A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  The last trick in the campaign to thwart the contractors and the architect was a sure-fire attack on the factory’s structural stability. It was hardly a novel means of planting doubt – Henry Kitchen had vigorously attacked both the Macquarie Tower and St James’ Church on similar grounds. In this case, Watkins dismissed a man named McPherson who allegedly spread a rumour concerning the adequacy of the building’s foundations. He was also suspected of ‘being sent up by one of the disappointed Contractors to cripple the building’. Greenway cautioned him sternly; this was a ‘serious affair … [and he] would be prosecuted for a Conspiracy’.

  McPherson pleaded his innocence and assured Greenway that he had worked on the foundations in close adherence to the architect’s instructions. According to the mason, the culprit was that troublemaker Jackson, who ‘stated to him … that some small Stones or Fragments had been thrown into some part of the Foundation’. Greenway was furious; why had he not been told earlier, rather than ‘after the Building was up and ready to receive the Roof ’? For the beleaguered architect, this was still further proof ‘that if anything of the kind had been done that it was done wilfully & maliciously’. The perpetrators deserved ‘a severe punishment for it’.

  Unsettling as this episode was for Greenway and the contractors, it was in the end only malicious rumour. The architect saw no signs of settlement, and after measuring the ashlar found it ‘very good’. The challenge to his authority was what galled Greenway most. ‘I should have been sent for at first by Mr Macarthur’, he complained, ‘when everything might have been properly and honorably [sic] settled without this Confusion & Party feeling’.35

  Greenway overstated his powers as a conciliator, even though he must have been aware of the larger forces at play at Parramatta. In the end, the factory was the scene of just another struggle for power and influence between the exclusives such as Hannibal Macarthur and Marsden, and the autocratic fiat of Macquarie. After all, in the eyes of his opponents, Greenway was nothing more than an emancipist functionary of the governor.

  The disruptive ‘vile conspiracy’, according to Greenway’s account, saw the contractors lose £500 or more. The disruptions, it seems, proved too much for Payten, and at some stage he withdrew from the partnership, leaving Watkins, ‘an heroic soul and an optimist’, to struggle on alone.36 Additional labour was later assigned by the governor to help expedite the work.

  The slow pace of the factory was becoming an acute embarrassment to Macquarie, as the newly arrived Commissioner Bigge quickly seized upon its state of incompleteness. In October 1819, at the time Macquarie granted a second three-month extension to the contractors, Bigge wrote to Bathurst. He had just attended a muster of convicts at Parramatta and homed in on the factory: ‘I have been strongly impressed with the pernicious effect of the imperfect confinement of female prisoners in the factory … and of the urgent necessity of completing with all expedition the new building … at the risk of discontinuing some one or other of the sumptuous and less important works …’37 It was the same old theme for the commissioner – utility over ‘sumptuousness’, or essentially ornament – but in the case of the female factory his criticisms were entirely valid. Macquarie was undeniably culpable in not starting on the factory and cleaning up Parramatta years earlier.

  A year later, the building was still not finished. On 24 November 1820, a worried Macquarie ‘visited the new Factory … [and] found it much more backward than the work should be’.38 Watkins, though, was full of reassurances, and promised completion within a month. Macquarie was now extremely anxious to see the factory operating before Commissioner Bigge quit the colony.

  According to Greenway, Mr Bigge naturally had to endure the fulminations of the conspirators, with ‘every effort … made through the medium of the Commissioner to ruin the contractor … and to prevent any one in future from contracting under me’. They would have ‘had all the game to themselves’, but he, as the architect, held firm, and by his ‘full explanation of the facts, [the commissioner] … gave every facility to the finishing of the building’.39 In the interests of economy, Bigge dispensed with a signature Greenway geometrical staircase and had a plain timber stair substituted. And, of course, all ornament was to be purged from the building.

