open house hobart 2020: part 3

I had to split this post into two because it’s way too long!

After our Open House Hobart tour of Blue Magnolia, Lil Sis and I made our way briskly to the waterfront, where we were due to meet Robyn Everist, our guide for the “What Style is That?” walking tour. I’d never met Robyn before but I went on one of the walking tours that run out of the company she used to own, Hobart Walking Tours, a few years ago. Robyn now spends her time researching the history of Hobart’s architecture, a subject very close to my heart, so I was looking forward to this tour immensely.

I know bugger all about architectural styles, unless it’s modernism (and even then I’m never really sure), and even less about the features of buildings. If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll probably know I’m not a huge fan of fancy, ornate bits stuck on buildings (there is a reason I’m called straightlinesgirl and it has nothing to do with my technical drawing skills, or lack thereof). If you point out a Colonial Classical Federation Georgian Revival building to me, I’ll probably nod politely and start photographing the 60s glass curtain wall across the road. Sorry not sorry.

However, I am here to learn, and I was very interested to find out more about the buildings that I normally dismiss as colonial sandstone relics that would look better with a bit of concrete and steel over the front.

I was not disappointed. Robyn is a fantastic guide; very well informed and extremely entertaining about a subject that could be as dull as River Yarra water. I mean who really cares about whether a column is Tuscan, Ionic or Doric? It’s a column, right? What even is the point of them? It holds up a building. Or a porch. Or nothing at all.

We only had hour for the tour, which, as with any great guide, extended to at least 90 minutes. Robyn explained so many features of the buildings we looked at that my head was spinning by the end. Actually, my head was spinning by the time we got to Dutch Anglo something at City Hall. I don’t think I’m an aural learner. I need to read stuff to take it in after I’ve heard it and, fortuitously Robyn had that covered with a summary we could download from her website.

The round cut out bits here are an example of the Dutch-Anglo something that is also found on City Hall. This one is in Murray Street.

We started out at the IXL buildings at 25 Hunter Street, where I learned what a pediment is. This is a word I forgot as soon as Robyn said it and I couldn’t for the life of me remember it for this post. I knew it started with P and that if you put im- in front of it, it meant something else. But could I think of the word? Absolutely not. I ended up having to go and look it up in my trusty* Rice’s Language of Buildings.

Pediment. Not pelmet. Not pedant.

Robyn explained that this building was in the Colonial Georgian style, which covers the period 1788 to 1840 in Australia. She describes the style as being like a Volvo: Boxy but good. As far as sandstone goes, it’s not a bad style. It’s symmetrical, and very plain, with none of that fancy nonsense that some of the later sandstone buildings have. My straight-lines brain approves.

We then made our way to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, which is a fascinating complex of buildings. The 1902 building on Davey Street, I hadn’t realised was built for Australia’s Federation in 1901 and the deal was that if the building was constructed before 1901 the Tasmanian Government would have to pay for it; after that it would be a Federation building and the Commonwealth would pay. Well played, Tasmania, by the looks of it. Robyn explained how this building and others in Hobart, because they were built by people with very British outlooks on life, were designed in very British styles that had exactly zero reference to life in Australia. I wondered if that was a reason why I don’t feel any particular attachment to any of those older buildings.

TMAG

As we walked, Robyn observed how there are buildings where the architects have tossed the rule books out the window when they designed them. For example, the style was for buildings to reflect the people who used them. So the ground floors would be highly decorated with grand entrances to be used by the upper classes; the middle floors, accessed by middle classes, were less ornate and the top floors, which were where the servant class had to go, were plain and unadorned, with the entrances for those people round the back. All designed, she said, so that people knew their place. So when thinking about the building, it helps to know what its purpose was as that will explain a lot of the design features.

