The Architectural Imagination and the Colonial Tasmanian Homestead

ABSTRACT

Colonial homesteads occupy a pivotal place within Australian architectural historiography: claiming country, adapting to the continent’s environmental conditions, and as pastoral and agricultural enterprises generating wealth they were a focus of self-conscious architectural endeavour. Their making was supported by diffuse networks of financial, cultural and social capital comprising the British Empire, which Harriet Edquist has observed can be belied by “popular representations of Australian homesteads as isolated objects within an abstract landscape.” This article presents a reading of Ratho, an early homestead in Tasmania, from the perspective of its occupants and, especially, one daughter, Jane (née Reid) Williams, whose own story points to the complex webs of Empire that informed colonial experience and homestead building. It uses personal letters, diary entries and reminiscences to highlight the incremental design of the homestead in social settings, over water and on land, and to contextualise apparent allusions to originary architectural thinking in the building’s idiosyncratic Grecian colonnade which comprises knotted tree trunks fashioned as Ionic columns. The article explores a mode of architectural history attentive to the lived experiences of a colonial Tasman world.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Morton Herman, Early Colonial Architecture (Croydon, Vic.: Longmans, 1963); J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1968); James Broadbent, Australian Colonial House: Architecture and Society in New South Wales, 1788–1842 (Potts Point, N.S.W.: Hordern House in association with the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, and supported by the Friends of the Historic Houses Trust, 1997).

2. Harriet Edquist and Stuart King, “Trans-colonial Family Enterprises at the Frontier: the forgotten origins of Australian colonial architecture,” Colonialism and its Narratives: rethinking the colonial archive in Australia conference, University of Melbourne, 10–11 December 2018.

3. Lisa Byrne, Harriet Edquist and Laurene Vaughan, Designing Place: an archaeology of the Western District (Melbourne: Melbourne Books, 2010); Harriet Edquist, “The Architectural Legacy of the Scots in the Western District of Victoria, Australia,” Architectural Heritage, XXIV (2013): 67–85; Harriet Edquist, “Thomas Learmonth and Sons: Family capitalism, Scottish identity and the architecture of Victorian pastoralism,” ABE Journal [Online], 14–15, (2019), Online since 28 July 2019. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/5822; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.5822. In relation to a wider Asia-Australia region, see: Paul Walker and Amanda Achmadi, “Advertising the East: Encounters with the Urban and the Exotic in Late Colonial Asia Pacific,” Fabrications: JSAHANZ 29, no. 2 (2019): 154–183; Amanda Achmadi, “The Architecture of Cultuurstelsel in Nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies: Built Traces of Colonial Agricultural Industry,” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 33, Gold, edited by AnnMarie Brennan and Philip Goad, 2–12. Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016, URL: https://www.sahanz.net/wp-content/uploads/Achmadi_The-Architecture-of-Cultuurstelsel-in-Nineteenth-Century-Dutch-East-Indies.pdf.

4. Tasmania is the Island state off mainland Australia’s south-eastern seaboard. Its initial European name was Van Diemen’s Land until renamed Tasmania in 1856. This article uses both names interchangeably depending on the period under discussion.

5. Stuart King, “Scottish Networks and their Buildings in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania,” ABE Journal, no. 14–15 (2019): URL: https://journals.openedition.org/abe/5887; DOI: 10.4000/abe.5887.

6. For example, see: Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012); and Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7. Williams’s diaries, letters and reminiscences are published in: P. L. Brown ed., Clyde Company Papers, 7 Vols., (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1941–71).

8. For a biography of Jane Williams, see: Lucy Bennett, “Jane Williams of Ratho, Van Diemen’s Land: A Transnational Nineteenth Century Woman of Letters,” (Hons diss., University of Tasmania, 2016). For the use of Williams’s observations in larger historical volumes, see: James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008); Henry Reynolds, History of Tasmania (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For the use of Williams’s observations in architectural history see: Edquist, “The Architectural Legacy of the Scots in the Western District of Victoria, Australia,” 74; King, “Scottish Networks and their Buildings in Van Diemen’s Land,” https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.5887.