  By the end of January 1821, nearly three years after the contract was signed, the second Parramatta Female Factory was ready to receive its initial intake of women. Although the building was still not quite complete, on 1 February Commissioner Bigge accompanied Macquarie to Parramatta, where the pair witnessed 109 women and 71 children take up lodgings. Also present was the usual band of officials, including Major Druitt and one listed only as the ‘Resident Magistrate at Parramatta’. At least according to Macquarie’s diary entry, the acting civil architect was not present. That evening, the ‘Commissioner and a large Party of Gentlemen’ dined with the Macquaries at Government House in Parramatta, and again there was no mention of Greenway.40

  Three days before the gathering of that ‘large party of gentlemen’, Henry Kitchen had written the first of his lengthy submissions to Bigge. His report inevitably included an attack on the female factory. ‘It is both defective in plan and in execution’, Kitchen contended, showing ‘extraordinary deviations from the original design and specification’. He pointed out a flaw in the design where, in his opinion, the security of the building was compromised.41

  Kitchen was concerned about rusticated ground-floor stone courses and quoins, together with matching windowsills and heads. These supposedly offered a leg-up to wayward male convicts wanting to scale the heights at night and force their way into the women’s dormitories on the first floor. Bigge later wrote Kitchen’s criticism into his report, though strangely, photographs taken of the building in the 1870s appear to show dressed masonry and not a rusticated stone in sight.42

  It also seemed to Kitchen that the building was improperly sited, requiring at ‘very serious expense’ the construction of a ‘massive stone Breakwater wall to prevent [it] from being actually washed away by the occasional overflowings of the stream’. To Kitchen this was a ‘more [un]pardonable and gross error’ than Greenway’s rusticated masonry. ‘The beautiful and extensive rising ground at the back of the building’ was left vacant, even though it offered ‘every thing that is desirable … for its situation’.43

  And how did the women regard their new accommodation? Not very favourably, it seems, judging by Bigge’s comments. ‘The apprehension of confinement and greater discipline’, he wrote in his Report … into the State of the Colony, ‘had not been without its effects’. In the three months following the opening of the factory, ‘several marriages had taken place at Parramatta Church, the motives for which were clearly attributable to the fear of greater restraint than … previously endured’. Although several women separated from their husbands within days, such marriages of convenience would not have been entirely unwelcome to either the commissioner, the governor or even perhaps that champion of moral virtue the Reverend Marsden.

  The second female factory at Parramatta inevitably became as overcrowded and squalid as its notorious predecessor. By 1829 there were more than 500 women and 60 children living within its high stone walls. In the last days of transportation in 1840, it accommodated nearly 900 women, three times the number originally planned for. Children were allowed to remain with their mothers until the age of four, at which time they were forcibly removed and placed in the nearby Female Orphan School (an initiative of Samuel Marsden), or its male equivalent in Sydney. All contact with the children was lost until the mothers were released from the factory. Greenway planned alterations and additions to both the male and female orphan schools. The infamous Parramatta Girls’ Home occupied the orphan school building from 1887 until its closure in the 1970s.

  The first riot occurred in the factory in 1827, with several more in the 1830s and 1840s. Overcrowding was largely to blame, but the Parramatta Female Factory remained a harsh place of secondary punishment for some, and a sad and so
mbre place of hard work, confinement and little compassion for all. With the end of transportation, the factory became a benevolent asylum for sick and destitute convict women, and in 1848 it was converted into the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum. Greenway’s dormitory building was demolished in 1883.

  The three-storeyed cruciform-plan dormitory, crowned with its rather odd-looking ventilating cupola, must have been an imposing sight when viewed from the grounds of Government House across the river. But impressive buildings behind high stone walls were a blunt reminder of the power of the state rather than an essay in architecture. Freedom and genteel privilege lay on one side of the divide, a closed world of reform or disintegration on the other. And amid all the acrimony and talk of vile conspiracies, one wonders just how much thought the erstwhile convict and architect of the Parramatta Female Factory was able to spare for the plight of his convict sisters. The women of the factory were hardly the recipients of Greenway’s gift of architecture.

