A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  When it came to the niceties of architectural composition, Greenway was equally vociferous. Reporting directly to the contracting trio of Wentworth, Riley and Blaxcell, he gave full voice to his disdain for their design skills and those of their workers:

  The Pillars which Mr Superintendent O’Hearne previously stated to be a credit to the colony, reflect as little Credit upon the Judgement of the Colony, as they do on the profound knowledge of the Architect … There is no Classical proportion in the Column … its Shaft is set wrong upon its base, the Cap is set wrong upon the Column, and is no description, ancient or modern.12

  Architraves and entablatures were not wide enough for the columns on which they were perched, but of equal offence to Greenway was the supervisor of masons’ habit of styling himself ‘John O’Hearne, Architect’. The acting civil architect continued in his disdainful tone: ‘let Mr Superintendent O’Hearne consider these particulars and take it as subject for anything else but boasting’.

  Greenway went as far as to recommend that a £10 000 penalty be levied on the contractors for breaching their agreement. Macquarie baulked, in no need of being reminded of his part in the whole unfortunate scheme; breaches in the contractors’ monopoly on rum imports had already led to a further concession of 15 000 gallons on their allowed quota, to total 60 000 gallons. They were also granted an extension of time on their contract. Reluctantly, the governor instructed the contractors ‘to commence forthwith on the important and necessary duty of remedying the defects pointed out in the said report, as far as they are capable of still being remedied’.13

  As for Whitehall’s reaction to the great public funding experiment of the new hospital, Lord Liverpool was predictably censorious but stopped short of outright condemnation: ‘It would have been advisable that an Engagement of this kind had not been entered into until you had an opportunity of learning the Sentiments of His Majesty’s Government upon the Propriety of adopting the measures which you had … so strongly recommended’.14 Liverpool could do naught but wash his hands of the matter; let the result be entirely on the governor’s head. His successor, Lord Bathurst, in the end did concede that a ‘Public Building of considerable convenience has been obtained; but I still believe that the Price paid for this Convenience has been even beyond its Value, and has been paid in a manner at once inconvenient and oppressive’.15 Bathurst was certainly relieved at Macquarie’s reassurance that the hospital project was to be the ‘last Experiment of its kind’.

  As Greenway pored over every brick and beam in the new hospital, a world away in London, Bathurst drafted a letter to Macquarie and actually recommended to him the services of an architect. Not that Whitehall had finally acted on Macquarie’s request and scoured England for a suitable person; it seems more likely that Henry Kitchen, wishing to emigrate, had approached the government for a reference. Bathurst felt that ‘Mr. Kitchin [sic] having been regularly educated as a Surveyor and Architect may render himself useful to you if the services of such a Professional Person should be required in the Colony’.16 If a ‘Professional Person’ was required? Macquarie’s opinion of such a lackadaisical attitude can well be imagined.

  As we have seen, Henry Kitchen trained in London under the prominent architect James Wyatt. Following Wyatt’s death in a carriage accident in 1813, Kitchen was briefly in practice for himself, and in 1815 was listed as an architect and surveyor for the insurers the Norwich Union. But possibly for the sake of his health, the young architect decided to leave England around this time. With Bathurst’s recommendation in hand, he boarded the Surry in Ireland in July 1816. He arrived in Sydney in December, just as Macquarie’s building program and the collaboration with Greenway was gathering pace.

  The following February, Kitchen placed a card in the Sydney Gazette, advertising his services as a ‘late Pupil of James Wyatt Esq. Surveyor General of His Majesty’s Board of Works’. Kitchen listed his business address as ‘49 Philip street’. He was ‘desirous of Engaging, upon moderate terms, in the superintendency and actual Management of Designs, whether for plain and agreeable Residences, Storehouses, Field or Road Improvements, or any other plans of Rural Œconomy [sic], or of Town Improvement’.17

  In the rancorous atmosphere that soon enveloped the acting civil architect and his rival, Kitchen used any opportunity to attack Greenway’s work. Several years later, the Bigge Commission provided the perfect vehicle for Kitchen’s grievances, either in formal hearings or in correspondence to the commissioner. But when it came to the hospital, for once he and Greenway were in accord, Kitchen contending to Bigge that:

  This Building is computed to have cost the community the enormous sum of £140,000. It has only been completed about Five Years. It is now in a state of actual dilapidation, and is unsafe, and the present Principal Surgeon was only the other day obliged to remove to another house … in order that the wing of the Building in which is his residence may undergo not only a considerable repair but many necessary alterations.18

  Kitchen thought the other wing should be immediately demolished and the main building undergo ‘very considerable and highly expensive alterations as well as repairs’.

