Ipswich's Architectural Heritage - Chasing Our Past At Home (Transcription)

Melanie : Good evening, and welcome to tonight's Chasing Our Past at Home.  My name is Melanie, and I'm the Digital Archivist and Historian with Picture Ipswich at Ipswich Libraries. Thank you for joining us tonight.  We're very excited about tonight's presentation but I'll tell you more about that in just a moment.

Firstly, Ipswich City Council would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land and waters we share.  We pay our respects to the elders, past and present and emerging, as keepers of the traditions, customs, cultures, and stories of proud peoples. 

We're glad that you've been able to join us tonight from the comfort of your own home. We ask that everyone please keep your microphone on mute.  If you have a question, you can write it into the chat section, and you'll find the chat button at the bottom of your screen.  If your questions are not responded to during the presentation, we will ensure that they are by the end of tonight's talk.

Now, as always, we can see the number of attendees who have logged on, but we realize that there might be more than one person sitting in front of your computer tonight.  So could you please indicate in the chat how many people are watching tonight from your home.  We are recording tonight's session for inclusion in the Picture Ipswich collection as a resource, but your typed questions or chat will not be a part of this recording.

Tonight's Chasing Our Past at Home is one of the many events in the Ipswich’s newest celebration of local history and heritage, the Galvanized festival.  Ipswich libraries have contributed other events, and I'm going to talk more about them at the end of the evening including something which is very exciting. 

Tonight, we have the pleasure of hearing from heritage architect Daniel Keenan. Daniel is the Principal Officer in Urban Design and Heritage Conservation for Ipswich City Council.  The majority of Daniel's career has been in heritage conservation and urban design in local government, primarily with Brisbane and now Ipswich City Councils.  With his background in architecture and town planning, Daniel brings a wealth of knowledge to his role as council's heritage advisor, and so tonight I would like to welcome Daniel to the webinar.  So if you're there Daniel.

Daniel : Well, you've stopped my video.

Melanie : Okay there should be a little button down the bottom of the screen that says start video.

Daniel : And I clicked on it and it says you cannot start your video because the host has stopped it. 

Melanie : Okay, we have De in the background (from Public Programming) who is posting so she'll be able to help with that tonight. I'll just stop sharing.

Daniel : Here we go. Hello! Thanks, Melanie. I hope after that introduction that I don't disappoint people, but I feel a bit humbled by the number of people who are on this show.  As Melanie said, I'm an architect that got involved in planning and heritage. I've sort of have a fairly wide interest in lots of lots of things.  Heritage is something that I feel personally quite passionate about. I grew up in Ipswich. I'm a fourth generation Ipswich person and I know Jane Kingston's listening and then she says, “Oh, I'm a sixth generation (or something). But anyway, but I'm really happy …

I left Ipswich to go to university to do Architecture and came back over 30 years later. And it's very, very, nice to help save, conserve, whatever the heritage, the architectural heritage of Ipswich that I think inspired my love of architecture. I think it was sort of like growing up thinking that every town had really lovely buildings and old things, and it's not until you travel that you realize just how special our town is in that respect, and so I've been very lucky to have had this job for 11 years now.  And I get to do an enormous amount of stuff both within council and their own things, applications, development stuff, as well as heritage advise. 

I think heritage advise is probably my favourite part of my job.  I get to meet a lot of people who are really interested in saving old houses.  We very rarely have fights with people who want to sort of change things into some modern house.  In Ipswich we've got you know 15 minutes out of town, or 10 minutes out of town, or whatever, you can actually build the modern house if you want to, so we're under different, totally different development constraints than say Brisbane for example.

One of the first questions that I'm generally asked is how old is my house.  And so there’s a … council has a document called,  booklet called “Every house has a history” that goes through and details all of those sorts of you know the documented stuff.  What I do is go through the style, materials, those sorts of things which can narrow down what period of house, or period of time your house may be built. 

One of the things that … Melanie was going to ask me a question – what makes the heritage advisor happiest? And I think it's getting the details right.  One of the things that I find most annoying is when people get the balustrades wrong on houses.  You know it'd be nice if Bunnings sold a variety of balustrades, not just the flat ones, but anyway, we will move on to that later on. 

What I'm proposing to do now is to …  Ipswich City Council also has a document called Ipswich House Types by Period, and what I'm going to do is sort of quickly run through the house types and periods, and try and explain the differences and the things I look for when I'm trying to age a house, and also before that I'd say we previously had a focus on pre-1946 houses which we've you know, know quite a lot about physically and we've got we've got over .. almost seven and a half thousand of these saved, protected in Ipswich, under the heritage schedules and the character controls that we have.

Now we're moving on to the next phase, which is the mid-century things from 1947, probably 1949, through to 1969, which is a sort of interesting period where the architecture probably isn't as distinct from other areas within Australia, however the social history is probably more important to that until we can identify what those particular social themes are for the development of Ipswich in terms of like you know, expansions of employment like woollen mills, the meatworks, those sorts of things. What influence they had on the physical makeup of Ipswich, in terms of new estates, that sort of stuff. 

So we're now looking at getting research done on the social development of Ipswich, rather than the physical development.  And then what we'll do is we'll choose houses,  or groups of houses that represent those particular themes.  We work quite closely with the University of Southern Queensland in their Anthropology and especially in the Museum Studies section with Dr Celmara Pocock, where we have students who have been researching as part of their Museum Studies degree.  They were doing some citations for us for listings. 

Now we've got them this year doing a streetscape study of some post-war streets in Eastern Heights, which are sort of just interesting in terms of the fact that looking at style differences, style similarities, what the materials were, what influences there were, because they were … from what we can read and gather is that the design of these houses was heavily influenced by magazines, lifestyle, a change of lifestyle.  There was lots of new products that were out there.  So all of those things influenced what went on as well, as once you got over the immediate post-war material shortages, there was a great optimism within the community, how that's expressed in buildings and things.  So that's the next thing we're going to move on to. 

