Edmund Blacket, Medievalism and the Gothic in the Colony

Celeste van Gent

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History.

University of Sydney

December 2020 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. John Gagne for your expertise and guidance, and always making time for long and insightful Zoom discussions. I would like to extend my thanks to the

University of Sydney’s Archives and Rare Books library for unearthing material for me throughout the year and scanning sources for me during lockdown. Thank you to Jayden and my family for your encouragement and enduring support. Abstract

Edmund Blacket (1817-83) was an English-born Gothic Revival architect. This thesis uses the critical framework of medievalism to identify the function of multiple timeframes, real and imagined, within the Gothic style. It traces Blacket’s youth sketching Gothic ruins in the Yorkshire countryside, his construction of quintessentially English churches in the Colony of New South

Wales, and his grand designs for the University of Sydney’s first buildings. This journey shows how

Blacket’s use of the Gothic style spoke at once to a romanticised medieval past and the fragmented colonial present, as well as anticipating the Colony’s future. Contents

List of Illustrations 5

Introduction

Inventing the Gothic 7

Chapter One

Blacket and the Gothic Ruin 17

Chapter Two

Bridges to ‘old England’ 36

Chapter Three

‘The growth of ages’ 61

Conclusion

‘Imperishable stone’ 85

Bibliography 92 Illustrations

Figures

1 Blacket’s ‘T’ shape buildings within the University of Sydney’s quadrangle 8

1.1 Locations of Gothic buildings Blacket visited in Yorkshire 17

1.2 A painting of Victoria and Albert in medieval costume for their ball 21

1.3 Blacket’s sketches from June 8, 1838 22

1.4 Blacket’s sketches at Rievaulx Abbey 23

1.5 John Sell Cotman’s sketch at Rievaulx Abbey 24

1.6 Turner’s watercolour of Rievaulx Abbey 24

1.7 Sophia Gray’s traced sketches of medieval fonts 25

1.8 Blacket’s sketches from Easby Abbey 27

1.9 Blacket’s detailed sketch of a tomb at Lanercost Priory 30

1.10 Blacket’s sketch of a smaller tomb at Lanercost Priory 31

1.11 Blacket’s notation of style at Selby Abbey 32

1.12 All Saints’ Church, Leamington Spa, a Gothic Revival church 34

1.13 All Saints’ Church, Newton-on-Ouse near York, a Gothic Revival church 35

2.1 Blacket’s representation of St. John’s Church, Parramatta 41

2.2 St. Mark’s Church, Darling Point designed by Blacket in 1848 45

2.3 An engraving of Holy Trinity Church in Lincolnshire 46

2.4 Tower likeness to St. Mark’s seen in Brandon’s plate of Achurch Church 46

2.5 Tracery in Sharpe’s Treatise that matches Blacket’s design for St. Mark’s 46

2.6 St. Philip’s Church, Church Hill designed by Blacket in 1848 47

2.7 Tracery at St. Mary’s, Oxford published in Bloxam’s text 47

2.8 Blacket’s tracery design for St. Philip’s main eastern window 47

5 2.9 Brandon’s plate of Martham Church, Norfolk 48

2.10 Decorated Gothic celebrated at St. Andrew’s Church, Heckington 52

2.11 Blacket’s sketch of Decorated Gothic tracery at Carlisle Cathedral 52

2.12 St. Paul’s Church, Redfern designed by Blacket in 1848 in the Decorated style 53

2.13 Brandon’s plate of Southfleet Church, Kent 53

2.14 Map of Sydney in 1854 59

3.1 The main buildings looking on the Great Hall 61

3.2 Interior detail of the Great Hall looking toward the Oxford Window 62

3.3 The main buildings and clock tower 63

3.4 The western facade of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge and its great window 67

3.5 Westminster Abbey’s Lady Chapel commissioned by Henry VII 75

3.6 Cloistered quadrangle of Magdalen College, Oxford 75

3.7 Trinity College Chapel with large Perpendicular style windows 76

3.8 Elizabethan style at the Second Court at St. John’s College, Cambridge 77

3.9 Pinnacles adorning the quadrangle of New College, Oxford 79

3.10 Oriel window at Balliol College, Oxford 79

3.11 The Great Hall’s arched windows in contrast to squared-framed windows 80

3.12 The Oxford Window on the Great Hall’s western end 82

3.13 Detail of the Royal Window showing Queen Victoria in the centre 83

3.14 Blacket’s plan for the Great Hall’s doorway 84

4.1 Interior sketch of the Great Hall from the Illustrated London News 85

4.2 Stained glass light of Queen Victoria from the Illustrated London News 86

4.3 The south range bordered by cloisters with MacLaurin Hall on the right 89

4.4 Heraldic ornamentation on the Nicholson Gateway 89

4.5 Blacket standing by the fireplace in the Great Hall during its construction 91

6 Introduction

Inventing the Gothic

The favourite part of my drive from Sydney to Mudgee, a regular foray home to visit family, is the stretch of country from Lithgow onwards. The narrow road winds along uninterrupted. Not far along it, in the distance, you can see the pinnacled tops of a stone tower peeking through the surrounding pines. The sight has always drawn my eye, for it reminds me of elsewhere, and

‘elsewhen.’1 The church’s sculpted stone and the pine’s dark green foliage stick out from the faded yellow-grey tones of the surrounding bush. Its association with a rainswept landscape, moss- covered stone and the ghost of a medieval past is entirely transporting. Particularly as this trip is usually taken in the glaring summer sun, with the dry-dust heat of an Australian drought making the air-conditioner in my car work overtime. Having driven past this sight countless times, earlier this year I turned off the Castlereagh Highway and wandered towards it. I pulled up to the church, and hopped out. I could feel the heat radiating off the bitumen as I crossed the road before my shoes crunched onto the dead grass of the churchyard. The square tower, its crenellated battlements, delicate tracery and gargoyles that stared down at me felt utterly incongruous. A nearby information board revealed first its name, the Church of St. John the Evangelist, and its maker: Edmund Blacket.

Edmund Blacket (1817-83) was an English-born Gothic Revival architect responsible for hundreds of buildings across colonial New South Wales, many of them Gothic style churches. The University of Sydney’s main buildings (1854-62) are the most celebrated of his works—the original north-east facing ‘T’ shape that includes the Great Hall and the adjacent wing fronted by the clock tower (fig.

1 Helen Dell, “What to Do with Nostalgia in Medieval and Medievalism Studies?,” Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2, no. 2 (November 2018): 288. 7 1).2 Blacket was born into a middle-class family in Southwark, and worked both in a linen mill and as a railway surveyor in Yorkshire, where he toured nearby medieval ruins in his free time.3 Blacket did so until he was twenty-five when he married Sarah Mease and with her, emigrated to Sydney in

1842, never to return. Blacket did not receive formal architectural training in England, nor did he build there, but upon arriving in Sydney he began to design almost immediately. Blacket was known as a devout Anglican and held the position of Diocesan Architect to the Church of England for several years in Australia, as well as Colonial and University Architect respectively.

Figure 1. Blacket’s ‘T’ shape buildings within the University of Sydney’s quadrangle outlined in yellow. (PSG Holdings. Aerial View of The University of Sydney’s Quadrangle. n.d. Photograph. https://www. psgholdings.com.au/sydney-university.)

Blacket’s life spanned the Gothic Revival movement, and his work revealed the influences of wider historical forces like Romanticism and industrialisation, colonialism and empire, and reforms in the Anglican church and university education. This thesis explores the role these contexts played in Blacket’s understanding of the Gothic, and assesses the visions and ideologies that Blacket

2 Clifford Turney, Ursula Bygott, and Peter Chippendale, Australia’s First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 1 1850-1939 (Sydney: University of Sydney in association with Hale & Iremonger, 1991), 443. The rest of the quadrangle was built later, and not by Blacket.

3 Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket 1817-1883 (Sydney: The National Trust of Australia, 1983), 8. 8 brought into the design of the University of Sydney. It explores the tension between Blacket’s youth in England, where he indulged in its medieval history through Gothic ruins, and his sudden emigration to Australia, never to see an original Gothic building again. Unfathomably distant in time and space from medieval England, Blacket recreated it anew in the Colony. Unavoidably, he participated in the colonial project, and his Gothic constructions scattered over New South Wales testify to his devotion to the Church of England and England itself.

I was already a few months into my research on Blacket by the time I happened upon the Church of St. John the Evangelist. The experience was the first of many as I began to notice Blacket’s legacy written in stone across New South Wales—estranged yet naturalised monuments to a vision of the English Middle Ages. The discordance between colonial Australia and medieval England created by the Gothic Revival is the foundation for this thesis, grounded in ideas of the medieval and medievalism, fiction and fabrication, and colonialism and the Gothic style.

The history of the Gothic Revival often appears simply as a Victorian fad. Using the intersections between medievalism and colonialism, this thesis addresses the ideological projects behind the conservative history of the Gothic by shining a critical light on what is generally a formulaic approach to architectural history. The history of the University of Sydney’s buildings is similarly straightforward as well as sparse.4 In place of formulaic readings, this thesis will explore how time worked through Blacket’s Gothic and how the memory of the Gothic functioned, especially through understandings and misunderstandings of the medieval. The workings of historical mediation presented in colonial Gothic buildings underlines the Gothic as a contested category of nineteenth- century modernity. The style was not a given, it was a site and product of dispute, and was especially contested in Australia where there was no medieval foundation for the Gothic.

4 Bertha McKenzie, Stained Glass and Stone (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989); Turney, Bygott, and Chippendale, Australia’s First. Though straightforward both texts have been useful guides to the buildings’ history. 9 Using time as a conceptual framework reveals how Blacket and the Gothic trafficked in multiple timeframes: past, present and future, real and imagined. These timeframes were in a state of flux, constantly informing one another. As such, time in relation to the Gothic style was heterogeneous.

This thesis demonstrates the ‘temporal heterogeneity’ of the Gothic style through the eye of Blacket and his work, culminating in the University’s main buildings where he used specific ideas of the medieval to produce a vision of the future.5

Chapters One, Two and Three broadly take past, present and future respectively as their main conceptual categories. Chapter One traces the Gothic Revival’s beginnings rooted in Blacket’s shared Romantic sensibility that was dedicated to an imagined medieval past. It uses Blacket’s sketchbooks to trace his journey across England’s actual and historical landscape as he toured

Gothic ruins. Chapter Two explores how Blacket carried this sentiment to the Colony. In seeking to materially recreate the romanticised medieval past there, Blacket’s Gothic came to represent the colonial present, an identity defined by a sense of Englishness both medieval and modern. It takes

Blacket’s library of church buildings and architectural texts to explore his use of the Gothic as an idealised bridge to ‘old England’ and its destructive consequences upon Australia’s Indigenous population. Chapter Three examines the University of Sydney’s main buildings and how Blacket’s

Gothic looked back on the English past and embodied the colonial present as well as gazing forwards. It shows how the University of Sydney’s Gothic dealt simultaneously with a romanticised heritage and an idealised modernity. It was heavily influenced by the architectural and institutional legacies of Oxford and Cambridge University, famed for their medieval quadrangles. Blacket envisioned the University of Sydney’s own quadrangle as a project that would spool forward over centuries, as such, Blacket used the medieval to signal the imagined future.

By drawing out the temporal heterogeneity of Blacket’s Gothic buildings, this thesis exposes the significant role the Gothic played in the conceptualisation of the Colony. It reveals Blacket’s Gothic

5 Carolyn Dinshaw, “All Kinds of Time,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35, no. 1 (2013): 4. 10 as both a fascinating and troubling product of a colonial era—something far more than an architectural fashion, the Colony was envisioned and constructed through the Gothic.

The multi-temporality of the Gothic explored in this thesis is conceptually underpinned by the idea of the fragment. The fragment is drawn from my study of Blacket’s sketchbooks of Gothic ruins mentioned earlier. Blacket’s illustrations visually isolate features of Gothic ruins and dismantle structures already in an incomplete state. Notions of the incomplete, the fractured, the elusive and the constructed (as pieces of a greater whole) drawn from these illustrations establish the idea of the fragment. The fragment as an analytical lens deepens our understanding of the

Gothic Revival; it illuminates how the Gothic related to a fabricated medieval past, structures

Blacket’s dislocated colonial experience and fractured design process, and exposes his buildings as a melange of original, imitated and ideal Gothic. Blacket’s Gothic, especially as showcased in the

University of Sydney, was a palimpsest of multiple times and spaces, fictions and realities.

We will now turn to a suite of concepts that frame this thesis, and return to Blacket in Chapter One.

These conceptual categories include the medieval and medievalism, the Gothic, and the colonial.

The European medieval era is the bedrock for this thesis, and ‘medieval’ is not a neutral word.

Medieval, in its primary sense, relates to the ‘Middle Ages’, a term popularised in order to contrast the ‘Renaissance’ with a ‘Dark Ages.’6 The Middle Ages were, and still are, synonymous with barbarism and ignorance. In contrast to this notion of the ‘Dark Ages’, the nineteenth century saw the popularisation of ‘medieval’, a word that Clare Simmons argues was ‘a Romantic-era invention that reflects a new attitude to the past.’7 Simmons illustrates how ‘medieval’ was drawn from the

‘heroic’ and ‘marvellous’ world of medieval romance.8 Yet these terms have become

6 Elizabeth Emery, “Medievalism and the Middle Ages,” in Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 79.

7 Clare A. Simmons, “Medievalism: its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Fugelso, Defining Medievalism(s), 29.

8 Simmons, 34. 11 interchangeable: ‘medieval’ is also defined as ‘having a quality (such as cruelty) associated with the

Middle Ages.’9 Thus medieval literature specialist David Matthews’ categories of ‘Romantic’ and

‘Grotesque’ characterisations are useful.10 Matthews describes the ‘Romantic’ medieval as a

‘reinvention’ that ‘powerfully and positively revalued’ the medieval past.11 This positive valence contrasts with the ‘Grotesque’ medieval, which represented a ‘barbarous other’ of Catholic superstition and ignorance (at least from the Anglophone perspective this thesis explores).12 These characterisations generally ran parallel to each other, but sometimes crossed over, especially in the colonial setting where Romantic characterisations of pious settlers were used to disguise the

Grotesque reality of colonial dispossession.13 The Gothic style flourished from the twelfth to the sixteenth century but is associated with the medieval in general, and thus also invested with these conflicting ideas. These categories guided Blacket’s approach to the Gothic in his youth, and underpinned his career in Australia.

The tensions freighted onto ‘medieval’ and the ‘Middle Ages’ evidence the need for more objective terminology, but the discussion of substitutes is likely to be inconclusive. The period of the Middle Ages in this thesis is not held fast by dates, but delves into the ‘premodern’ English past, as considered by Blacket and his contemporaries, that stretched from the Fall of Rome until at least the end of the sixteenth century. It is important to address how these terms—ones that signify constructed ideas of the medieval past—are not readily distinguishable from what scholars now call

‘medievalism.’

9 “Medieval,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, accessed November 26, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/medieval.

10 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 15.

11 Matthews, 27.

12 Matthews 3, 63.

13 See Louise D’Arcens, “From Holy War to Border Skirmish: The Colonial Chivalry of Sydney’s First Professors,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (October 2000): 519. 12 Medievalism resists easy definition but is essential for understanding the multi-temporality of the

Gothic as it deals with historical reception and the layering of times, real and imagined. Tom

Shippey, an authority on medieval literature, puts forward the most expansive yet succinct definition of medievalism as:

Any post-medieval attempt to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle Ages,

for the modern world, in any of many different media; especially in academic usage, the study of

the development and significance of such attempts.14

Shippey’s definition points to the fictional qualities of medievalism. As stated, the medieval is largely an idea detached from the historical Middle Ages, but it is uniquely poised for fictionalisation due to its ambiguity; literature specialists Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl argue that the medieval possesses an ‘in-between’ quality, that it ‘is neither one era (ancient) nor another

(modern) but something amorphous and unclear.’15 Such ambiguity helps to explain why the medieval has been such a popular resource for historical fiction and fantasy—especially in the

Gothic Revival.

The Gothic Revival is an example of medievalism in material form. It was a construct that traded in multiple time frames: the ‘real’ Middle Ages, ideas of the medieval, and ideas of the post- medieval. Critic Carolyn Dinshaw memorably recognised the ‘the multiplicity of temporal systems’ essential to medievalism that ‘is not linear at all’—ideas this thesis rests on.16 The heterogeneity of time that Dinshaw reveals draws our eye to the way medievalism, the Gothic in particular, is both

14 Tom Shippey, “Medievalisms and Why They Matter,” in Fugelso, Defining Medievalism(s), 45; See E.L. Risden, “Medievalists, Medievalism, and Medievalismists: The Middle Ages, Protean Thinking, and the Opportunistic Teacher- Scholar,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII, ed. Karl Fugelso (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), 45. Medievalism by nature is interdisciplinary, and this thesis will call upon a variety of authorities.

