When and wherever their first and subsequent meetings took place, the pair obviously responded positively to one another, for by the second half of 1814 Greenway was designing extensions to Ultimo House. When the governor first summoned him in July, Greenway had been requested to provide a ‘sketch of Dr Harris’s staircase’ by Captain Gill, the acting engineer. Perhaps it was simply yet another test, to see how the unproven architect performed, but in mentioning the sketch to Macquarie, Greenway proceeded with breathless enthusiasm to describe a stair fit for a palace:
I have begun a design for a geometrical staircase of stone of a much more elegant structure … with a figure of a Vestal with a lamp, large as life, to be done out of Parramatta stone or modelled in clay and baked similar to Codes Artificial Stone, with appropriate decorations in bas-relief down the staircase …12
Greenway’s flights of fancy often got the better of him. As Ellis commented pithily: ‘This was typical of the man. [If] one [asked] him to build a horse trough, visions of a rival to the Baths of Diocletian rose in his mind. Commission a fowl-house from him, and he would produce plans for a Belshazzar’s aviary’.13
It seems, though, that Greenway’s grand geometrical staircase was realised at Ultimo House, along with two substantial additional wings on either side of the new stair hall, and an enwrapping verandah, either added or rebuilt. A lantern capped by a shallow dome – a favourite Greenway element – crowned the composition. Light flooded in through the lantern, making the stair hall a dramatic focus of Greenway’s interior – a flame for the Vestal’s lamp indeed.
Broadbent and Hughes remarked that the staircase for Harris ‘may not have reached the heights of artistic accomplishment to which Greenway aspired, but it was probably original and fine enough in that circumscribed, provincial society to arouse the envy of the governor and his wife’.14 Such fine stairs would feature in a number of Greenway houses, as well as his 1820 designs for the Supreme Court in King Street, and those for the Liverpool Hospital of 1822.
Harris and his young wife Eliza (who was 33 years his junior) had married in England during his four-year absence from the colony. Eliza followed her husband to New South Wales, accompanied by a lady’s companion, Elizabeth Spurrell, the pair arriving in Sydney in August 1815. In contrast to Elizabeth Macquarie’s enthusiasm, Spurrell’s journal of the voyage paints a disenchanted picture of the colony, including rather unflattering observations of Harris’s house and estate. If Greenway’s alterations and additions had commenced, it seems that not much progress had been made:
On arriving at the Drs my spirits were not in the least cheered & really felt as if my heart would break, when I contemplated the wretchedness and misery all around. The House was a very good one but very much out of repair, during the doctor’s absence the property had been left to the care of an Agent who had made sad havoc by neglecting it … it might have been made an exceedingly pretty place, but it was quite in an uncultivated state. It was about a mile from Sydney & called Ultimo, we had a commanding view of the Town, which was not to be sure a very interesting Spectacle. I really could not help exclaiming to myself, ‘is it in this unhappy looking place after the fatigues of so perilous a voyage, that I am to remain’?15
The marriage of John and Eliza Harris remained childless. As a consequence, they deemed Ultimo House too large for just two and in 1821 moved out, eventually settling on Harris lands at Shanes Park, 30 miles to Sydney’s west. The property was put out to lease and thereafter the fortunes of Harris’s mansion fluctuated widely. In the 1820s it was considered one of the colony’s most fashionable addresses, but less than 30 years later it housed a commercial laundry. Members of the Harris family were in residence in the latter decades of the century and perpetrated several clumsy alterations that would only have incited Greenway’s scorn. By 1910, when the New South Wales Government purchased the property, John Harris’s grand park had been whittled down to less than four acres. Ultimo House was finally demolished in 1932 to make way for extensions to Sydney Technical College, which, since the 1880s had progressively gobbled up most of Harris’s original estate. Long gone were the horses, sheep and cattle, as well as the prized spotted deer Harris shipped in from India – living sculpture to graze in Arcadian splendour. Gone too were the piercing calls of the guinea fowl as they disturbed the slumbers of nearby billeted soldiers or tempted the poacher’s pot. And long past were the social occasions at one of the colony’s most desirable venues, where in July 1824 a gathering of 240 ‘sat down to tables, at three … periods, covered with every thing tempting the season afforded … [and where] the “merry dance” was kept up ’till [sic] morn by the kind aid of Captain Piper’s band’.16
