TRANSFERRING ELEGANT MANNERS 1800–1837

Australia’s second phase of colonial architectural history produced some of the southern hemisphere’s finest Georgian and Regency buildings. The flowering began with Old Government House at Parramatta, completed in 1800; surged under fifth Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his England-trained architects, notably Francis Greenway; then consolidated under later governors and their early colonial architects before Queen Victoria was crowned in London in 1838.

  • Forts Macquarie and Phillip at Sydney Cove; artist Edmond Bigot de la Touanne, 1825/1837 (SLM).

Topics surveyed in Chapter 2 of Australian Architecture are:

—Colonial commercial instrrastructure

—Napoleon’s spies survey Sydney’s buildings

—New settlements

—Struggles to build durable structures

—Rum rebels

—Meehan’s survey

—Governor Macquarie’s architecture ideals

—Building a new era

—Introducing Greenway

—Macquarie’s other architects

—Going Gothick

—British objections to building excesses

—Macquarie’s architects under new leaders

—Cautious spending on necessary structures

—Planning Newcastle as a coal port

—Land quests north and south

—Building more convict camps

—Tasmania’s colonial architects

—Finding Australia Felix and founding Melbourne

—Free settlers at the Swan River and South Australia

—Light’s Adelaide plan

—Sydney’s 1830s entrepreneurs and architects

—Charles Darwin’s views from the Beagle

—Governor Bourke’s building revival