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an architect,Hybrid a missionary, and their Beauty improbable desires Newell Platten Contents Introduction viii Part one ....................................................................... 1 Marnoo to Modernism 3 2 The grand tour 14 3 Settling down 37 4 Dickson and Platten: the early years 51 5 Greece 62 6 Dickson and Platten: the later years 91 7 Town planning, citizens’ campaign – and Monarto 107 8 The South Australian Housing Trust 117 9 Interlude 129 Part two ....................................................................... 1 Ancestors 135 2 The Jewel of the Pacific 143 3 Land of childhood dreaming 169 4 Southern sojourn 197 5 Volcano bride 204 6 Prelude to war 220 7 Rabaul: a town no more 233 8 Last music 253 Part three ..................................................................... Epilogue 270 Acknowledgments, bibliography and photographs 282 Index 287 Map of Bismarck Archipelago Introduction y father’s final moments in a church before a handful of mourners, none of whom had prepared a eulogy, left me with a profound Msense of anti-climax, almost distress that a life that had been lived in exotic places, had been idealistic, adventurous, selfless and in many ways exemplary should pass so unremarked. On retiring from my own professional career I wanted to make good the omission and give voice to his silence, so I have spent many hours tapping out the story of his life. Perhaps not wanting to suffer a similar if more appropriate exit, I wrote my own memoir. Kind people read them, making various suggestions. One friend told me everyone was writing schoolday stories; no one wanted to read about missionaries nowadays, but perhaps, a document on my years as an architect, and his in the mission field, might work if I identified the necessary unifying themes. This idea accorded well with my wish in both accounts to understand the connections between inheritance, happenstance and performance. viii I am after all my father’s son, so unifying themes were not difficult to find, despite the differences in our lives. Firstly there is Methodism, which for my father was belief, vocation and lifestyle. For me it was harness to a set of principles, then a lifestyle burden to be shrugged off, and finally purveyor of a fairy tale. If you ask what I believe in, I respond: atheism with leanings to a form of pantheism, in which the devil is capitalism, an insidious operator who by showering us with riches has seduced us into debasing the source of our spiritual wellbeing; that is to say, nature. However, it is practical Methodism that is relevant here, particularly issues of social justice and reform. Methodism is inherently a religion of reform. I happened into architecture at a time when two reform movements – Modernism and town planning – were at issue. My father wanted nothing less than to reform a society. y father and my mother lived their most fulfilling years in the islands of New Britain and New Ireland, the two largest of Mhundreds of islands forming the Bismarck Archipelago, stretching like an arrowhead from the northeast coast of New Guinea to the equator. These are steamy mountainous islands, subject to earthquakes and volcanic upheavals, clad for the most part in dense rain forest. Humans might have entered the islands over 50,000 years ago. Coastal areas supported hunter–fisher–gardener lifestyles. People shaped domestic tools such as hoes, scoops, mortars and pestles from stone, bone, shell and wood. From forest trees they made canoes, and from reeds, leaves and bark they made baskets, nets and mats. Also, from these natural resources they shaped the spears, axes, shields and clubs of war. As basic needs of food, clothing and shelter were easily satisfied, people were able to create rich spiritual lives, which they transmitted down the generations through speech, dance, music and art. Cultures were based on animistic beliefs in spirits that lived in nature. These spirits could be harmful if offended or munificent if approached correctly: sorcerers and sorcery supplied the medium between humanity and spirits. People believed sickness and death were caused by sorcery; treatment involved counter-sorcery or rituals to root out guilty persons and take revenge. Life was never secure and usually short. The first Methodist missionary in New Guinea was a wiry, whiskery, missionary–adventurer named George Brown. He arrived at Port Hunter in the Duke of York Islands on a mission boat named John Wesley in August 1875. With him were a photographer, a naturalist, five married Fijian missionaries and their wives, three single Fijian missionaries and a boy from the islands, as interpreter. Equipment included a steam launch named Henry Reed. Brown purchased land at Kinavanua, on Port Hunter’s western headland, from village elders and began building a house. ix Once established at Port Hunter, Brown explored places the Henry Reed could reach at a rate that left him rarely still, putting ashore at villages, meeting chiefs, handing out cloth, beads and tobacco, talking to people