I think in terms of looking at protecting those things, a couple of years ago we protected … we put I think it was 12 or 13 post-war buildings which included some houses, and some churches and things on to our schedule heritage register.  The owners of those places were quite happy.  In fact, after we sent the letters out, we weren't getting irate phone calls saying why are you doing this to us, and you're going to ruin our lives.  We had to keep checking to see whether the letters are actually being delivered, that people were quite happy when we went out and went through the whole process with them in terms of what listing meant.  And most people were proud of their homes, those sorts of things, and then you realize that there's a lot of urban myths about houses that are on heritage schedules or listed, that nothing can be done, and that sort of thing. 

And I think that if you look around Ipswich there are very few houses that are just sitting around going to waste with nothing happening on them.  Although sometimes I get comments from people going, “well look, you can't see anything happening, and you're stopping people doing work on their houses” and that sort of stuff, and I always take it as a great compliment to our heritage program that there is a vast amount of work being done on houses.  But what we're trying to do is protect the settings of these houses as well, so it's not only just the physical fabric that we're looking at, we're actually looking at the setting of the house and there's the gardens and the idea basically of a sort of a highset lightweight timber box on stumps, and it means that you can still build a building underneath, build out the back, those sorts of things - anyone who can get access to aerial photographs of Ipswich, and if you look at say for example Sadlier's Crossing, if you look at those, there are huge extensions at the rear of those houses, or underneath, and those sorts of things, and it just proves that you can actually do quite a lot of work to turn pre-character houses into modern family homes without destroying all of the things that really attract people to those houses. 

And as part of my job as the Heritage Advisor, I meet people who are sort of moving to the city for the first time, and in lots of cases it's because of the houses. It's just sort of quite heartening. I've met people who were moving, who are Australians who were working in South Africa, who were moving back to Australia, and to Ipswich because they had seen photographs of houses and that sort of thing.  They came, they really liked it, so the people who come here, really it's not an easy option, I don't think. 

It's certainly … the houses are less expensive than say Brisbane, but it's sort of heartening to see that people move here because of it, and also the community have been very supportive for over 30 years, of at least the Heritage Advisory Service. I'm only the third person to have been the Heritage Advisor, but the other two, Bruce Buchanan and Ivan Macdonald have both been private consultants who have done 20 years and more of being this heritage advisor, and it's I think it shows in the city, in terms of … I think if you look at our character areas they actually look better beginning to look better and more lived in, and loved - well like they used to be, I guess, as opposed to parts of Brisbane where you just wonder what the purpose is. 

I did work for the Brisbane City Council a long time ago, when demolition controls came in, those sorts of things, and I think what I'm seeing now is just disheartening.  I mean when you see a small two-room cottage sitting on the third floor of a concrete contemporary building, you go “what's that all about?”.  It's a bad outcome for the for the house (the existing house), it's a bad outcome for the new house, and you end up with a sort of very strange streetscape.  So luckily, we've been quite strict, I think, in some ways, in Ipswich,  but also quite lucky we've had that community support.

And also, my last plug for the Heritage Advisory Service, is that when people start to think of looking at changes to their houses, those sorts of things, that there are controls over character houses, and that before people get too committed financially and emotionally, to doing proposals that then once we get into council it's against … it doesn't conform to the character code, those sorts of things.  That if we talk to people soon enough, and with my architectural experience, I can elicit from people what they want from their house, those sorts of things.  So sometimes people don't do things out of vengeance or, but it's out of a sort of lack of knowledge of alternatives, those sorts of things.

Sometimes I've … well one particular case, I went to a lady who was looking at raising the house, and doing building in under and she had this plan downstairs with lots of little rooms that all had different purposes of all sorts of stuff, and at the end of discussing with her about why she needed all of these rooms for specific things and that sort of stuff, she said well I was just duplicating what was upstairs space-wise, and I just had all this space left over, and at the end of it, and talking through what she actually wanted was another bedroom, a bathroom, and an extra window in the kitchen. So it can save money and it's satisfying for everyone. I think I find a lot of satisfaction in doing it and I think the feedback that we get from people, it is.  As I said, that was my last plug.  Now, what I would like to do is to quickly just run through the document about house types, and just show the major points of difference.  Now there's lots of things have different names and those sorts of things, and I don't think people should get hung up on the actual correct terms for things, because there could be different things and they'll be too academic about it.  Melanie, can I just share the screen now?
Here we go.

Okay, so this council document was done some time ago, but these things don't change at all.  So this is actually a good document and it'll be … it currently isn't online, but it will be fairly soon.  So it goes through and talks about all of those bits and pieces, and names them all, that you don't know about like stop chamfers and capitals and collar molds and those sorts of things.

So it's really broken down into more periods than we just generally talk about.  We talk about colonial, there aren't that many colonial buildings within Ipswich, real colonial buildings.  Federation is this period that's here, into war and post-war, so we've got those four periods that we can easily stick things into, which are reflected in … basically we can choose them by the roof, the first thing. And then the cladding is the next thing, the chamfer boards, the tongue and groove inside, which way it goes, how big it is, those sorts of things. 

So if we go through this. Now, there aren't many of these, if any, of these bar cuts left in Ipswich.  However there is Cooneana Homestead, which is now the Cooneana Heritage Centre at Redbank, on Redbank Plains Road.  I mean it's a very interesting late 1860s sawn-slab house.  We sort of know very little about the where the materials came from, but it's a steam-driven saw.  The man who owned it came out from Scotland, I think, with someone who then set up a travelling steam mill.  So there might be some connection between those, but it's a sort of interesting one if you're ever down that way. I know they've had last weekend, they had an open house there, and it's just an interesting style of construction with these vertical sawn slabs of quite wide timber that have now shrunk, and there are gaps between them, and you'll see evidence of wallpaper and newspaper that was stuck on walls to paper over the gap, so to speak.

