London versus Sydney, 1815–1823: the politics of colonial architecture

Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 191e219 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

London versus Sydney, 1815e1823: the politics of colonial architecture Michael Rosenthal Department of the History of Art, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Abstract This paper investigates the architecture designed by transported convict, Francis Greenway, and erected under the reforming Governorship of General Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney from 1815 onwards. It analyses how that architecture articulated Macquarie’s ideas on how the planning and fabric of the city could facilitate the policies of reformation that he was implementing, and shows how this could have been perceived as oppositional to British Government policy after 1815. It affects this principally through considering the report of Commissioner of Inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, who arrived in Sydney in 1819, other literary sources, and the urban fabric of Sydney itself. In addition, it considers contemporary thinking on the built environment and social control, particularly as manifested in Scotland. It closes with more general observations on the ways in which Sydney contrasted with London, which city was perceived as falling short of what was expected of a great metropolis, and how its early nineteenth-century evolution into a new type of city itself affected the way in which Sydney was perceived. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Sydney; London; Architecture; Macquarie; Greenway; Bigge

E-mail address: [email protected] 0305-7488/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.07.001

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Introduction Ornamental architecture in Botany Bay! How could it enter the head of any human being to adorn public buildings at the Bay, or to aim at any other architectural purpose but the exclusion of wind and rain, we are utterly at a loss to conceive.1 Thus an incredulous Sydney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1823. Smith, informed about, and interested in the penal colony (he had recently been reviewing various books emerging from or about Australia) was responding to remarks that John Thomas Bigge had published concerning the programme of civic improvement instigated by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and, in particular, the buildings designed by Francis Greenway and erected in Sydney from 1815.2 Bigge had been sent out as a Commissioner of Inquiry in 1819 to report on the state of affairs in New South Wales, particularly as they had unfolded under Macquarie’s administration. As Bigge’s criticisms extended beyond the Governor’s building programme, I shall begin with a short account of the development of the town of Sydney during the latter’s governorship (1810e1820). I shall then investigate the issue of what is involved in ‘Ornamental architecture’, and why this should have been problematic. The transformation Macquarie wrought upon the town of Sydney is apparent from a comparison of James Meehan’s plan of 1807 (Fig. 1) with that (Fig. 2) published in 1823 by the French navigator, de Freycinet, who had been in the city for the latter part of 1819.3 Described in 1812 as being ‘in the Village Stile’ and evidently laid out with no idea of town-planning, by 1819 Sydney had been organised on a grid, and embellished with varieties of public buildings and spaces, from the military barracks to the botanical garden.4 De Freycinet’s draftsman, Jacques Arago, was impressed by the harbour: we see country houses, that remind us of the elegant seats in the environs of Bordeaux. Large, useless plants and weeds have given way to the fruit trees of Europe and regular odoriferous hedges; and amid a prodigal and sportive nature appear, as if by enchantment, long and spacious avenues terminated by country boxes, carefully embellished by the ingenious hand of art.

1

Sydney Smith, reviews of H. Grey Bennet, M.P., A Letter to Earl Bathurst and J.T. Bigge, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales, Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed, 19th June 1822 in Edinburgh Review (February 1823) 85e104, 85. 2 In 1803, Smith reviewed David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 2 Vols, London, 1798 and 1802, in January 1820 W.C. Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, London, 1820, and in November 1820, John Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, London, 1820. All these reviews are lengthy, and engaged with what he saw as issues relevant to the functioning and prospects of the colony. Bigge, Report (note 1), 21e43, 50e51, 70e73, 147e150. 3 Jacques Arago, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, in the Uranie and Physicienne Corvettes, Commanded by Captain Freycinet, during the Years 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820; on a Scientific Expedition Undertaken by Order of the French Government. In a Series of Letters to a friend, by J. Arago, Draftsman to the Expedition. With Twenty-Six Engravings. To which is Prefixed, the Report made to the Academy of Sciences, on the General Results of the Expedition, London, 1823, ‘Preface’. 4 Mitchell Library, Sydney, Mss 1593, Raine Family Papers 1775e1929, Item 1, Diary of Thomas Raine, 23 (January 28, 1812).

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Fig. 1. James Meehan, Plan of Sydney in 1808; repr. Historical Records of Australia, 1898, Vol. 6, opp. p. 366.

He was also impressed by the town of Sydney itself: I am enchanted, and I had rather give my admiration some respite. Magnificent hotels, majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy the chisels of our best artists, spacious and airy apartments, rich furniture . would you expect to find all these, four thousand leagues from Europe? I assure you, my friend, I fancied myself transported to one of our handsomest cities.5 In July 1822, writing from London, Macquarie informed Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the third Earl Bathurst, that he had found the colony: 5

Arago, Narrative (note 3), 160e161, 163e164.

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Fig. 2. De Freycinet, Esquisse de la ville de Sydney, Capitale des Colonies Anglaises a` la Nouvelle Hollande (showing the city in 1819) published in Louis de Freycinet, Voyage autour du Monde . Atlas Historique par M. Jacques Arago, Paris, 1824, Plate 94.

Emerging from infantile imbecility, and suffering from various privations and disabilities; the Country impenetrable beyond 40 miles from Sydney; Agriculture in a yet languishing state; commerce in its early dawn; Revenue unknown; threatened by famine; distracted by faction; the public buildings in a state of dilapidation . the few Roads and Bridges, formerly constructed, rendered almost impassable. and had left it: reaping incalculable advantages from my extensive and important discoveries in all directions, including the supposed insurmountable barrier called the Blue Mountains, to the westward of which are situated the fertile plains of Bathurst, and, in all respects, enjoying a state

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of private comfort and prosperity, which I trust will at least equal the expectation of His Majesty’s Government.6 The town of Sydney exemplified this achievement. Built on sharply undulating terrain, it now boasted broad streets and formal routes like Macquarie Street, along which lay such public buildings as the Prisoners’ Barracks (Figs. 3, 4 and 7), St. James’s Church (Fig. 10), the Hospital, and which linked Government House in the Government Domain with the area of ground Macquarie had designated as Hyde Park. Advantage had been taken of the harbour site. Incoming vessels would be treated to a view of Fort Macquarie on Benelong Point (now occupied by the Opera House) with Government House Stables (Fig. 5) making a castellated counterpoint within the landscape. The Lighthouse (Fig. 8), a welcome indicator that the voyage to Port Jackson was almost over, was prominent, too, in the view from the town to the east, while, to the west, the eye was blocked by the imposing barrier of the Blue Mountains. Reviewing (among other books) the Australian-born William Charles Wentworth’s 1819 Statistical Account of the colony, Sydney Smith had interpreted Wentworth’s observation that Sydney contained public buildings and private houses ‘that would not disgrace the best parts of London’ as ‘more patriotic than true’ before concluding that ‘the real Palladio for Botany Bay, in its present circumstances, is he who keeps out the sun, wind, and rain with the smallest quantity of bricks and mortar’.7 Miles Ogborn has written of how ‘the particular geographies of the modern state’ include ‘the capacity to organise space, time, knowledge, and both human and nonhuman resources for unprecedented levels of action at a distance’.8 Smith was aware of something like this when he wrote how new ‘circumstances will throw new light upon the effects of our religious, political, and economical institutions, if we cause them to be adopted as models in our rising empire’ but how Sydney was disadvantaged in this respect because of the ‘preponderance of depraved inhabitants’.9 That is, while the settlement in New South Wales could not help but comprise a microcosm of British society, its function as a penal colony and its location at a distance of seven months’ sailing severely tested that ‘capacity to organise space, time, knowledge’ and in complex ways. Hence, as we shall see, Smith’s outrage at the thought of ‘ornamental architecture’ at Botany Bay. Because this troubled Commissioner Bigge, too, it is necessary to investigate what the term involves. Christine Stevenson writes that ‘‘‘ornament’’ . connoted rustication, window- and doorsurrounds, and the classical orders’; in other words precisely those elements that articulated, as the orders did, the domestic or civic pretensions of any building.10 David Watkin points out that Sir John Soane ‘was anxious from the start of his career to find the appropriate character for every commission’, and how in 1788 he had ‘urged that ornaments should always be

6

Commonwealth of Australia, Historical Records of Australia (henceforth HRA), Series 1, Governors’ Dispatches 10, Sydney, 1917, 671e674. 7 Sydney Smith, The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith Including His Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, London, 1859, 262, 266. 8 Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity. London’s Geographies 1680e1780, New York, 1998, 161. 9 Smith, Works (note 7), 29. 10 Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence. British Hospital and Asylum Architecture ‘1660e1815’, New Haven and London, 2000, 196.