through interpreters and arranging the stationing of teachers where he deemed the prospects good. During four years of active service he visited villages spread along more than 500 kilometres of the New Britain coastline and over 200 kilometres of that of New Ireland, and he crossed the latter island twice. He studied the region’s flora and fauna, faced death many times on land and sea and took part in a reprisal expedition that saw him charged with manslaughter. He arrived in a country where no man walked around without a bundle of spears; when he left in January 1881, 2000 converts worshipped in twenty churches. Some 500 men from villages in the islands he had visited assembled to say farewell. These achievements cost him dearly, two of his children dying at Port Hunter and his own health wrecked. Colonisation began in 1884, when Britain and Germany resolved competing interests in the eastern end of New Guinea with an arbitrary east–west line through the central highlands. Britain took the section close to Australia, while Germany declared the Bismarck Archipelago and the northeast portion of mainland New Guinea a German protectorate. In 1906, Britain named her colony Papua. The privately owned New Guinea Company ran the German protectorate until 1899, when the Imperial German Government took over and moved the administrative centre from Finschhafen, on the mainland, to Herbertshohe (now Kokopo) at the northern end of New Britain, soon after appointing Albert Hahl governor of the new colony. Hahl persuaded the government to build a new administrative centre at the foot of a group of volcanoes, both active and extinct, at the sheltered innermost reach of Blanche Bay. He drained mangrove swamps, established a botanic garden, laid out broad tree-lined streets and named the place Rabaul, meaning mangrove, in the language of the Tolai people who lived there. In 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, Australian forces occupied Rabaul. In 1919 Australia was granted control of the colony under a League of Nations mandate. Rabaul’s subsequent short history of occupation and dispossession, war, violence, bloodshed and destruction is so tumultuous, its presence so powerful that I think of Rabaul as a femme fatale, a bewitching beauty with a demonic heart. Every attempt at possession ended in catastrophe. Today most of the twice-built town is an ashen waste after a devastating volcanic eruption in 1994, Kokopo again the administrative centre. Yet the original inhabitants drift back in defiance of governmental neglect. Tavurvur volcano smoulders away. Tourist ships call to soak up the magic. x Rabaul harbour 2013, Tavurvur on the far right y parents went to Rabaul in 1927, my father to serve a Methodist Mission that was fifty-two years old, its books recording 313 Mchurch buildings, eleven ministers, 277 indigenous pastor–teachers, 509 lay preachers, 9,875 scholars in day schools, and 39,020 members and adherents of the Church. The Mission could also boast of its role in providing rudimentary health services and eliminating intertribal enmities. However, these achievements had come at a cost. In spreading Christianity, most missionaries did their utmost to eradicate pre-Christian beliefs and practices connected with social magic and sorcery, not realising they were ‘ripping cogs out of working social mechanisms’. For want of ‘positive substitution’ (my father’s words), the indigenous people, already suffering government-sanctioned commercial exploitation of their land and labour, lost confidence in their old traditions, with debilitating consequences for village life. My father’s missionary career became distinguished by his capacity to recognise the ensuing malaise, understand the reasons and seek solutions. Unusually among missionaries he devoted much of his time to documenting the vanishing cultures and ways in which they equipped the natives in their struggle for existence. In a post-war article he expressed the hope that ‘the best in our way of life will blend with their way of life so that there may yet emerge a thoroughly Christian culture of a hybrid beauty and vigour all of its own and which will blossom abundantly in the waste places of New Guinea’. To find beauty by blending traditions with the new: this became an ideal I shared with my father as my architectural thinking evolved. Modernist architecture is mostly associated with the International Style’s plain boxy office buildings built in the second half of the twentieth century. My own work, as developed in collaboration with architect Bob Dickson, xi took a direction that combined the theories and practices of Modernism with the crafts and ambiences of rusticity, a hybrid that became recognised as a short-lived but identifiable South Australian style. My other claim to fellowship with the hybrid is more abstract, for it relates to a desire that cities should somehow unite our contemporary, machine-assisted lifestyles with the human scale, vitality and atmosphere found in old- time towns and precincts.

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