  ‘… FOR THE SAKE OF A NUMEROUS FAMILY’

  When writing to Macquarie in August 1818, Lord Bathurst finally noted his approval of Greenway’s appointment but stressed that he could not ‘consent to his being considered as holding a permanent Office’.1 Once the essential parts of Macquarie’s program of improvements were finished, in Bathurst’s mind, the services of the civil architect could be dispensed with. Such an attitude was more or less expected, but little could Macquarie have known that as Bathurst begrudgingly acceded to Greenway’s appointment, the colonial secretary was preparing to bring down the curtain on the governor’s improvements and send John Thomas Bigge to Sydney.

  In his blissful isolation, however, Macquarie was well pleased with an emergent colony fashioned to his own vision. By early 1819, the convict barracks – his and Greenway’s most ambitious project – were nearing completion, and he was prompted to ask for Bathurst’s blessing to a pay rise for his architect. Macquarie gave an assurance that Greenway’s salary would cease as soon as his services ‘can possibly be dispensed with’. But the architect had rendered ‘Useful and important Services’, of which his lordship should be apprised: ‘In consequence of Mr Greenway’s Scientific Skills, Judgement and superior Taste, the Government Buildings Erected by him are not only Strong, durable and Substantial, but also Elegant and good Models of Architecture’.2

  Bathurst’s attitude in reply was as parsimonious as ever. He chose not to comment directly on Greenway’s pay rise from three to five shillings a day, or a concurrent increase for the engineer. Rather, Bathurst questioned the need to pay an architect and an engineer: ‘I cannot understand the necessity of having two Officers … the duties of which appear to be nearly the same, and … I cannot see any reason why they should not be perfectly executed by either one of the Gentlemen’.3 The colonial secretary was unmoved by talk of ‘Elegant and good Models’ – after all, was not the colony supposed to be an ‘object of considerable terror’, where such architectural fancies would be nothing but a chimera?

  By the time Bathurst’s despatch reached Sydney later in 1820, the inquisitorial weight of Mr Bigge had already tested every public building site in the colony. Both Macquarie and Greenway felt the pressure keenly. The governor wanted projects finished, or at least pushed past the point where they could be halted or compromised at the commissioner’s whim. But delays were endemic, and an insolent and unwilling workforce was Greenway’s unfriendly companion wherever he went.

  The architect was plagued by overseers who were ‘walking about with their hands in their Pockets in a State of Intoxication’ rather than showing an ‘Example of Industry & Exertion’.4 He complained of interference by unnamed individuals, where ‘the Building may be thereby crippled and … my character injured’. He was an architect beleaguered, but the governor and Major George Druitt pressed him hard, as Fort Macquarie, the government stables and the female factory all lagged stubbornly, and – for the health of Macquarie’s hide – embarrassingly, behind schedule.

  Some time after Druitt took over from John Gill as acting engineer in December 1817, the relationship between the governor and his architect began to falter. In August 1819, Greenway wrote to Druitt about the management of convict workers. A frustrated and thwarted architect felt isolated:

  If … I am firmly supported by you … I think I can safely pledge myself to get double the Work done to what have [sic] been done by the same men these last twelve months … I cannot but think from the Governor’s Manner of writing that my Conduct has in some way been misrepresented – I am conscious however that I have in every instance paid immediate attention to his request.5

  The governor was clearly displeased. Perhaps somewhat disingenuously, Greenway feigned ignorance and defended his dealings with Macquarie: ‘I have never in any way attempted for my own private views to blind his understanding but have stated the Truth in all Cases to the best of my Judgement, & shall continue to do the Same with full Confidence in his Excellency’s Justice & Judgement’. In the first half of 1820, however, as delay piled upon delay, the governor’s disenchantment only depended. In late April, Macquarie complained that ‘several Public Works now in progress … are much retarded … by the Workmen not receiving the necessary Instructions or Information required from you’.6

  Greenway was to be reeled in. He was ordered to accompany Druitt at least twice a week on a tour of the various building sites and was also to confer with the engineer ‘at his Office in the Lumber Yard, every day at a quarter before Eleven O’Clock, (Saturday and Sundays excepted) …’

  Whether Greenway was inefficient and disorganised, indolent, neglectful and erratic, or simply overwhelmed, is hard to determine. He seems to have worked alone; as far as is known he had no draftsman to ease his load. One can imagine him toiling well into the night, poring over a drawing board, or writing specifications, correspondence and reports, all by the light of a guttering candle. Next morning he would be off on foot, horseback or hired chaise to all corners of the town and beyond. As to his frequent on-site altercations, he was hardly the pragmatic type to bring peace to the workplace through compromise and conciliation.