15 Tison Pugh, and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 5.

16 Dinshaw, “All Kinds of Time,” 4, 6. 13 fiction and reality—in other words how it has been fabricated.17 The medieval is a period that is

‘fluid’, ‘unstable’ and ‘regarded as historical yet also mythic.’18

Medievalism remains elusively and frustratingly in the fragmentary ‘middle’ of real and imagined which has consequences for Blacket’s vision of the Gothic that navigates the historical and mythic. Pugh and Weisl most clearly articulate the dynamic that underlies this thesis’ analysis: that medievalism is ‘a methodology for understanding the production of historical and cultural fantasies out of the fragments of real material.’19 They remind us how fragments—as pieces used to construct a larger whole, as shards both historical and fictional—allow us to see the trans-temporal and trans-spatial within Blacket’s Gothic.

As hinted at in the incongruity I experienced at St. John’s, concepts of the medieval function differently in locations outside of Europe where there was never a ‘Middle Age.’ Imposing the medieval on ‘New Worlds’ deliberately mobilises categories of the Romantic and the Grotesque.

The work of historian Kathleen Davis is essential to the consideration of the medieval in colonial environments. Davis’ text, Periodisation and Sovereignty, elucidates the teleology whereby colonisers considered themselves Romantic and thus ‘modern’, and the colonised as Grotesque and thus ‘backward.’20 The Romantic also masked the Grotesque nature of colonialism, where quaint,

Picturesque images like Blacket’s Gothic parish churches disguised a violent colonial reality.

Candace Barrington’s work on global medievalism similarly argues that the ‘European’ medieval must be reconsidered as ‘one of many possible pasts.’21 The notion of multiple pasts positions this

17 Dinshaw, “All Kinds of Time,” 23.

18 Louise D’Arcens, Andrew Lynch, and Stephanie Trigg, “Medievalism, Nationalism, Colonialism: Introduction,” Australian Literary Studies 26, no.3 (October 2011): 4.

19 Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms, 6.

20 Kathleen Davis, Periodisation and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularisation Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 20; See Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, “Introduction,” in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe, eds. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2.

21 Candace Barrington, “Global Medievalism and Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 191. 14 thesis as part of a larger ambition to ‘relinquish’ the measure of Western European standards.22 This thesis shows how essential Eurocentrism and ideas of Europe’s own past was to the colonial imaginary, and in academia too, as this thesis attempts in part to present an Indigenous history of

Australian Gothic. Similarly, we must remain aware of the conservative and paternalistic nature of nineteenth-century medievalism. The world we dive into was the elite, white and gendered world of church and university. The Gothic in Australia traded in fiction as the past it was employed to evoke by colonists like Blacket was in so many ways false, illusory, even corrosive: Louise D’Arcens reminds us that the idea of an ‘antipodean medieval past’ is an ‘impossible history.’23

Blacket’s Gothic Revival buildings were predicated on an imagined history. The Revival was rooted in a desire for what Chris Brooks describes as ‘the lost world of the European Middle

Ages.’24 Brooks connects this search for the romanticised past to ideas of modernity by signalling that it was used to conceptualise ‘how individuals and societies understood their own place in their own history.’25 Blacket and other Revival architects participated in this search in several phases.

The Revival transitioned from loose pastiche, to archaeological imitation, to originality and novelty.

This thesis will only focus on the early part of Blacket’s career until the building of the University in the late 1850s, when the imitation of Gothic originals was in vogue, not creativity or innovation.

Architectural historian Michael Lewis illustrates how the Gothic, ‘condemned’ as the ‘apex of barbarism and irrationality’ was ‘rehabilitated’ in the nineteenth century ‘at first playfully, then seriously and finally dogmatically.’26 This thesis will trace this process in Blacket, especially his

‘serious’ and ‘dogmatic’ approach to church and university design. The Revival was accompanied

22 Barrington, “Global Medievalism,” 191.

23 Louise D’Arcens, “Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox,” in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 177.

24 Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), 4.

25 Brooks, 4.

26 Michael Lewis, The Gothic Revival (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 7; See Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: John Murray, 1995), 11. 15 by a wealth of architectural literature that categorised the Gothic in high and low forms, and as

Early English, Decorated English and Perpendicular—terms that will become familiar over the next three chapters.

Whilst Gothic architecture is undeniably at the heart of this thesis, it will differ from many accounts of the Revival by taking a richly historical approach, focusing on one architect and the ideological processes that culminated in a single set of buildings. Many architectural accounts also include value judgements, particularly on ecclesiastical architecture, denouncing certain features as

‘disappointing’ or ‘feeble.’27 This approach assesses whether Blacket was a ‘good’ architect or not, but does not meaningfully contribute to contemporary understandings of Blacket and so will not be considered.

Furthermore, Blacket has only been the subject of three major biographical works—one, by Nick

Vine Hall is a family history and lacks academic rigour, another by Morton Herman appraises his career in Australia, and another by Joan Kerr evaluates Blacket astutely but mostly according to an architectural assessment of his buildings.28 The most recent of these was published in 1983. This thesis will bring Blacket into the twenty-first century in a nuanced historical and conceptual analysis. It is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of Australian medievalism with meaningful implications for colonial studies, as well as considering afresh the many Gothic constructions that still stand across New South Wales.

27 H. G. Woffenden, “Architecture in New South Wales, 1840 to 1900” (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1966), 71-2.

28 Nick Vine Hall, My Name Is Blacket (Belrose: N.J. Vine Hall, 1983); Morton Herman, The Blackets: An Era of Australian Architecture (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963); Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect. 16 Chapter One

Blacket and the Gothic Ruin

In 1837, when Edmund Blacket was twenty-years old, he lived in Yorkshire, working first in his brother’s linen mill in Stokesley and later as a surveyor for the Stockton and Darlington Railway

Company.1 Blacket’s working life was steeped in industry yet his free time was spent indulging in a far more Romantic pursuit, touring the Yorkshire moors and sketching the medieval remnants of abbeys, churches and castles that peppered the landscape. At least two of his sketchbooks from these trips survive, and show that from 1838-41, Blacket took many trips in the warmer months of the year, visiting and sketching cathedrals like Durham and Carlisle, the remains of castles like

Richmond and Naworth, and the ruined abbeys of Rievaulx, Easby and Egglestone (fig.1.1).2 The world Gothic ruins offered in place of industry enticed Blacket into the countryside, and nursed an

Figure 1.1. Locations of Gothic buildings Blacket visited in and around Yorkshire. (Map by author.)

1 Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket 1817-1883 (Sydney: The National Trust of Australia, 1983), 8.

2 Nick Vine Hall, My Name Is Blacket (Belrose: N.J. Vine Hall, 1983), 182. Five of Blacket’s sketchbooks exist today: the two featured in this chapter are held in the University of Sydney’s Rare Books library, and date June 8, 1838-June 16, 1840, and August 5-November 28, 1841. Another is held in the State Library of NSW, and dates August 9-December 19, 1842. Nick Vine Hall’s records that two others exist in private collections, one dates July 1, 1840-August 9, 1841 and includes sketches of York Minster, Mount Grace Priory and Winchester Cathedral, and another dating from 1833. 17 idealised re-imagining of the medieval past born from his experience of these architectural fragments. Using Blacket’s sketchbooks, this chapter will trace Blacket’s experience of the medieval fragment and how it influenced his perceptions of the Gothic as a style and the medieval past more broadly.

The existing historiography on Blacket barely addresses his life in England, presumably because he never built there.3 Yet Blacket’s experience established his dedication to the Gothic style that would dominate his architectural career. Blacket’s sketchbooks have been neglected by the historical record as well, but they were the foundation of his architectural eye and design process.

They evidence the processes of Romanticism and the Picturesque that encouraged Blacket’s architectural and antiquarian interest in Gothic ruins. Blacket was a man of the industrial present, and through his sketchbooks we can see how he escaped into a jarringly quiet and other-worldly landscape by touring gothic remnants. I will outline the Romantic sensibility and the Picturesque before returning to Blacket’s sketchbooks.

Blacket’s Romantic sensibility grew, broadly speaking, from the social dislocation, natural destruction and religious fragmentation caused by industrialisation in England that spurred widespread desire for an idealised medieval past, one that was socially cohesive, agrarian and pious.4 The desire for a romanticised past went hand in hand with an antiquarian interest in British history: an archaeological concern driven by nationalist impulses that revalued ethnic traditions and

3 Morton Herman, The Blackets: An Era of Australian Architecture (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), 1; Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 8; Brian Andrews, Australian Gothic: The Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2001), 45; G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2013), 32.

4 Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 55; Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: the Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 3-6; For an illuminating discussion on the misconceptions of nostalgia and Romanticism see Kevis Goodman, “Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195-6. 18 folklore, and sought its material remains.5 The act of exploring Gothic ruins was a cornerstone of the Romantic sensibility that used them to imaginatively engage with remnants of the medieval past: ruins were objects that prompted ‘recognitions dim and faint’ and ‘gleams of half-extinguished thought’, as Wordsworth famously mused on Tintern Abbey.6 As Wordsworth, Blacket and others pursued the romanticised past into the countryside, they created well-worn paths to scenic parts of

Britain like Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley.7 This experience was framed by the re-appreciation of the medieval romance, headed by Walter Scott and his widely-read Waverley Novels (1814–32) which popularised an aesthetic view of the medieval as a chivalric time of knights and heroism, celebrating piety, prayer, the rural and the rustic.8 The Gothic Revival was the Romantic sensibility rendered in material form, and it dominated ecclesiastical architecture. The nature of the desired pious past materialised in Revival churches was contested and we will see how Blacket navigated the profound tension between England’s professed Anglicanism and a medieval Catholic aesthetic of worship.

Blacket’s Romantic sensibility was matched by the Picturesque as a way of seeing and representing the landscape. The Picturesque valued the contrast between wild and tame, and manipulated subjects in order to achieve this stylistic effect.9 It also provided a visual escape from the geometry and machinery of the industrial world, and favoured Gothic ruins as a subject matter.

It invited viewers to see wild landscapes and the rugged nature of ruins as a contained and stylised

5 Rosemary Hill, “‘Proceeding like Guy Faux’: The Antiquarian Investigation of St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster, 1790–1837,” Architectural History 59 (2016): 254; David Blayney Brown, Romanticism (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 199; See Tom Duggett, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 8.

6 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,’ in Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (London: Penguin, 2004), 63.

7 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 83.

8 Michael Lewis, The Gothic Revival (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 50-51; Chandler, A Dream of Order, 12.

9 Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 3. 19 picture.10 Ann Bermingham argues how the Picturesque ‘smoothed nature’s confusing complexity into a simple formula’—artists controlled its wildness and irregularity into something aesthetically pleasing.11

The Picturesque way of seeing applied to landscape painting as much as it applied to the

‘landscape’ of medieval history. The Picturesque encouraged a stylistic manipulation of the past and invited viewers to see history as a picture too. In this sense the Gothic past was transformed. The

Gothic initially aligned with negative visions of the Middle Ages that saw only the ‘grotesque water-spewing gargoyle’ as a symbol of ignorance and superstition, loaded especially with negative ideas of medieval Catholicism.12 By approaching it as a Picturesque subject matter, the medieval past associated with the Gothic ruin was ‘rearranged’ into a romanticised ‘Waverley version’ of

British history.13 The Picturesque visually aided the imaginative, Romantic leap that turned the landscape of history, of the ‘dark ages’, into a fantasy.14 This kind of aesthetic medievalism offered

Blacket and his contemporaries a rich source for artistry, architecture and literature throughout the nineteenth century. It was brought to life in the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 that reenacted jousting, endorsed on a royal level by Victoria and Albert’s medieval-themed costume ball of 1842

(fig.1.2), and evident in the sensuous painting of the Pre-Raphaelites. The turreted, battlemented

University of Sydney buildings covered in heraldic symbols participated in this imagined medieval world, and remind us of the fiction inherent to medievalism.

Blacket’s sketchbooks catalogued the ruins that housed ‘Waverley’ interpretations of the medieval past. This interpretation was also aided by fragmentation. The fragment allows us to see

10 Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), 24-6.

11 Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2000), 107.

12 Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 10.

13 Rosemary Hill, “Keats, Antiquarianism, and the Picturesque,” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 2 (April 2014): 127; See Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 70.

14 See Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 8. 20 Figure 1.2. A painting of Victoria and Albert in medieval costume for their fourteenth-century themed ball. (Edwin Landseer. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Costume Ball of May 12 1842. 1842-46. Oil on canvas. 143 x 111 cm. Royal Collection Trust.) how the conceptualisation of the Gothic unfolded. When sketching in the shadows of abbeys and cathedrals, Blacket drew out the fragmentation unique to ruins by sketching these already broken structures in smaller pieces. On the page, such fragmentation emphasised absence both in time and space. It gave room for imaginative possibility: to fill the gaps left by the fragmentation of medieval ruins and their history, fictionalised notions of the past took hold. In the fields, contemplating

Gothic remnants and musing on pasts, real and imagined, is where we first encounter Blacket.

On June 8, 1838, Blacket sketched the interior of Durham Cathedral. On the same day, Blacket crossed the River Wear on a short walk to St. Oswald’s Church where he sketched its great east window, and later that afternoon he made his way to the ruins of Finchale Priory (fig.1.3). Blacket’s two sketchbooks, now in the University of Sydney’s Rare Books library, are both small—made for travelling and sketching in hand. The pages are as yellowed and foxed as one would expect of paper

21 Figure 1.3. Blacket’s sketches from June 8, 1838. (Edmund Blacket. St Oswald’s Church, Durham and Finchale Priory, June 8, 1838. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.) nearing two hundred years old. The sketches themselves are simple and precise, drawn only in black pen with an attention to detail and confidence that is striking. They depict various architectural features of original medieval buildings, mainly ruins, always fragmented and never set in the landscape. These fragments of windows, arches, pillars, corbels, tombs and doorways are set in two’s and three’s on the page, and generally only noted with place and date.

At face value we can read them simply as technical drawings composed by a burgeoning architect; it is in the nature of architectural drawing to include elements in isolation and divorced from their landscape setting. However, there is an opportunity to see more in Blacket’s sketchbooks.

This chapter will trace Blacket’s physical journey before considering his sketchbooks in a more conceptual way.

Blacket was in the Yorkshire countryside not only for the summer of 1838, but for the next three.

As well as offering an escape from industry, touring Picturesque sites was an important shared encounter that encouraged the growth of the imagined medieval ideal born from the Gothic. Several sites became epicentres of Picturesque interest, like Rievaulx Abbey, immortalised in literature and art. Blacket visited Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire on August 22, 1839, and sketched its windows and

22 doors over three pages (fig.1.4). Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had visited before him in July,

1802. In her diary Dorothy mused on ‘this solemn quiet spot’ and noted how the surrounding hills were ‘scattered over with grovelets of wild roses and… covered with wild flowers’, evoking the

Picturesque contrast between wild and tame.15 Artists like John Sell Cotman and J. M. W. Turner had already visited too. In 1803, Cotman sketched Rievaulx’s ruined archways (fig.1.5), and in

1836, Turner painted a watercolour of Rievaulx seen from a distance, nestled within dramatic hills

(fig.1.6).

Prescription determined visits to sites like Rievaulx—from the route taken, the views sketched and the way in which these sites were seen. Historian Esther Moir argues, especially of the Wye

River tour, that it demanded the tourist ‘follow a closely defined route, and exercise an equally clearly defined aesthetic judgement.’16 In a sense, the English landscape Blacket toured was already

Figure 1.4. Blacket’s sketches at Rievaulx Abbey. (Edmund Blacket. Windows at Rievaulx Abbey, August 22, 1839. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.)

15 Mary Moorman, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 149.

16 Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists 1540-1840 (London: Routledge, 1964), 128-129. 23 LEFT Figure 1.5. John Sell Cotman’s sketch at Rievaulx Abbey. (John Sell Cotman. Rievaulx Abbey. 1803. Graphite on paper. 371 × 270mm. Tate, London. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cotman-rievaulx-abbey-t00973.)

RIGHT Figure 1.6. Turner’s watercolour of Rievaulx Abbey. (Joseph Mallord William Turner. Rievaulx Abbey. 1836. Watercolour on paper. 121 × 206mm. Tate, London. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-rievaulx-abbey- n05615.) stylised by visitors before him, and the idea of a wistful, bygone history already embedded in the landscape.

With the nature of tourism in mind, we can see how Blacket’s sketchbooks existed alongside a host of others produced in the period as the more privileged classes toured the British countryside, rediscovering and rewriting its history. They produced sketchbooks as souvenirs of trips or in the course of amateur antiquarian studies.17 However, this is not to dismiss Blacket’s sketchbooks as simply typical, as Kerr does in her account of Blacket, for this overlooks their significance in marrying the Romantic sensibility with a precise architectural awareness.18 To draw a brief comparison—Sophia Gray, a colonial Gothic Revival architect who emigrated to South Africa, also lived in Yorkshire and kept a sketchbook from 1836-47. Gray’s sketchbook (fig.1.7) carefully catalogued decorative features from local medieval castles and churches but was devoid of

Blacket’s Romantic impulse that drew him into the landscape. Gray methodically grouped features and specific Gothic styles in a rigid approach that, as Deirdre Thackray argues, showed no evidence

17 See Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 125-26.

18 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 8. 24 of organic development suggestive of in situ

composition.19 Though Gray lived in the midst of

medieval originals, her sketchbooks were not

records of ventures into Yorkshire’s moors and

dales: she traced examples from published

material.20 Gray’s sketchbook was purely an

architectural resource. Blacket, however, indulged

in the Romantic sensibility by travelling the

landscape and ruminating on its architectural

remnants as he sketched in situ. This Romantic

approach ran alongside Blacket’s emerging

architectural awareness that appeared in his precise

Figure 1.7. Sophia Gray’s traced sketches of penwork, his notation of style, the inclusion of a medieval fonts. (Sophia Gray. Medieval church fonts. 1836-47. Sketch. William Cullen Library. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.) floor plan and his minute attention to ornamental

detail. Yet Blacket’s sketchbooks are neither an ornamental catalogue, like Gray’s, nor abstract impressions. Blacket’s sketches of fragmented decorative features are at once orderly and methodical, couched in an architectural awareness, and haphazard and impulsive as he indulged in a Romantic preoccupation with the past by sketching in the moment.

