One of the great difficulties in Botany Bay is to find proper employment for the great mass of convicts who are sent out. Governor Macquarrie [sic] selects all the best artisans, of every description, for the use of Government; and puts the poets, attornies [sic], and politicians up for auction. The evil consequences of this are manifold. In the first place, from possessing so many of the best artificers, the Governor is necessarily turned into a builder; and immense drafts are drawn upon the Treasury at home, for buildings better adapted for Regent Street than the Bay.10
The forces of enlightenment had aimed unwittingly at the wrong target. In such a vituperative atmosphere, Macquarie’s attackers were in a sense Greenway’s attackers, and any assault on the governor’s program of civic improvement was an assault on Greenway’s buildings – from their finely cut stones and elegant proportions to their urbane and civilising power. Mr Bigge, or second-hand critics such as the Reverend Smith, might have thought such noble buildings out of place in Botany Bay, but at least one visitor to New South Wales thought otherwise.
A ‘PALACE FOR HORSES’: THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE STABLES, 1817–21
On 19 November 1819, not quite two months after Bigge’s arrival, the French explorer Louis de Freycinet called at Port Jackson in the course of a four-year circumnavigation of the world. The artist and writer Jacques Arago accompanied Freycinet’s expedition and could hardly believe Sydney Town’s ‘majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, [and] fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy of the chisel of our best artists’. Despite the obvious hyperbole, should Macquarie have entertained Monsieur Arago, or Greenway taken the French visitor on a tour of Sydney, such comments would naturally have brought much pleasure to the governor and his architect. Arago continued his commentary: ‘The principal buildings exhibit themselves in a very original manner … and have their places supplied by structures of hewn stone, ornamented with pleasing sculptures, and embellished by balconies … You would imagine that our best architects had deserted Europe, and repaired to New Holland …’1
Arago thought the Macquarie Tower to be an ‘elegant, solid and noble construction’, and the new hospital ‘magnificent’. And of first arriving off Sydney Cove, the French artist described:
A new fort, regular and of little elevation, but built like ancient towers … [It] seems placed there more particularly to defend the stores and residence of the governor, whose stables appear to me to be built with a view to render them capable of being fortified in case of need. Their architecture is so whimsical, that I cannot find terms to describe it.2
Arago’s description of the new fort on Bennelong Point and the governor’s stables nearby as ‘whimsical’ was entirely accurate. As much architectural follies as utilitarian structures, such buildings fell easily under Mr Bigge’s critical gaze.
Back in December 1817, Macquarie had assured Bathurst that he would continue to suffer in his hovel of an official residence and thereby risk being pinned to the ground when the termite-riddled structure fell on top of him. Yet not four days later, on 16 December, Macquarie’s ceremonial trowel was busy, striking the first blow in building his own gubernatorial estate. That mid-December day proved particularly busy, the governor and his entourage dashing between the Macquarie Tower and the laying of foundation stones at both the new fort and the stables, ‘on the site of the old Bake-House within the Government Domain’.3 Momentous, too, it was for Greenway as he watched Macquarie’s trowel do its best, a certificate of conditional pardon – his emancipation – now safely tucked in his pocket after the morning’s visit to South Head.
No mention had been made to Bathurst of the little matter of the stables in the five months since Greenway received his instructions, and nor was it mentioned now. Similarly, plans for the fort had only just been revealed, despite the governor’s instructions being given to Greenway back in July. The commencement of work on the fort and the stables belonged to that brief era when the viceroy’s fiat ran largely unchecked, when the time lag provided by more than 13 000 miles of ocean conveniently conspired to hinder communication, and Lord Bathurst could quibble as much as he liked in London. With the dead hand of Mr Bigge yet to descend on New South Wales, all was seemingly right with the remote world of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie. The dreaming, scheming and planning were to continue, at least for a short time.
In his memorandum to Greenway of the previous July, Macquarie commanded his architect to: ‘Draw a Ground Plan and Elevation of a Court of Offices and Stables … for the use of the Governor’s Horses, Carriages, & Servants attached thereto’.4 The stables were planned around a central courtyard with accommodation for 30 horses, including separate stalls in the octagonal corner towers for stallions. Coach houses and quarters for grooms, stable hands, drivers and so on, were also included. But the first Bathurst knew of the new stables was from Macquarie’s despatch of March 1819, more than two years after the work commenced! Again, Macquarie justified such a fait accompli on the grounds of necessity and economy:
I had so long Suffered such very great Inconvenience from the Want of Secure Stables for my Horses and decent Sleeping places for my Servants, that I have been under the Necessity of building a regular Suit [sic] of Offices … These Stables are built on a Commodious tho’ not expensive Plan …5
In the years between the building’s commencement and his admissions to Bathurst, the hole Macquarie had dug for himself on the site of the stables grew ever deeper. In time, he and Greenway struggled to escape from its depths. After only three weeks in the colony, Bigge wrote indignantly to Bathurst about several issues, including delays in the construction of a female factory at Parramatta, and of the likelihood of ‘discontinuing some one or other of the sumptuous and less important works that are already begun … at Sydney’. He was also aghast to have learned from Greenway that plans and estimates for the stables had been forwarded to ‘your Lordship only in [the] commencement of this year’. Bigge then implied that Bathurst had been deliberately deceived. He continued: ‘I cannot help expressing my astonishment at the useless magnificence … of this building and my doubts whether under any circumstances … it would have obtained your Lordship’s sanction’.6
In January 1820, Bigge and Scott left Sydney for a tour of Van Diemen’s Land. During their absence, the commissioner expected work on the stables to be scaled back, but it was with ‘much surprise and regret’ that he learned of the project’s ‘steady continuation’.7 Bigge later wrote to Macquarie lamenting the fact that the stables, and another one of the governor’s follies, the turnpike gates on Parramatta Road, were ‘too far advanced to admit of Suspension or abandonment without a risk of total loss of all materials & labour that they had then cost’. He hoped, however, that ‘they would be speedily brought to such a state as to be rendered serviceable’ and that no ‘ornamental building should be undertaken until those of a more useful description were completed’. But by June, Bigge ‘confessed … that I have viewed with more pain than I can describe the entire neglect of this suggestion in the continued & laborious & expensive completion of these two buildings’.8 Mr Bigge was not amused.