So that's a very interesting one. The kitchen at the back is interesting, because it's actually built on a couple of just logs that have had the tops laid on the ground.  The tops have been flattened and then the floor joists have just been put on top of that, and built over that one.  Obviously, there weren't a lot around at this particular time.  Also quite early, there were little brickworks around, but timber was just so available that most of our buildings are out of timber, and that the civic buildings were out of brick, or the more elite houses, those sorts of things. 

With this one here, they're very early little cottages, and this style was built right through to the end of or just before the First World War, which is called the transverse gable roof, so it runs parallel to the street.  And these were tiny, some of these houses. And then you could have double gables, some examples of those later on.  There's still a lot of them around. There's been some very interesting extensions to these little cottages.  There's one at North Ipswich that won a design award a few years ago for doing an extension at the rear, in a sort of u-shape that just fitted the scale perfectly for this house. 

Then the late Victorian ones which is sort eighteen twenty to eighteen eighties, which then sort of well goes into federation style from there.  This is the sort of fancy Colonial Gable house which was the next rank up.  There aren't a lot of these around, but we have these.  Some of them are actually called Carpenter Gothic because you'll find that there's  on this gable fascia that runs up here barge board it's sort of shaped and curved, which is sort of quite nice. There are more of those in the southern states than in Queensland. 

I guess if we look at this, this is Claremont, which is one of the earliest house in Ipswich – sandstone.  It was an elite house, it's a one-off of a group of houses, but it just showed the I guess the typical style that all houses of all scales and all socioeconomic groups were based on this design, with a sort of Georgian box, with a veranda that ran around in front, two sides, one side all the way around, um and then with a central corridor with rooms going off either side and then they just became different sizes. So I guess Claremont's not the typical example. 

This is Ginn cottage, an old photograph of Ginn Cottage, now in Ginn Street in the city, which is a really good example of a 19th century cottage because the roof is quite steep.  One of the things I look at when I first look at a house is the pitch of the roof.  As time went on the pitch of the roofs got lower and lower and lower.  I don't know why.  It might have been to do with materials or whatever.  This is generally earlier houses, have 45 degree-pitch roofs, which was very easy - which is one in one, so carpenters didn't have all the equipment that they have now, so one in one was an easy pitch.  Then it went down to 22 and a half, which is one in two, which is its most traditional roof pitch that we have, for obvious reasons that it was very easy to pitch a roof that was one in two.

And then another sort of I guess, ergonomic result on houses is that their high set houses are always annoyingly just that little bit too low and you bump your head, and that was basically because the house’s stumps were levelled by eye, so the builder would set the stumps up and then just stand at the highest point, I guess or whatever, and level them that way.  So if you had a short builder you were unlucky, but if you had a taller builder you probably had a bit more space under your house.

These on the left hand side here, I think we all recognize these little variations on these cottages.  This one at Churchill here demonstrates the 45 degree pitch on these roofs which is extraordinary when you see it, when you look at the volume of that roof compared to the volume of the house underneath, it's probably almost three quarters of the amount of room.  And then when you look at the framing of these things which is basically from this time, all the way through to the end of the First World War period, there were balloon frames. We've got very few photographs of these houses being constructed, but a balloon frame is, they would build all the outside walls and the roof framing, and then like a balloon on the outside and then fill it all in on the inside, so the only walls that are really load bearing are the external ones.  All the internal walls are just tying things together and creating privacy, from there. 

Then this is probably the ones that we most associate with, this one in Sadlier's Crossing - the standard sort of … this is probably more of a middle-class house, with all this really gorgeous detailing that was  here.  One of the things that we also look at in terms of aging a house is the distance between this gutter up here and this detached veranda down here.  Good rule of thumb is that things just got smaller as time went on.  You'll find smaller cottages like we were talking about before, with those transverse gable ones.  Some of the chamfers on the front are sort of like a foot wide, which says this is really early, basically because they had supplies of very large timbers that they could use.  So this one here, as time went by, ceiling heights lowered because of materials or costs or whatever, to points where it was actually quite minimal.  And then later on when you get to the federation period, the two roofs became one.  And these all were different scales and sizes,  but variations on the same theme. 

And then this one, if we can sort of point out the fact that this is probably late 19th century, this house.  The detailing here is that the 19th century things was all quite light in terms of its detailing. You had these smaller brackets on the posts which were cut out and curly and quite sinuous.  You had smaller elements up in the roof here, with brackets supporting the gutter.  You had an OG (Old Gothic) gutter with acroteria which is those pieces that stick out here.  Acroteria is greek for roof ornaments.  And they sort of continued through the federation period as well, these sort of trims up through here. So there was a great delight in decorating your house, and you can see here that there's a very simple dowel balustrade.  Cast iron was expensive and it was probably only used a bit earlier in the 19th century, and on quite elite houses. 

If we look down at this one on Woodend Road down here, which was a bigger scale of house, you'll see similar things, I think.  It's got wrought iron as well.  You could get these gable treatments at the at the front through here, and then also these fences which are extraordinary in detail, which well we've lost a lot of those things.  And you can see the difference between this fence up here at Sadlier's Crossing, and this very fancy fence with all of its iron.  You can buy these irons from catalogues, and the gates from iron mongers in … I know there were lots in the south where you could just buy - get a catalogue, and order them, and send them up.  Similarly, with these with the corrugated iron.  However, everything else was generally made on site, or in Ipswich.  There is a particular Ipswich style of fan light - the timber ones that are cut out, and I don't know how that happened, but there's one you can sort of really only find in Ipswich. 

This is another sort of elite house, which was the Kieraville, which was the pastor's house for the Congregational Church, I think.  Same sort of deal - look at the size of that gap between there. So then, and this is another one, another type of balustrade that's there in Darling Street.  This is quite an elite house as well, it's masonry, but it's sort of hard to tell the difference, it could have been made out of timber or rendered masonry that was there. 