Aside from using Blacket’s sketchbooks as evidence of travelling the landscape, there is something more evocative in Blacket’s sketches themselves that illuminates our understanding of his Romantic sensibility. They are ordinary in one sense, but if we look at them conceptually, using fragmentation as a lens, we can trace how the Gothic ruin hosted ideas of the imagined medieval world. It is worth dwelling on this point for the next section, as the concept of the fragment remains

19 Deirdre M. Thackray, “Sophia Gray (1814-1871): An Architectural Apprenticeship for Home, Church and Empire” (MA thesis, University of York, 2017), 87.

20 Thackray, 87. 25 important across the following chapters. Fragmentation determined Blacket’s observational approach. Blacket rendered multiple fragments of architectural features but never suggested an entire building. The concept of the fragment helps us to understand Blacket as an observer and the romanticisation of the medieval past attached to Gothic ruins by centralising absence and imaginative compensation. Absence is particular to the pointed arch, a typical Gothic feature

Blacket frequently sketched. Across both sketchbooks, of eighty-nine features sketched, twenty- eight are windows, and fifteen more are of a similar shape like doorways, arcades and archways. In the first instance these windows are simply windows—isolated architectural elements. Reading on a deeper level, we can recognise more sibylline qualities. Most of these structures are in ruins and so many of the pointed arches are empty of glass, missing stone or sprouting weeds. They are enigmatic, whether from the fragility of the stone structure or the marvel of its survival. The windows especially, in their non-ruinous state would mostly have been fitted with stained glass, and as such would function in terms of light and colour. Empty of glass, they function as vantage points.

When sketching windows, Blacket did not include the view beyond but emphasised the negative space. Blacket replaced a potential landscape with a blank expanse as well as divorcing the windows from their place in the building, allowing these windows to act as evocative and imaginative gateways to other times and spaces. Blacket’s windows offer obscurity in place of wholeness, leaving imaginative room. Sophie Thomas, a specialist in Romanticism and visual culture, argues how ‘ambivalent effects’ are created by the way ‘fragments are suspended between the part and the idea of the whole’ just as ‘ruins float between the past and present… but belong fully to neither.’21 This suspension, Thomas argues, prevents understanding of the ‘historical whole’ whilst fuelling desire for its full comprehension, a process that ‘impels the creation of imaginary or

21 Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), 49. 26 fantasised “histories”’ to fill the gap (a propensity already put in place by Romantic and Picturesque impulses).22

Blacket’s enigmatic pointed arches invoke absence as an object of attention. Carolyn Korsmeyer, a Professor of Philosophy, acknowledges that ruins ‘stimulate the imagination to try to fill in yawning gaps of time’ but illuminates how this encourages viewers to ‘realise absence in the presence of a ruin’— that the very ‘impossibility’ of presence draws their attention.23 Impossibility informed Blacket’s experience touring ruins, and his fragmented sketches evidence his preoccupation with ‘vanished wholeness.’24 This is evident in his sketch from Easby Abbey, which he visited on September 2, 1839 (fig.1.8). Blacket’s sketch of Easby’s intersecting arcade begins on the left in its most whole form, with the stone wall still intact. As the arcade progresses, the state of ruin becomes more evident: the wall has collapsed, grass begins to push through the cracks, the

Figure 1.8. Blacket’s sketches from Easby Abbey. (Edmund Blacket. Window and arcade at Easby Abbey, September 2, 1839. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.)

22 Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 49.

23 Carolyn Korsmeyer, “The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux: The Aesthetics of Ruin and Absence,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 4 (September 2014): 433.

24 Korsmeyer, 431. 27 pillar begins to crumble, before the arcade itself breaks, its pointed arch now miraculously suspended as the sketch runs off the page. Similarly, Blacket’s detail of Easby’s refectory window floats on the page. With the lack of visual context, the height and position of both features is unknown, as is a larger sense of the rest of the ruined abbey; a vision of wholeness is not achieved, but a vision of absence certainly is.

Absence gave room for Romantic ideas of the medieval to grow, and echoes the expanse of historical and fictional interpretation medievalism enables. The physical incompleteness of a ruin like Easby Abbey helped to translate the associated history of the ruin into a vague, fleeting sense of the past. Blacket was not touring the destructive consequences of the Reformation, for example, nor was his vision of Easby a functioning twelfth-century Premonstratensian abbey.25 He saw a

‘stupendous past’—a heroic, ghostly vision of worship.26 Easby failed to offer its own history and offered imaginative space in its stead.

Sites like Easby could easily become host to legends and romanticised visions of the medieval past already popular in the period—as at Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, a ruin commonly understood as

King Arthur’s (mythic) birthplace. Tintagel acted so easily as a metonym for Arthurian legend because of the castle’s ruined state; Tintagel’s history, Susan Aronstein argues, ‘can never be fully present’ and so ‘can be substituted for something else associated—however arbitrarily—with it.’27

These vague ideas of the medieval made it ripe for fantasised and idealised reinterpretation.

With such room for possibility, Blacket and other Anglican architects used medievalism in ways they desired, and navigated the profound tension between Englishness, Anglicanism and a medieval

Catholic aesthetic of worship. The benign nature of their interpretation was especially important in order to overcome associations with the Grotesque Middle Ages. Paying attention to the ways the

25 Peter Fergusson, “The Refectory at Easby Abbey: Form and Iconography,” The Art Bulletin 71, no. 3 (September 1989): 335.

26 Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 40.

27 Susan Aronstein and Laurie Finke, “Conjuring the Ghosts of Camelot: Tintagel and the Medievalism of Heritage Tourism,” in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 202. 28 Gothic navigated these tensions is essential for our understanding of Blacket’s career as a devout church builder that will be addressed in Chapter Two. We must remember the English-Anglican perspective of Blacket and many of his contemporaries, to whom Catholicism jarred with their sense of Englishness. Gothic ruins had traditionally aroused a threatening idea of Catholicism especially characterised by horror and superstition in eighteenth-century Gothic literature, where novels like Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796) portrayed Gothic piles stalked by ghostly monks and ghoulish nuns.28 By the time of Blacket’s youth, Gothic was synonymous with ruins, for the ruination of ecclesiastical Gothic was not simply a consequence of time but a deliberate act born of the English Reformation.29 The Gothic was first a symbol of the defeated Catholic past before it could become available as an aesthetic ideal.

The Gothic’s ruined state represented failed Catholic power. Gothic literature specialist Dale

Townshend presents a study of Gothic imagery that proposes the Gothic was ‘available to the staunchly Anglican biases of the Picturesque only as a broken architectural form emptied of all historical content.’30 It existed as a reminder of Catholic defeat.31 This process was eased by vague ideas of the ruin; historian Anne Janowitz argues that the history of ruins takes on a ‘mythic over a particularised historical conception of the past.’32 The memory the Grotesque Catholic past was nebulous, and Blacket could disembody its negative side from his idea of the Gothic.

Romantic sensibilities like Blacket’s completed the domestication of the Catholic legacy through their preoccupation with the ‘dead’ past. It invested the ruin with a stasis and ‘melancholic

28 Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 236.

29 Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel, and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107-8.

30 Dale Townshend, “Ruins, Romance and the Rise of Gothic Tourism: The Case of Netley Abbey, 1750-1830,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 3 (September 2014): 379.

31 Ousby, The Englishman’s England, 107.

32 Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 59. 29 placidity’ that removed any threat of its negative Catholic inheritance.33 The dead past was recalled by the tombs Blacket sketched. Blacket laboured over the sketch of a tomb in Lanercost Priory where he visited on April 8, 1840 (fig.1.9). It takes up a full page in his sketchbook, and contains minute attention to detail—the tomb is faced with three heraldic devices and Blacket captured the feathers of the eagles, and the tiny figures on the emblazoned shields. This detail is presented alongside distressed stone and grass growing over the canopy. Blacket sketched another, less ostentatious, tomb in the choir of Lanercost that same day (fig.1.10). It is a humble, yet evocative scene that details both the decay and the longevity of stone and invasive overgrowth as well.

Historians have analysed how overgrown nature seeping through the cracks of ruins was a stylistic

Picturesque tool, which played an important role to shore up a ‘temporal barrier’ and establish the

‘reassuring obsolescence’ of the past.34 This was something Blacket underscored by accentuating the overgrowth, and conceptually brought into his curated idea of the Gothic.

Figure 1.9. Blacket’s detailed sketch of a tomb at Lanercost Priory. (Edmund Blacket, Ornate tomb at Lanercost Priory, April 8, 1840. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.)

33 Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 144.

34 Louis Hawes, Presences of Nature: British Landscape 1780-1830 (New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 1982), 36; Janowitz, 65; Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 66. 30 Figure 1.10. Blacket’s sketch of a smaller tomb at Lanercost Priory. (Edmund Blacket, Small tomb at Lanercost Priory, April 8, 1840. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.)

The obsolescence of the past enabled the medieval period associated with the Gothic to be envisioned as vague, benign, decidedly post-Catholic (doctrinally at least), and thus desirable. As a devout Anglican, Blacket was able to celebrate Catholic monuments, even later rebuild them as a national, Anglican symbol. Processes of medievalism enabled Blacket and many of his contemporaries to see the Gothic as unequivocally English, and yet retain some sacred elements from its inherent Catholic nature. Blacket completed the transformation of the Gothic by using the medieval Catholic aesthetic as an ideal of worship within the Anglican canon of his church buildings, as will be explored in Chapter Two.

The Catholic aesthetic ideal emerged from the same Romantic sensibility that envisaged the medieval past. Many historians credit Walter Scott for the re-association of Gothic with the

‘sensuous’ intensity of medieval worship.35 This can be referred to as ‘Catholicity’, a term this thesis uses in order to suggest the sumptuous visuality of medieval Catholic worship and the fervour inspired by its affective qualities, but firmly divorced from its doctrinal values.36

35 Hill, “Keats, Antiquarianism, and the Picturesque,” 130.

36 Andrews, Australian Gothic, 10. 31 Looking back on the Gothic as a veneration of past piety is embedded within Blacket’s descriptions. Blacket’s descriptions are generally sparse; he often recorded just place and date, sometimes he located the feature, for example, ‘tomb in the choir’ or ‘clerestory window’, and sometimes he denoted its specific architectural style, like ‘Early English’ as he designated an arcade in Hexham Abbey, or ‘Decorated English’ as he described a window he sketched in Selby Abbey

(fig.1.11). Blacket’s comments on style drew on a classification of the Gothic recently popularised by Thomas Rickman’s An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture (1817). This text organised Gothic architecture chronologically as Norman, Early English, Decorated English and Perpendicular—categories that remain important for the rest of this thesis.37 Rickman’s classification also judged the Gothic based upon its stylistic qualities, and he celebrated Decorated

English as the pinnacle of Gothic architecture: ‘the perfection of the English mode.’38 This

Figure 1.11. Blacket’s notation of style at Selby Abbey. (Edmund Blacket, ‘Norman’ Triforium and ‘Decorated English’ window at Selby Abbey, October 30, 1839. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.)

37 Thomas Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 39. It is unknown if Blacket owned a copy.

38 Rickman, 5. 32 judgement was most notably expanded upon by the famed Gothic Revival architect, A. W. N. Pugin, into a moral and religious frame.

Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) argued that architecture reflected the spiritual state of the society by which it was built. In regards to Gothic churches, Pugin credited ‘the faith, the zeal, and, above all, the unity, of our ancestors’ for their ability to ‘conceive and raise those wonderful fabrics that still remain to excite our wonder and admiration.’39 Pugin contrasted the ‘wonderful fabric’ of medieval church building—the signifier of its Catholicity—to the ‘present degraded state of Architectural taste’ he saw owing to the ‘total want of religious zeal’ and ‘lukewarm feelings that religion is regarded by the majority in this country.’40 Pugin’s polemic was matched by art critic John Ruskin’s popular publications on Gothic architecture, especially his later Stones of Venice (1851-53) and oft- quoted chapter on the ‘Nature of Gothic.’41 Both Pugin and Ruskin celebrated the Catholicity invested in Decorated Gothic as representative of the pinnacle of piety and worship that they saw lacking in their time.

Architects and antiquarians, like Blacket, with any interest in the Gothic, would have been familiar with these authors. From Pugin, Blacket drew his awareness of the Gothic styles and their moral associations framed by a domesticated Catholic legacy. Blacket’s idea of a ‘venerable past’ formed the foundation of his Gothic’s multi-temporality that would determine the way he designed churches and the University of Sydney.

When employed in the Revival, the Gothic was used to selectively navigate Englishness,

Anglicanism, medieval Catholic worship and the world of medieval romance. The Revival carried the Gothic style into the present and left its state of ruin behind. The rebuilding of the British

39 A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London: James Moyes, 1836), 3.

40 Pugin, 29, 26.

41 Robert Hewison, “Ruskin and the Gothic Revival: his research on Venetian architecture,” in Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 56. Hewison elaborates on Ruskin’s profound effect on the latter half of the Gothic Revival. 33 Figure 1.12. All Saints’ Church, Leamington Spa, a Gothic Revival church built 1843-69. (Wikimedia. All Saints’ Church, Leamington Spa (1843-69). December 18, 2018. Photograph. https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_Saints_Church,_Gloucester_Street,_Leamington_ Spa.jpg.)

Houses of Parliament, destroyed by fire in 1834 and reconstructed in Perpendicular Gothic from

1840 on, sparked the Revival in earnest. Parish churches were plucked from the ‘bygone’ past like

All Saints’ Church, Leamington Spa (1843-69, fig.1.12) and All Saints’ Church, Newton-on-Ouse

(1848-9, fig.1.13). The Gothic Revival was already underway in Australia, with the construction of

St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral (1835-51) in Sydney. These whole, new structures were imbued with all the meanings of the Gothic ruin, the English Catholicity of the Romantic medieval, but transformed from brokenness into wholeness. This takes on new meaning as Blacket and other

Gothic Revival architects exercised their careers in the colonies of the British Empire.

The next chapter will follow Blacket from England to Sydney, and the transfer of the Gothic from its medieval origin to the Colony. Blacket relished the retrospection of the Gothic—in the material experience, Romantic reveries on the past and the sacred aura of age-old ecclesiastical buildings. As Blacket stood newly married on the wharf at Gravesend, awaiting to board the Eden on June 13, 1842, this is something he unknowingly would never experience again. Yet his devotion to the Gothic remained. The birth of Blacket’s sketchbooks in the damp English landscape, their 34 tour through cold crypts and shadowy naves to their arrival in the dry, glaring heat of Sydney in summertime emphasises the incongruity of medieval England’s visual and physical transferral to the

Colony, and the transformations required for a such a journey.

Figure 1.13. All Saints’ Church, Newton-on-Ouse near York, a Gothic Revival church built in 1849. (Eirian Evans. All Saints’ Church, Newton-on-Ouse. May 30, 2018. Photograph. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5797377.)

35 Chapter Two

Bridges to ‘old England’

We last encountered Blacket in England looking back on the Gothic. This chapter will illustrate a shift away from retrospection by investigating the Gothic as a symbol of the colonial present.

Blacket lived and built in Sydney from his arrival in 1842, where his design process was based on the imitation of the original Gothic structures he had so carefully observed in England. In copying them, Blacket, like other architects throughout the British Empire, seized the Gothic from the

‘bygone’ past and planted it into the present. Though Blacket left the fragmented Gothic ruin forever behind, the distance and unfamiliarity he now experienced meant that everything in the

Colony, divorced from England, was fragmented. The idea of the fragment illuminates our understanding of Blacket’s dislocated colonial experience and his resulting fractured design approach to the Gothic. Blacket tried to remedy such fragmentation by constructing Gothic style churches out of real and imagined ideas of England and its medieval past. In doing so, he fused

Romantic notions of the past to the colonial present.

This attempt to bridge to ‘old England’ predicated itself on the devastating dislocation of the

Eora population in the Sydney area and the complete fragmentation of their known world.1 In creating the illusion of England’s history and landscape, Blacket temporally and spatially colonised

New South Wales.2 Blacket’s churches replicated English values and its supremacy by imposing ideas of longevity, continuity and permanence on the Eora landscape.3 They celebrated Englishness in national, historical and Anglican terms, drawn from the medieval ideals explored in Chapter One.

1 Edmund Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Frank Blacket, May 12, 1843, Letter, MLDOC 695, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Blacket’s words.

2 See Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2004), 60-72.

3 See Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 309-310. 36 The Gothic’s Picturesque guise masked the violence of this process—the ramifications of which have emerged more fully in retrospection.

