Bell (2002) - A History of The Queensland House

A History of the Queensland House
Peter Bell
Historical Research Pty Ltd
Adelaide
December 2002
This paper is based on extracts from an unpublished report
to the Queensland Heritage Council:
Guidelines for Entering Houses in the

Queensland Heritage Register
Cover illustration: the Queensland house at Federation;

Weinheimers' house in Ravenswood, built c.1900.
(Photograph courtesy Mrs Weinheimer, Townsville)
Queensland Houses: Background to Historical Study
This report includes a historical overview of Queensland houses. This was not
specifically called for in the project brief, but is an essential background to any
discussion of the heritage assessment of Queensland houses. The evolution and
pattern of Queensland houses has been a process that has taken place over 180 years
from the 1820s to the present. In that time, well over a million houses have been built in
Queensland. Those houses have been subject to many geographical, social and
economic forces, taken many diverse forms and been built of many materials. There
have been times when Queensland houses evolved into distinctive local forms, not built
elsewhere, and other times when Queensland house-builders were content to adopt
standard, universal house models from outside the state. For much of Queensland's
history, there have been significant differences between the houses built in the north
and the south, and between the coast and the inland. The assessment of Queensland
houses as heritage places obviously must be informed by knowledge of these events.
yet, despite all that has been written on the subject of the Queensland house, there is
no single account in existence that can be adopted as a reliable and comprehensive
history of the houses of Queensland as a whole since settlement by Europeans. Some
are very brief, others are concerned with particular regions of the state, with particular
types of houses, or particular periods rather than with the whole story. Hence this
project includes its own historical summary.
From the late nineteenth century onward, travellers in Queensland frequently recorded
comments recognising distinctive features in the local building stock, that is, that
Queensland houses were different in appearance from those of the other Australian
colonies. Not all of these were admiring comments. However, no serious study of the
history - or any attempt to assess the heritage value - of Queensland houses was
undertaken until the inception of the National Trust in the 1950s. Then the early studies
tended to be preoccupied with the homes of famous people and formal architectural
values, resulting in over-representation of grand and exceptional houses on the National
Trust register. As a result of the heritage legislation of 1990 and 1992, many of these
houses are now on the Queensland Heritage Register.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of writers on Australian architectural history

commented that the Queensland house had distinctive features (Boyd, Freeland, Lewis,
Newell), but did not pursue these qualities in detailed studies. The first serious study of
the Queensland house was Ray Sumner’s survey of a sample of North Queensland
dwellings, principally rural homesteads, done from a geographical viewpoint. She
concluded that environmental factors were not the principal determinant of the
distinctive forms of Queensland houses. (Sumner 1974 & 1975)
My own research in 1978-82 took this finding as a starting point, and looked at a large
number of houses in the northern towns - Charters Towers, Townsville, Cairns,
Herberton, Cooktown, Ravenswood, Croydon etc - most of which were founded or
developed by mining industry. This was almost exclusively a study of timber houses,
and devoted some space to investigating the origins of Australian building techniques. I
concluded that economic and social forces accounted for the historical development of
houses in the region. The conservatism of the building industry was a far more powerful
determinant than the tropical climate. (Bell 1982 & 1984)
Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 1

Simultaneously but quite independently, Donald Watson was also researching the
Queensland house for the National Trust, concentrating on the South-east of the state.
(Watson 1981) His report findings largely reinforced my own conclusions about the
origins of Queensland construction techniques, although differing in detail. Watson
tended to stress the importance of individual architects in the process, while I was more
inclined to point to the influence of timber merchants and builders.
By the early 1980s, the historical development of early houses in both the north and
south of the state was becoming well-understood. Bob Irving’s The Australian House
(1985) was a landmark national publication, and Ray Sumner’s chapter emphasised the
distinctiveness of Queensland houses, summarising the work that had been done to
that time. Balwant Saini’s book of the same name (1982) actually focused throughout on
the Queensland house as the archetypal form of the Australian house, and sought to
return the emphasis to environmental determinism. To this time, with the exception of
Watson’s work, almost all of the research done on the Queensland house had been in
the north of the state.
From 1985 the Brisbane History Group was actively publishing on the history of the
Brisbane house, spearheaded by Rod Fisher’s research. In the early 1990s, the
Queensland Museum entered the field of architectural history with the publication of
both Watson and Judith McKay’s extremely useful directory of Queensland architects
(1994), and Fisher and Brian Crozier’s The Queensland House, a collection of essays
on a variety of topics exploring technical, social and literary themes (1994). In this
Fisher himself offered a typology of Queensland house types, which was later expanded
by Judy Rechner in Brisbane House Styles (1998).
The Fisher/Rechner work is a very valuable contribution to the study of houses in

Brisbane and the South-east, although it leaves the reader largely unaware of the
strong regional variations evident within Queensland. Their concept of style also
appears at times to overlap with that of house-form, and needs to be defined more
clearly. One of the distinctive features of Australian mass-market houses over many
decades is that builders could build two houses of almost identical form in quite different
styles - Tudor and Californian for example.
The rise of heritage consciousness throughout Queensland in the last two decades has
seen a proliferation of heritage surveys and other studies. Robert Riddel has studied
Robin Dods and the Queensland timber tradition, and several useful theses have been
written on aspects of the history of the Queensland house. The National Trust
commissioned a number of local heritage studies in the 1980s. More recently, since
heritage and planning legislation have encouraged local heritage conservation
programs, councils have funded studies in Brisbane, Ipswich, Townsville, Toowoomba,
Maryborough and other places, usually done by architectural firms. Many private house
owners have also undertaken or commissioned studies of their own houses. There is
now a wealth of unpublished and semi-published information in existence, although not
all of it is easy to find.
The 1990s also saw a plethora of books on specific aspects of Australian housing:
conservation, restoration, cottages, verandahs, interiors, gardens, the Federation era,
the inter-war period, Californian bungalows, fibro and the post-war decades, among
others. All of these works contain some reference to houses in Queensland, and are
useful for their comparative observations in the national context. The most recent work,

The Queensland House by Ian Evans, published last year, is a historical synthesis of
what is known, concentrating on conservation advice. Don Roderick has completed a
monumental work, “Malaria, Miasma and Mosquitoes” which goes much further than
any previous writing in investigating the origins and history of the elevated house, but
has not yet found a publisher.

Queensland Houses: History of the Queensland House
The Convict Era
European settlement in Queensland began with a convict station at Redcliffe in 1824,

which was transferred to the Brisbane River the following year. Construction of the first
houses in what was to become Queensland commenced 36 years after the
establishment of Sydney, although at the time there was no thought of a new colony;
the new settlement was only a northern outpost of New South Wales.
None of these earliest Queensland houses survive today, but we know a little about
their materials and forms from documentary sources. There was no local tradition in
evidence; all the buildings of early Brisbane conformed to the austere Georgian models
which dominated Sydney and Hobart at the time. A variety of materials was used; local
timber was cut from the outset, and small huts of hand-sawn timber were probably the
earliest form of housing erected, although we know nothing about the construction
methods. Bricks were manufactured locally from an early date, and stone was being
quarried from the cliffs at Kangaroo Point. By 1828 limestone from Ipswich was being
shipped to Brisbane to burn lime for masonry, and sandstone from the Lockyer Valley
was being used in larger buildings. (Johnston 1988) An export industry had grown up
around Brisbane cutting cedar and other softwoods for the Sydney market as far afield
as the Albert, Logan and Tweed rivers. (Hyne 1980)
The building industry in a convict settlement did not conform to free market economics;
the workforce was unpaid, and after all one purpose of the buildings was to create work.
Hence in the 1820s and 1830s a number of houses were built in stone, brick and timber,
with little regard for cost, in what was to become Brisbane and its suburbs and on the
offshore islands in Moreton Bay. The convict settlement was closed in 1842, and a
short-lived attempt at repeating it at Gladstone in 1847 came to nothing.
Almost nothing built in this era survives. The heart of the settlement which had the most
substantial buildings is now the Brisbane CBD, repeatedly built over in the 160 years
since free settlers arrived. In all of Queensland only three convict era buildings remain,
all of stone: the Commissariat Store and Windmill of 1828-29 in Brisbane, and a
navigational beacon built on Raine Island off the far north coast in 1844.
Free Settlement
The highly profitable sheep grazing industry had occupied large areas of eastern New
South Wales by the 1830s, and a few graziers had taken up land on the Dumaresq and
Condamine rivers and the Darling Downs as early as 1840. It was partly their pressure
for a closer northern port somewhere on the Brisbane-Bremer river system that led to
the closure of the convict settlement and the opening of the Moreton Bay district to free
settlers in 1842.
The arrival of a free population converted the military settlements of Brisbane and
Ipswich to commercial centres, principally focused on providing marine and mercantile
services to the grazing industry. However, the population was to grow only slowly in the
next two decades. The wool industry employed a relatively small number of people
spread over a large area, and its demand for labour and services was seasonal; once a
year the wool clip was shipped out, and perhaps twice a year supplies were shipped in.

Industrial timber became locally available when Queensland's first steam sawmill was
established on the Brisbane River by William Pettigrew in 1853. (Kerr 1990) His early
market was small, for there was little economic incentive for the construction of houses
in the towns, and cheap convict labour was no longer available.
The greatest impact of early free settlement was in the bush. Fencing sheep runs would
not become an economic option for decades to come, and the early grazing industry
employed shepherds to manage the sheep flocks, guard the sheep and keep them on
good feed and water. They were dispersed in pairs across the runs, each team looking
after one or two thousand sheep, and leading a solitary and monotonous life for months
on end. Their housing practices were to make a lasting contribution to Queensland
building tradition.
The Primitive Building Tradition
For nearly a century from the 1840s onward, a significant proportion of the Queensland
population would consist of small farmers, shepherds and other station employees and
itinerant workers living alone or in isolated communities. Most of them had very little
money to invest, and relied on their own labour to build shelter. Further, many of them
lived a transient lifestyle, and had little use for a substantial or permanent building.
In these circumstances, large numbers of people lived in what modern architectural

historians have called "primitive" buildings. The primitive building tradition has two
essential characteristics, first its building materials are gathered in the local area, and
second they are worked exclusively with hand tools. (Lewis 1977) Primitive materials
and techniques vary widely, including split slabs, whole logs, saplings, shingles and
palings, bark, grass thatch, stone, clay, earth and many combinations of these
materials.
Most of eastern Queensland has abundant native trees, and these provided the raw
material for the two most common primitive building techniques: bark and slab. A bark
building relies on a framework of wooden poles, clad and roofed with sheets of bark
stripped from the trunks of suitable large trees. The bark gathering process killed the
trees, but that was usually considered desirable in the circumstances of nineteenth
century settlement. The resulting buildings were notoriously leaky, and the flat bark
sheets had to be weighted down to prevent them reverting to their natural curved shape.
Bark is not a durable material, and apart from modern replicas, no examples of bark
construction older than the 1930s are known in Australia.
Slabs were heavy planks which were roughly split from tree trunks using axes, mallets
and wedges, giving rise to construction methods which were both more versatile and
much more durable than bark. Slabs could be used in two ways, vertical or horizontal.
Vertical slabs were set upright between posts, sometimes set directly into the ground,
sometimes standing on {or housed into} a sill, and occasionally in better quality
construction supported by a bearer raised on low posts. Most vertical slab buildings
were vulnerable to fungal attack encouraged by ground damp, or to racking (the
tendency of an unbraced rectangular structure to deform sideways into a parallelogram
as a prelude to falling over) and relatively few examples exist today.
Horizontal slab was a far more sophisticated technique, involving a frame of heavier
posts (typically 150mm square) with slabs laid horizontally between them to form

panels. The methods of fixing the slabs to the posts varied; in the most primitive (and
rare) form, vertical slots were cut into the posts, and the slabs were dropped into them,
giving us the infelicitous name "drop-slot slab" which is sometimes used to describe the
technique. Sometimes the post was shaped into a T-section, and battens were nailed
on to complete the channel. Most commonly, both sides of the channel were formed by
light sawn battens nailed to a square post. The technique could be extremely durable,
and a number of horizontal slab buildings survive from the 1850s and 1860s onward;
Canning Downs homestead near Warwick from about 1853 and Gracemere homestead
near Rockhampton from about 1858 are notable examples.
These primitive techniques were not necessarily invented locally, nor were they
necessarily the work of the owner of the building. All of these techniques were
developed in the southern colonies, and came to Queensland with the northward flow of
settlers. Even recent arrivals from Europe had access to this tradition; during the
decades in which most of Queensland was being occupied by Europeans, there was a
steady output of published books with titles like Advice to New Settlers or Manual for
Immigrants which gave detailed instructions on how to build a bark or slab house. As
late as 1913, the government-published Queensland Agricultural Journal was still
reprinting advice on bush house construction virtually unchanged since the 1850s.
(Boyd 1899 & 1913)
Probably the most important channel for transmission of these techniques was the
itinerant bush worker. Semi-skilled workers travelled the bush settlements and
homesteads, seeking casual employment in such tasks as fencing, well-sinking, and
building stockyards and slab huts. They undoubtedly passed on building skills and
traditions over large areas of the country in ways that were never documented and are
difficult to retrace today except for the evidence of the buildings themselves. For
example, two of the oldest surviving buildings in North Queensland are the former
Bowen River hotel near Collinsville (originally Heidelberg homestead), and the former
Eureka Hotel at Harvey Range west of Townsville. Both buildings are very solidly built of
horizontal slabs, were constructed within a short period in the early 1860s, and
interestingly both were built on pastoral runs leased at the time by Phillip Somer.
Although there is no documentary evidence about their construction, the two buildings'
similarities in detail suggest that both were built by the same skilled bush carpenter,
who probably spent some time in Somer's employ.