Town Hall steps

One story that I particularly loved, among the many, was the story of the CML building on the corner of Macquarie and Elizabeth Street. CML wanted all its buildings to look the same, as you do, and its buildings were made of granite, which no one in Tasmania could afford. So they developed this solution where they would get some crushed up pink stone material from Brisbane, mix it up with concrete, make it onto tilers to stick to the building, which would be made much more cheaply from Besser blocks and no one would know the difference. The ultimate in keeping up appearances.

Here’s one I prepared earlier: the view up Macquarie Street showing the GPO, CML and Reserve Bank buildings

One building I have always liked is the Reserve Bank building a bit further up Macquarie Street. It was built in the 1970s by the Government, and at the time there was no money around to construct a building that would look like the elaborate buildings of other financial institutions that stood on this street. Think Treasury for starters (we’ll get there in the next post). So, said, Robyn, the people of Hobart would not have appreciated big bucks going towards a replica Treasury building on the site and accepted the need for a cheap, quick building instead. Steel and concrete. Bang, done.

I do love these buildings, at least from the outside. The less said about the money-saving open plan designs inside the better.

The beautiful Reserve Bank building on Macquarie Street

However, I have, for a long time, wondered how a building like this has been tolerated in a streetscape of ornate sandstone when other brutalist structures standing close to sandstone landscapes were detested and deemed not to fit and ultimately demolished. Why is this one okay? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they hate it and it doesn’t fit and should be demolished. I did also read somewhere that it wasn’t actually concrete, it had a sandstone finish but I can’t remember where I found that.

A magnificent feature of this building is the “Antarctic Tableau” sculpture by Stephen Walker. I wasn’t aware that Stephen had had a keen interest in Antarctica and had actually travelled there as part of the Antarctic Division’s art program.

Stephen Walker sculpture at the Reserve Bank building

We continued our tour along Macquarie Street with the Treasury complex, which will be in the next post.

* “Trusty” in that I bought this book 18 months ago and until today, hadn’t actually looked at anything in it that pre-dated 1930.

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Mercury

The former Mercury Building, Macquarie Street, Hobart.

open house hobart: day 2 part 1

part 1: supreme court

part 2: construction house & jarvis house

part 3: town hall, carnegie building & henry jones

Sunday 10 November 2019

I was really looking forward to our first port of call today, having seen photos from people who had been there on instagram yesterday. This was the Riverfront Motel at Rosetta.

Riverfront Motel from the river side

Built in the 1960s in classic mid-century style as a stopover for travellers on the newly built Brooker Highway. Major extensions to the dining room were completed in 1970, with a bar, function space, dance floor and additional story added. Now owned by the Beck family, the motel is gradually undergoing sensitive refurbishment to retain many original features, including a large mid-century guest house and Glenorchy’s iconic Royal Arch.

Say no more. You already want to go and stay there don’t you? Hell, I want to go and stay there. Let’s all go! Let’s stay in the mid-century guest house and have a mid-century party! Seriously, how fun would that be?

The Royal Arch is brilliant. It was built in 1954 by the EZ Company to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Tasmania. It was meant to represent the industrial nature of the Glenorchy area, and was funded by local businesses including Cadbury. It was temporarily installed at the lower end of Liverpool Street for Her Majesty’s visit and then moved to the Berriedale Reserve. In 1961 it landed at the motel and has been there ever since.

The arch

There’s a project underway to restore it being undertaken by the Beck family and Glenorchy City Council, which includes tying to find out what happened to the crown that was originally on top and the “Municipality of Glenorchy” sign in the middle.

Enough words. Photos!

We got to see the reception and bar/restaurant areas and one of the rooms.

Corner of the restaurant

Cool planter box

Behind the reception desk

Reception area

Check out the bathroom floor!

Bathroom floor in one of the rooms

The mid-century guest house, aka the River House, is an orange brick house located next to the motel and it is so cool! A shoes-off affair, it has four bedrooms, a funky kitchen, a central courtyard . . . and it really would be fun to stay in.

River House

No bookshelves though so I don’t think I could live there . . .