9. Clive Lucas, Australian Country Houses: Homesteads, Farmsteads and Rural Retreats (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1987), 29.

10. Eric Ratcliff, A Far Microcosm: Building and Architecture in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania 1803–1914, Vol. 2 (Launceston, Tas.: Fullers Bookshop in association with Foot and Playsted, 2015), 698.

11. Karen Burns, “Archive Stories/Symptomatic Histories: The Commemoration of Australian Frontier Space at Purrumbete, 1840–1902,” Architectural Theory Review, 18, no. 1, (2013): 94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13,264,826.2013.788048.

12. William Whyte, “Architecture and Experience: Regimes of Materiality in the Nineteenth Century,” in Experiencing Architecture in the Nineteenth Century: Buildings and Society in the Modern Age, ed. Edward Gillin and H. Horatio Joyce, (London: Bloomsbury 2020), 15–28.

13. Whyte, “Architecture and Experience,” 25.

14. Mrs Charles Meredith (Louisa Anne Meredith), My Home in Tasmania, during a residence of nine years (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1852). https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600411h.html.

15. Joan Kerr and James Broadbent, Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales (Sydney: David Ell Press in association with the Elizabeth Bay House Trust, 1980), 35.

16. A. F. Pike, “Reid, Alexander (1783–1858),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/reid-alexander-2584/text3541, published first in hardcopy 1967.

17. For an account of dispossession and conflict between Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples and Europeans, see: Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014).

18. Williams, “Reminiscences of Mrs Williams (Jane Reid),” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 15.

19. Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 89.

20. Reynolds, History of Tasmania, 89.

21. CSO 1/88/1954, Tasmanian Heritage and Archives Office, quoted in: E. Graeme Robertson, Early Buildings of Southern Tasmania, Vol. 2 (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1970), 295.

22. On Scotland’s improved farmhouses see Daniel Maudlin, The Highland House Transformed: Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Britain 1700–1850 (Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2009).

23. Alexander Reid, Application for an additional grant of land, 19 June 1828. CSO1/88/1954, Colonial Secretary Office Correspondence 1824–1836, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. Digitised by Genealogical Society of Utah, “FamilySearch,” URL: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/304877, film no. 008131793, image no. 580.

24. Reid, Application for an additional grant of land, 19 June 1828.

25. “Report of the Land Board upon the letter of Mr Reid of Bothwell for additional land, 24 January 1831,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 229.

26. “Mrs Reid to Mrs Williams, 15 March 1834,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 181.

27. Janette Holcombe, Early Merchant Families of Sydney: Speculation and Risk Management on the Fringes of Empire (Sydney: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), 13.

28. Williams, “Reminiscences of Mrs Williams (Jane Reid),” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 7–8 & 24–25.

29. Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 31 October 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 38.

30. Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 90–91.

31. William J. Glover, “A Feeling of Absence from Old England: The Colonial Bungalow,” Home Cultures, 1, no.1, (2004): 61–82, https://doi.org/10.2752/174,063,104,778,053,617.

32. Glover, “A Feeling of Absence from Old England,” 89.

33. Correspondence between the Reids and Williams, while the Williams were in India (1828–1835), is reproduced in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 95–214.

34. “Alexander Reid to Brevet Captain Williams, 24 June 1834,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 195.

35. “Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 14 May 1835,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 214.

36. Reynolds, History of Tasmania, 179.

37. “Alexander Reid to Brevet Captain Williams, 3 April 1831,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 129.

38. Quoted in Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 161.

39. Catherine M. Pearce, “Daniel Herbert: Colonial Caravaggio,” Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers & Proceedings 58, no. 1 (2011): 46–60, 57.

40. Hobart Town Courier, 28 October 1836, 2.

41. “Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 31 October 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 32.

42. “Mrs Williams’s Journal, 5 November 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 33.

43. “Mrs Williams Journal, 5 November 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 33.

44. “Mrs Williams’s Journal,” 23 September & 6 October 1836, in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 18.

45. On early colonial perceptions of Australia’s landscape and eucalypts see: Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 67–99.

46. “Mrs Williams’s Journal, 5 November 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, vol. 2, 33.

