Free The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd

they had fled from hunger. The release in architecture for the promoters’ nostalgia was thus often frustrated by careless workmanship and the crudest craftsmanship. Not until the eighties, when the sure hands of Italian workmen dwelt lovingly upon the details, and the nineties, when the Australian-born began hunting in their own forests for motives, did craftsmanship reach the stage of competence at which it may be overlooked. Long before this much of the city of Melbourne and most of the provincial cities had been sketched out and roughly filled in.
    Before building could begin seriously in the late eighteen-thirties, the raw land had to be cut and sold. The smartest people of Sydney and Tasmania came to pick up huge estates at Government auctions. Everybody of importance stood around the auctioneer’s tent on the great sale days, chatting brightly, perspiring gaily under what they believed was the latest London fashion, blowing earthy dust off their cigars and picking little gum twigs out of the French champagne. Between 1837 and 1847 the population rose from 500 to 5,000 and half a million pounds was paid to the Government for land along the Yarra river plains. Building was limited to the town area and the squatters’ homesteads of the outer country. The standard house was a single-storied box cottage, recognising only the necessity for immediate shelter. The few Government buildings in brick and local bluestone had more pretensions, and the churches from the first were openly competitive. The first and probably the best was St James’s Anglican Cathedral, by Robert Russell, a surveyor-architect who arrived in 1836, when Melbourne was still called Bearbrass.
    Thus Melbourne spent a conventional colonial childhood to the age of sixteen. Then suddenly she found the gold, and everything changed. Now she faced the future with supreme self-confidence, determined that from this day on only the world’s most elaborate garments would be fine enough. The soil blossomed into golden blooms of all styles of history. Great Renaissance public buildings reared up on every hill as a new constitution was proclaimed and the first Parliament was elected. In 1853 nearly two hundred new buildings arose each month. Spectacular international exhibitions offered self-congratulation on a grand scale. In 1867 Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh, looked in to a quarter-million-pounds entertainment.
    The eighties produced revived bursts of spending by the State and the investors. Speculation in land sent Melbourne bounding out across the low hills to the east. New suburbs opened with great mansions—two tall storeys of ball-rooms, banquet halls and galleries, plus a feature tower—set in rolling estates of foreign trees which usually flourished, on this new side of the world, far more quickly than in their native climates. Little houses flocked to the feet of the mansions—poor houses, but finely dressed for the occasion with weather-boards made to look like stone, and cast iron veils on the brims of their galvanized iron hats. Closer to the city, rows of terrace houses grasped all the accommodation that they could from mean slices of land. Big houses squeezed into deep, narrow lots, breaking the single-storey tradition by a second floor and a tower. In the city, office buildings shot up ten and twelve floors until the hydraulic lift power and the city fathers’ tolerance ran out. Rich building stones and fine timbers flowed into the port. But not bread alone was imported. Painting collections and musicians were brought from England for the exhibitions. Local groups of painters and musicians formed desperately bohemian clubs. Huge theatres were built.
    They were golden years for an architect like Joseph Reed who could catch their spirit. Reed’s life ran parallel to the history of the colony. He landed in 1852 in a ship full of diggers headed for the goldfields. Without much money or influence, he