Idealised elevation of a bark hut (Boyd 1913-14)
Instructions for new settlers: how to split palings (Boyd 1899)

Separation and the Pastoral Rush
The New South Wales administration was never very interested in settling the north. It
was too far away, too expensive in its infrastructure demands of roads, bridges,
wharves and court houses, and it was unnecessary to go to all that trouble while there
was still copious grazing land available closer to Sydney. Northern pastoral lands were
opened for leasehold at a leisurely pace, and only the Moreton Bay, Darling Downs,
Wide Bay, Port Curtis and Leichhardt districts were opened to pastoral settlement by
the Sydney administration. The towns of Warwick, Toowoomba, Maryborough,
Gladstone and Rockhampton, most of them very newly-established, defined the extent
of settlement at the time of Separation.
The situation changed dramatically when Queensland became a separate colony in

1859. The new Brisbane administration was keen to increase the colony's population
and generate income by promoting export industries. The Treasury was also short of
cash, and one of the quickest ways for a nineteenth century government to raise
revenue was to sell or lease land. The Herbert government threw open the entire west
and north of the colony to pastoralists within five years, in the process creating an
extraordinary land rush. The Kennedy district was opened in 1861, the Flinders and
Mitchell districts to the west were opened in the next two years, and finally in 1864 the
Burke and Cook districts were opened, extending the pastoral lands all the way north to
the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York Peninsula. About an eighth of the Australian
continent was opened to pastoral leases in the first five years of separate government.
This episode greatly expanded the area of Queensland settled by Europeans, and led to
the establishment of both coastal and inland towns. To serve the expanding pastoral
industry, the new ports of Bowen, Townsville, Cardwell, Somerset and Burketown were
all founded by 1865. In the west, Roma, Tambo, Blackall and Aramac were established
as regional centres.
Early settlement concentrated on the wool industry, which provided faster returns, but
much of northern Queensland proved to be unsuitable for sheep, and within a few years
beef cattle dominated the grazing lands. While cattle flourished, the problem with beef
was getting the product to the consumer; the northern market for fresh meat was
insignificant, and shipping or overlanding cattle to major population centres was costly
and time-consuming, and the stock arrived in poor condition. Mid-nineteenth century
pastoralists did not think of fresh meat as a viable commodity except for small local
sales. Instead at first they established boiling-down works, which rendered down the
carcass for its tallow, used to make soap and candles Most of the meat was discarded
as waste. By 1870 there were meat canning plants in Australia, but the product was
unattractive and met resistance from consumers who greeted it with derisive nicknames
like "boiled dog". Wool was the glamour commodity.
The initial rush was for large-scale grazing land, but there was also demand for small
farming blocks. A lot of country suitable for agriculture, particularly in the south-east,
had short-sightedly been thrown open for leasehold in the early years, but conforming to
the closer settlement trend in the other Australian colonies and the USA, the Crown
Lands Alienation Act of 1868 resumed much arable land for selection and purchase by
small farmers. From the late 1860s, a patchwork of large and small grazing and
agricultural holdings progressively filled up the map of Queensland.

Two separate housing traditions arose from the pastoral rush. One had already been
established by the shepherds and bush workers before Separation: the small hut of
slab, bark and other local materials, which were to remain staple techniques in small
farm houses for the remainder of the century. Generally the intention was for this to be
only a temporary house until prosperity permitted the construction of a more substantial
building of sawn timber, in which case the earlier hut was often retained as a farm shed.
But there were many small selections which never saw the second house built.
The second tradition arose from the prosperity of the wool industry. The first people in
Queensland with the capital necessary to build large houses were graziers, and
substantial homesteads were built on some of their properties. There was no consensus
about the preferred material; Cressbrook and Kenilworth in the south-east were built of
sawn timber, as were Mount Abundance and Nive Downs, two of the first generation of
large houses in the west. Inkerman on the Burdekin was also built in 1870 of local
timber, in this case sawn by a portable steam sawmill taken to the site. But elsewhere
Kilcoy was built of brick, and across Queensland there were a sprinkling of stone
homesteads; Mount Cornish, Rockwood and Lammermoor in central Queensland. In
some of the far western towns - Boulia, Bedourie, Birdsville - stone was occasionally
used in the early years to build hotels and stores as well.
The most remarkable stone homestead tradition was in the south-east. On the elevated
tablelands of the Darling Downs and Granite Belt, the earliest parts of Queensland
taken up for grazing, between the 1850s and the 1870s there rose a number of grand
sandstone homesteads: notably Burndale, Ballandean, Glengallan, Talgai and Jimbour.
The town of Warwick also had a strong sandstone building tradition. The reasons for
this local practice are probably to do with early prosperity among a patrician class of
graziers, and climate may also have played a part; the grand sandstone homesteads
conform almost exactly to the only part of Queensland which sometimes receives snow
in winter.
In terms of the rise of a recognisable Queensland building tradition, these buildings

appear at first sight anomalous. But that is only the case if we do not look beyond the
Queensland border. In the context of building practices in New South Wales, from
where nearly all the early settlers on the downs arrived, these houses make perfect
sense. They are simply a northward extension of the building tradition of the New
England tableland.
A second land rush followed twenty years later. In 1880 the first successful cargo of
frozen beef was exported from Australia, and this revolutionised the grazing industry.
The increased profitability of beef caused a further expansion of grazing into land that
had been non-viable during early settlement, and most available land was taken up by
the early twentieth century. The shape of coastal settlement was also changed by the
new technology; wealthy pastoralists formed companies that built sophisticated
meatworks equipped with freezing and canning plants at the export ports of Brisbane,
Rockhampton, Bowen and Townsville between 1881 and 1895. The broad outline of
European settlement was established, and modern Queensland was recognisable by
about 1900; the major industries then are still the major industries today, and most of
the major cities then are still the major cities today.

The Timber Frame
The 1860s and 1870s were a crucial period in shaping the traditions which would
dominate Queensland's domestic architecture for the next fifty years and more. To this
time there had been nothing distinctive about houses in Queensland; they used the
same forms and materials as those of New South Wales, where many of their designers
and builders had come from. But by the 1880s, travellers were reporting that some
Queensland houses were very different from any they had seen before.
The first distinctive element to emerge was the high proportion of timber houses. The
northward expansion of settlement after Separation quickly led to growth in the building
industry. Pettigrew and Sim built a steam sawmill at Dundathu near the mouth of the
Mary River in 1862, strategically sited to exploit the hoop pine forests of Wide Bay and
Fraser Island. There were five more competing mills in the district within the next few
years, and by 1879 Queensland was exporting nearly £75,000 worth of softwoods
annually. (Hyne 1980, pp. 6-7) In comparison with most other building materials, timber
was light, relatively cheap to transport, and quick to erect, and so it became a popular
material during a period of rapidly expanding settlement. As the new towns spread north
up the coast and west across the blacksoil plains, the majority of their houses were built
in sawn timber.
The construction technique used in most of these houses was the light stud frame, in
which each wall of the house was formed of a row of light vertical posts or studs, with
horizontal boards nailed to them. The technique had been developed in England a
hundred years earlier for lightweight farm sheds and cricket pavillions, and adopted
enthusiastically in Australia and New Zealand in the early nineteenth century to provide
cheap colonial housing. (Contrary to some authors’ opinions, it is not the same thing as
the “balloon” frame of the USA, and in fact was in use in Australia long before the
American balloon frame was invented.)
Next the climate played a part in shaping the Queensland house. In Europe or southern
Australia, the cold winter required a second layer of boards on the outside to trap an air
layer for insulation. But in the benign climate of the north, a single skin of boards was
enough. Hence the practice arose of reducing costs by leaving the timber frame
exposed on the outside of the house (of course the option of later cladding remained
open). The technique was pioneered in the mid-1860s, and came into general use
throughout Queensland for the next few decades. People from the south thought the
houses looked unfinished, but their appearance was quickly accepted by local people.
Donald Watson has drawn attention to the role played by architect Richard Suter in
popularising the exposed frame, in a series of schools he designed as commissions for
the Board of Education, and some churches and other buildings, from 1866 onward.
Suter seems to have been influenced by the Ecclesiological movement within the
Anglican church, and some of his churches and schools featured elaborate external X-
braced framing resembling medieval half-timbering. Four government schools
completed in 1866 all had exposed frames, although Suter's connection with the earliest
of these, designed about September 1865, is uncertain. (Watson 1988; Watson &
McKay 1994) The elaborated exposed frame remained popular in ecclesiastical
architecture until the 1870s.

However, there is more to the story than this, for others were at work building exposed
frames before Suter. In Townsville, John Melton Black had built his house on the
summit of Melton Hill at some time in early 1865, with the stud frame left exposed on
the rear verandah. This was a modest beginning, but three years later the new
Townsville hospital was built with its front wall framing left exposed to the main street.
This northern exposed framing did not have Suter's decorative diagonal bracing, but
was simply the plain light stud frame with the outer layer of boards left off. (Bell 1982)
There was a third, apparently independent, origin for the technique. Margaret Strelow
has shown that the railway offices in Rockhampton, built with a heavy exposed frame
incorporating some X-braced panels, were finished by July 1865, before Suter was
working in Queensland. (Strelow 1999) The designer was probably Great Northern
Railway engineer Henry Plews, who also designed the Westwood and Stanwell railway
stations with exposed frames. (Watson & McKay 1994, p. 143) He may have been using
a technique he had seen used for English railway waiting rooms, but exposing the frame
on the outside of the wall rather than the inside. (Interestingly, Plews was a former
colleague of William Coote, who had spoken out publicly on several occasions on the
need to establish new architectural practices for the Queensland climate.) The Traffic
Manager's Residence, as the Rockhampton building is now known, still stands and is
almost certainly the oldest extant exposed frame house in Queensland.
It appears that within a few months in 1865, the exposed frame was adopted quite
independently in three widely-separated parts of Queensland. This is such an
extraordinary coincidence that it calls for further research, to see if there are links
between these buildings' designers that have not yet come to light. Intriguingly, these
very first buildings in the technique reflected the regional division in exposed framing
that would persist for decades; the more elaborate X-braced frame in heavier timbers in
the south, and the simple light stud frame in the north. By the 1880s, the Colonial
Architect's office appears to have recognised this geographical division, and was
designing police buildings for Townsville and Beenleigh with regionally appropriate
exposed framing details. (Bell 1984, p. 168)
There were other ways to build in timber. In Tambo and nearby places such as
Barringun in the central west, a technique called board-and-batten was used to build a
number of houses, only one of which now survives. The wall is framed with heavy
timbers at corners and openings, and the intervening wall is formed of vertical 25mm
thick boards simply butted together and nailed to the top and bottom plates, with the
cracks covered with battens. Although quite common in the USA and New Zealand,
board-and-batten is very rare in Australia. The local builder may have been a J. Stewart,
who used the same technique for the Tambo Telegraph Office in 1876. Although the
technique superficially resembles vertical slab construction, the Tambo walls are not
slab, as Miles Lewis has described them (Lewis 2000, p. 47); they are boards cut with a
circular saw, and the cover battens are milled timber with beaded edges.
The use of external framing required a lining board that lay flush against the studs, and
was weather-lapped by milled chamfers at the top and bottom of each board, giving
them the local name of chamferboards. Internal partitions in timber houses were usually
very light walls consisting of a single layer of vertical tongue-and-groove boards secured
to one or two horizontal rails. In use from the 1860s, they were hidden within house
interiors for the next few decades, but they would become more conspicuous in the
future.

Roofs
The second material which quickly came to dominate Queensland domestic building
practice was corrugated galvanised iron. Developed in England by about 1840, roofing
iron was expensive and heavy to transport, and only came into use in southern Australia
about ten years later. By the time Queensland's population began to grow in the 1860s,
corrugated galvanised iron was readily available and quickly began to dominate all the
coastal settlements, especially after municipal building regulations began to prohibit
flammable roofs.
Penetration into the interior took a little longer. The weight of iron roofing made it
prohibitively expensive for overland transport at first, so bark, thatch and shingles
persisted longer. At the 1864 census, 47% of the roofs in the colony were still of these
primitive materials, although they formed only 5% of the roofs in Brisbane. (Marsden
1966, p. 123) However, iron roofs had the three obvious advantages of being durable,
watertight - which no primitive material was - and also of providing a supply of untainted
rainwater. A more subtle advantage known to cost-conscious builders was that iron was
actually lighter per unit of area covered than most other roofing alternatives, and its
rigidity meant that very little framing was required to hold it up; a single iron sheet could
span a verandah with no support whatever. Iron soon penetrated throughout the
outback, despite its initial expense, and replaced all other materials in every district as
soon as rail transport lowered the cost. By the 1921 census, 93% of Queensland house
roofs were of corrugated galvanised iron.
The use of iron roofs demonstrates that although Queensland was slowly developing a
distinctive building tradition, its techniques remained dependent on Great Britain for
manufactured components. All of Queensland's corrugated galvanised iron was
imported, mostly from England, until after the First World War; not a single sheet was
manufactured in Australia until 1921. The local building industry was still operating
within a colonial economy until well into the twentieth century, and in some respects it
still does.
Iron was at first only used for roofs, but in the 1870s its use broadened into wall
cladding for sheds and industrial buildings. In mining towns, houses were built entirely
of corrugated iron, and iron-walled two-roomed cottages dominated early twentieth
century towns like Cloncurry and Chillagoe. Iron walled houses made up 8% of
Queensland's total in the 1911 census, and they are still common in small towns and
station homesteads in the far north and west. However, iron house walls never achieved
respectability in the larger towns, and were almost unknown in Brisbane.