River House bedroom

River House kitchen clock

Kitchen appliances

In the kitchen

How cool are these chairs!

River House living room

And back to the bedroom

open house hobart: day 1 part 3

part 1: supreme court

part 2: construction house & jarvis house

My Open House Hobart adventure continued with my sister after our visit to the Jarvis House and lunch. We headed back to town to find some more buildings before our 4pm tour.

Town Hall, Macquarie Street. This photo may have been taken in a hurry on my phone when I realised I had heaps of photos inside the building for this post but none of the outside.

We started at Town Hall on Macquarie Street, which was designed by Henry Hunter and opened in 1866. The basement space, known as “The Underground” was also open so we went there first.

Underground, Town Hall. A very cool space.

Underground, Town Hall. I wonder who A L was.

There was a flower show in the main hall so it wasn’t possible to take any photos that showed the room, but we got to see the council chambers and pretend to be Lord Mayor, so that was fun.

Council Chambers, Town Hall.

We spoke to a lady who was visiting from Brisbane and she told us how great it was that we still had so many of these old colonial public buildings in Hobart. She told us about Brisbane Town Hall, which was build in the 1920s and sounds amazing. If I ever go to Brisbane that is definitely on my to-see list.

Main staircase, Town Hall.

We then ventured around the corner to the Maritime Museum in Argyle Street, housed in the Carnegie Building. It was formerly the public library and was badged as the State Library of Tasmania in 1944, before the state library moved to its present location in Murray Street.

Maritime Museum (aka the Carnegie Building), Argyle Street. See comment on Town Hall photo.

There was a great photo of the building, when it was still the library, which demonstrates that sometimes cars parked in front of buildings, much as I hate them now, are a good thing because they provide a way to date the photograph and a window onto what the living streetscape looked like many years ago. Perhaps one day I will look back on my own photos of buildings with cars parked out the front that really annoyed me at the time, and appreciate the history I have documented.

This picture shows the Argyle Street side of the building. There is now an inconveniently placed tree in front it so this photo can’t be replicated.

We were able to see the caretaker’s flat upstairs and the boiler room downstairs, and the attendant said that the caretaker would have to climb up and down the stairs regularly to make sure the boiler was still operating. That was all sealed up because of asbestos. There was also no bathroom in the flat so we were standing round debating whether the caretaker had a chamber pot or used to have to climb down three flights of stairs every time he needed the bathroom. These are need to know issues!

We didn’t really have time to look around the museum in detail because we had our 4pm tour at the Henry Jones Art Hotel. This is within the broader Henry Jones complex in Hunter Street, designed by Circa Morris-Nunn and constructed out of the remains of the former IXL jam factory. The tour was led by the hotel’s history liaison person, Greg (how do I get this job? does the Supreme Court need a history liaison person? I’m sure they do . . .), who told us the history of the complex, the story of Henry Jones and the philosophy of the art hotel.

I didn’t know anything about the place except that Henry Jones ran the IXL jam factory and that the Peacock and Jones restaurant is very very good. The Peacock in the name is George Peacock, who ran the jam factory before Jones took it over. I love the fact that Robert Morris-Nunn built his own office into the complex. What a fantastic spot to work from!

Turns out an art hotel is, well, a hotel that showcases art. Who would have thought.

Greg showed us through the hotel’s John Glover collection, which is housed in the hotel’s restaurant, Landscapes, as well as their Glover Prize winner collection. The painting that caught my eye was the 2009 winning entry by Matthew Armstrong called Transformed at Night, which shows everyone’s favourite Hobart street, Mellifont Street, at night.

Transformed at Night by Matthew Armstrong in Landscapes restaurant

Upstairs is a function room that used to be the offices of the factory.

Ceiling of the former IXL factory offices

Greg told us the story of Henry Jones, whose parents were both convicts, and who started working at the factory as a child and worked his way up to eventually own the company. We heard how hard the work would have been in the factory but how the company had the philosophy of “a job for life” and built a real community for its employees that included things like a band and sports teams.

