local government boundaries enable us to break the houses down into regions, to divide them into urban and rural, and to identify the main centres which have large numbers of houses represented. Some other physical attributes of houses are consistently described in the assessment reports, so it is possible to record the general forms of the houses, the materials they are built of, and the time when they were built. However, none of these attributes is as straightforward as it might seem. For example, the forms in which houses have been built has varied enormously over time, and there is no consistent vocabulary used to describe them. The best that can be done is to describe houses as single-storeyed or two-storeyed, usually to identify the highset examples, and to create a tentative and necessarily subjective category of "grand" houses, based largely on their scale and to some extent their form. Materials might seem easy to record objectively, but the reality is that most houses are made of many materials in places, and to list them all would give an identical list of wood, brick, steel etc. for almost every house on the Register. In practice, every house was identified by one material only, and the decision was made on the basis of the predominant material visible in the external walls. This is a historically useful method, as it corresponds with a table in the census returns, giving one of the few reasonably objective pieces of information about Queensland houses which we can compare over time. But even such a simple attribute as "predominant material visible in the external walls" is not easy to decide in a brick house with timber extensions and fibro-enclosed verandahs. Not every house in the Register has its materials described in the assessment reports; in a very few cases what seems to be a detailed physical description of a house does not mention its construction materials. The date of construction is another seemingly simple attribute with unexpected pitfalls. The construction of a house often extends over several years, but it is usual to give the year of completion as the construction date. In addition, nearly all large houses - which make up a high proportion of the houses on the Register - have been extended over time, sometimes repeatedly, so that to give all their dates of construction is to recite a list extending over decades. The decision here was to give the earliest date, and ignore later extensions. However, occasionally a house was first built as a very modest cottage which was later extended into a house of architectural or historic significance. In these cases the date of earliest construction does not record the event which created the building in the form which we judge to be significant today. It would be useful to break the houses down into styles or periods, but this is impossible because of the lack of a consistent vocabulary in the assessment reports. Problems in describing the periods and styles of Queensland houses will be discussed later in this report, but the written descriptions of the houses in the Register have been done by many people over many years and describe houses in many different ways. Frequently the report does not make any attribution to a period or style. Other reports describe


houses variously, for example, as "High Victorian", "Colonial Georgian", "gothic revival", "vernacular cottage", "Functionalist", "Georgian in style with vernacular influence", "vernacular 1860s dwelling" or "classic Queensland timber colonial residence of the early 1880s". There is nothing incorrect or inappropriate about any of these descriptions, but they are difficult to compare with each other or sort into categories. The descriptions combine the attributes of the house's general form (e.g. cottage), its period of construction (e.g. 1860s), and its style (e.g. gothic) and have no consistent method of giving information in ways that can be compared or categorised. (If this assessment of the difficulty seems pedantic, consider a direct comparison. You are doing a stocktake in a fruit shop, and you have three assistants helping you. When you read the lists they have compiled, you find that one has listed the fruit by its form (large fruit, small fruit, long fruit, curved fruit), another by colour (red fruit, green fruit, yellow fruit) and the third by species (apple, banana, pineapple). How do you combine the three lists? In the case of the Register it is even more complicated than that, because to pursue the fruit shop analogy, some houses have been described as large green mango-influenced apples, some as long curved yellow fruit and others just as bananas, while a great many are only listed as "fruit".) As a result, no attempt was made to categorise the houses in the Register by historical or architectural period, or by their architectural style. (While broadly correlated, period and style are really quite independent concepts, to be discussed later: a house may have been built in the Georgian style during the Modern period.) Lack of consistent descriptions makes it impossible to give the numbers of Colonial, Victorian, Federation or Modern houses in the Register. Instead, the dates of construction were simply categorised by decade, which is mathematically straightforward and gives a very clear picture of the distribution of the Register's houses in time, but does not correspond to any periods or styles in the literature of architectural history.

Remember that so far, these are the attributes which Davison regarded as relatively simple to assess. The more complicated ones arise when we begin to consider the historic values that can be attached to a house. These will principally be identified under criterion (a) "important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history" or (h) "special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland’s history", although historic values could also potentially arise under (b) "demonstrates rare, uncommon or endangered aspects of Queensland's cultural heritage", (c) "potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of Queensland’s history", or (d) "important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a particular class of cultural places". We will look at the more complicated issue of historic values separately.


Queensland Houses: Discussion of Historical Significance The criteria imply that a house's historic values may vary widely; they may be on a grand scale if they demonstrate evolution or pattern, or on a much more personal level if they involve association with a person or group. In either case, however, the criteria strongly support Davison's and the Burra Charter's case that historic value is closely tied up with the value of the house as a document providing evidence, for they repeatedly use words such as "demonstrates", "demonstrating" and "potential to yield information". In other words, it is not sufficient for a house to have been built during the Federation period; to be assessed as historically significant it must provide insight, information and evidence about that period. There are words in the criteria which stress that the values identified by the assessment must be strong ones: "important in demonstrating", "special association" and "of importance". Every house probably makes a small contribution to understanding the evolution and pattern of history, but to qualify for the Register the house must make an important contribution to that understanding. Relatively few houses will qualify. Likewise it is not sufficient for a house to have been built by or for a notable person, to have been occupied by that person, or for that person to have been born or died in that house. For a start, the criteria say that the person must have been of importance. Then there must be a special association. Nearly every one of us owns and lives in many properties in a lifetime, and the historically important are no exception. They mostly had brief, incidental or trivial associations with a great number of houses, and very few such associations will be special. Even if a very important historic person was born, lived their entire life, and died in the same house, does that necessarily mean the house is historically significant? We still have to apply Davison's test: whether the house "throws light on a significant aspect of the lives of people in the past". If the occupant of the house was a famous poet who composed volumes of her greatest works while seated in the drawing room, then the house probably throws important light on that person's contribution to history. On the other hand, if it was the house of a very prominent and controversial bank manager who simply came home for a few hours each day to eat and sleep, then that person's contribution to history is probably better expressed by entering the bank in the Register. The majority of houses are very ordinary, and say very little about the people who lived there, especially after they have been altered by generations of later occupants. Some people are surprised to find that the house where Sir Donald Bradman lived for over 60 years in a moderately affluent Adelaide suburb is not in the South Australian State Heritage Register. The house is a pleasant 1930s early Modern house in pale orange brick, very like hundreds of other houses in the surrounding suburbs, and it really says nothing of importance about Bradman except that, like most people, he lived a quiet life. On the other hand the Adelaide Oval where he played some memorable games of cricket, and the Adelaide Stock Exchange building where he earned his living for many years are both in the Register, and these places shed significant light on Bradman's career in ways that his house can not. This brings us to the question of the commonplace. The use of words like "special" and "importance" in the criteria strongly suggest that places entered in the Register must


have qualities that raise them out of the ordinary. In other words, places that are ordinary, or like many other places, should not usually be entered in the Register. One important exception is places that qualify under criterion (d) by "demonstrating the principal characteristics of a particular class of cultural places". This is clearly an invitation to consider houses for inclusion if they are good examples of a type, and the criterion says nothing about that class or type of place having to be special or important. Very ordinary classes of houses can be represented in the Register by examples, and the criteria put no restriction on the number of examples that might be selected. The test is that the examples entered must demonstrate the characteristics of their class, that is, they should be good typical examples. This criterion comes right to the heart of Davison's definition of historic value as the ability to provide evidence about the past. How can the historic values which have been attributed to the Queensland houses in the Register be analysed and categorised? I believe they cannot. The difficulty of categorising houses by period, form and style pale into insignificance when we consider the practical difficulties of analysing the many forms of information which relate to historic values. Some of the questions which have to be answered in order to do this are:

Criterion (a): What exactly does the house demonstrate about the evolution or pattern of history? What aspects of the evolution or pattern? Is what is demonstrated more than commonplace? Can the same claim be made for many other places? How strongly is it demonstrated? How good is the evidence? Criterion (h): What is the nature of the association(s) with a person, group or organisation? How important were the persons, groups or organisations? How special was the association? Is the association with the life or work? How long did it last? Is the association more than commonplace? Can the same claim be made for many other places? How strongly is it demonstrated? How good is the evidence?

The problem is once again compounded by the lack of a consistent vocabulary, and varying thresholds, or judgments of levels of significance, over time. There is also the widely varying nature of the historical associations that a house may have, leading to an almost infinite number of permutations of levels of importance, strengths of associations and qualities of evidence. These difficulties do not arise to nearly the same degree when we count locations, forms, materials and dates of construction. It would be very informative to undertake a detailed analysis of the historical significance attributed to houses in the register, but I cannot see a way to do it systematically so as to produce a meaningful result. However, it is possible to look at a number of individual reports, and examine the ways in which they relate historical information to statements of significance. When we look at a sample of assessment reports describing places on the Register, we find that criterion (a) is attributed to a very high proportion of houses, which is not surprising. Criterion (h) or association with a person, group or organisation is quite commonly used, and criterion (e) describing aesthetic or architectural value is probably the next most common. I believe that many of these assessments could provide more information and undertake more critical analysis. A large number of the reports use formula expressions like "the property has associations with ...", an assertion which


should immediately be followed by a clear statement about the strength of the association, and the importance of the person or group which is the subject of the association. In some reports this is done; in others it is not. Taking a number of examples in the Register and reading their assessment reports, we find many places which are manifestly of great historical significance: at the upper end of the scale, Old Government House in George Street, while built as a house, has impeccable historical credentials as a seat of government, the focus of early tertiary education in Queensland, and the home for many years of the National Trust. Moorlands at Auchenflower has long and strong links with the Mayne family, benefactors of the University of Queensland who occupied this house and its predecessor for nearly 70 years, and it is appropriate that the house is sited in a location where it is seen by thousands of people travelling to the university every day. Both houses are also of great architectural interest quite independently of these associations. I regard such examples as clear-cut, even obvious, candidates for inclusion in the Register. Where a person is valued for a particular career or contribution to society, how much value attaches to the house depends on the nature of that person's work. Vida Lahey's house at Saint Lucia is an example of a house where a creative person worked at home, and the house is depicted in some of her paintings. The house was moved to its present site, which in some cases would diminish its heritage value, but in this case, the house was the scene of Vida Lahey's productive life both before and after the move. People associated with the building industry usually have a valuable and clear-cut relationship with their houses, as they have the luxury of designing or building them without the influence of clients, and the houses are sometimes of exceptional documentary value because they may be seen as pure expressions of their creator's design philosophy or construction techniques. Karl and Gertrude Langer's house at Saint Lucia is a significant work by a significant architect, occupied by two prominent people for many years. The Grange at Windsor was built by William Williams, a prominent brickmaker, in the year when he established his brickworks. There is little doubt that such people frequently built their houses as display homes for business promotion, and thus the relationship between the house and the profession of the owner and occupier is very strong, and the house can be regarded as a highly informative document about building and business practices. Much the same can be said for Craigellecchie at Windsor, built by master stonemason John Grant, or Yongala Lodge (formerly Avoca) at Townsville, built by timber merchant and builder Matthew Rooney. The relationship is a little more complicated in the case of Bardon House, built by prominent builder Joshua Jeays in 1864. Although designed as the family home, Jeays never lived there, probably because of the death of his wife while the house was under construction. However, while the house's significance may be diluted by this, the intention was there, the house was built as he wanted his own home to be, and family members occupied the house for many years until 1911. Indeed, some may see the circumstances in which Jeays failed to occupy the finished house as increasing rather than diminishing its significance. This is one of the many ways in which historical values can be subjective; whether circumstances make them greater or less cannot be measured objectively, but is a judgement formed in the mind of the beholder.


At the opposite end of the scale of historical associations is Andrew Fisher's cottage at Gympie, the only Queensland house assessed as significant for its association with an Australian Prime Minister. However, while the house is promoted as a heritage attraction by the local community, Fisher's time there was very brief. The Register assessment report recognises this, and interestingly bases the house's significance solely on criterion (g) not (h), because the connection between Fisher and the house is extremely tenuous, as he is merely "thought to have resided in the house for a short period after their marriage in 1901". This sparing use of the criteria provides a realistic and accurate assessment of the house's heritage value. Booval House at Ipswich is a very early grand brick house, accurately described as "a rare surviving example of a substantial two-storeyed brick house of the 1850s", and is assessed as meeting all of criteria (a), (b), (d), (e), (g) and (h) although the statement of heritage significance does not elaborate in detail on how all of these six criteria are met. Under criterion (h) associations with entrepreneurs George Faircloth and John Ferrett, the Sisters of Mercy and (possibly) architect William Wakeling are listed. In this case I find the use of criterion (h) to be weak. Faircloth occupied the house only from 1859 to 1868, Faircloth and Ferrett are hardly household names - of value in the history of Ipswich rather than of Queensland - the Mercy Sisters were prolific property owners, and Wakeling was a minor and obscure architect with only two substantiated commissions in Queensland. The assessment of Booval House makes a strong case for criteria (a) and (e), but the other four are much weaker. The assessment report on Ralahyne at Clayfield relies in part on criterion (h), citing the house's association with "Robert Gray, the then under colonial secretary". We are told Gray shortly afterward became Commissioner for Railways and died 14 years after the house was built. How important was he, how long was he Under-Colonial Secretary, and what were his achievements in that position? How many other people have served in the same position (which would be called CEO of the Premier's Department today) in the course of Queensland's history? Should all their houses be entered in the Register? If Gray had a really important administrative career, why is his house the best thing we have to commemorate him? However, these questions may be unnecessarily carping, because the assessment report tells us that Ralahyne is valuable as a notable example of timber architecture, the work of George Addison and Robin Dods, with an exceptionally fine interior, and the house would qualify for the register on its architectural merit alone. While it is useful to have some historical background about the house's owners and occupiers, in this case the assessment appears to inflate the historical significance of the house's first owner. It seems clear that the assessment process has moved from an initial recognition of the house's architectural significance to later research on its occupants, which turned up Gray as someone "of importance". I question whether it is either necessary or justified to include criterion (h) in the assessment of this house's significance at all. Dunaverty at Albion has been assessed as having significant value under criterion (h) because it "has a strong association with one of Brisbane's 1880s immigrant entrepreneurs, Archibald McNish Fraser." In fact Fraser's association with the house was brief, from its construction in 1887 until the "early 1890s", and the report goes on to list several other suburbs where Fraser lived. This fleeting association is not surprising, because Fraser is described as a "real estate entrepreneur" and principal of the Onward Real Estate Mart, with hundreds if not thousands of residences to choose from in the


course of his career. Can we really say this residential butterfly had a "strong association" with one house out of the many which formed his stock in trade over the years? Raymont Lodge (formerly Drysllwyn) at Auchenflower also relies on criterion (h) in its assessment, and the report names several people and groups without specifying which of them is of most significance: "Raymont Lodge has a special association with the life of mining entrepreneur William Davies, the domestic work of architect Claude Chambers and the benevolent work of the Methodist Church." The report does not mention criterion (a), but stresses the house's architectural qualities. Here again I have difficulty with the use of criterion (h); Davies and his family had a long association with the house, but his name is not prominent outside Gympie, and the Methodist Church is certainly historically important, but has owned a very large number of properties in Queensland, so that neither of these associations meets both the "special" and "importance" tests, and both associations in fact seem very ordinary. Chambers was certainly a prominent architect, and much of his reputation is based on precisely this kind of Federation house, so his association with the house is much stronger, reinforcing the suggestion that its values are principally architectural rather than historical. There appear to be circular reasoning processes at work in some of the assessment reports, leading to some inflation of the historical values attributed to houses which are principally of architectural significance. The reasoning goes something like this: an important house is assumed to have had important owners, therefore the owners' and occupants' life and work are researched. Everyone is interesting when you know enough about them, so the owners' biographies are presented as evidence of the house's importance. This problem may arise in part because the criteria do not directly mention architectural values, and researchers may feel obliged to find something to fill this gap. Another circular argument may arise when the name of a famous architect is invoked. A relatively large number of houses are identified as of value because they are the work of a notable architect. yet many buildings were; by definition, most notable architects designed many buildings. We could instead argue that the output of some architects was so large as to verge on the commonplace. Certainly we should not make the mistake of assuming that all houses designed by a notable architect are good architecture; all architects did some mediocre work, and a house should not be assessed as architecturally significant simply because its designer did some good work elsewhere. There is a further problem with famous architects, because there is no opportunity to speak directly of architectural value under the Register criteria, so this association must be translated into historical value, and assessed under criterion (h). This is wrong; the criteria should be amended to include architectural value by name, including associations with a notable designer. Beth-Eden (formerly Verney) at Graceville illustrates some aspects of these problems. It is assessed under criterion (h) as having "a special association with prominent nineteenth century newspaper proprietor C.H. Buzacott and with important Brisbane architect Richard Gailey, being an example of his domestic work." There is no doubt that both Buzacott and Gailey were important historical figures, but I am troubled by their "special" associations with this house. Buzacott occupied the house only from 1888 until 1895. How many other houses did he occupy, and how important are they?


Gailey was almost too important, practising in Queensland for an extraordinary 60 years from 1864 until 1924 with a prolific output, executing 274 known commissions between 1865 and 1899, including many houses. (Watson & McKay 1994, pp. 72-80) When an architect's commissions are numbered in the hundreds, should not evidence be provided of why he had a "special" association with one of them? It is difficult to generalise from the few individual examples cited here, but they show that in some cases the assessments of houses in the Register have been clear and detailed, but in other examples the assessment has not been backed up by hard facts and critical judgements. In a few cases the assessments have been vague and relied on unsubstantiated assertions. I recommend that in all cases where criteria (a) and (h) are used, the evidence in support of them needs to be looked at very critically. In summary, whenever a report makes a case for a house because it is "important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history" it needs to make it clear just what aspects of that history are demonstrated, and why this particular house is more important than many others in providing that evidence. Whenever a report claims that a house "has a special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland’s history", it needs to make a convincing case for just how important the person really was, and how special was the association.


Queensland Houses: What Houses are on the Register? A sample of 261 houses on the Heritage Register was analysed to see what sorts of places are represented at present. (This is not all the houses on the register; there are approximately 286 in all. However, for a variety of reasons including the problem of deciding exactly what is a house, the difficulty of distinguishing between some houses and other types of places on the database, non-existence of citations in some cases - some houses on the database are described as "under summary review" - the quality of information available in others, and the inaccessibility of files which were in use when the survey was done, a number of houses have been omitted from the analysis. This number omitted is not great - about 25, or less than 9% of the total - and is unlikely to bias the sample significantly.)

Location First the houses were categorised according to their location. Initially, they were divided into urban and rural according to their street addresses. This is not an entirely satisfactory approach, but is the simplest method without tedious recourse to a map in each case. A number of houses which now have urban addresses were built as farm houses, but have since been absorbed by a growing town or city. The result of the urban/rural analysis is as follows:

Location Number % of total Urban 211 80.8 Rural 50 19.2

Total 261 Next the houses were broken down by town and district. The distribution of houses in all urban centres with more than two houses on the register was as follows:

Location Number % of total Brisbane 120 46.0 Toowoomba 25 9.6 Ipswich 20 7.7 Townsville 8 3.0 Rockhampton 7 2.7 Maryborough 6 2.3 Warwick 5 1.9 Charters Towers 3 1.0

Total 194 75.0 To sum up the analysis to this point, 81% of all houses on the Register are in towns, and 75% are in just eight towns.


Next the houses were allocated to regions regardless of whether they were urban or rural. In this table, for example, all houses either in or near the town of Warwick appear under Darling Downs/Granite Belt. These regions reflect broad popular usage, but do not necessarily correspond to statistical or local government divisions. Central Queensland means Gladstone-Rockhampton and their hinterlands, North Queensland means the Mackay-Townsville hinterlands, and Far North Queensland means the Cairns hinterland and Cape York Peninsula.

Location Number % of total Brisbane 120 46.0

Brisbane and 30 11.5 Lockyer Valleys Near-Brisbane coast 8 3.1

Darling Downs and 36 13.8 Granite Belt

Other South-East 25 9.6

Sub-total South-East 219 83.9

Central 11 4.2

North 17 6.5

Far North 5 1.9

West 9 3.4

Islands 1 0.5

Sub-total North & West 42 16.1

Total 261

Discussion These figures obviously raise some questions about the representativeness of the houses on the register at present, but it is difficult to establish any measure of how many places should be on the register in each region. As the number of houses is going to be closely related to the number of people, one crude indication we could look at is the present population of each region, to see if the number of houses on the register in the region bears some proportional relationship to the size of the region’s population. Perhaps the population at some time in history might be a better indicator, but when? In the 1840s when the oldest houses on the register were built, virtually the entire European population of Queensland lived in Brisbane or Ipswich. In 1900, by which time 75% of the houses on the register had been built, only about half the population of Queensland lived in Brisbane. Nearly half the houses on the register are in metropolitan Brisbane, which may suggest a slight over-representation because for many decades Brisbane's population has been about 40 to 45% of that of Queensland as a whole. (Shortly we shall look at the types of houses which are on the register in Brisbane.) But 84% of all houses on the Register


are located within 200km of Brisbane; only about one in six is further west than Dalby or further north than Maryborough. Whole areas of the state are barely represented at all. The major urban centres of Bundaberg, Gladstone and Cairns have one house each on the register, Mackay has only two, Rockhampton seven, Townsville/Thuringowa eight. The combined population of these cities - with twenty houses on the register between them - is more than a third of Brisbane's. It might be argued that these cities' population gains have occurred in recent decades, and their proportion of historic building stock is therefore likely to be lower, but this is untrue. Charters Towers, for example, is a highly significant historic town, for decades the second-largest city in Queensland, with about a thousand houses built during its gold mining era still standing. Only three of them are on the Register, and we shall see that those three are atypical in the context of the town's building stock. There are only nine houses from western Queensland on the register: one each from Aramac, Roma, Goondiwindi, Ilfracombe and Barcoo Shire, and two each from Mount Isa and Boulia. Only the last four could be described as the far west. The characteristic regional housing stock of such towns as Longreach, Barcaldine, Blackall, Charleville and Cunnamulla is completely unrepresented. This pattern of distribution appears to have been shaped by local heritage surveys or energetic local nominations, because there are some urban areas which seem well represented, such as Toowoomba, Ipswich, Warwick and Toogooloowah.

House Forms The houses on the register were categorised according to their overall form; not the detailed house forms listed earlier in the discussion of methods that have been used to classify Queensland houses, but a simple division - based on the description in the citation - into small cottages and single-storeyed or two-storeyed houses. The two-storeyed houses can be roughly subdivided further into simple and grand.

Location Number % of total Single storey 155 59.4 Two storey grand 60 23.0 Other two storey 30 11.5 Cottage 16 6.1

Total 261 Twenty-five of the single-storeyed houses are specifically identified as highset.


Discussion There are no figures giving the numbers of these house forms in existence, that we could turn to for an indication of what would be a reasonable proportional representation on the register. However, as a rough indication, in a study of historic houses in North Queensland towns some years ago I found that small two-roomed cottages were the single most prevalent house form, constituting about 40% of the housing stock in most towns. In a study of about 4,000 houses throughout the region, the survey found only one two-storey grand house. (Bell 1982 & 1984) The proportion of two-storey grand houses in the overall housing stock of Queensland is certainly nothing like 23%, indicating that this house type is grossly over-represented on the register. When we look at the locations of these houses, we find that the great majority are in Brisbane suburbs like Hamilton, Ascot and Milton, with small numbers in Ipswich and Toowoomba. Almost all date from the period 1860-1900, with the main cluster built in the 1880s. Conversely, common house types like two-roomed cottages and highset four-roomed houses appear to be grossly under-represented on the Register. To return to the case study of Charters Towers for example, these two house forms make up nearly 70% of the total historic houses in the town, roughly 700 houses. However, there are just three houses on the Register in Charters Towers, none of which is of these types. Two of the three houses on the Register are two-storeyed; and these are the only two-storeyed houses in Charters Towers. All three are historically important houses which should certainly be on the Register, but none of them is typical of Charters Towers houses.

Material of Construction The houses were further categorised by the materials used to build their walls. Where two or more materials are described, the one that seems to predominate is recorded. When a house was built in stages of different materials, the first stage of construction is recorded. A summary of the materials used to build the houses on the Register follows:

Material Number % of total Timber 123 47.1

Brick 86 32.9

Stone 35 13.4

Slab 10 3.8

Corrugated iron 3 1.1

Earth 2 0.8

not given 2 0.8

Total 261


Discussion In the case of building materials, there is reliable documentary information about their proportional use in historic houses. At the first Commonwealth census in 1911, occupied private dwellings were classified by the materials of their outer walls, giving a detailed picture of Australian houses ninety years ago. The figures given for Queensland are as follows:

Material Number % of total Wood 95,348 78.7

Brick 2,201 1.82

Stone 242 0.2

Slab not given -

Adobe 36 0.3

Corrugated iron 9,969 8.2

other 13,957 11.5

Total 121,753 (Source: Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911, p. 408) The category “wood” in the census apparently covers both sawn timber and slab construction, with no means of differentiating them, but we can assume that the number of slab dwellings was relatively small. The other categories of materials are directly comparable. Of the “other” dwellings summarised here, 11,692 were tents. There are a number of disparities evident in the relative proportions of building materials when we compare this historic housing population with the houses on the register today. First, while the proportion of timber houses on the register may seem high at nearly fifty percent, that is in fact only about five-eighths of their proportional role in the housing stock of ninety years ago. Brick houses make up nearly a third of those on the Register, whereas they were only 2% of Queensland’s houses in 1911. Stone, the material of nearly one in every seven houses on the Register, never amounted to more than a fraction of one percent of the total housing stock. In fact, more than 14% of the stone houses counted in the 1911 census are now on the Queensland Heritage Register! By contrast, only 0.1% of the 1911 number of timber houses are on the Register. Corrugated iron, the third most popular building material in 1911, is represented on the register by only three examples, while canvas, the second most popular material in 1911, is represented only by the Mount Isa tent house, which ceased to be a tent four years after it was built. Of all the building materials represented on the register, only the miniscule proportion of earth houses in both surveys is about right. Overall, the distribution of building materials on the register bears little resemblance to that typifying Queensland houses ninety years ago.