Board-and-batten cottages in Tambo
The Far West has a tradition of stone construction (Anne Allingham)

Verandahs
Another building tradition which would develop into a fundamental characteristic of the
Queensland house was the use of the verandah. The verandah is a simple functional
device: an extension of the house sideways by means of a row of posts outside the wall
which support a skillion roof whose upper end is supported on the wall head. Its
principal function is to shade the wall, reducing the heat load on the house while
permitting air movement. However, it has a number of subsidiary functions in providing
an external space which is sheltered but not enclosed, and over time these grew to
outweigh its utilitarian purpose.
The verandah is not an Australian invention. It is a universal design motif of buildings in

hot climates, across Asia and the south of Europe. Even the origins of its name are in
dispute; architectural dictionaries agreeing that it originally meant a railing or balustrade,
but uncertain whether the word came from Hindi or Portuguese. In the last two centuries
it has been common to the architecture of colonial cultures in warm climates, in Africa,
central America, south-east Asia and Australasia.
However, the verandah is not found on the first generation of Queensland houses. The
buildings of the convict era did not have verandahs, nor did the early houses of the free
settlers, which remained identical to the models provided by the southern capitals of
Sydney and Hobart. It was only during the 1860s that verandahs began to be adopted in
large numbers, and by the 1880s they were universal. Once the fashion was
established, it was a simple matter to add verandahs to older houses, and some of the
early pastoral homesteads which began with plain Georgian facades had verandahs
added in later decades.
The positioning of verandahs on Queensland houses demonstrates that their social

functions were more important than their role in climate control. Almost all houses built
from the 1880s until the early twentieth century had a front verandah; it was unthinkable
to build a house with a verandah at the side but not at the front. Yet if a house is to have
only one verandah, the maximum climatic advantage would be achieved by positioning
it on the western side to shade the house from the afternoon sun. But houses were not
built with their sole verandah on the west, they turned it toward the street frontage, in
whatever direction that might be. The convention of placing the verandah at the front of
the house shows that it functioned as a space for welcoming, entertaining and
farewelling guests: an intermediate space between interior and exterior, both climatically
pleasant and socially useful.
The ideal disposition of verandahs was all round the house. While this was not always
possible on suburban allotments, it was commonly done in rural areas, and the house
core completely surrounded by verandahs became the classic image of a country
homestead from the 1870s onward. Often the kitchen was detached at the rear of the
back verandah, or even separated from the house completely and reached by a
covered walkway. This was less common in town, where the kitchen was more likely to
be within the enclosed rear verandah space.
Strangely, given the standardisation of component sizes that set in as the Queensland
house matured, there was never any consensus about the preferred width of
verandahs. Wider was generally seen as better, and the width was usually roughly in

proportion to the size of the house, but verandahs varying from four feet wide to twelve
feet wide were found on Queensland houses during the last four decades of the
nineteenth century. Verandah widths generally varied by multiples of two feet, to
conform to the standard lengths of corrugated iron sheets.
The Gold Rushes
The occupation of Queensland for grazing purposes would by itself have created only a
sparse rural population, with a few small service towns and ports. It was the discovery
of minerals that transformed the economy and brought the great population boom. Coal
had been mined at Ipswich since the 1840s, but at first supplied only a small domestic
market. A disappointingly small gold discovery had been made at Canoona near
Rockhampton in 1857 before Separation. Then in the 1860s and early 1870s, coinciding
with the great land rush, came a succession of major gold discoveries: Cawarral in
1863, Gympie in 1867, Ravenswood and the Etheridge in 1869, Charters Towers in
1871, the Palmer in 1873. They were followed by Croydon and Mount Morgan in the
1880s.
These events saw the extension of the international gold rushes into Queensland, and
they would have a profound impact on the colony's development for the next hundred
years. First, they brought an enormous upsurge in population from 30,000 in 1861 to
500,000 in 1901, accompanied by an increase in wealth that would finance the
construction of roads, railways, ports and other infrastructure to serve the rapid growth.
The gold rushes also brought about a geographical redistribution of both people and
economic activity, as many of the largest gold discoveries were in the north, previously
only sparsely occupied by Europeans. New ports like Cairns, Port Douglas and
Cooktown were established in the 1870s to serve the mining industry
Charters Towers is a good case study in the economic growth that the gold discoveries
brought to the north. At the beginning of 1872 the only European activity in the district
was sheep grazing, but within ten years it had become Queensland’s greatest goldfield,
with the colony's third railway under construction from the coast. By the turn of the
twentieth century it had grown into a community of about 25,000 people, and was
producing ten tons of gold each year. A sheep run thirty years earlier, Charters Towers
had become the largest city in Queensland outside Brisbane, and indeed the largest in
the northern half of Australia.
Typically, nineteenth century mining fields went through an initial pioneering phase of
construction in the same primitive building materials that the farmers used, while the
likely future of the mineral deposit was assessed. But once confidence in the field was
established, and transport costs fell - particularly if the field was fortunate enough to
have a railway - the staple building materials of every major Queensland mining field
were sawn timber framed walls with corrugated iron roofs. Nineteenth century
photographs show that many of the houses and industrial buildings on Queensland's
goldfields were identical to those of northern New Zealand, South Africa's Rand and
Kimberley fields, or the mining towns of the American West.
This was so because another effect of the gold rushes was to bring local builders into
the marketplace of a sophisticated international building construction industry. A mining
field is different from a farming or grazing community in its transport infrastructure and
the consequent availability of imported goods. By the 1870s, underground mining had

become a highly mechanised business, requiring access to sophisticated industrial
materials. Mining companies needed steam engines, boilers, winders, crushing
machinery and pumps, all of which had to be housed in buildings erected quickly at low
cost. Thus in the first few years of the discovery of a goldfield, materials such as sawn
timber and corrugated iron, glass and nails were being imported to the field in large
quantities.
Not surprisingly, these materials quickly became available to domestic house builders.
While imported manufactured building materials might seem to be prohibitively
expensive to buy, they were attractive because of the low labour cost of construction.
Stone or brick masonry or even locally gathered bark, slab or earth construction had a
very high labour component, and in the inflated labour market of a goldfield - where no-
one wanted to work as a builder's labourer when there was gold visible in the creekbed -
it was wages that were the principal cost in building houses. Here the light timber stud
frame came into its own, for it was the quickest and cheapest way to build a house.
Goldfield builders adopted simple methods of construction using light standardised
components which could be assembled on site without requiring much work or great
skill.
The other standard building material was corrugated galvanised iron for roofing.
Imported from England In heavy bales, for the same reasons of speed and simplicity, it
became the almost universal roofing material of Queensland houses. Brick was
available to house builders in every major town, but was almost never used for houses
because of the labour cost. Bricklayers on the goldfields expected to be paid £5 a week,
which was more than many mine managers earned. Brick was used for fireplaces and
chimneys, but rarely for walls. Stone too was cheaply available - there were thousands
of tons of it available for the taking on the mine dumps - but the cost of employing
stonemasons ruled it out as a building material.
Some Australian architectural historians have identified a goldfield "Boom Style" period
in the nineteenth century, characterised by ostentatiously elaborate buildings funded by
gold. A few examples do exist in places like Ballarat and Bendigo, but it is a mistake to
think that the prosperity of a gold mining town will necessarily create streets of opulent
mansions. For one thing, much of the wealth generated did not stay on the field, but
was paid as dividends to distant company shareholders. And in a colonial culture, many
people who accumulated wealth on a goldfield immediately returned to metropolitan
society to spend it - “get rich and get home” was the popular slogan - so that the wealth
of most Queensland goldfields built more mansions in Melbourne and London than it did
in the local area.
The effects of prosperity on a Queensland goldfield certainly created buildings, but not
large and elaborate ones. Most housing was built to provide accommodation for mine
employees and their families. Nineteenth century Queensland mining companies
provided no housing for their workers, and so house construction was dominated by
speculators, who were usually builders. When there was a mining boom underway and
the mines were hiring labour, there was a demand for a great number of houses which
had to be built quickly and cheaply in the face of intense demand and high labour costs.
In a prosperous period in 1891, a newspaper reported that “there is not an empty
habitable house on Charters Towers, despite the fact that cottages are being run up like
magic. One builder alone has fifty carpenters working for him.” (Queenslander 21
November 1891) Obviously houses “run up like magic” were not likely to be luxurious,

and the most typical product of a mining boom was not gracious mansions, but a few
more streets of identical cheaply-built cottages.
The similarity of many goldfield houses was not coincidence, nor was it at the request of
the house buyers. In a highly competitive economic climate, builders cut their costs by
offering a small range of designs, all built with exactly the same techniques. Many of the
houses were prefabricated in the builders’ yards. In 1886, Griffith and Terry of Charters
Towers advertised, “buildings of every description framed on the premises and sent out
with competent workmen to any part of the field”, and in 1891 Richard Craven offered,
“Cottages Prepared and Framed, ready for Erection.” Benjamin Toll’s mill in 1889, with
a workforce of 120, was turning out five framed houses each week. (Bell 1984, pp. 135-
136)
The sudden housing demands created by the gold rushes were to have several lasting
impacts on the Queensland building industry. They put in train processes for building
large numbers of houses quickly and cheaply, and so institutionalised the light timber
frame as the staple construction method. The plans of houses also became simplified
and standardised. Striving to lower costs in a competitive market, the builders
developed techniques for prefabrication, which would have its heyday in the early
twentieth century. All these impacts were felt not only in the mining towns themselves,
but in the ports and railway towns which serviced them, and in which the same
economic circumstances prevailed while the mining boom was underway.
And the mining towns would have one more impact on the history of Queensland
houses after the boom ended and the gold mines closed. By the end of the First World
War, with most of the goldfields closing down and their workforces leaving, there were
thousands of redundant houses standing empty in Gympie, Mount Morgan, Charters
Towers and Ravenswood. A new building industry arose, dismantling houses and railing
them to new sites in the railway towns of western Queensland, to the sugar towns of the
coast, and to the growing suburbs of the regional cities. The great movement of houses
out of Charters Towers was one of the important themes of North Queensland housing
history in the 1920s and 1930s. The exodus can still be seen in the coastal suburbs of
South Townsville and Railway Estate, where many houses dating in appearance from
the 1880s and 1890s stand on allotments not surveyed until the 1920s.
While the great gold rushes provided the most dramatic impetus to Queensland's
economic and social development, we should not think of the mineral boom as
something that happened for a few decades in the late nineteenth century. Other
commodities such as tin, copper, silver, tungsten, bauxite and gemstones continued to
create towns all over Queensland for decades, and the greatest mineral deposits in all
of Queensland were only discovered at Mount Isa as late as 1923, so that Mount Isa
was going through its pioneering phase in the 1930s, just as Gympie did in the 1870s.
Even more recently the Bowen Basin coal mines became one of Queensland's greatest
industries, and newly-valuable metals such as nickel and uranium have created more
mining towns. In the 1970s, the Queensland mining frontier was at places like
Moranbah and Dysart, Mary Kathleen and Greenvale; today it is at the Century Zinc
Mine and the gas bores west of Thargomindah. As Geoffrey Blainey's book reminds us,
the rush has never ended.

Industrialisation and Standardisation
The range of housing types built in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century
exhibited a great deal of variety, but certain strong themes were becoming evident. One
was the standardisation of house forms, that is the arrangement of rooms, which is most
easily described by reference to the floor plan, and can be quickly understood visually
by looking at the house’s roof.
Probably the single most common house form built in Queensland between the 1870s
and the First World War was the two-roomed cottage. This was a small house intended
to accommodate a bachelor worker or small family, with two rooms side-by-side under
the core roof. The cottage was built on low stumps parallel to the street with a small
setback, and was asymmetrical in floor plan, with the central front door entering the
larger room. The house was usually built with a front verandah, and the core roof might
be either gabled or hipped. The rear skillion verandah was usually enclosed to form one
or two more rooms, and if one of these was the kitchen, a fireplace or stove recess
would be let into its rear or side wall.
Houses of this general form were derived from rural workers’ cottages in the British
Isles, and they were built in enormous numbers in a variety of materials throughout
Australia. They housed the majority of the workforce in mining towns such as Gympie
and Charters Towers. Indeed in Australian minds they are so closely associated with
the mining industry that, whether they are in the suburbs of the capital cities or in dairy
farming communities, people often refer to them as “miners’ cottages”.
The second common house form was the four-roomed house, a larger building
designed to accommodate a family, with four rooms symmetrically arranged about a
central hallway to form a core nearly square in plan under a pyramid roof. It too was
usually built with an open front verandah, and had a kitchen attached to the rear
verandah. It was usually built on a larger allotment with space for front and rear
gardens, had a modest degree of ornamentation, and was often elevated on high
stumps.
As time moved on, both of these common house cores provided the basis for a number
of more complex arrangements of extensions and verandahs. Either form usually came
with verandahs or skillion extensions at front and rear, but could be further extended by
the addition of verandahs to one or both sides, which could transform the character of
the basic form. The simplest form of the four-roomed house was a utilitarian timber box,
but set on high stumps with wide verandahs on all four sides on a large allotment, it
became unexpectedly gracious and imposing.

The gabled two-roomed cottage in its most basic form
The pyramid-roofed four-roomed house

Cottages and houses almost identical to these in form and floor plan were built
throughout Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, but in Sydney or
Adelaide they would have looked very different, because they were more likely to have
been built in brick or stone, respectively. One remarkable feature of Queensland
houses, established by the late nineteenth century, was the dominance of timber as the
principal building material.
This trend had begun with the establishment of the softwood industry in the Wide Bay
district from the 1860s, and the rapid spread of light stud framing from about 1865
onward. The popularity of the timber frame was given impetus by the economic inflation
brought by the gold rushes in the 1870s - which demanded cheap building methods
while providing industrial infrastructure which favoured imported sawn timber over other
materials - and it was adopted as the staple building technique by the 1880s. As the
building industry grew and stabilised, it utilised steam powered sawing and planing
machinery, coastal shipping and the inland railways to deliver a cheap product to the
market. Many large Queensland building firms, such as Pettigrew and Hynes in
Maryborough and Rooneys in Townsville, vertically integrated their operations, doing
everything from forest logging and timber milling and shipping to building construction
on site. Most of them offered prefabricated houses to consumers, and even the less
sophisticated builders delivered presawn components to the building site.
The outcome of this industrialisation in a competitive market was to standardise the

business of building houses. In the mass housing market, the choice of material, floor
plans, roof forms, wall framing techniques, doors, windows and decorative details all
became extremely standardised throughout Queensland. If you inspect the fretsawn
verandah brackets on two 1890s houses in Hughenden and Dalby, a thousand
kilometres apart, you may find they are identical. Measure the size of the sash windows
in the same two houses, and they may also be identical. This is not as surprising as it
may seem, because they may very well have been made in the same sawmill, and even
been ordered from the same catalogue. Certainly they were both products of a
competitive and cost-conscious industry.
By the early twentieth century, timber was established as the pre-eminent building
material, and Queensland led Australia in its proportion of timber houses. The first
census of the Commonwealth of Australia was held in 1911, and one of the many things
it enumerated was the material of the outer walls of private dwellings throughout the
country. Queensland at the time had 121,753 houses, of which 95,348 or nearly 79%
were of "wood". This includes an unknown but relatively small number of slab houses,
but the great majority would have been of sawn timber. Of the other states, Tasmania at
75% and Victoria at 66% came closest to Queensland in their proportion of timber
houses; the average for Australia as a whole was 55%.
Of the other building materials which predominated in some of the southern states, brick
formed less than 2% of Queensland's houses, and stone a mere 0.2%, with 242 houses
counted in the census. The second largest category of materials in Queensland was
"Calico, Canvas, Hessian" at just under 10%, indicating that a significant proportion of
the population - in railway or logging camps, newly-established farms and on alluvial
mining fields - still lived in tents.