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Fig. 3. Convict Barracks, Sydney, 1817e1819. Photograph, author.

‘‘characteristic of their situations.’’’ That is, they should ‘tend to show the destination of the edifice, as assist in determining its character’.11 The Convict Barracks at Sydney, designed by Greenway, and built between 1817 and 1819, offers an appropriate example of how this might work in practice. 11 David Watkin (Ed.), Sir John Soane. The Royal Academy Lectures, Cambridge, 2000, 2. See also G.L. Hersey Associationism and Sensibility in eighteenth-century architecture, Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, 1 (Autumn 1970) 71e87.

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Fig. 4. Convict Barracks, Sydney, 1817e1819. Photograph, author.

The Convict Barracks was a secure dormitory. Its function e intimated, of course, through its very location e was communicated, too, through appearance: the intimidating ratio of height to width fitted a barrack for convicts (as Humphry Repton wrote, ‘we admire St Luke’s Hospital as a mad-house and Newgate as a prison because they both announce their purposes by their appropriate appearance).’12 The material, brick, and a hardly Tuscan order were properly austere. Greenway’s repeating the brick pilasters and stone ‘capital strips’ at the church of St. Matthew, Windsor (Fig. 6), implies that he considered them appropriate to public buildings in a penal colony. Recessed arches and general plainness had already appeared in workhouse architecture in England; and, while the arches may more specifically have referred to Dance the Younger’s 12

Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence (note 10), 104.

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Fig. 5. Conrad Martens, Government House Stables, 1840, oil on canvas Mitchell Library, reproduced courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.

St Luke’s Asylum, Greenway’s full windows (rather than Dance’s glazed lunettes) indicate this was not a place of permanent confinement.13 The building’s functionalism was further emphasised by its generic linkage to British industrial architecture which was generally brick, and as restrained in any allusions it made to the classical orders.14 Greenway’s surrounding the Barracks with a low rusticated wall with guardhouses signalled that this was a place of confinement; the prominent clock that the convicts’ time was no longer their own. As J.B. Hirst pointed out: convicts had devoted a part of their earnings from extra work in their own time e after 3.00 pm, or when their task was complete e to pay for their own lodgings in a private house or pub. Macquarie’s plan was that convicts should now work for the government the whole day e mornings and afternoons e and sleep in the new institution at night. For the first time in the thirty years of the colony’s history, convicts were to be under constant surveillance, to be locked up at night, and their ‘own time’ taken from them.15 13

For workhouses, Kathryn Morrison, The Workhouse. A Study of Poor-Law Buildings in England, Swindon, 1999, 22e24. For St. Luke’s Asylum, Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence (note 10), 101e103; also Christine Stevenson ‘Carsten Anker dines with the Younger George Dance and visits St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane’, Architectural History 44 (2001) 153e161. 14 James Broadbent, in: James Broadbent and Joy Hughes (Eds), The Age of Macquarie, Carlton, 1992, 168. For British industrial architecture, Edgar Jones, Industrial Architecture in Britain 1750e1939, London, 1985. 15 J.B. Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies. A History of Early New South Wales, Sydney, London and Boston, 1983, 41e42.

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Fig. 6. Windsor, N.S.W., St Matthew’s Church. Photograph, author.

There was a graded release from these restrictions. One year in barracks earned a ticketof-leave. Four years crime free, or demonstrably married and of good character, a person could live out of Barracks. This was a practical system of progressive reform. While carrying out his Commission of Inquiry into the state of the colony, John Thomas Bigge engaged in extensive consultation and inspection. He approved of the fact that Macquarie’s building programme had provided ‘constant employment to a very large body of convicts’ and noted that: the labour in the government works at Sydney since the arrival of Mr. Greenway in the colony, has undoubtedly tended to improve the practice of several descriptions of workmen . In the art of stone-cutting, brick-making, and brick-laying, there has been an evident and striking improvement; and in almost every branch of mechanical industry, attempts have been made to improve those convicts who showed any disposition for it, as well to instruct several of the convict boys.16 That is, Greenway’s presence had promoted practical reform: Morton Herman notes how while the Barrack walls were made from ‘soft red sand stone bricks. The window heads and surrounds are made with soft bright red ‘‘rubbing bricks’’’ to attest to the quality of both materials and craftsmanship.17 The Commissioner also had an educated eye for architecture.

16 17

Bigge, Report (note 1), 21, 32e33. Morton Herman, The Early Australian Architects and Their Work, Sydney, 1954, 2nd revised ed., 1970, 64.

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Fig. 7. Anonymous, Convict Barracks, Sydney c1820 watercolour 140  225, Mitchell Library, reproduced courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.

Turning his attention to the Convict Barracks, he first described its situation, then wrote of it as a ‘handsome brick structure’ in a style ‘simple and handsome’. But that it could easily be converted ‘into a military barrack or an hospital’ shows how close Greenway had come to designing a civic rather than a penal structure. And in one important respect, he had exceeded his brief (Fig. 7). The external walls . which are of stone, and only 10½ feet high, are executed in a style much too ornamental for the character as well as destination of the principal building; and in their dimensions, the leading object of security has been sacrificed to that of exhibiting with advantage and effect the regular proportion of the building they enclose.18 A great deal hinges on Bigge’s finding the walls ‘much too ornamental’. Macquarie’s successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane was categorically instructed to discontinue ‘any Ornamental Work’, and ‘constantly and prominently bear this principle in mind upon every occasion’.19 Bigge’s objection to the walls was that, rather than embody their function they suggested it, through rustication. It is necessary to ask both why this should have been inappropriate in a penal colony, and why one comparatively modest, though architecturally distinguished building should have provoked what appears an extreme reaction.20

18

Herman, Early Australian Architects (note 17), 22e23. Peter Bridges, Foundations of Identity. Building Early Sydney 1788e1822, Sydney, 1995, 153. 20 J. Broadbent and J. Hughes, Francis Greenway Architect, Glebe, 1997; Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19); Broadbent, Age of Macquarie (note 14), 3e18, 157e171, have supplied exemplary accounts of the architectural history, without explicitly examining why the buildings were contentious. For the Governorship of Macquarie, see John Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie. A Biography, Carlton, 1986. 19

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The status of the penal colony The problem stemmed from a chronic uncertainty as to whether the colony at Port Jackson was a strategic Pacific outpost, a dumping-ground for the British and Irish proletariat, a place of unimaginable retribution, or all three. When Joseph Banks appeared before a Committee of the House of Commons in 1779 and recommended New Holland for a penal colony he was asked what benefit Britain might derive. He ‘replied that if the people formed among themselves a civil government, they would necessarily increase, and find occasion for European commodities’. In addition, it ‘was not to be doubted that a tract of land such as New Holland, which was larger than Europe, would furnish matter of advantageous return’.21 Significantly, the settling of Western Australia, described by the eighteenth-century English buccaneer William Dampier as barren, sandy, lacking water e fine for a penal outpost, but not for settlement e was not considered.22 As founding Governor Arthur Phillip wrote, Cook’s claiming New South Wales for England ‘added to the more favourable accounts given of this side of the continent than the other’ were important in influencing the decision of government to found what, as G.A. Wood originally argued, and Dan Foley has recently confirmed, was a penal colony established for strategic reasons.23 While some offered dire prognostications of the fate awaiting any transportees, others prophesied that the ‘thief-colony’ might emulate Rome, and ‘may hereafter become a great empire’.24 The title page of the Voyage of Governor Phillip of 1789 was embellished with an allegorical vignette, designed after a medallion which Wedgewood had made from ‘a small piece of clay from Sydney Cove’, and which represented ‘Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement’.25 On the following page was Erasmus Darwin’s poem ‘The visit of Hope to Sydney Cove’. Darwin has the allegorical figure of Hope communicate her vision of a future Sydney: ‘There shall broad streets, their stately walls extend,/The circus widen, and the crescent bend’, or ‘There shall tall spires, and dome-capt towers ascend,/And piers and quays their massy structures blend’. The diction would inevitably remind any contemporary reader of both the resplendent London, which, in ‘Windsor-forest’, Pope has Father Thames prophesy, and James Thomson’s eulogium on the cultural virtues of the imperial trading city from The Seasons.26 Architecture will confirm a future Sydney as a great commercial city and cultural centre. In 21

