St James’ Church is undoubtedly one of Greenway’s finest buildings, and its conversation with the convict barracks across Macquarie Street gives but a hint of what might have been had his town plan been unshackled. Recessed gable faces off against gable; the sandstone plaque of St James’ echoes the sandstone gable mount of the barrack clock opposite; similarly proportioned engaged pilasters articulate each façade, and so on. The centreline of each building locks the two together in strict symmetry, and the urban composition is unified. The tragedy of St James’ is that this gracious English Georgian town church was never given the space and architectural repose it deserved.
As for the courthouse next door, its construction would run far less smoothly than St James’. As Ellis remarked wryly: ‘Courthouses were not very lucky for Mr Greenway. His original design for one had been turned into St James’s Church. And this second attempt was being turned into an abomination’.23
A proper home for the colony’s judiciary had long been desired by Macquarie. As far back as July 1813 a meeting of magistrates was held to discuss the construction of a ‘substantial and convenient Building’. The Sydney Gazette reported that funds would be raised by a ‘general voluntary Subscription’.24 Macquarie opened the appeal, committing the government to £590, and on ‘his own private Account’ he promised £60. Among the other subscribers, his secretary John Campbell pledged £50, Simeon Lord £40 and Samuel Marsden £30.25 In all, £1112 was promised. But the fund failed to reach the required £5000, with few among the free settlers and more prosperous emancipists sharing Macquarie’s enthusiasm. After five months, the fund was abandoned and Macquarie found himself reluctantly resigned to using convict labour. In 1814, Macquarie forwarded a design for a courthouse (possibly by Daniel Dering Mathew – see chapter 8) to the Colonial Office for approval. Bathurst’s response was unequivocal:
As there is not any intention of remodelling the Courts of Justice, or introducing the Trial by Jury … I conceive that the Arrangement, which has been proposed and, I trust, adopted, of converting one of the detached Wings of the Hospital into a Court house will sufficiently answer every object for which the new Building could be required.26
When the foundation stone of the courthouse on the St James’ site was finally laid in 1819, Macquarie must have thought the matter of a judicial home had at long last been resolved. But Bigge’s insistence that the court be moved to the site next door saw Macquarie’s cherished dream quickly sour, becoming in his last two years in the colony the ‘abomination’ that Ellis described.
With the intention of making the school-cum-courthouse ‘as respectable as possible’, Greenway prepared a sketch plan that received the approval of both Bigge and Macquarie. His idea was as grand in the recollection as the eventual reality was compromised, yet it speaks with a gravitas appropriate to the function of the building:
The entrance front to the two courts to be toward the Park, under a recessed colonnade of the Doric Order, up a grand flight of steps, extending from one wing to the other; the two wings projecting for offices, and a portico entrance to the criminal court of the same order … the court-room in size to be 70 feet by 46 feet.27
And on the description meandered. In trademark Greenway, his plan included a ‘good geometrical staircase to lead to the upper court, the roof of which [was] to be supported with Ionic columns over those below’. Greenway’s plan was approved and the work commenced.
At Major Druitt’s urging work proceeded apace. In the haste of having the building roofed in before Macquarie quit Sydney, it seems that serious structural liberties and shortcuts were taken – all, according to Greenway, without his consent or involvement: ‘An overseer was appointed to get the roof of this building done before Governor MACQUARIE sailed for England, for which he was promised his emancipation’.28 Greenway objected to him as a ‘man unfit to be trusted with such an undertaking’, but despite his protestations, ‘the roof was put on in an ‘unfinished state, without pillars, plates, or … angular braces … and propped … up only with scaffold poles of no strength’. The overseer, it seems, was given his liberty without Greenway approving his work.
He ‘again requested the pillars to be got ready, when the roof could have been secured and braced up to last fifty years without danger’. Instead, Greenway was ignored again, and the building was supposedly left in an unsafe state. It languished for many months, it seems – beyond his term as acting civil architect – leaving him ‘without … the power to act, from circumstances well known’.