On the coast, timber was used for everything except the roof (Doris Coleman)
In the interior away from the railways, entire houses were clad with iron

Tropical Agriculture
The course of Queensland history was altered by a new industry which created an
unfamiliar living environment for European settlers in the late nineteenth century. The
early decades of European settlement in Queensland had seen a series of events that
essentially repeated the experience of the southern colonies; convict settlement,
followed by sheep and cattle grazing industries, then a later generation of settlements
created by mineral discoveries. Every Australian colony had followed the same pattern.
Queensland's economy was about to move in a new direction. It was obvious that the
tropical coasts with their monsoonal climate closely resembled, and were at the same
latitudes as the Caribbean, where intensive agriculture had been practised by European
planters for 200 years. Commencing in the 1860s, there were a series of experiments
along the Queensland coast, not only with sugar which would later become the staple
crop, but with a wide and exotic variety of tropical produce: maize, cotton, rubber,
tobacco, rice, tea, coffee, indigo and tropical fruits.
This was a development which would cause the pattern of Queensland's history to
diverge from those of all the other Australian colonies, as Europeans began to settle the
hot wet tropical coast in large numbers. By the 1880s the picture had simplified
somewhat; although experiments with other products would continue into the twentieth
century, sugar cane had become the staple crop, and was concentrated on the
floodplains of the major rivers, notably the Burnett, Pioneer, Burdekin and Herbert. The
sugar industry had begun with a plantation economy, relying on imported Pacific Island
labour, but as time passed small farmers began to play a larger part in the industry.
With the arrival of co-operative mills in the 1890s and the phasing out of islander labour
after Federation, small farming came to dominate the industry, and the chain of coastal
sugar settlements grew to become important towns: particularly Childers, Bundaberg,
Proserpine, Mackay, Ayr, Ingham, Innisfail and Cairns. The tropical coastal lifestyle
became established as an important element of Queensland's diverse culture, with
important implications for the design of the Queensland house.
The Elevated House
The most conspicuous architectural legacy of the tropical planter economy was the
highset house. The practice of raising houses three metres or more off the ground is
one of the more distinctive features of Queensland's domestic architecture, and a
number of authors have devoted space to explaining the reasons for it, variously
proposing flooding, hillslope sites, defence against mosquitoes or termites, or in one
case, crocodiles. Its origins and diffusion throughout Queensland have been described
in a number of ways, but it has commonly been asserted that it was invented in
Brisbane, and spread north up the coast.
In fact, there can be no doubt that the practice arose first in the north of Queensland,
and was associated with the early sugar industry. From the early 1870s, travellers in the
Herbert River district (near the later site of Ingham) were commenting on the local
technique of raising houses well above ground. The earliest published account of a
Queensland highset house described the Avoca plantation in 1871, where a journalist
wrote "A fine substantial house has been erected on piles ten feet high, the object of
which is to get the sea breeze and to avoid miasma." (Queenslander 23 September

1871) Don Roderick has written a historical account of the origins of the Queensland
highset house which convincingly traces its antecedents to the Caribbean, and
attributes its principal motivation to the avoidance of malaria, which was then attributed
to miasma arising from damp ground. (Roderick 2000)
We can probably identify the very first elevated house and the likely originator of the
idea. In about 1868 a house had been built on the short-lived Bellenden Plains
plantation near Cardwell, "the floor being nearly nine feet six off the ground." (Roderick
2000, p. 117) The owner of Bellenden was John Ewen Davidson, a planter who had
experience in the West Indies, where military barracks and houses had been elevated
for decades with the specific intention of avoiding malaria. The motivation behind the
high stumps at Bellenden is ambiguous, for the house site was known to be flood-prone,
but the house was undoubtedly the model for the later Herbert River homesteads, all of
which were built on ground well above flood level.
In the 1870s a dozen or more elevated houses were built on the coastal plain around
Ingham, then by the early 1880s the technique began to spread both north and south to
the Cairns, Townsville and Mackay hinterlands. From 1884 it was accepted by the
Colonial Architect's office, and highset government residences were specified for
Innisfail and Georgetown. (Bell 1984) By the early twentieth century the practice was
routinely used for government schools, and had arrived in Brisbane. It was not long
before it was identified with Queensland in the wider world, for in 1903 an article on the
Queensland house in the London Building World not only illustrated an elevated house
on the journal's cover, but advised as the first maxim of house design: "Always elevate
the house on timber blocks or stumps." (Bellamy 1903)
There has never been a standard term for the posts which elevated the house; they
have been variously called posts, piles, piers, blocks or stumps. Traditionally they were
round tree trunks, which gave them the most popular name, stumps. They also became
an important part of the timber house's defence against termites. As early as the 1860s,
stumps under low-set houses were being capped with a piece of sheetmetal as a
termite barrier, and by the early 1880s this had become standardised as a mass-
produced dish-shaped stump cap. The stumps were also treated with creosote or tar,
giving them a black appearance which became traditional. From the 1870s they were
sometimes built in brick or concrete for greater termite resistance, and by the 1920s the
concrete stump had already taken on its modern square form with chamfered corners,
although it was not until the 1950s that it replaced timber in general use.

An early highset sugar plantation homestead in the 1870s (Mrs Fardon)
By 1900, highset houses had become widely accepted (Mrs Weinheimer)

Ornamentation
Like the construction techniques and the materials, the details and ornamentation of
Queensland houses were usually standardised and mechanised. The open verandahs
provided the principal opportunity for publicly visible ornament. From the widespread
adoption of verandahs in the 1860s, timber balustrades were usually elaborated with an
X-braced design, often a simple diagonal cross, but sometimes expanded into a Union
Jack motif. In the early 1880s, cheaper vertical dowel balustrading became more
common on houses; simply a top and bottom rail connected by one inch dowels spaced
at five inch centres. The more exuberant X-braced balustrades remained in fashion for
hotels and shops.
Cast iron balustrades, verandah brackets and fences came into use around larger
houses from about the late 1870s. At first they were imported from the south, or even
from Britain, but by the 1880s locally manufacturing architectural ironwork was on the
market; John Crase of Fortitude Valley advertised his foundry's wares in the Post Office
Directory from 1887. Even then there were no local designs manufactured, for the
industry seems to have been tightly franchised; the range of cast ware illustrated in
Crase's catalogue New Book of Designs of Ironwork is identical to that offered in
catalogues from Melbourne, Adelaide and Glasgow. The standard range of cast iron
designs persisted on grander houses for about twenty years, but the castings had a
High Victorian frilliness which was out of fashion by the early twentieth century.
Only a small proportion of Queensland houses ever had cast iron ornamentation, and
those were mostly at the upper end of the market; even there, nothing like the full range
of valencing, crestings and finials found in the catalogues was ever seen in
Queensland. Indeed, the most common purchases from the foundry catalogues were
probably grave surrounds, for there is a far richer variety of cast iron designs in the
Toowong cemetery than on the houses in any Brisbane suburb. The high point of
architectural ironwork in Queensland was found not on houses, but on the grand hotels
with their multi-storey screens of lacy metal: the Empire, Carlton and Regatta in
Brisbane and the lost Buchanan's in Townsville.
Fretsawn brackets in a variety of catalogue designs adorned the tops of verandah

posts. There was a standardised range of bracket designs mechanically sawn from
timber sheets by jigsaws, usually in highly stylised vegetation designs, often with an
ogee or S-shaped swirl loosely based on classical consoles. On two-roomed cottages
the brackets were often the full extent of the decoration, but four-roomed houses usually
had the posts elaborated with small cornice mouldings and stop chamfering, and a
colour scheme articulated the details, with the main timber elements painted dark
brown, green or red, and the brackets, mouldings and dowels picked out in white or
cream. The exposed stud wall with its repeating pattern of braces provided a second
layer of ornamentation behind the transparent screen of the verandah posts and
balustrade. There seems never to have been any attempt to coordinate or repeat the
designs of these two visual layers; they normally conflict, turning the front elevation of
the house into a complex geometrical interplay of timber elements. Some houses.
especially in Brisbane, had a central arched or gabled fretsawn pediment ornamenting
the verandah roof over the front stairs. (Stringer 1982)
House exteriors were frequently ornamented with sheetmetal work; acroteria distantly
derived from Greek temple designs at the corners of guttering, and frilly edges on the

hoods that shaded the side windows. The crowning glory of some pyramid roofs was a
cylindrical sheetmetal ventilator topped with a spreading cone, also with a mechanically
stamped frilly edge. These were popular in the tropical north, ostensibly removing hot
air from the roof space by convection, but in practice they were little more than another
decorative finishing touch.
In larger towns, every piece of ornamentation found on houses was normally composed
of standardised industrial elements. The joinery and fretwork was all made in the same
mills that supplied the building timber, the cast iron was ordered from a foundry and the
sheetmetal came ready-made from a plumbing works. All the designs could be selected
from catalogues. Only on farms and in smaller country towns did individual craft designs
sometimes appear: home-made brackets held in a vice and cut with a fretsaw, or a
decorative sheetmetal edge cut by hand with tinsnips. They were always very rare, and
are almost unknown today.
Modification
The distinctive housing stock that began to evolve in Queensland from the 1860s
onward underwent many changes over time. Fire and termites took a steady toll of old
timber houses, and many of the early modest cottages and farm houses were replaced
by larger ones as time passed. The increasing prosperity of the 1880s and early
twentieth century encouraged large-scale replacement of housing.
The early houses that remained also underwent change. The timber-framed house
lends itself to modification and extension, and there are few nineteenth century houses
that have not had something added to them. Two-roomed cottages have frequently
been extended to the rear, and most houses of any size have had bathrooms, laundries
and toilets – originally banished to the back yard before sewerage and septic tanks –
added to the back verandah. A cheap way to add an extra bedroom or two was to
enclose a verandah, and relatively few colonial houses still have their original open
verandahs. Lowset houses could later be raised on high timber stumps, although the
reverse - lowering a highset house - very rarely happened.
Some of the early houses were not as well designed for the climate as they might have
been, and there are a variety of modifications to improve climatic performance,
especially in summer. We have seen that the first generation of Queensland houses
often had verandahs added later. Sheetmetal hoods were placed over windows to
reduce glare. Verandahs were shaded with latticework, with blinds of canvas or drop-
down wooden laths wired into rolls, or with wooden louvres. A characteristic
modification of many early houses in western towns was the verandah eave, an outward
extension of the roof supported on struts from the verandah posts, to further protect the
verandah from both sun and rain. Another common climatic modification did not involve
change to the building, but planting trees to shade the house, usually attractive exotics
with dense foliage like mangoes, figs or bougainvillea.
The Queensland House at Federation
In the rapid expansion of pastoral and mining industry that characterised Queensland's
first four decades, the population grew by a factor of more than sixteen from 30,000 in
1860 to just under 500,000 by the turn of the twentieth century. At Federation, there
were over 100,000 houses standing in Queensland. By that time, the Queensland

house had evolved a number of features which between them identified a characteristic
regional house type. It was not a style, nor even a house form; it was simply a list of
materials, techniques and preferences which between them made up a house unlike
those built in other places. Typically, the Queensland house looked something like this
• The house was detached on its own allotment
• The house was single storeyed
• The house was built entirely of industrialised materials
• Its roof was almost certainly of corrugated galvanised iron
• The house walls were probably of sawn timber
• Its wall construction technique was most likely the light stud frame
• The frame was very likely left exposed on the exterior walls
• The house was raised on timber posts at least a short distance above ground
• The house was perhaps elevated to a height of up to three metres
• The general form of the house probably followed a common design
• The core of the house probably conformed to one of two simple plans
• The front elevation and general floor plan of the house were symmetrical
• The house's ornamentation was simple, conventional and mass-produced
• The house had at least one verandah, and possibly verandahs all round
Few Queensland houses had all these attributes, and every element on this list was to
be found in some nineteenth century houses throughout the rest of Australia, and
indeed elsewhere in the world, especially in English-speaking colonial societies in warm
climates: South Africa, Mauritius, Malaya, the North Island of New Zealand, the
Caribbean, the American South and West. However, nowhere other than Queensland
could all these attributes be found in combination in large numbers of houses. Two of
them, the exposed frame and highset elevation, were very rare everywhere else in the
world, and can be taken as the distinctive identifying elements of Queensland's colonial
houses.
One characteristic house form of the southern capital cities was almost unknown in
Queensland. The terrace house, or row of attached houses, which occupied large areas
of the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, was extremely rare in Brisbane. From
the 1860s onward, the principal explanation for this was presumably that Brisbane
simply did not experience the same pressure for land and resulting real estate prices as
the southern cities, but in 1885 the difference was formalised by the Undue Subdivision
of Land Prevention Act, which among other things, made sixteen perches the minimum
size of a housing allotment. (Watson 1981, p. 3.2) The effect was to make attached

