ABSTRACT

Colonial homesteads occupy a pivotal place within Australian architectural historiography: claiming country, adapting to the continent’s environmental conditions, and as pastoral and agricultural enterprises generating wealth they were a focus of self-conscious architectural endeavour. Their making was supported by diffuse networks of financial, cultural and social capital comprising the British Empire, which Harriet Edquist has observed can be belied by “popular representations of Australian homesteads as isolated objects within an abstract landscape.” This article presents a reading of Ratho, an early homestead in Tasmania, from the perspective of its occupants and, especially, one daughter, Jane (née Reid) Williams, whose own story points to the complex webs of Empire that informed colonial experience and homestead building. It uses personal letters, diary entries and reminiscences to highlight the incremental design of the homestead in social settings, over water and on land, and to contextualise apparent allusions to originary architectural thinking in the building’s idiosyncratic Grecian colonnade which comprises knotted tree trunks fashioned as Ionic columns. The article explores a mode of architectural history attentive to the lived experiences of a colonial Tasman world.

摘要

殖民地宅基地在澳大利亚建筑史学中占有举足轻重的地位：拥有主权，适应大陆的环境条件，以及作为创造财富的牧业和农业企业，它们是自觉建筑努力的焦点。它们的制作得到了包括大英帝国在内的分散的金融、文化和社会资本网络的支持，Harriet Edquist 观察到，“澳大利亚宅基地作为抽象景观中的孤立物体的流行表现”可以掩盖这一点。本文从居住者的角度，特别是一位女儿 Jane (née Reid) Williams 的角度，介绍了对塔斯马尼亚早期宅基地 Ratho 的解读，她自己的故事指出了帝国的复杂网络，这些网络为殖民经验和宅基地提供了信息建造。它使用个人信件、日记条目和回忆来突出宅基地在社会环境、水上和陆地上的增量设计，并将建筑独特的希腊柱廊中原始建筑思维的明显暗示置于语境中，该柱廊由打结的树干组成，被塑造成离子列。这篇文章探讨了一种关注塔斯曼殖民时代生活体验的建筑史模式。