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Time of Construction The houses were categorised by the period in which they were built, which was done by allocating them to calendar decades. Generally the date taken was that of completion, but where a house was built in several stages, the date given is that for the completion of the earliest surviving stage. In a few cases the date given here may not represent the period for which the house is most significant; for example a modest house of the 1870s which was later extended into a notable Federation villa. However, the alternative of taking the last or a later date of construction is less satisfactory, as it is more likely to record the date of inconsequential additions. The distribution of construction dates is as follows:

Decade Number % of total 1840-1849 6 2.3

1850-1859 16 6.1

1860-1869 49 18.8

1870-1879 23 8.8

1880-1889 68 26.0

1890-1899 34 13.0

1900-1909 18 6.9

1910-1919 22 8.4

1920-1929 14 5.4

1930-1939 2 0.8

1940-1949 4 1.5

1950-1959 3 1.1

not given 2 0.8

Total 261 The distribution of dates represented here raises some interesting questions, because there are conspicuous bulges and gaps along the time-line. The largest bulge occurs in the late nineteenth century; exactly two-thirds or 66.6% of the houses on the Register were built in the forty years between 1860 and 1899, and over a quarter of the total number of houses date from the single decade of the 1880s. There are 196 houses on the Register dating from six decades in the nineteenth century, and only 65 from six decades in the twentieth. Three-quarters of the houses on the Register date from the nineteenth century, and 90% date from before the end of the First World War. Only eleven houses on the Register or 4% were built since 1929, seventy-three years ago, only seven or 3% since the beginning of the Second World War, and there are none at all dating from after 1959.


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Construction decades of houses on Queensland Heritage Register


We can put these bulges and gaps into perspective by considering the historical process of settlement throughout all the regions of Queensland. The first Europeans in the historical record visited Queensland in 1606, and the first settlement at Redcliffe occurred in 1824. The oldest houses on the register date from over twenty years later, after free settlement had commenced in the Moreton Bay region. Then another twenty years went by until the 1860s when significant numbers of houses first appear on the register outside Brisbane. It was sixty years from first settlement until the great economic boom of the 1880s which generated the largest bulge on the register. Hence in Brisbane there was a historical time-lag of twenty to forty years between European settlement and the establishment of the economic and social circumstances which created large numbers of the substantial types of houses which dominate the register at present. It was over sixty years until the peak in the graph. When we look at the rest of Queensland, the time-line is very different. Most of Queensland was thrown open to pastoral settlement in the early 1860s, so many inland towns date from that period. Then mineral settlement spread up the east coast in the 1870s, and the sugar industry and other tropical agriculture boomed from the 1880s onward. If we apply the twenty-to-sixty year Brisbane experience to these places, we see that towns like Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville, Cairns and Charters Towers would probably have been building their most significant houses between the 1890s and the 1920s. Yet there are very few houses dating from those decades on the register, and almost none in those towns. The process went on. Mount Isa was not discovered until the 1920s, and many timber-milling and dairying towns of the South-east and the Atherton Tablelands all date from that same decade. Hence we can expect the earliest pioneering houses in those places - if any survive - to date from the 1920s, a hundred years after the heyday of the Moreton Bay penal settlement. If we follow the Brisbane precedent again, we might expect their great age of building significant houses to be the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. The Register is almost completely silent in that period.


Conclusion The houses on the register are not a representative sample of the houses built in Queensland during the last 180 years. There are too many stone and brick houses, too many two-storey houses, and too many houses close to Brisbane. The houses on the register are too preoccupied with the late nineteenth century economic boom, too reflective of Victorian architectural taste, and perhaps too deferential toward a few wealthy and powerful former residents of a few Brisbane suburbs. This report does not propose that any of these houses should be removed from the register; instead it recommends that systematic measures be undertaken to find others to improve the balance. To redress the balance, it appears that the register should include more timber houses, more small houses, more rural houses, more ordinary houses, more recent houses, and more houses in the north and west of the state. Of course, this analysis raises the question whether the houses on the register should represent the full range of those built on the past? If not, in what ways should they differ from that range? If so, what should be done to ensure better representation? The report will go on to consider those questions.


Queensland Houses: History of the Queensland House

The Convict Era European settlement in Queensland began with a convict station at Redcliffe in 1824, which was transferred to the Brisbane River the following year. Construction of the first houses in what was to become Queensland commenced 36 years after the establishment of Sydney, although at the time there was no thought of a new colony; the new settlement was only a northern outpost of New South Wales. None of these earliest Queensland houses survive today, but we know a little about their materials and forms from documentary sources. There was no local tradition in evidence; all the buildings of early Brisbane conformed to the austere Georgian models which dominated Sydney and Hobart at the time. A variety of materials was used; local timber was cut from the outset, and small huts of hand-sawn timber were probably the earliest form of housing erected, although we know nothing about the construction methods. Bricks were manufactured locally from an early date, and stone was being quarried from the cliffs at Kangaroo Point. By 1828 limestone from Ipswich was being shipped to Brisbane to burn lime for masonry, and sandstone from the Lockyer Valley was being used in larger buildings. (Johnston 1988) An export industry had grown up around Brisbane cutting cedar and other softwoods for the Sydney market as far afield as the Albert, Logan and Tweed rivers. (Hyne 1980) The building industry in a convict settlement did not conform to free market economics; the workforce was unpaid, and after all one purpose of the buildings was to create work. Hence in the 1820s and 1830s a number of houses were built in stone, brick and timber, with little regard for cost, in what was to become Brisbane and its suburbs and on the offshore islands in Moreton Bay. The convict settlement was closed in 1842, and a short-lived attempt at repeating it at Gladstone in 1847 came to nothing. Almost nothing built in this era survives. The heart of the settlement which had the most substantial buildings is now the Brisbane CBD, repeatedly built over in the 160 years since free settlers arrived. In all of Queensland only three convict era buildings remain, all of stone: the Commissariat Store and Windmill of 1828-29 in Brisbane, and a navigational beacon built on Raine Island off the far north coast in 1844.

Free Settlement The highly profitable sheep grazing industry had occupied large areas of eastern New South Wales by the 1830s, and a few graziers had taken up land on the Dumaresq and Condamine rivers and the Darling Downs as early as 1840. It was partly their pressure for a closer northern port somewhere on the Brisbane-Bremer river system that led to the closure of the convict settlement and the opening of the Moreton Bay district to free settlers in 1842. The arrival of a free population converted the military settlements of Brisbane and Ipswich to commercial centres, principally focused on providing marine and mercantile services to the grazing industry. However, the population was to grow only slowly in the next two decades. The wool industry employed a relatively small number of people spread over a large area, and its demand for labour and services was seasonal; once a year the wool clip was shipped out, and perhaps twice a year supplies were shipped in.


Industrial timber became locally available when Queensland's first steam sawmill was established on the Brisbane River by William Pettigrew in 1853. (Kerr 1990) His early market was small, for there was little economic incentive for the construction of houses in the towns, and cheap convict labour was no longer available. The greatest impact of early free settlement was in the bush. Fencing sheep runs would not become an economic option for decades to come, and the early grazing industry employed shepherds to manage the sheep flocks, guard the sheep and keep them on good feed and water. They were dispersed in pairs across the runs, each team looking after one or two thousand sheep, and leading a solitary and monotonous life for months on end. Their housing practices were to make a lasting contribution to Queensland building tradition.

The Primitive Building Tradition For nearly a century from the 1840s onward, a significant proportion of the Queensland population would consist of small farmers, shepherds and other station employees and itinerant workers living alone or in isolated communities. Most of them had very little money to invest, and relied on their own labour to build shelter. Further, many of them lived a transient lifestyle, and had little use for a substantial or permanent building. In these circumstances, large numbers of people lived in what modern architectural historians have called "primitive" buildings. The primitive building tradition has two essential characteristics, first its building materials are gathered in the local area, and second they are worked exclusively with hand tools. (Lewis 1977) Primitive materials and techniques vary widely, including split slabs, whole logs, saplings, shingles and palings, bark, grass thatch, stone, clay, earth and many combinations of these materials. Most of eastern Queensland has abundant native trees, and these provided the raw material for the two most common primitive building techniques: bark and slab. A bark building relies on a framework of wooden poles, clad and roofed with sheets of bark stripped from the trunks of suitable large trees. The bark gathering process killed the trees, but that was usually considered desirable in the circumstances of nineteenth century settlement. The resulting buildings were notoriously leaky, and the flat bark sheets had to be weighted down to prevent them reverting to their natural curved shape. Bark is not a durable material, and apart from modern replicas, no examples of bark construction older than the 1930s are known in Australia. Slabs were heavy planks which were roughly split from tree trunks using axes, mallets and wedges, giving rise to construction methods which were both more versatile and much more durable than bark. Slabs could be used in two ways, vertical or horizontal. Vertical slabs were set upright between posts, sometimes set directly into the ground, sometimes standing on {or housed into} a sill, and occasionally in better quality construction supported by a bearer raised on low posts. Most vertical slab buildings were vulnerable to fungal attack encouraged by ground damp, or to racking (the tendency of an unbraced rectangular structure to deform sideways into a parallelogram as a prelude to falling over) and relatively few examples exist today. Horizontal slab was a far more sophisticated technique, involving a frame of heavier posts (typically 150mm square) with slabs laid horizontally between them to form


panels. The methods of fixing the slabs to the posts varied; in the most primitive (and rare) form, vertical slots were cut into the posts, and the slabs were dropped into them, giving us the infelicitous name "drop-slot slab" which is sometimes used to describe the technique. Sometimes the post was shaped into a T-section, and battens were nailed on to complete the channel. Most commonly, both sides of the channel were formed by light sawn battens nailed to a square post. The technique could be extremely durable, and a number of horizontal slab buildings survive from the 1850s and 1860s onward; Canning Downs homestead near Warwick from about 1853 and Gracemere homestead near Rockhampton from about 1858 are notable examples. These primitive techniques were not necessarily invented locally, nor were they necessarily the work of the owner of the building. All of these techniques were developed in the southern colonies, and came to Queensland with the northward flow of settlers. Even recent arrivals from Europe had access to this tradition; during the decades in which most of Queensland was being occupied by Europeans, there was a steady output of published books with titles like Advice to New Settlers or Manual for Immigrants which gave detailed instructions on how to build a bark or slab house. As late as 1913, the government-published Queensland Agricultural Journal was still reprinting advice on bush house construction virtually unchanged since the 1850s. (Boyd 1899 & 1913) Probably the most important channel for transmission of these techniques was the itinerant bush worker. Semi-skilled workers travelled the bush settlements and homesteads, seeking casual employment in such tasks as fencing, well-sinking, and building stockyards and slab huts. They undoubtedly passed on building skills and traditions over large areas of the country in ways that were never documented and are difficult to retrace today except for the evidence of the buildings themselves. For example, two of the oldest surviving buildings in North Queensland are the former Bowen River hotel near Collinsville (originally Heidelberg homestead), and the former Eureka Hotel at Harvey Range west of Townsville. Both buildings are very solidly built of horizontal slabs, were constructed within a short period in the early 1860s, and interestingly both were built on pastoral runs leased at the time by Phillip Somer. Although there is no documentary evidence about their construction, the two buildings' similarities in detail suggest that both were built by the same skilled bush carpenter, who probably spent some time in Somer's employ.


Idealised elevation of a bark hut (Boyd 1913-14)

Instructions for new settlers: how to split palings (Boyd 1899)


Separation and the Pastoral Rush The New South Wales administration was never very interested in settling the north. It was too far away, too expensive in its infrastructure demands of roads, bridges, wharves and court houses, and it was unnecessary to go to all that trouble while there was still copious grazing land available closer to Sydney. Northern pastoral lands were opened for leasehold at a leisurely pace, and only the Moreton Bay, Darling Downs, Wide Bay, Port Curtis and Leichhardt districts were opened to pastoral settlement by the Sydney administration. The towns of Warwick, Toowoomba, Maryborough, Gladstone and Rockhampton, most of them very newly-established, defined the extent of settlement at the time of Separation. The situation changed dramatically when Queensland became a separate colony in 1859. The new Brisbane administration was keen to increase the colony's population and generate income by promoting export industries. The Treasury was also short of cash, and one of the quickest ways for a nineteenth century government to raise revenue was to sell or lease land. The Herbert government threw open the entire west and north of the colony to pastoralists within five years, in the process creating an extraordinary land rush. The Kennedy district was opened in 1861, the Flinders and Mitchell districts to the west were opened in the next two years, and finally in 1864 the Burke and Cook districts were opened, extending the pastoral lands all the way north to the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York Peninsula. About an eighth of the Australian continent was opened to pastoral leases in the first five years of separate government. This episode greatly expanded the area of Queensland settled by Europeans, and led to the establishment of both coastal and inland towns. To serve the expanding pastoral industry, the new ports of Bowen, Townsville, Cardwell, Somerset and Burketown were all founded by 1865. In the west, Roma, Tambo, Blackall and Aramac were established as regional centres. Early settlement concentrated on the wool industry, which provided faster returns, but much of northern Queensland proved to be unsuitable for sheep, and within a few years beef cattle dominated the grazing lands. While cattle flourished, the problem with beef was getting the product to the consumer; the northern market for fresh meat was insignificant, and shipping or overlanding cattle to major population centres was costly and time-consuming, and the stock arrived in poor condition. Mid-nineteenth century pastoralists did not think of fresh meat as a viable commodity except for small local sales. Instead at first they established boiling-down works, which rendered down the carcass for its tallow, used to make soap and candles Most of the meat was discarded as waste. By 1870 there were meat canning plants in Australia, but the product was unattractive and met resistance from consumers who greeted it with derisive nicknames like "boiled dog". Wool was the glamour commodity. The initial rush was for large-scale grazing land, but there was also demand for small farming blocks. A lot of country suitable for agriculture, particularly in the south-east, had short-sightedly been thrown open for leasehold in the early years, but conforming to the closer settlement trend in the other Australian colonies and the USA, the Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1868 resumed much arable land for selection and purchase by small farmers. From the late 1860s, a patchwork of large and small grazing and agricultural holdings progressively filled up the map of Queensland.


Two separate housing traditions arose from the pastoral rush. One had already been established by the shepherds and bush workers before Separation: the small hut of slab, bark and other local materials, which were to remain staple techniques in small farm houses for the remainder of the century. Generally the intention was for this to be only a temporary house until prosperity permitted the construction of a more substantial building of sawn timber, in which case the earlier hut was often retained as a farm shed. But there were many small selections which never saw the second house built. The second tradition arose from the prosperity of the wool industry. The first people in Queensland with the capital necessary to build large houses were graziers, and substantial homesteads were built on some of their properties. There was no consensus about the preferred material; Cressbrook and Kenilworth in the south-east were built of sawn timber, as were Mount Abundance and Nive Downs, two of the first generation of large houses in the west. Inkerman on the Burdekin was also built in 1870 of local timber, in this case sawn by a portable steam sawmill taken to the site. But elsewhere Kilcoy was built of brick, and across Queensland there were a sprinkling of stone homesteads; Mount Cornish, Rockwood and Lammermoor in central Queensland. In some of the far western towns - Boulia, Bedourie, Birdsville - stone was occasionally used in the early years to build hotels and stores as well. The most remarkable stone homestead tradition was in the south-east. On the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs and Granite Belt, the earliest parts of Queensland taken up for grazing, between the 1850s and the 1870s there rose a number of grand sandstone homesteads: notably Burndale, Ballandean, Glengallan, Talgai and Jimbour. The town of Warwick also had a strong sandstone building tradition. The reasons for this local practice are probably to do with early prosperity among a patrician class of graziers, and climate may also have played a part; the grand sandstone homesteads conform almost exactly to the only part of Queensland which sometimes receives snow in winter. In terms of the rise of a recognisable Queensland building tradition, these buildings appear at first sight anomalous. But that is only the case if we do not look beyond the Queensland border. In the context of building practices in New South Wales, from where nearly all the early settlers on the downs arrived, these houses make perfect sense. They are simply a northward extension of the building tradition of the New England tableland. A second land rush followed twenty years later. In 1880 the first successful cargo of frozen beef was exported from Australia, and this revolutionised the grazing industry. The increased profitability of beef caused a further expansion of grazing into land that had been non-viable during early settlement, and most available land was taken up by the early twentieth century. The shape of coastal settlement was also changed by the new technology; wealthy pastoralists formed companies that built sophisticated meatworks equipped with freezing and canning plants at the export ports of Brisbane, Rockhampton, Bowen and Townsville between 1881 and 1895. The broad outline of European settlement was established, and modern Queensland was recognisable by about 1900; the major industries then are still the major industries today, and most of the major cities then are still the major cities today.


The Timber Frame The 1860s and 1870s were a crucial period in shaping the traditions which would dominate Queensland's domestic architecture for the next fifty years and more. To this time there had been nothing distinctive about houses in Queensland; they used the same forms and materials as those of New South Wales, where many of their designers and builders had come from. But by the 1880s, travellers were reporting that some Queensland houses were very different from any they had seen before. The first distinctive element to emerge was the high proportion of timber houses. The northward expansion of settlement after Separation quickly led to growth in the building industry. Pettigrew and Sim built a steam sawmill at Dundathu near the mouth of the Mary River in 1862, strategically sited to exploit the hoop pine forests of Wide Bay and Fraser Island. There were five more competing mills in the district within the next few years, and by 1879 Queensland was exporting nearly £75,000 worth of softwoods annually. (Hyne 1980, pp. 6-7) In comparison with most other building materials, timber was light, relatively cheap to transport, and quick to erect, and so it became a popular material during a period of rapidly expanding settlement. As the new towns spread north up the coast and west across the blacksoil plains, the majority of their houses were built in sawn timber. The construction technique used in most of these houses was the light stud frame, in which each wall of the house was formed of a row of light vertical posts or studs, with horizontal boards nailed to them. The technique had been developed in England a hundred years earlier for lightweight farm sheds and cricket pavillions, and adopted enthusiastically in Australia and New Zealand in the early nineteenth century to provide cheap colonial housing. (Contrary to some authors’ opinions, it is not the same thing as the “balloon” frame of the USA, and in fact was in use in Australia long before the American balloon frame was invented.) Next the climate played a part in shaping the Queensland house. In Europe or southern Australia, the cold winter required a second layer of boards on the outside to trap an air layer for insulation. But in the benign climate of the north, a single skin of boards was enough. Hence the practice arose of reducing costs by leaving the timber frame exposed on the outside of the house (of course the option of later cladding remained open). The technique was pioneered in the mid-1860s, and came into general use throughout Queensland for the next few decades. People from the south thought the houses looked unfinished, but their appearance was quickly accepted by local people. Donald Watson has drawn attention to the role played by architect Richard Suter in popularising the exposed frame, in a series of schools he designed as commissions for the Board of Education, and some churches and other buildings, from 1866 onward. Suter seems to have been influenced by the Ecclesiological movement within the Anglican church, and some of his churches and schools featured elaborate external X-braced framing resembling medieval half-timbering. Four government schools completed in 1866 all had exposed frames, although Suter's connection with the earliest of these, designed about September 1865, is uncertain. (Watson 1988; Watson & McKay 1994) The elaborated exposed frame remained popular in ecclesiastical architecture until the 1870s.


However, there is more to the story than this, for others were at work building exposed frames before Suter. In Townsville, John Melton Black had built his house on the summit of Melton Hill at some time in early 1865, with the stud frame left exposed on the rear verandah. This was a modest beginning, but three years later the new Townsville hospital was built with its front wall framing left exposed to the main street. This northern exposed framing did not have Suter's decorative diagonal bracing, but was simply the plain light stud frame with the outer layer of boards left off. (Bell 1982) There was a third, apparently independent, origin for the technique. Margaret Strelow has shown that the railway offices in Rockhampton, built with a heavy exposed frame incorporating some X-braced panels, were finished by July 1865, before Suter was working in Queensland. (Strelow 1999) The designer was probably Great Northern Railway engineer Henry Plews, who also designed the Westwood and Stanwell railway stations with exposed frames. (Watson & McKay 1994, p. 143) He may have been using a technique he had seen used for English railway waiting rooms, but exposing the frame on the outside of the wall rather than the inside. (Interestingly, Plews was a former colleague of William Coote, who had spoken out publicly on several occasions on the need to establish new architectural practices for the Queensland climate.) The Traffic Manager's Residence, as the Rockhampton building is now known, still stands and is almost certainly the oldest extant exposed frame house in Queensland. It appears that within a few months in 1865, the exposed frame was adopted quite independently in three widely-separated parts of Queensland. This is such an extraordinary coincidence that it calls for further research, to see if there are links between these buildings' designers that have not yet come to light. Intriguingly, these very first buildings in the technique reflected the regional division in exposed framing that would persist for decades; the more elaborate X-braced frame in heavier timbers in the south, and the simple light stud frame in the north. By the 1880s, the Colonial Architect's office appears to have recognised this geographical division, and was designing police buildings for Townsville and Beenleigh with regionally appropriate exposed framing details. (Bell 1984, p. 168) There were other ways to build in timber. In Tambo and nearby places such as Barringun in the central west, a technique called board-and-batten was used to build a number of houses, only one of which now survives. The wall is framed with heavy timbers at corners and openings, and the intervening wall is formed of vertical 25mm thick boards simply butted together and nailed to the top and bottom plates, with the cracks covered with battens. Although quite common in the USA and New Zealand, board-and-batten is very rare in Australia. The local builder may have been a J. Stewart, who used the same technique for the Tambo Telegraph Office in 1876. Although the technique superficially resembles vertical slab construction, the Tambo walls are not slab, as Miles Lewis has described them (Lewis 2000, p. 47); they are boards cut with a circular saw, and the cover battens are milled timber with beaded edges. The use of external framing required a lining board that lay flush against the studs, and was weather-lapped by milled chamfers at the top and bottom of each board, giving them the local name of chamferboards. Internal partitions in timber houses were usually very light walls consisting of a single layer of vertical tongue-and-groove boards secured to one or two horizontal rails. In use from the 1860s, they were hidden within house interiors for the next few decades, but they would become more conspicuous in the future.


Roofs

The second material which quickly came to dominate Queensland domestic building practice was corrugated galvanised iron. Developed in England by about 1840, roofing iron was expensive and heavy to transport, and only came into use in southern Australia about ten years later. By the time Queensland's population began to grow in the 1860s, corrugated galvanised iron was readily available and quickly began to dominate all the coastal settlements, especially after municipal building regulations began to prohibit flammable roofs. Penetration into the interior took a little longer. The weight of iron roofing made it prohibitively expensive for overland transport at first, so bark, thatch and shingles persisted longer. At the 1864 census, 47% of the roofs in the colony were still of these primitive materials, although they formed only 5% of the roofs in Brisbane. (Marsden 1966, p. 123) However, iron roofs had the three obvious advantages of being durable, watertight - which no primitive material was - and also of providing a supply of untainted rainwater. A more subtle advantage known to cost-conscious builders was that iron was actually lighter per unit of area covered than most other roofing alternatives, and its rigidity meant that very little framing was required to hold it up; a single iron sheet could span a verandah with no support whatever. Iron soon penetrated throughout the outback, despite its initial expense, and replaced all other materials in every district as soon as rail transport lowered the cost. By the 1921 census, 93% of Queensland house roofs were of corrugated galvanised iron. The use of iron roofs demonstrates that although Queensland was slowly developing a distinctive building tradition, its techniques remained dependent on Great Britain for manufactured components. All of Queensland's corrugated galvanised iron was imported, mostly from England, until after the First World War; not a single sheet was manufactured in Australia until 1921. The local building industry was still operating within a colonial economy until well into the twentieth century, and in some respects it still does. Iron was at first only used for roofs, but in the 1870s its use broadened into wall cladding for sheds and industrial buildings. In mining towns, houses were built entirely of corrugated iron, and iron-walled two-roomed cottages dominated early twentieth century towns like Cloncurry and Chillagoe. Iron walled houses made up 8% of Queensland's total in the 1911 census, and they are still common in small towns and station homesteads in the far north and west. However, iron house walls never achieved respectability in the larger towns, and were almost unknown in Brisbane.


Board-and-batten cottages in Tambo

The Far West has a tradition of stone construction (Anne Allingham)


Verandahs

Another building tradition which would develop into a fundamental characteristic of the Queensland house was the use of the verandah. The verandah is a simple functional device: an extension of the house sideways by means of a row of posts outside the wall which support a skillion roof whose upper end is supported on the wall head. Its principal function is to shade the wall, reducing the heat load on the house while permitting air movement. However, it has a number of subsidiary functions in providing an external space which is sheltered but not enclosed, and over time these grew to outweigh its utilitarian purpose. The verandah is not an Australian invention. It is a universal design motif of buildings in hot climates, across Asia and the south of Europe. Even the origins of its name are in dispute; architectural dictionaries agreeing that it originally meant a railing or balustrade, but uncertain whether the word came from Hindi or Portuguese. In the last two centuries it has been common to the architecture of colonial cultures in warm climates, in Africa, central America, south-east Asia and Australasia. However, the verandah is not found on the first generation of Queensland houses. The buildings of the convict era did not have verandahs, nor did the early houses of the free settlers, which remained identical to the models provided by the southern capitals of Sydney and Hobart. It was only during the 1860s that verandahs began to be adopted in large numbers, and by the 1880s they were universal. Once the fashion was established, it was a simple matter to add verandahs to older houses, and some of the early pastoral homesteads which began with plain Georgian facades had verandahs added in later decades. The positioning of verandahs on Queensland houses demonstrates that their social functions were more important than their role in climate control. Almost all houses built from the 1880s until the early twentieth century had a front verandah; it was unthinkable to build a house with a verandah at the side but not at the front. Yet if a house is to have only one verandah, the maximum climatic advantage would be achieved by positioning it on the western side to shade the house from the afternoon sun. But houses were not built with their sole verandah on the west, they turned it toward the street frontage, in whatever direction that might be. The convention of placing the verandah at the front of the house shows that it functioned as a space for welcoming, entertaining and farewelling guests: an intermediate space between interior and exterior, both climatically pleasant and socially useful. The ideal disposition of verandahs was all round the house. While this was not always possible on suburban allotments, it was commonly done in rural areas, and the house core completely surrounded by verandahs became the classic image of a country homestead from the 1870s onward. Often the kitchen was detached at the rear of the back verandah, or even separated from the house completely and reached by a covered walkway. This was less common in town, where the kitchen was more likely to be within the enclosed rear verandah space. Strangely, given the standardisation of component sizes that set in as the Queensland house matured, there was never any consensus about the preferred width of verandahs. Wider was generally seen as better, and the width was usually roughly in


proportion to the size of the house, but verandahs varying from four feet wide to twelve feet wide were found on Queensland houses during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Verandah widths generally varied by multiples of two feet, to conform to the standard lengths of corrugated iron sheets.