Without the addition of a Government House in a larger landscaped ensemble, the stables would inevitably look strangely out of place. ‘As an isolated building in a garden setting … [and] without the new Government House to anchor them’, remarked Chris Johnson, a New South Wales government architect of our era, ‘the stables were … a constant reminder of grandeur that might have been and an expensive vision shared neither by the British Government nor by many of the … settlers’.9
Greenway later claimed that he was always dissatisfied with the siting of the stables, and told Macquarie so. The governor, it seems, wanted to place his own residence higher up the ridge and to the south, ‘where the windmill now stands’.10 This is certainly the composition illustrated in the perspective sketch attributed to Greenway of the two buildings. In such a relationship, the architect feared the stables would rob any future Gov
ernment House of its importance, particularly when viewed from the harbour. Greenway contended that they should be a ‘subservient object, partially planted out of view’. In Macquarie’s arrangement, the stables would be overlooked by Government House and ‘become a nuisance to it’.
In his evidence before Commissioner Bigge, Greenway stated that Elizabeth Macquarie had provided him with an elevation of the stables, thus defining their Gothic-revival style. And while the overall picturesque Gothic theme was suggested by Mrs Macquarie, the detailing was most likely informed by the medieval buildings with which Greenway had once been intimately familiar. Broadbent and Hughes suggest his studies of Oxford’s Magdalen College and the Saxon Gateway at Bristol Cathedral as inspiration. They also point to Ashton Court outside Bristol, with its attached Gothic stables and battlemented octagonal turrets as a possible influence. But Thornbury Castle, his admitted model for one of his Government House schemes, is perhaps the most likely contender.
Whatever the building’s architectural pedigree, this Gothicinspired wonder soon had those associated with its construction – save for Greenway, that is – trying to shift the blame for its size and extravagance, while its free-ranging critics were universally condemnatory. In the controversy that engulfed the stables, the ‘commodious tho’ not expensive’ description quickly gave way to derogatory labels such as ‘palatial’. Most mocking of all was Bigge’s description of a ‘palace for horses, while people at Parramatta remain unhoused’.11 The epithet of the equine palace soon gained wide currency.
By the end of September 1820, an anxious Macquarie was expecting the stables to be ‘ready for the occupying of the horses &c’ in three weeks.12 But to the embarrassment of the governor, those three weeks inevitably became four months. Greenway recalled the growing astonishment in the town as the scale of the building became apparent:
The Government stables now became a subject of much conversation – one said it was a most extravagant thing … and good enough for a government house … surely the Governor and Mr Greenway must be mad. Others again … said that I was deceiving the Governor, and that it would not be finished in two years, with all the men we had; all this was thundered in my ears … to which I returned a hearty laugh, with an ejaculation – Oh! Glorious ignorance, we will raise an altar to thee, and worship thee!!!13
The architect admitted that the governor did not see a final plan before the work commenced, and outgoing engineer Captain John Gill suggested that the eventual size of the stables was Greenway’s fault, revealing in his evidence to the commission that: ‘The Plan was … approved by the Governor, but I think … that after the Building was commenced, the Governor imagined that Mr Greenway had exceeded the Plan’.14
Others were not so measured in their commentary. Henry Kitchen lashed out in his correspondence with the commissioner:
This building is one among many structures in this Colony that calls for the severest animadversion – As being most extravagantly expensive without affording that accommodation … it ought to do. This building is a very incorrect attempt at the style of castellated gothic – It encloses an era [sic] of 174 feet long and 130 feet wide but affords accomodation [sic] for 28 horses only …
The site of this erection seems also to be particularly illchosen … there is left scarcely room for the turning of a carriage and in addition to this circumstance it is planted upon a spot precisely in front of what would appear the most eligible site for the intended government house.15
Of course, the most damning criticism came from Commissioner Bigge himself. The stables were ‘only just completed’, he posed to Macquarie in February 1821, and were ‘in a style of magnificence far exceeding the wants or allowance of any Governor of New South Wales, and must impose the necessity of a very large & expensive Government House’.16 Bigge was trying to assert that, ipso facto, Macquarie’s stables were wagging the architectural dog of a future governor’s residence. In his final report Bigge would claim that he had cautioned Macquarie over continuing with the building, and that the governor himself had, ‘upon many occasions, expressed to me his own regret at having sanctioned it’.17