One of the hallways

We looked at some photos of the site before the work commenced and Greg explained that if it had taken much longer to make a decision to reconstruct the complex, it probably would have all been demolished and we would have lost what is an iconic part of Hobart’s history.

Ceiling in the hotel with a huge Oregon pine beam

It had all been all in a very bad state, but what they tried to do was retain as much of what was remaining as they could and build the new parts so as to reveal what used to be there. So there are beams and pipes out in the open.

Wall in the hotel

One sandstone wall had been rendered over, and they removed a lot of that to bring the sandstone back to life but kept some of the render to tell the story of the history of the wall.

What was, what is, and what was before

The carving on the main staircase up to the office is incomplete and Greg said this was because Henry Jones thought that kind of decoration was keeping people from doing real work, so he stopped the worker mid-task and sent him off to do something more worthwhile.

Stairs up to the function room, Henry Jones Art Hotel

The best part was the story of the decades-old cold jam leaking through the ceilings and walls once the buildings were completed and heated. At first, people weren’t sure what was going on with the smell of jam permeating the hotel and then there were complaints . . .  from people whose room didn’t leak jam!

This has to be the craziest building I have ever been in. It puts whole new perspective on the word “random”.

Random fragment of a German newspaper

The contemporary art collection is displayed in the corridors of the hotel and we wandered (quietly) around admiring it.

Looking down on some art

Then it was time for a recovery drink after such a long day before dinner and our final event of the day.

The Dark Sky tour was conducted by Landon from Dark Sky Tasmania, a group that aims to “preserve and protect Tasmania’s might-time environment and our heritage of dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting”. Landon took us on a walk from Salamanca to the city, explaining why dark skies are so important for our health and for the environment. He said, and this completely blew me away, that six per cent of Australia’s energy emissions comes from inefficient, inappropriate and ineffective lighting.

Six per cent of our total emissions! Think about that.

As we walked, Landon pointed out some lighting and explained why it worked or didn’t work and explained why brighter doesn’t always equal better. Some of the brightest lights make it harder to see than some of the dimmer ones just because of the way they are positioned and where the light goes. There were some very bad examples at Salamanca and in the Parliament lawns, along with a nearby lit up crane and building site.

The steps behind the Executive Building, which are lit with small downlights in the handrails—exactly where you need to be able to see when you’re ascending or descending stairs in the dark—and the lighting in Franklin Square were much better examples of effective lighting. Landon was less complimentary about the Shadforths sign on the building across the road.

The final stop was the Sportsgirl corner on Murray and Liverpool Street, from where you can see four generations of street lighting, ranging from the old sodium lights to the new and very bright LEDs, which, Landon said, don’t light up the places they need to light.

Finally, we walked into the bright lights in Liverpool Street, covered one light with our hands and looked up at the sky to see the one star Landon said we could still see. I couldn’t even see that, but I have crap eyesight, so there you go.

This was an interesting and thought-provoking way to end what had been a wonderful day of exploration, and I will never look at street lighting the same way again. We headed home to get ready to do it all again tomorrow.

An old building

I love the T&G Building on the corner of Collins and Murray Street. I don’t know a lot about it, other than it was one of several buildings constructed for the T&G Mutual Life Assurance Society in Australia around the same period. Most of these buildings were designed by the Melbourne architectural firm A&K Henderson, which was also responsible for a number of other landmark buildings in Hobart including the building that now houses Dome cafe on the corner of the mall and Collins Street, and the Hobart Council Centre, formerly the Hydro Electric Commission, on Davey Street.

Many of the T&G buildings were a similar Art Deco style as Hobart’s T&G and featured a similar clock tower.

According to the sign across the road that gives some of the history of the building, the 1945 City of Hobart Plan recommended that the height of this building should not be exceeded in Hobart’s CBD.