  Commissioner Bigge was predictably scathing in his criticism of the hospital when reporting to Lord Bathurst in 1820:

  I am sure that your Lordship will learn with feelings of astonishment and concern that the General Hospital at Sydney the construction of which was accomplished by such a sacrifice of Public Morals & expediency has been pronounced by the only Two Architects in the Colony to be in a state of rapid decay …19

  The commissioner blamed the parlous state of the building on the ‘ignorance of the workmen employed, the violation of the terms of the Contract by the Contractors’, and, as in all his criticisms of the viceroy’s building program, the ‘unfortunate propensity to ornament & Architectural effect’. Bad workmanship and contractual corner-cutting undoubtedly, but blaming a building’s decay specifically on ‘ornament & Architectural effect’ betrays the wowser in Mr Bigge and seems like more of his tireless pursuit of flaws in Macquarie’s judgment and sense of priority than any rational and reasoned argument.

  Following the report of the hospital committee, Greenway was involved from time to time in further inspections of the buildings and their structural problems, supervising repairs and designing alterations. Ever sensing an opportunity for his own advancement, he wrote to Macquarie in March 1818, having again found the hospital in a ‘State requiring an immediate attention from more causes than one’. He warned that unless action was taken, a ‘few more Years will place it out of the Power of any one to remedy the evil’. Greenway predicted that it would cost less to replace the buildings than to keep them in repair, with no guarantee that those repairs would forestall the hospital’s premature demise. But, as ever, he imagined better things:

  I will however … pledge myself to remedy all the Evils in the Centre Building [and] make it contain more Room than belongs to … the present Hospital, Wings and all and secure it [for] Five Hundred Years for one half the Sum of Money it will cost the Police Fund to keep it in repair Ten Years.20

  Macquarie’s hospital, with its deeply shadowed colonnaded verandahs, would not have looked out of place in the India of the viceroy’s soldiering years. Sitting high on the Macquarie Street ridge, it endured for decades as something of an early colonial anachronism: a grand gesture of premature confidence. In reality it was as disorderly and unhygienic as its predecessor. It lacked adequate kitchens, a morgue, lavatories and a secure dispensary, yet Macquarie’s edifice served Sydney’s sick for several decades. The central building was finally demolished in 1879, and replaced by the stolidly Italianate Victorian-era Sydney Hospital, while the northern wing was taken over by the Parliament of New South Wales in 1828, and its southern counterpart converted to the Sydney Mint in the 1850s.

  In his dealings with the hospital, Greenway first showed himself, as Ellis put it, to be ‘the natural foe of very large and influential sections’ of Sydney’s pop
ulace: ‘He was the enemy of the entrepreneur who felt that the Government was created to be robbed. He was a shield for the Governor against bitter critics and therefore became party to his master’s quarrels’.21

  Greenway would doggedly maintain a haughty disdain for amateurs and pretenders in the serious – and to him sacred – pursuit of aesthetic perfection. His rigorous calculation of quantities would leave eager contractors red-faced, stranded on the overly generous side of a tender price. ‘His bright eye detected the fraud which left the wall sitting upon sand, while the foundation-stone went to build a mason’s cottage’ – Greenway was always on the lookout for the trickster and the sharp operator. Bad workmanship, ill-selected stone, green timber, skimpy engineering, weak mortar and inadequately fired bricks: all these, again in Ellis’s words, ‘now belonged to the good old days, as Mr Greenway jog-trotted about on his old horse amid the forest of iniquities which was called “the building trade” in New South Wales’. The world would always be agin the quixotic Greenway.