A few reminiscences in the Sydney Morning Herald were all that marked the transformation to rubble of Ultimo House. Photographs taken shortly before the wreckers moved in showed Harris’s mansion hemmed in by a growing city, nondescript brick walls muscling up to the remnants of Greenway’s alterations and later architectural indiscretions alike. One visitor climbed Greenway’s old stone geometric stair and then ascended a further wooden flight to the distinctive dome. ‘The view was disappointing’, wrote TS Champion. ‘It was not the extensive landscape that must have met the eyes of visitors of past years, but a view entirely restricted to glimpses of workshops and tall buildings’.17
The feature that was most lamented from the passing of Ultimo House was Greenway’s staircase. James Nangle, renowned Sydney architect and teacher of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, considered it a ‘fine example of what is known as a geometrical stair’. Nangle went to some length to describe the exquisite geometry of such a structure, where ‘the treads are of stone supported at one end only in the wall, so that the stair depends largely for its stability on the arch principle’. And whether or not the Vestal ever adorned its curvaceous rail, with its beautiful scroll end and absence of newel posts, it was to Nangle a ‘fine example of the skill of the handrailer’. With the passing of Ultimo House there was sadly one less among the ‘very few examples to be seen in this country’.18
THREE SHILLINGS A DAY AND A GOVERNMENT HORSE
In January 1816, the governor’s secretary, John Campbell, had written to Greenway addressing him as ‘Civil Architect’ and commissioning him to inspect his own quarters, the much blighted ‘Building and Offices lately erected for My Official Residence’.1 This is the first recorded reference to Greenway in his government role, but it was not until two months later that he was officially engaged as ‘Acting Civil Architect’. Again, Campbell conveyed the news:
Sir
I transmit You herewith a copy of His Excellency the Governor’s Government and General Orders dated the 30th ultimo constituting You Acting Civil Architect and Assistant Engineer with a Salary of Three Shillings per Day and commencing from the 1st ultimo.2
The Sydney Gazette for 30 March published the official notice of Greenway’s new position. He was to be paid from the Police Fund, a revenue pool set up by Macquarie to help finance a grab bag of infrastructure and public services that included wharves, bridges, roads, gaols and, as the name implied, the police themselves. Three-quarters of the revenue from port and customs duties went to the fund. In addition to his modest stipend (about the same as a clerk might receive), Greenway was also entitled to the use of a government horse and reimbursement for his travelling expenses when on government business. He and the family would be provided with rations and coals from the government store, a convict servant, and, most importantly of all, a house to live in. Around this time the Greenway family shifted the short distance to the south-western corner of Argyle and George streets and the former home of the assistant surgeon William Redfern. The well-known Orient Hotel (built in 1844) stands on the opposite corner today.
The terms of Greenway’s employment appear to have been perfectly agreeable to the architect in these early days. Even the opinionated and conceited Greenway would have known that this was not the time to question the governor’s generosit
y; he was indeed fortunate to have risen from the murky convict pool to a legitimate government post in so short a time. Backed by the governor, through patience and good manners he might well rise among the emancipist ranks to a solid and respected position in colonial society.
In the fullness of time, Macquarie would further compensate Greenway with a grant of land and cattle from the government herd. But what started as a seemingly amicable agreement later descended into bitter dispute, Greenway claiming – without documentary evidence, of course – that the governor had promised him all manner of additional compensation, including commissions and percentage fees.