Blacket reproduced images of medieval England through a design process that rested on his sense of archaeological accuracy and imitation. This antiquarian impulse for veracity was also prompted by ecclesiology—the study of ‘correct’ church architecture and decoration—that sought liturgical idealism through historically accurate church decoration. Ecclesiology was a discourse of reform that dealt largely with the relationship between ornament and function in architecture, and invested the Gothic with ideas of modernity via notions of progress, both of which will determine our understanding of the University of Sydney’s main buildings in Chapter Three.

On November 4, 1842, after five months at sea, Blacket and his wife Sarah disembarked the Eden in

Sydney. In a diary he kept on board, Blacket described his first sight of Sydney—its ecclesiastical and Gothic features—the spire of St. James’ Church and the crenellated parapets of Government

House.4 Blacket quickly found his feet in the colonial city having with him letters of introduction to influential colonists like Charles Nicholson (1808-1903) who enabled his appointment as Inspector of Church of England schools.5 This position involved designing and supervising the construction of school buildings, parsonages and churches, a role for which his work as a railway surveyor had sufficiently prepared him for.6 Blacket was also able to establish a private architectural business that specialised in Gothic churches, though not exclusively so, he also built banks, shops and factories in

Classical and Georgian styles. This chapter will focus on Blacket’s formative years in the Colony, from his arrival to his appointment as Diocesan Architect for the Church of England in 1847,

4 Edmund Blacket, Journal of a voyage from London to Sydney on the Eden June 13–November 4, 1842, Diary, B 1596, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

5 Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket 1817-1883 (Sydney: The National Trust of Australia, 1983), 8.

6 Morton Herman, The Blackets: An Era of Australian Architecture (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), 5. 37 Colonial Architect in 1849, and as University Architect in 1854.7 It was a crucial time where one can trace the context and experience Blacket brought into the design of the University of Sydney’s main buildings. From his arrival until 1854, Blacket made dozens of renovations and repairs to existing churches and wholly built several Gothic churches, becoming well-versed in the style and well-known as the man to build it.

Blacket’s experience as a colonist was neither common nor particularly unique. He and his wife travelled as cabin passengers with some social standing and capital behind them, but nothing extraordinary.8 Yet as a voluntary emigrant of the more privileged classes, he was a minority among the working class poor, assisted and forced emigrants.9 Blacket’s emigration, however, was not totally voluntary for Blacket married without consent and familial pressure drove him to Australia.10

Indeed, little over a month after the couple married, they departed. This sudden break with home and family probably emphasised feelings of dislocation abroad—a yawning gap between England and Australia that he and many colonists attempted to bridge.11 Cultural and spatial fragments of

‘old England’ were scattered, their whole forms impossible to reconcile. Blacket wrote to his brother Frank in London, a few months after arriving in Sydney on May 12, 1843 and conveyed his desire for home:

So, when you hear anyone vaunting Australia as superior to old England in any respect, tell them

from me that it is all my eye [sic], that nothing is near so good here, neither climate, nor people,

nor soil nor fruit not any thing else—not that I am complaining, far from it, I am well satisfied,

7 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 10. Blacket did little other than utilitarian repairs during his time as Colonial Architect.

8 Blacket, Journal of a voyage from London to Sydney.

9 Penny Russell, “Travelling Steerage: Class, Commerce, Religion and Family in Colonial Sydney,” Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 4 (October 2, 2014): 388.

10 Nick Vine Hall, My Name Is Blacket (Belrose: N.J. Vine Hall, 1983), 130.

11 See Penny Russell, “Unsettling Settler Society,” in Australia’s History: Themes and Debates, eds. Martin Lyons and Penny Russell (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 1999), 22-23. 38 having plenty of work and good health, but every person who comes here must expect to lose a

great deal in every respect.12

Blacket clearly missed life in England, and one even feels his sense of the idyllic rural life born from romanticised visions of medieval England. The sincerity of Blacket assuring his brother that he is ‘well satisfied’ is questionable. At the very least, Blacket’s early encounter with the Colony was filled with longing for England and a sense of dislocation. Blacket’s architecturally-inclined

Romantic sensibility keenly felt this fragmentation in the distance from original medieval structures. The absence he felt amongst Gothic ruins in England was doubled, as the original medieval abbeys and cathedrals Blacket loved to sketch had already passed into time immemorial, but now the English landscape itself and the sensation of its bygone history was thousands of miles away. In its place Blacket saw, or rather chose to see, an empty land without a history.13

Blacket’s early career was an earnest attempt to import the time and space of the original Gothic

—an impossible task from the outset. Now only accessible in imitations, Blacket’s observational and designing practice was turned on its head, as he was forced to change from observing solid stone and rendering it on paper in his sketchbooks, to now only having the fragile, ephemeral paper as the source from which to build stone.

The most recognisable of these ‘paper’ creations, and the most pervasive, were Blacket’s Gothic parish churches. The Colony had laden itself in Gothic apparel as the community saw in it the most tangible way to bridge space and time. The Gothic style channelled English national identity, the spiritual care of Anglicanism and a sentimental sense of home bound up with ideas of a Romantic medieval history. This associational desire was shared in particular by Blacket’s Anglican patrons who cherished ‘the fond image of the village church back home.’14 Architectural historian G. A.

12 Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Frank. Blacket’s emphasis.

13 Russell, “Unsettling Settler Society,” 23; See Karsken’s evocation of ‘storied lands.’ Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 18.

14 Brian Andrews, Australian Gothic: The Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2001), 29. 39 Bremner argues for the conservatism of these Anglican patrons who wanted ‘churches that reminded them of the ancient landscapes of their homeland’ in a ‘coherent and identifiable medieval idiom.’15 The nature of this idiom needs further elaboration for much of the early Sydney Anglican community desired more than a sentimental or functional building in which to pray. Some were happy with ‘ersatz Gothic.’ Others wanted to directly replicate an existing church. Others wanted more—an idealised church that acted as a bridge to ‘old England’ through precise imitation but also encompassed emerging church reform.

The exact image of this remembered, mis-remembered, idealised, homely Gothic church differed between many. Anglicans unbothered by ecclesiological discourse were satisfied by designs that did little more than add pointed windows to Georgian frames but served their Gothic-tinged

‘Anglomania.’16 This is now known as ‘associationism’ which is often disparaged in architectural literature as marking the infancy of the Gothic Revival; architectural historian Michael Lewis defines associationism as the way some nineteenth-century architects worked according to ‘the degree and multitude of mental images… not its materials or correct proportions.’17 Such an approach to the Gothic produced a haphazard selection of motifs cobbled together—famously so at

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Constructed in the mid-eighteenth century, it is a cornucopia of quatrefoils, blind niches, faux fan-vaulting, ornate screens and ogee windows.18 Later architects like

Blacket were not satisfied by such pastiche and moved the Revival towards an archaeological and antiquarian accuracy.19

15 G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2013), 264.

16 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 9.

17 Michael Lewis, The Gothic Revival (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 65.

18 See Kevin Rogers, “Walpole’s Gothic: Creating a Fictive History,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, eds. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 59.

19 Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 86, 90-91. 40 Blacket’s fervent study of Gothic ruins, and his attention to Pugin’s ideas on architecture and moralism, predisposed him to imitate original examples in detail. Blacket was at the forefront of this approach in the Colony; before his arrival, churches were frequently designed according to associationism or in a predominately functional way. This is represented in another of Blacket’s sketchbooks held in the State Library of NSW which records his first encounter with Sydney in the last two months of 1842. Blacket recorded associationism at St. John’s Church, Parramatta, which he visited on November 29, 1842 (fig.2.1). Completed in 1819, it was one of Sydney’s first

Anglican churches. Blacket’s sketch depicts a blocky structure that supports gratuitous pointed-arch windows and two plain square twin towers that weigh heavily with tiny windows and unadorned spires. Indeed, the whole structure is unadorned, with no ornamental stonework to be seen—in its place is stuccoed brick, so vastly unlike original Gothic but still vainly drawing links to it. Blacket’s composition is quite unlike his precise and enigmatic sketches of ruins in England; his depiction of

St. John’s in loose watercolour suggests his disinterest.

Figure 2.1. Blacket’s representation of St. John’s Church, Parramatta and its loose Gothic connections. (Edmund Blacket. St. John’s Church, Parramatta, November 29, 1842. Sketch. PXE 925 Box 1. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.)

41 Whilst St. John’s satisfied some Anglo patrons on a sentimental level, Blacket’s inclination for archaeological accuracy had far more enduring colonial implications. Blacket’s approach involved more than drawing comforting ties and building familiar scenes. In copying medieval originals, he deliberately imitated England itself. This faithfulness to England made Blacket’s churches colonial tools—ones that mimicked the same imperial agenda in terms of displacing the Indigenous world and replacing it with a new, recognisable built environment that represented a superior English cultural and historical identity.20

Though the desire for Gothic in the Colony was strong, the process of constructing it was difficult. In Britain, Gothic Revival architects could physically visit, sketch and measure the medieval church they wished to recreate. The same materials could be used, drawn from the same landscape, suitable to the same climate. It was not so simple in the Colony. Though Blacket desired to recreate medieval churches, the distance, fragmentation and manifold ways the Colony differed from Britain meant that Blacket could often only imitate in part. Yet, Blacket succeeded in what he could imitate, so much so that his valorisation of English Gothic has been credited with the prevention of a native style. H. G. Woffenden provocatively argues that Blacket’s ‘plagiarism’ of existing English churches was largely responsible for there being no identifiable ‘Australian style’ of Gothic.21 Whilst plagiarism is a misleading term for what was an accepted practice of copyism,

Blacket’s design process was so entrenched in imitation that it did not adapt to climate or landscape, or rural and urban environments. What was produced was simply more English Gothic, rebuilt as close as possible to the original. Without environmental concession or originality, in the early phase, no distinctively Australian style of Gothic could be born.

20 See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 29.

21 H. G. Woffenden, “Architecture in New South Wales, 1840 to 1900” (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1966), 2, 240. 42 The extent to which English Gothic was imitated without concession was remarkable. When building Gothic churches in other colonial locations, architects often made accommodations for the specific climate: in Canada, they introduced high-pitched roofs to deflect snow, and added double- glazing and double-doors for the cold.22 In more tropical locations like India and Hawaii, architects used timber Venetians in place of glass to admit less light and heat.23 Blacket’s early churches did not offer such accommodations and strove to be as identical as possible.

Blacket’s uncompromising imitation was enabled by his bookshelf. The Gothic Revival sparked a proliferation of books and journals that included sketches and plans of medieval churches, and many were exported to the Colonies. Blacket’s architectural library emphasised how far he was from medieval originals by the resources he needed to amass in their place. Blacket could no longer walk amongst Gothic ruins, so he inhabited it via his books and drawings that offered another imagined medieval world, coloured by fragments from his ruin sketchbooks and his memory. These conceptual shifts underlying Blacket’s process permit a deeper reading of what is often dismissed as the ‘pattern book’ approach to architecture credited to unskilled and unimaginative architects in the

Colonies.24

At least eighteen texts from Blacket’s library are held in the University of Sydney’s Rare Books library, six of which draw our attention: M. H. Bloxam’s The Principles of Gothic Architecture

(1836), George Godwin and John Britton’s The Churches of London (1838), A. W. N. Pugin’s The

Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (1843), J. H. Parker’s A Glossary of Terms used in Grecian, Roman, Italian, and Gothic Architecture (1845), Raphael and Joshua Brandon’s

Parish Churches (1848) and Edmund Sharpe’s A Treatise on the Rise and Progress of Decorated

22 Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 300, 303.

23 Bremner, 291.

24 Bremner, 259; Andrews, Australian Gothic, 45; Joan Kerr, and James Broadbent, Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales (Sydney: David Ell Press, in association with the Elizabeth Bay House Trust, 1980), 16. 43 Window Tracery in England (1849).25 Some of these texts Blacket brought with him from England, perhaps even took with him on his trips, and the rest he was able to acquire in Sydney.

Unfortunately, Blacket was not a reader with a pen, only inscribing his name and date on the flyleaf. These books are revealing nonetheless. Many of the authors were architects and antiquarians. Godwin was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and Parker was vice-president of the Oxford Architectural Society.26 Blacket and the authors bar Britton were of the same age, which suggests how the Gothic was a fashionable and exciting pursuit rather than the archaic now associated with ‘antiquated’ interests. Though some authors were professional architects, others like

Bloxam and Parker were amateurs. Their books catered for other amateurs by assisting them in the rudiments of Gothic architecture, especially the delineation of style. Indeed, the texts all agreed with Thomas Rickman’s classification of Gothic as Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular.

These texts show how firmly the authors had isolated English Gothic from other influences, making it synonymous with England and Anglicanism, and no longer associated with ‘popery’—each is an investigation of the Gothic in England and Parker’s Glossary is the only text to offer a handful of continental examples. All of them could be used to design from, some catered for building in mind and thus including floor plans and scale measurements as Pugin and Brandon did. Parker’s Glossary is especially precise and extensive, near exhaustive, for interior and exterior Gothic decoration.

From these texts one can pinpoint the examples, features and plans Blacket used to design his churches. Kerr has previously assessed some of the sources Blacket used, and when other historians assess Blacket’s architectural portfolio as evidence of the ‘pattern book’ approach, like Bremner, they tend only to repeat Kerr’s initial findings.27 Kerr’s examples are broadly useful, but lack

25 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 6. The dates reference the edition Blacket owned. Kerr states that Blacket’s library contained sixty texts, mainly held in Fisher Library but they are not catalogued together.

26 G. B. Smith, “Godwin, George (1813–1888), architect and journal editor,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed November 29, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10891; Richard Riddell, “Parker, John Henry (1806– 1884), writer on architecture and publisher,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed November 29, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21324.

27 See Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 16; Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 61. 44 Figure 2.2. St. Mark’s Church, Darling Point designed by Blacket in 1848. (Unknown author. St. Mark’s Church, Darling Point. 1937. Photograph. 31982. Sam Hood Photographic Collection. Mitchell Library. State Library of New South Wales.) precision. Here I attempt a more specific approach focusing on the architectural fragments Blacket probably based his designs on. For example, for Blacket’s design of St. Mark’s, Darling Point

(1848, fig.2.2), Kerr points to a published engraving of Holy Trinity Church in Lincolnshire (fig.

2.3) which was a recent Revival building that does not bear a very strong similarity.28 By looking through Blacket’s library, one can pinpoint elements: St. Mark’s mirrors the square tower which narrows into a steep spire with three tiered windows in Brandon’s plate of Achurch Church,

Northamptonshire (fig.2.4), and in Sharpe’s Treatise, one finds the window tracery that matches St.

Mark’s tower windows (fig.2.5).29 The identification of individual elements allows us to see how

28 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 22; “New Church at Horncastle,” Illustrated London News, April 17, 1847, 252, The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, accessed November 18, 2020, https://link-gale- com.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/apps/doc/HN3100000038/GDCS?u=usyd&sid=GDCS&xid=30909760.

29 Raphael Brandon and Joshua Brandon, Parish Churches: Being Perspective Views of English Ecclesiastical Structures (London: George Bell, 1848), 54-57; Edmund Sharpe, A Treatise on the Rise and Progress of Decorated Window Tracery in England (London: John van Hoorst, 1849), 23. 45 Figure 2.3. An engraving of Holy Trinity Church in Lincolnshire noted by Kerr for its likeness to St. Mark’s.

Figure 2.5. Tracery in Sharpe’s Treatise that matches Blacket’s design for St. Mark’s tower windows.

Figure 2.4. Tower likeness to St. Mark’s seen in Brandon’s plate of Achurch Church, Northamptonshire. the ‘pattern book’ approach was so concerned with imitation as to leave no element uncopied. It shows a deep concern for accuracy to original structures, guided by ecclesiological and antiquarian ideals, not a lack of skill.

Similarly, for his design of St. Philip’s, Church Hill (1848, fig.2.6), Blacket used Bloxam’s example of tracery from St. Mary’s, Oxford for St. Philip’s main eastern window (fig.2.7-2.8).30 St.

Philip’s tiered church body also bears close resemblance to Martham Church, Norfolk (fig.2.9) published in Brandon’s text.31 This assessment of Blacket’s library, framed by the fragment as a lens, confirms the ‘pattern book’ approach but as something conceptually significant—indicative of the desire for imitation not solely a deficiency in skill or imagination. The lack of medieval

30 M. H. Bloxam, The Principles of Gothic Architecture Elucidated by Question and Answer (London: Tilt, Weale, and Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1836), 59.

31 Brandon and Brandon, Parish Churches, 38, 35. 46 originals in the Colony is significant, for despite his desire to imitate, Blacket had no originals to measure against for accuracy. Blacket’s attempt to copy medieval originals thus resulted in composite creations as he brought various copied elements from different existing buildings

Figure 2.6. St. Philip’s Church, Church Hill designed by Blacket in 1848. (Unknown author. St. Philip’s Church, Church Hill. 1870. Photograph. ON 4 Box 60 No 364. Mitchell Library. State Library of New South Wales.)