Joseph Banks, Journals of the House of Commons, Vol. 37, 1778e1780; H.M.C. Clark, A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie, Carlton, 1963, 62, 66; G.A. Wood, ‘The Plan of a Colony in New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 6 (1920) 36e68, 46e48. 22 Wood, ‘The plan’ (note 21), 39; William Dampier A Voyage to New Holland & c. in the Year 1699, London, 1703. For seventeenth-century Netherlandish explorers, Clark, History of Australia (note 21), 20e41. 23 The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, London, 1789, 4e5; Wood, ‘The plan’ (note 21); D.J. Foley ‘The British Government Decision to found a Colony at Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1786’, PhD, University of London, 2004. 24 Mitchell Library 4658, Album of Newspaper cuttings, 35e36, 5e6. 25 The Voyage (note 23), iv. 26 The Voyage (note 23), v; see also Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire. Neo-classical Culture in New South Wales 1788e1860, Melbourne, Oxford, Auckland, New York, 1986, 14e16. For James Thomson, The Seasons, ‘Autumn’, lines, 42e150.

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1788 Captain of Marines, Watkin Tench, explained how ‘the plan of a town was drawn, and the ground on which it is hereafter to stand surveyed and marked out. To proceed on a narrow, confined scale, in a country of the extensive limits we possess, would be unpardonable: extent of empire demands grandeur of design’.27 Alan Frost has described how, in 1775, Phillip had been impressed with Lisbon, then being rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake, and understood how the town he planned would need: the main square or plaza lying adjacent to the harbourside; the plaza being of extensive dimensions, with the main streets running outwards from it; the placing of the church, hospital, viceregal palace, council chambers, customs house, and naval arsenal about the plaza By July 1788 he was describing Sydney as the future ‘Seat of Empire’. This ‘vision, had it been fulfilled, would have given the future city an honoured place among the world’s town-planning achievements’.28 This suggests that Darwin’s poem has some basis in what was intended, but never carried into effect, and Robert Dixon has noted that the verses were amongst the earliest expressions of an idea that ‘the foundation of the settlement at Sydney’ was ‘as a stage in the cyclical rise and fall of empires’.29 Indeed, it was not uncommon to find writers imagining how colonising the South Pacific was effectively to sow the seeds of civilisations that would reign triumphant when those of the Northern Hemisphere lay in ruins. The indigenous Australians themselves were invisible in this scheme, as they will remain invisible throughout this paper, thus to indicate something of the priorities of the imperial gaze. And although the realities of surviving in a strange environment meant that any plans for erecting anything other than utilitarian buildings were impracticable, the idea was, as Robert Dixon has shown, remarkably persistent in Australia, if not Britain, although hardly consistent with the ramshackle collection of miscellaneous buildings Governor Macquarie found on his arrival.30 Expressive architecture In his very first despatch to London of March 8, 1810 the Governor ‘asked that the Colonial Office send a government architect to New South Wales’.31 He announced himself ‘extremely desirous to do every thing in his power that can in the least degree contribute to the Ornament and regularity of the Town of Sydney, as well as to the Convenience, Accommodation, and Safety of the Inhabitants’. Early reforms included numbering the houses, imposing such planning regulations as the stipulating of street widths, rearranging the town plan on a regular grid, and renaming the streets. Windmill Row became Prince Street; Barrack Street, York Street; and Chapel Row

27

Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay; with an Account of New South Wales, its Productions, Inhabitants, & c. To which is subjoined a List of the Civil and Military Establishments at Port Jackson, Dublin, 1789, 102. 28 Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip 1733e1814. His voyaging, Melbourne, 1987, 200, 214; Phillip, The Voyage (note 23), 122e123; Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 14. 29 Dixon, Course of Empire (note 26), 14. 30 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed., New Haven 1985, 150e152; Dixon, Course of Empire (note 26). 31 Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 128.

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Castlereagh Street, for example, all of which moved towards identifying Sydney as much a colonial town as the centre of a penal colony.32 Regularity thus imposed, albeit a regularity partly neutralised by the sharp changes in relief of the irregular terrain, applied not just to the town but, by implication, its inhabitants; for this could be an environment appropriate to reform and rehabilitation. As Alan Atkinson writes, ‘towns were centre and symbols of public order, places where the remodelling of citizenship must necessarily begin’.33 In addition, as Peter Kohane has suggested, wide, straight streets would facilitate the control of any potential mob activity.34 Yet Macquarie’s architectural ambitions worried London. In 1812, Castlereagh’s successor, Lord Liverpool warned him not to ‘undertake . public buildings or Works of any description without having the previous Sanction of His Majesty’s Government’.35 The Governor took the hint, on his own terms. In 1813 he submitted to Liverpool’s successor, Bathurst, proposals for a Court House that might look ‘respectable’ but sport none of the ‘Expensive Ornaments of Architecture’.36 That is, he was clear that it was inappropriate for even public buildings in a penal colony to aspire to architectural status. Other improvements necessitated no drain on the exchequer. The Rum Hospital, finished by 1814, and designed in the functional colonial idiom employed both in India and the Caribbean, was essential to the Colony. It was financed by granting its undertakers three years’ monopoly on the import of spirits in return for its building.37 However, with the arrival of Greenway, the Governor’s architectural ambitions expanded. Greenway, one of that body of skilled and educated convicts that Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold have styled an ‘English labour aristocracy’, was, like many of the more creative amongst them, a convicted forger, forgery being a crime often committed by ‘persons of ability and information’.38 Around 1800 he had served in the office of John Nash. In 1805 he moved to Bristol, where he designed the Assembly Rooms.39 He arrived in Sydney in February 1814.40 Greenway enticingly claimed both that classical buildings would cost less than ‘the meanest production’ and, were the Governor to grant him the power as an Architect to Design and Conduct any Public work, I will exert myself in every way to do your Excellency credit as promoter and encourager of the most useful 32

Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 97, 101e103; Broadbent, Age of Macquarie (note 14), 4e5. The streetrenaming was announced in the Sydney Gazette, October 6, 1810. 33 Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Melbourne, 1997, 137; see also Helen Proudfoot, Opening towns, public virtue and the interior; Broadbent, Age of Macquarie (note 14), 60e74. 34 During a Research Seminar at the Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney, March 30, 2006. 35 Atkinson, Europeans (note 33), 98. 36 HRA (note 6), 18, 1916, 77e78. 37 Clark, History of Australia (note 21), 270. 38 Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, Unlocking the Past, in: Stephen Nicholas (Ed.), Convict Workers. Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, Cambridge, New York, La Rochelle and Sydney, 1988, 3e13, 10, also 63e68. J. Broadbent and J. Hughes, Francis Greenway Architect, Glebe, 1997, 8e9. V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770e1868, Oxford, 1994, 582. 39 For architecture in Bristol see Tim Mowl, Bristol: Last Age of the Merchant Princes, Bath, 1991, To Build the Second City: Architects and Craftsmen of Georgian Bristol, Bristol, 1991. 40 Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 11. See also John Small, Francis Greenway in London, Quadrant (July 1980), 60e61.

