A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Watercolour, 1853, National Library of Australia

  Louis Philippe Alphonse Bichebois, Vue prise dans les Jardins du Gouvernement a Sidney [sic]. The Government House stables as a picturesque folly and object of fascination for visitors to Sydney. From the 1826 visit of the French explorer Hyacinthe de Bougainville.

  Lithograph, 1837, National Library of Australia

  Macquarie Place. Greenway’s fountain can be seen on the right-hand edge of the photograph. It drew the ire of Macquarie’s detractors, and accusations of extravagance with ‘temples round pumps’.

  American & Australasian Photographic Company, ca 1869–74, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  W Hardy Wilson, St James’ Church, Sydney. One of Greenway’s finest buildings.

  Pencil and French crayon, 1914, National Library of Australia

  Lachlan Macquarie, memorandum for Mr Greenway, 4 July 1817. The viceroy’s instruction to Greenway to commence work on the Government House stables. Lord Bathurst was not informed of the stables until March 1819.

  Greenway papers, A 1451, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  James Barnet, Design for a National Public Library. Victorian bombast by one of Greenway’s successors as government architect. Barnet’s library was intended for the site of the Hyde Park convict barracks.

  Watercolour, 1883, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  W Hardy Wilson, St Matthew’s Church, Windsor. Greenway’s original design may have been for a two-storeyed church, abandoned when the project descended into acrimony and dispute.

  Measured pencil drawing, ca 1915, National Library of Australia

  St James’ Church from Queens Square. The Supreme Court building can be seen behind St James’, with Greenway’s geometrical stair expressed externally and capped by one of his distinctive domes. The crowded placement of these two buildings was an unfortunate consequence of the meddling of Commissioner Bigge.

  American & Australasian Photographic Company, ca 1870, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  Supreme Court Geometrical Stair. A fine example of one of Greenway’s frequently used planning devices.

  Government Printing Office, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  Francis Greenway, letter to ‘My Dear Sister’, 20 March 1821. Feeling exploited, a disaffected Greenway wrote to one of his two sisters hoping she might show his ‘friends in England’ that he had not been idle in New South Wales. He enclosed a grossly inflated estimate of professional fees he thought were his due.

  Greenway papers, A 1451, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  W Hardy Wilson, St Matthew’s Rectory, Windsor. Built by William Cox and completed in 1825, almost three years after Greenway’s dismissal, the rectory is attributed to the architect on stylistic grounds, with a floor plan and geometric stair typical of his work.

  Measured pen and ink drawing, 1912, National Library of Australia

  Robert Frain, Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane. Macquarie’s successor as governor of New South Wales. In May 1822 Brisbane clarified Greenway’s conditions of employment and renewed his appointment as acting civil architect, but dismissed him seven months later.

  Engraving by Frederick Bromley, 1842, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  Cumberland Place, Sydney. A large house on Bunkers Hill (now the southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge) for merchant Robert Campbell senior, designed around 1825. The symmetrical house comprised L-shaped wings bisected by a two-storeyed pavilion topped with a typical Greenway pediment. Cumberland Place was later the birthplace of David Scott Mitchell, book collector and benefactor of the Mitchell Library.

  Photographer unknown and undated, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

  ‘ … A NEAT HANDSOME FORT’: COLONIAL DEFENCES, 1816–21

  From the earliest days of British occupation in New South Wales there existed a wariness of both an enemy without and an enemy within. Widespread or enduring peace was virtually unknown in the realpolitik of European affairs, and despite their remoteness from major conflict, successive colonial governors expected the enmities of the old world to one day wash up on the shores of Port Jackson. Arthur Phillip’s ‘finest harbour in the world’, with its 150 miles of protected foreshore, was a strategic and commercial asset any one of Britain’s European rivals – the French, Dutch, Spanish or Russians – might covet. News of the outside world was fragmentary at best, and many months often went by before information trickled through to Sydney on who was now at war with whom. Through such protracted silences, communal sentiment swung from casual indifference to a nagging anxiety and sense of foreboding.