I guess they abandoned that recommendation pretty quickly because by the end of the 1960s there were several taller buildings dotted around the CBD, including AMP (now NAB) House (1968) and 10 Murray Street (1969), to be followed by more in the 1970s including T&G’s neighbour over the road, the distinctive Jaffa Building (1978).

According to a plaque on the wall, the building was significantly refurbished in the early 1980s. The ground floor of the building has several shops and there’s an open linkway between Murray and Collins Street that houses more shops, and the lifts and the stairwells to the businesses on the upper floors and lower. I believe that some of the top floors are residences. At least there’s one. The penthouse apartment on the top floor recently sold for over $1 million.

If you go into the linkway, you’ll find a plaque commemorating the completion of the building in 1938.

When I first saw this, I thought, oh yeah, 1938, it’s not that old. It’s a pretty modern building. But, as I walked on, it dawned on me that the 21st century is nearly 20 years old and that, therefore, this building is over 80 years old. It’s not exactly a young building. (I think that in my mind, nothing has aged since the year 2000, which is why I get such a shock when I see people I met when they kids in 1996 drinking in the pub and turning 21. I genuinely imagined the building was only 60 years old.)

Reflecting on the age of the T&G Building made me recall a comment on an internet post reporting on a building of a similar age in another town that burnt down not that long ago. The person had said that it wasn’t that great of a loss because it wasn’t like the building was 150 years old.

That made me scratch my head. It seemed to be a very now-centred perspective. What I wanted to ask this person was, how do you think a building gets to the age of 150 years if it’s not left alone at 80 years?

If we don’t care for and protect these buildings now, they won’t ever be 150 years old, and If we were to neglect and destroy all our 80-year-old buildings, in 70 years time people would be asking where all the 150-year-old buildings were.

That’s the first reason the comment made no sense to me. The second question I thought of was why would a 150-year-old building be more valuable than an 80-year-old building just because it’s older? The comment implied that if the same building had been 150 years old it would have been sad to have lost it but because it was only 80, losing it was no big deal.

Did the person mean that the longer a building has been standing, the more unfortunate its loss would be? That seemed to be what they were saying. If the building had burned down in 2088 rather than 2018, it would have been a greater loss because it would have been older. I could only assume that this person places greater value on older buildings, for no reason other than they’re old. I didn’t understand that either.

Using this logic, a building isn’t valued because it’s not very old, say 80 years in this case, but at some point it must become old enough that people look at it and say, yeah, that’s important and we need to preserve it. But who’s to say where that point is? If it has to be older than 80 when is old enough? 100? 120? 150? It doesn’t make any sense. If an 80-year-old building isn’t important or significant or valuable now, how it is it that the same building suddenly becomes important or significant or valuable some time within the next 70 years? It can’t be just because it’s achieved the status of “an old building”.

I’d like to think that significance, value and importance have nothing to do with age. I’m sure there are some ugly 150-year-old buildings around that have ended up being preserved primarily because of their age, while there are 80-year-old (and 50-year-old and even 20-year-old) buildings that are deemed expendable because they aren’t very old and haven’t yet reached that point where their significance has been acknowledged—and it never will be because, by the time it would have, the building is long gone and it’s too late.

Dirk Bolt, the original designer of one of those 50-year-old buildings that didn’t survive, speaking about that building before it was demolished, observed that this is exactly what happens.

“It is in a phase where buildings are seen to be too old to be adequate for their task and too young to be part of a significant heritage,” he said. “However, this phase is temporary and demolition denies future generations to judge for themselves.” (The Mercury 21 October 2009)

Often, we don’t appreciate our more modern buildings and don’t put in the effort to preserve them now so that they will still be standing when they’re 150 years old and future generations make that call about whether they are significant. But if we continue to focus on age as a measure of value or importance or significant, many buildings have to wait until someone in the future judges them to be significant—if they survive that long, which a lot of them don’t.