According to the project’s former architect, a contract was let for a new roof – a further abomination – by a man named Gough. His solution was not by trusses and braces and loads directed to columns, external walls and the like, but ‘in a most novel manner, and by the raising of partitions in such a way as only added to the weight on the upper floor of the building’. Greenway maintained that he lobbied the new governor’s secretary, Major Frederick Goulburn, but the so-called ‘intriguers’ continued to do their worst, meddling with the architect’s façade, and consequently, as Ellis remarked, ‘the building was shorn of its elegance’.29 Gone were Greenway’s entablature and Doric columns, all ‘magnanimously destroyed’.30 And that elegant geometric stair – was crowned, in Ellis’s words, by an ‘insult to the art of architecture’, a dome Greenway ‘considered only fit for an old barn’. But was this lamentation a little too dramatic? Broadbent and Hughes felt the ‘external form of the building with an implied arcade of relieving arches to the ground floor, with piers or pilasters above … is probably to Greenway’s design’. So too the offending dome – ‘not as elegant in line, perhaps as he would have wished, but familiar in its overhanging umbrella-like form’.31 Various alterations and additions were proposed during the term of Greenway’s successor, Standish Lawrence Harris, but it is thought unlikely that much of what Harris proposed was actually built. Further modifications may also have been made in turn by a later government architect, Ambrose Hallen.32
The courts moved from their temporary home in the hospital in 1823, yet the King Street premises were still far from complete. An article in The Australian in May 1829 continued Greenway’s criticism and was possibly written by him. It seems that the building was fraught with problems to the end:
This New Court-house … is not the firmest structure in the world. The light, airy, and capacious style of architecture, certainly in general fills and pleases the eye and the imagination … but even to elegance there are bounds. We like the lofty, the majestic, and the spacious – but wanting solidity – these ‘become but as sounding brass or as tinkling cymbal.’33
With a plaster ceiling crashing down a ‘full seventy feet … not many weeks ago, and which nearly cost the life of one person who happened to be underneath’, the building was, in the author’s opinion, ‘not as well finished as could be wished’. The whole thing was in need of inspection ‘by some competent persons’ – Greenway no doubt. In contrast to such opinions, the Sydney Gazette, an organ wary of the architect’s mutterings and soon to decline to publish anything in his name, thought the ‘old new roof … contracted for by Gough the builder [to be] executed in a masterly and durable style’.34 In Gazette editor Robert Howe’s opinion, Gough had ‘in many instances, proved himself a clever and excellent builder’, and as such was ‘entitled to patronage and support’. As for Greenway, he could only sit and wait in the vain hope of a call on his professional skill.
Successive users of the building suffered from the consequences of its ad hoc siting and construction. In 1832, the inaugural chief justice of New South Wales, Sir Francis Forbes, complained of alarming cracks in the walls and lived in fear of the building’s collapse. Forbes might not have shared Robert Howe’s opinion of Gough’s work. The fireplaces in the courtrooms smoked, and during the 19th century severe overcrowding was solved by a series of patchwork additions. Ventilation was poor, and the intrusion of noise from passing carriages on busy King and Castlereagh streets was a constant problem,
so much so that Forbes’s successor, Sir James Dowling, petitioned the government to close the streets to traffic while the courts were in session. His entreaties were refused. In 1868 the then colonial architect, James Barnet, added a Doric arcaded loggia to the King Street façade, providing a sheltered meeting place outside the courts that was ‘stylistically compatible’ with the original building though no more than ‘stolid’ in its detailing.35 Barnet also added a parapet and classical cornice to match, replacing the simple eaves of the troublesome pitched roof.
And what of the displaced Georgian School? According to Greenway, a ‘piece of ground was at last fixed upon, belonging to Mr. Rose’.36 The site was bounded by Hyde Park, with frontages to both Elizabeth and Castlereagh streets. David Jones department store and the St James Centre occupy the site today. Greenway designed a simple, hip-roofed, two-storey Georgian building, which commenced construction in 1820.