  Aside from an attack from a major flagged fleet, there were also privateers ready to plunder and harry, or to offload pirated goods on the local market. And while Port Jackson provided perfect shelter from storm and tempest, its labyrinthine bays and inlets also offered concealment from which surprise raids could be launched.

  Within the colony, a sullen convict population watched and waited; the low mutterings of rebellion, and a do-or-die dash for freedom, were never far from the minds of some. Thousands of Irish convicts – refractory and mutinous at home – were unlikely to be overcome with passivity when thrown onto an antipodean shore. Small bands of runaways were a common problem, and in this prison without walls, escape was a constant temptation; ships rode quietly at anchor in the harbour, there to be hijacked by the bold and the desperate and sailed away. ‘Not fewer than three piratical seizures … have been effected within the last three years’, observed William Charles Wentworth – explorer, landowner, son of D’Arcy Wentworth, and by 1819 a prominent member of colonial society: ‘On all of these occasions the vessels so seized were run ashore on the uninhabited parts of the coast, and all hands on board, the innocent crews, as well as the abandoned pirates, either perished from hunger, or were immolated by the spears and waddies of the ferocious savages’. Men working on the Macquarie Tower made one such ‘piratical seizure’ (see chapter 11). And the so-called ‘ferocious savages’, the Indigenous population around Sydney, were at first nervously accepting of the disruptions to their lives and land, but had since turned hostile as it became clear that these troublesome strangers were not going away.

  Whether the fears of successive governors bordered on paranoia and were ill founded, or such anxiety was fed by an instinctive martial distrust of one’s enemies, each prepared for an attack from over their shoulder or from over the seaward horizon.

  The first fortifications to guard the new settlement in Sydney Cove were in place by the end of 1788, with a redoubt built near what later became Macquarie Place, and two brass cannons mounted. The following year a powder magazine was set up at Point Maskelyne (later renamed Dawes Point) on the west side of the cove, and in 1791 a battery was constructed there and equipped with eight guns taken from the First Fleet transport HMS Sirius. These early structures consisted mainly of low parapets, with wicker gabions or timber structures filled with earth and rock providing protection to the guns. In 1798 a half-moon battery was built on Bennelong Point on the east side of the cove and armed with cannon from another First Fleet transport, HMS Supply. Additional batteries followed on Garden Island, and at Georges Head at the eastern end of the harbour.

  In 1804, a major fortification was commenced immediately to the west of the town on Windmill (Observatory) Hill, which, with its extensive views up and down the harbour, as well as over the surrounding countryside and the settlement below, offered cannon cover in every direction. An uprising in March of that year of mainly Irish convicts at Castle Hill, to Sydney’s north-west, was all the justification Governor King needed for the massive hexagonal fort on Windmill Hill. But work on Fort Phillip, as it came to be known, proved both expensive and slow, and under Governor Bligh progress stalled. By the time Macquarie arrived, all that had been built were the fort’s extensive perimeter walls.

&nbs
p; In June 1813, a year after Congress had voted to go to war with Britain, news of hostilities with the United States finally reached Sydney. Macquarie was immediately on high alert. Foreign ships would now be prevented from proceeding up the harbour without a pilot, and they were stopped at Neutral Bay, an anchorage from where their guns were unable to take aim on Sydney Cove and the town.

  On 20 May 1814, Sydney received a taste of what an enemy bombardment might be like when the Three Bees caught fire in Sydney Cove. A fiery helpless hulk, she burnt to the waterline and her powder magazine exploded, sending ball and shot raining down on the terrified populace. Miraculously, no one was killed or even wounded. But as the Three Bees nudged into Bennelong Point, one stray cannon ball could easily have tested the security of the hapless battery’s own magazine, with potentially dire consequences. Clearly, the settlement’s defences might not be so lucky under a real enemy’s targeted and sustained fire.