Figure 2.7. Tracery at St. Mary’s, Oxford Figure 2.8. Blacket’s tracery design for St. published in Bloxam’s text. Philip’s main eastern window. (Edmund Blacket. St. Philip’s Church plans. c.1848. Architectural drawing. PXD 195/vol. 2. Mitchell Library. State Library of New South Wales.) 47 Figure 2.9. Brandon’s plate of Martham Church, Norfolk. together. The ‘pattern book’ label overlooks the conceptual significance of this result, especially how the nature of Blacket’s design process encouraged an increasingly fictionalised use of medievalism that will be fully developed in Chapter Three’s assessment of the University of

Sydney’s buildings.

There was another more ecclesiastical dimension to Blacket’s concern for archaeological accuracy in Gothic church buildings. Blacket’s imitative churches like St. Mark’s and St. Philip’s went hand in hand with the Cambridge and Oxford Movements. Both movements stemmed, broadly speaking, from a push to reform and reinvigorate the Anglican church during the 1840s, sparked by religious pluralism and decreasing piety, and were named after their members’ close association with both universities.32 Reform sought to reinvest spiritual vigour, and affected a range of church elements including ritual, legislation and decoration. In particular, the Cambridge Movement gave rise to the Ecclesiological Society founded in 1839, which sought to reinvest the Anglican church

32 James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 25-27. See White’s delineation of the two movements. 48 with its Catholicity through church decoration, signalling again the prevalence of Pugin’s discourse.33

The Ecclesiological Society saw archaeological accuracy in church building as the way to restore the sensory and material richness of Catholic worship valued by the Romantic sensibility. The

Society saw the current church as utterly prosaic—‘bleak’ and ‘dry’ both materially and ceremonially—and enriching church architecture was their remedy.34 Their attention focused on restoring elements of pre-Reformation church design like chancels and rood screens, eradicating box pews, correcting forms for larger elements like porches and aisles, and perfecting details like altar cloths and gargoyles—but into an Anglican context.35 Architectural historian Brian Andrews clearly articulates how the Society centred on a ‘correlation between the perfection of style and religious faith’, arguing that their mission was to ‘restore the architecture’ and by doing so,

‘rekindle that faith with which it was once associated.’36 The Society’s search for archaeological accuracy was a pursuit of religious idealism. They were trying to build the ‘perfect’ church in form and function rather than restore an old one (the prospect of restoring the ‘old church’ was still abhorrent to many), in effect attempting to anchor Anglicanism in even deeper histories and aesthetics than actually belonged to it. Their concept of a Catholic-esque yet strictly Anglican church was a very specific, fictionalised use of the medieval.

The Society promoted an intense study of medieval church architecture like that undertaken by

Blacket. The Society published their polemic in their London-based journal, The Ecclesiologist

(1841-68), known for its scathing reviews of contemporary church building.37 One assumes Blacket

33 See Andrews, Australian Gothic, 10. Founded as the Cambridge Camden Society, it was known as the Ecclesiological Society from 1845 on.

34 Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: John Murray, 1995), 151; Rosemary Hill, “Keats, Antiquarianism, and the Picturesque,” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 2 (April 2014): 130.

35 The Cambridge Camden Society, A Few Words to Church Builders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1841), 8, 22, 24. This text espoused the Society’s central beliefs.

36 Andrews, Australian Gothic, 9.

37 Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 92. 49 was familiar with the journal, perhaps he even became a member of the Society after he left

England, for it was especially preoccupied with implanting an ideal Church of England in the

Colony. It reviewed his work several times: in 1851, they credited Blacket with ‘the great improvement in taste and construction’ in church building, and described Blacket as ‘a devout and faithful member’ (whether of the Society or the Church more broadly remains unclear) whose

‘tastes fortunately led him into a very minute and careful study of ecclesiastical art.’38 The Society’s commentary linked the spiritual significance they placed on architecture with Blacket’s antiquarian concern for accuracy.

Blacket’s desire to imitate original Gothic churches carried even more weight in New South

Wales which had to overcompensate with its architecture in order to address the gaps in physical distance, sentimentality and spiritual commitment it was trying to bridge. Blacket built his churches to serve parishes the Ecclesiologists considered doctrinally (and also architecturally) weak and wayward. The same issue from 1851 included a lengthy section on ‘The Ecclesiology of New South

Wales’ which voiced the journal’s ‘fear that the externals of religion were as little heeded as religion itself.’39 The Society uniquely placed their ecclesiological concerns in the colonial environment:

None but those who have been in new colonies, can tell of what vast importance Her [the

Church] aesthetical work is to the due Christianisation of the people; of what infinite power over

the heart the externals of religion, care in the form, and structure, and arrangement of the church,

and decency, and order, and solemnity of ritual, have with those who have cast themselves out

into the wilderness in a strange land, where their occupations, and habits, and associations all

tend to produce forgetfulness of GOD.40

38 The Ecclesiological Society, The Ecclesiologist Volume XII (London: Joseph Masters, 1851), 262.

39 The Ecclesiological Society, 254.

40 The Ecclesiological Society, 264-265. 50 The Society firmly attributed the restoration of faith in the Colony to ‘correct’ decoration—the

‘external’ aesthetics of religion—evoking Pugin’s and Ruskin’s links between architecture and moralism. The Society was more explicit about its colonising mentality than Blacket, and their polemic even suggests ideas of colonial degeneration in which they feared the dilution of English religion in far-off colonies.41 Blacket was certainly concerned with ecclesiology in the Colony, writing to his brother in May 1843 about his desire to ‘have a great hand in improving the taste of the discerning Public upon Ecclesiastical Architecture’ and wishing to ‘study decency in churches as well as economy.’42 Yet Blacket’s concern for ‘decency’ over ‘economy’—as in visually accurate churches over those modestly and functionally built—was more a byproduct of his devotion to imitating English Gothic. As we will see, Blacket’s devotion to Englishness sometimes overrode his ecclesiological impulses, especially on the point of style.

Both Blacket and The Ecclesiological Society were hyperaware of what ‘decency’ entailed and it centred not only on features like altars and rood screens, but more broadly on the spiritual meaning of the different Gothic styles. As Chapter One established, the transfer of moral meaning to architecture rested on Thomas Rickman’s categorisation of Gothic. Rickman’s Early English,

Decorated and Perpendicular categories were equated with the birth, maturity and decline of

Christianity respectively. The Society, often vehemently, celebrated the ‘mature’ or ‘high’ phase—

Decorated Gothic—as the most appropriate style for the reformed Church to build in. To them, it represented the pinnacle of religious purity, piety and rapture, celebrated in churches like St.

Andrew’s in Heckington, Lincolnshire constructed in the early fourteenth century (fig.2.10).43

Decorated Gothic was characterised primarily by its curvilinear tracery—windows that had flowing

41 See Mizutani’s discussion of ‘British Prestige and Fears of Colonial Degeneration’ in another colonial context. Satoshi Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the “Domiciled Community” in British India 1858-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.

42 Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Frank.

43 Basil Clarke, Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Gothic Revival in England (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1969), 79. 51 LEFT Figure 2.10. Decorated Gothic celebrated at St. Andrew’s Church, Heckington. (Richard Croft. St.Andrew’s Church, Heckington. June 7, 2006. Photograph. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St.Andrew%27s_church, _Heckington_-_geograph.org.uk_-_183007.jpg.)

RIGHT Figure 2.11. Blacket’s sketch of Decorated Gothic tracery at Carlisle Cathedral. (Edmund Blacket. Carlisle Cathedral’s great east window, October 11, 1840. Sketch. RB 508.5 17. Rare Books & Special Collections. University of Sydney.) shapes—seen notably in Carlisle Cathedral’s great east window that Blacket sketched October 11,

1840 (fig.2.11).

At times, Blacket followed suit in the imitation of original Decorated Gothic churches such as his design for St. Paul’s, Redfern (1848, fig.2.12). St. Paul’s bears striking resemblance to

Brandon’s plate of Southfleet Church, Kent (fig.2.13) a ‘building of pure Decorated character.’44

However, sometimes Blacket rejected the Society’s Decorated stylistic ideal. To Blacket, and perhaps to most of his homesick patrons, the ideal church was not only in Decorated Gothic; the community desired, and the Colony demanded, England’s ecclesiastical landscape in all its styles to satisfy the variety of imagined churches ‘back home.’ The impulse for the replication of Englishness in a distant colony outweighed ecclesiological motive. This is evident in three churches Blacket built in 1848, designed in each of the three Gothic styles. He used Early English, Decorated and

Perpendicular for St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, St. Philip’s respectively—three churches we have

44 Brandon and Brandon, Parish Churches, 20. 52 Figure 2.12. St. Paul’s Church, Redfern designed by Blacket in 1848 in the Decorated style. (Unknown author. St. Paul’s Church, Redfern. c.1885. Photograph. SPF/88. Mitchell Library. State Library of New South Wales.)

Figure 2.13. Brandon’s plate of Southfleet Church, Kent, which Blacket’s design for St. Paul’s strongly resembles, especially its asymmetrical tower. encountered already. Whilst this variety has been explained away as Blacket showing off his architectural ability, it has far more significance as evidence of the colonial project.45 Blacket’s design for St. Philip’s in particular encapsulated his dedication to English Gothic.

45 Kerr and Broadbent, Gothick Taste, 130. 53 Blacket designed St. Philip’s in the Perpendicular style. Perpendicular became a site of contest in the 1840s; the Society saw it as a debased style, but it also carried important associations with

Englishness and warrants particular attention as it takes on even more significance in Chapter

Three. Perpendicular extended loosely from the late-fourteenth to the late-sixteenth century, and drew its name from its tracery.46 Bloxam’s 1836 text on Gothic architecture described how the term derived from its mullions (vertical bars between panes of glass) which ‘form perpendicular divisions between the window sill and the head’ rather than Decorated’s flowing tracery.47

Perpendicular was characterised not only by these rectilinear features, but also by repetition of form, large windows divided by transoms with square-headed mouldings, and spectacular fan-vault or hammer-beam roofs.

The Perpendicular style represented Englishness in a number of significant ways both sacred and secular. As a style it was uniquely English, and by definition had ‘no Continental, Irish, or Scottish equivalent.’48 It offered the imitation of national English monuments; Perpendicular is the style of the original Westminster Hall and the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and the Lady Chapel at

Westminster Abbey. Perpendicular constructions pervade the quintessential English university cities of Cambridge and Oxford in King’s College Chapel and the Divinity School respectively, and of course, the University of Sydney’s main buildings. It was a uniquely English style that projected a post-Reformation, Anglicised church, yet carried the sacred aura of medieval Gothic, a Catholicity important to nineteenth-century reformed Anglicanism.

The Ecclesiological Society saw Perpendicular as a style of ‘frivolous debility’ and ‘the sign of a declining and secularised Church.’49 The Society directly criticised Blacket for building St. Philip’s

46 James Stevens Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 209), 571.

47 Bloxam, The Principles of Gothic Architecture, 15.

48 Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture, 571.

49 The Cambridge Camden Society, A Few Words, 6; The Cambridge Camden Society, The Ecclesiologist Volume IV (London: John Thomas Walters, 1845), 270. 54 in Perpendicular, commenting during construction that ‘according to the Society’s canon [it is] faulty in style.’50 That Blacket knowingly built in a style the Society disapproved of reveals that he, and the wider colonial project, preferred signs of Englishness over ideal forms of Anglicanism.

Despite the laments of the Ecclesiologists, Blacket constructed two of the most important churches in the Colony in Perpendicular for the Englishness they represented: St. Philip’s, built on the spiritually significant site of the first church in the Colony, and the Colony’s first Anglican cathedral, St. Andrew’s.51

Blacket selected the quintessential English Gothic style as the richest way to mark the Australian landscape with ties to ‘old England.’ St. Philip’s embodied fragments of a romanticised medieval

England and idealised Anglican-Catholic worship within a distinctly English identity. Identifying

St. Philip’s conceptual fabrication reveals the fictionality invested in the Gothic by Blacket’s

Romantic sensibility when paired with the desires of the colonial present. The search for a perfect

English church reminds us of the same kind of Picturesque manipulation applied both to Gothic ruins and medieval history that rested on idealisation. The exercise of stylistic control takes on more significance as Blacket erected his aesthetic Gothic churches on what his generation saw was an empty and wild land, and this project disguised what the Gadigal people of the Eora nation knew as

Country.

The idea of the Picturesque colonial church calls for us to turn our understanding of Blacket’s

Gothic on its head and see the way it functioned in the colonial environment from a different perspective. I have demonstrated how Blacket used the Gothic to bridge the Colony to the known and ideal English ecclesiastical landscape. However, the benign image of the Gothic church disguised the Colony’s dispossession, disregard and violence towards Indigenous people, especially

50 The Ecclesiological Society, The Ecclesiologist Volume XII, 262-263

51 Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, 48, 45. Blacket took over the design of St. Andrew’s in 1846. 55 in Blacket’s case, those who belonged to the Eora nation.52 The comforting image of Blacket’s churches acted as a mask that obscured its colonial threat.53 Blacket’s Gothic churches fragmented

Indigenous society in the attempt to build colonial ‘wholes.’ Consequently, his means to avail his sense of dislocation was predicated on the dislocation of others.54

Through the Gothic, Blacket performed what Australian medievalist Stephanie Trigg describes as

‘the imaginative re-inscription of the landscape.’55 Such re-inscription was only achievable by

‘historical and ideological denial’ of Indigenous ownership and culture—as Louise D’Arcens notes was so common for colonial medievalism.56 This reminds us that the history of the Gothic is overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric.

Blacket’s Gothic churches spoke to the European medieval and its polarising Romantic and

Grotesque characterisations. Candace Barrington, a specialist in medieval English literature, articulates how ‘Europeans could imagine themselves as embodying medieval virtues while attributing medieval vices to outsiders.’57 This offers a way to see the colonial world through

Blacket’s eyes, where white colonists inhabited Walter Scott’s pious, chivalric world of the

Romantic Gothic, and Indigenous peoples—the black ‘other’—were encased in ideas of the

Grotesque medieval like barbarism and heathenism.58 We know Blacket shared a typical nineteenth- century view of Aboriginal people as he described them to his brother as a ‘miserable looking

52 See Karksens’ consideration of place as ‘territorial.’ Karskens, The Colony, 17.

53 See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 177.

54 See Gelder and Jacob’s discussion on uncanny experiences that ‘occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar.’ Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 23.

55 Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Medieval and Gothic Australia,” in Trigg, Medievalism and the Gothic, xxii.

56 Louise D’Arcens, “Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox,” in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 183.

57 Candace Barrington, “Global Medievalism and Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 183.

58 Barrington, 185; See Louise D’Arcens, “From Holy War to Border Skirmish: The Colonial Chivalry of Sydney’s First Professors,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (October 2000): 536. 56 race.’59 In 1836, an article in the Saturday Magazine (which Blacket also read) described those entrapped within the city:

Nothing… could be more pitiable than the sight of these wretched creatures, half-naked, half-

starved and half-drunk, straggling, squalling and jabbering daily through the streets of Sydney.60

Yet as Grace Karskens and others illustrate, many Aboriginal people adapted to the colonists’ presence, made livings and maintained aspects of traditional life.61 What then, is the Indigenous history of the Gothic?

The attempt to trace Barani—a Darug word that means ‘yesterday’—is a view of Blacket’s

Gothic determined by Gadgial lands and history.62 In an attempt to avoid another wholly white history of the Gothic, I mean to offer space for another history by looking at the landscape from the

Gadigal’s perspective in nineteenth-century Sydney. This is not to presume to understand

Indigenous experience, but to continue to acknowledge the enduring and destructive colonial legacies that colonists like Blacket incurred by living and building on Country, and how this history is inextricably bound to the Gothic. In order to see how the aesthetic of the Gothic was underpinned by the violence of colonialism, we will look at the Gadigal’s changing landscape.

The tower of St. Philip’s, the turret of St. Paul’s and the spire of St. Mark’s rose on the ancestral homeland of the Gadigal, one of at least thirty clans living in the Sydney area at the time of invasion.63 To the Gadigal, Blacket and the early Sydney community were Berewalgal—people

59 Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Frank.

60 William Romaine Govett, Sketches of New South Wales: Written and Illustrated for the Saturday Magazine in 1836-37, eds. Gaston Renard, and Annette Potts (Melbourne: Gaston Renard, 1977), 7-8; Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Frank; See Grant’s discussion of racial predestination: Robert D. Grant, “Curious Consistencies: The Shaping of the Literature of Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement,” in Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement, ed. Robert D. Grant (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12.

61 Karskens, The Colony, 521; See Ann Curthoys’ discussion of the ‘status of victim in Australian historical consciousness.’ Ann Curthoys, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology,” Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 61 (January 1999): 3.

62 “About Barani Website,” Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History, City of Sydney, accessed November 30, 2020, https:// www.sydneybarani.com.au/whats-on-this-website/.

63 Karskens, The Colony, 3. 57 from a distant place.64 The Berewalgal were alien to the Gadigal by mubaya—an unknown language, whereas the Gadigal were Eora meaning ‘here’ or ‘from this place.’65 The parish of St.