  During his six-and-a-half-year term as acting civil architect, Greenway neither designed nor supervised every public building in the colony – far from it. Macquarie’s extensive works program was beyond any one architect, and whether through Greenway’s own limitations, or by Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s personal favour, a number of others with architectural pretensions were invariably called upon.

  Losing the confidence of his superiors and the respect of workers was one thing, but having his designs copied and imitated as the inevitable consequence of spreading the work around was of another order entirely. Bigge observed in his Report … into the State of the Colony that working drawings had been ‘purloined by the overseers’ and adapted for projects built under contract. The results were ‘plainly derived’ from the architect’s buildings but possessed none of his ‘proportion, solidity [or] convenience’. Greenway was ‘mortified by an interference in his own pursuits, by persons to whom he himself had taught the first rudiments of their art’.7 His remedy was to withhold drawings and merely give directions on site. Confusion and delay followed as assuredly as the bile rising to Greenway’s throat.

  Of those who could draw a plan, there was a bricklayer-cumforeman of the government gangs named Francis (or Frank) Lawless, a young Irish lifer who had ‘amended’ a paymaster’s bill early in his Sydney days and narrowly escaped the hangman. Morton Herman described Lawless as one who designed buildings ‘of by no means contemptible quality’, even if they aped Greenway’s or sprang from a builder’s pattern book.8 Among his known works, Lawless built a benevolent asylum in Pitt Street, Sydney – a severely plain Georgian brick building that faced off against Greenway’s indulgent turnpike gates nearby. At Campbelltown, south-west of Sydney, Lawless also built and possibly designed the now much altered St Peter’s Church.

  In readiness for the church’s restoration in the 1960s, Morto
n Herman made a drawing-board reconstruction of the original St Peter’s, which showed that it echoed many of the features of St Luke’s at Windsor. Yet following the church’s completion in 1823, Greenway remained mute, not referring to this building among the works of plagiarists he derided as ‘Pickers & Stealers of knowledge’.9 Similarly, the benevolent asylum escaped his splenetic voice.

  Rather than quibble with style or aesthetic niceties, Greenway instead fretted over Lawless’s working arrangements, and particularly his partnership with fellow bricklayer William Stone. He complained to Druitt about a ‘Building carried on by Contract without consulting me’, as it seems the pair were hiring out their services while the architect’s back was turned. Greenway continued: ‘Seeing the Government Stables neglected not above a Fortnight’s Work having been done this month, I rode past this New Building where I saw Stone busy at work as I had several times seen Lawless in Government time’. Greenway lumped Stone and Lawless in with those who would ‘plunder the Public as well as Government’ and claimed Stone had ‘given a Plan, in a most underhanded manner to [Druitt] accompanied with observations & remarks derogatory to my Character’. When challenged, an insolent Stone simply fixed the architect with a ‘satanic grin’.

  Summoning all his paranoiac rage, Greenway pleaded with Druitt: ‘can I expect such a Man to pay attention to me in my Situation, when he is only laughing in his Sleeve for more reasons than one [?]’. Greenway berated Stone on the stables site and, no doubt in front of other workers, told him that ‘his Conduct was that of an ungrateful Scoundrel’. For his part, Stone just kept his trowel flowing, mortar deftly buttered on brick – tap, tap, tap – after brick – tap, tap – after brick – tap – building walls Henry Kitchen described as ‘extremely good … a proof of what … the Colony is capable’, and all the while with his face beset by that satanic grin.10 The little architect was flummoxed.