houses uneconomical for sale in Queensland; the amount of land that each terrace
house would tie up made it more attractive to build and sell detached houses. Some
attached houses were built for rental, but they never became an attractive option for
speculative investment.
Railways and Regionalism
Every city and major town in Queensland is on a railway. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, railway transport was fundamental to all economic activity, and all
Queensland governments made railway building an important political priority during the
four decades of rapid growth from 1860 to 1900. Railway lines were extended west from
the east coast ports into first the agricultural and then the mining districts of the
hinterlands: from Ipswich in 1865, Rockhampton in 1867, Townsville in 1880,
Bundaberg in 1881, Mackay and Cooktown in 1885, Cairns in 1887 and Normanton on
the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1889. Each railway brought economic prosperity to its coastal
terminus, and it was no coincidence that the ports which had the longest railways -
Townsville and Rockhampton - eventually became the biggest cities outside Brisbane.
The immediate effect of railway access on Queensland houses was an abrupt fall in the
cost of industrial building materials such as sawn timber and corrugated iron, so almost
as soon as the first train arrived, the primitive building tradition disappeared from the
district. Sawmills were built at every coastal railway terminus, and the railways became
the principal means of distribution of building materials. This virtual monopoly on the
supply of materials contributed to the standardisation of both components and
techniques in the domestic building industry.
The railway network also had longer term and more subtle impacts on the Queensland
house. While every major port had an inland railway by 1890, it was not until 1924 that a
railway was opened along the coast from Brisbane to Cairns. This emphasis on regional
rail systems tended to slice Queensland into a series of parallel economic hinterlands,
bringing a strong sense of regionalism which dominated many aspects of life in
Queensland for decades, and in many ways persists to the present day. This probably
explains some, although not all, of the regional variations that arose in the Queensland
house in the late nineteenth century; why, despite overall state-wide similarities, there
are differences between the historic houses of Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville.
These can be attributed to independent patterns of timber supply, and the divergent
influences of individual architects and builders within each hinterland.
The Boom Style
Much of the discussion so far has described mass housing, but of course there were
many Queensland houses built in a grander tradition. From early in the development of
Queensland there were people with wealth and status who wished to build themselves
more impressive dwellings. In general, these took two forms. One was simply an
expanded version of the single storey four-roomed house; large, spacious, beautifully
finished and richly ornamented, although in plan simply a bigger version of four main
rooms symmetrically arranged about a central corridor. The house was likely to have
very wide verandahs, perhaps shading bay windows to maximise the breeze and the
view. Bellevue at Coominya, Gabbinbar at Toowoomba and Rosebank at Townsville
exemplify the type. Larger pastoral homesteads in the north and west were usually of
this kind, and they were also very common in the cities.

The other, more urbane, option was the conventional grand mansion favoured by polite
society in the southern capital cities. Cumbooquepa (now Somerville House),
Moorlands, and Andrea Stombuco's masterpiece Palma Rosa exemplify the general
type. They were likely to be two-storeyed, built of masonry, asymmetrical in plan,
perhaps with a tower or turret as a badge of status, and sometimes richly decorated
with cast iron lacework on their open verandahs.
In other words, they were not Queensland houses. They were outside the range of
characteristics identifying the distinctive house type that had evolved in Queensland
since the 1860s, but were within the range of house types commonly being built in
Sydney and Melbourne at the same time. In common speech, grander houses were
sometimes called "villas", a word which did not describe any particular house form, but
implied a house outside the normal Queensland range of types.
The early grand houses in urban areas tended to be built on hilltops, reinforcing their
social status. In Brisbane a belt of hills north of the river and east of Breakfast Creek
formed a focus for the houses of the wealthy in the late nineteenth century, that would
evolve into Queensland's densest concentration of grand houses in the suburbs of
Ascot, Hamilton and Clayfield. But other hilltop suburbs as far afield as Bardon and
Auchenflower - both named after grand houses - were also chosen as desirable sites.
Grand houses were very rare outside metropolitan Brisbane. There were a sprinkling in
Ipswich, Toowoomba, Mackay and Townsville, but as they went north they were more
likely to be built of timber than of masonry. Despite the prodigious wealth of Charters
Towers, only two two-storey houses were ever built there, and one of those was of
timber.
Of course, the notion of a what constituted a grand house changed over time. The first
Charters Towers miner to become very wealthy was Friedrich Pfeiffer, who built himself
a very fine house beside his Day Dawn mine in about 1881. It was a remarkable house,
conventional in its use of an exposed stud frame and roofing iron, but unlike any other
northern house in its complex plan and multiple gabled and vaulted roof form. When it
was built, Pfeiffer was among the wealthiest people in North Queensland, and this was
the largest house that had ever been built there. Yet such was the rise of wealth and
housing standards in Charters Towers over the next twenty years that when Pfeiffer
died early in the twentieth century, his obituary praised him for being “content with a
humble home”. (North Queensland Register 16 March 1903)
One design element of the grand house trickled down to the mass housing market.
From about the 1880s, some four-roomed houses were built with an asymmetrical
facade formed by omitting the verandah on one side of the front door, and projecting the
room on that side forward into the verandah space. The forward-projecting room might
be accentuated by a bow window on its front wall. Houses with this pretentious feature
were sometimes described as "villa-fronted". They were rarely seen north of Brisbane,
but their asymmetrical facade would outlive the Victorian era to become an important
motif of the Queensland house in the twentieth century.

The Works Department conformed to regional preferences in house forms
Thornburgh in Charters Towers: grand houses were rare outside Brisbane

The Federation Era
The house forms in use throughout Queensland saw little variation in the twenty or thirty
years after 1860. However, late in the century change came in the form of a movement
which Australian architectural historians have agreed to call the Federation period. Its
effects on domestic architecture were similar to those of the Edwardian period in
England and the Queen Anne style in the USA, for it was part of a world-wide
phenomenon signalling the end of the Victorian era. It was influenced by the continental
Art Nouveau and Jugendstijl movements, and by the Arts-and-Crafts ideas of Willam
Morris.
Australian architecture of the Federation period was a direct reaction against the
Victorian era, rejecting the mannered Classicism, the over-decoration and the
pomposity that had characterised the worst architecture of the nineteenth century.
Locally, there was an element of nationalism, inspiring a search for an architecture more
in keeping with an independent Australian culture, and also early stirrings of
functionalism, with some architects seeking to design buildings better suited to the
Australian climate. Architects were exhorted to design buildings that were simple and
honest:
In a young and comparatively-poor country like this, our architecture should be

more simple. I would go so far as to say that it is absolutely dishonourable to
squander our clients' money in what is not durable, or to introduce needless fads
of our own ... (Joseland 1898, p. 1011)
Sadly, despite the intellectual aspirations toward nationalism and independence that
accompanied the Federation movement in architecture, it looked much the same in
Australia as its contemporary movements elsewhere throughout the world. Aspiring to
change simply became the new orthodoxy.
Queensland adopted only a few characteristics of the Federation movement. In the

houses of Sydney and Melbourne during the period from about 1885 to 1914 there was
a conspicuous stylistic change, incorporating rich red brickwork - often contrasted with
bands of cream render - Marseilles roof tiles and terracotta roof crestings and finials.
The newly-fashionable houses were likely to be asymmetrical in plan, with eccentrically
shaped openings and their asymmetricality emphasised by a turret at one corner with a
conical candle-snuffer roof. The house roof would be steep and complex, often a major
visual element of the house, and elaborated with completely unnecessary gables,
turrets, dormer windows and tall, elaborate brick chimneys.
Queenslanders greeted these stylistic adventures with little enthusiasm. Red brick and
cream render began to appear on commercial office blocks and government schools,
but rarely on houses. There were a few fashionable houses built in Ascot and Hamilton
around the turn of the twentieth century which demonstrated part of this range of
stylistic attributes, but in general the Brisbane house adopted Federation characteristics
only very selectively. The new southern taste for brick and terracotta did little to wean
Queenslanders away from their attachment to timber walls and corrugated iron roofs,
but the Federation period did popularise two fundamental changes in house form: the
asymmetrical floor plan and increased emphasis on the roof as a visual element of the
house.

North and west of Brisbane the stylistic mainstream of the Federation period was
ignored completely; there was never a terracotta finial or a circular front door to be seen
in Longreach or Charters Towers. But even there, asymmetrical floor plans were slowly
adopted in the next twenty years. To sum up the impact of the Federation era, in the
nineteenth century the majority of houses built in Queensland had a symmetrical
elevation when viewed from the street, reflecting their symmetrical floor plan; in the
twentieth, most houses had an asymmetrical plan and elevation. In the nineteenth
century, most houses had simple roof forms, whereas in the twentieth century, many
houses would have complex roof forms. Those shifts in taste were probably the lasting
legacies of the Federation movement.
The best illustration of the modified impact of the Federation era in Queensland is the
work of architect Robin Dods. On the face of it, it is difficult to relate Dods' work to the
textbook descriptions of the Federation house except in their asymmetricality and their
deliberate seeking of originality in design. But in Dods' case, this did not involve
incorporating elements from northern hemisphere Queen Anne design books, but by
freely interpreting Queensland's own spreading house forms in superbly-crafted timber,
to evoke a mood of rural serenity. (Riddel 1993)
The continuing influence of Dods and his contemporaries was to reinforce Queensland's
infatuation with timber, and lead to greater complexity and refinement in timber
ornamentation of verandahs and porches. Timber ornament also appeared in the new
gables on the more complex house roofs, although these more sophisticated details are
rarely found north of Brisbane. Dods' own tastes probably increased the use of external
weatherboards rather than the traditional internal chamferboards, and assisted in
popularising oiled and stained timber in preference to paintwork.
One important aspect of the greater flexibility of floor plans in the early twentieth century
was the incorporation of functions from the periphery into the house core. New ideas
about house forms played a part in this, but so did the gradual wider adoption of
technological innovations such as reticulated water, septic tanks and cast iron stoves.
These meant that one by one the old problems of water supply, unpleasant smells and
fire risk were dealt with, so that over the last few decades of the nineteenth century and
the first two of the twentieth, progressively the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry and
finally even the toilet were incorporated into the core of the house. Backyard
outbuildings became a thing of the past. In the delightful phrase of Robin Boyd, they
had knocked timidly at the posts of the rear verandah and been "allowed to step up."
(Boyd 1952, p. 51)

The Federation house brought asymmetrical plans and complex roof forms
Most Queensland houses adopted only muted versions of the Federation style

The legacy of the Federation era: a nineteenth century Queensland house facade
(National Trust of Queensland leaflet)
The legacy of the Federation era: a twentieth century Queensland house facade
(State Advances Corporation report 1923)

The Prefabricated House
From the early twentieth century, a large proportion of Queensland houses were
prefabricated; that is, manufactured in every detail at a sawmill and sent in package
form to be assembled on the building site. Prefabrication was not new. It had been used
for centuries, particularly to provide housing in colonies, and was widely adopted during
the early settlement of southern Australia. We have seen that the building firms of
Charters Towers were already advertising prefabricated houses in the 1880s, and the
Rooney Brothers of Townsville had shipped prefabricated houses all over northern
Australia, as far afield as the Northern Territory and New Guinea.
What happened in the years leading up to the First World War was the adoption of
these established techniques by Brisbane timber firms who refined them, and marketed
the product on an unprecedented scale, moving from individual prefabrication to mass
prefabrication. James Campbell and Sons had begun as retailers of building materials in
Brisbane in 1854, then from the 1860s expanded into sawmilling, architectural ceramics
and lime and paint manufacture, eventually advertising with the slogan "Everything for
Building." (James Campbell & Sons 1924, p. 2; RAIA 1959, p. xx) In 1903 Campbells
began to advertise a range of cheap, simple prefabricated houses, "all materials
numbered and ready for erection" for under £100. The houses were prefabricated in the
company's Albion sawmill and could be delivered in kit form anywhere on rail or by sea.
The wording of their advertising was specifically designed to attract country buyers.
(Queenslander 8 August 1903)
They were not alone in this market for long. In 1905, sawmiller George Brown and
builder Edmund Broad formed a second Brisbane company, Brown & Broad Limited, to
compete directly with Campbells. They too used regional newspapers to market
completely prefabricated Ready-to-Erect houses from their Newstead sawmill by mail
order. In moving into the field of mass prefabrication, both Brisbane companies were
using techniques that were being evolved simultaneously in the USA by the Aladdin
Company of Michigan (1904), the Prebuilt Company of Massachusetts (1905) and
Sears, Roebuck of Chicago (1908). (Gowans 1987, pp. 48-50) Whether the links
between the mail order house companies of Queensland and the USA went beyond
reading each other catalogues is a topic worth investigating.
The mail order companies carried prefabrication to an extraordinary degree. Each

house came in a kit with an instruction manual. The kit contained not only basic timber
and iron, but the entire house: guttering, doors, windows, nails, screws, doorknobs,
even paint and brushes. The resulting houses were distinctive in appearance. They
were very simple, the basic models just wooden boxes with roofs and a front verandah,
although the more expensive ones made quite gracious farmhouses. Every component
was smaller in dimensions than common practice; studs were 2 x 3 inches rather than
the standard 2 x 4, roof iron was 26 gauge, not 24. Decorative details such as verandah
brackets were small, simple and geometric; the floral fretwork of the nineteenth century
was gone. The exposed frame was also out of favour, and walls exposed to the weather
were externally clad with weatherboards or chamferboards.