The functional musical chairs continued beyond the building’s 1823 completion, as while the King Street courthouse foundered in its incompleteness, the temporary courts decamped from the hospital in Macquarie Street to the ground floor of the new school. Finally, in 1833 the entire building was turned over to its original purpose. In succession, it served as a Catholic school; a parish school for St James’; and then, in government ownership from the 1880s to the 1920s, the building was occupied at various times by Sydney Girls’ and Sydney Boys’ high schools.
But it was in the building’s temporary judicial functions that the substantive accretions of history were laid down. Recently arrived in the colony in June 1823, John Dunmore Lang preached there to the Presbyterians of Sydney for the first time, and in 1826 the building witnessed the infamous Sudds and Thompson trial, which moved the Sydney press to the stinging censure of Governor Darling. The Charter of Justice establishing the Supreme Court of New South Wales was first read there, and the first sitting of that same court occurred within its walls. On Australia Day in 1827 a crowded meeting under the auspices of the likes of WC Wentworth and Sir John Jamison drafted a petition to be put to the British Parliament requesting trial by jury and a representative assembly in New South Wales. Greenway’s Georgian School played host to the foundation meeting of Australian suffrage. But as Ellis lamented laconically, this sacred Australian site of social, judicial and political evolution ‘was pulled down after the first world war to make room for a department store and picture theatre’.37 From the foundations of the law to shopping – such have been the fruits of Australia’s democracy.
A ‘VILE CONSPIRACY’: THE PARRAMATTA FEMALE FACTORY, 1818–21
In the earliest days of the colony, Governor Phillip segregated the sexes, with a flogging the likely reward for any male convict, soldier or sailor caught assaulting or otherwise harassing women. But it was also always intended that convicts would form relationships and rear families, doing their part to populate a new world. Successive governors would tread a tortuous path between moral proscription and fostering a new and properly functioning society.
Many convict women came from poor rural backgrounds, or had been caught up in the inexorable migration to towns and cities as the agricultural and industrial revolutions convulsed British society. Most were domestic workers, servants and so on. For vulnerable women with few skills, the chance of finding a useful place in colonial society was often limited. On arrival in the colony, some were assigned as domestic servants while others were put to work in the government stores. The lucky ones, with marketable skills and a few resources behind them, were allowed to find work of their own and were frequently granted their ticket of leave on arrival.
There was no accommodation set aside for female convicts in the early days of the colony, and like the men, they were expected to find their own lodgings. But with a dearth of suitable employment, homelessness or the protection of a male – suitable or not – frequently loomed as their only options. Free settlers rarely took in women newly arrived with children, and men of all classes regarded convict women as little more than a commodity. Governor Hunter described them as a ‘disgrace to their sex … found at the bottom of every infamous transaction committed in the colony’.1
The first attempt at protecting women who might otherwise fall prey to immorality, drunkenness and the depredations of homelessness was made by Governor King in 1804, when the upper floor of the new Parramatta Gaol was set aside as a female factory. From that makeshift start in Parramatta, 13 factories were built and operated in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land until the 1850s. Around 9000 women passed through their gates in that time. The female factory in Australia became the colonial child of the bridewells and workhouses of England, where punishment, particularly for minor offences, went hand in hand with the redemptive power of work.
To modern sensibilities, the term ‘female factory’ has an awkward and somewhat unsettling sense to it. It was as if the women who worked behind the factory’s walls were the final products of some harsh industrial process. In one sense, though, that is exactly what they were intended to become – fallen souls restored to virtue through hard work. But the grim reality for most female factory inmates was never so simple or restorative.