The Gold Rushes The occupation of Queensland for grazing purposes would by itself have created only a sparse rural population, with a few small service towns and ports. It was the discovery of minerals that transformed the economy and brought the great population boom. Coal had been mined at Ipswich since the 1840s, but at first supplied only a small domestic market. A disappointingly small gold discovery had been made at Canoona near Rockhampton in 1857 before Separation. Then in the 1860s and early 1870s, coinciding with the great land rush, came a succession of major gold discoveries: Cawarral in 1863, Gympie in 1867, Ravenswood and the Etheridge in 1869, Charters Towers in 1871, the Palmer in 1873. They were followed by Croydon and Mount Morgan in the 1880s. These events saw the extension of the international gold rushes into Queensland, and they would have a profound impact on the colony's development for the next hundred years. First, they brought an enormous upsurge in population from 30,000 in 1861 to 500,000 in 1901, accompanied by an increase in wealth that would finance the construction of roads, railways, ports and other infrastructure to serve the rapid growth. The gold rushes also brought about a geographical redistribution of both people and economic activity, as many of the largest gold discoveries were in the north, previously only sparsely occupied by Europeans. New ports like Cairns, Port Douglas and Cooktown were established in the 1870s to serve the mining industry Charters Towers is a good case study in the economic growth that the gold discoveries brought to the north. At the beginning of 1872 the only European activity in the district was sheep grazing, but within ten years it had become Queensland’s greatest goldfield, with the colony's third railway under construction from the coast. By the turn of the twentieth century it had grown into a community of about 25,000 people, and was producing ten tons of gold each year. A sheep run thirty years earlier, Charters Towers had become the largest city in Queensland outside Brisbane, and indeed the largest in the northern half of Australia. Typically, nineteenth century mining fields went through an initial pioneering phase of construction in the same primitive building materials that the farmers used, while the likely future of the mineral deposit was assessed. But once confidence in the field was established, and transport costs fell - particularly if the field was fortunate enough to have a railway - the staple building materials of every major Queensland mining field were sawn timber framed walls with corrugated iron roofs. Nineteenth century photographs show that many of the houses and industrial buildings on Queensland's goldfields were identical to those of northern New Zealand, South Africa's Rand and Kimberley fields, or the mining towns of the American West. This was so because another effect of the gold rushes was to bring local builders into the marketplace of a sophisticated international building construction industry. A mining field is different from a farming or grazing community in its transport infrastructure and the consequent availability of imported goods. By the 1870s, underground mining had


become a highly mechanised business, requiring access to sophisticated industrial materials. Mining companies needed steam engines, boilers, winders, crushing machinery and pumps, all of which had to be housed in buildings erected quickly at low cost. Thus in the first few years of the discovery of a goldfield, materials such as sawn timber and corrugated iron, glass and nails were being imported to the field in large quantities. Not surprisingly, these materials quickly became available to domestic house builders. While imported manufactured building materials might seem to be prohibitively expensive to buy, they were attractive because of the low labour cost of construction. Stone or brick masonry or even locally gathered bark, slab or earth construction had a very high labour component, and in the inflated labour market of a goldfield - where no-one wanted to work as a builder's labourer when there was gold visible in the creekbed - it was wages that were the principal cost in building houses. Here the light timber stud frame came into its own, for it was the quickest and cheapest way to build a house. Goldfield builders adopted simple methods of construction using light standardised components which could be assembled on site without requiring much work or great skill. The other standard building material was corrugated galvanised iron for roofing. Imported from England In heavy bales, for the same reasons of speed and simplicity, it became the almost universal roofing material of Queensland houses. Brick was available to house builders in every major town, but was almost never used for houses because of the labour cost. Bricklayers on the goldfields expected to be paid £5 a week, which was more than many mine managers earned. Brick was used for fireplaces and chimneys, but rarely for walls. Stone too was cheaply available - there were thousands of tons of it available for the taking on the mine dumps - but the cost of employing stonemasons ruled it out as a building material. Some Australian architectural historians have identified a goldfield "Boom Style" period in the nineteenth century, characterised by ostentatiously elaborate buildings funded by gold. A few examples do exist in places like Ballarat and Bendigo, but it is a mistake to think that the prosperity of a gold mining town will necessarily create streets of opulent mansions. For one thing, much of the wealth generated did not stay on the field, but was paid as dividends to distant company shareholders. And in a colonial culture, many people who accumulated wealth on a goldfield immediately returned to metropolitan society to spend it - “get rich and get home” was the popular slogan - so that the wealth of most Queensland goldfields built more mansions in Melbourne and London than it did in the local area. The effects of prosperity on a Queensland goldfield certainly created buildings, but not large and elaborate ones. Most housing was built to provide accommodation for mine employees and their families. Nineteenth century Queensland mining companies provided no housing for their workers, and so house construction was dominated by speculators, who were usually builders. When there was a mining boom underway and the mines were hiring labour, there was a demand for a great number of houses which had to be built quickly and cheaply in the face of intense demand and high labour costs. In a prosperous period in 1891, a newspaper reported that “there is not an empty habitable house on Charters Towers, despite the fact that cottages are being run up like magic. One builder alone has fifty carpenters working for him.” (Queenslander 21 November 1891) Obviously houses “run up like magic” were not likely to be luxurious,


and the most typical product of a mining boom was not gracious mansions, but a few more streets of identical cheaply-built cottages. The similarity of many goldfield houses was not coincidence, nor was it at the request of the house buyers. In a highly competitive economic climate, builders cut their costs by offering a small range of designs, all built with exactly the same techniques. Many of the houses were prefabricated in the builders’ yards. In 1886, Griffith and Terry of Charters Towers advertised, “buildings of every description framed on the premises and sent out with competent workmen to any part of the field”, and in 1891 Richard Craven offered, “Cottages Prepared and Framed, ready for Erection.” Benjamin Toll’s mill in 1889, with a workforce of 120, was turning out five framed houses each week. (Bell 1984, pp. 135-136) The sudden housing demands created by the gold rushes were to have several lasting impacts on the Queensland building industry. They put in train processes for building large numbers of houses quickly and cheaply, and so institutionalised the light timber frame as the staple construction method. The plans of houses also became simplified and standardised. Striving to lower costs in a competitive market, the builders developed techniques for prefabrication, which would have its heyday in the early twentieth century. All these impacts were felt not only in the mining towns themselves, but in the ports and railway towns which serviced them, and in which the same economic circumstances prevailed while the mining boom was underway. And the mining towns would have one more impact on the history of Queensland houses after the boom ended and the gold mines closed. By the end of the First World War, with most of the goldfields closing down and their workforces leaving, there were thousands of redundant houses standing empty in Gympie, Mount Morgan, Charters Towers and Ravenswood. A new building industry arose, dismantling houses and railing them to new sites in the railway towns of western Queensland, to the sugar towns of the coast, and to the growing suburbs of the regional cities. The great movement of houses out of Charters Towers was one of the important themes of North Queensland housing history in the 1920s and 1930s. The exodus can still be seen in the coastal suburbs of South Townsville and Railway Estate, where many houses dating in appearance from the 1880s and 1890s stand on allotments not surveyed until the 1920s. While the great gold rushes provided the most dramatic impetus to Queensland's economic and social development, we should not think of the mineral boom as something that happened for a few decades in the late nineteenth century. Other commodities such as tin, copper, silver, tungsten, bauxite and gemstones continued to create towns all over Queensland for decades, and the greatest mineral deposits in all of Queensland were only discovered at Mount Isa as late as 1923, so that Mount Isa was going through its pioneering phase in the 1930s, just as Gympie did in the 1870s. Even more recently the Bowen Basin coal mines became one of Queensland's greatest industries, and newly-valuable metals such as nickel and uranium have created more mining towns. In the 1970s, the Queensland mining frontier was at places like Moranbah and Dysart, Mary Kathleen and Greenvale; today it is at the Century Zinc Mine and the gas bores west of Thargomindah. As Geoffrey Blainey's book reminds us, the rush has never ended.


Industrialisation and Standardisation The range of housing types built in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century exhibited a great deal of variety, but certain strong themes were becoming evident. One was the standardisation of house forms, that is the arrangement of rooms, which is most easily described by reference to the floor plan, and can be quickly understood visually by looking at the house’s roof. Probably the single most common house form built in Queensland between the 1870s and the First World War was the two-roomed cottage. This was a small house intended to accommodate a bachelor worker or small family, with two rooms side-by-side under the core roof. The cottage was built on low stumps parallel to the street with a small setback, and was asymmetrical in floor plan, with the central front door entering the larger room. The house was usually built with a front verandah, and the core roof might be either gabled or hipped. The rear skillion verandah was usually enclosed to form one or two more rooms, and if one of these was the kitchen, a fireplace or stove recess would be let into its rear or side wall. Houses of this general form were derived from rural workers’ cottages in the British Isles, and they were built in enormous numbers in a variety of materials throughout Australia. They housed the majority of the workforce in mining towns such as Gympie and Charters Towers. Indeed in Australian minds they are so closely associated with the mining industry that, whether they are in the suburbs of the capital cities or in dairy farming communities, people often refer to them as “miners’ cottages”. The second common house form was the four-roomed house, a larger building designed to accommodate a family, with four rooms symmetrically arranged about a central hallway to form a core nearly square in plan under a pyramid roof. It too was usually built with an open front verandah, and had a kitchen attached to the rear verandah. It was usually built on a larger allotment with space for front and rear gardens, had a modest degree of ornamentation, and was often elevated on high stumps. As time moved on, both of these common house cores provided the basis for a number of more complex arrangements of extensions and verandahs. Either form usually came with verandahs or skillion extensions at front and rear, but could be further extended by the addition of verandahs to one or both sides, which could transform the character of the basic form. The simplest form of the four-roomed house was a utilitarian timber box, but set on high stumps with wide verandahs on all four sides on a large allotment, it became unexpectedly gracious and imposing.


The gabled two-roomed cottage in its most basic form

The pyramid-roofed four-roomed house


Cottages and houses almost identical to these in form and floor plan were built throughout Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, but in Sydney or Adelaide they would have looked very different, because they were more likely to have been built in brick or stone, respectively. One remarkable feature of Queensland houses, established by the late nineteenth century, was the dominance of timber as the principal building material. This trend had begun with the establishment of the softwood industry in the Wide Bay district from the 1860s, and the rapid spread of light stud framing from about 1865 onward. The popularity of the timber frame was given impetus by the economic inflation brought by the gold rushes in the 1870s - which demanded cheap building methods while providing industrial infrastructure which favoured imported sawn timber over other materials - and it was adopted as the staple building technique by the 1880s. As the building industry grew and stabilised, it utilised steam powered sawing and planing machinery, coastal shipping and the inland railways to deliver a cheap product to the market. Many large Queensland building firms, such as Pettigrew and Hynes in Maryborough and Rooneys in Townsville, vertically integrated their operations, doing everything from forest logging and timber milling and shipping to building construction on site. Most of them offered prefabricated houses to consumers, and even the less sophisticated builders delivered presawn components to the building site. The outcome of this industrialisation in a competitive market was to standardise the business of building houses. In the mass housing market, the choice of material, floor plans, roof forms, wall framing techniques, doors, windows and decorative details all became extremely standardised throughout Queensland. If you inspect the fretsawn verandah brackets on two 1890s houses in Hughenden and Dalby, a thousand kilometres apart, you may find they are identical. Measure the size of the sash windows in the same two houses, and they may also be identical. This is not as surprising as it may seem, because they may very well have been made in the same sawmill, and even been ordered from the same catalogue. Certainly they were both products of a competitive and cost-conscious industry. By the early twentieth century, timber was established as the pre-eminent building material, and Queensland led Australia in its proportion of timber houses. The first census of the Commonwealth of Australia was held in 1911, and one of the many things it enumerated was the material of the outer walls of private dwellings throughout the country. Queensland at the time had 121,753 houses, of which 95,348 or nearly 79% were of "wood". This includes an unknown but relatively small number of slab houses, but the great majority would have been of sawn timber. Of the other states, Tasmania at 75% and Victoria at 66% came closest to Queensland in their proportion of timber houses; the average for Australia as a whole was 55%. Of the other building materials which predominated in some of the southern states, brick formed less than 2% of Queensland's houses, and stone a mere 0.2%, with 242 houses counted in the census. The second largest category of materials in Queensland was "Calico, Canvas, Hessian" at just under 10%, indicating that a significant proportion of the population - in railway or logging camps, newly-established farms and on alluvial mining fields - still lived in tents.


On the coast, timber was used for everything except the roof (Doris Coleman)

In the interior away from the railways, entire houses were clad with iron


Tropical Agriculture

The course of Queensland history was altered by a new industry which created an unfamiliar living environment for European settlers in the late nineteenth century. The early decades of European settlement in Queensland had seen a series of events that essentially repeated the experience of the southern colonies; convict settlement, followed by sheep and cattle grazing industries, then a later generation of settlements created by mineral discoveries. Every Australian colony had followed the same pattern. Queensland's economy was about to move in a new direction. It was obvious that the tropical coasts with their monsoonal climate closely resembled, and were at the same latitudes as the Caribbean, where intensive agriculture had been practised by European planters for 200 years. Commencing in the 1860s, there were a series of experiments along the Queensland coast, not only with sugar which would later become the staple crop, but with a wide and exotic variety of tropical produce: maize, cotton, rubber, tobacco, rice, tea, coffee, indigo and tropical fruits. This was a development which would cause the pattern of Queensland's history to diverge from those of all the other Australian colonies, as Europeans began to settle the hot wet tropical coast in large numbers. By the 1880s the picture had simplified somewhat; although experiments with other products would continue into the twentieth century, sugar cane had become the staple crop, and was concentrated on the floodplains of the major rivers, notably the Burnett, Pioneer, Burdekin and Herbert. The sugar industry had begun with a plantation economy, relying on imported Pacific Island labour, but as time passed small farmers began to play a larger part in the industry. With the arrival of co-operative mills in the 1890s and the phasing out of islander labour after Federation, small farming came to dominate the industry, and the chain of coastal sugar settlements grew to become important towns: particularly Childers, Bundaberg, Proserpine, Mackay, Ayr, Ingham, Innisfail and Cairns. The tropical coastal lifestyle became established as an important element of Queensland's diverse culture, with important implications for the design of the Queensland house.

The Elevated House The most conspicuous architectural legacy of the tropical planter economy was the highset house. The practice of raising houses three metres or more off the ground is one of the more distinctive features of Queensland's domestic architecture, and a number of authors have devoted space to explaining the reasons for it, variously proposing flooding, hillslope sites, defence against mosquitoes or termites, or in one case, crocodiles. Its origins and diffusion throughout Queensland have been described in a number of ways, but it has commonly been asserted that it was invented in Brisbane, and spread north up the coast. In fact, there can be no doubt that the practice arose first in the north of Queensland, and was associated with the early sugar industry. From the early 1870s, travellers in the Herbert River district (near the later site of Ingham) were commenting on the local technique of raising houses well above ground. The earliest published account of a Queensland highset house described the Avoca plantation in 1871, where a journalist wrote "A fine substantial house has been erected on piles ten feet high, the object of which is to get the sea breeze and to avoid miasma." (Queenslander 23 September


1871) Don Roderick has written a historical account of the origins of the Queensland highset house which convincingly traces its antecedents to the Caribbean, and attributes its principal motivation to the avoidance of malaria, which was then attributed to miasma arising from damp ground. (Roderick 2000) We can probably identify the very first elevated house and the likely originator of the idea. In about 1868 a house had been built on the short-lived Bellenden Plains plantation near Cardwell, "the floor being nearly nine feet six off the ground." (Roderick 2000, p. 117) The owner of Bellenden was John Ewen Davidson, a planter who had experience in the West Indies, where military barracks and houses had been elevated for decades with the specific intention of avoiding malaria. The motivation behind the high stumps at Bellenden is ambiguous, for the house site was known to be flood-prone, but the house was undoubtedly the model for the later Herbert River homesteads, all of which were built on ground well above flood level. In the 1870s a dozen or more elevated houses were built on the coastal plain around Ingham, then by the early 1880s the technique began to spread both north and south to the Cairns, Townsville and Mackay hinterlands. From 1884 it was accepted by the Colonial Architect's office, and highset government residences were specified for Innisfail and Georgetown. (Bell 1984) By the early twentieth century the practice was routinely used for government schools, and had arrived in Brisbane. It was not long before it was identified with Queensland in the wider world, for in 1903 an article on the Queensland house in the London Building World not only illustrated an elevated house on the journal's cover, but advised as the first maxim of house design: "Always elevate the house on timber blocks or stumps." (Bellamy 1903) There has never been a standard term for the posts which elevated the house; they have been variously called posts, piles, piers, blocks or stumps. Traditionally they were round tree trunks, which gave them the most popular name, stumps. They also became an important part of the timber house's defence against termites. As early as the 1860s, stumps under low-set houses were being capped with a piece of sheetmetal as a termite barrier, and by the early 1880s this had become standardised as a mass-produced dish-shaped stump cap. The stumps were also treated with creosote or tar, giving them a black appearance which became traditional. From the 1870s they were sometimes built in brick or concrete for greater termite resistance, and by the 1920s the concrete stump had already taken on its modern square form with chamfered corners, although it was not until the 1950s that it replaced timber in general use.


An early highset sugar plantation homestead in the 1870s (Mrs Fardon)

By 1900, highset houses had become widely accepted (Mrs Weinheimer)


Ornamentation Like the construction techniques and the materials, the details and ornamentation of Queensland houses were usually standardised and mechanised. The open verandahs provided the principal opportunity for publicly visible ornament. From the widespread adoption of verandahs in the 1860s, timber balustrades were usually elaborated with an X-braced design, often a simple diagonal cross, but sometimes expanded into a Union Jack motif. In the early 1880s, cheaper vertical dowel balustrading became more common on houses; simply a top and bottom rail connected by one inch dowels spaced at five inch centres. The more exuberant X-braced balustrades remained in fashion for hotels and shops. Cast iron balustrades, verandah brackets and fences came into use around larger houses from about the late 1870s. At first they were imported from the south, or even from Britain, but by the 1880s locally manufacturing architectural ironwork was on the market; John Crase of Fortitude Valley advertised his foundry's wares in the Post Office Directory from 1887. Even then there were no local designs manufactured, for the industry seems to have been tightly franchised; the range of cast ware illustrated in Crase's catalogue New Book of Designs of Ironwork is identical to that offered in catalogues from Melbourne, Adelaide and Glasgow. The standard range of cast iron designs persisted on grander houses for about twenty years, but the castings had a High Victorian frilliness which was out of fashion by the early twentieth century. Only a small proportion of Queensland houses ever had cast iron ornamentation, and those were mostly at the upper end of the market; even there, nothing like the full range of valencing, crestings and finials found in the catalogues was ever seen in Queensland. Indeed, the most common purchases from the foundry catalogues were probably grave surrounds, for there is a far richer variety of cast iron designs in the Toowong cemetery than on the houses in any Brisbane suburb. The high point of architectural ironwork in Queensland was found not on houses, but on the grand hotels with their multi-storey screens of lacy metal: the Empire, Carlton and Regatta in Brisbane and the lost Buchanan's in Townsville. Fretsawn brackets in a variety of catalogue designs adorned the tops of verandah posts. There was a standardised range of bracket designs mechanically sawn from timber sheets by jigsaws, usually in highly stylised vegetation designs, often with an ogee or S-shaped swirl loosely based on classical consoles. On two-roomed cottages the brackets were often the full extent of the decoration, but four-roomed houses usually had the posts elaborated with small cornice mouldings and stop chamfering, and a colour scheme articulated the details, with the main timber elements painted dark brown, green or red, and the brackets, mouldings and dowels picked out in white or cream. The exposed stud wall with its repeating pattern of braces provided a second layer of ornamentation behind the transparent screen of the verandah posts and balustrade. There seems never to have been any attempt to coordinate or repeat the designs of these two visual layers; they normally conflict, turning the front elevation of the house into a complex geometrical interplay of timber elements. Some houses. especially in Brisbane, had a central arched or gabled fretsawn pediment ornamenting the verandah roof over the front stairs. (Stringer 1982) House exteriors were frequently ornamented with sheetmetal work; acroteria distantly derived from Greek temple designs at the corners of guttering, and frilly edges on the


hoods that shaded the side windows. The crowning glory of some pyramid roofs was a cylindrical sheetmetal ventilator topped with a spreading cone, also with a mechanically stamped frilly edge. These were popular in the tropical north, ostensibly removing hot air from the roof space by convection, but in practice they were little more than another decorative finishing touch. In larger towns, every piece of ornamentation found on houses was normally composed of standardised industrial elements. The joinery and fretwork was all made in the same mills that supplied the building timber, the cast iron was ordered from a foundry and the sheetmetal came ready-made from a plumbing works. All the designs could be selected from catalogues. Only on farms and in smaller country towns did individual craft designs sometimes appear: home-made brackets held in a vice and cut with a fretsaw, or a decorative sheetmetal edge cut by hand with tinsnips. They were always very rare, and are almost unknown today. Modification The distinctive housing stock that began to evolve in Queensland from the 1860s onward underwent many changes over time. Fire and termites took a steady toll of old timber houses, and many of the early modest cottages and farm houses were replaced by larger ones as time passed. The increasing prosperity of the 1880s and early twentieth century encouraged large-scale replacement of housing. The early houses that remained also underwent change. The timber-framed house lends itself to modification and extension, and there are few nineteenth century houses that have not had something added to them. Two-roomed cottages have frequently been extended to the rear, and most houses of any size have had bathrooms, laundries and toilets – originally banished to the back yard before sewerage and septic tanks – added to the back verandah. A cheap way to add an extra bedroom or two was to enclose a verandah, and relatively few colonial houses still have their original open verandahs. Lowset houses could later be raised on high timber stumps, although the reverse - lowering a highset house - very rarely happened. Some of the early houses were not as well designed for the climate as they might have been, and there are a variety of modifications to improve climatic performance, especially in summer. We have seen that the first generation of Queensland houses often had verandahs added later. Sheetmetal hoods were placed over windows to reduce glare. Verandahs were shaded with latticework, with blinds of canvas or drop-down wooden laths wired into rolls, or with wooden louvres. A characteristic modification of many early houses in western towns was the verandah eave, an outward extension of the roof supported on struts from the verandah posts, to further protect the verandah from both sun and rain. Another common climatic modification did not involve change to the building, but planting trees to shade the house, usually attractive exotics with dense foliage like mangoes, figs or bougainvillea.

The Queensland House at Federation In the rapid expansion of pastoral and mining industry that characterised Queensland's first four decades, the population grew by a factor of more than sixteen from 30,000 in 1860 to just under 500,000 by the turn of the twentieth century. At Federation, there were over 100,000 houses standing in Queensland. By that time, the Queensland


house had evolved a number of features which between them identified a characteristic regional house type. It was not a style, nor even a house form; it was simply a list of materials, techniques and preferences which between them made up a house unlike those built in other places. Typically, the Queensland house looked something like this

• The house was detached on its own allotment • The house was single storeyed • The house was built entirely of industrialised materials • Its roof was almost certainly of corrugated galvanised iron • The house walls were probably of sawn timber • Its wall construction technique was most likely the light stud frame • The frame was very likely left exposed on the exterior walls • The house was raised on timber posts at least a short distance above ground • The house was perhaps elevated to a height of up to three metres • The general form of the house probably followed a common design • The core of the house probably conformed to one of two simple plans • The front elevation and general floor plan of the house were symmetrical • The house's ornamentation was simple, conventional and mass-produced • The house had at least one verandah, and possibly verandahs all round

Few Queensland houses had all these attributes, and every element on this list was to be found in some nineteenth century houses throughout the rest of Australia, and indeed elsewhere in the world, especially in English-speaking colonial societies in warm climates: South Africa, Mauritius, Malaya, the North Island of New Zealand, the Caribbean, the American South and West. However, nowhere other than Queensland could all these attributes be found in combination in large numbers of houses. Two of them, the exposed frame and highset elevation, were very rare everywhere else in the world, and can be taken as the distinctive identifying elements of Queensland's colonial houses. One characteristic house form of the southern capital cities was almost unknown in Queensland. The terrace house, or row of attached houses, which occupied large areas of the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, was extremely rare in Brisbane. From the 1860s onward, the principal explanation for this was presumably that Brisbane simply did not experience the same pressure for land and resulting real estate prices as the southern cities, but in 1885 the difference was formalised by the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act, which among other things, made sixteen perches the minimum size of a housing allotment. (Watson 1981, p. 3.2) The effect was to make attached


houses uneconomical for sale in Queensland; the amount of land that each terrace house would tie up made it more attractive to build and sell detached houses. Some attached houses were built for rental, but they never became an attractive option for speculative investment.

Railways and Regionalism Every city and major town in Queensland is on a railway. In the second half of the nineteenth century, railway transport was fundamental to all economic activity, and all Queensland governments made railway building an important political priority during the four decades of rapid growth from 1860 to 1900. Railway lines were extended west from the east coast ports into first the agricultural and then the mining districts of the hinterlands: from Ipswich in 1865, Rockhampton in 1867, Townsville in 1880, Bundaberg in 1881, Mackay and Cooktown in 1885, Cairns in 1887 and Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1889. Each railway brought economic prosperity to its coastal terminus, and it was no coincidence that the ports which had the longest railways - Townsville and Rockhampton - eventually became the biggest cities outside Brisbane. The immediate effect of railway access on Queensland houses was an abrupt fall in the cost of industrial building materials such as sawn timber and corrugated iron, so almost as soon as the first train arrived, the primitive building tradition disappeared from the district. Sawmills were built at every coastal railway terminus, and the railways became the principal means of distribution of building materials. This virtual monopoly on the supply of materials contributed to the standardisation of both components and techniques in the domestic building industry. The railway network also had longer term and more subtle impacts on the Queensland house. While every major port had an inland railway by 1890, it was not until 1924 that a railway was opened along the coast from Brisbane to Cairns. This emphasis on regional rail systems tended to slice Queensland into a series of parallel economic hinterlands, bringing a strong sense of regionalism which dominated many aspects of life in Queensland for decades, and in many ways persists to the present day. This probably explains some, although not all, of the regional variations that arose in the Queensland house in the late nineteenth century; why, despite overall state-wide similarities, there are differences between the historic houses of Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville. These can be attributed to independent patterns of timber supply, and the divergent influences of individual architects and builders within each hinterland.

The Boom Style Much of the discussion so far has described mass housing, but of course there were many Queensland houses built in a grander tradition. From early in the development of Queensland there were people with wealth and status who wished to build themselves more impressive dwellings. In general, these took two forms. One was simply an expanded version of the single storey four-roomed house; large, spacious, beautifully finished and richly ornamented, although in plan simply a bigger version of four main rooms symmetrically arranged about a central corridor. The house was likely to have very wide verandahs, perhaps shading bay windows to maximise the breeze and the view. Bellevue at Coominya, Gabbinbar at Toowoomba and Rosebank at Townsville exemplify the type. Larger pastoral homesteads in the north and west were usually of this kind, and they were also very common in the cities.