Philip’s served by Blacket’s church rose upon the shores of the Tank Stream—a once fertile watercourse that supplied fresh water to the area and provided rich fishing grounds.66 By the time of

St. Philip’s construction, the encamped groups had been squeezed out of this area to live in those spaces deemed undesirable on the city outskirts. Blackwattle Swamp, in what is now Redfern, was such an area considered by the colonial community as suitable only for slaughterhouses, tanneries and other polluting industry.67 To the Gadigal this area was ancient Country; the Blackwattle site was a swamp that sustained a wetland of birds and fish, close by to a corroboree ground and intersected by paths that led to other clan lands in Botany Bay and across the Cumberland Plain.68

The Blackwattle Swamp Creek supplied fresh water from Redfern to Blackwattle Swamp Cove, another significant site for fishing and food.69 By the time the Berewalgal constructed their first churches, disease and dispossession had already devastated the Indigenous population, and the

Blackwattle Swamp Creek was renowned for the unsightly amounts of refuse and offal it now carried out to sea.70 Settlers pushed the Gadigal farther from shore, some resisted, some became enclosed and others ‘entangled’ themselves but they did not disappear.71

64 Karskens, The Colony, 47.

65 “Dictionary,” Dharug and Dharawal Resources, UNSW and Centre of Indigenous Technology, Innovation and Environmental Sustainability, accessed November 30, 2020, https://dharug.dalang.com.au/language/view_word/1756; “Aboriginal People and Place,” Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History, City of Sydney, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/aboriginal-people-and-place/.

66 Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2017), 91.

67 “Eveleigh Railway Workshops Machinery,” NSW Government Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, accessed November 30, 2020, https:// www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5001063.

68 “Redfern Park and Oval,” NSW Government Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5063600; Ian Hoskins, Sydney Harbour: A History (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2009), 12.

69 Paul Irish and Tamika Goward, “Blackwattle Creek,” Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History, City of Sydney, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/blackwattle-creek/.

70 Hoskins, Sydney Harbour, 174, 181.

71 Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 96. 58 The Berewalgal turned the northern part of Blackwattle Swamp into their main railway terminus in 1855 where St. Paul’s rose near its edge. The Blackwattle still flowed through the shrinking wetlands St. Paul’s guarded and as it had done for uncounted years, it branched west and flowed through what was then Grose Farm, where it pooled in a shallow, marshy lake (fig.2.14).72 This lake still exists, though manicured and artificial, as Lake Northam in Victoria Park—the sloping foreground of the University of Sydney’s main buildings.

The heavy stone of Blacket’s Gothic buildings drowned the Gadigal’s once-fertile watercourse.

The Great Hall in its Picturesque permanence harked back to an unknown, unreal world, and completely obscured the Gadigal’s fragile environment. The Gothic halls of Blacket’s creation forced the Gadigal to make way. Blacket and the University founders carelessly traded the

Figure 2.14. Map of Sydney in 1854 showing (highlighted in blue): St. Paul’s Church, Redfern south-west of the railway terminus, traces of the Blackwattle Swamp Creek running top to bottom, and Grose Farm with Lake Northam on the far left. (Woolcott & Clarke, City of Sydney, 1854. 1854. Map. A-00880471. City of Sydney Archives. Accessed November 18, 2020. https://archives.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/nodes/view/1709398.)

72 “Lake Northam,” Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History, City of Sydney, accessed November 30, 2020, https:// www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/lake-northam/; Alistair Hobbs, Natalie Blake, and Alan Williams, University of Sydney Aboriginal Heritage Impact Assessment (Sydney: Archaeological & Heritage Management Solutions, 2016), 59. 59 Gadigal’s ancient sites of congregation for their own—something Blacket must have known when he stood on the grounds of Grose Farm in 1854 envisioning his medieval monument.73

Blacket succeeded in turning the alienness he saw in colonial New South Wales into a Gothic fantasy based on denial, erasure and Picturesque manipulation. Blacket’s idealised Gothic churches celebrated a medieval, pious world with their imitative architecture and Catholicity, but disguised a violent other. Blacket’s churches signalled the Colony’s present and its progress: the colonists believed they ‘founded the future’ as the Gadgial ‘represented the flawed and dwindling past.’74 The

Colony’s modernity, born of a romanticised heritage, comes to fruition in Chapter Three which will bring the temporal heterogeneity of the Gothic into one realm. It will elucidate the University of

Sydney’s main buildings as a folly at once medieval, modern and futuristic: as something overtly

Romantic yet unavoidably colonial, more ornamental than functional, more artificial than real, an evocation of ruin that trumpets futurity.

73 See Wendy S. Shaw, “Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney,” Geographical Research 51, no. 3 (August 2013): 257.

74 Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 106. 60 Chapter Three

‘The growth of ages’

Blacket is memorialised by the University of Sydney’s main buildings, especially the Great Hall

(1854-59). It is a large hall in the Perpendicular style, richly decorated with a hammer-beam roof, large stained glass windows and accented with a turret (fig.3.1-3.2). Through the Great Hall especially, this chapter traces another temporality of the Gothic: from notions of a romanticised heritage to an idealised modernity, incorporated visions of futurity. Blacket’s design used an age-old style to represent not only the colonial present, but to herald uncounted years into the future.

Blacket’s buildings navigated three main tensions: between secular and sacred ambitions, ideas of ornament and function, and the dynamic between history and fiction inherent to medievalism.

The main buildings altogether rested on Blacket’s ecclesiastical Gothic idealism traced throughout the last two chapters, now paired with the University founders’ firm belief in education reform—in a secular institution. Both Blacket and the University founders drew heavily on the institutional and architectural legacies of Oxford and Cambridge University. The association to Oxbridge drew ideas

Figure 3.1. The main buildings looking on the Great Hall. (Unknown author. The University of Sydney main buildings. 1870. Photograph. G3 224 0497. Courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives.) 61 Figure 3.2. Interior detail of the Great Hall looking toward the Oxford Window. (Photo by author) of academic excellence couched in medieval Englishness from its Gothic buildings, and the founders saw the Gothic as the way to instil this atmosphere of learning. The association strengthened the Colony’s sense of modernity in validating it as a place worthy of its own great institution. However, Oxbridge’s religious foundation, structured by denominational colleges that required religious tests, was the object of nineteenth-century university reforms and something the

University of Sydney positioned itself against as another aspect of its perceived modernity.

Yet in the same instance, whilst distinct from ‘sectarian’ learning, the University of Sydney did share in a sense of the sacred with Oxbridge: it valued the veneration of academic excellence. This reverence for learning was something that called upon the Gothic style’s ecclesiastical inheritance, and the Anglican church’s more recent interest in recovering its Catholicity through the style.

Matched with Blacket’s devotional sensibility and his expertise in ecclesiastical Gothic, the Great

Hall in particular became a kind of ‘church of learning.’

The University of Sydney’s buildings evoked these contested ambitions via their ornamental qualities. It was above all an aesthetic project promoted by the University’s Senate and Building

Committee, both headed by Charles Nicholson, and brought to fruition by Blacket. Blacket, the 62 University founders, the wider community and even Parliament clashed over the aesthetic of the buildings: those who realised the decorative significance of the Gothic and its more sacred elements, like Blacket and Nicholson, met the resistance of utilitarian-inclined groups. This architectural and institutional dispute was complicated by the way the main buildings drew on remembered and mis-remembered ideas of the medieval English built environment, bringing the formation of the University of Sydney and its visual realisation into a deeper complexity.

By 1859, Grose Farm was unrecognisable under the University’s main buildings. The main branch faced north-east towards the harbour, folding out in relative symmetry punctuated with traceried windows set in square-frames and adorned with battlements and crockets. It only awaited its clock tower that would be completed in 1862 (fig.3.3). The Great Hall was finished in untarnished sandstone, accenting the ‘T’ shape of the main buildings. They combined Blacket’s devotion to the

Gothic with the University Building Committee’s vision. Established in 1853, the Building

Committee comprised of Charles Nicholson (then Vice-Provost), Francis Merewether (Senate

Figure 3.3. The main buildings and clock tower. (Photo by author)

63 member) and John Woolley (Professor of Classics) among others, many of whom were Oxbridge graduates.1 The buildings they had concocted in 1853, resplendent and symbolically rich in towering Perpendicular Gothic, contrasted starkly with the paucity of the student body. A report from the Building Committee in 1853 revealed their initial intention only to construct those buildings considered ‘indispensable’ to the functioning of the University, like lecture rooms and laboratories, first.2 Yet, early in these discussions their intentions flipped from a functional to an ornamental priority, and they committed to building the Great Hall first.

For the functioning of the University, the Hall was unnecessary. The student body was meagre: during the 1850s the University had an average of eleven full-time students matriculating each year, and the University had seen only twenty-five graduate in its history.3 The assemblies and ceremonies the student body formed were tiny in contrast to the Hall’s capacity.4 The Building

Committee undertook the endeavour at great expense too; they knowingly spent around £66,000 on a suite of hollow buildings. Pamela Bell, who has investigated the buildings in this time, describes them as ‘empty’, a characterisation that is a provocative way to think about the implications of ornamentation in relation to the practicalities of function and expenditure in architecture.5 The

University founders prioritised the symbolic power of Gothic architecture by commissioning grand buildings for such a small student population—an overcompensation unique to the fragmented predicament of the Colony. Bell expands her analysis of the ‘empty’ buildings to consider the relationship between form and meaning in the Colony:

1 University of Sydney Building Committee, Copy of a Report of the Building Committee of the University Senate November 1853, P3 F.5/10, Personal Archive of Edmund Thomas Blacket, University of Sydney Archives.

2 University of Sydney Building Committee, Copy of a Report.

3 Clifford Turney, Ursula Bygott, and Peter Chippendale, Australia’s First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 1 1850-1939 (Sydney: University of Sydney in association with Hale & Iremonger, 1991), 125.

4 Turney, Bygott, and Chippendale, 99.

5 Pamela Bell, “‘Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato’: Nineteenth-Century Art Collections and Architectural Style at the University of Sydney” (MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1989), 10. 64 At the Oxbridge universities the meaning came first, the content or substance of the institution

shaped the outer form… In Sydney, on the other hand, the form was created first and from that it

was hoped to create the substance. The University Great Hall was only an imitation of all that it

was supposed to stand for.6

The ‘outer form’ of the University of Sydney was paramount to its intended vision as a great academic institution: a Gothic ‘Great Hall’ was certainly more of a statement than a laboratory or lecture room. Yet there is something more conceptually complex to the Hall’s imitation.

The expense and effort that went into the largely functionless Hall suggest how the University hoped to heighten academic success by aesthetics, just as the Ecclesiological Society hoped to intensify religious worship through church decoration. Nicholson, like Blacket, firmly believed that the visuality of the Hall would ‘improve the minds, the tastes, and the habits of the rising generation’ providing them with ‘those impressions which are only to be acquired by the contemplation of objects of this kind.’7 The University’s Gothic would act as a marker of the

Colony’s reputation, but would also look inwards to heighten the learning of its students through its suggestive architecture. Nicholson’s statement also reminds us of the significance of the absence of original medieval Gothic buildings in Australia. Absence invited remembered and mis-remembered visions of the Gothic, especially that at Oxbridge, to Blacket’s design, as well as investing great importance on the opportunity to establish the first Gothic institution in the Colony.

Nicholson argued vehemently for the importance of these grand empty buildings. He and Blacket were allied by shared interest. They both grew up in the Romantic-industrial Yorkshire landscape, shared an antiquarian tendency and were already familiar with one another through their Church of

6 Bell, “Nineteenth-Century Art Collections,” 22.

7 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly During the Session of 1859-60: With the Various Documents Connected Therewith in Four Volumes, Vol. IV (Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1860), 315. 65 England connection.8 With a staunch sense of Anglicanism, they both were predisposed to hold a unique interest in the Gothic. Nicholson expressed his concern for the importance of Gothic ornament in letters he sent seeking patronage to support the interior decoration of the Hall. In 1856,

Nicholson wrote to Thomas Barker, a wealthy grazier and engineer, inducing him to ‘enrich’ the

Colony and its students with ‘those attributes and associations connected with art, which… constitute the chief charm of older countries’, illustrating how:

large sums are systematically bestowed on objects of a purely aesthetic character from the

conviction that they tend to elevate and improve the moral tastes and habits of all classes. The

same argument applies with infinitely greater weight in a new country like ours destitute of all

historical monuments and traditions.9

Nicholson was acutely aware of the importance of ‘attributes’ and ‘associations’ to England’s historical monuments, that they inspired moral and intellectual, even spiritual qualities, as well as contributing to the University’s desired atmosphere of learning. This was something Nicholson considered especially necessary in the ‘destitute’ colony, and that which the ‘purely aesthetic character’ of the Hall would address.

Not everyone shared Nicholson’s belief in architecture’s symbolic power but it certainly aligned with Blacket’s vision. Three years prior, when Blacket was first ruminating on the design of the main buildings, his concerns were also grounded in the ‘charm of older countries.’ Blacket noted his thoughts ‘concerning university architecture’ on a piece of scrap paper that is held in the University

Archives:

There is one great peculiarity that overrides all others—that leaves the question of Architectural

beauty or comparative perfection untouched—that avoids the real or supposed requirement of the

8 David S. Macmillan, “Nicholson, Sir Charles (1808–1903),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, accessed November 30, 2020, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/nicholson-sir-charles-2508.

9 Charles Nicholson, Charles Nicholson to Thomas Barker, October 31, 1856, Letter, P4 4/3, Personal Archive of Sir Charles Nicholson, University of Sydney Archives. 66 climate of the colony—that evades all objections & defies all contradictions—I mean the fitness

of association. It is impossible so for an Englishman to think of an University without thinking of

Mediaeval [sic] Architecture—We cannot entertain the most visionary idea of styles or learning

without associating in some way or other the forms & peculiarities of the Gothic styles & if the

memory of King’s College…10

Blacket’s crescendo of emphasis placed associative and symbolic links above all other architectural considerations. This is not the same architectural approach as ‘associationism’ discussed in Chapter

Two, for Blacket always recognised archaeological accuracy. Blacket’s crossed-out reference to the

‘visionary’ image of King’s College, Cambridge, a thought that cuts off mid-sentence, reveals his idea of the epitome of University architecture. Its associations are familiar: King’s College and its famous Perpendicular chapel (1506-15, fig.3.4) projected Englishness, the English landscape, a

Romantic vision of the medieval, the importance of longevity as well as the academic and

Figure 3.4. The western facade of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge and its great window. (Wikimedia. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. July 12, 2006. Photograph. https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kings_College_Chapel_Cambridge.JPG.)

10 Edmund Blacket, Notes concerning architectural styles, and the problems of designing buildings for a university, n.d., manuscript, P3 F.1/1, Personal Archive of Edmund Thomas Blacket, University of Sydney Archives. Blacket’s emphasis and strikethrough. 67 theological legacy of Oxbridge. Not everyone in the Colony agreed on the importance of these links, but the Oxbridge graduates among the University founders and the architect they selected certainly did.

Drawing on Oxbridge in the 1850s, even stylistically, could not have avoided the tension between sacred and secular forces in education. Reform attempted to wrest Oxbridge’s academia from its religious core. A reformed Oxbridge in the Antipodes took all the associations of academic excellence, legitimacy and longevity but sought to leave behind its religious foundation. The main object of reform was the Oxbridge collegiate system. Denominational colleges prevailed over the university (which acted as merely an examination authority) and controlled education for its students, whose admittance they determined by a religious test.11 Reform sought a centralised university that controlled the education of its students, where the collegiate system was ‘dominated’ by the university.12 This was essential to the secular foundation of the University of Sydney which saw itself as a modern institution that valued more accessible education and meritocracy over class and religious divides.13 Some historians, however, have doubted the secular intention of the

University since it did still endorse denominational colleges and had considered a religious test.14

The establishment of denominational colleges, though ‘weak’, met strong opposition in the period. The Parliamentary Select Committee, founded in 1859 to assess the University’s expenditure, vehemently opposed their establishment. They believed the colleges violated the secular intention of the University by drawing too closely on the unreformed Oxbridge model. As the Great Hall was finished in 1859, the humble cluster of Early English buildings that make up St.

11 Geoffrey Sherington and Julia Horne, “Empire, State and Public Purpose in the Founding of Universities and Colleges in the Antipodes,” History of Education Review 39, no. 2 (October 2010): 38; See Ted Tapper and David Palfreyman, Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition (London: Woburn Press, 2000), 36-37; See Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151-152.

12 Turney, Bygott, and Chippendale, Australia’s First, 134.

13 Sherington and Horne, “Empire, State and Public Purpose,” 50-51.

14 Sherington and Horne, 41. 68 Paul’s Anglican College were rising, and the Gothic foundations for St. John’s Catholic College had been laid; the Select Committee found this abhorrent, stating ‘that a grievous mistake has been made’, denouncing the ‘violation’ of the ‘strictly secular institution’ by giving it a ‘sectarian character.’15 For all the Select Committee’s vexed opposition, it seemed to have little effect. The

University’s buildings rose in Gothic grandeur, the colleges too. Julia Horne, the University of

Sydney’s historian, argues that the University only met popular approval in Sydney by the inclusion and endowment of denominational colleges that were always part of the vision, though such a compromise was contested at the time.16 The intersection of sacred and secular concerns is important to consider as it conceptually underpinned the University as an institution and the nature of its Gothic ornamentation. It complicates the University’s intention, especially given Blacket’s role as an ecclesiastical architect, and indeed the Gothic as an ecclesiastical style. To understand this more fully, we will turn to Blacket and Nicholson’s campaign for ornamental over functional qualities.