These are more of these small miners’ cottages, or you'll sort of find them around North Ipswich, which we assume belong to railway workers.  They're very cute.  There was a time when there was no cladding on the outside of these buildings, even on some larger houses, which were just a single skin on the inside - obviously that was a complete disaster environmentally, with water going in there, and you'll find that these houses are generally chamferboard prior to World War One, and they could be clad in weatherboard, which is post-World War One generally. And you then think material-wise and style-wise, these are different, but that's how you get that difference in there.  Lots of these places were enclosed or extended out the back with this sort of lean-to that ran on forever, potentially to create more rooms for kids and those sorts of things, from there.

This can just go on - this is a great example of these things just going on and on and on out here.  This is one where the veranda's obviously been enclosed much later with weatherboards and chamferboards. Now the reason that I've been told, the difference why chamfer boards were used up until the start of World War One was because there were a lot of pine.  Pine supplies ran out, and there were lots of hardwood, so then after World War One you find weatherboards coming up.  Now, there's always exceptions to this as well.  None of these style things are hard and fast because we aren't the only generations that have been renovating houses, and changing them, and building them in. People have been reusing materials, houses were built in an old style much later than newer styles coming in, those sorts of things. 

You also have houses that were pre-World War One where you could say like this one is,  but it's a 19th century house, with gables -with front-facing gables, which we'd normally associate with post-war houses.  But there were people like local architects like George Brockwell-Gill and Will Haenke who I think we've had on this session, historians talking about them being influenced by what they were seeing via magazines coming in from the United States, and the Californian bungalows, and those sorts of things.

So we're beginning to look at those style indicators from that, but they're sort of like quite early leaders in this.  This is a very good example of this cross bracing.  Some people think that it was a later addition, and it's just purely there for decoration, but it was actually structural to just brace the whole house, because if you had this balloon frame that was then having tongue and groove around it, you actually needed something to brace the house so it didn't fall over in the breezes and the winds and those sorts of things.

The early houses had their … the external tongue and groove walls were horizontal and beaded, and double beaded, so they looked like they're two boards but they're actually one, and they're horizontal.  That's another key indicator of an early house. 

And also there's another thing -  there's always a catch to these things.  Looking through early tender documents and stuff in adverts in the QT you'll find ads from architects and builders for the re-erection of a house from used materials, those sorts of things.  So that can be another thing, they were dismantling houses, rebuilding using old materials, those sorts of things. I've seen a house at Woodend that had three different sizes of chamferboard on the outside, and similar mix of materials on the inside.  So it becomes impossible to date them unless you go through some other process, and it's difficult to do that way.

And then this is another example of a bit later on where you can see that the gap between the pyramid roof and the concave roof (which is not a bullnosed roof,  it's a concave roof.  The bullnose roof is the one that's flat, and then curves at the end). You can still see the quite light decorative brackets that are here.  You'll find most of the dowel handrails which seem to be quite fitting period-wise.  You'll find with lots of these houses that the joinery items at the windows and doors were cedar.  Cedar was quite … red cedar was quite readily available around this time, and also it was a really good timber, soft timber to work, for fine quality timber joinery like windows and doors, and those sorts of things from there.

Doing in verandas, same thing.  Lots of that work was done for obviously a lot of space -people needed it.  After World War II there was a huge housing shortage.  The government actually paid people to enclose their verandas, and rent the space out for accommodation, those sorts of things.

And now if we move on to that sort of Victorian split roof, they're also building that in the Federation period, which is sort of up to about First World War.  But one of the major style indicators for Federation is a tent roof, so you can see that the separate veranda roofs disappeared and it just becomes one big roof that sort of covers the whole house.  The decoration can be a little more …  it's heavier, tending to have more of a horizontal proportion than a vertical proportion.  The balustrade which you can see on here is three rails, and they're called cricket wicket ones, because you'll see that there are three or two of the dowels that go up through the second rail up to the top, I think it's quite a sweet description of that. 

And then these columns, the brackets on the capitals are getting quite heavy, which is heavy heading towards the interwar period.  There are also the asymmetrical houses that started to come out, and I'm fairly conscious of time with this.  This is another sort of Victorian house, but sadly while we're here, the reason why Ipswich developed its character controls and it's stopping removal of houses from the city was because it was being mined for houses like this in the 70s, and also in the early 80s. 

This house is in Mogill.  We've tracked other houses down to Brookfield, those sorts of places.  So in order to keep our city's heritage within the city itself, that's why our character controls came in to stop the removal of the city's heritage to the pony paddocks of Brookfield. 

This is another one.  This is quite early.  It's a George Brockwell Gill.  It's chamferboards but it's got this gable at the front.  It's an asymmetrical house.  One of George Brockwell Gill's key style indicators is that he just didn't do normal balustrades.  They're all a bit tailor-made for each house.  So that's another one.  You'll see this is 1901. 

It's got chamferboards down here and this really rather gorgeous timber balustrading that's there.  So when people find these sorts of things on houses they should just keep them because they're the odd ones out, it's not that they've been replaced in the 1960s by something else, but they're an indicator that generally they weren't just a sort of normal house that was there.  He also did some different variations on these.  And I was talking about getting the details right.  See, the importance of these collar molds that we all sort of know, I guess, up here, and then also this stop-chamfering on the posts, those sorts of things, just give that incredible fine grain of detail to these houses that if it's not there, they just really lack something, I think.

So here's another one.  This is a fantastic example of a house that could have had a double Victorian roof.  Inside you probably wouldn't see any difference but the roof shape is different.   Around this time, there was a government thing that funded workers housing.  So they had they had pattern books for cottages that you could flick through, and you could build this one, which was a sort of number - 356 or something, and it was done for an agreed price, those sorts of things.  They were just generally here - creosoted timber, the joinery work was painted white, it's quite simple, and you'll just see lots of these. 