James Campbell advertising leaflet 1914
{Pioneer Mill records, James Cook University)

Brown & Broad advertising booklet 1924
(John Oxley Library)

Two innovations made the houses particularly striking in appearance, and would remain
characteristic elements of the Queensland house for the next few decades. First was
the appearance of the roof. In the nineteenth century it had been standard practice to
attach the verandah roof to the core wall a short distance below the eave, giving the
house roof a characteristic stepped-down profile. The new practice was a straight
roofline, extending unbroken over both core and verandah. This had occasionally been
used in the nineteenth century, especially on rural homesteads, and was sometimes
known as a "bungalow roof", but by about 1910 it had become common practice. Its
stylistic origins lay in Dods and the other Federation architects' experiments with new
rooflines, but its appeal to the mail order companies lay in the fact that the new roof was
cheaper to manufacture, and easier for amateurs to build.
The second departure was in the walls. In nineteenth century Queensland houses, the
outer core wall was almost always stud framed, with the studs left exposed on the
verandahs. The new practice was to use studs only at corners and openings, and form
the intervening wall panels of vertical tongue-and-groove boards secured to one or two
horizontal rails. It was the standard internal partition wall brought out into the open. The
wall looked flimsy, but in fact the boards continued through floor and ceiling, with their
ends nailed to the roof beams and the underfloor joists, making the house core a very
solid timber box. The new walls greatly reduced the number of studs, and thus the
number of expensive mortice-and-tenon joints. By techniques such as this, the mail
order houses saved a lot of timber, and kept both milling costs and freight costs to a
minimum.
At first, Campbells' mail order houses were utilitarian in appearance and colourlessly
listed as "The Number 2 Cottage", "The Number 4 Cottage" and so on, but by the First
World War the choice of house designs was much greater, and their appearance was
more up-market. They had become the Redicut Homes range, illustrated in glossy
catalogues with regional names such as "The Bribie", "The Gympie" or "The Blackall", a
tradition which survives in the ready-made home industry to the present. (James
Campbell & Sons 1924) Brown & Broad's rival Newstead Homes catalogue was also
offering "The Moreton", "The Kennedy" and "The Carpentaria". (Brown & Broad 1918)
Both the language and graphic design techniques were very similar to Sears, Roebuck's
catalogues promoting their Modern Homes range. (Stevenson & Jandl 1986)
The influence of the new business methods seems to have been profound. The turnover
of cheap houses from the two Brisbane firms was enormous, and with the completion of
the North Coast railway in stages up to 1924, nearly every home-buyer in Queensland
was coming within their marketplace. The greatest triumph of the new marketing
strategies - and probably the biggest single contract for mail order houses - came when
Brown & Broad supplied over 280 houses and other buildings to Mount Isa Mines in
1929-30. (Kirkman 1998, pp. 26-30)
All regional builders found themselves losing customers. Rooneys in Townsville

struggled to compete, advertising: "Old Methods of Building now Give Way to Rooney's
Ready-to-Erect System". (North Queensland Register 14 August 1916) In fact the
company had been selling prefabricated houses for over thirty years, and pioneered
many of the "new" techniques, but now they obviously found it necessary to imitate both
Brown & Broad's language and their marketing style. The success of the Brisbane mail
order firms drove small builders out of business and forced the larger ones to copy their

methods, so that by the 1920s nearly all new Queensland houses looked just like the
ones in the catalogues. The age of regional building styles had ended.
The Timber Resource
The parsimonious use of timber in the new houses reflected its rising cost as forest
resources diminished. By the early twentieth century, Queensland's native softwoods
were becoming scarce. As early as the 1880s, some observers had been calling for
forest conservation, and commenting on wasteful logging and milling practices:
The unwelcome truth is now dawning on both interested and uninterested alike,
that although our forests may still be immeasurable to the eye, the valuable,
marketable portion of them is a strictly finite quantity, and even now approaches
exhaustion. All the better sorts of timber are failing fast, and nobody, at this time of
day, will be hardy enough to dispute that the rich dowry of forest wealth which
Nature had conferred on this colony at the time when it started on an independent
career, has been, and still is being, recklessly squandered. (Barton 1885, p. 4)
Twenty years later, the kauri and red cedar trees that had been profitably shipped south
as whole logs in the colonial period were virtually extinct. Even the prolific hoop pine
forests of the south-east could no longer be harvested cheaply on the coastal plain, but
were being cut at progressively greater cost up in the ranges. During the first half of the
twentieth century, the building industry would react to the growing scarcity of easily-
milled timber in three ways, by:
(1) reducing the size of all timber components in houses, and finding other
materials to substitute for them, a process which continues to the present;
(2) substituting native hardwoods in roles that previously had been filled more
satisfactorily by softwoods, accompanied by claims that they were more
durable, termite resistant and so on; and
(3) reluctantly supporting a government program of planting State Forests which

would eventually become the principal timber resource for the building
industry, in the process converting the industry's softwood staple from native
Araucaria to faster-growing exotic Pinus species.
There followed a long slow process of transition, but all three paths inevitably converged
on the use of commercial plantation timbers, the only sustainable option in the long
term. In the 1880s, a new Queensland house was most likely to be sawn from native
hoop pine felled in the forests of the Wide Bay region. By the 1980s it was almost
certain to be sawn from Californian radiata pine harvested in a commercial plantation.

Government Housing Schemes
The success of the mail order building firms, the simplification of building practices, and
the decline of regionalism in the Queensland house throughout the twentieth century
were all assisted by State intervention in the housing industry.
In 1909 the Kidston government passed the Workers Dwellings Act, setting up the first
State-subsidised house ownership scheme in Australia. This essentially provided a low-
interest government loan of up to £300 for a worker with an annual income below £200
to build a house of an approved design on his own land. This differed in three important
respects from State housing programs in other states: first, it was an ownership
scheme, not a rental scheme; second, the scheme simply provided house-building
finance to an owner who already owned the land; and third, the owner chose the house
site, so the Queensland Workers' Dwellings were distributed throughout the suburbs
and country towns, not clustered in new subdivisions like the government-assisted
housing of New South Wales or South Australia. As Robert Riddel pointed out, there
was never a Garden Suburb movement in Queensland, perhaps because there were no
heavily built up terraced suburbs to react against. (Riddel 1993, p. 111)
The first Workers Dwelling was built at Nundah in 1910. The scheme proved
tremendously popular, with 447 houses financed by the Workers' Dwellings Board in the
first year of operations. It was modified slightly as the Workers’ Homes scheme from
1919, and has operated with ongoing modifications continuously to the present day, its
administrative agency known first as the Workers’ Dwellings Board, in the 1920s as the
State Advances Corporation, after the Second World War as the Queensland Housing
Commission, and today as Home Purchase Assistance.
In addition, the First World War brought further subsidised housing schemes for ex-
servicemen; the Queensland government’s own Discharged Soldiers’ Workers’
Dwellings Scheme from 1917, and the Commonwealth War Service Homes
Commission.
The State housing schemes - and specifically the process of obtaining approval for the
proposed house design - brought further pressures for standardisation and conformity in
house design and construction practices. The mail order housing firms took care to
advertise that their house designs conformed to the specifications of the schemes, so
that there was automatic approval of a prefabricated house. Each annual report of the
Workers Dwellings Board and its later manifestations was copiously illustrated with
photographs and plans of houses that had been built that year. These reports must
have exerted powerful pressure on the building industry to conform to the designs that
had already received approval. Judy Rechner has done a study of the forms and styles
of housing in Brisbane through the early decades of the twentieth century. (Rechner
1998) Its illustrations suggest a very strong correlation between designs that the Board
had previously approved, and what the major building firms were offering their
customers.

The first Workers' Dwelling, 1910 (Qld Housing Commission report 1947)
Rural houses remained symmetrical and conservative well into the new century

New Styles
The First World War brought a downturn in housing construction, and when it picked up
again after 1919, there was a sudden influx of new styles in domestic architecture.
Michael Kennedy has identified five principal styles, most of which appeared in a very
few years after the war ended: the Californian Bungalow, the Spanish Mission house,
the Georgian Revival house, the Tudor Revival (or Old English) house, and the
Functionalist (or Modern) house, which arrived in the 1930s. (Kennedy 1989)
The most striking thing about all the new styles was that they defined a new source of
influence in Australian architectural history. Without exception the new styles came from
the USA; the Californian Bungalow and the Spanish Mission house were straight out of
American pattern books. This was the beginning of a new era for the Queensland
house; whereas in the nineteenth century, virtually all the styles of Australian
architecture came from England, in the twentieth century they came from America.
(Every glossary of architectural terms says that the word "bungalow" is Indian in origin,
and originally meant a house of the form common in Bengal. That is true, but the word
was rarely used in nineteenth century Queensland except in the vaguest English sense
of a single storey house - which in Queensland meant most houses - or to describe a
straight-profiled roof. The word did not achieve popularity until the 1920s, and then it
was used in the American sense with a style name - either Californian or Tudor -
preceding it. Although its remote etymology may be Indian, in Queensland "bungalow"
is really an American word.)
Even the Tudor Revival bungalow, despite its very distant medieval English origins, was
fashionable in the USA as a modern fad for twenty years before it appeared in Australia.
Mercifully, Queensland was spared the full horror of the Dutch Colonial, Picturesque,
Pueblo and Classical Temple styles which swept across America in the same period.
(Apperly et al 1989; McAlester 1986; Gowans 1987)
The Modern or Functionalist house was derived ultimately from the Bauhaus and other
radical design movements of Europe, but it too came filtered through American pattern
books, and in the 1930s it was simply a visual style, rather than being a genuine change
in design philosophy to embrace the principles of Functionalism. A Modern house was
usually a standard house in plan and form, with a few Modern details added. Exactly the
same house could be built with Tudor or Spanish details instead. The crucial test was
the roof; whereas European Functionalist design dictated a flat roof, Queensland
builders were unwilling to build them (or unable to make them watertight), and
compromised by hiding their usual hipped roof behind a parapet. It was not until the late
1950s that any significant number of Queensland houses really embraced modernist
design with any conviction.
The Tudor Revival house was probably the most influential of the inter-war eclectic
housing styles, not in its details of stucco, twee brick details and fake half-timbering, but
in the multiple gabled roofs that accompanied these features. Domestic roof forms had
tended to be artificially complex since the Federation era, and the Tudor revival house
reinforced that tendency. The most durable legacy of the inter-war proliferation of
foreign styles was a fondness for multiple gables.

The Spanish Mission house was said to be suited to the Queensland climate
The Inter-War Modern house frequently exhibited Art Deco stylistic influence

The Queenslander
During the 1920s there arose a characteristic local type of house which is often
recognised as Queensland's most distinctive contribution to Australian domestic
architecture. It dominated the suburbs of Brisbane and some of the major cities between
the two World Wars, and has subsequently become known as "the Queenslander". Like
the house of 20 years earlier, it was not simply a style, nor a single house form; but a
combination of materials, techniques and preferences. Some of its characteristic
elements remained similar to those of the Queensland house at the time of Federation,
but others were derived from a number of newer influences:
• The house was still detached on its own allotment and single storeyed
• The house was still built of sawn timber and roofed with corrugated iron
• The house was still raised on timber posts to a height of up to three metres
• There were still a range of standard designs, but now many more of them
• The front elevation and floor plan of the house were now asymmetrical
• The house walls were probably of tongue-and-groove board
• The house roof was lower-pitched and straight in profile
• The house roof was complex in form and dominated by gables
The asymmetrical plan which appeared in the late nineteenth century had now become
almost universal, internal room arrangements were much more flexible, and the central
hallway had vanished. The stud frame and its chamferboard lining were rarely seen,
and the stepped roof had also virtually disappeared, although it survived over some
entrance porches. By the late 1920s the new houses had gained a wealth of distinctive
timber details, broadly derived from the Californian Bungalow, but with local
modifications inspired by the work of Robin Dods.
The Queenslander's facade was dominated by gables facing the street, low-pitched with
broad white bargeboards and other prominent timber elements unmistakably reflecting
the Californian style. Sometimes there was just one large gable, more often there were
two asymmetrical gables, and as time went on there might be three, stepped back in
plan to form what became known as a triple-fronted house.
Weatherboards were back in fashion, now sawn from hardwood timbers rather than
softwoods, and frequently in the dark stained finishes favoured by Dods. Colour
schemes had simplified, and many houses were almost monochrome, with white or
cream paintwork contrasting with dark wood stains, echoing the black and white of
Tudor half-timbering. Where paint colours survived, they were usually in the organic
greens or browns favoured for details by the Californian school.

The Queenslander (War Service Homes report 1927)
The Queenslander (State Advances Corporation report 1924)

The raised foundations of the house, visually spindly and open in the nineteenth
century, were given an illusion of substance by wooden boxes at the corners;
weatherboarded pylons rising from ground level to the verandah rail. They were clearly
descendants of the massive verandah pylons of the Californian house. The open space
under the house was concealed by vertical timber battens between the foundation
posts. At first these formed a modest skirt of dark-stained timber between the posts.
Later the screen of battens between the posts was painted white, and sometimes cut
into arched or occasionally zig-zag patterns.
The dowel verandah balustrading of the nineteenth century had vanished completely. In
its place, balustrading was composed of flat battens, some with fretsawn motifs, often in
a wider baluster in the middle of each verandah bay. By the 1930s few houses had an
open balustrade; instead the balusters were replaced by solid weatherboard to waist
level, open above. Sometimes the upper weatherboards were relieved by regularly-
spaced curved openings with batten screens.
During the First World War a fashion had developed of elaborating the balustrades on
the front staircase. Instead of a single sloping handrail either side of the stair, as had
been standard since the 1880s, the balustrade was suddenly built in a series of two or
three steps, with vertical battens forming the balusters. The result was visually much
more impressive, but with its giant steps it lost most of its function as a handrail,
becoming more like the bars of a cage. Often the staircase was given a right-angled
bend, so it descended parallel to the front of the house, displaying the stepped
balustrade prominently to the street. On larger houses the staircase was made T-
shaped in plan, descending from the verandah to a landing, from which two stairs with
stepped balustrades extended either side.
At first these elaborate staircases entered the front verandah, a relic of the colonial past,
but it became more common to shelter the front door under a small American-style
porch. Beside the front door there appeared a small feature window, often a circular
porthole with a leadlight motif.
These changes did not happen all at once; they took place slowly from the early years
of the twentieth century, and the Queensland house was still evolving until the late
1930s. In that time the spirit of the Queensland house changed. The Queenslander
began with the adventurous spirit of experimentation that characterised the Federation
era, adopted the simplifications that kept the prices of the prefabricated houses down,
institutionalised them through the various government housing schemes, and then
responded to the new tastes arriving from America in the 1920s. The early
Queenslander of about 1920 was a modest asymmetrical highset box, but over the next
twenty years it became larger, more elaborate and more complicated, growing ever
more porches, gables and fancy skirts about its legs. There was never a typical
Queenslander, it was always a characteristic local way of doing things rather than a
single type of house. (Fisher 1994; Rechner 1998)
Like its ancestor the Federation house, the Queenslander was really more a Brisbane
house than a Queensland house. In its more elaborate forms, its natural habitat was the
growing suburbs of inter-war Brisbane, as the tramlines extended out to Ashgrove,
Mount Gravatt, Chermside and Cannon Hill. Its more restrained versions appeared in
the larger provincial cities of Toowoomba, Rockhampton and Townsville, but even they