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Art to a Society which adds to the Comforts of the Colony as well as to the dignity of the Mother Country. Greenway had brought Sir William Chambers’ 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture to Australia with him, and clarified his aspirations by misquoting its ‘Preface’ from memory: Let it not however be imagined that building merely considered as heaping stone upon stone Can be of great Consequence; or reflect Honor on either Nations or Individuals; Materials in Architecture of Words in Phraseology having separately but little power . yet when combined with skill expressed with energy, they activate the mind with unbounded Sway. An able writer can move even in rustic language, and the masterly disposition of a skilfull artist will dignify the meanest Materials.41 In other words, Francis Greenway was proposing himself as the designer of a civic architecture as this had been understood from Alberti onwards. The architect’s background and origins are salient here. James Broadbent observes that the Greenways ‘had been West Country builders and masons for generations’, with particular connections with Bristol and Bath. While we do not know where Francis fitted with these other Greenways, we can infer several things. Firstly, he would have been both intimately familiar with, and involved in the architectural embellishment of a flourishing trading port set in hilly terrain. Secondly, his knowledge of the Bristol Exchange (and perhaps the grand ceremonial that, as Wood related, accompanied its opening) would have alerted him to the potential impact of public buildings within the cityscape, and to the role that architectural sculpture could play in visually communicating information about their functions.42 Thirdly, Bath represented the ne plus ultra in modern town planning in Britain and together with John Wood’s stated ambitions for it, may have convinced Greenway of the potential of architecture to ‘be of great consequence; or reflect Honor on either Nations or Individuals’.43 Governor Macquarie now had the architect through whom he could realise his plans for the urban improvement of Sydney. A memorandum of 4 July 1817 commanded that Greenway draw out a ‘Plan and Elevation of a neat handsome Fort intended to be erected, as soon as possible, on the lower part of Bennelong’s Point’ e this was to be Fort Macquarie e and to supply like drawings for a ‘Court and Stables . for the use of the Governor’s Horses, Carriages, & Servants attached thereto’ as well as a ‘Handsome and commodious Castellated House for the Residence of the Governor in Chief of the Colony’.44 These buildings would be sited to form picturesque features of the cityscape as viewed from the water (Fig. 5). Macquarie was treading 41 Mitchell Library, Sydney, Ms A1451 Greenway Family Papers 341e342, letter of July 27, 1814. Greenway was misquoting William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the Principles of that Art are Laid Down, and Illustrated by a Great Number of Plates, Accurately Designed and Elegantly Engraved by the Best Hands, London, 1759, iieiii. See also Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 64e65, and Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 38), 11e12. 42 For the architectural sculpture see John Wood, A Description of the Exchange at Bristol: Wherein the Ceremony of Laying the First Stone of that Structure; Together with the Opening of the Building, for Public Use, is Particularly Recited, Bath, 1745, 22, 25, 26, 27. 43 John Wood, A Description of Bath, 2nd ed. in 2 Vols, London, 1765. 44 Mitchell Library Ms A1451, 1e4.

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on very thin ice here. Bathurst had vetoed the building of a new Government House, but ‘had not specifically countermanded the building of new offices’: hence the grandiose stable block.45 Other projects included an obelisk and a fountain, under construction in Macquarie Place from 1817.46 The former would serve as a point from which distances throughout the colony were to be measured; the latter, a stone block articulated with doric pilasters at the corners and a doric frieze, as an architecturally elaborate structure for the delivery of water. These, too, ‘were deliberately picturesque features in the landscapes for which they were designed’.47 Their very conception e modern buildings arranged over a terrain that could, with its grass and trees, be imagined a version of what was familiar from Britain e appears to have exemplified a colonial mindset that simply accommodated indigenous flora, fauna, and people within the apparently known as one tactic for neutralising the disruptive potential of the exotic. As part of this project, a major building campaign was under way. In 1818 the churches at the new, outlying towns of Windsor (Fig. 6) and Liverpool were begun. In Sydney the Convict Barracks (Figs. 3, 4 and 7) was built between 1817 and 1819. Greenway published an informative account of this Barracks in the Sydney Gazette of July 17, 1819. He wrote how it exhibited ‘a noble structure of admired architecture’ and had an aspect ‘beautiful at a distance’ but which at a ‘near approach’ conveyed ‘an idea of towering grandeur’. The building itself was: executed conformably with the most elegant proportions of the Greek school. Opposite the entrance gate, four pilastres [sic] break nine inches before the face of the work, standing on a plinth, with a double string course under the eaves of the projecting roof, giving the appearance at some distance of a capital to the pilasters, with an elegant entablature, they also supporting a pediment where the roof ends. The wall, which fronts the park, is also much entitled to notice, being of stone, rusticated, with breaks to correspond with the whole contour, and contributing essentially to the general harmony of a style which has been studiously preserved throughout the whole edifice.48 Greenway was evidently concerned to create an architecture proper to a penal colony. However, historical developments were affecting the way the colony was viewed from London. The post-Waterloo years saw a sharp rise in the transportation of offenders from an annual average of under 500 to 1074 in 1815 and from 1818 (1823 excepted) ‘never less than 2000’. Setting them to building was at least one way of getting them working, for agricultural and pastoral employment could not absorb their labour.49 At the same time, it compounded a perception in London that New South Wales was looking like a very expensive prison.50 In his 1814 book,

45

Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 19. For these, Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 53e54, 62e63. 47 Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 39. 48 For Greenway’s authorship, Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 121; Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 38), 56e57. For the barracks, also James Semple Kerr, Design for Convicts. An Account of Design for Convict Establishments in the Australian Colonies during the Transportation Era, Sydney, 39e42. Broadbent notes that Greenway was given ‘his absolute pardon’ upon completion of the Barracks. 49 Atkinson, Europeans (note 33) 345; Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 144. 50 For this see Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 153e158. 46

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Fig. 8. J.G. Austin after Robert Russell, Lighthouse at South Head, Lithograph, published 1836, nla.pic_an6055802, National Library of Australia.

A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire (second edition, 1815) the influential Magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, was branding New South Wales as an exorbitantly costly failure.51 Post-war depression focussed government attitudes, and erecting expensive architecture would have exacerbated problems that Lachlan Macquarie, insulated from events in Britain by time and distance, would have been unaware that he was facing. Not the least of these was the impact of the complaints his enemies in New South Wales were sending back to their influential friends back in Britain.52

Macquarie’s opposition One of those most outspoken in condemnation of the governance of the colony was the radical M.P., Henry Grey Bennet. Bennet himself was in close contact with Macquarie’s inveterate enemy, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, and his speeches and pamphlets could put the case against

51

Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, in Every Quarter of the World, Including the East Indies: The Rise and Progress of the Funding System Explained, 1814, 2nd ed., London, 1815, 222e223, 415, 418e420; Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 153. 52 Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 138, 136e137.

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Fig. 9. J.G. Austin after Robert Russell, Prisoners’ Barracks, Sydney, Lithograph, published 1836, nla.pic_an5924561, National Library of Australia.