This is a great federation one, because in terms of the single roof form in here.  Then there was variations – you could get two rooms as opposed to the two that were here and those sorts of things.  So you can just imagine what these suburbs of Ipswich must have looked like when there were rows of these, no trees, and all this sort of dark red maroon colour would have been quite exciting.  You could buy them and get them shipped out to you, to western properties. 

McDonnell & East had houses, and so you get a package that had all the timber sawn to size, you'd have the glazed glass cut to size, you'd have paint nails, all that sort of stuff that could go out onto the thing. So we're just going through here in terms of different styles.  Over here, this is beginning to look at that interwar period with that sort of the bigger gables at the front, the asymmetrical ones. 

Also, I don't have a copy of it, but it was an advert from the 1920s, which was about modifying your 19th century cottage with the pyramid roof, which was to add that sort of gable and a room at the front.  You can see them because they just sort of look a bit odd, but you just have to look at the materials and the roof pitch and all of those sorts of things. 

So I'll just go through these.  These pattern books and things are all online.  They’re typical houses for us - 1917 … and if you keep looking through these you'll see that there's a consistent sort of style, turning on the scale of the materials that sort of thing, which is up to the First World War. 

After the First World War there was the interwar period, which was between the First and the Second World War.  You can see with this one the changes.  It becomes … they're more heavily influenced by the Californian bungalow style. Well it's actually more the First World War … Will Haenke houses and the George Brockwell-Gill houses, but especially Will Haenke houses were Californian bungalows, and then this becomes a variation on a sort of a southern theme on it.  So you get these gay double gables fronting the street and you can see that it's a stylistic variation on the Victorian houses that you had.  There was a lot of solid balustrades with a bit of decorative piece in here.

You'll also see some of these houses where there's a veranda or a sleepout, out this side. There was also then, during this period of time, a belief that … or more about healthy living, so if it was great if you could sleep out on an open veranda, which is why you have lots of these verandas, that have stairs to the outside, or that sort of thing.  You might have two bedrooms, but most people slept on the veranda outside. 

They were just generally timber, and the thing about this is they tried to get a horizontal proportion and it was quite heavy, so all the things began to reflect the heavier proportion, and especially the stair detail (not this particular one), but in terms of the brackets became sort of solid pieces - that's a great example of that.  You can see that with this one here there was very clever sort of geometry of folding roofs out of gables, sort of sticking out, as opposed to the quite simple pyramid roof form that we had before.  You got more decorative things on gables … they became more asymmetrical.

Here's some Ipswich ones.  I think this is a Will Haenke house that sort of shows you that sort of long horizontal proportion and these big heavy columns that don't need to be that solid and heavy, and this big piece of timber here for the pergola, across the front which was starting to look at sort of more of a relaxed sort of outdoor living, reflect this sort of thing.   

This is another one, “Dougleen”,  in Thorn Street which is the same long horizontal gables things, very fancy, the masonry ones.  So you can see the difference - they're just really going for this very heavy solid look.  So in terms of when you're looking at aging your house or doing renovations to it, you have to look at if you did a lightweight timber  extension to this then it would probably be okay, but if you did one of those sort of Victorian houses like with this one here, if you did sort of like a heavy brick extension out the back it just isn't sympathetic to it.

And I guess you'll find while we're flicking through these things, people will be saying. “Yes, but new work has to be noticeably new”.  Now that's a terrible misquotation from the Borough Charter which is Australia-wide I guess, put out by ICOMOS, which is the International Council of Monuments and Sites,  which is part of the United Nations, which guides the principles for conservation within Australia and in line with what's in the world, and it talks about new work being noticeably new, but people forget that it also says unsympathetic, so generally I've found in my long career that people who just say that have never even read the Borough Charter and don't know.  And that initially that section in the Borough Charter about noticeably new was aimed at architraves, so you didn't actually have to match the architrave as the existing one, so it's been sort of distorted and taken to its own thing. 

So this is where -  another one, where you can see here this is an interwar house hopefully, yes.  The detailing and these brackets are getting heavier here.  It's basically the same form as the Victorian house or the Federation house, but the balustrade is no longer a dowel, it's flat panels of timber in there.  This is a really good example of it from here, as well.  Look at the size of  this sort of heavy detailing that's in there.  You could probably redo this on a Victorian house and you wouldn't know the difference. Then this is really getting towards what we know as the Queenslander, where all of this stuff is quite heavy.  You have these piers (well not on this one, but some of them) go all the way down to the ground.  You have this big heavy stepping balustrade down here on the sides so it's becoming more grounded. I think this is where the things that I find difficult in terms of getting the details right, that if you have a house that's supposed to be the detail is quite light but then you start introducing interwar detailing, there's a terrible conflict and the poetry doesn't sing, I don't think, in the house.

So these are still variations on a theme, of the central hallway with rooms going off the sides, this bedroom is pushed out to the front to use some of the veranda.  There's lots of theories about how all of these things developed (bay windows, those sorts of things).  As we got through … (this is a beauty, this is gorgeous).  I guess we all know Bowerlea in the city, in Milford Street, which is a George Brockwell-Gill, which is a sort of masterpiece, I think, of this Californian bungalow style of house. And they all got down to different scales of it as well.

As we got into the 30s there was obviously the depression, and with financial constraints on things there were also restrictions on materials and sizes of houses you could build, and so we enter into what's called the Austerity Period, and you can pick these houses because they're just little and everything - the roof pitch is lower, the eaves are much smaller, they're not as big and comfortable and as imposing as these ones even though that's a sort of elite house. They just look as though they were at hard times for here, so that that went through up until the war.

Let's contrast these two houses. This is 1937. This is obviously the 1920s.  So you can see there's a completely different attitude to the style, the size, the materials, those sorts of things.  So this, happy times.  Worldwide sad times leading up to the war, and I think that it's quite interesting.  I mean these things just got to be bigger and bigger and variations on themes.  This is one of those sleepouts, sometimes they were enclosed with timber shutters, those sorts of things that we have. This is probably quite a typical one of what we have.  I suspect that the step balustrade has been changed on that one.