  BRIGHT PROSPECT: THE MACQUARIE TOWER , 1816–20

  And yon tall Tow’r, that with aspiring Steep,

  Rears its proud Summit o’er the trackless Deep; –

  The recent Care of His Paternal Hand

  That long has cherish’d this improving Land; –

  Thro’ the drear Perils of the starless Night

  Shall shed the Lustre of revolving Light:

  And, from the adverse Wind, and Stubborn Tide,

  Safe to its Port the sea-worn Vessel guide.1

  During the wild night of 25 August 1834 the barque Edward Lombe tried desperately to negotiate her entrance to Port Jackson at the end of an otherwise uneventful voyage from London via Hobart. She attempted to anchor but the gale got the better of her and she was dashed against Middle Head. Twelve of the Edward Lombe’s passengers and crew were drowned. While there had been shipwrecks within the harbour before, none had resulted in a loss of life. The tragedy provoked an outpouring of grief in the colony second only to the Dunbar disaster of 1857.

  By 1834, Greenway’s architectural glory days were long past. He no longer built anything, nor did he still command the ear of governors or men of influence. But the wreck of the Edward Lombe was all the excuse he needed to take to the press and remind the world that if his advice had been heeded, then tragedy might have been averted. If a beacon had been placed where Greenway had advised – in this case on the Sow and Pigs Reef – the Edward Lombe may not have foundered on that foul August night. It was but one instance of a world rewritten according to Francis Greenway, a world where his wisdom alone prevailed.

  He claimed to have reported to Macquarie on matters of port safety as early as November 1814, almost twenty years before the Edward Lombe disaster. In the Sydney Gazette, Greenway recalled that: ‘Governor Macquarie desired me to inspect the different points at the entrance of this harbour, as he intended to build a light-house and fort to secure the entrance of the harbour from surprise, as England was then at war with the great powers of Europe and America’.2

  It seems improbable that Greenway was consulting on such weighty matters as the siting of lighthouses and fortifications so soon after the tensions of his July 1814 exchange with Macquarie. His appointment as acting civil architect was still more than a year away. This task was not some minor public project, set to test his credentials; he was supposedly asked to report on the very security and safety of the colony! But with Greenway very much on probation throughout 1815, it was more likely Captain John Gill who reported to Macquarie, with Greenway acting as his assistant.

  More than 18 months after Greenway was supposedly put to work by Macquarie, a small group gathered on the southerly bastion of the entrance to Port Jackson. Macquarie’s diary recorded the events of the afternoon of 11 July 1816 in his typically unemotional fashion:

  This day at 2, o’Clock [sic] in the afternoon I went through the ceremony of laying the Foundation Stone of the New Tower intended to be immediately erected at the South Head of Port Jackson (and to be completed in Nine Months from this Date), to answer for the double purpose of a Light House, and a Barrack for the Party of Soldiers quartered there.3

  The lieutenant governor, Lieutenant Colonel George Molle; the judge advocate, Frederick Garling; the governor’s secretary, John Campbell; and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John Watts; as well as Gill and Greenway, all accompanied Macquarie on that fine winter’s afternoon. With the glint and flourish of a ceremonial trowel, and a ‘holey’ dollar and a ‘dump’ – coins famously struck from Spanish silver dollars at Macquarie’s command – lobbed into a freshly laid bed of mortar, the foundation stone for Australia’s first lighthouse was duly placed, and Greenway’s first significant public building in New South Wales begun. From their vantage point on high, the assembled gentlemen gazed north past the scrubby flanks of South Head and out across that scintillating divide, the portal to what Arthur Phillip had enthused was ‘the finest harbour in the world’ more than a quarter of a century before.

  Immutable against the languid ocean swells, fortress-like North Head rose pastel yet stern through the seaborne afternoon haze. Beyond lay empty acres of opportunity, an untrammelled wilderness where the Indigenous inhabitants were all but invisible to those present on South Head. Much of it was still unknown, an unfamiliar world seemingly without end, yet as much as any structure in Macquarie’s estate, the lighthouse would soon symbolise the inexorable pegging back of that wilderness. It would literally be the beacon of civilisation where before there was perceived to be only darkness and the anarchy of nature. With a chink of glasses the seven assembled gentlemen drank to the success of the work in cherry brandy. In predictable style, the building would be named ‘Macquarie Tower’. Rather optimistically, Greenway advised Macquarie that the tower would be completed in nine months. A few days later he enthused over his design in the pages of the Sydney Gazette:

