Compared to the grandeur of Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building or the ancient timeline of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, a 19th-century “portable building” might at first seem unremarkable.
But some high-profile heritage advocates think these early examples of prefabrication should become the next Australian sites to be added to the UNECO World Heritage list.
Shipped to Australia’s shores from around the world from the 1840s onwards, portable buildings, as they were then known, ranged from humble houses, shops, churches and schools formed of simple materials through to elaborate cast iron plate cottages, a lighthouse and even the NSW legislative council chamber.
While such buildings were shipped to many different places in this period, including to California and Latin America, Australia has more surviving examples than anywhere in the world; in fact, “it has, by a considerable margin, more than the rest of the world combined,” the proponents say.
Wingecarribee, Bowral, c 1854-7.
Image:
Miles Lewis
The campaign to have them placed on the World Heritage list was launched by former federal minister Barry Jones, who previously served as the vice president of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The campaign taskforce, which includes many leading heritage bodies and experts from Australia and further afield, notes that the buildings are significant for their association with “episodes of great moment” in history, including the proliferation of steam navigation, the gold rushes in Australia and the US, and the Crimean War.
One of the campaign organizers is Miles Lewis, a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Architecture, Building and Planning and one of Australia’s most notable architecture historians.
“The huge importation of buildings from overseas is a really exciting aspect of Australian history, because there has been nothing comparable in scale elsewhere in the world,” he said.
There are 104 known examples through Australia, though around 20 percent are “very fragmentary” or too altered to be understood visually. The majority, 63, are in Victoria, 16 are in New South Wales, 13 in South Australia, four in Tasmania, three in Queensland, three in Western Australia, and two in the Northern Territory.
Among them are the only Singapore-made wooden portable buildings from the 19th century to survive in the world; more than a dozen iron buildings made in Glasgow in the 1850s (only two survive in Glasgow); buildings made in the United States (only one such building survives in the US, and that in storage); and both wood and iron buildings by twenty-one English makers, “very few of which can be identified in England itself.”
Corio Villa, Eastern Beach, Geelong, designed by Bell and Miller and manufactured by Robertson and Lister.
The nominations taskforce explains that the gold rushes of the 19th century caused a boom in the demand for portable houses, and saw the emergence of house entrepreneurs in Singapore and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong houses in both San Francisco and Melbourne have all disappeared, but a number of the hundreds of houses from Singapore survive in Victoria.
“The houses were generally built of dedaru (Singapore teak or Singapore oak) and meranti (cedar), and were cultural hybrids,” the taskforce’s report notes. “The dimensions and room sizes were designed to meet the European tastes of the market; the entrepreneurs were ethnically Chinese, and at least some of the labour was Malay.”
One of them is the former 1 Hoddle Street house, which was threatened with demolition in 1983, before being rescued by architect Andrew Muir and re-erected on his property in Collingwood, where he has since collected other examples.
On the grander end of the scale, is Corio Villa in Geelong, which was designed by Bell and Miller and manufactured by Robertson and Lister in Glascow, which arrived in Geelong in August 1853.
“The house is beautifully constructed of heavy cast iron plate with joints run with red lead and virtually invisible externally, a system which was probably copied from Alexander Gordon’s cast iron lighthouses,” the taskforce report reads.
The taskforce noted that many of the buildings are now protected under relevant heritage controls, but they are not recognized collectively for their contribution to world architecture.
“A World Heritage listing is an important thing for the country concerned,” said convenor of the campaign, Tony Isaacson. “It gives a boost to national pride and identity, and it generates tourism. Two-thirds of the buildings in this proposal are in Victoria, and it will be a bonanza for the state and for all states that get on board.”
The taskforce acknowledged that a world heritage nomination was “a major exercise” that would be further complicated by the number of properties involved. It’s asking the federal government and all state governments to support the nomination, and is expecting the process to take “from five to ten years.”
Source: Architecture - architectureau