Macquarie’s policies years before Macquarie could defend them.53 At issue were Macquarie’s perceived autocracy in general and his reformist policy of allowing emancipists back into society in particular. The latter enjoyed the qualified support of both the Prince Regent and Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Bathurst. In February 1814 Bathurst understood how the prospect of being readmitted to society would rekindle in the convict ‘that feeling of honourable Ambition, which is the best incentive to vigorous Exertion’. Unfortunately, it might also inflame that ‘illiberal tho’ not unnatural Prejudice, which you have had to encounter in your Endeavour to restore the Meritorious Convicts to their former Rank in Society’.54 Bathurst warned specifically against Macquarie’s intention to promote emancipists to the magistracy. Macquarie ignored him. This further alienated a polite society comprising Military Officers and free settlers which imagined

53

Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 154 for Bennet in 1816. Henry Grey Bennett, Letter to Viscount Sidmouth, Secretary of State for the Home Department, on the Transportation Laws, the State of the Hulks, and of the Colonies in New South Wales, London, 1819 quotes Marsden 75e76, Appendix, 126e137, Copy of a letter from the Rev. Samuel Marsden, principal Chaplain of New South Wales, to Governor Macquarie [sic] Parramatta, 19 July, 1815; A Letter to Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonial Department, on the Condition of the Colonies in New South Wales and Vandieman’s Land, as set forth in the Evidence taken before the Prison Committee in 1819, London, 1820 quotes Marsden, 33e35, 50e59. Appendix 2, 117e122 is a letter from Marsden to Wilberforce, 3, 122e126, a letter from Marsden to Alexander Riley (who had returned from New South Wales in 1817). For Marsden, see A.T. Yarwood, Samuel Marsden. The Great Survivor, Carlton, 1977. Lachlan Macquarie, A Letter to the Right Honourable Viscount Sidmouth, in Refutation of Statements made by the Hon. Henry Grey Bennet, M.P. in a Pamphlet ‘‘On the Transportation Laws, the State of the Hulks, and of the Colonies in New South Wales’’, London, 1821. 54 HRA (note 36), 134.

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Fig. 10. J.G. Austin after Robert Russell, St James’s Church and Court House, Lithograph, published 1836, nla.pic_an6055843-1, National Library of Australia.

itself forming the landed aristocracy in some not too distant New South Welsh future; for by now, particularly with the opening up of rich pastureland to the west of the Blue Mountains (the Great Dividing Range some 60 km west of Sydney) the colony offered the prospect of boundless wealth. Judge-Advocate Barron Field wrote of this grassland as ‘the promised land of Australia’, and of how ‘New Holland will be a second America’.55 Free settlers relished the idea of vast pastoral estates, worked with the labour of former convicts. The Liverpool administration, whose penal policies were geared to retribution rather than reformation, would have been sympathetic to this aspiration. Boyd Hilton has written of the post-war years as being ‘scarred by distress and discontent. Prices and wages fell in all sectors, while discharged soldiers and sailors added to unemployment. To the upper classes it seemed that lack of ‘‘all respect for established authority and ancient institutions’’ was leading to revolution’. The quote was from Lord Liverpool himself, in a letter of November 1819. 1816 had already seen the suspension of habeas corpus and the government responded to the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 by passing the ‘Six Acts’ by that December.56 The Gentleman’s Magazine reported on 55

Barron Field (Ed.), Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales; by Various Hands; Containing an Account of the Surveyor General’s Late Expeditions to two new Ports; the Discovery of Moreton Bay River, with the Adventures there for Seven Months of Two Shipwrecked Men; A Route from Bathurst to Liverpool Plains; Together with Papers on the Aborigines, the Geology, the Botany, the Timber, the Astronomy, and the Meteorology of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, London, 1825, 420, 455. 56 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, or Dangerous People? England 1783e1846, Oxford, 2006, 251. For this, see also Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People. Britain 1815e1865, London, 1979, 5; Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 155; James Vernon, Politics and the People. A Study in British Political Culture c1815e1867, Cambridge, 1993, 301; Michael J. Turner, The Age of Unease. Government and Reform in Britain, 1782e1832, Stroud, 2000, 150e178.

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Peterloo thus: ‘we cannot reflect upon the lamentable circumstances, without expressing our strongest disapprobation of those unprincipled individuals, whose only object under the specious name of patriotism, is to effect a Revolution, and aggrandize themselves on the ruins of their country’.57 To challenge the authority of tradition was not just to threaten the status quo but also to offend against divine providence. ‘We govern our country by laws emulative of those by which he [God] governs his creatures’, wrote Hannah More: we train our children by probationary discipline, as he trains his servants, Penal laws in states, like those of the Divine Legislator, indicate no hatred to those to whom they are proclaimed, for every man is at liberty to break them; they are enacted in the first instance for admonition rather than chastisement, and serve as much for prevention as punishment.58 ‘An apparently savage’ penal code underpinned British liberty.59 Robin Evans has described how, in the late eighteenth century, architecture came to be seen as ‘a serviceable weapon in the war of attrition against vice’ and how prisons assumed ‘a separate identity as institutions’, that is, became places of incarceration and horror. ‘Boundary walls . were fixed at between 15 and 20 feet high’ and the separation of prisoners from themselves and society was of paramount concern. Evans writes of how the ‘words ‘‘dread’’ and ‘‘terror’’ were heard with much greater frequency now’, and the penitentiary at Millbank a cluster of Benthamite panopticons, where prisoners were kept solitary, and forbidden conversation until half-way through their sentences, was to open in 1821. In 1818, William Cubitt would invent the treadmill e which, as Evans has written, reduced ‘the act of labour to an inescapable sequence of necessary movements’: one was installed at Brixton prison by 1821.60 This penal policy was based on deterrence, not reform, and consistent with this was an intention to restore the prospect of transportation into something that could only be viewed with terror.61 Macquarie’s Sydney had become a place to which felons begged to be transported.62 Jeremy Bentham always had opposed the colony, because: ‘When criminals had been sent to America . they entered an established moral society. In New South Wales they existed in a society composed largely of themselves’.63 During the 1810s Bentham’s views were influentially promoted by Bennet and others. There was an issue of class underpinning all this. In March 1819, The Black Dwarf pre´cid Adam Smith’s contention that ‘laws and governments may be considered in this and every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of goods’ in

57

The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 89 (August 1819), 171. Hannah More, Christian Morals, 4th ed., 1813, 69e70, quoted Hilton, Mad, Bad (note 56), 320. More’s book went through at least 7 editions in its year of publication, 1813, alone. 59 V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770e1868, Oxford, 1994, 498. See also Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain. The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, London, 1989, 154e179. 60 Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue. English Prison Architecture, 1750e1840, Cambridge, 1982, 6, 45, 143, 3, 295e297; Ignatieff, Just Measure (note 59), 177. 61 Gatrell, The Hanging Tree (note 39), 498, 577; also Ignatieff, Just Measure (note 59), 154e179. 62 Ignatieff, Just Measure (note 59), 170; Bennet, Letter to Earl Bathurst (note 1), 60e63. 63 Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies (note 15), 12; also Bennet, Letter to Earl Bathurst (note 1), 80e81. For Bentham, Evans, Fabrication of Virtue (note 60), 216e220. 58

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observing that: ‘The laws are only intended to protect the rich’.64 Hence, Henry Grey Bennet asked in his Letter to Earl Bathurst, was New South Wales ‘to be a gaol or a colony? e if it is a gaol you must bring back to Europe all the free settlers: e if a colony, in order to maintain those who are already there in a flourishing condition, as well as to induce persons of character and property to settle within its territories, a rational limited, legal government, must be established’. If it was to remain a gaol, he wrote, white-collar criminals should not be transported, but, rather, ‘men inured to daily labour’.65 In April 1817, responding ‘to pressure from Whitehall, from parliament and from the antipodes’, Bathurst decided to establish a Commission of Inquiry, to be conducted by the judge, John Thomas Bigge ‘which would investigate the administration in New South Wales and report on the means by which the colony might be restored to its original purpose’.66 Bathurst instructed Bigge that the prospect of transportation ‘must be rendered an object of terror to all classes of the community’.67 This rendered the architecture of reformation obsolete. Macquarie knew nothing of this. In June 1813 he had asked Bathurst straight if ‘the colony was to be for free settlers and their class, or for convicts and their reformation and rehabilitation as citizens’. Bathurst’s reply (of sorts) sent on February 3rd 1814, arrived on October 7th: ‘His Royal Highness is fully sensible that the increased Industry of the Settlers and the great Improvement of the general Morals and Conduct is principally to be attributed to the wise Regulations, which you have established’. He then went on to give his qualified approval to the policy of readmitting emancipists to society. Macquarie could have been forgiven for understanding this as endorsement of the view that the colony was for the convicts. Attempting to defend himself against the attacks of Bennet in 1821, he would reiterate what by then would have appeared the heretical position, that ‘transportation is meant not only for the punishment but for the reformation of the criminals’.68 Bathurst instructed Bigge to gauge whether or not the colony had developed in such ways as to warrant the ‘abandonment of the present system of transportation’, and whether it might be politic to institute a policy whereby, within New South Wales, the convicts should be quarantined, completely separated from the rest of the population. In Benthamite style, Bigge was instructed to investigate the feasibility of enforcing a regime of ‘general discipline, constant work, and vigilant superintendence’.69 Bathurst instructed Macquarie that he was to implement Bigge’s suggestions unequivocally, and were he to take upon himself ‘the heavy responsibility of declining to adopt his suggestions, you will communicate to me without delay the reasons for your Refusal for the special consideration and Decision of His Royal Highness’.70 As Peter Bridges notes, Bigge’s landed background would have inclined him to sympathise with those who opposed Macquarie. And, since reducing expenditure was paramount, he would inevitably have concerned himself with Macquarie’s architecture. Indeed, Henry Kitchen, whom Greenway had displaced as architect of 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Gatrell, Hanging Tree (note 39), 498; Ignatieff, Just Measure (note 59), 160. Bennet, Letter to Earl Bathurst (note 1), 23e24, 79e81. Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 153. Bigge, Report (note 1), 4. Macquarie, Letter (note 53), 56. Bigge, Report (note 1). HRA, 1 10, 2e3.