The Select Committee also focused its criticism on the expense of the main buildings. They interviewed many figures connected with the University, including Blacket, Nicholson, Woolley,

Merewether and the Registrar, Hugh Kennedy, when the buildings were nearing completion. The

Select Committee was adamant that the cost of the University’s construction was ridiculous—an act of ‘throwing money away’ on needless ‘luxury.’17 They repeatedly, rather exaggeratedly, referenced continental universities that produced ‘eminent men’ with ‘no buildings at all.’18 Though the

University buildings were extravagant for the student population, the Select Committee’s furore over expense was actually based on a misunderstanding of the University’s expenditure, a

15 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 173.

16 Julia Horne, Geoffrey Sherington, and Roderic Campbell, Sydney: The Making of a Public University (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2012), 13; New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 188. Nicholson rejected the idea of the colleges as a compromise.

17 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 171, 172.

18 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 172. 69 miscalculation that still persists today.19 Their interviewees revealed the true relationship between the buildings and their expense as well as information about the visual intention of the main buildings in the absence of Blacket’s original plans (donated to the University and lost in the twentieth century).20

Blacket first drew a plan for the University that cost £70,000 for the collection of buildings.21

The University Senate rejected this proposal, in Blacket’s words, because ‘it was thought not to be sufficiently extensive and commanding.’22 Blacket drew up a grander plan, in brick with ornamental stonework for £130,000, despite containing the same number of rooms and functional properties as the former.23 The Senate accepted this second plan. After inspecting Sydney’s clay bricks and deeming them unsuitable, Blacket recommended constructing the buildings entirely of stone and drew up a final quote for £148,000, which the Senate willingly accepted.24 The Select Committee focused its astonishment on this figure. Crucially, this £148,000 was not just for the original buildings (the Hall and the main front). It was for a whole Gothic quadrangle—one that the Senate never intended to construct in full themselves. Blacket stated that, when the main buildings were largely complete, it was upon ‘the whole plan which was finally approved… that I made the estimate’, explaining that ‘one wing has never been carried out; part of another wing, and the cloisters, have never been carried out.’25 Nicholson explained in more detail:

19 David Lawton and Jeremy Steele, Futurity’s Folly: the Great Hall, the University of Sydney (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1981), 7. Lawton and Steele incorrectly state that £150,000 was spent on Great Hall alone, as we will see, the cost of the main buildings altogether was about half that sum.

20 Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket 1817-1883 (Sydney: The National Trust of Australia, 1983), 105. Four fragments of Blacket’s plans survive in the University of Sydney Archives: the north-east elevation, a detail of the Great Hall’s turret, a plan for its windows and principal doorway.

21 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 217.

22 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 217.

23 Edmund Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Registrar Hugh Kennedy, January 17, 1855, Letter, G3/82, Letters Received (Registrar) 1851-1856, University of Sydney Archives.

24 Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Registrar.

25 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 217. 70 the aim of the Senate was this, not to carry out the whole details of the plan which Mr. Blacket

presented to us, but to erect such a portion of it as would probably provide sufficient

accommodation for all purposes for a hundred years to come, and which should be part of a great

design that might be carried out in after times.26

The Senate intended to leave the quadrangle for future generations—to accrue, like medieval originals, slowly over time, with expenditure over time. The main buildings, as planned, cost only in the region of £60,000 of government endowment; the University did not overspend.27 The Select

Committee misunderstood, condemning how:

a large amount of unnecessary expenditure has been incurred, in an attempt to raise here, all at

once, buildings not at present required, on a scale of magnitude which, in other parts of the

world, has almost invariably been the growth of ages.28

Ironically, this was just the opposite of the University’s intention—they had anticipated ‘the growth of ages.’ Blacket and the Building Committee may have architecturally overcompensated for the present, but the remaining quadrangle design and the remains of the £148,000 budget relied on fulfilment by succeeding ages. Despite the loss of Blacket’s designs, the quadrangle was, as intended, completed by future generations just over a century later in 1966.

The Gothic style underpinned the University’s vision of futurity that was embedded in their ambitions for the quadrangle. The Senate and Building Committee selected a medieval style in which to look one hundred years or more into the future. They no longer looked back on the Gothic with an antiquarian interest inasmuch now that it represented the colonial future for a century to come. Blacket played a key role in choosing Gothic as the ‘futuristic’ style. His notes on university

26 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 315.

27 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 314. At least not on the scale the Select Committee thought—the original government endowment was £50,000, and the University successfully applied for a further £10,000. The total expenditure was around £68,000 as private donations funded most of the ornamentation, but the Select Committee only took issue with public money.

28 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 171. 71 architecture emphasise how deliberately it was chosen, especially as the Building Committee and the Colony were unbound by precedent:

It is not now, as formerly, when there was but one style and… no one troubled himself with

questions concerning the comparative excellence of Gothic, Roman, or Greek. Even the

distinctions of style now remarked as the Native architecture were unknown… In Building an

University therefore, in the 19th Century [sic], one has a difficulty at the outset which never

troubled the founders of those ancient seats of learning which it is our ambition to imitate. We

have to determine which of all Architectural styles shall be taken. 29

Blacket’s emphasis on choice highlights discourse in the nineteenth century that criticised Victorian architects as having ‘no power to form a style of Architecture’, only producing ‘multitudinous revivals.’30 This criticism was not unfounded, but it overlooked the significance behind deliberately reviving a style. On top of the various meanings housed within the Gothic this thesis has developed,

Blacket and the Building Committee chose the Gothic as the medieval style to represent the

University’s and by extension, the Colony’s futurity. By selecting the medieval as the style in which to build for successive ages, Blacket extended the temporal heterogeneity of the Gothic. At the

University, the bygone announced modernity in anticipation of its future—and not only its future, but even the illustrious past it hoped to eventually acquire.

This multi-temporality was also drawn from Oxbridge, as the image of its medieval history symbolised its place as the leader of academic knowledge at the forefront of modern thinking.

Gothic at Oxbridge also mixed Englishness and Anglicanism with its academic leadership that recommended it to Blacket and Nicholson, and made other styles, especially Classical, unsuitable.

For Blacket, the choice for university architecture was never seriously between Classical and Gothic

29 Blacket, Notes concerning architectural styles.

30 Blacket, Notes concerning architectural styles; See Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 126. 72 because of his belief in the importance of the ‘fitness of association.’31 Likewise Nicholson explicitly stated that ‘we could not well have adopted any style… a Grecian building is wholly unadapted for purposes such as those aimed at.’32 Nicholson would have seen the newly-built colonnaded facade of London University (now UCL) and other universities built in non-Gothic styles before he left England in 1833. Even though in England they were building ‘Grecian’ university buildings, in the Colony Nicholson rejected the Classical style. This position suggests how essential ideas of Englishness and Anglicanism in the Gothic were to the University, and the overcompensation the Colony in general made to obtain them: even though the University of

Sydney institutionally aligned with London as one of the first secular thus ‘modern’ institutions, it had to be Gothic.

The real choice Blacket and the Building Committee faced, as with Blacket’s church designs, was between the various ‘distinctions’ of Gothic. For Blacket, the style that met his ‘fitness of association’ was the Perpendicular Gothic of King’s College Chapel. For Nicholson, ‘the later

Tudor style’ being ‘thoroughly English in its character and associations’ brought to mind the ‘great academical institutions of the Mother Country.’33 The rest of the Building Committee recommended

‘the Elizabethan style of Architecture as that best suited to the proposed buildings.’34 In light of

Thomas Rickman’s popular Gothic categorisation—Early, Decorated and Perpendicular—we must consider the use of different terminology. At the first instance they remind us of the fragmentation and indeterminacy at the heart of this exploration of the Gothic—that between Blacket, Nicholson and the Building Committee were a string of understandings and misunderstandings of original

Gothic buildings, especially at Oxbridge.

31 Blacket, Notes concerning architectural styles.

32 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 315.

33 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 315.

34 University of Sydney Building Committee, Copy of a Report. 73 The free interchange of ‘Gothic’ with ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘later Tudor’ occurs as they can all refer to Perpendicular as each period fits within its span (approximately late-fourteenth to late-sixteenth century), however, they are loaded with different ideological connotations. Chapter Two established how contemporaries associated ‘Perpendicular’ most with Englishness. Yet as a term it was not applied to the University by its founders. Blacket even distanced himself from the term despite its

Englishness and opted for another when quizzed by the Select Committee:

In the directions you received from the Senate of the University at first, what was the style of

architecture recommended to you, or was it left open to yourself?

It was talked of, and I proposed a similar style to that I have adopted.

What style do you call that?

The style of Henry VII. I do not know any particular name for it; it is the style of the larger

portion of the buildings at Cambridge and Oxford.

It is not then any pure style of architecture?

It is not a style to which I can give a particular name; in the architect’s textbooks it is called

“Perpendicular English.”35

Blacket appeared to be on the defensive. By invoking a period and not a style he gave himself leeway in the face of criticism. It explains why, for all Blacket’s acute awareness of the Gothic styles in noting them as he toured ruins and built churches within their specifications, he was so vague. Even when pressed, Blacket admits to ‘Perpendicular’, though he offloads the terminology onto textbooks. By choosing ‘Henry VII’ Blacket explicitly drew on national religious monuments and some of Oxbridge’s most quintessential buildings. ‘Henry VII’ boldly connected to Westminster

Abbey’s Lady Chapel (1503-16, fig.3.5) and King’s College Chapel, and as a period (1457-1509) it encompassed the archetypal Oxbridge style in the cloistered quadrangle of Magdalen College,

Oxford (1474-80, fig.3.6). ‘Henry VII’ suggested a sacred Oxbridge—a pre-Reformation institution entwined with worship, and a sense of untarnished Catholicity.

35 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 218. 74 Figure 3.5. Westminster Abbey’s Lady Chapel commissioned by Henry VII. (Josh Hallett. Westminster Abbey, Henry VII Lady Chapel. April 10, 2008. Photograph. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Henry_VII_Lady_Chapel#/media/File:Henry7Chapel_09.jpg.)

Figure 3.6. Cloistered quadrangle of Magdalen College, Oxford. (David Wilson, Magdalen College, Oxford. June 2017. Photograph. https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Attraction_Review-g186361- d195358-Reviews-Magdalen_College-Oxford_Oxfordshire_England.html#photos;aggregation Id=&albumid=&filter=7&ff=261567412.)

Nicholson’s preference for ‘later Tudor’ is a similarly vague term that suggested a sacred as well as post-Reformation idea of the Gothic. Trinity College, Cambridge comes to mind, especially its modestly adorned chapel (1554-67, fig.3.7) that married ecclesiastical Gothic to a restrained, post-

Reformation age. However, the term favoured by the Building Committee, ‘Elizabethan’, was far

75 more reminiscent of England coming into its secularised modernity than its medieval religious heritage, as well as being the last cusp of a truly native English style before neo-Classicism took hold.36 ‘Elizabethan’ indicated the legacy of the Reformation, loading the term with a secularism,

Anglicanism and Englishness that members of the Building Committee found appealing. It suggested architecture like that of the Second Court at St. John’s College, Cambridge (1598-1602), more akin to castle than to church with its crenellated towers and distinctive square-framed windows with no ornamental sculpture to be seen (fig.3.8).

Though each term and each style certainly had porous borders, there was a striking material difference between Blacket’s notion of ‘Henry VII’, Nicholson’s ‘later Tudor’, and the Committee’s

‘Elizabethan’—in stone versus brick. The use of stone characterised the earlier period of

Perpendicular denoted by Henry VII and the most quintessential Tudor Oxbridge buildings. The

Committee’s idea of Elizabethan, as at St. John’s, used brick.

Figure 3.7. Trinity College Chapel with large Perpendicular style windows but minimal stone sculpture. (Cambridge Colleges. Trinity College clock tower, viewed from the top of Great St Mary’s church, with the College chapel to the right. n.d. Photograph. https://www.cambridge- colleges.co.uk/trinity-college/.)

36 See Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: John Murray, 1995), 171. 76 Figure 3.8. Elizabethan style at the Second Court at St John’s College, Cambridge. (St. John’s College. The Second Court at St John’s College. n.d. Photograph. https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/ living-st-johns.)

Blacket, Nicholson and the rest of the Building Committee disagreed on this material difference.

It signified a broader conceptual split between the ornamental and the functional, and the sacred and the secular. A report from the Committee in 1853 recorded their pragmatic priority as they decided on Elizabethan for ‘two reasons’:

1st. From the peculiarity of this style of architecture, inasmuch as a Building constructed in

accordance with it admits of indefinite extension without impairing its general effect as a whole.

2nd. That for Buildings in this style brick may be employed, stone being alone used for [that]…

of great importance.37

Though the Committee was concerned with expressing links to Oxbridge, as an early proposal to the Senate the Committee probably wanted to appear as practical as possible—their preference for a style that employed an inexpensive material and could be easily extended displayed their utilitarianism. However, by selecting brick the Committee promoted a conceptual shift that reduced

37 University of Sydney Building Committee, Copy of a Report. 77 sacred ties. Original Gothic buildings in brick in England are exclusively secular, and original ecclesiastical Gothic in England, as documented by Blacket’s sketchbooks, was always stone. There is a sacredness attached to the materiality of stone—and a secularity to brick. Only stone lends itself to sculptural manipulation. Brick cannot be sculpted into the realm of ornamental imagery—the saints, angels and gargoyles—that so typify Gothic.38 In desiring an Elizabethan-Gothic style in brick, the Committee sought to pair associations to Oxbridge and England with pragmatic considerations of cost and extendability and an exclusive secularity.

Yet Blacket, as we remember his religious inheritance as an architect, famed for his Gothic churches and a figurehead for the Christian colonisation of the land, used stone—the medieval signifier of church worship. Blacket rejected the use of brick in Gothic on aesthetic and associational grounds. On January 17, 1855, Blacket wrote to the University’s Registrar informing him that the buildings should be constructed wholly of stone, submitting at the same time the revised quote of £148,000:

The Clay in the neighbourhood of Sydney… is of an uniform light colour whenever it is well and

sufficiently burnt, and is consequently very unfit for erecting a Building of this kind where the

contrast between the Dark Brick wall, and the light stone dressings is the chief part of the style

[see fig.3.8].39

Blacket reasoned ornamentally rather than structurally or functionally. He overrode the Committee’s parsimony in choosing a style guided by sacred, English association, not the utilitarian, secular approach to architecture as displayed in the Committee’s given reasons.

It is important to recognise that the Committee’s desire for a secularised Oxbridge was a type of

fictionalised medievalism. It was an idealised, composite creation not unlike Blacket’s churches, and rested on their fragmented understanding of Gothic architecture at Oxbridge. Their notion of

Elizabethan-Gothic in brick at Oxbridge was even misplaced: St. John’s College aside, there is very

38 Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), 41.

39 Blacket, Edmund Blacket to Registrar. 78 little surviving brick Gothic in England, ecclesiastical or secular, let alone at Oxbridge, nor was the

Elizabethan period a time for significant building there.40 The architecture the Committee envisioned was fictionalised—drawn from vague understandings and misremembered buildings.

This blur foregrounds notions of the fragment, the Colony’s distance, the absence of medieval originals, and the Romantic approach to the past. The Committee drew on a mythical Oxbridge for the conception of the University.

Blacket, for all his archaeological and antiquarian tendencies, participated in this mythologising and achieved it by employing the same imitative approach he used for his churches to create a melange of various Oxbridge-like buildings—real, remembered and imagined. The University main buildings draw on various visions of Oxbridge at once in a Gothic, colonial fragmentariness. The fragment allows us to see how the main buildings contain elements like the square-framed traceried windows of St. John’s, the buttressed regularity of King’s College Chapel, the jutting pinnacles of

New College (fig.3.9), and the oriel windows of Balliol College (fig.3.10)—details supplied by

LEFT Figure 3.9. Pinnacles adorning the quadrangle of New College, Oxford. (Cherwell News. New College, Oxford. n.d. Photograph. https://cherwell.org/2017/08/11/new-college-tops-201617-norrington-table/.)

RIGHT Figure 3.10. Oriel window at Balliol College, Oxford. (Tony Hisgett. Balliol College Window, Oxford. April 23, 2011. Photograph. https://commons. wiki media.org/wiki/ File:Balliol _College_Window_(5646952307).jpg.)

40 See Geoffrey Tyack, “The Architecture of the University and its Colleges,” in The Illustrated History of Oxford University, ed. John Prest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 93; See Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style, 41. 79 Blacket’s library, architectural network and imagination. The University’s medieval fabrication cast a convincing, if fictionalised, illusion of Oxbridge in the Antipodes.

Though a melange of sacred and secular elements, the main buildings—the Great Hall especially

—carried a rich ecclesiastical inheritance and association with worship. Though a notionally secular building, Blacket invited the sacred into the Hall via fragments of sacred buildings and the

Catholicity inextricable to the Gothic—seen especially in its graceful arched windows that contrasted sharply with the rest of the main buildings’ distinctively Elizabethan square-framed windows (fig.3.11).41 Blacket transferred the sensation of reverence from church architecture into his design for the University. This aura already inhered in Oxbridge—the sensation of reverence not only in a Christian sense, but for academia itself.