Bigge also carped over delays, implying that through the size and lavishness of the stables, convict labour had been tied up for longer than necessary. For his part, Macquarie (answering through his secretary, John Campbell) attempted to fob Bigge off, and certainly could not ‘feel any responsibility attached to him for the delay of mechanics, whereby those stables were not finished in the time the Governor stated or expected’.18 Besides, why should Macquarie take responsibility for the delays? Shifting the blame squarely to his architect, he concluded that the ‘Commissioner of Enquiry must be too aware of Mr Greenway’s dilatory habits, to feel any surprise at the Governor’s disappointment’. Making a site visit with Greenway and engineer George Druitt, the governor further shifted the blame by pinpointing the ‘ornamental part of the tower’ as the problem. Druitt recalled that Macquarie ‘disapproved of the rich Cornish [sic] intended to be placed round the top of the battlement’.19
The architect was under pressure, but he claimed to have just the solution. Greenway always favoured piecework for the convict labour force; he maintained that as an incentive to speed, the skilled men under his direction should be allowed time of their own to seek other employment once an allotted task was completed. The governor and magistrates, however, were generally not so keen on convicts having too much free time, with all its attendant temptations. But in desperation to have the stables finished, Macquarie consented to ten of the best masons being set to work according to Greenway’s system. The tower was duly finished in five days – perhaps not in the most substantial and workmanlike manner, but it was finished. Inevitably, the downside was that three of Greenway’s masons were brought before the superintendent of police. One was accused of ‘street robbery and ill using a female’. His reward was 100 lashes, while the other two were sentenced to solitary confinement for their troubles.
As always, Greenway sought to have the last word on battles won but often lost. Of the stables, he maintained that a full investigation of the government’s accounts would reveal that their cost was less than £2500, ‘a sum not equal to what the Secretary’s office cost Government’. What Greenway did not reveal to any reader who could be bothered was that this figure was an estimate given to Bigge in December 1819. His later, and much inflated, ‘Measure and Value of Work’ priced the stables at £9000, making them fourth in cost to the Hyde Park Barracks (a building designed to accommodate around 600 men), Fort Macquarie and the additions to the military barracks.
He lauded the concept of piecework, claiming that 13 masons could achieve in three days what 30 would take three weeks to do ‘in direct opposition to my system’. And in his world, the stables had been ‘finished within the time stated by me, and for so trifling a sum … to the mortification of those who wished otherwise’. Still dreaming of what might have been, he concluded that ‘they had better let me commence a Government house … which would be completed while they were cavilling about that which they could have no just idea of ’.20 He always knew best, yet by 1825, when he began his series of digressive letters to The Australian, ‘they’ were taking no notice.
The governor’s horses might have been living in palatial style, but their owner still had no Sydney residence worthy of his status. A few months after Greenway’s epistle in The Australian, Major General Sir Thomas Brisbane, Macquarie’s successor, wrote to Bathurst suggesting that: ‘The Gothic Building on the pleasantest suite [sic] of the Domain, which was intended for Government Stables is utterly useless … [and] may be easily and advantageously improved into a government Residence’.21 During the term of the next incumbent, Lieutenant General (later Sir) Ralph Darling, planning finally began for a new gubernatorial home. Bathurst did consider Brisbane’s suggestion of adaptive remodelling but nothing came of it, and successive governors continued to use the stables for their intended purpose. At times, a local polo club played
in the Domain and housed its horses at the governor’s stables, while the Sydney Hunt Club cut a dash riding to hounds from Greenway’s building.
While the building remained an oddity to many, locals, visitors and artists continued to admire Greenway’s equine folly. In the 1840s, Conrad Martens produced several views of the building in its isolated landscape setting and, like Jacques Arago, further French visitors responded to the romantic spirit of the ‘palace for horses’. In 1826, Hyacinthe de Bougainville likened the building to a medieval baronial fortress, while artist Louis de Sainson, who accompanied the great French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, painted views of the stables and of the Macquarie Tower in 1827.
With the coming of the motor car, the original function of and need for the stables were gone. After much deliberation concerning appropriate re-use, the courtyard was roofed over between 1913 and 1915 and the building converted according to the design of Seymour Wells, who himself later became the government architect. The palace for horses became a school for the arts, and the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music was born.
FOLLIES, FOUNTAINS AND FUGACIOUS TOYS, 1818–20
Just seven months after sailing into Port Jackson – back when his enthusiasm for building, planning and improving had not been questioned or blunted by Whitehall’s reproachful despatches and when a disconsolate Greenway was still in Bristol attempting to clear his debts – Lachlan Macquarie had begun making pronouncements on the ad hoc layout of Sydney. Accordingly, the first building and town-planning regulations in New South Wales were published by decree in the Sydney Gazette of 11 August 1810.
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