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the church at Windsor, lost no opportunity to acquaint the Commissioner with the expense and extravagance of that architecture.71 Bigge only gradually became implacably opposed to any ambitious building programme in Sydney, as we learn from a letter Greenway published in The Australian of February 17, 1825. He recalled giving Macquarie, Bigge and others a guided tour of the Barracks, which had elicited ‘their most decided approbation’. He explained to them how his Court House, which was to face the barracks, would answer its stern fac¸ade with an ionic portico, ‘forty feet high, on six ionic pillars, similar to the Temple of Minerva’. The two buildings were to be linked across Macquarie Street by a ‘screen of the Doric order.’ The other end of the street was would be terminated with one of the lodges to the new Government House they still planned to build, once Bathurst had rescinded his veto. According to Greenway Bigge was part of the distinguished party that ‘laid the foundation-stone [of the Court House] according to the plan laid down e all parties expressing their high approbation of the plan and undertaking and wishing success to it.’ Bigge’s active hostility was sparked in 1820 by a ‘Metropolitan Church’, to be (provocatively) dedicated to St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, and which Macquarie had determined on erecting, laying the foundation stone on August 31, 1819.72 In March 1820 Bigge wrote from Tasmania, ordering that all work on the church cease, subsequently going on to veto ‘all work in progress that was merely of an ornamental nature’.73 This effectively meant all public building then in progress. Bigge made himself brutally clear in a letter to Greenway on September 24, 1820. Not only was he to confine his efforts to necessary building (a School House at Sydney, for example) or repairs (as with the roof of the Commissariat Stores at the same place) he also received detailed instructions with regard to his other tasks. Thus, the Granary proposed for Liverpool, ‘should consist of three stories, the height between each being Eight feet’, and it ‘should be 80 feet in length by 40 in breadth, and it might be advantageously placed on a Line with the present Store at Liverpool’.74 Bigge, treating someone he acknowledged as an architect of ability as a mere tradesman, underscored the incompatibility of architecture and the proper purpose of the colony.

Civic Sydney Lachlan Macquarie’s background was central to forming his ideas. In the general sense, he was the product of a Scottish Enlightenment that had: placed an emphasis on moral sense and a consensus of practical support for improving the existing social structure . One result was support for public works and institutions . with

71

For Kitchen’s complaints, Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 38), 60, 69. Also Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 131e139, 132. For Bigge’s lack of impartiality, Doughlas Pike (general editor), Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1788e1850 (Section editors A.G.L. Shaw and C.M.H. Clark), 99e101, entry on Bigge by J.M. Bennet. 72 Broadbent, Age of Macquarie (note 14), 70. 73 Broadbent, Age of Macquarie (note 14), 70e71; Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 127e128; Bigge, Report (note 1), 50. 74 HRA, 1 10, 382.

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the need for factories, hospitals, prisons, court houses, gaols, mental asylums, libraries, galleries and museums.75 Such ideals were integral to his thinking.76 John Ritchie suggests that visiting St Petersburg in 1803 crucially demonstrated the impressive effects of a regular street lay-out, splendid public buildings and public gardens.77 The Governor may have had his convictions reinforced by his experience of modern examples of urban planning, most obviously in his native Scotland, with Edinburgh New Town, while, more generally, Dublin too had been embellished with fine public buildings. Stationed in Bombay from 1788 to 1801, he would have known the urban splendours of neoclassical Calcutta, if only through the popular series of twelve aquatints which the Daniels published in 1786, and of which city William Hodges had written: ‘For its magnificence . it is indebted solely to the liberal spirit and excellent taste of the late Governor General’ (who had been, ironically enough, Warren Hastings).78 More specifically, Macquarie was probably aware of current thinking on the urban environment in the surveillance and regulation of proletarian behaviour. Stephen Daniels has written of how factory, and, by extension, model villages were coming to be understood as important in this regard.79 Macquarie showed himself alert to towns and countryside in the diary he kept of a tour of Scotland in 1804. For example, on August 4 he reached the town of Dunkeld and ‘took a walk through the Town and the Grounds of the Duke of Athol. e the Town is neat and clean, and the Duke’s Grounds are beautifully laid out. The Town and the Duke’s Palace are both beautifully situated in a Vale close on the banks of the river’ (Macquarie was evidently au fait with the language of picturesque travel). Two weeks later he was able to ‘prevail upon Miss Campbell to accompany and her two young Nephews and myself from Inveraray to Edinburgh’. Elizabeth Campbell would become his second wife, Inveraray the planned town which the 5th Duke of Argyll had laid out and built during the 1770s. When they reached there on August 29, Macquarie ‘took a long ride in the afternoon . through the beautiful and extensive Grounds of the Duke of Argyle in the Vicinity of Inveraray’, and, in the evening, he dined with the Duke and a large party.80 It would be interesting to know if the Duke spoke of the town, or mentioned the unexecuted design for a castellated lighthouse ‘nearly 140 feet high, on a heavily rusticated square base, with an octagonal lower floor and a circular five-storey tower’ which Alexander Nasymth had submitted in 1801.81 Might Macquarie, too, have been aware of the ideas that Robert Owen

75

Leonore Coltheart and Peter Bridges, The Elephant’s bed? Scottish Enlightenment Ideas and the Founding of New South Wales, Journal of Australian Studies 68 (2001), 19e33, 19e20. 76 Coltheart and Bridges, Elephant’s Bed (note 75). 77 Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 86. 78 William Hodges, Travels in India During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783, London, 1793, 16. I owe this reference to Geoff Quilley. 79 Stephen Daniels, Social discipline and the built environment: the contribution of Jeremy Bentham and Alexander Maconochie to a nineteenth-century debate, The Bloomsbury Geographer 9 (1978) 79e84. 80 Lachlan Macquarie, Journal 6, 15 July 1804e16 March 1807, Original in Mitchell Library, ML A7770, 36e107; http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/digital/lema/1804aug.html, entries for August 9, 20, 29. For Macquarie’s comments on the fortifications at Fort George see entry for August 1. 81 Ian G. Lindsay and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll, Edinburgh, 1973, 253e254.