  Macquarie was determined to improve security around Sydney Cove, and in 1816 gave instructions to Greenway to enlarge the fortifications on Windmill Hill. Governor King’s Fort Phillip was to be part of a grand scheme of defensive emplacements stretching down the slope to a beefed-up Dawes Point Battery. In his evidence before Commissioner Bigge, Greenway would claim that the ‘Magazine at Fort Philip [sic]’ was the first building on which he was employed as acting civil architect.1

  In later fantastical musings, voiced through his letters to The Australian in 1825, Greenway claimed to have argued for much more than a strengthened fort on Windmill Hill. His proposed fortifications stretched from South Head to the Sow and Pigs Reef and on to Sydney Town itself. A jumble of sandstone redoubts and bastions, parapets, ramparts and walls spilled from the architect’s fevered recollections; Greenway would claim Fort Phillip and all the rest as part of his grand scheme to secure the defences of the colony:

  My opinion as to fortifying the entrance of the Harbour did not arise merely from its immediate necessity, but as considering it a permanent object of future utility … A very trifling force might have entered the harbour and have destroyed the whole with the town and eight or ten ships lying in Sydney Cove, or have laid all parties under contribution [ransom] …2

  Greenway claimed to have chosen Fort Phillip as the best site for a mighty citadel, an impregnable defensive place and, in the face of a rampaging aggressor, a place of refuge for the civilian populace and their most valued possessions. And as Ellis observed, further fortifications ‘loomed like the Great Wall of China’ in the architect’s imagination, from Sydney Cove to Woolloomooloo and on to John Harris’s Ultimo.3 Greenway even talked of defences stretching from Parramatta to the site of the ‘intended Metropolitan church’ (in George Street) and culminating in a ‘grand entrance’. It was the stuff of pure delusional fantasy.

  Protection from the barbarian hordes assured, a Sydney by Greenway’s hand might eventually have looked like some heavily fortified Italian medieval hill town oddly misplaced beside a tranquil Pacific shore. Greenway was of course far more accurately convinced that the town ‘in the course of a few years [would] most likely extend round Wooloomooloo [sic] by Surry Hills to Anson’s [Mrs Macquarie’s] Point and join the land of Captain Piper’. But those who did not share the dreamer’s vision of this fortified metropolis were as ever ‘crippled by the narrow and contemptible notions of false economists, which proves more destructive to society than ever extravagance with all its evils’.4

  And on and on Greenway rambled, describing his misfortunes up on Windmill Hill, and at the Dawes Point Battery and Fort Macquarie. What he failed to mention was that Commissioner Bigge had instructed two officers of the 48th Regiment, Majors James Taylor5 and Thomas Bell – both of them experienced campaigners from the Peninsular Wars – to report ‘as to the best mode of Defence to be adopted against an Invading Army or Maritime Force’.6 What involvement, if any, Greenway had with the two officers is unknown. Both Taylor and Bell reported back to Bigge during the course of 1820, Taylor concluding in his report that the size and remoteness of the colony were not ‘of sufficient consequence to repay the expenses which any Enemy would incur in fitting out an Expedition’, nor were raids by privateers a significant threat. Taylor and Bell did concede, however, that if the population of New South Wales continued to grow, and the local economy flourished as a result, then Sydney’s attractiveness to any hostile power would increase commensurately. Both officers concluded that the settlement’s defences could best be secured by fortifications on North and South heads, as well as at Georges Head (south of Middle Head) and any one of the four islands further east from Sydney Cove. Such installations, Taylor thought, would ‘completely frustrate any attempt to get possession of the harbour’.

  With a shift in strategic thinking away from Sydney Cove, in the end all that was added to Fort Phillip in Macquarie’s time was a powder magazine. And it leaked!