One of the things with Picture Ipswich is that we can look at … well there are also these picture book pattern books that these things came from.  Also with Picture Ipswich, with the thousands of photographs that they have on that, sometimes you can be lucky enough to find a photograph of your house on the street or something like that there. Or  there's also the Corley collection at the State Library.  (Oh my goodness we're almost out of time).   The Corleys were a couple who were photographers who drove around taking photographs of houses in the late 1960s and early 70s, with the purpose of putting the photograph of your house on a calendar for you to buy.  If you didn't buy the calendar then the photograph just stayed in their collection.  So I think they've got like 30,000 photographs in this thing, so it's always good to have a try, to look at what your house looked like in the 60s and 70s.  So it's good also for not just character housing but also for post-war things as well, it's great.

So I can just sort of flash through these… these are fantastic - these extreme deep gables with these deep verandas that is quite different and very nice in that respect, so that's the interwar period. Some of these are just beautiful. Also the Spanish Mission. They were sort of like the Spanish Mission-ish with things stuck onto the front of them.  Some of these then continued through into the post-war period.  And I might just finish on this one, which is the house at 6 Lloyd George Street at Eastern Heights, which was built by Marty Doyle post-war, who's a local builder, for his family.  It shows that sort of post-war prosperity of Ipswich.  This is on our heritage register just because it's so … it's significant because it's an example of the post-war prosperity within the city.  And I think I'm going to leave it at that because we've only got five minutes for questions. Melanie?

Melanie : Okay I'm back.  First up, we have a couple of comments before we go into the questions.  Jane would like to say that she is only the fifth generation.  (Daniel laughs). Which then leads me to say well I'm sixth generation. Fifth generation on this actual site.

Daniel :  But there were seven generations that did live in our house, so anyway, if there's any bigger ones please send in a comment.

Melanie : Yes, anybody who can beat six generations in Ipswich, or seven, please let us know.  And Judith Nissen who was of course a presenter recently on, talking about Bruce Buchanan, for those who missed it, she says it's great to hear an architect also talking about social significance.   So I guess that leads to a good question - why is social significance so important in understanding these houses?

Daniel : Well I think it's because they were houses.  And they were personal.  Everyone has a personal story about where they live.  Last Thursday night we had the opening of Galvanized Heritage Festival, and we had a little panel group, including you Melanie (thank you), and one of the questions was what's your favourite heritage building in Ipswich and why, and everyone told a personal story about their favourite building.  No one said I love it because it's a very good academic example of a Queenslander and those sorts of things, and I think that just sums up why social significance is so important, because we all have memories and these things mean different things.

Previously it's been very easy to say pretty buildings having heritage significance because everybody understands they're attracted to them and those sorts of things.  If you have a building that isn't very attractive however … say we use a topical one at the minute, which is the woollen mills over at North Ipswich.  It's a single story, very big brick building that's vacant at the minute, but generations of mostly women worked in that building and have had vast numbers of stories and associations with that building. And that's far more exciting and interesting than the physical fabric that's there.

We know very little about the character pre 1946 houses, about how people lived in them.  There are some interior shots but we're generally fairly ignorant about how people lived in them.  So now's a great opportunity to gather that information from people who are living in those things, so that's where I find the social significance is quite exciting, and it's always been one of the criteria for listing, but it's never been one that's really been pushed more.  And it has to be pushed more for the post-war stuff as well, because there was so much going on socially.

Melanie : Well in October we have another house-themed “Chasing our past at home”,  and that's going to be “Great houses of Ipswich”, so another one in with the National Trust.  And we've got three homeowners, and one of the questions that I like to ask them (like I did last year when we had a similar session), was that experience of living in a house. So for those who weren't there on Thursday night, my answer to my favourite heritage building ended up being the Commonwealth Hotel, which was where we held the launch event, because back in 2017 I got to work as part of the deconstruction and pulling it apart and learning the stories from the building itself.   So because you put that question to me on Thursday night, I'm now going to put the question to you : What's your favourite Ipswich heritage building?

Daniel : It was the Boys Club at the Congregational Church, the old RACQ building that burnt down, which I'm still mourning.  And I've tried to think about, and I haven't been able to - there are so many - that it's … I don't have one.  But if it was it would be a nice interwar house like this one, I think.  I think I have a favourite style which I think is this sort of thing - the interwar houses, that's as close as I could get to.

Melanie:  Yes, it is an absolutely impossible question to only select one house, one building, one site.  

Daniel : Yeah as someone said in response to that question it's like asking who's your favourite child. So anyway it's a good one.  And I thought if people were struggling with that one, an alternative question could be - what would you miss most if it went, which is another good question for everybody to ponder I think.

Melanie:  Which is also a good way of judging what is socially significant, is when you put a building under threat, you know, see what the response is from the community.  It's unfortunately a really good way of gauging the social significance of a site.

Daniel : Yes, and very luckily with social media now, it's much easier to gauge social significance.  And I use, for example, the first building that we listed in Ipswich, purely on social significance, was Boody’s Store over opposite Brassall, which had the wall of lollies and there were many generations of people who remember that from school, going there after being at Brassall State School or Ipswich State High, buying the lollies and those sorts of things.  The Boodys sold that shop 70 years ago or 80 years ago, and it just was kept being that.  It was under threat, we had independent heritage advice saying that we didn't have any significance or anything.  However due to a campaign on social media we could prove that it did have a lot of social significance to people, and it's now on our heritage register. 