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was then beginning to implement at New Lanark, south of Edinburgh and Glasgow, where a regulated architectural environment was central to the regulation of the working population? It was, arguably, likely. His 1804 Scottish tour diary reveals a keen eye for landscape and ‘several thousand visitors’ were, between 1795 and 1799, visiting New Lanark on their way to see ‘the famous Falls of Clyde’, which were nearby. It is also worth noting that, in 1808, Macquarie ‘envisaged a model village of sixteen crofts at Salen’ on his estates on the Island of Mull.82 The Governor was aware of the reformatory potential of the built environment before he left for Australia. Francis Greenway had arrived with a Letter of Introduction from founding governor, Arthur Phillip, from whom he may well have learned of the imperial ambitions that underpinned the founding of Sydney.83 Hence, it is worth attending to Greenway’s own description of his lighthouse (Fig. 8), in a letter of July 1816 to the Sydney Gazette: The centre of this handsome building is to be 65 feet above the level of the eminence on which it is placed, and will form a square base or pedestal with a circular tower crowned with a frize [sic], on which will be carved the four winds in alto relievo, distributing their different good and evil qualities from their drapery, as they appear to fly around the tower, above which will be a cornice and lanthern, with a revolving light, the whole forming an appropriate capital to the tower. On the inside of it is intended to be a geometrical stone stair leading up to the lanthorn and two basso relievos will be upon the pedestal.84 Although the relief sculptures never materialised, the lighthouse was complete by December 1817. Macquarie was so pleased with it that he rewarded Greenway with his emancipation. It went well beyond the utilitarian structure, ‘most required and essentially necessary in the new increasing commerce of the colony’ that Macquarie represented it as.85 Greenway (probably mindful of Roman precedent) planned the lighthouse as a large free-standing column. Rather than a simple beacon to guide approaching vessels through the Sydney Heads Greenway’s lighthouse may, one suspects, have been intended as a latter-day rival to the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Jacques Arago was duly complimentary in referring to Macquarie Tower (as the lighthouse came to be known) as an ‘edifice equally useful and magnificent . a magnificent light-house, equally solid and elegant in its structure’; and more light is shed by the Sydney Poet Laureate, Michael Robinson, in his ‘Ode for the Queen’s Birth-Day, 1819’, published in the Sydney Gazette of January 23 that year: And yon tall Tow’r, that with aspiring Steep, Rears its proud Summit o’er the trackless Deep; The recent care of his Paternal Hand That long has cherish’d this improving Land; Shall shed the Lustre of revolving Light:

82

Macquarie, Diary, August 10, 1804; Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony, East Linton, 2000, 70; Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie (note 20), 91. 83 Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 63; Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 11. 84 Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway (note 20), 16, 53. 85 Mitchell Library, A1191 Governors’ Despatches, No 18, 1817.

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These lines follow this passage: Hence shall Australia, like her Sister Isles, By Britain rear’d, and fostered by her Smiles, From her own Source her ample Produce pour, Thro’ Eastern Climes, and every peopled Shore: Whilst, on th’expansive Waste of Waters wide, Commerce shall see her treasur’d Navies ride; And her full Marts, her busy Quays, proclaim Her prosp’ring Course to Opulence and Fame 86

These lines, with their reminiscence of Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove’, reiterate the idea of the foundation of Australia beginning the process from which a great empire shall arise; with Greenway’s Lighthouse a symbol of this civilising process. The convict artist Joseph Lycett would make the same point, writing of the Lighthouse as a ‘masterpiece’ before going on to commend Macquarie’s imposition of regularity on the urban fabric of Sydney, before going on to speculate that in ‘these infant settlements of AUSTRALIA we probably behold the germs of a mighty empire’. In 1823 the Australian-born William Charles Wentworth lauded ‘those astonishing monuments’ Macquarie had raised, ‘the bridges you built, the palaces you erected, and the town you founded’ which he linked to ‘that great moral reformation, of which, both by your precept, your example, and your institution you sowed the seeds of among all classes of the colonists’.87 These ambitions were as explicit in the way in which the town was being laid out. Regular street design meant efficient regulation of the population. Public buildings were sited to articulate civic points. The Barracks was to face the impressive ionic portico of a Court House, each linked by a Doric screen, stretching across Macquarie Street. As Peter Bridges has noted, the substitution of the Court House with the less grand St. James’s Church (Figs. 9 and 10), still preserves something of Greenway’s intended effects.88 At the Hyde Park end of Macquarie Street, the pedimented ends of the Prisoners’ Barracks and St James’s Church respond to one another across a public thoroughfare. This is civic planning such as would have been internationally recognised as embodying certain ideals.89 Originally the Barracks’ visual connection with the Court House, would have expressed the actual relationship between convicted felons and the majesty of the Law. The church, more architecturally elaborate than the Barracks e there is more stone, the order is a restrained doric e successfully articulates the superiority of

86

Arago, Narrative (note 3), 160; Robinson quoted Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 115, also George Mackaness (Ed.), Odes of Michael Massey Robinson, First Poet Laureate of Australia (1754e1826), Sydney, 1948, 81. 87 Joseph Lycett, Views in Australia or New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land Delineated in Fifty Views with Descriptive Letter Press, London, 1824, 5, 14. W.C. Wentworth, Australasia. A Poem Written for the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, July 1823, London, 1823, ixex. 88 Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 129. 89 Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 120e121, 129.

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religion over secularity. Macquarie Street itself was already forming a grand thoroughfare (with the potential to compare very favourably with the Strand) along which public buildings, the church, the barracks, the hospital, were aligned, and which was at one end to be connected with the Government House area by a gothic gateway, and at the other was to open through a classical screen into Hyde Park. There was nothing like this in London. On April 28, 1825 Greenway published a letter in the Australian which assumed it natural that this urban landscape e one that completely ignored its original inhabitants e could serve as an antipodean counterpoint to a British city. He wrote of plans to throw a bridge from Dawes Point to a North Shore on which he envisaged building a new town. The idea might have originated in the way that Pulteney Bridge connected either side of Bath. In addition, on a landscaped Garden Island he had planned to erect a cenotaph to the late Princess Caroline (with some irony, if Shelley’s 1817 ‘Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte’ is taken into account): perhaps a royalist counterpoint to the monument to Rousseau at Ermenonville.90 This would have created ‘a grand whole, that would have surprised any one on entering the harbour; and have given an idea of strength and magnificence that would have reflected credit and glory on the mother country’. If Greenway had spoken of any of this to Bigge (and his prolific letter-writing suggests he was in the habit of talking to anyone who would listen) the latter would (incredulously) have learned of an architectural iconography that mixed conservative and radical motifs to articulate the virtues of the mother country through a convict settlement. It was to form an emblematically zoned cityscape, with classical buildings for the convicts and gothic for the free citizens that they might in time become. In England, gothic architecture (particularly as promoted by John Carter) was now a ‘national’ style: in 1824 Sir John Soane would be thrown into deep depression by an order ‘to demolish the new classical law courts next to Westminster Hall and replace them with a castellated Gothic design of the type he most despised’.91 The castellated Government House, Stables, and Fort Macquarie were, as Peter Bridges has acutely noted, ‘all intended to be built as a group in the same Gothic Revival style’, and sited to form significant elements in a picturesque landscape.92 By now the picturesque connoted tradition, established settlement; more generally a deeply moral conservatism.93 Access to these gothic buildings symbolised readmission to society.

90

P.B. Shelley, An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte in T. Webb (Ed.), Poems and Prose, London and Vermont, 1995, 71e81 contrasted the death of the Princess with the executions of the 1817 Derby rioters. 91 Gillian Darley, Soane: the man and his circle, in: Margaret Richardson and Mary-Anne Stevens (Eds), John Soane, Architect (Exhibition Catalogue), London, 1999, 16e25, 24. For Carter see J. Mordaunt Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival, London, 1995. 92 Bridges, Foundations of Identity (note 19), 118. 93 Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape, New Haven and London, 1994.

