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Cairns Post (Qld. : 1909 - 1954), Wednesday 3 February 1954, page 7
The Great Architect Among Convicts
By the beginning of 1814, Governor Macquarie, of New South Wales, had sorted out from the motley mass of convicts most of the talents necessary to achieve his aim of transforming a gaol in a freely functioning community.
By LA.T.
There were bankers, burglars and king's officers, scholars from Oxford, Irish parsons and seducing baronets, sprigs of the peerage and "gamins" from Seven Dials, iron workers and plasterers, masons and carpenters. Patriots and grim Scots reformers, devotees of Tom Paine, had found their way to Botany Bay.
There were a small group of aspiring painters, engravers and poets to match Mrs. Reibey, whose coming to the Antipodes, says Mr. M. H. Ellis in his thrilling "Francis GreenwayHis Life and Times" had been caused by high-spiritedness, "in that, when 13 years old, she had taken a neighbour's pony for a frolic and had been banished across the earth to breed a family, whose earlier generations included an archdeacon" and a premier, one of the makers of the Australian Constitution.
Amid the mass of enterprise in the new colony, it was, however, not until the General Hewitt with Francis Greenway abroad, sailed into Sydney Harbor on February 7. 1814, that the great criminal class of Great Britain was able to throw up a single architect.
Seldom has history treated architects themselves as important people. "What, then," asks Morton Herman in a foreword to Ellis's biography, "is the secret of Francis Greenway's undisputed position in Australia's history? The only occupation he combined with being an architect was that of being a convict. Nearly all the work upon which his reputation is based was designed during his six years' tenure of the office of Colonial Architect."
Until the present biography, it has not been possible to assess fully the value of Greenway's contribution. A man of the highest standards professionally, he was temperamental, weak, petulant and tactless. Only in architecture was he strong: he loved it and devoted to it his unrelenting but erratic artistic genius.
CONDITIONS DIFFERENT In his own view, he remained the leading architect of Bristol and Clifton; yet he realised that Australian conditions differed in climate, building materials and craftsman-ship; he rearranged his thinking accordingly, except in a few Gothic designs.
His churches show how pro-portion alone is so controlled that beauty results. The carved Doric porticoes of St James's Church, Sydney, are necessary parts of the building; St Matthew's Church, Windsor, has beautifully turned stone urns forming part of the belfry story: St Luke's, Liverpool with its vibrant soft colours, has a square, severe bulk commanding respect in its feature-less surroundings.
Greenway's other most important design is the Hyde Park Barracks, now serving as the District Law Courts, even if somewhat mutilated.
His original Macquarie Light-house, on the South Head of Port Jackson, was monumental in conception and showed his grasp of architectural problem: - the imaginative foreseeing the choice of materials sympathetic to the design, and the craftsmanship.
Had his larger schemes been adopted, Sydney would have been properly planned for its civic requirements. His impatience with minds unable to follow at his own swift pace made enemies for him and estranged his wellwishers.
Mr. Morton Herman's sketch-es are excellent but it is the accurate, vivid historical writer Mr. Ellis, who steals the show and brings back to life the west of England architect, who, sentenced to death for forgery in 1812, then endured the misery of the hulks and emerged with a letter of recommendation from Rear-Admiral Phillip to Macquarie, to become civil architect of New South Wales and to dine at the Governor's table, before misfortunes again overtook the unstable immigrant.
As in his life of Macquarie, Mr. Ellis combines scholarship with humor and narrative skill of a high order. He transports us into the colourful world of early Australia, its squalor and soaring aspirations, and set in the midst of it the vain, quarrelsome little convict architect whose artistic integrity left an enduring monument and an example not always followed.
All Greenway's criteria were artistic. The transgression of man-made- laws of conduct seems to have been for him a matter of expediency. But to flout the absolute basic laws of art and of the Grand Architect of the universe was, in Greenway's sight, a capital crime against the Holy Inspiration.
It is Mr. Ellis's triumph in that, whilst creating the general picture of early Sydney, he has nowhere at any time blurred or obscured the fine detail of his central subject's personality.
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