In his Report … into the State of the Colony, Commissioner Bigge noted that a ‘greater number of female convicts of every description have arrived, than were required by the settlers of New South Wales; and consequently those who were not sent to Van Dieman’s [sic] Land, were consigned to the factory at Paramatta [sic]’. Bigge also described the troublesome female cargo as the women neared the end of their long journey from England:
In their passage thither from Sydney … great irregularities take place; and the women frequently arrive at Paramatta [sic] in a state of intoxication, after being plundered of such property as they may have brought from the ships with them, during the time they stop at a public house on the shore of the Paramatta river.2
With such a stream of new inmates being shipped upriver, the inadequacy of the first female factory was soon apparent, and upwards of 200 women and children were often crowded in. The women were put to work spinning wool and weaving linen, blanketing, sackcloth and sails, working and living on the job in filthy and unsanitary conditions. Ellis described it as ‘filled with the smell of unscoured fleeces upon which the residents slept of a night’.3 There they waited to be assigned or reassigned, or for the birth of their babies. The factory also served as a gaol for those who had committed a further crime in the colony, the offenders condemned to break rocks or pick oakum. Those who could not be accommodated within the factory fell back on the town, often finding the four-shillings asking price for their lodgings by selling their bodies.
The gaol and factory were erected under the direction of the Reverend Samuel Marsden acting in his capacity as one of the two magistrates at Parramatta, and as the local chaplain, the welfare of the women also came under his not so watchful eye. ‘Numbers of these women are of the most infamous and abandoned characters’, he remarked, ‘composed of the very dregs of the whole colony … many of them are a terror to the better part of society’. But while Marsden proclaimed pity and Christian concern for the welfare of so many fallen souls, he also presided over a judiciary where, in Ellis’s sardonic words:
Thither went two young ladies who had been sentenced to be chained together for a month for polluting the ears of innocent Parramatta with unseemly eloquence; there was immured a little runaway, safe in double irons; there sulked in the corner a wretched maiden, due to remain where she was ‘with a log chained to her leg’, at the injunction of the gentle Mr Marsden.4
Marsden decried the depravity of Parramatta, much of it, in his opinion, attributable to the deteriorating state of the female factory. Yet according to Ellis, the reverend gentleman did not make a pastoral visit for six years, even though ‘he drew £50 a year for this duty’.
By the time of Macquarie’s governorship, the dilapidated, filthy and overcrowded Parramatta Female Factory was in desperate need of refurbishment, expans
ion or replacement. In November 1812, Macquarie wrote to Lord Liverpool (who by that date, and unbeknown to the governor, had already succeeded to the prime ministership) concerning the ‘female Convicts … burthensome in point of Expence [sic], and difficult of Approbation’. The governor proposed setting the women to work making slop clothing for their own convict brethren. The coarse wool grown in the colony would be used ‘instead of Allowing it to rot on the Ground as is the Case at Present’, and Macquarie’s convict clothes would ‘Cost the Crown Much less Money than those sent out from England’. If his lordship approved of the ‘Factory being Carried on to any Extent … it Will be Necessary to enlarge the Building Very Considerably, and to enclose the Whole with a high Stone Wall’.5
There was no response to Macquarie’s entreaty from Lord Bathurst as Liverpool’s successor in Whitehall. The Parramatta Female Factory would endure for several more years as a fetid sore of moral and physical degradation, and would inevitably become an embarrassment to Macquarie in his tussles with Commissioner Bigge.
Marsden was equally tardy in his representations, and neglected to complain to the governor about the worsening state of the factory until 1815. But the churchman’s timing in writing to Macquarie had more to do with his own sense of political advantage, and the governor’s discomfiture, than the welfare of a group of unfortunate women. The relationship between the governor and the parson-cum-landholder, wheeler-dealer businessman and magistrate was testy at best. But in 1815 Marsden resisted the reading of government proclamations in church and refused an order for magistrates to muster convicts on Sunday. He also remained implacably opposed to emancipists being appointed to the bench. ‘Whoever holds up the clergy and magistrates to public contempt stabs at the very vitals of that Government’, Marsden thundered in 1814.6 There was now ‘holy war at Parramatta’.7
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