The other, more urbane, option was the conventional grand mansion favoured by polite society in the southern capital cities. Cumbooquepa (now Somerville House), Moorlands, and Andrea Stombuco's masterpiece Palma Rosa exemplify the general type. They were likely to be two-storeyed, built of masonry, asymmetrical in plan, perhaps with a tower or turret as a badge of status, and sometimes richly decorated with cast iron lacework on their open verandahs. In other words, they were not Queensland houses. They were outside the range of characteristics identifying the distinctive house type that had evolved in Queensland since the 1860s, but were within the range of house types commonly being built in Sydney and Melbourne at the same time. In common speech, grander houses were sometimes called "villas", a word which did not describe any particular house form, but implied a house outside the normal Queensland range of types. The early grand houses in urban areas tended to be built on hilltops, reinforcing their social status. In Brisbane a belt of hills north of the river and east of Breakfast Creek formed a focus for the houses of the wealthy in the late nineteenth century, that would evolve into Queensland's densest concentration of grand houses in the suburbs of Ascot, Hamilton and Clayfield. But other hilltop suburbs as far afield as Bardon and Auchenflower - both named after grand houses - were also chosen as desirable sites. Grand houses were very rare outside metropolitan Brisbane. There were a sprinkling in Ipswich, Toowoomba, Mackay and Townsville, but as they went north they were more likely to be built of timber than of masonry. Despite the prodigious wealth of Charters Towers, only two two-storey houses were ever built there, and one of those was of timber. Of course, the notion of a what constituted a grand house changed over time. The first Charters Towers miner to become very wealthy was Friedrich Pfeiffer, who built himself a very fine house beside his Day Dawn mine in about 1881. It was a remarkable house, conventional in its use of an exposed stud frame and roofing iron, but unlike any other northern house in its complex plan and multiple gabled and vaulted roof form. When it was built, Pfeiffer was among the wealthiest people in North Queensland, and this was the largest house that had ever been built there. Yet such was the rise of wealth and housing standards in Charters Towers over the next twenty years that when Pfeiffer died early in the twentieth century, his obituary praised him for being “content with a humble home”. (North Queensland Register 16 March 1903) One design element of the grand house trickled down to the mass housing market. From about the 1880s, some four-roomed houses were built with an asymmetrical facade formed by omitting the verandah on one side of the front door, and projecting the room on that side forward into the verandah space. The forward-projecting room might be accentuated by a bow window on its front wall. Houses with this pretentious feature were sometimes described as "villa-fronted". They were rarely seen north of Brisbane, but their asymmetrical facade would outlive the Victorian era to become an important motif of the Queensland house in the twentieth century.


The Works Department conformed to regional preferences in house forms

Thornburgh in Charters Towers: grand houses were rare outside Brisbane


The Federation Era The house forms in use throughout Queensland saw little variation in the twenty or thirty years after 1860. However, late in the century change came in the form of a movement which Australian architectural historians have agreed to call the Federation period. Its effects on domestic architecture were similar to those of the Edwardian period in England and the Queen Anne style in the USA, for it was part of a world-wide phenomenon signalling the end of the Victorian era. It was influenced by the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstijl movements, and by the Arts-and-Crafts ideas of Willam Morris. Australian architecture of the Federation period was a direct reaction against the Victorian era, rejecting the mannered Classicism, the over-decoration and the pomposity that had characterised the worst architecture of the nineteenth century. Locally, there was an element of nationalism, inspiring a search for an architecture more in keeping with an independent Australian culture, and also early stirrings of functionalism, with some architects seeking to design buildings better suited to the Australian climate. Architects were exhorted to design buildings that were simple and honest:

In a young and comparatively-poor country like this, our architecture should be more simple. I would go so far as to say that it is absolutely dishonourable to squander our clients' money in what is not durable, or to introduce needless fads of our own ... (Joseland 1898, p. 1011)

Sadly, despite the intellectual aspirations toward nationalism and independence that accompanied the Federation movement in architecture, it looked much the same in Australia as its contemporary movements elsewhere throughout the world. Aspiring to change simply became the new orthodoxy. Queensland adopted only a few characteristics of the Federation movement. In the houses of Sydney and Melbourne during the period from about 1885 to 1914 there was a conspicuous stylistic change, incorporating rich red brickwork - often contrasted with bands of cream render - Marseilles roof tiles and terracotta roof crestings and finials. The newly-fashionable houses were likely to be asymmetrical in plan, with eccentrically shaped openings and their asymmetricality emphasised by a turret at one corner with a conical candle-snuffer roof. The house roof would be steep and complex, often a major visual element of the house, and elaborated with completely unnecessary gables, turrets, dormer windows and tall, elaborate brick chimneys. Queenslanders greeted these stylistic adventures with little enthusiasm. Red brick and cream render began to appear on commercial office blocks and government schools, but rarely on houses. There were a few fashionable houses built in Ascot and Hamilton around the turn of the twentieth century which demonstrated part of this range of stylistic attributes, but in general the Brisbane house adopted Federation characteristics only very selectively. The new southern taste for brick and terracotta did little to wean Queenslanders away from their attachment to timber walls and corrugated iron roofs, but the Federation period did popularise two fundamental changes in house form: the asymmetrical floor plan and increased emphasis on the roof as a visual element of the house.


North and west of Brisbane the stylistic mainstream of the Federation period was ignored completely; there was never a terracotta finial or a circular front door to be seen in Longreach or Charters Towers. But even there, asymmetrical floor plans were slowly adopted in the next twenty years. To sum up the impact of the Federation era, in the nineteenth century the majority of houses built in Queensland had a symmetrical elevation when viewed from the street, reflecting their symmetrical floor plan; in the twentieth, most houses had an asymmetrical plan and elevation. In the nineteenth century, most houses had simple roof forms, whereas in the twentieth century, many houses would have complex roof forms. Those shifts in taste were probably the lasting legacies of the Federation movement. The best illustration of the modified impact of the Federation era in Queensland is the work of architect Robin Dods. On the face of it, it is difficult to relate Dods' work to the textbook descriptions of the Federation house except in their asymmetricality and their deliberate seeking of originality in design. But in Dods' case, this did not involve incorporating elements from northern hemisphere Queen Anne design books, but by freely interpreting Queensland's own spreading house forms in superbly-crafted timber, to evoke a mood of rural serenity. (Riddel 1993) The continuing influence of Dods and his contemporaries was to reinforce Queensland's infatuation with timber, and lead to greater complexity and refinement in timber ornamentation of verandahs and porches. Timber ornament also appeared in the new gables on the more complex house roofs, although these more sophisticated details are rarely found north of Brisbane. Dods' own tastes probably increased the use of external weatherboards rather than the traditional internal chamferboards, and assisted in popularising oiled and stained timber in preference to paintwork. One important aspect of the greater flexibility of floor plans in the early twentieth century was the incorporation of functions from the periphery into the house core. New ideas about house forms played a part in this, but so did the gradual wider adoption of technological innovations such as reticulated water, septic tanks and cast iron stoves. These meant that one by one the old problems of water supply, unpleasant smells and fire risk were dealt with, so that over the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, progressively the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry and finally even the toilet were incorporated into the core of the house. Backyard outbuildings became a thing of the past. In the delightful phrase of Robin Boyd, they had knocked timidly at the posts of the rear verandah and been "allowed to step up." (Boyd 1952, p. 51)


The Federation house brought asymmetrical plans and complex roof forms

Most Queensland houses adopted only muted versions of the Federation style


The legacy of the Federation era: a nineteenth century Queensland house facade

(National Trust of Queensland leaflet)

The legacy of the Federation era: a twentieth century Queensland house facade

(State Advances Corporation report 1923)


The Prefabricated House From the early twentieth century, a large proportion of Queensland houses were prefabricated; that is, manufactured in every detail at a sawmill and sent in package form to be assembled on the building site. Prefabrication was not new. It had been used for centuries, particularly to provide housing in colonies, and was widely adopted during the early settlement of southern Australia. We have seen that the building firms of Charters Towers were already advertising prefabricated houses in the 1880s, and the Rooney Brothers of Townsville had shipped prefabricated houses all over northern Australia, as far afield as the Northern Territory and New Guinea. What happened in the years leading up to the First World War was the adoption of these established techniques by Brisbane timber firms who refined them, and marketed the product on an unprecedented scale, moving from individual prefabrication to mass prefabrication. James Campbell and Sons had begun as retailers of building materials in Brisbane in 1854, then from the 1860s expanded into sawmilling, architectural ceramics and lime and paint manufacture, eventually advertising with the slogan "Everything for Building." (James Campbell & Sons 1924, p. 2; RAIA 1959, p. xx) In 1903 Campbells began to advertise a range of cheap, simple prefabricated houses, "all materials numbered and ready for erection" for under £100. The houses were prefabricated in the company's Albion sawmill and could be delivered in kit form anywhere on rail or by sea. The wording of their advertising was specifically designed to attract country buyers. (Queenslander 8 August 1903) They were not alone in this market for long. In 1905, sawmiller George Brown and builder Edmund Broad formed a second Brisbane company, Brown & Broad Limited, to compete directly with Campbells. They too used regional newspapers to market completely prefabricated Ready-to-Erect houses from their Newstead sawmill by mail order. In moving into the field of mass prefabrication, both Brisbane companies were using techniques that were being evolved simultaneously in the USA by the Aladdin Company of Michigan (1904), the Prebuilt Company of Massachusetts (1905) and Sears, Roebuck of Chicago (1908). (Gowans 1987, pp. 48-50) Whether the links between the mail order house companies of Queensland and the USA went beyond reading each other catalogues is a topic worth investigating. The mail order companies carried prefabrication to an extraordinary degree. Each house came in a kit with an instruction manual. The kit contained not only basic timber and iron, but the entire house: guttering, doors, windows, nails, screws, doorknobs, even paint and brushes. The resulting houses were distinctive in appearance. They were very simple, the basic models just wooden boxes with roofs and a front verandah, although the more expensive ones made quite gracious farmhouses. Every component was smaller in dimensions than common practice; studs were 2 x 3 inches rather than the standard 2 x 4, roof iron was 26 gauge, not 24. Decorative details such as verandah brackets were small, simple and geometric; the floral fretwork of the nineteenth century was gone. The exposed frame was also out of favour, and walls exposed to the weather were externally clad with weatherboards or chamferboards.


James Campbell advertising leaflet 1914

{Pioneer Mill records, James Cook University)


Brown & Broad advertising booklet 1924

(John Oxley Library)


Two innovations made the houses particularly striking in appearance, and would remain characteristic elements of the Queensland house for the next few decades. First was the appearance of the roof. In the nineteenth century it had been standard practice to attach the verandah roof to the core wall a short distance below the eave, giving the house roof a characteristic stepped-down profile. The new practice was a straight roofline, extending unbroken over both core and verandah. This had occasionally been used in the nineteenth century, especially on rural homesteads, and was sometimes known as a "bungalow roof", but by about 1910 it had become common practice. Its stylistic origins lay in Dods and the other Federation architects' experiments with new rooflines, but its appeal to the mail order companies lay in the fact that the new roof was cheaper to manufacture, and easier for amateurs to build. The second departure was in the walls. In nineteenth century Queensland houses, the outer core wall was almost always stud framed, with the studs left exposed on the verandahs. The new practice was to use studs only at corners and openings, and form the intervening wall panels of vertical tongue-and-groove boards secured to one or two horizontal rails. It was the standard internal partition wall brought out into the open. The wall looked flimsy, but in fact the boards continued through floor and ceiling, with their ends nailed to the roof beams and the underfloor joists, making the house core a very solid timber box. The new walls greatly reduced the number of studs, and thus the number of expensive mortice-and-tenon joints. By techniques such as this, the mail order houses saved a lot of timber, and kept both milling costs and freight costs to a minimum. At first, Campbells' mail order houses were utilitarian in appearance and colourlessly listed as "The Number 2 Cottage", "The Number 4 Cottage" and so on, but by the First World War the choice of house designs was much greater, and their appearance was more up-market. They had become the Redicut Homes range, illustrated in glossy catalogues with regional names such as "The Bribie", "The Gympie" or "The Blackall", a tradition which survives in the ready-made home industry to the present. (James Campbell & Sons 1924) Brown & Broad's rival Newstead Homes catalogue was also offering "The Moreton", "The Kennedy" and "The Carpentaria". (Brown & Broad 1918) Both the language and graphic design techniques were very similar to Sears, Roebuck's catalogues promoting their Modern Homes range. (Stevenson & Jandl 1986) The influence of the new business methods seems to have been profound. The turnover of cheap houses from the two Brisbane firms was enormous, and with the completion of the North Coast railway in stages up to 1924, nearly every home-buyer in Queensland was coming within their marketplace. The greatest triumph of the new marketing strategies - and probably the biggest single contract for mail order houses - came when Brown & Broad supplied over 280 houses and other buildings to Mount Isa Mines in 1929-30. (Kirkman 1998, pp. 26-30) All regional builders found themselves losing customers. Rooneys in Townsville struggled to compete, advertising: "Old Methods of Building now Give Way to Rooney's Ready-to-Erect System". (North Queensland Register 14 August 1916) In fact the company had been selling prefabricated houses for over thirty years, and pioneered many of the "new" techniques, but now they obviously found it necessary to imitate both Brown & Broad's language and their marketing style. The success of the Brisbane mail order firms drove small builders out of business and forced the larger ones to copy their


methods, so that by the 1920s nearly all new Queensland houses looked just like the ones in the catalogues. The age of regional building styles had ended.

The Timber Resource

The parsimonious use of timber in the new houses reflected its rising cost as forest resources diminished. By the early twentieth century, Queensland's native softwoods were becoming scarce. As early as the 1880s, some observers had been calling for forest conservation, and commenting on wasteful logging and milling practices:

The unwelcome truth is now dawning on both interested and uninterested alike, that although our forests may still be immeasurable to the eye, the valuable, marketable portion of them is a strictly finite quantity, and even now approaches exhaustion. All the better sorts of timber are failing fast, and nobody, at this time of day, will be hardy enough to dispute that the rich dowry of forest wealth which Nature had conferred on this colony at the time when it started on an independent career, has been, and still is being, recklessly squandered. (Barton 1885, p. 4)

Twenty years later, the kauri and red cedar trees that had been profitably shipped south as whole logs in the colonial period were virtually extinct. Even the prolific hoop pine forests of the south-east could no longer be harvested cheaply on the coastal plain, but were being cut at progressively greater cost up in the ranges. During the first half of the twentieth century, the building industry would react to the growing scarcity of easily-milled timber in three ways, by:

(1) reducing the size of all timber components in houses, and finding other materials to substitute for them, a process which continues to the present;

(2) substituting native hardwoods in roles that previously had been filled more

satisfactorily by softwoods, accompanied by claims that they were more durable, termite resistant and so on; and

(3) reluctantly supporting a government program of planting State Forests which

would eventually become the principal timber resource for the building industry, in the process converting the industry's softwood staple from native Araucaria to faster-growing exotic Pinus species.

There followed a long slow process of transition, but all three paths inevitably converged on the use of commercial plantation timbers, the only sustainable option in the long term. In the 1880s, a new Queensland house was most likely to be sawn from native hoop pine felled in the forests of the Wide Bay region. By the 1980s it was almost certain to be sawn from Californian radiata pine harvested in a commercial plantation.


Government Housing Schemes The success of the mail order building firms, the simplification of building practices, and the decline of regionalism in the Queensland house throughout the twentieth century were all assisted by State intervention in the housing industry. In 1909 the Kidston government passed the Workers Dwellings Act, setting up the first State-subsidised house ownership scheme in Australia. This essentially provided a low-interest government loan of up to £300 for a worker with an annual income below £200 to build a house of an approved design on his own land. This differed in three important respects from State housing programs in other states: first, it was an ownership scheme, not a rental scheme; second, the scheme simply provided house-building finance to an owner who already owned the land; and third, the owner chose the house site, so the Queensland Workers' Dwellings were distributed throughout the suburbs and country towns, not clustered in new subdivisions like the government-assisted housing of New South Wales or South Australia. As Robert Riddel pointed out, there was never a Garden Suburb movement in Queensland, perhaps because there were no heavily built up terraced suburbs to react against. (Riddel 1993, p. 111) The first Workers Dwelling was built at Nundah in 1910. The scheme proved tremendously popular, with 447 houses financed by the Workers' Dwellings Board in the first year of operations. It was modified slightly as the Workers’ Homes scheme from 1919, and has operated with ongoing modifications continuously to the present day, its administrative agency known first as the Workers’ Dwellings Board, in the 1920s as the State Advances Corporation, after the Second World War as the Queensland Housing Commission, and today as Home Purchase Assistance. In addition, the First World War brought further subsidised housing schemes for ex-servicemen; the Queensland government’s own Discharged Soldiers’ Workers’ Dwellings Scheme from 1917, and the Commonwealth War Service Homes Commission. The State housing schemes - and specifically the process of obtaining approval for the proposed house design - brought further pressures for standardisation and conformity in house design and construction practices. The mail order housing firms took care to advertise that their house designs conformed to the specifications of the schemes, so that there was automatic approval of a prefabricated house. Each annual report of the Workers Dwellings Board and its later manifestations was copiously illustrated with photographs and plans of houses that had been built that year. These reports must have exerted powerful pressure on the building industry to conform to the designs that had already received approval. Judy Rechner has done a study of the forms and styles of housing in Brisbane through the early decades of the twentieth century. (Rechner 1998) Its illustrations suggest a very strong correlation between designs that the Board had previously approved, and what the major building firms were offering their customers.


The first Workers' Dwelling, 1910 (Qld Housing Commission report 1947)

Rural houses remained symmetrical and conservative well into the new century


New Styles The First World War brought a downturn in housing construction, and when it picked up again after 1919, there was a sudden influx of new styles in domestic architecture. Michael Kennedy has identified five principal styles, most of which appeared in a very few years after the war ended: the Californian Bungalow, the Spanish Mission house, the Georgian Revival house, the Tudor Revival (or Old English) house, and the Functionalist (or Modern) house, which arrived in the 1930s. (Kennedy 1989) The most striking thing about all the new styles was that they defined a new source of influence in Australian architectural history. Without exception the new styles came from the USA; the Californian Bungalow and the Spanish Mission house were straight out of American pattern books. This was the beginning of a new era for the Queensland house; whereas in the nineteenth century, virtually all the styles of Australian architecture came from England, in the twentieth century they came from America. (Every glossary of architectural terms says that the word "bungalow" is Indian in origin, and originally meant a house of the form common in Bengal. That is true, but the word was rarely used in nineteenth century Queensland except in the vaguest English sense of a single storey house - which in Queensland meant most houses - or to describe a straight-profiled roof. The word did not achieve popularity until the 1920s, and then it was used in the American sense with a style name - either Californian or Tudor - preceding it. Although its remote etymology may be Indian, in Queensland "bungalow" is really an American word.) Even the Tudor Revival bungalow, despite its very distant medieval English origins, was fashionable in the USA as a modern fad for twenty years before it appeared in Australia. Mercifully, Queensland was spared the full horror of the Dutch Colonial, Picturesque, Pueblo and Classical Temple styles which swept across America in the same period. (Apperly et al 1989; McAlester 1986; Gowans 1987) The Modern or Functionalist house was derived ultimately from the Bauhaus and other radical design movements of Europe, but it too came filtered through American pattern books, and in the 1930s it was simply a visual style, rather than being a genuine change in design philosophy to embrace the principles of Functionalism. A Modern house was usually a standard house in plan and form, with a few Modern details added. Exactly the same house could be built with Tudor or Spanish details instead. The crucial test was the roof; whereas European Functionalist design dictated a flat roof, Queensland builders were unwilling to build them (or unable to make them watertight), and compromised by hiding their usual hipped roof behind a parapet. It was not until the late 1950s that any significant number of Queensland houses really embraced modernist design with any conviction. The Tudor Revival house was probably the most influential of the inter-war eclectic housing styles, not in its details of stucco, twee brick details and fake half-timbering, but in the multiple gabled roofs that accompanied these features. Domestic roof forms had tended to be artificially complex since the Federation era, and the Tudor revival house reinforced that tendency. The most durable legacy of the inter-war proliferation of foreign styles was a fondness for multiple gables.


The Californian Bungalow adapted to Queensland suburban taste

The Old English or Tudor Revival house differed little throughout the world


The Spanish Mission house was said to be suited to the Queensland climate

The Inter-War Modern house frequently exhibited Art Deco stylistic influence


The Queenslander During the 1920s there arose a characteristic local type of house which is often recognised as Queensland's most distinctive contribution to Australian domestic architecture. It dominated the suburbs of Brisbane and some of the major cities between the two World Wars, and has subsequently become known as "the Queenslander". Like the house of 20 years earlier, it was not simply a style, nor a single house form; but a combination of materials, techniques and preferences. Some of its characteristic elements remained similar to those of the Queensland house at the time of Federation, but others were derived from a number of newer influences:

• The house was still detached on its own allotment and single storeyed • The house was still built of sawn timber and roofed with corrugated iron • The house was still raised on timber posts to a height of up to three metres • There were still a range of standard designs, but now many more of them • The front elevation and floor plan of the house were now asymmetrical • The house walls were probably of tongue-and-groove board • The house roof was lower-pitched and straight in profile • The house roof was complex in form and dominated by gables

The asymmetrical plan which appeared in the late nineteenth century had now become almost universal, internal room arrangements were much more flexible, and the central hallway had vanished. The stud frame and its chamferboard lining were rarely seen, and the stepped roof had also virtually disappeared, although it survived over some entrance porches. By the late 1920s the new houses had gained a wealth of distinctive timber details, broadly derived from the Californian Bungalow, but with local modifications inspired by the work of Robin Dods. The Queenslander's facade was dominated by gables facing the street, low-pitched with broad white bargeboards and other prominent timber elements unmistakably reflecting the Californian style. Sometimes there was just one large gable, more often there were two asymmetrical gables, and as time went on there might be three, stepped back in plan to form what became known as a triple-fronted house. Weatherboards were back in fashion, now sawn from hardwood timbers rather than softwoods, and frequently in the dark stained finishes favoured by Dods. Colour schemes had simplified, and many houses were almost monochrome, with white or cream paintwork contrasting with dark wood stains, echoing the black and white of Tudor half-timbering. Where paint colours survived, they were usually in the organic greens or browns favoured for details by the Californian school.


The Queenslander (War Service Homes report 1927)

The Queenslander (State Advances Corporation report 1924)


The raised foundations of the house, visually spindly and open in the nineteenth century, were given an illusion of substance by wooden boxes at the corners; weatherboarded pylons rising from ground level to the verandah rail. They were clearly descendants of the massive verandah pylons of the Californian house. The open space under the house was concealed by vertical timber battens between the foundation posts. At first these formed a modest skirt of dark-stained timber between the posts. Later the screen of battens between the posts was painted white, and sometimes cut into arched or occasionally zig-zag patterns. The dowel verandah balustrading of the nineteenth century had vanished completely. In its place, balustrading was composed of flat battens, some with fretsawn motifs, often in a wider baluster in the middle of each verandah bay. By the 1930s few houses had an open balustrade; instead the balusters were replaced by solid weatherboard to waist level, open above. Sometimes the upper weatherboards were relieved by regularly-spaced curved openings with batten screens. During the First World War a fashion had developed of elaborating the balustrades on the front staircase. Instead of a single sloping handrail either side of the stair, as had been standard since the 1880s, the balustrade was suddenly built in a series of two or three steps, with vertical battens forming the balusters. The result was visually much more impressive, but with its giant steps it lost most of its function as a handrail, becoming more like the bars of a cage. Often the staircase was given a right-angled bend, so it descended parallel to the front of the house, displaying the stepped balustrade prominently to the street. On larger houses the staircase was made T-shaped in plan, descending from the verandah to a landing, from which two stairs with stepped balustrades extended either side. At first these elaborate staircases entered the front verandah, a relic of the colonial past, but it became more common to shelter the front door under a small American-style porch. Beside the front door there appeared a small feature window, often a circular porthole with a leadlight motif. These changes did not happen all at once; they took place slowly from the early years of the twentieth century, and the Queensland house was still evolving until the late 1930s. In that time the spirit of the Queensland house changed. The Queenslander began with the adventurous spirit of experimentation that characterised the Federation era, adopted the simplifications that kept the prices of the prefabricated houses down, institutionalised them through the various government housing schemes, and then responded to the new tastes arriving from America in the 1920s. The early Queenslander of about 1920 was a modest asymmetrical highset box, but over the next twenty years it became larger, more elaborate and more complicated, growing ever more porches, gables and fancy skirts about its legs. There was never a typical Queenslander, it was always a characteristic local way of doing things rather than a single type of house. (Fisher 1994; Rechner 1998) Like its ancestor the Federation house, the Queenslander was really more a Brisbane house than a Queensland house. In its more elaborate forms, its natural habitat was the growing suburbs of inter-war Brisbane, as the tramlines extended out to Ashgrove, Mount Gravatt, Chermside and Cannon Hill. Its more restrained versions appeared in the larger provincial cities of Toowoomba, Rockhampton and Townsville, but even they


were always rare in the smaller towns and on the farms. Outside the Greater Brisbane area, formed into one municipality in 1926, the simpler designs of the prefabricated house catalogues continued to provide the models for most new houses until the Second World War.