So far, the T&G building has escaped any such debate. People seem to like Art Deco more than many other 20th century styles, which I’m sure helps. I’d say it’s a Hobart icon and I can’t imagine anyone succeeding with an application to knock it down and replace it with a high-rise tower. It’s on the Tasmanian Heritage Register for a start.

Though you can never be too sure. T&G in Townsville, which had a similar design, was on the Heritage Register. It was smaller and built later than Hobart’s T&G and was demolished in 2008 to make way for an office block. This building had been removed from the Heritage Register on the grounds that it had no architectural or cultural heritage significance. Having been designed in Melbourne by our friends A&K Henderson, it was deemed to be an inappropriate design for tropical Queensland and, consequently, was a structural mess that would have been difficult to restore and maintain. (The decision is an interesting read.)

And specifically being an Art Deco building on the Heritage Register won’t necessarily save you either, as the former government printing office in Salamanca Place found out when the Tasmanian Government brutally made legislation that permanently removed it from the Heritage Register so it could be demolished.

No, just being Art Deco isn’t enough. Just ask this building in Macquarie Street that was killed in 1985 and I think is now the Grand Chancellor. (Paul Johnston sums up the dilemma well in this article, where he says, “the generation that creates something is never the one to appreciate it”.)

I wonder what people will make of T&G when it’s 150 years old. I hope they’ll appreciate it as much as we do now. I also wonder if people will still be as obsessed with preserving old sandstone buildings as they are now and if they’ll regret the choices made today to remove some wonderful newer buildings from our streets. (Actually, I really wonder if half of Hobart might not be underwater by then and if preserving our built heritage will be the least of our concerns, a worry long since forgotten.)

Amazing where looking at a simple plaque inside a building can take your mind. For now, I will continue to enjoy photographing T&G and its many angles and intricacies because it really is a delight. And next time I might even take my camera instead of my phone!

A day in Launceston

Recently I travelled to Launceston and ended up with a full day to myself. I spent the whole day walking around the city, going to museums and galleries and looking for things that caught my eye.

Here are some of the things I saw. No explanations, just photos.

Taroona to Moonah

I’ve been in a heap of fun runs (walks) with catchy names like Point to Pinnacle, City to Casino, City to Surf (okay, I have never participated in that event but I needed three names to emphasise my point).

I always wondered why they didn’t include Taroona to Moonah as such an event. It’s a catchy name AND it rhymes. Win-win!

Unfortunately, the road race organisers have never cottoned on to this one so if I ever wanted to do it, it was going to have to be on my own.

I do like walking and, while the 15 km or so that this walk would be is longer than most of my “long” walks, it’s not a difficult distance for me and I wanted to do it just for the satisfaction of saying I’d walked from ‘Roona to Moonah. So I added it to my list of 19 things I intended to do in 2019 (aka 19 for 2019—I’ve been blogging about it on my personal blog) and there it’s sat since the start of the year.

I was thinking last Saturday night that I really needed to get out and go for a long walk again, take some photos and wander for the sake of wandering. Last time I did that was back in January.  After I hurt my back three weeks ago in an unfortunate incident involving wet stairs and slippy shoes, I’d not been walking a lot and I was starting to feel a bit cabin feverish.

That walk was beckoning. My back was feeling okay and it wasn’t going to be stupid-hot so I decided to do it.

I had no idea how long it would take or even how far it was but I had no expectations. I was just going to walk, take in whatever I wanted on the way and the goal would be simply to get there. Whatever happened after that would be fine.

And that’s exactly how it turned out.

I wandered my usual route along Sandy Bay Road, stopping to photograph some of my favourite places.

Long Beach Bathing Pavilion | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 7.26 am

Wrest Point Casino | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 7.48 am

I took a turn along Marieville Esplanade so I could go through Battery Point and pass by other friends I hadn’t seen for a while.

1 Cromwell Street, Battery Point | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 8.22 am

Empress Towers | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 8.36 am

The Silos | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 8.48 am

I stopped briefly at the Supreme Court before heading down to the bottom of Collins Street to take photos for my Hobart Street Corners project.

