Australia 2 – Building Anew

Often what makes one place distinct from another is the architecture. In Sydney we were very aware of a different architectural landscape from Scotland. And the contrast we had felt between the harshness of life for the first colonists and the idealism of the later settlers was apparent in the buildings.

The brutality of the convict settlements could be seen on Goat Island – a small settlement in the middle of Sydney harbour which had once been the home of some of the most troublesome convicts to be transported. Here we could see buildings painstakingly wrought from rock and a miserably small wooden cell on wheels which could house 20 convicts lying chained at night which could be moved to wherever these unfortunate souls were set to work from dawn to dusk in appalling conditions. The stone buildings created by these men were, in their way, beautiful and expertly crafted as if somehow the souls of the convicts longed to create something meaningful in the midst of the horror they were experiencing.

Then there are the buildings descended from the nineteenth century settlers, many of them attractive wooden boarding with tin roofs painted in muted colours and all with a well kept garden filled with exotic flowers. Preserved as a museum are some of the other nineteenth century dwellings of The Rocks – terraced and more like tenements – inhabited by artisans and traders who arrived to serve the growing colonial population of Sydney.

Moving into the Edwardian era we could see streets which reminded us of images of the Wild West and of the Southern States of America – overhanging verandas to shade pedestrians as they walked along in the hot Australian sun and wrought iron work to indicate the house of someone who had gone up in the world.