War and Depression Whereas the nineteenth century history of Queensland is conveniently spelled out by episodes of agricultural expansion and railway construction, the twentieth century is divided up by two major wars and a great depression. These were not simply faraway political events, for each had a global impact, and profoundly affected the construction of Queensland houses. The Great War, or First World War as it became known after 1939, was fought from 1914 to 1918. Large numbers of Australian troops were involved from 1915 to 1919, at first in the Pacific Islands and the Middle East, then in greater numbers in Europe. About 60,000 died. Its economic effects on Australia were to bring about a serious shortage of labour, to disrupt all shipping and practically sever commercial trade with Europe, and make many manufactured goods completely unavailable for several years. All building activity slumped as labour and building materials became scarce, although it did not cease entirely. Australia's dependence on British industry became painfully apparent, and the war saw Australia's first steelworks established at Newcastle and Port Kembla, where Lysaghts produced the first corrugated iron in 1921. Wunderlichs began manufacturing terracotta roofing tiles in Australia during the war, and with Hardies, also started making asbestos-cement sheeting. From that time, Australia steadily became more self-sufficient in building materials. However, the psychological effects of the war were more profound than the physical ones. The unprecedented death toll and disruption of the Great War brought a period of change and restlessness to Australia, which spelled out the end of an era in matters such as clothing fashions and architectural taste. It brought the final break with the architecture of the nineteenth century. Whereas in 1912 a few people were still building symmetrical houses with stepped verandah roofs little changed from Victorian taste (Warringa in Townsville for example), by 1920 that had become unthinkable. Times had changed, and a new cosmopolitan awareness helped loosen the ties with English architecture, so that most of the inter-war houses looked to America for inspiration. Those inter-war years were not prosperous. Rural depression was affecting agriculture and country towns during the 1920s, and spread abruptly to affect all urban industry and business activity after the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929. The early 1930s saw high unemployment levels and a shortage of investment capital. Building activity again shrank to a very low level, and only slowly improved as the decade wore on. The great outward expansion of metropolitan Brisbane began during this prolonged period of economic depression. The architectural heritage of the Depression is expressed in the relatively small number of elaborate buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, and second in the construction details of most buildings. The move to cost-cutting that had begun earlier in the twentieth century was continued, and the houses that were built employed every trick to lighten components, use less material, reduce transport costs, and minimise


labour on the building site. Joinery in mortice and tenon and other joints became simpler, or disappeared entirely in some houses, to be replaced by simple butted and nailed joints. The most visible legacy of the period was the practice of extending houses by the cheapest possible means. Families continued to grow, and instead of adding a bedroom, the simplest expedient was to enclose a verandah to form a sleepout. Across Queensland, thousands of verandahs were enclosed between the 1920s and the 1950s to accommodate a growing population with the minimum of expense. Many other family homes were converted to boarding houses or divided up into flats in the same period. However, it is a mistake to categorise the Depression as a period of universal poverty and a completely depressed building industry. Life is never as simple as that. For many people, life went on as usual, and indeed some industries such as gold mining prospered despite - or because of - the prevailing downturn. Under successive Labor governments, the State Advances Corporation increased its efforts to provide housing and sustain the weakened building industry. Even in the depths of the mid-1930s, there were houses being built as usual, and a few people could still afford to build grand houses. Some of the most opulent Queenslanders date from the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Second World War changed life in Australia even more profoundly than either the previous war or the Depression. It began in 1939, and once again saw Australians fighting in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Then in 1941 Japan entered the war, and for the only time in its history, Australia came under direct attack and, it seemed, threat of invasion. There followed a prolonged national emergency, with Australian troops fighting in the Pacific theatre, large American forces based in Australia, and stringent government control of the economy. Because of their proximity to the fighting, Queensland and the Northern Territory experienced the most dramatic changes. While the casualties of the Second World War were much lighter than those of the first, the economic impacts were much more profound. Even before the Japanese entry into the war, the Federal government had introduced strict regulation of industry. Non-essential industries were simply closed down and their workforces transferred to other jobs; factories were told to stop manufacturing particular goods and produce something else. All building materials were reserved for military and government use, and all labour was regulated, so the domestic building industry simply ceased to exist. From 1940 to about 1946, no houses were built in Queensland except for defence purposes. Even minor modifications to houses could only be done with scrounged or blackmarket materials.


The Modern Era Like its predecessor, the Second World War brought psychological change that swept away the architectural tastes of the pre-war era. The classic Queenslander vanished, as the multiple gables, foundation skirts, stepped staircases and fretsawn verandah balustrades of the 1930s became simply too frivolous and old-fashioned for a generation that was trying to come to terms with the atrocities of the Burma railway and the implications of nuclear weapons. Besides, there were no longer the materials to build such houses. Although the war ended in 1945, rationing of fuel and shortages of materials persisted for years afterward, and it was not until the mid-1950s that the building industry returned to anything like normal. Robin Boyd identified those post-war years as the Austerity period (although other writers have given the period less emphasis, characterising it as "brief but drastic": Apperly et al 1989, p. 222). It was a time of conflicting pressures in housing, for there was a tremendous increase in population both through a rising birthrate and immigration from Europe. The city suburbs began expanding rapidly again at the very time when the materials to build houses were in short supply. As post-war recovery coincided with the fastest population growth Queensland had seen since the gold rushes, sawmills and brickworks simply could not keep up with demand. In the face of both economic pressure and changing popular taste, newly-built Queensland houses shrank in size, and their forms dwindled to a simpler range of floor plans. Almost all urban houses were now low-set, and verandahs had virtually disappeared, to be replaced by a narrow eave or overhang, although a small porch usually survived over the front door. Only in country areas did old traditions survive the war, and new homesteads in the 1950s usually retained traditional floor plans and generous verandahs. The shortages of the Austerity period encouraged a general diversification in the use of building materials. Concrete block had been in use on a small scale since the early twentieth century, usually manufactured on site in patent machines rather than commercially supplied, but in the post-war period it increased rapidly in popularity, to become a major building material by the 1960s. In its early years it was rendered, or given a veneer of ceramic bricks, but by the 1970s concrete blocks had gained acceptance for external walls, and were simply painted. One brand, Besser Block, was available in a range of pierced designs, used for decorative walls and fences, and also laid as a screen between the stumps of elevated houses. The stud frame returned, although no nineteenth century carpenter would have recognised it. During the wartime emergency, joinery had shrunk to the absolute minimum needed to keep two pieces of timber in contact. Mortice and tenon joints had vanished, and studs were merely housed into a slot cut a few millimetres into the top and bottom plates (a joint requiring two brief sawcuts and two chisel blows) and then skew-nailed. In the cheapest construction, the joinery was omitted and skew-nails did the entire job.


Impact of the Second World War: a 1930s house in Tarragindi

Impact of the Second World War: a 1950s house in Tarragindi


Frequently the timber stud frame was concealed behind a single skin of external bricks; a construction technique known as brick veneer. It was promoted by builders as combining the advantages of timber and brick construction: a prestigious and low-maintenance exterior at lower cost. (Ten years later, the owners discovered that it also combined the disadvantages of the two materials: the exterior brickwork cracked, while termites ate the timber frame.) Internally the frame was concealed by various forms of synthetic particle board; CSR produced a number of products, first Caneite and later the more durable Masonite. Although the timber frame remained the staple construction technique for Queensland houses as it had for the past hundred years, in many new houses not a trace of timber was visible. The most popular material of the age was asbestos-cement sheeting. It had been imported into Australia before 1910 both as flat panels for use as wall linings and as corrugated sheets for roofing. James Hardie had begun manufacturing Fibro Cement - later Fibrolite - and Wunderlichs their nearly identical Durabestos in Sydney during the First World War, and in Brisbane in the late 1930s, but they were brittle and unattractive materials, and found only a small market. Their heyday came in the 1950s, when bricks and sawn timber were still scarce and expensive. By the post-war era, cement was being manufactured at Darra outside Brisbane and Stuart near Townsville, removing another building product from the list of overseas purchases. Hence domestic manufacture of asbestos-cement sheeting was relatively easy to organise, and Fibrolite and Durabestos house walls became the fastest growing building material of the post-war years. By 1961 there were nearly 60,000 Queensland houses with walls clad in asbestos-cement, although it was much less popular for roofing. (Marsden 1966, p. 121) Hardies' trade name won the brand recognition war, with laconic Australian shortening, and the material has been known locally as "fibro" since the 1950s. One effect of the new materials and techniques was to simplify the process of building a house; a timber frame clad with fibro and lined with Masonite could be put together with few more tools than a saw and hammer. The years following the Second World War were the great age of the owner-builder, as families unable to pay for professional skills built their own houses with little interference from planning legislation or building inspectors. Recent immigrants from Europe combined their skills to form working bees and co-operated in building chains of houses. They were following an old tradition; the prefabricated house firms had been encouraging home-owners to put their own houses together since the turn of the century. Queensland houses of the post-war era were not confined to the work of owner-builders. A style known as Post-War Brisbane Regional brought genuine flat-roofed Modernism to the Brisbane suburbs in the late 1950s. (Apperly et al 1989, pp. 222-223) Impressively, sometimes daringly modern, this style reflected the contemporary Internationalist movement of the USA, and brought the first really clean-cut Functionalism to Queensland streets. Examples spread up the coast as far as Cairns throughout the 1960s, to evolve into Late Twentieth-Century Tropical. (Apperly et al 1989, pp. 250-251) But builders everywhere grumbled over the unconventional techniques the International style demanded. Expensive to build with its steel framing and large sheets of plate glass, it was mostly built by architects for their own families or other cognoscenti, and never amounted to more than a few hundred houses


A combination of Modern taste and the legacy of Austerity economics kept most Queensland houses very simple in appearance during the 1960s and 1970s. The overt allusions to Californian, Tudor or Spanish houses had all vanished with the Second World War, and there were no historical references visible in new houses. It appeared that Functionalist philosophy had triumphed, and the concept of "style" seemed almost irrelevant. That was to change abruptly in the 1980s, when the advent of Post-Modernism as an intellectual movement brought deliberate historical allusions back into architectural fashion. This was interpreted by the building industry as a licence to imitate, bringing a wave of popular nostalgia into house design. By the 1990s it was common to see Federation houses going up alongside Georgian and High Victorian houses on new subdivisions. Like the eclectic styles of the 1920s and 1930s, most of these houses demonstrated little understanding of the styles they parodied, but simply placed a few stylistic embellishments on the exterior of modern house forms built in modern materials. The effects of the post-war period of Austerity had not been restricted to Queensland. The same forces were at work all over Australia, with the result that by 1960 there was very little to distinguish the newly-built Queensland house from its contemporary in Victoria or Western Australia: throughout the country, "buildings everywhere began to look more and more similar". (Apperly et al 1989, p. 222) The tendency for national conformity in domestic architecture has not diminished since. On the contrary, the mass housing market is now dominated by trans-national building firms, and the majority of new houses erected in the Queensland suburbs are catalogue designs or kit homes, in a tradition distantly descended from Campbells' Redicut Homes and Brown & Broad's Newstead Homes of eighty years ago. Despite the nostalgic messages of building firms' marketing literature, there is no longer a Queensland house today. Most houses built in Queensland are Australian houses; typically they have timber frames of exotic softwood held together by metal fasteners - often without a trace of joinery - an external veneer of bricks, synthetic linings in a dizzying range of manufactured substances from particle boards to gypsum sheets to asbestos-free '"fibro", and a roof of cast concrete tiles. Identical houses are to be found across the country in every town from Darwin to Hobart; air-conditioning having made the local climate irrelevant to house design. The distinctive Queensland house vanished with the economic crisis of the Second World War.


The Austerity house (Qld Housing Commission report 1948)

The International Modern house arrived in Queensland in the late 1960s


Queensland Houses: Regional Variations It is important to recognise that there were significant regional variations in the traditional building practices of Queensland. While there were certain unifying themes, there were also geographic and climatic forces, and more importantly patterns of transport infrastructure and hence economic supply, which encouraged diversity in building practices. Some of these were: Brisbane Since the 1850s Brisbane has always been the largest urban centre in Queensland and thus has the largest number of historic houses. As the principal repository of wealth, it also has a higher proportion of grand houses, masonry houses and two-storey houses than any other region of the state. Brisbane was always more receptive to stylistic experiments such as the Federation house and the inter-war eclectic styles than provincial Queensland, and was also the centre for the development of the inter-war Queenslander, which occurs there in greater numbers and more diversity of form than elsewhere. The South-east The densely-settled region extending for a few hundred kilometres north and west of Brisbane has a large number of nineteenth century houses with their own housing tradition. It is the heartland of the X-braced frame; the exposed timber stud frame with conspicuous heavy diagonal bracing in a variety of patterns. Ipswich In Queensland's early decades, Ipswich rivalled Brisbane in size and economic prosperity, and this is reflected in its early houses, a significant number of which are large and elaborate. It also has one of the most notable concentrations of late nineteenth century timber framed houses, which tend to be particularly elaborate. Toowoomba A prosperous regional centre at fairly high altitude, Toowoomba has another concentration of relatively large and elaborate houses. Its cool climate means that open verandahs with their characteristic forms of embellishment are relatively rare, while masonry construction, fireplaces and brick chimneys are prevalent. Darling Downs The Darling Downs and Granite Belt are the coldest part of Queensland, and the region's early houses, especially in the Warwick district, have a distinctive sandstone building tradition. In many ways the region's early houses are anomalous in the context of Queensland architectural history, and form a northern extension of the housing tradition of the New South Wales tablelands.


Maryborough Like Ipswich, Maryborough has a notable concentration of late nineteenth century timber framed houses, which tend to be particularly elaborate. For many decades, Maryborough was an important centre of forestry and timber milling, and supplied a large proportion of the native softwoods which were the traditional timber of the Queensland house. Rockhampton In the 1870s and 1880s, Rockhampton was Queensland's second-largest urban centre, and has a significant number of late nineteenth century timber framed houses, which tend to be particularly elaborate. The southern X-braced frame and the northern stud frame traditions overlap in Rockhampton. The West There are several generations of historic settlement in western Queensland; the early pastoral homesteads and towns like Aramac and Tambo dating from the 1860s onward, the later urban centres like Charleville and Longreach dating from the extension of the railways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and newer mining centres like Blair Athol and Mount Isa, which date from the early twentieth century. The house forms naturally tend to be determined by the hot dry climate, and the local building tradition has always been very conservative about accepting urban architectural styles. The Far West The homesteads and small towns in the arid far west of the state, such as Birdsville, Bedourie and Boulia, have their own historical tradition of building in stone, an expression of the climate, the extreme costs of transporting industrial building materials, and influence from South Australia. Charters Towers A prosperous gold-mining town, from the 1880s to the First World War the second-largest urban centre in Queensland, Charters Towers has some notable Boom Style buildings and the largest concentration of nineteenth century timber houses outside Brisbane. Its houses tend to be better-preserved than those of the coastal cities, retaining more original detail, and have conspicuous climatic adaptations such as an outward extension of the verandah roof as an eave supported on diagonal struts. Townsville Since the First World War the second-largest urban centre in Queensland, Townsville shared in Charters Towers' prosperity and has been a major industrial and transport centre to the present. It was another important timber-milling centre, reflected in its extensive suburbs of late nineteenth and early twentieth century timber houses.


Cairns Cramped on a small coastal plain, Cairns has been repeatedly rebuilt, but the older part of the city still has several hundred early twentieth century houses, mostly highset. Open verandahs and exposed timber frames are relatively rare, probably a response to the wet climate. The North The region north of Townsville has its own distinctive housing tradition imposed by a hot wet climate, and is the Australian birthplace of the highset house which is still prevalent there. Many houses demonstrate precautions against both timber rot and extreme winds, and enclosure of verandahs by wooden louvres or lattice is common. There are local responses to past cyclone damage, such as the concrete building tradition of the Innisfail and Tully districts.


Queensland Houses: Previous Methods of Classification Earlier writers have suggested a number of different ways of dividing Queensland houses into categories. Some of those ways are summarised here.

Boyd (1952) Robin Boyd in Australia's Home wrote the earliest, but in many ways very perceptive, broad history of Australian houses. Unfortunately his observations tell us more about houses in Melbourne than elsewhere. He identified five principal house plan types:

primitive cottage bungalow asymmetrical front L-shape triple-front

and commented that "nearly every small Australian house was based on one of these five plans - more than one million of them being based on No. 3 [asymmetrical front] alone". (Boyd 1952, p. 9) Boyd also identified eleven stylistic periods in the history of Australian houses:

Georgian Primitive Colonial Georgian Gothic Revival Italianate Boom Style Queen Anne Californian Bungalow Spanish Mission Waterfall Front Post World War II Austerity L-shape

Hence Boyd has given us the beginning of two typologies: one based on floor plans and one on stylistic attributes, but neither of them has much relevance in Queensland. Three of Boyd's house styles - Georgian Primitive, Colonial Georgian and Boom Style - are prevalent in Sydney and Melbourne, but rare in Queensland. His Gothic Revival and Italianate styles are confined to a small number of grand houses. Queen Anne, now renamed Federation, has more relevance, although its Queensland manifestations bear little resemblance to Boyd's description. The Californian Bungalow, Spanish Mission, Waterfall Front (or Modern) houses were all simultaneous experiments during the inter-war eclectic period. The Post World War II Austerity house is prevalent, but the L-shape house is not so much a style as a house form, also appearing on Boyd's list of plan types. His typology of plans jumps from the asymmetrical villa to the post-war L-shape, completely missing the freeing-up of house plans in the Federation period. Nowhere does he recognise the inter-war Queenslander as a regional type.


Spencer (1967) J.L. Spencer, in a thesis on the townscape of Gympie, provided one of the earliest typologies of Queensland houses, suggesting a division of nineteenth century houses into three types:

skillion-roofed divided-roofed other

While the strange vocabulary of these verbal descriptions may not seem very helpful, the accompanying illustrations make it clear that the division is into what this report describes as gabled two-roomed cottages and stepped pyramid-roofed four-roomed houses. Sparse as this typology is, it has more relevance to Queensland than Boyd's observations in the southern capital cities. To Boyd, all two-roomed cottages were "primitive", whereas, built in industrial materials, they were a dominant house form in Queensland towns from the 1850s until the First World War.

Freeland (1968) Professor John Freeland, writing in Sydney and interested mainly in high-style architecture, identified thirteen periods in Australian architectural history:

Primitive 1788-1809 Age of Macquarie 1810-1821 Colonial 1822-1837 Late Colonial 1838-1850 Early Victorian 1851-1860 Mid-Victorian 1861-1878 High Victorian 1879-1892 Late Victorian 1893-1900 Edwardian 1901-1916 Transition 1917-1929 Early Modern 1930-1944 Austerity 1945-1954 Mid-Twentieth Century 1953-1967

It is immediately noticeable that Freeland has categorised Australian buildings not into forms and styles, as Boyd did, but into periods of time. His first four periods are relevant only in Sydney and Hobart, and all but a handful of Queensland houses date from his Early Victorian period onward. From here on, Freeland is describing Australian architecture, not Australian houses, and has relatively little to say about house types, and then mostly the grander ones. It may be possible to find traces of his Mid-Victorian, High Victorian and Late Victorian periods in a few large Queensland houses, but the differences hardly seem essential. Freeland's Edwardian period (like Boyd's Queen Anne) is now known as the Federation period, his Transition is the inter-war eclectic period. Early Modern, Austerity and Mid-Twentieth Century are recognisable in the evolution of the Queensland house, but Freeland, unlike Boyd, has little to say about mass housing, the building industry or the owner-builder.


Sumner (1974)

Ray Sumner undertook a geographical analysis of a sample of 330 houses illustrated in Fox's History of Queensland, (1919-1923) and inspected about 20 early urban and rural houses still standing in North Queensland, principally looking for the influence of climate on house design. She did not propose a typology of houses, although she categorised their roof shapes into eight types:

Pyramid 1 (straight profile) Pyramid 1a (break of pitch) Pyramid 1b (stepped profile) Pyramid 1c (concave verandah) Modified Pyramid 2 (hipped) Modified Pyramid 2a (hipped with break of pitch) Straight Gable Multiple Gable

Although Sumner did not spell out the connection, external inspection of the roof provides a simple means of categorising house forms, because of the nexus between floor plan and roof form. In Queensland, a four-roomed house will usually have a pyramid roof, and a two-roomed cottage will almost always have either a gabled or hipped roof.

Bell (1984) In 1978-1982, I carried out a survey of nearly 4,000 houses built in the period 1861-1920 in 21 North Queensland towns. The survey demonstrated that the majority of extant houses could be subdivided into variations of the two-roomed core plan (39%) and the four-roomed core plan (64%), and that these corresponded closely to the roof forms which Sumner had described. Accordingly this was the typology adopted in analysing the distribution of house types, based on the nexus between floor plan and roof structure, with houses further subdivided by their roof form and arrangement of verandahs. The essential roof forms were:

stepped pyramid (four-roomed plan) straight pyramid (four-roomed plan) short ridge hipped (four -roomed plan) gabled (two -roomed plan) hipped (two -roomed plan)

All of these forms could be built with verandahs on one, two, three or four sides, and there were in addition a number of multiple-gabled roofs with their own verandah variants, so there were in all about 24 possible roof forms, which between them accounted for nearly 95% of the houses built in the period under study. However, in the period after 1920 (and probably much earlier in southern Queensland), this simple typology breaks down very rapidly.


Saini (1982)

Professor Balwant Saini's book The Australian House (in cooperation with photographer Roger Joyce) concentrated on the houses of North Queensland, which he considered to be a distinctive and archetypal form of the Australian house. The book adopted without amendment my typology of two-roomed cottages and four-roomed houses with roof and verandah variations.

Ipswich Townscape Study (1977) In 1977 the National Trust undertook a townscape study of the City of Ipswich for the National Estate Program, a pioneering work which was the first systematic analysis of a large urban environment in Queensland. The study analysed house types by dividing the history of Ipswich into five periods, and identifying about 43 characteristic house forms built in those periods. The periods were:

Victorian and Colonial 1850-1880 11 house types Late Victorian 1880-1900 9 house types Edwardian 1900-1920 9 house types Californian Bungalow 1920-1935 6 house types End of Local Vernacular 1935+ 8 house types

Previous studies had proposed typologies based on form, style or period (or a mixture of these), but this was the first to take the logical step of identifying chronological periods and looking for the evolution of house forms within each. It avoided comment on style, preferring to describe house variations by the more neutral word "type". The Ipswich typology has been widely adopted in other studies since, partly because of the clear and delightful line drawings which illustrate each of the house types.

Apperly et al (1989) Richard Apperly, Robert Irving and Peter Reynolds produced their book A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture with the specific intention of providing a standard vocabulary for the analysis of architectural style in Australia. It is the definitive work, its terminology universally adopted by Australian architectural historians today. It simplifies Freeland's chronology down into six major periods, but within these periods, expands the nuances of design into 66 named stylistic movements. The six periods are:

Old Colonial Period 1788-c.1840 Victorian Period c.1840-1890 Federation Period c.1890-c.1915 Inter-War Period c.1915-c.1940 Post-War Period c.1940-c.1960 Late Twentieth Century Period c.1960+


As a national work on buildings generally, the book has relatively little to say on the specific topic of Queensland houses, although it does illustrate a number of examples, and its periods and stylistic analysis can be applied to Queensland houses with little variation.

Stapleton (1997) Maisy and Ian Stapleton produced a handbook of Australian House Styles which draws on the typologies of Boyd, Freeland and Apperly et al to identify 24 styles, and provides pointers on recognising each. For the most part the work is based on examples in Sydney and Melbourne, and much of it has little relevance to Queensland. However, in a section on Regional Variations, it describes the different housing traditions of the Australian colonies, and illustrates a late nineteenth century elevated Queensland house with an exposed stud frame (p. 32), accurately identifying its distinctive regional characteristics at that time.

Fisher (1994) Up to the mid-1990s, all of these typologies proposed for, or relevant to, the Queensland house had in fact been written either for only a part of Queensland, or all of Australia. None of the nine studies summarised above actually set out to prepare a typology for the Queensland house. In 1994, Rod Fisher undertook the task of systematically analysing all of Queensland's houses into periods and styles. His division into four periods was the simplest so far, although he identified 29 styles used in those periods:

Colonial 1820s-1880s 6 styles Federation 1880s-1900s 8 styles Interwar 1920s-1930s 14 styles Postwar 1940s-1980s 1 style

In fact as Fisher points out, this is a deliberate simplification of Apperly et al's periods (adopted unchanged by Robert Riddel in the very next chapter of the same volume) for application to Queensland. As no houses survive in Queensland from before the 1840s, there is little point in distinguishing the Georgian period from Victorian as Sydney historians do. He also simplifies the post-war era into one rather than two periods for reasons which he does not explain, but which soon become apparent. However, there are problems in applying Fisher's typology to the Queensland house. First, it takes the radical view that the real Queensland house is the timber-framed house, and simply ignores masonry houses, grand houses, brick Federation villas, inter-war eclectic houses, post-war fibro houses and all other modern houses built in materials other than timber. It concentrates on the inter-war Queenslander. This explains the omission of the late twentieth century which most other typologies include as separate from the post-war era. Fisher's view of the Queensland house is a perfectly legitimate ideological position, but it produces a typology which can be applied to only a part of the state's housing stock.


Second, the range of house forms which Fisher's typology describes are all characteristic of the urban south-east of Queensland, principally Brisbane and Ipswich. Even as close as Warwick there are house types which are not found in the typology, and in the far north and west of the state, some common local house types are not represented, whereas many of the 29 house forms in the typology were never built in those districts. In summary, Fisher's typology is a useful detailed analysis, but it applies only to certain types of houses in certain parts of Queensland.

Rechner (1998) Fisher's typology has been extended by Judy Rechner in Brisbane House Styles, which is concerned specifically with Brisbane houses, and focuses on the "affordable" house, that is the mass-market timber house built between 1880 and 1940. It includes inter-war eclectic houses - appropriately described as "Derivative" - if they are built of timber. Rechner's typology identifies 11 styles with a total of 53 sub-styles, and provides a useful compendium of details. However, these styles vary in the way they can be applied to the description of houses: "Colonial" is a chronological period from 1859 to 1901; "Bungalow" is a straight-profiled roof form; "Asymmetrical Bungalow" is a house form, identified not only by its roof, but also by its floor plan; "Spanish Mission" is an architectural style in the formal sense, with characteristic detailing. It does not mention the Federation or post-war periods, making it difficult to reconcile with other typologies of the Queensland house.


The sketches from the Ipswich Townscape Study have been widely adopted

(Ipswich Townscape Study 1977)


Queensland Houses: Typologies The principal characteristics used to categorise Queensland houses to the present have been period, house form, floor plan, roof form, style and type. Let us be clear about what these words mean:

period: a chronological span of years, e.g. 1860-1880, house form: the general form of the space occupied by the principal elements

of the house; its rooms, roof, verandahs etc, floor plan: the spatial arrangement of rooms within the house, expressed as

the footprint of its walls on the floor or the ground, roof form: the general external geometry of the forms which make up the

house roof; style: "the manner in which a work of art is executed" (OED), which is

domestic architecture is defined principally by the house's historical references, e.g. Gothic Style, Neo-Tudor Style; and

type: a general term used to distinguish in any way between things that

are different. The methods of classifying Queensland houses proposed in the foregoing typologies are obviously not directly comparable, as they divide houses up according to quite different criteria, some systems using more than one. Boyd used plan and style, Spencer used roof form, Freeland period, Sumner roof form, Bell roof and floor plan, Saini floor plan, Apperly et al period and style, Stapleton style, Fisher and Rechner a combination of period, form and style. Some detailed studies such as Donald Watson's (1981) have not proposed any typology for Queensland houses. Nor has the prolific author Ian Evans. Even where a particular criterion such as period or house form has been used by two authors, in no case are their systems directly comparable, for without exception they have identified different periods, different forms and different styles. The total number of styles in this literature which might potentially be applied to Queensland houses runs to well over a hundred, ranging from "Gothic Revival" through "Coptic Bungalow" to "Late Twentieth-Century Immigrants' Nostalgic". In any case, not one of the studies published to the present has actually looked at Queensland houses as a whole; all have either dealt with Queensland only as part of the national scene, or have been focused on a specific region, city or type of house within Queensland. To sum up, there appears to be no single system in existence which could be adopted to provide a satisfactory means of classifying Queensland house into types, although there are useful pointers to ways of constructing a typology.