were always rare in the smaller towns and on the farms. Outside the Greater Brisbane
area, formed into one municipality in 1926, the simpler designs of the prefabricated
house catalogues continued to provide the models for most new houses until the
Second World War.
War and Depression
Whereas the nineteenth century history of Queensland is conveniently spelled out by

episodes of agricultural expansion and railway construction, the twentieth century is
divided up by two major wars and a great depression. These were not simply faraway
political events, for each had a global impact, and profoundly affected the construction
of Queensland houses.
The Great War, or First World War as it became known after 1939, was fought from
1914 to 1918. Large numbers of Australian troops were involved from 1915 to 1919, at
first in the Pacific Islands and the Middle East, then in greater numbers in Europe.
About 60,000 died. Its economic effects on Australia were to bring about a serious
shortage of labour, to disrupt all shipping and practically sever commercial trade with
Europe, and make many manufactured goods completely unavailable for several years.
All building activity slumped as labour and building materials became scarce, although it
did not cease entirely. Australia's dependence on British industry became painfully
apparent, and the war saw Australia's first steelworks established at Newcastle and Port
Kembla, where Lysaghts produced the first corrugated iron in 1921. Wunderlichs began
manufacturing terracotta roofing tiles in Australia during the war, and with Hardies, also
started making asbestos-cement sheeting. From that time, Australia steadily became
more self-sufficient in building materials.
However, the psychological effects of the war were more profound than the physical
ones. The unprecedented death toll and disruption of the Great War brought a period of
change and restlessness to Australia, which spelled out the end of an era in matters
such as clothing fashions and architectural taste. It brought the final break with the
architecture of the nineteenth century. Whereas in 1912 a few people were still building
symmetrical houses with stepped verandah roofs little changed from Victorian taste
(Warringa in Townsville for example), by 1920 that had become unthinkable. Times had
changed, and a new cosmopolitan awareness helped loosen the ties with English
architecture, so that most of the inter-war houses looked to America for inspiration.
Those inter-war years were not prosperous. Rural depression was affecting agriculture
and country towns during the 1920s, and spread abruptly to affect all urban industry and
business activity after the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929. The early 1930s
saw high unemployment levels and a shortage of investment capital. Building activity
again shrank to a very low level, and only slowly improved as the decade wore on. The
great outward expansion of metropolitan Brisbane began during this prolonged period of
economic depression.
The architectural heritage of the Depression is expressed in the relatively small number
of elaborate buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, and second in the
construction details of most buildings. The move to cost-cutting that had begun earlier in
the twentieth century was continued, and the houses that were built employed every
trick to lighten components, use less material, reduce transport costs, and minimise

labour on the building site. Joinery in mortice and tenon and other joints became
simpler, or disappeared entirely in some houses, to be replaced by simple butted and
nailed joints.
The most visible legacy of the period was the practice of extending houses by the
cheapest possible means. Families continued to grow, and instead of adding a
bedroom, the simplest expedient was to enclose a verandah to form a sleepout. Across
Queensland, thousands of verandahs were enclosed between the 1920s and the 1950s
to accommodate a growing population with the minimum of expense. Many other family
homes were converted to boarding houses or divided up into flats in the same period.
However, it is a mistake to categorise the Depression as a period of universal poverty

and a completely depressed building industry. Life is never as simple as that. For many
people, life went on as usual, and indeed some industries such as gold mining
prospered despite - or because of - the prevailing downturn. Under successive Labor
governments, the State Advances Corporation increased its efforts to provide housing
and sustain the weakened building industry. Even in the depths of the mid-1930s, there
were houses being built as usual, and a few people could still afford to build grand
houses. Some of the most opulent Queenslanders date from the darkest years of the
Great Depression.
The Second World War changed life in Australia even more profoundly than either the
previous war or the Depression. It began in 1939, and once again saw Australians
fighting in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Then in 1941 Japan entered the
war, and for the only time in its history, Australia came under direct attack and, it
seemed, threat of invasion. There followed a prolonged national emergency, with
Australian troops fighting in the Pacific theatre, large American forces based in
Australia, and stringent government control of the economy. Because of their proximity
to the fighting, Queensland and the Northern Territory experienced the most dramatic
changes.
While the casualties of the Second World War were much lighter than those of the first,
the economic impacts were much more profound. Even before the Japanese entry into
the war, the Federal government had introduced strict regulation of industry. Non-
essential industries were simply closed down and their workforces transferred to other
jobs; factories were told to stop manufacturing particular goods and produce something
else. All building materials were reserved for military and government use, and all
labour was regulated, so the domestic building industry simply ceased to exist. From
1940 to about 1946, no houses were built in Queensland except for defence purposes.
Even minor modifications to houses could only be done with scrounged or blackmarket
materials.

The Modern Era
Like its predecessor, the Second World War brought psychological change that swept
away the architectural tastes of the pre-war era. The classic Queenslander vanished, as
the multiple gables, foundation skirts, stepped staircases and fretsawn verandah
balustrades of the 1930s became simply too frivolous and old-fashioned for a
generation that was trying to come to terms with the atrocities of the Burma railway and
the implications of nuclear weapons.
Besides, there were no longer the materials to build such houses. Although the war
ended in 1945, rationing of fuel and shortages of materials persisted for years
afterward, and it was not until the mid-1950s that the building industry returned to
anything like normal. Robin Boyd identified those post-war years as the Austerity period
(although other writers have given the period less emphasis, characterising it as "brief
but drastic": Apperly et al 1989, p. 222). It was a time of conflicting pressures in
housing, for there was a tremendous increase in population both through a rising
birthrate and immigration from Europe. The city suburbs began expanding rapidly again
at the very time when the materials to build houses were in short supply. As post-war
recovery coincided with the fastest population growth Queensland had seen since the
gold rushes, sawmills and brickworks simply could not keep up with demand.
In the face of both economic pressure and changing popular taste, newly-built
Queensland houses shrank in size, and their forms dwindled to a simpler range of floor
plans. Almost all urban houses were now low-set, and verandahs had virtually
disappeared, to be replaced by a narrow eave or overhang, although a small porch
usually survived over the front door. Only in country areas did old traditions survive the
war, and new homesteads in the 1950s usually retained traditional floor plans and
generous verandahs.
The shortages of the Austerity period encouraged a general diversification in the use of
building materials. Concrete block had been in use on a small scale since the early
twentieth century, usually manufactured on site in patent machines rather than
commercially supplied, but in the post-war period it increased rapidly in popularity, to
become a major building material by the 1960s. In its early years it was rendered, or
given a veneer of ceramic bricks, but by the 1970s concrete blocks had gained
acceptance for external walls, and were simply painted. One brand, Besser Block, was
available in a range of pierced designs, used for decorative walls and fences, and also
laid as a screen between the stumps of elevated houses.
The stud frame returned, although no nineteenth century carpenter would have
recognised it. During the wartime emergency, joinery had shrunk to the absolute
minimum needed to keep two pieces of timber in contact. Mortice and tenon joints had
vanished, and studs were merely housed into a slot cut a few millimetres into the top
and bottom plates (a joint requiring two brief sawcuts and two chisel blows) and then
skew-nailed. In the cheapest construction, the joinery was omitted and skew-nails did
the entire job.

Impact of the Second World War: a 1930s house in Tarragindi
Impact of the Second World War: a 1950s house in Tarragindi

Frequently the timber stud frame was concealed behind a single skin of external bricks;
a construction technique known as brick veneer. It was promoted by builders as
combining the advantages of timber and brick construction: a prestigious and low-
maintenance exterior at lower cost. (Ten years later, the owners discovered that it also
combined the disadvantages of the two materials: the exterior brickwork cracked, while
termites ate the timber frame.) Internally the frame was concealed by various forms of
synthetic particle board; CSR produced a number of products, first Caneite and later the
more durable Masonite. Although the timber frame remained the staple construction
technique for Queensland houses as it had for the past hundred years, in many new
houses not a trace of timber was visible.
The most popular material of the age was asbestos-cement sheeting. It had been
imported into Australia before 1910 both as flat panels for use as wall linings and as
corrugated sheets for roofing. James Hardie had begun manufacturing Fibro Cement -
later Fibrolite - and Wunderlichs their nearly identical Durabestos in Sydney during the
First World War, and in Brisbane in the late 1930s, but they were brittle and unattractive
materials, and found only a small market. Their heyday came in the 1950s, when bricks
and sawn timber were still scarce and expensive.
By the post-war era, cement was being manufactured at Darra outside Brisbane and
Stuart near Townsville, removing another building product from the list of overseas
purchases. Hence domestic manufacture of asbestos-cement sheeting was relatively
easy to organise, and Fibrolite and Durabestos house walls became the fastest growing
building material of the post-war years. By 1961 there were nearly 60,000 Queensland
houses with walls clad in asbestos-cement, although it was much less popular for
roofing. (Marsden 1966, p. 121) Hardies' trade name won the brand recognition war,
with laconic Australian shortening, and the material has been known locally as "fibro"
since the 1950s.
One effect of the new materials and techniques was to simplify the process of building a
house; a timber frame clad with fibro and lined with Masonite could be put together with
few more tools than a saw and hammer. The years following the Second World War
were the great age of the owner-builder, as families unable to pay for professional skills
built their own houses with little interference from planning legislation or building
inspectors. Recent immigrants from Europe combined their skills to form working bees
and co-operated in building chains of houses. They were following an old tradition; the
prefabricated house firms had been encouraging home-owners to put their own houses
together since the turn of the century.
Queensland houses of the post-war era were not confined to the work of owner-
builders. A style known as Post-War Brisbane Regional brought genuine flat-roofed
Modernism to the Brisbane suburbs in the late 1950s. (Apperly et al 1989, pp. 222-223)
Impressively, sometimes daringly modern, this style reflected the contemporary
Internationalist movement of the USA, and brought the first really clean-cut
Functionalism to Queensland streets. Examples spread up the coast as far as Cairns
throughout the 1960s, to evolve into Late Twentieth-Century Tropical. (Apperly et al
1989, pp. 250-251) But builders everywhere grumbled over the unconventional
techniques the International style demanded. Expensive to build with its steel framing
and large sheets of plate glass, it was mostly built by architects for their own families or
other cognoscenti, and never amounted to more than a few hundred houses

A combination of Modern taste and the legacy of Austerity economics kept most
Queensland houses very simple in appearance during the 1960s and 1970s. The overt
allusions to Californian, Tudor or Spanish houses had all vanished with the Second
World War, and there were no historical references visible in new houses. It appeared
that Functionalist philosophy had triumphed, and the concept of "style" seemed almost
irrelevant. That was to change abruptly in the 1980s, when the advent of Post-
Modernism as an intellectual movement brought deliberate historical allusions back into
architectural fashion. This was interpreted by the building industry as a licence to
imitate, bringing a wave of popular nostalgia into house design. By the 1990s it was
common to see Federation houses going up alongside Georgian and High Victorian
houses on new subdivisions. Like the eclectic styles of the 1920s and 1930s, most of
these houses demonstrated little understanding of the styles they parodied, but simply
placed a few stylistic embellishments on the exterior of modern house forms built in
modern materials.
The effects of the post-war period of Austerity had not been restricted to Queensland.
The same forces were at work all over Australia, with the result that by 1960 there was
very little to distinguish the newly-built Queensland house from its contemporary in
Victoria or Western Australia: throughout the country, "buildings everywhere began to
look more and more similar". (Apperly et al 1989, p. 222) The tendency for national
conformity in domestic architecture has not diminished since. On the contrary, the mass
housing market is now dominated by trans-national building firms, and the majority of
new houses erected in the Queensland suburbs are catalogue designs or kit homes, in
a tradition distantly descended from Campbells' Redicut Homes and Brown & Broad's
Newstead Homes of eighty years ago.
Despite the nostalgic messages of building firms' marketing literature, there is no longer
a Queensland house today. Most houses built in Queensland are Australian houses;
typically they have timber frames of exotic softwood held together by metal fasteners -
often without a trace of joinery - an external veneer of bricks, synthetic linings in a
dizzying range of manufactured substances from particle boards to gypsum sheets to
asbestos-free '"fibro", and a roof of cast concrete tiles. Identical houses are to be found
across the country in every town from Darwin to Hobart; air-conditioning having made
the local climate irrelevant to house design. The distinctive Queensland house vanished
with the economic crisis of the Second World War.

The Austerity house (Qld Housing Commission report 1948)
The International Modern house arrived in Queensland in the late 1960s

Queensland Houses: Regional Variations
It is important to recognise that there were significant regional variations in the

traditional building practices of Queensland. While there were certain unifying themes,
there were also geographic and climatic forces, and more importantly patterns of
transport infrastructure and hence economic supply, which encouraged diversity in
building practices. Some of these were:
Brisbane
Since the 1850s Brisbane has always been the largest urban centre in Queensland and
thus has the largest number of historic houses. As the principal repository of wealth, it
also has a higher proportion of grand houses, masonry houses and two-storey houses
than any other region of the state. Brisbane was always more receptive to stylistic
experiments such as the Federation house and the inter-war eclectic styles than
provincial Queensland, and was also the centre for the development of the inter-war
Queenslander, which occurs there in greater numbers and more diversity of form than
elsewhere.
The South-east
The densely-settled region extending for a few hundred kilometres north and west of
Brisbane has a large number of nineteenth century houses with their own housing
tradition. It is the heartland of the X-braced frame; the exposed timber stud frame with
conspicuous heavy diagonal bracing in a variety of patterns.
Ipswich
In Queensland's early decades, Ipswich rivalled Brisbane in size and economic

prosperity, and this is reflected in its early houses, a significant number of which are
large and elaborate. It also has one of the most notable concentrations of late
nineteenth century timber framed houses, which tend to be particularly elaborate.
Toowoomba
A prosperous regional centre at fairly high altitude, Toowoomba has another

concentration of relatively large and elaborate houses. Its cool climate means that open
verandahs with their characteristic forms of embellishment are relatively rare, while
masonry construction, fireplaces and brick chimneys are prevalent.
Darling Downs
The Darling Downs and Granite Belt are the coldest part of Queensland, and the
region's early houses, especially in the Warwick district, have a distinctive sandstone
building tradition. In many ways the region's early houses are anomalous in the context
of Queensland architectural history, and form a northern extension of the housing
tradition of the New South Wales tablelands.

