Australian Residential Architectural Styles - Old Colonial Period 1788 - C. 1840

C. 1840

Colonial Architecture is the term used for the buildings constructed in Australia between European settlement in January 1788 and about 1840.

The first buildings of the British penal settlement in Sydney were a prefabricated house for the Governor and a similarly prefabricated Government Store to house the colony's supplies. Sydney was a tent settlement. Building anything more substantial was made unnecessarily difficult by the poor quality of spades and axes that had been provided and the shortage of nails.

The convicts adapted simple country techniques commonly used for animal shelters and the locally available materials to create huts with wattle-and-daub walls. So useful were the local acacia trees for weaving shelters that they were given the name Wattle. Some pipe clay was obtained from the coves around Port Jackson. Bricks were fired in wood fires and were therefore soft. Lime for cement was obtained by burning oyster shells.

The first imported roofing material was corrugated iron sheeting. Roofs of this type were to become part of the Australian vernacular. For many years imported roofing was in very short supply. Two local roofing materials were available- there were extensive reed beds near the Cook's river for thatching. There was also bark which could be peeled off a number of the indigenous trees in large sheets. Methods of heating and flattening the bark were used by the Aboriginal people and these were quickly assimilated by the convict builders.

The two most significant trees, both of which grew in the Sydney area, were the Melaleuca and the Iron Bark. The Melaleuca bark, having the texture of paper, could be peeled off the tree in layers up to 2 cm thick, a metre long and perhaps half a metre wide without serious damage to the tree. Although not particularly durable as exterior roofing, the material provided excellent insulation and was used for ceilings and lining the walls.

The resilient bark from the Iron-bark tree was adapted as a major building material everywhere that such trees grew. It was widely used as a roofing material, was weatherproof, insulating and could last for thirty years. Houses of axe-hewn slabs with Iron-bark roofs continued to be built in rural Australia until WWII.

As better tools became available the Colonial builders became adept at working the extremely hard and durable timber of the native hardwood forests. The majority of houses were built of split logs rather than sawn timber. The technique employed for the construction of a wall was to chisel out a deep groove in a straight log, preferably of the local termite-resistant Cyprus pine which became the foundation. Split logs that had been adzed flat at the ends were then stood in the groove and another groove log was placed on top and slotted into place in a circular corner post. The gaps between the split logs were either packed with clay and animal hair or had narrow strips of metal cut from kerosene tins tacked over them. The interior could be plastered with clay, lined with paperbark or papered with newspaper, wrapping paper or calico. Cards, photographs, news clippings and commemorative items were often stuck directly onto the walls.

The technique of making durable hardwood roofing shingles was also developed. Where these shingles have been applied to brick houses, they have sometimes survived to the 21st century, covered by subsequent corrugated iron roofs.

In the earliest houses windows were usually small, and multi-paned with cylinder glass. When the cost of glass put it beyond reach of the home-owner, blinds of oiled calico were tacked across window openings in the winter months.

Types of buildings

The simplest houses were of a single room, which, if the bread-winner prospered, became the kitchen to a more substantial residence, or conversely, became the living room with a lean-to kitchen added. Houses that grew piecemeal were generally asymmetrical, with the door leading into the original room.

Houses that were planned were generally symmetrical, and very simple, usually containing 2 to 4 rooms around a central hallway. The kitchen was frequently detached and entered from a rear verandah or covered breezeway where pantry or scullery might also be located. Fireplaces projected outwards from the walls of the house. Except in the case of some small inner-city Georgian row houses built of brick, houses generally had a verandah added to them, often on three sides.

One class of people who maintained the tradition of wattle and daub, with a bark roof was the squatters who did not have title to their land, and potentially had to move on every two years.

Very few 19th-century houses of wattle and daub or split timber have survived. A small number of split-timber cottages which later became kitchens may be seen adjacent to more substantial homes, generally painted to match the house and barely recognizable.

Most buildings erected in the first 50 years of Australian settlement were simple and plain. Convict huts, marine barracks, government stores and houses for officials were simple rectangular prisms covered with hipped or gabled roofs often with verandahs supported on wooden columns in the Classical manner. They were influenced in particular by the regulation British military buildings in India and other tropical locations.

At the time of the first settlement, Georgian architecture was the architectural vernacular in Britain. Craftsmen, including carpenters and plasterers were trained in the classic proportions associated with the Palladian style fashionable across Europe. Palladian ideals reveal themselves in some of the few larger homes of the Regency period such as “Elizabeth Bay House”. Neoclassism incorporating not only Greek but also sometimes Ancient Egyptian motifs, beginning in Europe about 1760, also influenced Australian architectural style. “Fernhill” at Mulgoa with its wide colonnaded verandah shows the influence of Neoclassicism. As the Australian economy developed and settlements became more established, more sophisticated buildings emerged.