Constructing a Useable Typology We might begin by looking for useful elements in the wealth of typologies that have so far been used in writings on Queensland houses. The aim will be to keep the lists of types as simple as possible, and also to use descriptions of houses that are used by the lay observer, excluding terms which only a specialist architectural historian would recognise. Design Period The periods into which Queensland (or Australian) houses have been divided are probably the simplest starting point, for they have been adopted by a number of writers, and those proposed have much in common, generally differing only in the level of detail into which periods are subdivided. There is general consensus that the following broad periods identify significant watersheds of change in the design of the Queensland house:


This is Apperly et al's chronology, leaving out their Old Colonial Period before 1840, which has no relevance in assessing Queensland's extant houses. It is also similar to Fisher's chronology, but with his single Post-War period divided into two. It is broadly consistent with Boyd's, Freeland's and the Stapletons' more detailed chronologies. These five periods are simple, intuitively understood, widely adopted in their general form by other writers, and they fit the general pattern of major changes in the design and construction of Queensland houses. However, there are limitations to their usefulness. Every date used to define these periods is prefixed circa - about - for there is always a problem with assigning beginning and end dates to periods such as these. All human behaviour including house-building is complex and diverse, and these periods did not stop and start quickly. For example, we can identify the first stirrings of the Federation style in a few houses as early as 1885, but other houses were still clinging to Victorian design principles as late as 1915. This means that a house built in the 1890s is not necessarily a Federation house in form or style. Even in the course of the relatively dramatic stylistic watershed created by the First World War, the houses in the prefabricated builders' catalogues change only by barely perceptible increments between 1914 and 1924. We must accept that although they form convenient demarcations in time, these periods overlap in practice, and that houses built in two adjacent periods will share many characteristics. Indeed, some general characteristics - the detached elevated timber family house under a pyramidal iron roof - were to be found in some Queensland houses through all five of these periods.


For the purpose of analysing the houses currently on the Queensland Heritage Register, these periods were found to be too imprecise to produce useful results. Instead, the houses were allocated to calendar decades - 1880-1889, 1890-1899 etc. This makes it possible to give a precise count of how many houses were built in a particular decade, but not to count how many houses are of a particular style. The overlap between design periods makes the correlation between chronological periods and styles too blurred to be much use. Materials Probably the second-easiest characteristic of the Queensland house to categorise is the material of construction. In practice, every house is made of a number of different materials, but the conventional way of describing a house's construction materials for purposes such as the census is to name the principal cladding material of the external walls. This is easy to do and appears at first glance to be reasonably objective in its results. For decades the census returns - our best overall picture of what actually constituted the historical Queensland house - categorised external wall materials into lists such as wood, brick, stone, earth, iron and other. Immediately we consider what these words mean, we realise that a list of materials alone does not tell us very much about the houses. Wood simply means made from parts of a tree, but there are very big differences between houses (a) in a suburban street, made from sawn studs and boards from a steam sawmill, (b) on an established dairy farm, made from boards sawn laboriously by hand in a saw-pit, and (c) on a new selection in a forest clearing, made from slabs split with wedges from a log. All are wooden houses, but they will be profoundly different in their monetary cost, labour investment, size, building methods, time of construction, durability and likelihood of survival to the present. We might usefully subdivide wood into its primitive and industrial forms, but even so, primitive buildings of wood might take the very different forms of massive whole logs (very rarely) or flimsy saplings or anything in between. Virtually all the primitive wooden houses that survive in Queensland today are of horizontal slab construction. Even within the industrial sawn timber tradition, while the majority of nineteenth century wooden houses had either weatherboard cladding or exposed frames, a significant number used other techniques such as board-and-batten, and by the early twentieth century most used vertical tongue-and-groove boards. A typology based on buildings materials alone tells us very little about houses unless we further subdivide materials into construction techniques; that is, how the material is used. On the other hand, if we look at materials alone, we at least have information in a form which we can compare directly with historical data from the census reports. The census figures are silent on construction techniques. When the census figures are considered, it is immediately evident that we are faced with disparities between the historical building stock, and the surviving houses from that time today, because of the differing levels of durability of the materials involved. At the 1911 census, there were nearly five times as many tents counted in Queensland (11,692) as there were stone and brick houses combined (2,443). Today, we can safely assume that none of those tents still exist, whereas a high proportion of the masonry houses undoubtedly still stand. Heritage registers today always over-represent the more durable materials. We will consider this pattern further when we look at the houses currently in the Register.


Design Traditions Another common way of categorising houses is to describe their broad design. This has rarely been done consistently, some writers using floor plan, some roof form and some style, separately or in combination, to categorise Queensland houses. We should look briefly at the role these attributes might take in drawing up a typology of houses. Floor Plan The spatial layout of the rooms in a house was used in part by Boyd, Bell and Saini in constructing typologies of houses. Its usefulness comes from the fact that in the early decades of settlement, the great majority of house cores conformed to one of two basic English-derived floor plans: the two-roomed cottage and the four-roomed house. Both were essentially symmetrical, usually with a central entrance door. Variations of the plans were achieved by adding different combinations of verandahs, and late in the century the asymmetrical villa became fashionable, adding a further variant to the list. As the basis for a typology, this simple division appears promising in the nineteenth century, but breaks down completely in the twentieth. From the Federation era onward, symmetricality vanished, central hallways disappeared, service rooms were added to the house core, and the arrangement of rooms became subject to a much greater range of variations. From that time, the number of floor plans in use makes their categorisation too complex to be useful. Roof Form The form of a house's roof usually expresses its floor plan, so much the same observations can be made about typologies based on classifying roof forms. In the nineteenth century they conformed to a small range, broadly reflecting the division into two basic floor plans, although with a greater number of variations. Even a simple cottage might have either a gabled or hipped roof over its core, and a four-roomed house could have a number of roof forms: in early decades a transverse gable, later either a pyramid or a short-ridged hipped roof. Any of these roofs could either be stepped down at the core perimeter or continue straight to the verandah edge. If the house had an asymmetrical facade, a longitudinal gable was usually added to the roof form. The Federation era threw all this tidiness away, deliberately seeking novelty and complexity in the design of roofs, and the inter-war period saw the proliferation of complex roof forms continuing on urban houses. Not until the Austerity period did roofs revert back to a small range of hipped forms, fairly directly reflecting the house's floor plan. We can allocate typical roof forms to the broad period in which they were built, but in the twentieth century the number of variant forms becomes too great for useful categorisation. Style The style of a building is a somewhat elusive concept, and like many architectural terms, it is frequently used to mean different things. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the succinct but not very helpful definition: "the manner in which a work of art is executed". Apperly et al, authors of the definitive work on Australian architectural styles,


give it a very broad definition. "An architectural style exists when each of a number of buildings exhibits similar (but not necessarily identical) sets of characteristics". They go on to list eleven such characteristics: relationship of parts, shape, space, scale, structure, materials, detailing, colours, textures, ornament and ""use or non-use of elements related to a previous style". (Apperly et al 1990, p. 16) Some of these elements - form, materials, construction technique, colour - can vary quite independently of a house's style, and in dealing with a specific building type, the Queensland house, I would prefer to narrow the definition down to deal principally with details, ornament and "elements related to a previous style". Style in this narrow sense comes down principally to the ways in which the building is influenced by past architectural examples; the historical references made in its design:

Style, in architecture, [is] a manner or mode or fashion of building practised at any one period (e.g. the Gothic style) or in any particular region in that period (e.g. the German Gothic style); and distinguished by certain characteristics of general design, construction and ornament. (Briggs 1959, p. 322)

Apperly et al have identified 66 stylistic movements in Australian architectural history, but many of these are restricted to specific types of buildings such as churches, banks and prisons, and thankfully only a small proportion of them have relevance to the Queensland house. Summarising their stylistic categories somewhat, we can identify about fifteen of their styles which are found in Queensland houses:

Victorian Georgian Victorian Regency Victorian Classical Victorian Italianate Victorian Gothic Federation Bungalow Federation Queen Anne Federation Filigree Inter-War Californian Bungalow Inter-War Old English Inter-War Spanish Mission Inter-War Functionalist Post-War Brisbane Regional Late Twentieth Century Australian Nostalgic Late Twentieth Century Post-Modern

This analysis leaves a very large number of Queensland houses unspoken for. As an architectural stylistic analysis, it ignores many mass-market trends in Queensland houses which originated within the building industry rather than the architectural profession. Many Victorian rural homesteads and urban cottages had no identifiable architectural style, nor did the pre-First World War prefabricated house or the post-Second World War Austerity house. Probably the Inter-War Queenslander did constitute a style, but it was a regional development, of little interest to Sydney architectural historians.


Rather than inventing style names for these missing houses and corrupting the existing widely-accepted vocabulary, I propose that houses in these categories simply be referred to as house types. Hence if an inter-war house conforms to Apperly et al's list of style indicators for the Californian Bungalow, then it should be referred to by that style name. If it does not, but it fits into Fisher's typology for the inter-war Queenslander, then it should be referred to as being of that house type.


Queensland Houses: Recommended Typology There appears to be no simple way of categorising Queensland houses into a typology by reference to any one attribute. I propose instead that houses be described consistently by reference to their period, their form with comment on variations in plan, roof and verandahs (in the nineteenth century), their materials, their style where relevant, and if not, their type, along the lines suggested below. It will undoubtedly be found desirable to add to these categories in practice, but the intention should be to keep the number of categories as small as possible so as not to become lost in details, and to use existing concepts and vocabulary wherever possible. Generally speaking the concepts and vocabulary recommended here are those used in Apperly et al (1990), with minor modifications to suit the particular circumstances of the Queensland house. Design Periods I recommend the following design periods be used in categorising Queensland houses:


House Forms I recommend the following floor plans be used in categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:


I recommend the following house forms be used in categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:


I recommend the following roof forms be specified when categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:

simple gabled simple hipped pyramid short-ridged hipped multiple gabled


U-shaped plan I recommend the following relationship between core and verandah roofs be specified when categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:


I recommend the following verandah forms be specified when categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:


Verandah roofs can be further described as straight, convex, bullnose, concave or ogee. Combining these elements, a nineteenth century house might be described as "single storey four-roomed plan with pyramid roof and stepped bullnose verandahs at front and both sides". Not all nineteenth century houses will fit into these categories. If a house has minor variations these should be added to the description - "two-roomed cottage with hipped roof, extended to the rear" - and if it does not conform at all, then it should simply be recorded as a non-standard form, and described briefly in a way consistent with these conventions, e.g. "six-roomed plan with two hallways, under three-gabled roof". I do not recommend that house forms be used to describe twentieth century houses because of their much greater complexity and range of types. It may be possible to develop an appropriate vocabulary of terms along these lines, but I believe it will become too cumbersome to be useful in practice. Instead, they can be described by reference to the styles and types below. Materials Even the briefest description of a house should mention the principal materials of its external walls and roof. There is little point in describing houses simply by the historical census categories - wood, brick, stone, earth, iron and other - without also mentioning the construction techniques used. Hence a house might be described briefly as "red brick walls with terracotta tiled roof" or "exposed stud frame timber walls with corrugated iron roof, side verandahs enclosed in asbestos cement sheeting".


Styles I recommend the following style names be used in categorising Queensland houses:

Victorian Georgian Victorian Regency Victorian Classical Victorian Italianate Victorian Gothic Federation Bungalow Federation Queen Anne Federation Filigree Inter-War Californian Bungalow Inter-War Old English Inter-War Spanish Mission Inter-War Functionalist Post-War Brisbane Regional Late Twentieth Century Australian Nostalgic Late Twentieth Century Post-Modern

House Types I recommend that in cases where none of the style names above can be applied, then the following house types be used in categorising Queensland houses:

Prefabricated Catalogue House Inter-War Queenslander Post-War Austerity House

Further house types will undoubtedly become evident and can be added to the list as they are identified.


Queensland Houses: Guidelines

Criteria and Guidelines for the Entry of Houses in the Queensland Heritage Register

These guidelines offer advice on assessing the cultural heritage significance of Queensland houses being considered for entry in the Heritage Register established by the Queensland Heritage Act 1992. A house may be entered in the register if the Queensland Heritage Council considers that it is of cultural heritage significance and satisfies one or more of the criteria for entry in the Queensland Heritage Register set out in Section 23 (1) of the Queensland Heritage Act 1992 (as amended 1995). These guidelines suggest ways of interpreting those criteria to assess houses. Obviously there will be many cases where more than one criterion will apply to a single house. However, it is not necessary for a house to meet more than one criterion to be entered in the register. Failing to meet one or even several criteria cannot disqualify a house for consideration under others. Some of the criteria may overlap, for example “aesthetic significance” and “creative achievement” are closely related concepts, and may both apply to one house. Others will probably exclude each other; a house is unlikely to be both “rare” and a good representative of a wider class. Four of the criteria require that a house demonstrate a particular quality. That implies that the quality must not be merely present, but be clearly visible. The house should be able to serve as a good example to illustrate that quality. The following comments are based on the criteria in Section 23 (1) of the Queensland Heritage Act 1992 (as amended 1995). (a) the place is important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of

Queensland’s history; This criterion might be applied to houses which make a statement about broad

aspects of the pattern of settlement throughout Queensland. It suggests not only an assessment of the house’s role in history, but its ability to demonstrate that role. The broad expression “evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history” might imply an association either with specific events, if they were of great significance, or with overall trends, such as a population movement into an area, a change in economic circumstances over time, or the aging of a community. However, in the latter case, many other places are likely to be associated with the same broad trends, and it should be demonstrated why a particular house has a particularly strong claim to be associated with them.


Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should be closely associated with events, developments or cultural phases which have played a significant part in Queensland history. Ideally it should demonstrate that association in its fabric. The house may have been broadly associated with events of interest to a large number of people, houses associated with developments which were to have great significance in the future, or alternatively the house may have a special association with a specific significant event.

Examples

• The Anglican Deanery in Ann Street, Brisbane, was the scene of the formal proclamation of the new colony of Queensland in December 1859. The event is well documented, and the balcony where the proclamation was read can still be seen.

• Gracemere homestead near Rockhampton dates from the earliest phase of pastoral

settlement in central Queensland, before Separation. Its early date is evident in its fabric of split slabs.

• Friedrich Pfeiffer's house in Charters Towers is closely associated with the general

rise of gold mining there, and specifically with the success of the Day Dawn mine. (b) the place demonstrates rare, uncommon or endangered aspects of

Queensland's cultural heritage; This criterion might be applied to houses which demonstrated a quality which

was very uncommon, or confined to a relatively small number of examples, and thus potentially in danger of being lost altogether. It encompasses both those types of houses which were always rare, and those which have become scarce through subsequent loss or destruction. If a type of house was once relatively common but is now scarce, that in itself may be taken as evidence that houses of the type are endangered.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should demonstrate a way of life, social

custom, economic activity, construction technique or design quality which is valued by the community and is no longer practised, is of exceptional interest, or is in danger of being lost. The criterion might most appropriately be applied to types of houses which exist only in relatively small numbers; for example, houses built of pre-industrial materials in the nineteenth century are now very scarce.

Examples

• Shafston House at Kangaroo Point is a rare example of the Gothic style applied to domestic architecture.

• Gracemere and other houses such as Canning Downs homestead near Warwick are

rare examples of wooden slab construction.


(c) the place has potential to yield information that will contribute to an

understanding of Queensland’s history; This criterion applies to places which are potentially of value for research

purposes. It recognises that sometimes archaeological deposits or standing structures contain information which does not exist in documentary or other sources, and that examples should be conserved for future study. This criterion will apply relatively rarely to standing houses. Sometimes the interiors or the contents of the houses will be the most significant sources of information.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should demonstrate a likelihood of providing

information that will contribute significantly to our knowledge of the past. That information should be inherent in the fabric of the place, but may supplement other information found in documents or portable artefacts associated with the place. The house is of special value if it is unusually well-preserved, or contains information which is not available from other sources.

Examples

• A well-preserved house from a date early in the settlement of a particular district is likely to provide information about the supply of building materials and the origins of construction techniques which may be of value more generally to the historical study of that district. In a case like that, the house’s fences, outbuildings, rubbish deposits, gardens and tree plantings are also likely to be of similar value.

• A house that is the work of a known architect or builder may be of research value,

assisting in the attribution of other similar works to that person. Yongala Lodge, built by Townsville builder Matthew Rooney in 1885 as a showpiece for his company, is a good example.

(d) the place is important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a

particular class of cultural places; A "class" of houses might mean all the houses of a region or those built in a

period of time, or that have in common a particular form, historical style, building material, construction technique, etc. A house selected under this criterion should be a good example to show what the characteristics of that class of houses are. This criterion is the one that will normally be used to assess houses of common types, because it applies to houses that represent others of the same class. However, a house need not necessarily be of a common type to meet this criterion; it could be a good example of a relatively small class of houses. Houses will not be considered under this criterion simply because they are identified as members of a class; it should be shown that they are good examples of that class and demonstrate its characteristics clearly.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should be capable of providing understanding

of a range of places which it represents. If a house can be


described as “typical”, then this criterion may apply to it. The house should speak for a wider range of houses, and be in a good state of integrity, that is, with its significant features well-preserved.

Examples

• Santa Barbara at New Farm is a particularly fine example of the Spanish Mission style, as it demonstrates most of the stylistic characteristics of that 1920s design movement.

• Talgai near Warwick is a good representative of the sandstone homestead building

tradition of the southern tablelands in the nineteenth century. (e) the place is important because of its aesthetic significance; If a thing is aesthetically significant, then it makes an appeal to the senses which

many people find attractive. In the case of a house, those aesthetic qualities will be largely visual. The criteria do not mention architectural design values, although “architectural” appears among the qualities in the definition of cultural heritage significance. Thus houses which are valued for their architectural quality are likely to be assessed under this criterion. The word "aesthetic" describes the sense of the pleasing and beautiful, and also the study of that sense. The aesthetic response may not be a purely personal judgment, for at times during Queensland's history there have existed generally understood rules or canons of taste which governed what was deemed to be good design or composition.

A house commanding a beautiful view, or built in an aesthetically appealing garden or natural setting might qualify under this criterion. A house in a ruinous or dilapidated state might also be considered under this criterion if its appearance evoked a sense of romantic picturesqueness.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should demonstrate high standards of beauty

or design which are held in high regard by the community or can be judged by formal canons of taste. A house might be selected under this criterion as a good example of the work of a notable designer. The house need not necessarily be a work of great originality; creative achievement is considered under criterion (f). A historic house being considered under this criterion might not be assessed by the aesthetic taste of our time, but by that of the time in which it was built.

Examples

• Palma Rosa at Hamilton is a fine example of high Victorian design, and a good representative example of the work of Andrea Stombuco.

• Even a trite pattern book design might qualify under this criterion if it conformed to

accepted architectural taste of the time.


(f) the place is important in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period;

This criterion applies to houses which have landmark qualities, exemplifying the

arrival of a new design movement, or an early application of new technology. The house must demonstrate creativity or innovation; if it is simply a good example of an established technique, then it should be considered under criterion (d). This criterion will be applied relatively rarely to houses.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should show qualities of innovation or

departure, or represent a new achievement of its time. Breakthroughs in technology or new developments in design might qualify, if the place clearly shows them. A high standard of design and originality is expected.

Examples

• The Fulton house at Taringa, built in 1940, demonstrates the arrival of the Modern movement in Queensland house design. It was to be influential in local domestic architecture for the next twenty years.

• Goldicott at Toowong, built in 1885, is an early example of the use of poured mass

concrete as a house construction material. It was made possible by the manufacture of Portland cement, and was a precursor of the reinforced concrete of later years.

(g) the place has a strong or special association with a particular community

or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons; This criterion applies to community feelings, which can be difficult to measure.

There may indeed be conflicting values held by different groups, and these will need to be articulated and assessed before a judgment can be made. The associations involved must be stronger than people’s normal sentimental attachment to their surroundings. This criterion will apply relatively rarely to houses.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house should be one which the community or a

significant cultural group has held in high regard for an extended period. The association may in some cases quite legitimately have its origins in folklore rather than in reality.

Examples

• Strathearn at Enoggera, built in 1920 under the Anzac Cottage Scheme, has special significance to the community as a house that is also a form of war memorial.

• Xavier and Sadie Herbert’s cottage at Redlynch near Cairns is popularly associated

with the author of several classic Australian novels, although in fact the novelist did most of his writing elsewhere.

• The house of a former influential mayor or popular local football hero in a provincial

city or country town might reasonably be judged to be of significance to a Queensland community for social and cultural reasons. It would need to be demonstrated that the association was strong and deeply held within the community.


(h) the place has a special association with the life or work of a particular

person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland’s history. This criterion requires a "special" association; that is, something more than

simply showing that a prominent person was once involved with the house. Most people are associated with many places in their lifetime, and it must be demonstrated why one house is more significant than many others. Ideally the house should have had a long association with the person or group during their period of productivity or prominence. It should be considered whether an example of the person's work, such as a bridge designed by an engineer, or the warehouse of a merchant, might more clearly express that person’s achievement than would his or her home.

Guidelines for Inclusion: the house must have a close association with a

prominent individual person, a group of people, or a company or other formal organisation which played a significant role in Queensland’s history, and that association should be apparent in the fabric of the place. If there are many other houses and other places similarly associated with that person or group, then it must be demonstrated why this house is the most appropriate place to recognise the association.

Examples

• The first Workers Dwelling, built at Nundah in 1910, represents the role of the Workers Dwellings Board in providing low-cost housing, and the beginning of State housing schemes which have operated to the present.

• The Lahey family house at Saint Lucia was the home of prominent artist Vida Lahey

from 1946 until her death in 1968. A significant amount of her work is known to have been done in the house, which is depicted in several of her paintings.


Queensland Houses: Discussion of Recommendations This project seeks to guide the Queensland Heritage Council in its assessment of houses for entry in the Heritage Register. The recommendations which follow are based on the foregoing sections of the report: the History of the Register, Previous Methods of Classification, Analysis of the Register, History of the Queensland House, Regional Variations, Recommended Typology and Guidelines for Applying the Criteria. Some further discussion may be necessary to summarise the issues leading to the recommendations. History of Register The process by which the Queensland Heritage Register was created is probably the cause of some unsatisfactory representation among many types of heritage places, including houses. The pathway of transferral from a very old National Trust Classified List to a Schedule which later became a Register undoubtedly built a number of biases into the content. Although the techniques of assessment have become more sophisticated in the years since, there has never been a systematic process for seeking out heritage places for entry in the Register; the input of recommendations to the Register has always been achieved by reactive rather than proactive means. One way of achieving a more proactive approach is by instituting a program of heritage surveys, a suggestion which is discussed below. Legislative Guidance The process of entering houses in the Register must conform to the Queensland Heritage Act, which sets out two qualities of the house which must be tested: First, the house must be of "cultural heritage significance", which is not defined in the Act, except to say that it "includes ... aesthetic, architectural, historical, scientific, social or technological significance to the present generation or past or future generations." This wording is not entirely satisfactory, as the use of the word "includes" implies that there may be other forms of cultural heritage significance not defined in the Act. This is a clumsy test, not found in any other Australian heritage legislation, and it seems unnecessary, as the criteria go on to provide their own tests of significance. Second, the house must satisfy one or more of the criteria. These are broadly similar to criteria in use elsewhere in Australia, and suggest a number of significant values; for example the house might be of historical value, either generally in "demonstrating the evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history", or more particularly because of its "special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland’s history". The house may have rarity value, if it has qualities that are "rare, uncommon or endangered", or may have documentary value if it "has potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of Queensland’s history". The house may have representative value if it demonstrates "the principal characteristics of a particular class of cultural places", aesthetic value if it "is important because of its aesthetic significance", or technological value if it demonstrates "a high degree of creative or technical achievement". (As there is no direct reference to architectural value in the criteria, these three values will often be applied in assessing the architectural qualities of houses.) Finally, the house may have social value if it "has


a strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons". Obviously in many cases more than one criterion will apply to a single house. Some of the criteria may overlap, for example “aesthetic significance” and “creative achievement” are closely related concepts, and both may apply to one house. Conversely, other criteria may exclude each other; a house is unlikely to be both “uncommon” and a good representative of a wider class. Four of the criteria require that a house demonstrate a particular quality. That implies that the quality must not be merely present, but be clearly visible. The house should be able to serve as an example to illustrate that quality. The criteria do not provide any thresholds, that is any indication of what level of significance must be present before a decision is made whether to include it in the Register. They use words like "important", "special" and "rare", all of which imply that the house should be distinguished in some way to raise it out of the ordinary. But the Act is silent on how important, how special, and how rare a house must be before it is entered in the Register. If a house has a special association with a particular person of importance, how special an association and how important must the person be to warrant entry in the Register? The criteria do encourage us to think of Queensland houses as divided into categories and regions. They repeatedly refer to significant values relating to a particular class, particular person and particular community, making it clear that the cultural heritage significance of a house does not have to mean significance to Queensland as a whole. As the "evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history", probably more than that of any other state of Australia, is the history of interacting and competing regions, then a place that is significant to any one of those regions is significant to the heritage of Queensland. History The history of the Queensland house which appears earlier in this report is intended to provide background which will assist in assessing a house under some of these criteria. It should go some way toward suggesting whether an individual house makes a statement about historical evolution, whether it is rare or common, whether it is likely to provide evidence or is a good representative, or is of technological value. It probably will not help with deciding whether a house has specific historical associations, or is of aesthetic or social value. These are qualities which apply to many things other than houses, and whose assessment can also be highly subjective. What should emerge from a reading of the history is an appreciation that the story of the Queensland house is very complex; that the historical "evolution or pattern" of Queensland has taken different forms at different times and in different places, and that this is reflected in the diversity of Queensland houses. The history of Brisbane has been very different from the history of Bundaberg or Barcaldine, and all three towns have different types of houses as a result. While the literature on the historical evolution of the Queensland house seems impressively extensive, especially that published in the past twenty years, closer inspection shows that in fact there are major gaps in what has been written. The majority of researchers have dealt only with particular regions or house types, and there


are large areas of the state's housing about which we know very little. In much historical writing there has been a particular tendency to concentrate on the houses of Brisbane, understandably enough, while the houses of some areas such as the west and centre of Queensland are little known. One recommendation which naturally arises from this observation is that research be undertaken to fill the gaps. This unevenness is a normal state of affairs in the process of compiling any aspect of the state's history, and it will change in the future, but the immediate danger is that in the absence of more detailed information, there is a tendency to take what is known about one part of the state and apply it to other parts. Frequently statements are made about "the Queensland house" which are in fact true only of the Brisbane house. The other obstacle to understanding the regional diversity of Queensland's houses is the tendency to forget that events in different parts of the state took place in very different time frames. Queensland was not settled by Europeans in 1824; only Brisbane was. The sugar town of Tully and the mining town of Mount Isa were both established almost exactly a hundred years later. The implications of this in the "evolution and pattern" of Queensland's history are that in both those towns there are houses built in the 1920s which might be regarded as commonplace in Brisbane, but which are the founding buildings of the historic environment in their regions. They have exactly the same significance to the local communities as an 1820s house in Brisbane would have, if any had survived from the now almost totally vanished convict landscape. It takes a conscious effort of the historical imagination to keep these different time frames in view when assessing the heritage significance of Queensland houses. But to fail to do so will result in making bad judgments in the assessment of regional houses. Such judgments in the past probably account for some of the unbalanced representation on the Register. Register Analysis The foregoing analysis of houses already on the Register is based largely on their physical description and their date of construction. These are values which are relatively easily observed and can be conveniently described from the register assessment reports. As a result, it is a rather cold enumeration of characteristics of houses which can be counted. What it lacks is an assessment of the historical and social significance of the houses; that is, their significance under criteria (a) "evolution or pattern of Queensland’s history", (g) "association with a particular community or cultural group", and (h) "special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation". It is possible to record that these criteria have been applied to the assessment of the house, but there seems to be no way of rigorously analysing their comparative strength. Is the house of a wealthy banker more significant than the house of a noted artist? Is a house that a moderately famous person lived in for fifty years more or less significant than a house that a very famous person lived in for only five years? Is historical significance more important than architectural merit? These are all subjective judgments. Such judgements must be made, but they can only be made subjectively, case by case. In my reading of the literature on the assessment of cultural heritage value in Australia and elsewhere, I can find very little advice on how to make these judgements on a rigorous and consistent basis. The problem is widely recognised, but there has been little progress in moving away from intuitive judgment. Thus in analysing what already exists on the Register - which seems central to the aims of this project - there is a disparity between the physical values which are relatively


straightforward to measure, and the more ephemeral values relating to historical and social significance. This presents some problems in formulating recommendations. However, it is possible to make some progress toward recommendations by looking at the more easily measurable qualities. Typology One problem which arises in analysing exactly what kinds of houses are represented on the Register today is a lack of consistency in the descriptions of those houses. Accordingly this report has devoted some space to listing the ways in which types of Queensland houses have been categorised by other writers in the past. There is so much divergence in approaches and vocabulary that no one has yet proposed a workable typology which could be adopted without alteration. However, there are many typological analyses in existence which provide valuable insights. I believe it is important that consistent methods be adopted for describing houses and assessing their significance, and that this should commence with the use of a standard typology using a standard vocabulary of terms. Hence, rather than inventing yet another kind of typology, this report has taken what seem to be the most workable and consistent approaches at present in existence, simplified them where necessary, and proposed the best features of present methods of categorisation be adopted. Part of the problem with existing approaches is that they have combined or blurred the houses' period of construction, form, style, materials and other characteristics, so that no two systems are directly comparable. My recommendation is that the typology to be adopted should recognise all these elements as separate characteristics of Queensland houses and describe them distinctly clearly.