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Greenway’s buildings were to articulate ‘Enlightenment conceptions of civic virtue’.94 The relatively restrained planning eschewed crescents and utilised a circus only as the site of the metropolitan church. The church, Greenway explained: was to stand in the centre of a large circus, similar to the plan laid down by Sir Christopher Wren, of St. Paul’s in London. At the four principal points four streets were intended to be made, one to Parramatta, one through York-Street, through the soldiers’ barracks, to the entrance of the intended fort, one mile in length; one street would have gone to Cockle Bay. A quay was to have been made at the end of it, opposite to that street; another was to have communicated with Hyde Park, which Park was originally given to the inhabitants of Sydney for ever, and to be laid down in the most elegant style of landscape gardening, and about this grand quadrangle, so laid out, all the public buildings were to have been raised in a classical style, upon a level base, making as a whole as grand a square as any in Europe. The observations made by the Commissioner, and others, upon the explanation of these plans, &c. were, that if I was suffered, I should make, the way I was going on, a city superior in architectural beauty to London, with other equally sapient remarks. Robert Dixon supplies a brilliant analysis of Greenway’s intentions: The ‘grand quadrangle’ was to unite the various public works which were in themselves beautiful and practical emblems of the public virtues. The church, at the centre, represents religion, the barracks represent decorum and discipline, the quay and the roads (which unite city with city) represent commerce, while the park was a token of the benevolent institutions of government: all was to be ‘given to the inhabitants of Sydney for ever’. This belief in the moral value of public works was not merely incidental to the design e it was the ultimate justification for even the comparatively little expense they anticipated.95 That it was probably Greenway’s boast rather than Bigge’s worry that Sydney might become ‘superior in architectural beauty to London’ (for the actuality of Sydney hardly warranted this kind of fear) does not diminish the significance his being aware of this possibility; one which acknowledged that trope of the great imperial potential of the colony in Australia. London was notoriously unplanned, and could offer nothing comparable to what Greenway and Macquarie had arguably achieved, let alone were proposing. People were very sharply aware that Westminster’s vaunted status as capital of the greatest empire since the Roman, centre of global trade, and cultural hotbed, was flatly contradicted by its actual appearance.96 As

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John Gascoigne with the assistant of Patricia Curthoys, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, Cambridge, 2002, 15. 95 Dixon, Course of Empire (note 26), 32e33. 96 Also John Summerson, Georgian London, Harmondsworth, 1978, 113, 121e122; Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (note 8), 75e115, 98e101.

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the French visitor, Pierre-Jean Grosley had put it in 1772, ‘London has only a first view to recommend it, and it is indebted to that for the Thames’ and, when it came to public and private buildings, could not compare ‘for splendour and magnificence to Paris and the cities of Italy’.97 In the mid-eighteenth century this had preoccupied the metropolitan improver, John Gwynn, who had rediscovered, and, in 1749, published Wren’s enlightened plan for rebuilding the City.98 Gwynn’s complaint of the mean appearances of and the dominant roles of speculative builders within the cities of London and Westminster was echoed by Thomas Malton in 1792, and at length by Sir John Soane, in lectures delivered at the Royal Academy in 1815.99 Soane, who equally regretted the rejection of Wren’s plan, tore into speculative building; repeatedly bemoaning ‘the want of public buildings’, in contrast to which he pointedly set the example of modern Paris.100 Soane’s lectures attracted good audiences.101 We can imagine his respectable auditors would have talked about them amongst themselves, uneasy with the idea that Napoleonic architecture could be anything other than ideologically distasteful.

London versus Sydney Francis Greenway knew Gwynn’s writing (hence his reference to Wren’s plan) and may have adapted his scheme for a Hyde Park, ‘given to the inhabitants of Sydney for ever’ from a proposal of Gwynn’s for amalgamating Hyde and Green Parks to create a grand new space, a royal palace in its centre, thoroughfares going to the various points of the compass. Terraces of the grandest domestic building would run along at least two sides.102 By contrast, embellished with neither palace, nor domestic terraces, Greenway’s park was to be surrounded with ‘public buildings . raised in a classical style’. Gwynn may also supply a point of origin for the Regent’s Park that, during the 1810s, John Nash was laying out to supply an illusory rural existence for urbanites who would live in speculatively-built villas or terraces of crudely classical style. Regent’s Street, a processional thoroughfare given over to shopping, linked the park to Carlton House. This scheme, thought the Prince Regent, would allow London to ‘eclipse’ Napoleon’s Paris, the traditional rivalry played

97

M. Grosley, A Tour to London; or, New Observations on England and its Inhabitants. By M. Grosley, F.R.S. Member of the Royal Academies of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres. Translated from the French by Thomas Nugent L.L.D. and Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, 2 Vols, Dublin, 1772, I, 24, 31. 98 John Gwynn, London and Westminster Improved, London, 1766, vevi, 5. See also Miles Ogborn, Designs on the City: John Gwynn’s Plan for Georgian London, Journal of British Studies 43 (2004) 15e39. 99 Thomas Malton, A Picturesque Tour through the Cities of London and Westminster, Illustrated with the Most Interesting Views, Accurately Delineated and Executed in Aquatinta, 2 Vols, London, 1792, 1e2. Watkin, Sir John Soane (note 11), 21. 100 Watkin, Sir John Soane (note 11), 174, 228, 226, 238, 239, 240, 256e258. 101 Watkin, Sir John Soane (note 11), 21; Darley Soane, the man (note 91), 188, 195, 217, 218. 102 Gwynn, London and Westminster (note 98), 76e100.

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out with modern architecture.103 Vic Gatrell has pointed out that ‘it was no accident that the project was initiated’ soon after the Burdett riots of April 1810, and created an effective barrier between the poor areas to its east, and those inhabited by the wealthy to its west.104 Regent’s Street would additionally have supplied a fast route for the cavalry quartered in barracks at Regent’s Park to reach Whitehall or Westminster to quell any disturbance that might arise.105 The Nash buildings were to feature very prominently in James Elmes’s 1827 book, Metropolitan Improvements; or London in the Nineteenth Century, which began: Augustus made it one of his proudest boasts, that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble. The reign and Regency of George the Fourth have scarcely done less.106 This might sound close to Wentworth’s encomium on Macquarie’s architectural achievements, but the city Elmes thus represented was very different. It was a place of housing, commerce; a place where the same crude classicism served for terraces, theatres, and banks. It was a place of canals, docks and a centre of modernity, characterised by such new building types as a national bank, museums and art galleries, penitentiaries, and universities. Yet there was no emblematic architectural narrative such as might articulate the interconnectedness of the elements of society as was developing in Sydney. Andrew Saint writes that such public buildings as ‘the Bank of England or the British Museum . have to be read as self-sufficient and enclosed’.107 This London was becoming a new type of city; a modern, industrial trading place, in process of formation to cater for the demands of new technologies and the social changes they brought. These processes drove such things as penal policies and the insistence that, since it was the substitute for judicial murder, transportation had to become an object of terror. Francis Greenway knew what prisons looked like; John Nash had designed them. Sydney looked like anything but a prison. The penitentiary at Millbank was surrounded, as was the convention, by a high, forbidding, impenetrable curtain wall; the Prisoners’ Barracks at Sydney by an elegantly rusticated wall which John Thomas Bigge censured as too ornamental. In that censure, one that was picked up by Sydney Smith, we see how the new London could, by 1820 or so only be complemented by an entirely different Sydney, illustrating perfectly Sydney Smith’s observation that new ‘circumstances will throw new light upon the effects of our religious, political, and economical institutions’.

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John Summerson, The Life and Work of John Nash Architect, Cambridge, MA, 1980, 71. Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter. Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London, London, 2006, 81. 105 Ann Saunders, Regent’s Park. A Study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day, Newton Abbott, 1969, 108, 131, 133. 106 James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements; or London, in the Nineteenth Century: Being a Series of Views, of the New and Most Interesting Objects, in the British Metropolis and its Vicinity: From Original Drawings by Mr. Thos. Shepherd with Historical and Critical Illustrations, London, 1827, 1e2. 107 Andrew Saint, The Building of the first Industrial Metropolis, in: Celina Fox, London. World City 1800e1840 (Exhibition Catalogue), London, 1992, 51e76, 67. 104

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Acknowledgements I should like to thank Louise Campbell, Felix Driver, David Hansen, Peter Kohane, Geoff Quilley, Richard Read and Christine Stevenson, all of whom commented helpfully on successive drafts of this essay.