By the time of Greenway’s appointment, the colony of New South Wales had struggled through more than a quarter of a century and had stared down shortages and famine, droughts, floods and mutiny. The earliest years were among the hardest, and Arthur Phillip’s term as first governor had ended in illness and exhaustion and his subsequent departure for England in December 1792. With all of Europe anxiously watching the unfolding revolution in France, and Britain again at war with the French from 1793, a distracted Colonial Office failed to appoint Phillip’s successor for more than a year.
As second governor, Captain John Hunter finally sailed into Port Jackson in September 1795. He also sailed into a sea of trouble that was to blight his administration and those of his successors, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh. In the interregnum between Phillip and Hunter, day-to-day administrative control of the colony had devolved to two military officers, Major Francis Grose and Captain William Paterson. Under their lax command, the members of the New South Wales Corps, the fractious and unruly soldiery that replaced the garrison of marines from the First Fleet, set about enriching themselves.
With land freely carved up at the stroke of a pen, and abundant convict labour at their disposal, the officers of the New South Wales Corps quickly became powerful overlords. They dominated trade, especially in spirits, and without government sanction became a law unto themselves. Rum was the free-flowing embrocation to the pain of isolation and exile for soldier and convict alike, and it quickly became the essential lubricant of the colonial economy.3 With a shortage of hard currency, government workers regularly drew their wages in spirits. The three naval-officer governors – Hunter, King and Bligh – laboured hard to curb the monopoly trade in spirits, but each achieved only limited success against a determined red-coated camarilla. Ellis described the ‘Demon Rum’ as sitting on the ‘shoulders of every New South Wales Governor as a sort of Old Man of the Sea’.4
Macquarie’s commission, like those of his predecessors, came with instructions to curb the freewheeling trade in spirits and wrest control of the colonial economy from the military. Early in his term he reduced the number of premises licensed to sell spirits from 75 to 20 and tried to curb the production and sale of sly grog. As an alternative to restrictive controls at the point of consumption – which he sensed could be ineffectual in any case – Macquarie additionally proposed to Castlereagh the ‘good and sound policy [of allowing] the free Importation of good spirits under a high duty’. Also, any surplus grain would be turned over to the strictly regulated production of spirits.5 It was a classic solution of price control through abundance, with the government in for its cut, of course. While awaiting a reply, Macquarie increased the duty on rum imports from 1s 6d to 3s a gallon and continued to pay for public works in spirits.
From the time he took command in New South Wales, Macquarie considered one of his most pressing tasks to be arranging a replacement for the filthy and inadequate hospital on the western side of Sydney Cove. As has already been noted, he wrote to Castlereagh in March 1810 complaining of the ‘most ruinous State’ of the original prefabricated buildings of timber and copper, shipped in sections from England on the Second Fleet and erected in The Rocks in 1790. He addressed similar comments to Liverpool more than a year later in October 1811 and noted that a replacement would ‘not admit of any possible delay’.6 By then, however, the new hospital was a fait accompli; in the same despatch Macquarie also informed his minister that a contract had already been let!
And such was the governor’s eagerness for a start that work commenced on the hospital site less than two weeks later. In fact, the contract had been let nearly a year earlier, in November 1810, and obviously wary of their lordships’ disapproval, Macquarie had chosen not to inform them until the eleventh hour. His game of fiscal cat and mouse had quickly attained its high-risk edge. The new hospital was to be a project founded on Macquarie’s confidence in the future of the colony, a confidence he had good reason to imagine was not shared by Whitehall.
On the last day of October 1811, with a salvo of artillery from the battery on Dawes Point, three cheers from the notables assembled and a flourish of a silver trowel glinting in the spring sun, the confident hand of Lachlan Macquarie laid the foundation stone of the colony’s most ambitious building project to date. In its next issue the Sydney Gazette enthusiastically extolled the worth and benefit of the new hospital, quoting a projected cost of £20 000, and a ‘surrounding wall [that] incloses [sic] an area of seven acres in an airy and delightful situation’.7
Sited on the settlement’s eastern ridge and fronting the new street named by the viceroy after himself, the hospital was far removed both physically and emotively from its predecessor. There is no record of who designed the buildings, but both Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie may have had a hand in them. They certainly echoed the military-cum-colonial style of the governor’s past postings rather than the barefaced Georgian fronts of cottage Sydney Town. The hospital would stretch for 600 feet along the eastern frontage to Macquarie Street and was intended to accommodate at least 200 patients. Two separate wings to serve as surgeons’ barracks were also to be included within its perimeter walls.