Representation of House Types This analysis of the houses presently represented on the Queensland Heritage Register forms the basis of many of the following recommendations. It is apparent that the Register at present disproportionately represents some types of houses, notably:

• nineteenth century houses • grand houses • two-storey houses • stone houses • brick houses • urban houses • Brisbane houses • South-eastern houses

In other words, there are relatively high proportions of all these kinds of houses on the Register at present, in some cases very high proportions. The recommendations will propose ways in which that balance might be amended. However, before any recommendations can be implemented, it is necessary for the Queensland Heritage Council to decide what representation it wants to see on the Register. If it considers that the present balance is unrepresentative and undesirable, then the recommendations may be of some use. If however, the Council is happy with the present state of the Register, then no action is necessary. This report does not propose that any houses should be removed from the Register; instead it recommends that systematic measures be undertaken to find others to improve the balance. To redress the balance, it appears that the Register should include more examples of:

• twentieth century houses • recent houses • rural houses • small houses • primitive houses • ordinary houses • timber houses • corrugated iron houses • Northern houses • Western houses

It would be possible to go through the history of the Queensland house, draw up lists of materials, house forms and styles, and then seek to ensure that representatives of all these types were represented on the Register: Are there slab houses, iron houses, earth houses, fibro houses, Federation houses, Tudor houses, Spanish Mission houses? This approach has sometimes been described disparagingly as "stamp collecting" in heritage conservation circles, and it can degenerate into a very artificial and silly exercise. However, it can also be a very useful check on the current balance of representation on the Register, and a means of identifying existing gaps.


Finding Gaps There are some categories of houses identified in the overview history which are poorly represented - or not represented at all - in the Register at present. This may be because they are very rare, or difficult to identify, or their importance has not been recognised. Some of these are:

Houses in early primitive materials: slab, bark, shingle, etc. Depression houses in makeshift materials: oil drums, linoleum, bottles, etc. Austerity and owner-builder houses. Representative types of the Inter-War Queenslander house forms. The first (or early) use of new materials: asbestos cement, concrete block etc. Landmark houses: the first Workers Dwelling is on the Register. Other watersheds such as houses marking the transition from Victorian to Federation styles, the first (or early) prefabricated houses by Campbells and Brown & Broad would be equally valuable. Houses by specific architects at present poorly represented on the Register.

These examples are all chosen for their documentary value, that is their ability to tell us things about the past. All of these themes would most efficiently be identified by means of systematic surveys. There are also categories of houses with historic values which could actively be sought in a similar way. Missing Persons The earlier discussion of historic values associated with houses in the Register noted that in some cases the assessment appears to have moved from recognition of a house for its architectural values, to finding notable owners so historic values can also be attached to the house. In some cases this has resulted in a rather artificial inflation of the historic values. An antidote would be to search for unrecognised houses formerly occupied by notable historic figures. This approach would not begin with the house, as was the practice in years past, but with the person. Identify notable people and groups in Queensland history who are unrepresented on the Register at present. Then seek out houses and other places associated with the missing persons. Where did T.J. Ryan and Edward Theodore live when they were Premiers of Queensland? This approach of course could be applied to many types of places other than houses; what remains of the pre-Federation border customs posts? Where are the earliest CWA clubhouses? How many shearing sheds associated with the 1891 strike still stand?


Building Bias into the Assessment There are two ways to shift the emphasis of the Register. The first is the reactive way of assessing each nominated house in terms of the Register analysis, in other words building in a bias toward under-represented categories of houses. If for example, a grand masonry house in the Brisbane suburbs and a timber cottage in Barcaldine are both under consideration, let the relative representation of each type on the Register influence the decisions. This might seem to be a relatively crude instrument, but over time it will have the effect of shifting the Register's representation of house types. Heritage Council members cannot be expected to keep the current Register analysis in their minds when making decisions, but they can periodically be reminded of it. If Council accepts that it is desirable to re-shape the Register toward more balanced representation, then the professional assessments of heritage significance need to contain the information necessary for them to make informed decisions. More Information To assist in this process, it would be desirable for the assessment form placed before the Heritage Council to give some indication of the present representation of the house type on the Register. This might take the form of statements like, "This house is of brick, which makes up 33% of the houses currently in the Register", or "This house is of corrugated iron, which makes up only 1% of the houses currently in the Register". It would not be desirable to make a firm rule that no more brick houses be entered in the Register, because there are undoubtedly significant brick houses which are not yet entered, and a brick house may very well have significance for reasons completely unconnected with its material. However, it would be useful when making a judgment of significance to see which way the decision would tip the analysis of house types in the Register. This information is relatively straightforward in terms of a house's physical description, location and date, but much more complicated when historical and social value are being considered. Nonetheless, it should be possible to move in the direction of supplying more comparative information in those areas as well. Sometimes when a house is recommended for the Register under the criterion of demonstrating the "evolution or pattern of Queensland's history", the statement of significance sounds very generic, as for example in providing "evidence of the pastoral settlement of western Queensland". This is a statement which could be made for many thousands of houses, and contains no information which assists an assessment of its significance. A more rigorous assessment should state more clearly what aspect of the evolution or pattern of Queensland's history that house demonstrates, and why it is a particularly good example to select. It should provide some evidence of how many other houses (or other places) might demonstrate that particular evolution or pattern equally well, and why this example is superior to the others. It would be useful to know how many other places already are, or might be, entered in the Register for the same, or similar, reasons. Perhaps the statement above might read something like: "it is an exceptionally well-preserved example of the timber homesteads built during the occupation of the blacksoil plains during the 1860s; only two others of the type are on the Register, and no more are known to exist".


Similarly, a statement that a house "is associated with" a prominent individual needs to be expanded. How closely associated? For how long? Did the individual actually live there, or simply own the property as an investment? How many other houses were associated with that same individual and potentially demonstrate the same level of significance? A recommendation along these lines will of course mean more work for staff, but it is difficult to see what procedures can possibly be implemented to re-shape the representation of houses on the Register without taking up more staff time. Reviewing Register Decisions I have been reluctant to propose that any houses be removed from the Register, for I have seen no evidence to suggest that a wrong judgment was made in any particular case. However, it is clear that the pattern of representation of regions, periods and house types on the Register at present is distorted, and it appears that the general trend of overall judgments caused this effect. It is not hard to discover why this has occurred. The fact is that a very large proportion of houses on the Register were not initially assessed under the criteria which have existed in legislation since 1992, but owe their place on the Register to the legislation which included them in the Schedule of 1990. The places on that Schedule were originally assessed by the National Trust of Queensland or the Australian Heritage Commission for their own purposes, and using their own criteria. I distinguish sharply between the houses entered in the Register by decision of the Heritage Council after 1992, and those that were already entered before that date. My understanding of the processes adopted by the Cultural Heritage Branch since 1992 is that all houses entered in the Register in that time have been subject to rigorous professional scrutiny in terms of the criteria in the Act, and that the Council's decisions have been made on the basis of sound recommendations. However, the houses inherited from the 1990 Schedule have been through very different, and sometimes uncertain, processes. It is not clear to me what has been done since 1992 to re-assess the houses from the 1990 Schedule in the light of later criteria and procedures. Certainly a great deal has been done, for the majority of houses on the Register now have a statement of significance framed in terms of the 1992 criteria. However, given the imbalances revealed by the foregoing analysis of the Register, I propose that reviewing the significance of houses from the 1990 Schedule be continued as an ongoing process. I do not regard this as urgent, or as having high priority in allocating staff time, but I think it is desirable that as the Register evolves and the Heritage Council refines its vision of what the Register should contain in future, the 1990 houses be subject to periodic critical scrutiny.


Areas and Precincts There are undoubtedly many reasons why houses are recommended for the Register. In some cases the aim may be to recognise the significance of a group of houses rather than an individual building. In cases where criterion (d) is invoked, "demonstrating the principal characteristics of a particular class of cultural places", it may be that, rather than focussing on a specific house, the conservation of the overall character of a street or precinct would more appropriately achieve that aim. On several occasions in the past, consultants' reports have recommended that a precinct, a suburb or even an entire town should be entered in the Register. These recommendations have never been acted on, because there has always been resistance to these suggestions within Queensland Cultural Heritage. Queensland has a number of historic townships such as Ravenswood and Mount Crosby where the individual houses and other buildings are merely part of a rich historic environment in which the landscape setting, tree plantings, gardens, roads, fences and rubbish deposits all contribute heritage value. To single out some buildings for the register and ignore the rest of the environment is poor conservation practice. (There are 13 buildings on the Register in Ravenswood and none in Mount Crosby.) Groups of houses are routinely entered in heritage registers under similar criteria in other parts of Australia. In addition, most other heritage legislation in Australia also has provision for creating areas, variously given names like State Heritage Areas, Historic Conservation Zones or Urban Conservation Areas, which can take in a considerable extent of land, allowing landscapes and whole urban areas to receive the same statutory protection as individual buildings do in Queensland. The first such place in Australia to receive formal recognition was the Victorian goldfields town of Maldon, which in 1966 was designated a Notable Town by the National Trust of Victoria. This largely symbolic measure was given planning force in 1970 by the Town and Country Planning Board which made the town an unprecedented Area of Special Significance within the Maldon Shire. This was the first urban area in Australia set aside for heritage conservation measures because of its historical significance, and it pre-dated Victoria's Register of Historic Buildings by four years. In 1973 the Victorian Town and Country Planning Act was amended to create Urban Conservation Areas, and in the 30 years since, many other such areas have been created in Victoria and interstate. Similar provisions have been adopted in the legislation of most other states and territories in the following decades. Queensland has lagged behind this process, preferring to concentrate on a Register of individual buildings and places, despite repeated advice that a balanced approach to heritage conservation requires the ability to apply the concept of "place" in the Act to an area of land extending beyond a single allotment. As a result, an important tool has long been missing from Queensland's heritage toolkit.


Historical forces grouped houses into precincts: a Townsville street, 1915

(Workers Dwellings Board report 1915-16)

Workers' housing at the Bowen State Mine: a Collinsville street 1923

(Queensland Government Mining Journal 1923)


The Role of Local Government The Heritage Council might consider whether the Queensland Heritage Register is the best way to conserve some of Queensland's houses. Local government authorities have planning powers which can control development in specific areas such as a suburb or a precinct of houses. In some cases, where the aim is to preserve examples of a type of house rather than a specific significant house, these provisions may be the best way to achieve it. Obviously the Queensland Heritage Council cannot directly invoke these powers, and their use would involve discussion with the relevant local government body. This is a further reason why Council might also consider whether it would be desirable for the Queensland Heritage Act to provide for the entry of areas rather than single buildings in the Register. The types of places which might appropriately be conserved by local government planning powers are those whose significance is based on their general historical character rather than their specific historic associations. This issue of character runs parallel to, but is not quite the same thing as, heritage conservation. There are well-established principles for achieving the conservation of a group of buildings for their historic character; first it is necessary to study and define that character, then to put planning principles in place which will respect it in future. The historic character of a precinct of houses is not just a warm fuzzy feeling. Properly analysed, it is found to come down to a combination of elements such as building size, spacing, setback, materials, textures, roof height and pitch, tree plantings, fences and gardens which can be measured and described objectively. When new development occurs, the conservation of character is not achieved by direct imitation of historic building details - that usually looks ridiculous - but by attention to the measurable elements of local character. A modern house can look perfectly acceptable in a historic precinct if it respects the basic surrounding elements of size, spacing, setback, roof pitch etc. These are matters which may be handled more successfully through local government planning than through the Queensland Heritage Register. A further advantage of using the planning system rather than the Register in some cases is that property owners almost invariably feel more comfortable about being included with others in a precinct or zone than about having their house singled out for entry in the Register. Local Heritage Surveys The process of better understanding Queensland's whole heritage resource by means of heritage surveys is discussed below. If such an option is pursued, it would be most efficient to think of surveys being conducted as a joint project, funded and managed in cooperation by state and local government, as both levels of government will benefit from a more systematic approach to heritage assessment. Cooperation between state and local government might provide the best means of identifying all the heritage resources of a local government area or region.


Heritage Surveys Earlier this discussion proposed that the balance of the Register might be shifted by building deliberate bias into the process of assessment. The second and longer-term way to shift the balance of the Register is by actively seeking out the kinds of places which should be considered. Other registers in Australia grow in two ways; first by passively accepting public nominations, and second by actively commissioning surveys. Heritage surveys may take several forms. They may be (a) geographical, studying a particular town, shire, district or region of the state, (b) chronological, studying for example the Federation period or the inter-war years, or (c) they may be thematic, studying a topic such as primitive building materials, school residences or prefabricated houses. Of the three types of surveys, geographical ones are more efficient, as thematic surveys require repeated research in the same places, looking for different things. However, complete geographical coverage takes a long time; South Australia's regional survey program has been underway for over twenty years. Surveys are a long-term tool which can shape the balance of the Register, but they are slow, and they are expensive. There is also a public relations advantage in heritage surveys. Frequently people react badly to having their property proposed for the Register because it comes as a surprise to them, and because they are not familiar with either the heritage values or the administrative process they find themselves dealing with. A well-managed heritage survey is an opportunity to have heritage issues and processes out in the open and under discussion in the community for a lengthy period before any recommendations are made. Community consultation by means of meetings and workshops is an important part of the process, giving local people a sense of ownership of the recommendations. Much hostility to heritage conservation is based on anxiety and ignorance, and in the past has often exacerbated by administrative insensitivity. A transparent and respectful process, giving property owners plenty of opportunities to express their views and have their questions answered, defuses a large proportion of heritage issues before they arise. There follows a draft brief, showing what the tasks to be undertaken in a regional heritage survey might look like. It does not include the option of identifying local heritage places for incorporation into local government planning. This brief was originally drawn up in 1990 as part of a proposed Heritage Conservation Plan to guide the establishment of the Queensland Heritage Register. The region is an imaginary one, proposed as one of 22 regions into which Queensland could be divided under that plan.


Queensland Houses: Draft Survey Brief

PROJECT BRIEF FOR A HERITAGE SURVEY

OF REGION 14: NORTHERN RANGES 1 STUDY AREA The Shires of Hinchinbrook, Cardwell, Johnstone, Atherton, Eacham and Herberton. 2 BACKGROUND The Queensland Heritage Conservation Plan proposes that a systematic survey of the entire state be undertaken to provide an inventory of Queensland's heritage resources, to assist state government agencies and local authorities in planning for their more effective utilisation for the community's benefit, and for their conservation. For the purpose of conducting this survey the state has been divided into 22 regions, which are being studied as funds permit. This project is a part of that broader program. 3 OBJECTIVE The survey is to provide an authoritative description and evaluation of the heritage resources of the region for the purposes of planning and conservation. 4 TASKS Task 1 Historical Research To carry out historical research establishing the principal events and themes characterising the physical development of the region since European settlement, and to write an overview which will provide the basis for understanding the recommendations of the report. The overview history should take into account the framework set out in the Queensland Heritage Conservation Plan. It should be succinct and clear, and demonstrate familiarity with the range of historical source materials in existence. Research and writing should conform to accepted standards of professional scholarship. A comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, documentary, pictorial and oral, is required. Task 2 Fieldwork To carry out a thorough physical inspection of the region to identify, locate and describe the places which are of heritage significance. This fieldwork should take into account previous work in the region by the National Trust, the Australian Heritage Commission and other authoritative agencies, and should also be guided by the views of Councils, historical societies and interested residents. All field observations should be recorded by means of photographs, notes and marked maps, whether or not recommendations later arise from them.


Task 3 Inventory and Recommendations To make recommendations for the inclusion of places on the Queensland Heritage Register. These places will normally be part of the historic environment created since European settlement. (Aboriginal places and areas of the natural environment are conserved under separate legislation and will not usually be placed on this Register.) Recommended places may be buildings, structures, ruins, archaeological sites, shipwrecks, plantations, empty land or anything else which is normally fixed in position. However they should only be places which are of special cultural value according to the Criteria and Guidelines for the Register (attached). Places whose qualities are commonplace will not be placed on the Register. Recommendations should closely follow the format of the attached report, paying particular attention to the details of the site record. It is essential that a clear statement of significance in terms of the criteria for the Register be given for each recommended place. The report should also include a list of the other places which were considered in researching the survey, but which were not recommended for the Register. This information should simply give the names and locations of these places in the form of tabular lists and marked maps. 5 PRESENTATION The consultant will first submit a draft report to the Department of Environment and Heritage at a time agreed in the project timetable. The consultant is to present the master copy of the finished report in A4 format complete with all illustrations ready for reproduction, as well as a copy of the report on floppy disks. The report is to conform to the conventions of the current AGPS Style Manual. The report is to contain: (a ) an overview of the region's history, (b) recommendations for the Queensland Heritage Register in the form of assessment reports with site records, site plans, and accompanied by both monochrome photographs and colour transparencies (not in the report) illustrating the place, (c) a summary list and maps giving locations of all places recommended for the Register, (d) a summary list and maps giving locations of all other places noted as of interest, but not recommended for the Register, (e) a bibliography of all sources consulted during the survey, (f) an index of places and themes in the report.


The consultant will also lodge all research notes, diaries, field sketches, tapes, correspondence with informants and any other information compiled during the project with the John Oxley Library at the completion of the report. All marked maps and original photographic material, including negatives, will be lodged with the Department of Environment and Heritage. 6 TIMETABLE The survey will commence by ___________ The survey will be completed by _____________ At the commencement of the project the consultant will prepare a timetable for the stages of the study, to be agreed with the Department of Environment and Heritage, and will keep the Department informed of progress in the project. 7 LIAISON The consultant will maintain regular contact with the Department of Environment and Heritage at all stages of the project. The contact officer will be _____________. The project should be carried out with as much media publicity and public involvement as possible. The consultant will endeavour to make personal contact with the owner and occupant of any property which is to be recommended for the Register to ensure they are aware of the recommendation and what it entails. The consultant will also ensure Councils are advised of any recommendations which may have implications for planning within their areas. The Department will provide letters of introduction, press releases, information brochures and other reasonable assistance to the consultant as required. 8 PAYMENT Eighty percent of the consultant's fee will be paid in stages at dates to be agreed at the commencement of the project, on production of a brief report indicating satisfactory progress. The remaining twenty percent will be paid on acceptance by the Department of the finished survey report. All fees will be paid to the consultant, who is responsible for engaging and paying any other persons who are required to work on the project. 9 CONTRACT The survey will be carried out under a contract between the Department and the consultant according to this brief, which will be the basis for the contract. Any amendment to this brief will be done only with the written agreement of the Department and the consultant.


Queensland Houses: Recommendations 1 That the Queensland Heritage Council define a house as: "a building purpose-built

as one separate, self-contained dwelling". 2 Section 23 of the Queensland Heritage Act be amended to remove the double test

of cultural heritage significance, replacing the words "The place may be entered in the Heritage Register if it is of cultural heritage significance and satisfies one or more of the following criteria" with the simpler test: "The place may be entered in the Heritage Register if it satisfies one or more of the following criteria".

3 Section 23 of the Queensland Heritage Act be amended to allow buildings to be

entered in the Register for their architectural merit by that name, instead of relying on some combination of aesthetic, creative or technological values.

4 Consideration be given to amending the Queensland Heritage Act to enable

precincts of houses rather than individual examples to be entered in the Register, in keeping with practice in other states.

5 That the terminology, periods, styles and definitions in Apperly, Irving and Reynolds'

book Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture (1990) be consistently adopted in describing houses under assessment for the Register, with some modifications suggested below.

6 That the following periods be used in classifying types of Queensland houses:


7 That the following floor plans be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:


8 That the following house forms be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:


9 That the following roof forms be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:

simple gabled


simple hipped pyramid short-ridged hipped multiple gabled U-shaped plan

10 That the following relationships between core and verandah roofs be specified

in categorising nineteenth century Queensland houses:


11 That the following verandah forms be used in categorising nineteenth century

Queensland houses:


12 That house forms not be used to describe twentieth century Queensland houses

because of their much greater complexity and range of types, but that they be described by reference to their styles and types.

13 That the following style names be used in classifying types of Queensland

houses:

Victorian Georgian Victorian Regency Victorian Classical Victorian Italianate Victorian Gothic Federation Bungalow Federation Queen Anne Federation Filigree Inter-War Californian Bungalow Inter-War Old English (or Tudor Revival) Inter-War Spanish Mission Inter-War Functionalist (or Modern) Post-War Brisbane Regional Late Twentieth Century Australian Nostalgic Late Twentieth Century Post-Modern


14 That Queensland houses which do not conform to these typological categories be described as house types, adopting locally-understood names such as Inter-War Queenslander as considered appropriate.


Council should take the analysis of houses already in the Register into its deliberations.

16 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register, the assessment report

should contain a numerical analysis of how well that type of house is already represented in the Register in terms of its location, form, materials and age.


Council should adopt a conscious bias toward under-represented house types. 18 Some house types at present under-represented in the Register and which should

receive special consideration are:

Twentieth century houses Recent houses Rural houses Small houses Primitive houses Ordinary houses Timber houses Corrugated iron houses Northern houses Western houses

19 Whenever new houses are entered in the Register, the Register analysis be

updated, maintaining a current picture of the relative representation of house types.

20 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register under the criterion of

demonstrating the "evolution or pattern of Queensland's history", the assessment should (a) state precisely what aspect of the evolution or pattern of Queensland's history that house demonstrates, and also consider (b) how many other houses or other places demonstrate that particular evolution or pattern equally well, and (c) how many other places already are, or might be, entered in the Register for that reason.

21 Whenever a house is recommended for the Register under the criterion of close

association with a prominent individual person, a group of people, or a company or other organisation which played a significant role in Queensland’s history, the assessment should not only (a) state the nature of that role and why it was significant, but also consider (b) for how long was that house associated with that particular person, group or organisation, and (c) how many other houses already are, or might be, entered in the Register for the same reason.


22 An ongoing review be undertaken of all the houses entered in the Register as a result of their inclusion in the Schedule to the 1990 legislation, to see if they conform to the criteria subsequently adopted in the legislation of 1992.

23 A systematic program of heritage surveys be implemented, with the aim of

recommending houses for entry in the Register. 24 This program of heritage surveys be both (a) geographical, ensuring a balanced

coverage of houses from different regions of Queensland in the Register, and (b) thematic, seeking out under-represented forms, materials, styles and chronological periods.

25 Research be undertaken on a number of topics (see list of suggestions following)

where present knowledge of the historical development of Queensland houses is deficient, leading to difficulty in assessing heritage significance.


