PUBLIC LECTURE: Sydney versus London: Governor Macquarie and the politics of colonial architecture

Abstract: In 1981 Yale art historian Jules Prown defined 'material culture' as 'the study through artifacts of the beliefs - values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions - of a particular community at a given time'. Since buildings and artworks cannot but be objects of material culture, they have the potential to give up a great deal to those whose main focus may be on other manifestations of historical cultures. In other words, the art historian can demonstrate ways of extracting historical data from artefacts ranging from buttons to buildings. The formation of the urban environment through town planning, siting buildings, the very materials from which those buildings are made will, if we know how to translate these data, be eloquent about actual histories; and nowhere is this more potently explicit than in Governor Macquarie's Sydney. This is a live issue because particular buildings were strongly censured as inappropriate in a penal colony, by the West Indian Judge, John Thomas Bigge whom Secretary of State Bathurst had appointed as a one-man Commission of Inquiry into Macquarie's conduct of his office. A material analysis of the city shows why. It reveals that, anomalously, Macquarie's Sydney was developing more ordered a fabric than London, notoriously lacking town planning or grand public buildings. And if this were not bad enough, the convict colony had the temerity to advertise civic virtues through the medium of classical and gothic revival architecture which Commissioner Bigge correctly understood as an implicit critique of society in Britain which after 1815, was attempting to maintain hierarchic stability in the face of social disorder and political radicalism. This lecture will demonstrate how the material culture of historic Sydney gives up its messages, and contemplate their historic significance within broader traditions of the political uses of architecture.

Biographical note: Professor Michael Rosenthal teaches in the department of the history of art at the University of Warwick in the UK. Though primarily a specialist in British art and culture c1660-1840, he has taught extensively on the departments programme in Venice. His most recent book is "The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: 'a little business for the Eye'" (Yale University Press 1999), and he was the lead curator of the Gainsborough exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2002, and which then travelled to the National Gallery, Washington, and to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In recent years his research has focussed on picture-making in colonial Australia, and he is currently writing this up as a book.

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