Blacket’s Great Hall was a ‘church of learning.’ The veneration of academia derived from

Oxbridge’s religious foundations invested in the Gothic. Architectural historian Geoffrey Tyack aptly describes the ‘quasi-monastic atmosphere’ of Oxford, which encompassed its religious foundation, the worship with its doors as well as the biblical study that formed its academic

Figure 3.11. The Great Hall’s arched windows in contrast to the squared-framed windows on the main buildings. (Photo by author)

41 Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style, 202. 80 program.42 The quadrangle design, with hall, chapel, cloister and residences allowed students to be able to study and worship easily.43

The University of Sydney’s buildings drew on Gothic Oxbridge’s aura of holiness in the hope to heighten learning and study. Nicholson and Woolley described to the Select Committee the relationship between ornamental architecture and academic achievement. Nicholson challenged each Committee member to ‘go to the old country’ where ‘he will find his aspirations and his feelings powerfully affected by the contemplation of the magnificent piles of buildings.’44 Now that the Great Hall was complete, and the Colony could boast of its own Gothic ‘pile’, Woolley could invoke its aesthetic power:

the beauty of it, in itself, will have a great and elevating effect on the young men. It is a very

suggestive Hall. No boy of any spirit can walk up and down that place without getting his

ambition fired.45

Woolley connected the ‘beauty’ of the Hall to ‘spirit’ of the students and he coloured academic aspiration as a spiritual experience. The University main buildings were a sacred-secular space with an aura the University’s founders believed was palpable. Blacket invested the Hall with a sensation of reverence drawn not only from religious worship but from Oxbridge, where education was its own kind of religion and they considered the heights of knowledge with veneration. It suggests the artificiality of the divide between sacred and secular, in University spaces at least, where it is more productive to think of their interrelation.

Nicholson’s and Woolley’s remarks are encapsulated in the Hall’s sumptuous stained glass windows—their veneration expressed in reverential light.46 The Great Hall has three walls of

42 Tyack,“The Architecture of the University and its Colleges,” 90-91.

43 See Lester F. Goodchild, “Oxbridge’s Tudor Gothic Influences on American Academic Architecture,” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (January 2000): 275.

44 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 315.

45 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 210.

46 See Lucinda Matthews-Jones and Timothy Willem Jones, “Introduction: Materiality and Religious History,” in Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things, ed. Timothy Willem Jones and Lucinda Matthews-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015), 3. 81 windows that overtly ‘worship’ the academic. Two of them, the so-called Oxford and Cambridge windows, dominate the west and east walls respectively. Fourteen lights that depict the founders of each college form both windows. These lights take the place, within the framework of church windows, of saints. Though the Oxbridge founders notionally substitute saints, they are hardly purely secular figures, each founding a college for religious training, many of whom were bishops.

The Oxford Window (sponsored by Nicholson, fig.3.12) expressed a romanticised view of medieval

England by depicting King Alfred, an icon of medieval English Christianity, as the mythological founder of University College. The Cambridge Window features Henry VI as the (actual) founder of

King’s College, its chapel typifying both the English ecclesiastical and academic Gothic. Blacket even assisted the transfer of religious worship not only to academia but to England itself. The Great

Hall’s third major window enshrined Englishness (and colonialism) in reverential light—the Royal

Window depicts English and British monarchs from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria (fig.

3.13).47 It came attached with explicit royal and ecclesiastical approval: Queen Victoria and Prince

Figure 3.12. The Oxford Window on the Great Hall’s western end representing the founders of fourteen colleges. (Photo by author)

47 See Sarah Randles, “Rebuilding the Middle Ages: Medievalism in Australian Architecture,” in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006), 156. Randles has noted how the Hall’s smaller windows celebrate exclusively British scholars. 82 Figure 3.13. Detail of the Royal Window showing Queen Victoria in the centre. (Photo by author)

Albert viewed the completed window at Windsor before its shipment to Sydney, a widely-published event.48

In Blacket’s Great Hall, the light that shone through its windows was the light of knowledge and grace, invested not only with reverence for Oxbridge, but with reverence for the Church and

England as a colonial power. It continued to be an affecting experience. In 1922, a student mused

‘in the hushed hall’ about its stained glass light coloured like a ‘jewel’, passing ‘back and forth like a threaded fire’, and illuminating the hammer-beam roof in ‘half gleam.’49 The ruminative tone of the poem reminds us of Blacket’s Romantic sensibility the Hall’s Gothic grandeur was born from, bringing the fragment, distance and fantasy to the fore. The main buildings, the Great Hall especially, were a product of medievalism: a Gothic fabrication of stylistic, institutional and colonial ideals. They spoke to multiple pasts, presents and futures. In one of four surviving fragments of Blacket’s original plans, he depicted the Hall’s arched doorway (fig.3.14). Though

48 “Sydney University,” Illustrated London News, February 26, 1859, 202, The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/HN3100525684/GDCS?u=usyd&sid=GDCS&xid=ffbdb1ff.

49 Christina Stead, “In the Great Hall,” in The Kookaburra, Sydney Teachers College Magazine (1922), cited in Bertha McKenzie, Stained Glass and Stone (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989), 100. 83 drawn for its construction, the doorway evokes the enigmatic way in which Blacket sketched Gothic ruins: as a viewless window, an evocative gateway to other times and spaces, offering a glimpse into Blacket’s and the University founders’ imagined future-past.

Figure 3.14. Blacket’s plan for the Great Hall’s doorway. (Edmund Blacket. Elevation of Principal Hall Door. c.1854. Architectural drawing. G74_2_001 Courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives.)

84 Conclusion

‘Imperishable stone’

In the midst of local disagreement, international commentators praised Blacket’s Gothic pile. It was the triumph of the Colony: it symbolised its future trajectory of greatness, the illustrious medieval past it was to acquire, and all the authority, preeminence and distinction associated with such longevity. The significance of the University of Sydney’s main buildings extended backwards and forwards in time, and commentators in England recognised their importance. The Illustrated

London News published a three-page article on the University buildings on February 26, 1859, and it provides an opportunity to reflect on Blacket’s, the University’s and the Colony’s ambitions. The article led with a full-page rendering of the Great Hall’s interior (fig.4.1), a half page detail of the

stained glass light of Queen Victoria (fig.4.2), and a

smaller depiction of the main buildings.1 The

Illustrated London News catered for high-volume

light reading and thus reads superficially, but

despite its perfunctory nature, it connects to deeper

insights.

The article celebrates the University of Sydney’s

buildings as vanguards of the progress of the

‘Southern World.’2 By virtue of celebration, it

vindicated all the expense and minute deliberation

on style that Blacket undertook. In some ways, it is Figure 4.1. Interior sketch of the Great Hall from the Illustrated London News. as if the University’s founders desired grand

1 “Sydney University,” Illustrated London News, February 26, 1859, 196, 201, The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/HN3100525684/GDCS?u=usyd&sid=GDCS&xid=ffbdb1ff.

2 “Sydney University,” 202. 85 buildings just to impress the international media, for global publication

and celebration of the University validated the Colony as worthy of

such an institution. Yet the article does not mention the University’s

daring institutional secularism, or any institutional qualities at all; the

article was a celebration of Blacket’s buildings, and it was through

these buildings—their aesthetic qualities—that the achievements of the

Colony were filtered. The article proclaimed the University’s ‘material

arrangements’ that upheld ‘association with those time-honoured seats

of learning’ were responsible for Sydney as a ‘first-class city under the

degree of the metropolis in Great Britain.’3 Blacket’s Gothic

ornamentation, laden with links to ‘old England’ took precedence over

the University’s functional qualities. It was the Gothic style that was

responsible for the Colony’s ‘ultimate attainment to the dignity of an

empire.’4 One cannot imagine that the British public would bestow the

same praise upon the University, no matter how reformed or modern, if

it were represented by a suite of functional Georgian buildings. Nor Figure 4.2. Stained glass light of Queen Victoria from the Illustrated London would loose Gothic associationism have evoked the same response— News. Blacket’s inclination towards accuracy paid off in a vivid illusion of the medieval past. The scale and expense of the buildings, so criticised by the Select Committee, were a point of congratulation in the article. Their ‘magnitude’, in Gothic splendour and archaeological detail, was essential to the ‘importance influences’ the University of Sydney would

‘exercise on the future of the Southern World.’5

3 “Sydney University,” Illustrated London News, 202.

4 “Sydney University,” 202.

5 “Sydney University,” 202. 86 By venerating the Colony’s first university, the article celebrated Empire more broadly. The article displayed reverence for Englishness and its superiority as a colonial power. Queen Victoria as head of the Empire and its Christian mission appeared enshrined in the article’s illustration of one of the Royal Window’s stained glass lights. The publication recognised that ‘the style of architecture chosen is one which is essentially English in its nature’, bearing a ‘home familiarity which is unmistakable.’6 Such ties to ideas of Englishness materialised in the University buildings allayed colonial fragmentation. The article remarked that ‘we are told that an Englishman, on his arrival at Sydney, is scarcely conscious of any diversity of sensation’ now that such familiar sights like the University buildings, but also Blacket’s slew of Gothic churches, imitated ‘old England.’7 It signalled a marked difference from Blacket’s own reaction upon his arrival, one of dislocation, that he disclosed to his brother.

The success of casting an illusion of ‘old England’, both its Picturesque built environment and its history, contributed to a larger push in the mid-nineteenth century: the dispossession of the Eora nation. The Gadgial witnessed colonists transform their landscape into something foreign, and in a destructive exchange, Blacket’s Gothic landscape became naturalised in place of the Gadigal’s ancient claims to Country. Even today, the Gothic is so prevalent in New South Wales that it has become implicit, and we barely notice it. Since my surprise of learning Blacket designed a small church en-route to Mudgee, I have realised my daily journey to Fisher Library is heralded by

Blacket’s Gothic: I pass by St. Philip’s on the bus as it climbs on and off the Harbour Bridge, I pass under the shadow of St. Paul’s on the train from Central Station, and, of course, the University’s main buildings signal my arrival. Sydney is ensconced in a fabricated and illusory medievalism, and as we have seen in this thesis’ consideration of the Gothic in the Colony, it is more troubling than acknowledged.

6 “Sydney University,” Illustrated London News, 202.

7 “Sydney University,” 201. 87 The Illustrated London News article, a product of its time, did not recognise these colonial implications but focused its attention of the Hall as ‘the most striking feature[s] of the pile of building’, evidenced by its generous illustration of its interior.8 The idea of a Gothic ‘pile’ reminds us of the Romantic landscape in which Blacket’s devotion to the Gothic was born, and the legacy of

Gothic ruins. Whilst distinct from Picturesque traditions, the illustrator had subtly manipulated their representation of the Hall to differ from Blacket’s actual interior—it appears wood-panelled (which it never was), there are fewer windows, and the perspective dramatises the scale and angularity of the ceiling. These changes foreground the Gothic’s ecclesiastical inheritance as one both idealised and disputed.

For all the sense of pastness, in the same instance we are aware of how deliberately Blacket’s

Gothic was invested with a trajectory of futurity. The University and by extension the Colony’s modernity inhered in its ‘medieval’ buildings. Blacket and the University founders envisaged the

University in centuries to come, and we are in a position to see their future.

Over the succeeding decades Blacket’s quadrangle grew. In 1909, MacLaurin Hall (then Fisher

Library), arose to mirror the Great Hall, another heavily ornamented Perpendicular building situated to the south-west (fig.4.3). By 1918, the new south range connected MacLaurin Hall to Blacket’s original construction. The south range was punctuated by the Nicholson Gateway (fig.4.4) whose facade evoked a rich medieval fantasy in its array of mythical and heraldic creatures. Through this gateway one emerged onto a cloistered walkway, strengthening even more the University’s bond to

Oxford and Cambridge. By 1927, the completion of the north-west range enclosed the quadrangle, and by 1966, the installation of the West Tower deemed it complete.

The University celebrated its centenary in 1952.9 The centenary celebrations are an opportunity to consider the intersections of time, where the imagined future, medieval remembrances and the

8 “Sydney University,” Illustrated London News, 202.

9 The centenary of the Great Hall in 1959 appears to have passed without fanfare. 88 LEFT Figure 4.3. The south range bordered by cloisters with MacLaurin Hall on the right. (Unknown author. South range of the University of Sydney’s quadrangle. 1959. Photograph. G3_224_0219. Courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives.)

RIGHT Figure 4.4. Heraldic ornamentation on the Nicholson Gateway. (Unknown author. Nicholson Gateway. n.d. Photograph. G3_224_0225. Courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives.) present crossed over. The Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice of New South Wales, K.W. Street, delivered the Centenary Oration on August 28, 1952 in the Great Hall. Just like the Illustrated

London News, Street’s speech was littered with platitudes characteristic of any commemorative speech, yet what he said was more profound than he knew—his comments pinpoint the temporal loops this thesis has worked to identify. Street reflected on the moment of commemoration as an opportunity to ‘look not only backward to the past but… forward also to the future’, just as Blacket,

Nicholson and the University founders looked on multiple timescapes.10 Street gazed back into time immemorial as he referenced the University’s ‘everlasting inheritance.’11 Yet in the same instance, he spoke of the University as a ‘vision splendid on the distant heights’ that looked forward to ‘the

Golden Age’ yet to come.12 Street spoke not only of futurity but of immortality—encapsulated in the Great Hall and its ‘imperishable stone.’13 Australia as a colony, and now that it was a country, still conceptualised itself through the Gothic.

10 University of Sydney, The University of Sydney Centenary Celebrations, August 26-August 31, 1952 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1952), 61.

11 University of Sydney, 66.

12 University of Sydney, 62.

13 University of Sydney, 64. 89 The University in the mid-twentieth century still placed great value on the fabric of Blacket’s buildings and their ornamental importance. Street invited his listeners to:

Look at the outside of this Hall… [and] along the whole front of this building. Look up to all the

carved history in the stone; and upwards again to the gargoyles, copies of medieval church

architecture, carved with all the artistry of medieval craftsmen.14

The Gothic style was implicit and did not need articulation. Street summoned an age of medieval history embedded within the stone—though it was quarried only one hundred years earlier. He saw

Blacket as a medieval craftsman, pious, devoted, his work an expression of reverence. Street even evoked Blacket’s imitative design process in noting the ‘copies’ of Gothic church architecture. It is interesting to note how freely Street remembered the Gothic’s ecclesiastical inheritance with the sectarian tensions of the University’s foundation far behind. Yet for all that was remembered, the idea of the colonial landscape as empty still persisted, and the Picturesque Gothic still masked the memory of the violent colonial reality. In a sense colonial time became Australia’s Middle Ages—a time distinct from national modernity in the twentieth century. Street reinforced the characterisation of colonists like Blacket and Nicholson as pious, chivalric heroes who established the University amidst the wilds of what he described as ‘a stone age culture’ entirely ‘separated from civilisation.’15 Though a short span of time had passed for European colonists in Australia, these remarks suggest how distant the nineteenth century already felt to them, especially in the new epoch signalled by the post-war era. Street’s words remind us of the work this thesis attempts to do to hold the history of the Gothic accountable for its colonial implications.

This thesis has explored the refracted histories of nineteenth-century Australia, medieval England and Indigenous time. The fragments of these multiple temporalities form the Gothic, and addressing

14 University of Sydney, The University of Sydney Centenary Celebrations, 66.

15 University of Sydney, 62. 90 them together is the only way to rigorously assess Blacket’s Gothic at the University of Sydney. The

Romantic, Picturesque nature of the quadrangle will always remain incongruous as we recognise the corrosive effects of colonialism involved in bridging to ‘old England.’ After all, it is at best an illusion. Australian medievalist Stephanie Trigg memorably contemplated the relationship between medievalism and the ‘real’ Middle Ages. Trigg proposes that even if the medieval is ‘offered in a pure, unmediated form’, which it so rarely is, the viewer is post-medieval, our experience is

‘hybrid.’16 At best, an illusion or imitation of the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ medieval can be achieved.

Trigg frankly reminds us (and Blacket) that ‘whether we like it or not, there is no “pure” medieval; there is only medievalism.’17 Trigg’s words speak to a portrait of Blacket that captured him grasping the ‘medieval’ stonework inside the Great Hall: a tangible, yet inauthentic connection (fig.4.5). With

Trigg’s words in mind, I can see my experience of the Church of St. John the Evangelist near

Lithgow in a different light. On some level, no matter how dusty or hot, it was as ‘authentically’ medieval as walking among survivals from the Middle Ages like the ruins Blacket explored or through Oxford’s cloisters. Regardless of the historical veracity of these built environments, our experience of them is inescapably post-medieval, fabricated and fragmented.

Figure 4.5. Blacket standing by the fireplace in the Great Hall during its construction. (Professor John Smith. Portrait of Blacket. c.1857. Photograph. 809_021. Courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives.)

16 Stephanie Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists,” in New Medieval Literatures, ed. W. S. Scase, R. C. Copeland and D. L. Lawton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24, 29.

17 Trigg, 33. 91 Bibliography

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