Queensland Houses: Further Research History This review of the state of present knowledge of the Queensland house indicates that considerable progress has been made in the last twenty years. However, there are still notable gaps; for example almost nothing has been written about the houses of the western towns, nor has anyone investigated the distinctive traditions of stone construction in the far west of the state and the southern tablelands. A number of topics come to mind as requiring further research:

• Clearer definition of regional variations, especially in the West • Regional variations in and between major towns such as Ipswich, Maryborough

and Rockhampton • The impact of State housing schemes - Workers’ Dwellings, War Service Homes,

State Advances Corporation and Housing Commission • More knowledge of primitive and vernacular techniques • Transfers of influence between architects’ and builders’ traditions • More understanding of local and regional twentieth century house styles • The origins of the exposed timber frame in the 1860s • Materials other than timber - brick, stone, concrete etc • The modern era and the end of regionalism in domestic architecture

Assessment Issues Going beyond these issues of architectural history and regionalism to look at the process of representing houses on the Register, there are other areas which need investigation, notably:

• A more sophisticated understanding of the application of architectural values in the

heritage assessment of houses • The importance of architectural value in relation to other values • Ways of assessing the importance of community attitudes (social value) in

assessing houses • The assessment of houses as precincts rather than individual buildings • More detailed policies on representing the houses of the rich and famous


Climatic Responses The issues of geographical and climatic influences on the historical evolution of the Queensland house are important and complex, particularly in the West and North: “the principal drawbacks are heat, dust, flies, mosquitoes, ants, etc”, one architect wrote. (Coutts 1934, p. 11) He was one of a long list of people who have advocated specific design improvements to mitigate the unpleasant effects of the northern and western climates, a process which has extended with only partial success from the 1860s to the present day. There are two elements to the process: first the initial house design, and then the subsequent vernacular modifications to improve the house's climatic performance. Some writers have looked at these issues, notably Bal Saini and Ray Sumner, but much more remains to be done. Overseas Influences The historical overview in this report summarises the cultural influences on Queensland houses as being predominantly English in origin until about 1915, then becoming predominantly American until the 1960s, when they become indiscriminately internationalised. However, it is a little more complex than that. During Queensland's early history, while a recognisable house-building tradition was still taking shape, the colony saw an influx of people from a great many parts of the world. This raises some interesting questions about the cultural origins of some Queensland building practices. The south-east of Queensland had a significant minority of immigrants from Germany. In general their communities were not sufficiently numerous or culturally cohesive to create an enduring building tradition, but there were certainly individual houses built with traditional German techniques, for example the long-demolished Rohl's farmhouse at Marburg. (Howard 1992, p. 54) It has been suggested that the X-braced exposed wall framing of south-eastern Queensland may be influenced by German fachwerk or half-timbering. Likewise in Charters Towers there is a local tradition that the construction details of some of the early mining magnates' houses - notably Pfeiffer’s, Christian's and Paradies' - were German in origin. I am personally unconvinced by the evidence in both cases, but the topic has never been closely researched. Much has been written about the “balloon frame” of the USA as an influence on the light stud frame of Queensland. I have dismissed this as a myth, demonstrating that the Queensland timber frame is derived from the sawn softwood building tradition of England, itself ultimately derived from Scandinavia. (Bell 1983 & 1987) However, there were later cases where prefabricated houses were imported to Queensland from the USA, notably Thomas Swallow's house, built at the Hambledon plantation about 1882. (Bell 1984, p. 78) No work has been done to investigate the prevalence of this import trade and its possible influence on the Queensland house. Still later, in the early twentieth century, it is difficult to believe that it was coincidental that mass-produced mail order prefabricated houses were coming onto the market in Queensland at precisely the same time as they were in the USA. But the links between the two national industries, if any, have never been studied. A number of writers have drawn attention to similarities between colonial Indian, South-east Asian and Australian domestic houses, pointing to the words bungalow and verandah as evidence of links. In fact, many features of the Queensland colonial house


were common to most warm climates, and there is a problem with the chronology for causal influence, for Queensland was not settled by Europeans until after Australian building traditions were well established in the colonies of south-eastern Australia, and that was generally the direction from which they arrived in Queensland. However, there were individual settlers who arrived in Queensland directly from India or Malaya, and a study of the houses they built on arrival here could be interesting. The link with the Caribbean and West Indies sugar planters' house-building tradition seems to be more firmly established, but further research into this source of influence on the Queensland house would also be desirable. Finally there is New Zealand. Even a brief visit to the North Island demonstrates a tradition of building in timber and iron with some remarkable parallels to the houses of Queensland, far more evident than the links with the houses of the closer states of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. No investigation of Queensland-New Zealand housing influences has ever been done.


Queensland Houses: Bibliography Books and Journal Articles Allom, Richard, “The Small Brisbane House”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 19-22 Allom, Richard, "Two Centuries of the North Australian House", in Peter Freeman & Judy Vulker (eds), The Australian Dwelling, Canberra, 1991, pp. 55-58 Apperly, Richard, Robert Irving & Peter Reynolds, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present, Sydney, 1989 Archer, John, Building a Nation: a History of the Australian House, Sydney, 1987 Australian Cement Manufacturers' Association, Concrete Round the Home, Sydney, n.d.. [c.1925] Barley, M.W., The English Farmhouse and Cottage, London, 1961 Barton, C.H., The Queensland Timber Industry and its Prospects, Maryborough, 1885 "Beer Bottles as Building Material", Queenslander 1 August 1903 Bell, Peter, "Houses in North Queensland Mining Towns 1864-1914", in K.H. Kennedy (ed), Readings in North Queensland Mining History, Volume One, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1980, pp. 299-328. Bell, Peter, "The Balloon Frame Myth", Journal of Australian Studies, 12, 1983, pp. 53-66 Bell, Peter, Timber and Iron: Houses in North Queensland Mining Settlements 1861-1920, St Lucia, 1984 Bell, Peter, "Miasma, Termites and a Nice View of the Dam: the Development of the Highset House in North Queensland", in Lectures on North Queensland History, Fourth Series, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1984, pp. 36-53 Bell, Peter, "Stud Framing: the Empire Strikes Back", Architecture Australia 76, No. 2, 1987, pp. 81-84. Bell, Peter, "'Square Wooden Boxes on Long Legs': Timber Houses in North Queensland", Historic Environment 6, Nos. 2 & 3, 1988, pp. 32-37 Bell, Peter, 'Continuity in Australian Timber Domestic Building: an Early Cottage at Burra', Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology 8, 1990, 3-12 Bell, Peter, "Torode, Walter Charles (1858-1937)", Australian Dictionary of Biography 12, 1990, p. 244


Bell, Peter, "A Brief Survey of Timber Wall Construction Techniques in Australia", in David Reynolds (ed), Timber & Tin: Proceedings of the First ICOMOS New Zealand Conference on the Conservation of Vernacular Structures, Auckland, 1992, pp. 52-58 Bell, Peter, Early Bricks and Brickwork in South Australia, Adelaide, 1998 Bellamy, Herbert, "Timber Dwellings in Queensland", Building World 25 July 1903 Berry, D.W. & Gilbert, S.H., Pioneer Building Techniques in South Australia, Adelaide, 1981 Blainey, Geoffrey, The Rush that Never Ended: a History of Australian Mining, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1969 (2nd edn) Boyd, A.J., “Bush Work”, Queensland Agricultural Journal 4, 1899, pp. 20-26, 108-112, 180-184 & 341-432 Boyd, A.J., “Hints to New Settlers”, Queensland Agricultural Journal 30, 1913, pp. 11-16, 75-81, 152-154, 216-219, 279-281; 31, 1914, pp. 76-77; new series 1, 1914, pp. 371-373 Boyd, Robin, Australia's Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, Melbourne, 1952 Briggs, Martin, Concise Encyclopaedia of Architecture, London, 1959 Brown & Broad Limited, “B & B” Newstead Homes: a Catalogue of “Ready-to-Erect” Homes, Brisbane, 1918 Brunskill, Ronald, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture, London, 1978 Brunskill, Ronald, Timber Building in Britain, London, 1985 Butler, Graeme, The Californian Bungalow in Australia, Melbourne 1992 Carment, David, "Darwin's Home", Northern Perspective 17, No. 1, 1994, pp. 1-8 Clare, John, 'The Californian Bungalow in Australia', Historic Environment 5, No. 1, 1986, pp. 19-39 Clifton-Taylor, Alec, The Pattern of English Building, London, 1965 Cochran, Christopher, Restoring a New Zealand House, Wellington, 1980 Coote, W., “The Influence of Climate on our Domestic Architecture”, Transactions of the Queensland Philosophical Society 1, 1862, pp. 1-17 Coutts, J.V.D., Western Housing and Tropic Design, Brisbane, 1934 Cox, Philip, & John Freeland, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia, London, 1969 Cox, Philip, & Clive Lucas, Australian Colonial Architecture, Melbourne, 1978


Craik, Jennifer, "The Cultural Politics of the Queensland House", Continuum 3, 1990, pp. 188-213 Craik, Jennifer, "Verandahs and Frangipani: Women in the Queensland House", in Gail Reekie (ed), On the Edge: Women's Experiences of Queensland, St Lucia, 1994, pp. 145-167 Cuffley, Peter, Australian Houses of the 20s and 30s, Melbourne, 1989 Cuffley, Peter, Australian Houses of the Forties and Fifties, Melbourne, 1993 Davison, Graeme, "What Makes a Building Historic?" in Graeme Davison and Chris McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook, Sydney, 1991, pp.65-76 (revised version of a booklet published by the Heritage Council of Victoria, 1986) Drew, Philip, Veranda: Embracing Place, Sydney, 1992 Evans, Ian, Restoring Old Houses, Melbourne, 1979 Evans, Ian, The Australian Home, Sydney, 1983 Evans, Ian, The Federation House: a Restoration Guide, Sydney, 1986 Evans, Ian, Caring for Old Houses, Sydney, 1988 Evans, Ian, Getting the Details Right: Restoring Australian Houses 1890s-1920s, Sydney, 1989 Evans, Ian, The Queensland House: History and Conservation, Mullumbimby, 2001 Ferrier, Elizabeth, "From Pleasure Domes to Bark Huts: Architectural Metaphors in Recent Australian Fiction", Australian Literary Studies 13, No. 1, 1987, pp. 40-53 "Fibrolite Asbestos Cement Sheets", Cummins & Campbell's Monthly Magazine IV, No. 13, 1928, pp. 27-28 Fisher, Rod, “In Search of the Brisbane House”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 43-53 Fisher, Rod, “Brisbane’s Timber Houses in Queensland Context”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 13, 1989, pp. 309-328 Fisher, Rod, “Brisbane’s Timber Houses in Queensland Context: Towards a Dynamic Analysis”, in Brisbane: Mining, Building, Story Bridge, the Windmill, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 10, 1991, pp. 79-102 Fisher, Rod, "'Nocturnal Demolitions': the Long March towards Heritage Legislation in Queensland" in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past: Public Histories, Melbourne, 1991, pp.55-69


Fisher, Rod, “Identity”, in Rod Fisher & Brian Crozier (eds), The Queensland House: a Roof Over our Heads, Brisbane, 1994, pp. 31-48 Fisher, Rod & Brian Crozier (eds), The Queensland House: a Roof Over our Heads, Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 1994 Fletcher, Price, Hints to Immigrants: a Practical Essay upon Bush-Life in Queensland, London, 1887 Flying Doctor Service of Australia, Home Building in the Inland, Sydney?, n.d. {c.1950?] Fox, Matthew, The History of Queensland: its People and Industries (3 vols), Brisbane 1919-1923 Fraser, H & Joyce, R, The Federation House: Australia's own style, Sydney, 1986 Freeland, John, Architecture in Australia: a History, Melbourne, 1968 Freeman, Peter & Judy Vulker (eds), The Australian Dwelling, Canberra, 1991 Ginn, Geoff and E. Jeanne Harris, "Sherds of Early Brisbane: History, Archaeology and the Convict Lumber Yard", Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal 18, No. 2, 2002, pp. 49-67 Goad, Philip, "Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture in Australia 1930-1970", in Sheridan Burke (ed), Fibro House: Opera House: Conserving Mid-Twentieth Century Heritage, Sydney, 2000, pp. 27-43 Gowans, Alastair, The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890-1930, Cambridge, 1986 Grant, Roslyn, "Urban Consolidation Versus Character Housing: Brisbane's Awkward Compromise", Heritage in Trust, Autumn 2002, pp. 8-10 Gregory, Helen, “Lifestyle”, in Rod Fisher & Brian Crozier (eds), The Queensland House: a Roof Over our Heads, Brisbane, 1994, pp. 1-12 Harris, Philip & Adrian Welke, Punkahs and Pith Helmets: Good Principles of Tropical House Design, Darwin, 1982 Herbert, Gilbert, Pioneers of Prefabrication: the British Contribution in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, 1978 The History of Your House: a Step-By-Step Research Guide, Brisbane City Council, 1992 Hogan, Janet, Historic Homes of Brisbane: a Selection, Brisbane, 1979 Hogan, Janet, “The Elite Brisbane House”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 23-27


Holland, Graham, "The Comfortable House: Responding to the Australian Environment", in Patrick Troy (ed), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 197-217 Hollander, Robyn, "Every Man's Right: Queensland Labor and Home Ownership 1915-1957", Queensland Review 2, No. 2, 1995, pp. 56-66 Home-Building Publishing Company, Compendium of Queensland Home Designs, Brisbane, 1939 Howard, Ted, Mud and Man: a History of Earth Buildings in Australasia, Melbourne, 1992 Howells, Trevor & Michael Nicholson (eds), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890-1915, Sydney, 1993 Hyne, Lambert, Hyne-Sight: a History of a Timber Family in Queensland, Maryborough, 1980 Innocent, C.F., The Development of English Building Construction, Cambridge, 1916 Irving, Robert (ed), The History & Design of the Australian House, Melbourne, 1985 James Campbell & Sons, Redicut Homes, Brisbane, 1924 Job, William, The Building of Brisbane 1828-1940, St Lucia, 2002 John Crase & Coy, New Book of Designs of Ironwork, Fortitude Valley, n.d. [c.1900?] Johnston, Ross, Brisbane: the First Thirty Years, Brisbane, 1988 Joseland, Howard, "The Grotesque in Modern Developments of the Picturesque", Australian Association for the Advancement of Science Proceedings 7, 1898, pp. 1009-1011 Kerr, Ruth, "Construction of Pettigrew's Sawmill Close by the Commissariat Store in 1853", Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland XIV, 1990, pp. 177-179 Kirkman, Noreen, Mount Isa: Oasis of the Outback, James Cook University, 1998 Lewis, Miles, Victorian Primitive, Melbourne, 1977 Lewis, Miles, ''The Diagnosis of Prefabricated Buildings', Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology 3, 1985, pp. 56-69 Lewis, Miles, ''The Ugly Historian', Historic Environment 5, No. 4, 1986, pp. 4-7 Lewis, Miles (ed), Two Hundred Years of Concrete in Australia, North Sydney, 1988 Lewis, Miles, Physical Investigation of a Building, Melbourne, 1989


Lewis, Miles, "Making Do", in Patrick Troy (ed), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 41-56 Looking After the Queensland House, Brisbane City Council, 1997 Marquis-Kyle, Peter & Meredith Walker, The Illustrated Burra Charter, Sydney, 1992 Marsden, B.S., “A Century of Building Materials in Queensland and Brisbane 1861-1961”, Australian Geographer 10, 1966, pp. 115-131 McAlester, Virginia & Lee, A Field Guide to American Houses, New York, 1984 McCabe, M.B., "Brisbane House Types: a Tool for Geographical Analysis", Queensland Geographical Journal 3, 1975, pp. 23-32 Mercer, Eric, English Vernacular Houses: a Study of Traditional Farmhouses and Cottages, London, 1975 Milton, Hans, (ed), Glossary of Building Terms, Sydney, 1994 Moore, Robert, Sheridan Burke & Roger Joyce, Australian Cottages, Melbourne, 1989 Morris, Miranda, 100 Hobart Houses 1901-2000, Hobart, 2001 Newell, Peter, “The Heritage Architecture of Queensland”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 8, 1969, pp. 737-747 Newell, Peter, “Development of the Tropical House: Architecture in North Queensland”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 9, 1970, pp. 162-168 Nissen, Judith, Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: Index to the Biographical Dictionary, Brisbane History Group Sources No. 7, 1999, (index to Watson & McKay, Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: a Biographical Dictionary, Brisbane, 1994) Nolan, Carolyn, Sawdust in Our Veins, Brisbane, 2000 O'Callaghan, Judith (ed), The Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties, Sydney, 1993 Pearce, Howard, Homesteads of the Stony Desert, Adelaide, 1978 Penoyre, J. & J., Houses in the Landscape: a Regional Study of Vernacular Building Styles in England and Wales, London, 1978 Persse, J.N. & Rose, D.M., House Styles in Adelaide: a pictorial history, Adelaide, 1981 Pickett, Charles, The Fibro Frontier: a Different History of Australian Architecture, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, 1997 Pickett, Charles, "The Puzzle of Suburban Heritage: Fibro Houses and the Modern Vernacular", in Sheridan Burke (ed), Fibro House: Opera House: Conserving Mid-Twentieth Century Heritage, Sydney, 2000, pp. 101-110


Pikusa, Stefan, The Adelaide House 1836 to 1901: the Evolution of Principal Dwelling Types, Adelaide, 1986 Rapoport, Amos, House Form and Culture, Englewood Cliffs, 1969 Rechner, Judy, “The Queensland Workers’ Dwellings 1910-1940”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 15, 1994, pp. 265-278 Rechner, Judy, Brisbane House Styles 1880 to 1940: a Guide to the Affordable House, Brisbane, 1998 Reekie, Gail (ed), On the Edge: Women's Experiences of Queensland, St Lucia, 1994 Riddell, Robert, “Sheeted in Iron: Queensland”, in Trevor Howells & Michael Nicholson (eds), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890-1915, Sydney, 1993, pp. 108-127 Riddell, Robert, “Design”, in Rod Fisher & Brian Crozier (eds), The Queensland House: a Roof Over our Heads, Brisbane, 1994, pp. 49-62 Robertson, E.G., “The Australian Verandah”, Architectural Review 127, 1960, pp. 238-243 Roessler, David, The Toowoomba House: Styles and History, Toowoomba City Council, 2000 Rose, A.J., "Some Boundaries and Building Materials in Southeastern Australia", in Murray McCaskill (ed), Land and Life, Christchurch, 1962, pp. 255-276 Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Buildings of Queensland, Brisbane, 1959 Rudofsky, B, Architecture without Architects: a Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture, London, 1964 Saini, Balwant, Architecture in Tropical Australia, Melbourne, 1970 Saini, Balwant, “The Brisbane House in Environmental Context”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 35-41 Saini, Balwant & Roger Joyce, The Australian House: Homes of the Tropical North, Sydney, 1982 Salmond, Jeremy, Old New Zealand Houses 1800-1940, Auckland, 1986 Scott, John, The Penguin Dictionary of Building, Harmondsworth, 1974 Smith, Len, The Trees that Fell: a History and Description of the Timber Industry of North Queensland 1898 to 1988, Ravenshoe, 1991 Stapleton, Ian, How to Restore the Old Aussie House, Mullumbimby, 1998


Stapleton, Maisy & Ian, Australian House Styles, Mullumbimby, 1997 Stevenson, Katherine & H. Ward Jandl, Houses by Mail: a Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company, Washington DC, 1986 Stringer, Richard, Fretwork Pediments in Queensland, St Lucia, 1982 Sumner, Ray, Settlers and Habitat in Tropical Queensland, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1974 Sumner, Ray, “Pioneer Homesteads of North Queensland”, Lectures on North Queensland History, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1974, pp. 47-60 Sumner, Ray, “Environment and Architecture in Tropical Queensland”, Architecture in Australia 64, 1975, pp. 82-87 Sumner, Ray, “Local Materials in Early North Queensland Housing”, LiNQ 4, 1975, pp. 1-12 Sumner, Ray, “Our Father’s Tropic House: the Role of Man-Made Materials in Early North Queensland Housing”, LiNQ 5, 1976, pp. 20-31 Sumner, Ray, “Influences on Domestic Architecture in Charters Towers”, Queensland Heritage 3, 1976, pp. 39-48 Sumner, Ray, “The Tropical Bungalow: the Search for an Indigenous Australian Architecture”, Australian Journal of Art, No. 1, 1978, pp. 27-39 Sumner, Ray, More Historic Homes of Brisbane, Brisbane, 1982 Sumner, Ray, “The View from the Verandah: Homesteads and Landscapes in the Tropics”, Landscape Australia 4, 1982, pp. 292-297 Sumner, Ray, “The Brisbane House in Historical Context”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 29-33 Sumner, Ray, “The Queensland Style”, in Robert Irving (ed), The History & Design of the Australian House, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 290-313 Sumner, Ray & John Oliver, “Early North Queensland Housing as a Response to Environment”, Australian Geographer 14, 1978, pp. 14-21 Tanner, Howard & Philip Cox, Restoring Old Australian Houses & Buildings: an Architectural Guide, Melbourne, 1975 Troy, Patrick (ed), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge, 2000, Warr, Anne, "The Technology of the Corrugated Shed", in Peter Freeman & Judy Vulker (eds), The Australian Dwelling, Canberra, 1991, pp. 85-91


Watson, Donald, Dating Your House: a Guide to Establishing the Date of Construction of Your Own Home, National Trust of Queensland, Brisbane, 1978 Watson, Donald, "A Century of Distant Accommodation: Building Prefabrication in Queensland 1824-c.1920'", Historic Environment 4, No. 1, 1984, pp. 4-18 Watson, Donald, “An Overview of the Brisbane House”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 11-17 Watson, Donald, "Outside Studding: 'Some Claims to Architectural Taste'", Historic Environment 6, Nos. 2 & 3, 1988, pp. 22-31 Watson, Donald & Judith McKay, Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: a Biographical Dictionary, Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 1994 Williams, Fred, Written in Sand: a History of Fraser Island, Brisbane, 1982 Government Publications Australian Heritage Commission, Criteria for the Register of the National Estate, Canberra, 1988 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Melbourne, 1911 Notes on the Science of Building, CSIRO 1960s-70s NSW Heritage Office, Assessing Heritage Significance, Sydney, 2001 Queensland Government Mining Journal Report of the Workers’ Dwellings Board, Brisbane, 1911-1920 Report of the State Advances Corporation, Brisbane, 1921-1945 Report of the Queensland Housing Commission, Brisbane, 1946-1966 State Advances Corporation, Designs of Dwellings, Brisbane, 1938 State Heritage Branch, Criteria for the Inclusion of Places on the South Australian Register of State Heritage Items, Adelaide, 1990 Timber Notes, Queensland Forestry Department, 1980s War Service Homes Commission, Queensland Branch, Designs of Homes for Selection by Applicants, Brisbane, 1927 Theses Balchin, C.C., The Queensland House, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1957


Bell, Peter, Houses and Mining Settlement in North Queensland 1861-1920, PhD thesis, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1982 Cheney, P.J., Social Changes and their Influence on Domestic Architecture in Queensland, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1955 Kennedy, Michael, Domestic Architecture in Queensland Between the Wars, MBltEnvt thesis, University of New South Wales, 1989 Lafferty, F.B., Indigenous Architecture of Queensland, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1956 Macrossan, P., The Case for Regional Identity in the Domestic Architecture of South-East Queensland, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1976 Newell, Peter, The House in Queensland from First Settlement to 1985, MArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1988 Rechner, Judy, Houses for Queenslanders of Small Means: Workers’ Dwellings in Old Coorparoo Shire 1910-1940, MA thesis, University of Queensland, 1998 Seymour, Stewart, Warwick: a Sandstone Building Tradition, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1985 Short, R,N., The Need for the Verandah in Brisbane Housing, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1966 Smith, L.S., The Vernacular Tradition, BArch thesis, University of Queensland, 1967 Spencer, J.L., Relict Elements in the Townscape of Gympie, BA(Hons) thesis, University of Queensland, 1967 Sumner, Ray, Environmental Influences on Early Domestic Architecture in North Queensland, MA thesis, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1975 Unpublished Reports and Papers Allom Lovell Marquis-Kyle, The Character of Residential Areas: Brisbane, unpublished report to Brisbane City Council, 1994 Bell, Peter, Vernacular Domestic Architecture in North Queensland Mining Towns, unpublished report to Australian Heritage Commission, 1979 Bell, Peter, North Queensland Houses, unpublished report to Australian Heritage Commission, 1982 Frost, Alan, The Queensland High-set House: its Origins, Diffusion, Refinement and Sociology, unpublished paper, Latrobe University, 1992


Higman, Barry, "The Cartography of Domestic Space: Quantitative Approaches to a History of the Twentieth-Century House Floor Plan", paper at Australian Historical Association Conference, Brisbane, July 2002 Ivan McDonald Architects, Toowoomba Inner Residential Area Heritage Study, unpublished report to Toowoomba City Council, 1995 Ivan McDonald Architects, Tambo Town Precinct Conservation Plan, unpublished report to Tambo Shire Council, 2000 Kerr, Ruth, The Brisbane Valley Timber Industry, unpublished typescript, Brisbane, 1990 Mark Baker Town Planning Consultants Pty Ltd, Warwick Residential Heritage & Character Study, unpublished report to Warwick Shire Council, 1999 National Trust of Queensland, Ipswich: a Townscape Study for the National Estate, unpublished report to Australian Heritage Commission, 1977 Newell, Peter, The Origins and Development of the Single Family House in Queensland, research paper, University of Queensland, 1977 Orth, M.D., American Influence on Australian Architecture in the Nineteenth Century, research paper, University of Melbourne, 1971 Roderick, Don, Malaria, Miasma and Mosquitoes: a Search for the Origins of the Queensland Elevated House, unpublished typescript, Brisbane, 2000 Strelow, Margaret, Traffic Manager's Residence: a Conservation Plan, research paper, University of New England, 1999 Watson, Donald, The Queensland House: a Report into the Nature and Evolution of Significant Aspects of Domestic Architecture in Queensland, unpublished report to National Trust of Queensland, 1981 Welke, Adrian, Justin Hill, James Hayter & Philip Harris, Influences in Regional Architecture, unpublished report, University of Adelaide, 1978 Woods Bagot Pty Ltd, Urban Conservation Study, unpublished report to Townsville City Council, 1993


Queensland Houses: Acknowledgements Members of the Queensland Heritage Council and its sub-committees HRAC and MOD discussed the early drafts of this report and offered comments during my visits to Brisbane in late 2001. Rod Fisher and Diane Menghetti followed up some aspects of these comments in private conversation outside the meetings. Helen Bennett and Fiona Gardiner managed the project, and assisted me in accessing the Queensland Heritage Register database and the Cultural Heritage report library in Brisbane. Helen Gregory discussed the anticipated outcomes of the project and encouraged progress on the report until her retirement. Laurie Jones of Brisbane City Council discussed the role of local government in the conservation of precincts of historic houses. Jo Henderson of Adelaide assisted in compiling data on houses in the Register database. Don Roderick assisted me with helpful comments, in the process renewing a conversation about the history of Queensland's houses which has now been running for twenty-five years.