For good or bad, but that was the first one that we could demonstrate via social media, and comments and support on social media for it, for saving it.  That's what social media is I guess, it's sort of shows whether something's significant at all - people don't care.  So you know it's no good for so-called heritage experts who’s very significant in those sorts of things and ignoring what people think.  And I think heritage belongs to everyone, not just the council or a few people, it's for everyone and everyone can have an opinion on it.  If no one's going to be upset about something going, then you know, we don't do that really, but if there's a community support for it then we'll certainly fight for it in that respect.

Melanie : We've got a question from  Jane.  She's saying that one of the attractive aspects of housing in Ipswich is also the size of the block.  Is there anything that's being done to preserve this aspect of the Ipswich heritage of our homes, because obviously that idea of the yards  - the front yard, the backyard, … yeah .

Daniel : As I said earlier we're trying to preserve the setting as well.  One of the major threats to the setting is block splitting.  Those sorts of things – there are lots of houses on two blocks, which unfortunately people have got rights to do those sorts of things. However in subdivisions there has been a recognition of traditional neighbourhoods not being subdivided. I don't know how much I can say, but that is being addressed in the new town plan that's being written at the minute, which will be out at the end of next year, and that's been recognized as an issue. We've seen what's happened in Brisbane with that, and you can just see how disruptive to a streetscape that can be, so just stay tuned on that one but we do acknowledge it, and I'm glad to say it's being addressed.

Melanie : Okay, we have a question from  Roberta who asks - does council take any work experience interns in the heritage team .  They're currently undertaking a  Master of Urban and Regional Planning and would love to learn more about Ipswich's heritage on the ground.  I can say Picture Ipswich definitely takes volunteers.

Daniel :  We do. We do have planning students who come and do interns, and I don't think, we haven't been approached by anyone to do heritage, but we would love to, because we do need more people doing it.  We have a team of two and a half, and both of the two are heading towards retirement fairly soon. We've practically given up hope of having anyone take over from us.  So yeah just write to Council, and probably to Peter Tabulo, who's the General Manager of Planning and Regulatory Services, and just enquire from him.  I'd encourage you to do it.

Melanie :  A question from Laura Whitmore, and Laura did a presentation for us a few months ago on the Williams Family, the builders.  So she's asking if any of the Williams houses in the Denmark Hill area are on the Heritage Register, so Almondsbury I'm assuming would be one of them?

Daniel :  Yes it probably is, but as part of the program of research that we've been doing, we've done … the previous speakers on this session have said about Will Haenke, the architects ...  We also acknowledge builders, and there's been little research done on them, so the project that we're doing is research into architects and builders of Ipswich. 

So the next we have - this all depends on what budget we get - but the builders are the next lot -I can't tell you which ones they are, but we have been looking at the ones who have been doing … early ones, around Denmark Hill and those sorts of things. So yeah, I think builders are the ones that are probably a bit of the unsung heroes in a lot of this because they're in control of designs, and builders, we've done some little bit of hearsay on Hancock who did some houses around the lower slopes of Denmark Hill, who had his own brickworks, those sorts of things.  He wrote on his buildings as well.  You need to get up into the roof and you'll find his name written, so he signed his buildings. So hopefully, yes we will do some work on the Williams.

Melanie : Well Laura's already done a great presentation of the Williams, so she's given you a very good headstart there.  (Oh great, thank you).  We have  … whoops  … oh too many questions are coming in and now I can't - I've just lost the one I was about to ask  - it's moved up the screen.  A question from Bev - she's referring to the houses along Limestone Street between Thorn and Gordon Streets.   She says they seem to have lost their context.  Is there any reason to preserve those little houses?

Daniel : Not everything in Ipswich has been protected.  There's been an acknowledgment of the fact that we can't save everything, and that the city has to move on, so those particular little cottages there, built onto the street are probably amongst the last of those in the city, and they have lost their context.  They're zoned high-density, I mean high - you could build up to 17 stories on those sites, so yes, they have lost their context and all I can say is we can't save everything.  We document things like that so that we do have visual as well as a sort of set of measured drawings of a lot of those things when applications are made to remove them because they're not covered by our character controls…sadly.

Melanie :  We have a follow-up from Laura who just says that she would like to know if we do include George Williams in research and builders, so we'll definitely keep you posted there, Laura.  We have a thank you from Jane.  She says thank you Jenny, really appreciate your sharing of wonderful knowledge of our houses.  And we have another thank you from Julie, and oh we have two Julies - two different Julies, who basically said the same thing - so thank you  from both of them, and only one of them was my mother.  We have somebody else who's saying that they could listen to your wisdom for a lot longer, so good news this has been recorded so you can replay it and listen again.

Daniel : I do like a good chat though.  I mean it's a fascinating field of expertise.  And it's lovely that there are so many people in Ipswich who are so interested in the housing that we have, the buildings that we have.  In the old times in Heritage you would fight, it would be a continuous fight you know and it would be sometimes just demoralizing.  It's very nice to have moved into a period of time where, although you know heritage is not the flavour of the month (which is probably a good thing), that there's an acceptance by a lot of people, that these things are of value and you don't have to fight.

I can remember being at university and shouting from the fences when the Bellevue was being demolished in the middle of the night.  Those battles just don't happen anymore, and it's sort of very nice that it doesn't happen.  However the younger generations have to realize that has happened, and that you can't let your side down.  It hasn't always been like this, so it's nice.  These sorts of things are fabulous and this whole Picture Ipswich thing that's been set up, it's amazing because it sort of made history and heritage far more interesting at telling stories about people's lives and why things happened and that sort of thing, rather than just dry building architectural styles and those sorts of things which bore me to tears as well.   And I can never understand it you know, you read some description of a building that especially if you read it - just the old descriptions that were on State Heritage Register citations where they'd go through and list - that this house here - large double gable with a circular window and you know, a heavy sort of thing, you just go “Well, you've got a picture there, so you know, you don't really have to describe these things anymore,” - just makes it far more interesting for everybody.