  The centre of this handsome building is to be raised 65 feet … and will form a square base or pedestal with a circular tower, crowned with a frize [sic], on which will be carved the four winds in alto relievo, distributing their different good and evil qualities, from their drapery, as they appear to fly round the tower, above which there will be a cornice and lanthern [sic], with a revolving light, the whole forming an appropriate capital to the tower; on the inside is intended to be a geometrical stone staircase leading up to the lanthern, & two basso relievos will be on the pedestal. The wings of the building are to form the guard house and barrack.4

  Several locations had been considered for a lighthouse. Greenway’s choice was North Head, which is higher than its opposing headland, and also projects further east. But North Head’s remoteness and inaccessibility meant that constructing, manning and servicing a lighthouse in such extreme isolation was deemed too costly and impractical. The southern headland at the harbour entrance (known as Inner South Head) is low-lying, and while it was clearly visible to ships approaching from the east and north, high cliffs to the immediate south obscured it from the view of vessels closing from the south-easterly quarter.

  On the highest point south of the entrance, and a mile or so back along the rise from Inner South Head, lay Signal Hill, the site of a manned signalling station since 1789. The arrival or departure of ships was communicated between Flagstaff (Observatory) Hill in nearby Sydney Town and Signal Hill at the opposite end of the harbour. Signal flags had first flown there in February 1790, heralding the arrival of HMS Supply, which had returned to Sydney from one of her voyages to Norfolk Island. Nearly four months passed before the arrival of the next ship in early June, the Lady Juliana carrying 222 female convicts, but as arrivals grew more frequent, a permanent marker in the form of a 30-foot-high stone column was soon built, and a coal-burning iron brazier to aid night navigation followed.

  Macquarie’s major road-building enterprises commenced in earnest in March 1811, when a detachment of 21 soldiers built a road from Sydney to South Head. The 8-mile link, wide enough to carry carts a
nd carriages, took just ten weeks to construct and roughly followed the high route of a bridle trail cut by convicts in 1803. It would enable troops, cannon and materiel to move to South Head in case of emergency, and also allow for passengers, mail and official papers to be landed at Watsons Bay, often days before incoming ships could negotiate a passage up the harbour. The road finished below Signal Hill at Watsons Bay, where an obelisk recorded the feat.

  As shipping movements increased, the next logical step was to build a lighthouse. Opinions as to the eventual siting of Macquarie Tower would remain divided, but according to a further Greenway recollection, this time from 1825: ‘The Governor and his staff, in 1816, went to South-head to meet me, for the purpose of fixing upon the most eligible situation to build it on, and to examine the different points where to fortify the entrance of the harbour …’5 Greenway claimed that he warned against a lighthouse on Signal Hill, as ‘in stormy weather the waves beat so tremendously against the sand rock underneath, that it shakes the whole mass, as if it would cause it at some future period to tumble into the foaming sea with an awful crash’.6

  After seeking the opinions of ‘Captains of Vessels that were well acquainted with the Coast’, Gill advised Macquarie on a site on South Head that would ‘answer every purpose’.7 The governor heeded Gill and Greenway’s suggestions and settled on a site set back from the jutting cliffs and a further half-mile south from Signal Hill. But Greenway, according to his own 1825 account, was soon not so much imagining the structure tumbling into the sea as he was worried that it would rapidly crumble to a standing ruin. ‘I examined the stone at South-head’, he wrote, ‘and found it very friable and objected to it being used’.

  Whether he actually voiced his concerns about the durability of the locally quarried sandstone at the time, or this was yet another instance of Greenway tinkering with history is perhaps a moot point. Gill for one would certainly have assumed the latter. Commissioner Bigge asked the engineer whether Greenway had objected to the quality of the stone. He also asked ‘from what Quarry was it taken?’ Gill replied that ‘Mr Greenway never objected to the quality of the Stone; indeed it was selected by himself, wherever he approved it was had, from Quarries no great distance from the Building’.8 In a March 1819 letter to Major George Druitt, Gill’s successor as acting engineer, Greenway railed against sloppy workmanship, and the insolence, idleness and indifference of the workers, but not the suitability of materials to hand.