Collins & Campbell Street | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 9.24 am

Finally, I turned towards my destination and made my way up Argyle Street.

282 Argyle Street | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 9.53 am

My journey took me to New Town Road, through New Town and, finally, to Creek Road, the boundary between Hobart and Glenorchy, commonly referred to as the Flannelette Curtain.

I was in Moonah. I’d done it! If I’d wanted to I could have turned back and gone home again having checked off this mission.

Main Road & Creek Road | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 10.35 am

I made it!

I didn’t want to though. I was way past ready for breakfast and headed to a coffee shop so I could sit down for a break and think about what I wanted to do now I’d reached my destination. It was starting to get warmer than I was feeling comfortable with and I hadn’t dressed for burny sun so I didn’t feel like being out much longer.

I decided I’d at least walk to the end of Moonah, which ended up being a trek through Derwent Park and into Glenorchy itself.

The Carlyle Hotel, Corner of Main Road & Tregear St | Sunday 17 March 2019 | 11.56 am

I hadn’t planned on that, but I reached a bus stop with 10 minutes to wait before the next bus back to town so I figured I might as well walk to the next one, forgetting that on this route the bus stops are a lot further apart than they are on my bus route.

Howard Road & Main Road Glenorchy from the bus stop | Sunday 17 March 2019 |12.07 pm

Not to worry, I made it in time and after over 16.5 km (I turned the tracker off when I got to the coffee shop but I reckon I would have walked about another 2 km after that) and five and a half hours, I was heading back home with a thing crossed off my 19 for 2019 list, tired but satisfied.

There are some things in the Moonah area that I wanted to check out but they weren’t the purpose of the walk and I can go back and do them another time. By bus, I think.

waterfront mornings

Some mornings are so beautiful it’s very difficult to go into work. On mornings like this, I like to go for a walk around the waterfront before dragging myself into the office.

Last Friday was one such day. Conveniently, I had my camera with me.

Victoria Dock | Friday 15 March 2019 | 8.26 am

The Waterfront from MACq 01 | Friday 15 March 2019 | 8.28 am

Davey Street | Friday 15 March 2019 | 8.34 am

Marine Board Building | Friday 15 March 2019 | 8.37 am

Marine Board Building | Friday 15 March 2019 | 8.42 am

The last photo is the only one without a crane in it.

collins & elizabeth street

This site, on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Streets in Hobart, has been home to several different buildings, the first of which was one of the earliest pubs in Hobart. According to Colin Dennison in the book Here’s Cheers, it opened in 1819 as the New Inn Verandah House, a name which was changed in 1820 to the Crooked Billett-New Inn.

In 1883, the owner of the building traded it for another pub in a deal with the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, which demolished most of the building to build a bank on the corner. The billiard room of the old pub was retained and formed part of the Ship Hotel, which is still operating today.

The Bank of Van Diemen’s Land building was designed by the colonial architect Henry Hunter, who is responsible for many of Hobart’s well-known buildings including the Town Hall, St David’s Cathedral and the former AMP building on the diagonally opposite corner of Elizabeth and Collins Street, as well as many churches across Tasmania.

Bank of Van Diemen’s Land circa 1885 | Tasmanian Archives & Heritage | PH30-1-9922

It was constructed in 1883 and the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land operated there until 3 August 1891, when it closed down suddenly, without notice. The bank had been established in 1823 but collapsed in 1891, when mineral prices collapsed, leaving mining operations unable to service their loans. (Source: The Companion to Tasmanian History, Banking & Finance).

The sign on the corner opposite the site says that the failure of the bank in 1891 “was a major blow to Tasmania’s economy in general; most of the savings of the past few decades of hard work were lost and the island’s economic fabric and its society would never be the same again”.

Story of the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land | Collins Street

According to the history of the MBA in Tasmania by Dianne Snowden (Foundations of a Tasmanian Industry), the collapse of the bank created an economic depression and increased poverty and social instability.