But how was this bold show of colonial self-worth to be paid for when its likely cost would exceed a whole year’s government revenue, while stores, barracks, wharves and roads were also urgently needed? Macquarie had contemplated opening the project to competitive tender, but knew that among all the competing demands, there was simply not enough money to go around. The solution seemed elegantly simple; the colony’s liquid currency was now to be the lubricant to major public progress, and the demon rum, the scourge of his predecessors, was to be Macquarie’s salvation.
Or at least it started out that way, for the governor’s unique funding manoeuvre would soon prove more of a Faustian compact born of necessity than anything divine in inspiration. Three sharp operators – local merchants Alexander Riley and Garnham Blaxcell, and chief surgeon–cum–police magistrate D’Arcy Wentworth – had approached the governor with a proposal to build the hospital within three years in exchange for a monopoly on the importation of 45 000 gallons of rum. Excise duties would still accrue, and all the government need contribute were 20 convict labourers, a herd of oxen to feed them and several teams of draught bullocks to haul materials. At the end of the three years, the colony would be left with one of the grandest hospitals in the British Empire, and a prospective profit of £2500 into the bargain, once costs had been offset against the stream of duties. It all seemed too good to be true; in Ellis’s words ‘such a plan brought all that was frugally Scottish uppermost in the Governor’.8
But the trouble was, neither Riley, Blaxcell nor Wentworth had any experience of building, and Macquarie’s detractors soon saw the hospital as a call to arms. They were either convinced that the contractors would reap enormous profits, or that, as Henry Grey Bennet put it in one of his shrill attacks on Macquarie, ‘an extravagant propensity for drunkenness was taken advantage of by the Governor’. From his disgruntled antipodean informants, Bennet concluded that the ‘effect … of this wicked experiment, was the destruction of hundreds of convicts’. They informed him that ‘the burial-ground became like a ploughed field and that the loss of life was prodigious’.9 Others simply thought the buildings might collapse and bring the governor down with them. Macquarie was besieged. To give him
self respite, in March 1816 he appointed Francis Greenway – along with Ambrose Bryan, the government’s foreman of masons; and Samuel Bradley, supervisor of carpenters – to survey the works and prepare a report.
Greenway’s inspection and reporting on the new hospital were the first tasks performed following his official confirmation as acting civil architect. The surveying trio went about their task with alacrity and soon compiled an extensive list of what they considered grievous faults. No corner escaped their probing gaze. For Greenway, here was a chance to flex his engineering and construction muscle, letting all who cared know that his knowledge of building far exceeded that of anyone else in the colony.
In his assessment, the colonnades on both floors, as well as the roof, were supported on foundation walls of ashlar masonry that were only 18 inches wide. And worse, the colonnades were effectively founded on little more than half the width of the foundation walls, with the columns overhanging the rear face of the walls by a good eight inches. There was inadequate surface drainage, leaving the subfloor constantly damp. Courses of masonry were laid directly on the fall of the ground and not on a level foundation. Consequently, ‘according to the principles of gravitation, with the stones being worked out of square in their beds, and depending upon a thick bed of mortar to keep them in their places, [they] must soon fall to ruin’.10
Naturally, the contractors and their supervisor of masons, John O’Hearne, were affronted by ‘the invidious objections of illiberal and we must think in the great part incompetent judges’. To them, Greenway and his colleagues were simply out to misrepresent the contractors with ‘vexatious and unnecessary objections … [and so] disparage the abilities and character of those who had been employed’.11
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