Melanie : Well it's so useful for people who are restoring a property to know what each thing is.  But you mentioned the Bellevue, and firstly, I'm glad that you were shouting from the fence to try and protect it because I was too young, but actually, oh no I wasn't quite born.  But I was born in time for Cloudland, and even though I was only about two years old.  So I was going to say a few months ago I went to a production which told the story of Cloudland.  And so this musical production was just up at the Civic Centre,  and I went with my mother because that's where my grandparents used to go all the time. And yeah, that was a really interesting way of telling the story of a building through that social history, and doing it in a very different kind of way so this you know singing and dancing musical production that sort of went through several generations who attended Cloudland. So there are some very exciting and new ways of telling the stories of buildings out there.

Daniel : That's right, and I don't want anybody to repeat this, but it does raise the issue of do you actually need the physical fabric of the building that the stories are still there without the fabric of the building? It's an interesting one because you can't actually be at the building all the time so you know … anyway that's an academic point for discussion,  not getting a reason for demolition of buildings.

Melanie : Yes, definitely don't demolish your buildings.

Daniel :  Well buildings do burn down as well.

Melanie : Yeah, we won't get into the burning down of buildings, but that is one of the values of photos and you mentioned the Picture Ipswich website, so a little plug - very very soon we will have a brand new Picture Ipswich website and it's all about that idea that the website is based around people actually sharing their stories with the photos, like what memories are provoked by those images, by the houses, by the events. Our chat has been going berserk as we've been chatting here.

Daniel : Hopefully nice comebacks.

Melanie : We've had a few more people ask about the Builders project.  Diane wanting to know about David McLaughlin 1850 to 1860.  I believe he was involved with the  Ipswich Grammar School  (not now), a few other places … so she's interested to know if he's going to be included.

Daniel : What I'd suggest people do is if they do have names of people and dates and those sort of things (we don't know everything) that if they could email us with that information.

Melanie : And Tanya has already added the email address to the chats for everybody.

Daniel : Yes, diligent.  Tanya Jen is my other colleague, as well as Joe Porter,  and they're both watching tonight like supportive little colleagues that they are.

Melanie :  So there are lots more thank yous.  Marianne Taylor, the house detective ,  says that she really enjoyed learning more about Ipswich houses, and how refreshing to hear the subdivision issue is being addressed out there.

Okay, we have actually gone well over time and we've only lost a couple of people, so that's good.  Most people are hanging about.  I do have one more question to ask you, and it's a little bit weird but that's okay.  I was reading that last week, the city of Melbourne Council have recognized the heritage value and sensory experience of the vegemite factory.  So they’ve recognized the value of a smell.  Here's my little bit weird question. Is there an iconic sensory experience in Ipswich?

Daniel : Yes, there is, there is.  And it's very topical at the moment.  I think it's the decomposition plants, the vegetation plants, out of Swanbank ... Sorry, but I guess that's an extreme example of  the pong that comes from the soil manufacturing out of … I'm sure  people watching will know.  There's not one I can think of, and I don't know how you'd preserve it either.  I mean, I do remember when there was the biscuit factory on North Quay.  That end of the city always smelled like … you could smell whether they were cooking Tim Tams or whatever. I guess they were generally associated with manufacturing, and I can't see what  …  I know I mean they're sort of like audio sound things like the whistle at the workshops, would have been one that lots of people knew, but I can't think of anything pleasant that would … if people can think of one, that’d be  great.

Melanie : We do have a couple of suggestions.  Firstly, can I just say I'm glad you didn't mention nightsoil.  Sorry I had to mention nightsoil at some point.  So, Linda was suggesting McMahon's Soft Drinks factory.

Daniel : Oh yes! that did have a particular smell, didn’t it?

Melanie : And it’s sort of begging us here not to list the landfill smell.  And I've just lost it again.  Sorry.  Somebody suggested Johnson's Lolly Factory.

Daniel : I guess you could sort of pump those out into the smells, like Subway do, into the realm, but I mean it's interesting. I mean I think there's also that sort of smell of soot from steam engines when they were in town.  I remember as a kid going to town there'll be that smell of steam engines.

Melanie : Well maybe for the next Galvanized Festival we should start to look at how we can bottle the extractions…

I'd like to say thank you Danny for tonight.  We've really enjoyed it.  And thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom about Ipswich heritage and architectural styles.  And to all of our attendees, thank you for coming, we really appreciate your feedback as always, so a short survey will be emailed to you very soon.  If you could complete that and just let us know how we went.

And as part of Galvanized this week, I am very very excited to be able to share with you some of our a special sneak peek at the brand new Picture Ipswich website.  So we have some sessions coming up this week, the two at Ipswich Central tomorrow and Thursday are booked up I think, but we do have some spaces for the Rosewood sessions at the Rosewood library on the 3rd of September, so if you would like a sneak peek of the new Picture Ipswich website, and if you would like to be able to start using it about a month before everybody else does, come along! Okay, I’m really very excited I want to share it with everybody.

Galvanized started on the 27th of August and runs until the 5th of September. I have been to a number of events including the launch, the carrying view treasures that the library did, the woollen mills tour which Danny led, the Ipswich and miniatures which is at the railway workshops, and I also saw the RSL museum on Sunday.  Tonight's Chasing our Past and I am very much looking forward to the living history tour at the Ipswich cemetery on Friday night from digital theatre.  So, there are still heaps of events between now and Sunday so please check them out.  And for everybody just again, thank you, for coming tonight so I hope you enjoyed it.  Thank you.  That's okay there you go no one's gonna say thank you for inviting me on to speak. I can be reached by for the heritage advisor service by the number on the website and it is a free service it is a free service and um the only thing that council really offers free for heritage owners is me unfortunately so.

Anyway I do give some good advice sometimes, so you can tell your friends.  Okay, well tell everybody Heritage Advisor Service. You've now heard Danny you know he's an authority on the subject so please book in and please check out other Galvanized events and other Ipswich library events from the website.  So thank you everybody, we'll see you next time.