As an aside, 1891 was the year Master Builders Association was founded in Tasmania. Dianne Snowden says that the depression caused by the collapse of the bank was the reason for the foundation of the Builders’ and Contractors’ Association, forerunner to the MBA, as cheap unqualified labour was undercutting standards and many builders were on the verge of bankruptcy. The association was formed to develop standard conditions of contract and to protect the interests of its members. I have a personal interest in this because the first president of the association was my great great grandfather, Alfred Dorman, who undertook work for the Marine Board as well as building the Dunalley Pub.

After the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land collapsed, the Union Bank of Australia took over the building. The Union Bank had branches in several states as well as New Zealand, and in 1951 it merged with the Bank of Australasia to become the ANZ Bank.

The building renamed as the Union Bank 1900s | Tasmanian Archives & Heritage | NS392-1-747

Back to Colin Dennison again, he says in Yesterday’s Hobart Today that the building was acquired by the ES&A Bank (English, Scottish & Australian Bank) in the 1960s when it was demolished and a new bank erected in its place. (Other sources say the building was demolished in 1958.) The ES&A Bank amalgamated with the ANZ Bank in 1970. The photo isn’t dated but I imagine, since it says ANZ, it must have been taken after the 1970 merger. You can see the Ship Hotel on the left of the picture.

The ANZ bank building | Tasmanian Archives & Heritage | AB713-1-6950

When researching the history of this building I came across a post on ABC Open despairing at the loss of the “magnificent marble and cedar counters” from inside the building, which they reported had been put into landfill. What a shame! This person called the replacement building “an ugly concrete septic tank of a building”. I wonder if they were happy when the ANZ moved out in 2014 and it was demolished in 2017 to make way for a new commercial building.

I haven’t been able to find any photos of it when it was the ANZ bank in recent years, but Google Maps sourced this image from 2015, after the bank had moved out but before any plans for a new building had been made.

Here, the building is for lease | June 2015 | Source: Google Maps

Boarded up | November 2017

It stood empty until its demolition, which happened very quickly. It was there one day, a pile of rubble the next.

All gone | 18 January 2018

It took about 12 months from demolition to the new building being completed.

The completed building | 7 January 2019

The first tenants for the replacement building were reported this week as including the Police Bank, a dumpling restaurant and a Chinese tea house. It’s good to see the site will continue to be occupied by a bank, maintaining the links to the past use of the site. (It also means the sign across the road (photo above), referring to “the bank opposite” will continue to be accurate!)

There is one more piece to this story and this is the St David’s Park lions. At the Davey Street entrance to the park closest to Salamanca Place are two magnificent sandstone lions. (One is hidden by the plant. Trust me it’s there.)

St David’s Park | Davey St entrance 

According to the sign in St David’s Park, the lions were carved in a tent on the footpath by Richard Patterson in 1884 for the entrance to the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land building.

Sign in St David’s Park telling the history of the lions

The ABC tells us that Richard Patterson was a stonemason from the UK, transported to Tasmania in 1844 for burglary. After being granted a ticket of leave in 1850, he developed a reputation of excellence in his craft and worked on Tasmania’s Government House. The lions are described as his most famous and enduring work and it’s been noted that Richard Patterson made them without any model.

One of the sandstone lions

After the building was demolished, the lions were displayed at Port Arthur under the care of the Tasmanian Government until 1988. I couldn’t find any official information on how this was accomplished, but our ABC Open correspondent tells us that  “an enterprising Italian immigrant salvaged the lions on the back of his truck and took them to Port Arthur”. The official ABC article says that the Tasmanian Government arranged it. The sign goes on to say that the lions were restored as a bicentennial gift to the people of Hobart from the ANZ Banking Group. which erected them in the park jointly with the Hobart Council. Now someone needs to prune the plant that’s obscuring the lion on the left so we see it!