RUSHES OF PROGRESS 1851–1880

Australia swelled with great wealth during the goldrushes that began in rural Victoria and New South Wales in 1851. These induced a mass exodus of workers from cities and farms and an influx of foreigners who swarmed to the new prospecting fields. Among the hordes arriving from Britain and Europe were boys and young men who became Australia’s leading architects during the next half-century of Queen Victoria’s reign. Their buildings defined a golden milieu of prosperity, pleasure and progress.

Topics surveyed in Chapter 4 of Australian Architecture are:

—From paucity to productivity

—Buildings for education

—English inspirations for Australian churches

—Victorian government architects and planners

—Interpreting the polychrome controversy

—Melbourne’s gold-boom commercial architects

—Novel Melbourne entertainment venues

—Gold towns on the rise

—Imported kit buildings

—Great Sydney architects: Blacket and Barnet

—Sydney’s new centres of culture

—American iconoclast Horbury Hunt

—Tasmanian transitions

—Developing Queensland’s potential

—South Australia’s early architects

—Convict constructs in Western Australia

—A colonial village at Palmerston-Port Darwin

—Promoting Australia’s progress