Maryborough
Like Ipswich, Maryborough has a notable concentration of late nineteenth century

timber framed houses, which tend to be particularly elaborate. For many decades,
Maryborough was an important centre of forestry and timber milling, and supplied a
large proportion of the native softwoods which were the traditional timber of the
Queensland house.
Rockhampton
In the 1870s and 1880s, Rockhampton was Queensland's second-largest urban centre,
and has a significant number of late nineteenth century timber framed houses, which
tend to be particularly elaborate. The southern X-braced frame and the northern stud
frame traditions overlap in Rockhampton.
The West
There are several generations of historic settlement in western Queensland; the early
pastoral homesteads and towns like Aramac and Tambo dating from the 1860s onward,
the later urban centres like Charleville and Longreach dating from the extension of the
railways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and newer mining centres
like Blair Athol and Mount Isa, which date from the early twentieth century. The house
forms naturally tend to be determined by the hot dry climate, and the local building
tradition has always been very conservative about accepting urban architectural styles.
The Far West
The homesteads and small towns in the arid far west of the state, such as Birdsville,
Bedourie and Boulia, have their own historical tradition of building in stone, an
expression of the climate, the extreme costs of transporting industrial building materials,
and influence from South Australia.
Charters Towers
A prosperous gold-mining town, from the 1880s to the First World War the second-
largest urban centre in Queensland, Charters Towers has some notable Boom Style
buildings and the largest concentration of nineteenth century timber houses outside
Brisbane. Its houses tend to be better-preserved than those of the coastal cities,
retaining more original detail, and have conspicuous climatic adaptations such as an
outward extension of the verandah roof as an eave supported on diagonal struts.
Townsville
Since the First World War the second-largest urban centre in Queensland, Townsville
shared in Charters Towers' prosperity and has been a major industrial and transport
centre to the present. It was another important timber-milling centre, reflected in its
extensive suburbs of late nineteenth and early twentieth century timber houses.

Cairns
Cramped on a small coastal plain, Cairns has been repeatedly rebuilt, but the older part
of the city still has several hundred early twentieth century houses, mostly highset.
Open verandahs and exposed timber frames are relatively rare, probably a response to
the wet climate.
The North
The region north of Townsville has its own distinctive housing tradition imposed by a hot
wet climate, and is the Australian birthplace of the highset house which is still prevalent
there. Many houses demonstrate precautions against both timber rot and extreme
winds, and enclosure of verandahs by wooden louvres or lattice is common. There are
local responses to past cyclone damage, such as the concrete building tradition of the
Innisfail and Tully districts.

Queensland Houses: Further Research
History
This review of the state of present knowledge of the Queensland house indicates that
considerable progress has been made in the last twenty years. However, there are still
notable gaps; for example almost nothing has been written about the houses of the
western towns, nor has anyone investigated the distinctive traditions of stone
construction in the far west of the state and the southern tablelands. A number of topics
come to mind as requiring further research:
• Clearer definition of regional variations, especially in the West
• Regional variations in and between major towns such as Ipswich, Maryborough

and Rockhampton
• The impact of State housing schemes - Workers’ Dwellings, War Service Homes,
State Advances Corporation and Housing Commission
• More knowledge of primitive and vernacular techniques
• Transfers of influence between architects’ and builders’ traditions
• More understanding of local and regional twentieth century house styles
• The origins of the exposed timber frame in the 1860s
• Materials other than timber - brick, stone, concrete etc
• The modern era and the end of regionalism in domestic architecture
Assessment Issues
Going beyond these issues of architectural history and regionalism to look at the
process of representing houses on the Register, there are other areas which need
investigation, notably:
• A more sophisticated understanding of the application of architectural values in the

heritage assessment of houses
• The importance of architectural value in relation to other values
• Ways of assessing the importance of community attitudes (social value) in

assessing houses
• The assessment of houses as precincts rather than individual buildings
• More detailed policies on representing the houses of the rich and famous

Climatic Responses
The issues of geographical and climatic influences on the historical evolution of the
Queensland house are important and complex, particularly in the West and North: “the
principal drawbacks are heat, dust, flies, mosquitoes, ants, etc”, one architect wrote.
(Coutts 1934, p. 11) He was one of a long list of people who have advocated specific
design improvements to mitigate the unpleasant effects of the northern and western
climates, a process which has extended with only partial success from the 1860s to the
present day. There are two elements to the process: first the initial house design, and
then the subsequent vernacular modifications to improve the house's climatic
performance. Some writers have looked at these issues, notably Bal Saini and Ray
Sumner, but much more remains to be done.
Overseas Influences
The historical overview in this report summarises the cultural influences on Queensland
houses as being predominantly English in origin until about 1915, then becoming
predominantly American until the 1960s, when they become indiscriminately
internationalised. However, it is a little more complex than that. During Queensland's
early history, while a recognisable house-building tradition was still taking shape, the
colony saw an influx of people from a great many parts of the world. This raises some
interesting questions about the cultural origins of some Queensland building practices.
The south-east of Queensland had a significant minority of immigrants from Germany.

In general their communities were not sufficiently numerous or culturally cohesive to
create an enduring building tradition, but there were certainly individual houses built with
traditional German techniques, for example the long-demolished Rohl's farmhouse at
Marburg. (Howard 1992, p. 54) It has been suggested that the X-braced exposed wall
framing of south-eastern Queensland may be influenced by German fachwerk or half-
timbering. Likewise in Charters Towers there is a local tradition that the construction
details of some of the early mining magnates' houses - notably Pfeiffer’s, Christian's and
Paradies' - were German in origin. I am personally unconvinced by the evidence in both
cases, but the topic has never been closely researched.
Much has been written about the “balloon frame” of the USA as an influence on the
light stud frame of Queensland. I have dismissed this as a myth, demonstrating that the
Queensland timber frame is derived from the sawn softwood building tradition of
England, itself ultimately derived from Scandinavia. (Bell 1983 & 1987) However, there
were later cases where prefabricated houses were imported to Queensland from the
USA, notably Thomas Swallow's house, built at the Hambledon plantation about 1882.
(Bell 1984, p. 78) No work has been done to investigate the prevalence of this import
trade and its possible influence on the Queensland house. Still later, in the early
twentieth century, it is difficult to believe that it was coincidental that mass-produced
mail order prefabricated houses were coming onto the market in Queensland at
precisely the same time as they were in the USA. But the links between the two national
industries, if any, have never been studied.
A number of writers have drawn attention to similarities between colonial Indian, South-
east Asian and Australian domestic houses, pointing to the words bungalow and

verandah as evidence of links. In fact, many features of the Queensland colonial house
were common to most warm climates, and there is a problem with the chronology for
causal influence, for Queensland was not settled by Europeans until after Australian
building traditions were well established in the colonies of south-eastern Australia, and
that was generally the direction from which they arrived in Queensland. However, there
were individual settlers who arrived in Queensland directly from India or Malaya, and a
study of the houses they built on arrival here could be interesting. The link with the
Caribbean and West Indies sugar planters' house-building tradition seems to be more
firmly established, but further research into this source of influence on the Queensland
house would also be desirable.
Finally there is New Zealand. Even a brief visit to the North Island demonstrates a
tradition of building in timber and iron with some remarkable parallels to the houses of
Queensland, far more evident than the links with the houses of the closer states of
Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. No investigation of Queensland-New
Zealand housing influences has ever been done.

Queensland Houses: Bibliography
Books and Journal Articles
Allom, Richard, “The Small Brisbane House”, in Brisbane: Housing, Health, the River
and the Arts, Brisbane History Group Papers No. 3, 1985, pp. 19-22
Allom, Richard, "Two Centuries of the North Australian House", in Peter Freeman &
Judy Vulker (eds), The Australian Dwelling, Canberra, 1991, pp. 55-58
Apperly, Richard, Robert Irving & Peter Reynolds, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying
Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present, Sydney, 1989
Archer, John, Building a Nation: a History of the Australian House, Sydney, 1987
Australian Cement Manufacturers' Association, Concrete Round the Home, Sydney,

n.d.. [c.1925]
Barley, M.W., The English Farmhouse and Cottage, London, 1961
Barton, C.H., The Queensland Timber Industry and its Prospects, Maryborough, 1885
"Beer Bottles as Building Material", Queenslander 1 August 1903
Bell, Peter, "Houses in North Queensland Mining Towns 1864-1914", in K.H. Kennedy
(ed), Readings in North Queensland Mining History, Volume One, James Cook
University of North Queensland, 1980, pp. 299-328.
Bell, Peter, "The Balloon Frame Myth", Journal of Australian Studies, 12, 1983, pp. 53-
66
Bell, Peter, Timber and Iron: Houses in North Queensland Mining Settlements 1861-
1920, St Lucia, 1984
Bell, Peter, "Miasma, Termites and a Nice View of the Dam: the Development of the
Highset House in North Queensland", in Lectures on North Queensland History, Fourth
Series, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1984, pp. 36-53
Bell, Peter, "Stud Framing: the Empire Strikes Back", Architecture Australia 76, No. 2,
1987, pp. 81-84.
Bell, Peter, "'Square Wooden Boxes on Long Legs': Timber Houses in North
Queensland", Historic Environment 6, Nos. 2 & 3, 1988, pp. 32-37
Bell, Peter, 'Continuity in Australian Timber Domestic Building: an Early Cottage at

Burra', Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology 8, 1990, 3-12
Bell, Peter, "Torode, Walter Charles (1858-1937)", Australian Dictionary of Biography

12, 1990, p. 244

Bell, Peter, "A Brief Survey of Timber Wall Construction Techniques in Australia", in
David Reynolds (ed), Timber & Tin: Proceedings of the First ICOMOS New Zealand
Conference on the Conservation of Vernacular Structures, Auckland, 1992, pp. 52-58
Bell, Peter, Early Bricks and Brickwork in South Australia, Adelaide, 1998
Bellamy, Herbert, "Timber Dwellings in Queensland", Building World 25 July 1903
Berry, D.W. & Gilbert, S.H., Pioneer Building Techniques in South Australia, Adelaide,
1981
Blainey, Geoffrey, The Rush that Never Ended: a History of Australian Mining,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1969 (2nd edn)
Boyd, A.J., “Bush Work”, Queensland Agricultural Journal 4, 1899, pp. 20-26, 108-112,
180-184 & 341-432
Boyd, A.J., “Hints to New Settlers”, Queensland Agricultural Journal 30, 1913, pp. 11-
16, 75-81, 152-154, 216-219, 279-281; 31, 1914, pp. 76-77; new series 1, 1914, pp.
371-373
Boyd, Robin, Australia's Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, Melbourne, 1952
Briggs, Martin, Concise Encyclopaedia of Architecture, London, 1959
Brown & Broad Limited, “B & B” Newstead Homes: a Catalogue of “Ready-to-Erect”

Homes, Brisbane, 1918
Brunskill, Ronald, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture, London, 1978
Brunskill, Ronald, Timber Building in Britain, London, 1985
Butler, Graeme, The Californian Bungalow in Australia, Melbourne 1992
Carment, David, "Darwin's Home", Northern Perspective 17, No. 1, 1994, pp. 1-8
Clare, John, 'The Californian Bungalow in Australia', Historic Environment 5, No. 1,

1986, pp. 19-39
Clifton-Taylor, Alec, The Pattern of English Building, London, 1965
Cochran, Christopher, Restoring a New Zealand House, Wellington, 1980
Coote, W., “The Influence of Climate on our Domestic Architecture”, Transactions of the
Queensland Philosophical Society 1, 1862, pp. 1-17
Coutts, J.V.D., Western Housing and Tropic Design, Brisbane, 1934
Cox, Philip, & John Freeland, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia, London, 1969
Cox, Philip, & Clive Lucas, Australian Colonial Architecture, Melbourne, 1978

Craik, Jennifer, "The Cultural Politics of the Queensland House", Continuum 3, 1990,
pp. 188-213
Craik, Jennifer, "Verandahs and Frangipani: Women in the Queensland House", in Gail
Reekie (ed), On the Edge: Women's Experiences of Queensland, St Lucia, 1994, pp.
145-167
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A History of the Queensland House

Guidelines for Entering Houses in the

Cover illustration: the Queensland house at Federation;

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of writers on Australian architectural history

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 1

The Fisher/Rechner work is a very valuable contribution to the study of houses in

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 2

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 3

The Convict Era

European settlement in Queensland began with a convict station at Redcliffe in 1824,

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 4

The Primitive Building Tradition

In these circumstances, large numbers of people lived in what modern architectural

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 5

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 6

Instructions for new settlers: how to split palings (Boyd 1899)

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 7

The situation changed dramatically when Queensland became a separate colony in

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 8

In terms of the rise of a recognisable Queensland building tradition, these buildings

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 9

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 10

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 11

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 12

The Far West has a tradition of stone construction (Anne Allingham)

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 13

The verandah is not an Australian invention. It is a universal design motif of buildings in

The positioning of verandahs on Queensland houses demonstrates that their social

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 14

The Gold Rushes

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 15

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 16

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 17

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 18

The pyramid-roofed four-roomed house

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 19

The outcome of this industrialisation in a competitive market was to standardise the

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 20

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 21

The Elevated House

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 22

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 23

By 1900, highset houses had become widely accepted (Mrs Weinheimer)

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 24

Fretsawn brackets in a variety of catalogue designs adorned the tops of verandah

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 25

The Queensland House at Federation

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 26

• The house was detached on its own allotment

• The house was single storeyed

• The house was built entirely of industrialised materials

• Its roof was almost certainly of corrugated galvanised iron

• The house walls were probably of sawn timber

• The house was perhaps elevated to a height of up to three metres

• The general form of the house probably followed a common design

• The house's ornamentation was simple, conventional and mass-produced

Peter Bell • Queensland Houses • 2002 • 27