  Never one to accept blame, Greenway struck out before the Commission of Inquiry, and later in the press, asserting that any ruined gunpowder was definitely not his responsibility. Before Commissioner Bigge, he claimed that Captain John Gill had pressured him to allow gunpowder to be stored in the magazine before its roof was ‘shingled or otherwise secured’. According to the architect, the roof was to be covered by ‘large stones, that wd have lapped over each other, the same as stone tiles’.7 All this was to be built on top of bombproof stone arches or vaults some four feet thick. Greenway supposedly remonstrated with Gill that the gunpowder would be spoilt. Such hasty actions, it seemed to the architect, led to a suspension of work, and ‘it now remains to be the subject of ridicule to every man of common sense’.8

  For his part, Gill was baffled by Greenway’s version of events. In his rebuttal of the architect’s assertions, Gill, by then back home in Scotland, protested that: ‘I never heard, until now, that a grain of it had been damaged … Mr Greenway never warned me against reporting the new Bomb proof Magazine fit to receive [the gunpowder] but on the contrary, said, that it was’. Gill was unaware of Greenway’s intention to shingle the roof:

  [But] when it was discovered by the Commissariat Storekeeper, that some drops of wet, oozed through the crown of the arch, he proposed to run a composition over it, which he said would effectually secure it – I frequently urged him to make this composition, the principal ingredients of which, he told me, were Bullocks [sic] Blood and Lime. I did not know what quantity of Gunpowder was in the Magazine at the time, but a few tanned Hides spread over the barrels secured the whole of it from the drops that occasionally fell, after rain.9

  Having considered the recommendations of his two military advisers, Bell and Taylor, Bigge wrote to Macquarie in October 1820 declaring that the ‘Defence of New South Wales … will ultimately depend upon other Sources that [sic] those that may be afforded in the Town of Sydney’.10

  The commissioner conceded some localised defences, such as the nearby fortification at Dawes Point, were a fait accompli and therefore of some use as a ‘saluting battery’, as he called it. But he also thought the mighty citadel of Fort Phillip to be superfluous and certainly should not be proceeded with ‘until the pleasure of His Majesty’s Government should be known’. Bigge wanted the site high on the hill overlooking the town for a gaol. Perhaps, in his reasoning, the forbidding mass of a prison, dark against the western sky, would one day form as effective a deterrent to insurrection as sandstone glacis and embrasures bristling with cannon. Others, too, saw the folly of the great fort on the hill. WC Wentworth commented that ‘this fort is so completely hemmed in with houses, that a great part of the town would be inevitably destroyed by the fire from it’.11

  Fort Phillip or, as one recent history described it, ‘the colonial fort that never was’, was decommissioned in 1827 and its massive perimeter walls incorporated in part into the foundations of the Signal Station, built in the 1840s and designed by one of Greenway’s successors, the colonial architect Mortimer Lewis.12 The old Fort Phillip site is now home to the Sydney Observatory
, completed in 1858 immediately alongside the Signal Station.

  As work stuttered along up on Windmill Hill, Macquarie gave instructions for the battery on Dawes Point to be improved and a guardhouse built. Construction commenced in July 1819, with the work completed by October the following year. Writing before the battery’s upgrade, WC Wentworth remarked that the ‘embrasures are so low, that a single broadside of grape [shot] would sweep off all who had the courage or temerity to defend it’.13 The augmented Dawes Point fortifications were to prove more ornamental than practical, and they also appear to have been badly built. Inevitably, the critics circled.

  Giving evidence before Commissioner Bigge, Edward Cureton was quizzed about drawings being taken away from the site by Greenway, scales being added, and a discrepancy of two feet arising in the height of the completed tower compared to the architect’s design. The ridge of the guardhouse roof was visible behind the battlement, with the implication in Bigge’s questioning that Greenway altered his drawing to cover a mistake. According to Cureton, the architect ‘never mentioned any thing about the height but said that the battlements were not worked so well as he cd wish them’.14 It seems that Greenway may have recovered a design error through finding fault with the stonemason’s gang. He simply ordered that the work be pulled down and rebuilt – something the architect did ‘frequently’, as Cureton put it.

  Progress on the Dawes Point Battery faltered through a lack of skilled workers, a state typical of any number of public works in the colony. Cureton thought that only one workman among the eight employed at Dawes Point was any good. More widely, from the more than 90 men in Cureton’s gang, just four were good stonecutters. ‘The others are learners’, insisted the overseer, ‘quarrymen & Labourers’. And contrary to Greenway’s assertion that he had attempted to train labourers in the rudiments of the mason’s craft, Cureton maintained that ‘he has not’.