47. “Mrs Williams’s Journal, 5 November 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 33. For prior identification, discussion and context for this observation, see: Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 208–209.

48. “Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 31 October 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 38.

49. “Mrs Williams to Mr and Mrs Reid, 31 October,” 1836 in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 31.

50. No records provide reference to a date for the addition of the colonnaded verandah. It was not mentioned in a list of improvement made in 1828 (see footnote 23). Nor was it mentioned in relation to some alterations in 1834. The first evidence of it appears in a painting of the homestead by John Glover, c.1837. The absence of any mention of it in correspondence between Williams and the Reids, while she was in India (despite mention of other buildings activities), suggests that the work was undertaken while Williams was at Ratho.

51. John Lowry, “Caesarea to Athens: Greek Revival Edinburgh and the Question of Scottish Identity within the Unionist State,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 60, no. 2, (2001): 138–39.

52. Anne Neale, “Thomson, James Alexander,” in Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Philip Goad and Julie Willis, eds. (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 704.

53. On the attribution for Wentworth House, see: Ratcliff, A Far Microcosm, Vol. 4, 2209.

54. On Samuel Jackson and attribution for Hythe, see: Anne Neale, “Jackson, Samuel,” in Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, 361–62.

55. On the pervasive use of architectural pattern books for houses in colonial New South Wales, see: Broadbent, Australian Colonial House. On their wider use, including by architects, see: Scott Hill, “Francis Greenway and the Design of the Hyde Park Barracks: Revisiting Aspects of the Design of the Barrack and the St James Precinct,” Fabrications: JSAHANZ, 20, no. 2 (December 2011): 30.

56. T. D. W. Dearn, Sketches in Architecture: consisting of original designs for cottages and rural dwellings, suitable to persons of moderate fortune, and for convenient retirement (London: J. Taylor, at the Architectural Library, 1807). URL: https://archive.org/details/sketchesinarchit00dear/page/14/mode/1up.

57. J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Cambridge Library Collection – Art and Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1833]2014), 782. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107256637.015.

58. Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, 8.

59. Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, 763.

60. Daniel Maudlin, Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860 (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 17–27.

61. Maudlin, Idea of the Cottage, 25. On Austen, see 91–92.

62. Maudlin, Idea of the Cottage, 33.

63. “Mrs Williams’s Journal–from July 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 10–13.

64. Bennett, “Jane Williams of Ratho,” 57.

65. Bennett, “Jane Williams of Ratho,” 57.

66. Maudlin, Idea of the Cottage, 22.

67. Bennett, “Jane Williams of Ratho,” 58.

68. “Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 27 October 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 29.

69. “Mrs E. McLachlan to Mrs Williams, 27 July 1858,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 6, 548.

70. Mrs Williams to Mrs Reid, 31 October 1836,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 38.

71. In subsequent years, well beyond the focus of this article, the homestead was further extended with new rooms replacing the return of the colonnaded verandah indicated in Hudspeth’s sketch.

72. Whyte, “Architecture and Experience,” 25.

73. Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, 91. See also: David Hansen ed., John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery & Art Exhibitions Australia Limited, c2003).

74. Julia Lum, “Fire-Stick Picturesque: Landscape Art and Early Colonial Tasmania,” British Art Studies, 10, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/jlum.

75. “Mrs Williams’s Journal, 20 April, Gogar Mount, Scotland,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 213–14.

76. “Mrs Williams’s Journal, 15 November 1839,” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 2, 285–86. Of the mural, Jane Williams wrote: “No justice was done … we could not have recognized Hobart; some cockney like figures were watching sheep, & a train of yellow jackets working in chains.”

77. Reynolds, History of Tasmania, 93. As was the case in Jane Williams’s journal entries and letters, no mention is made of the associated dispossession and genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

78. Jane Williams, “Reminiscences of Mrs Williams (Jane Reid),” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 9.

79. Jane Williams, “Reminiscences of Mrs Williams (Jane Reid),” in Brown, Clyde Company Papers, 1, 8.

80. Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 2 March 1822, 2.

81. Bennett, “Jane Williams of Ratho,” 53–4.