A “great maker of Australian architectural history”

Throughout his career, Don Watson has devoted enormous time and effort to documenting Queensland’s architectural history. But as friend and colleague Fiona Gardiner notes, his work is distinguished by his dedication to identifying all architects who have worked across Queensland not just those already well known.

Serendipitously, two events in 1974–76 were crucial in shaping the research interests of Donald Watson. They are foundational to his extraordinary scholarship and lifetime of documenting Queensland’s architectural history.

In 1974, Don purchased a two-storey Georgian-style cottage in inner Brisbane. Built of mudbricks, his house led him to devise a method for dating houses and to gain a job with the National Trust of Queensland on the recommendation of his former employer, Geoffrey Pie (1938–2018), a National Trust councillor. These were the heady days of Justice Hope’s inquiry into the National Estate,1 the Australian Heritage Commission and grants from the National Estate program. The National Trust was an exhilarating place to work and Don’s colleagues included Richard Allom, Peter Forrest,

Bob Moore, Stephen Murray and Meredith Walker, all of whom have made significant contributions to heritage conservation.

At the National Trust, Don dated numerous houses by linking land titles and post office directories, now fundamental to historical research into the built environment in Queensland. He gave lectures for Trust members and wrote articles that led to an understanding of the formal evolution of the Queensland house and of housing types and styles.2 The latter, first illustrated in the Trust’s Ipswich townscape study,3 were quickly adopted as the graphic lingua franca of the Queensland house.

Funded by a National Estate grant, Don undertook research into the origins of the Queensland house for the National Trust of Queensland.

His report, “The Queensland house: A report into the nature and evolution of significant aspects of domestic architecture in Queensland” (1981), is still regarded by many as the definitive assessment of the subject. His study identified the historical, environmental and technical aspects of the house’s evolution and showed that Queensland’s former hardwood and softwood forests formed the basis of the local building tradition, in which hardwood was used for framing and softwood was used for flooring, lining and joinery.

Don continued this forestry research, presenting in 1988 at Australia’s first national conference on Australian forest history.4 He concluded that this originally abundant timber resource, long since cleared, was a juxtaposition of fire-resistant rainforest scrubs of softwood and joinery timbers and open eucalypt hardwood forests, the latter the result of Indigenous firestick farming over millennia. Using evidence from early artists, explorers’ diaries and survey plans, Don made this finding 20 years before Bill Gammage published on the subject.5

Don also found that the overwhelming predominance of detached housing, which is a pattern of Queensland towns, was due to the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1885. Intended to control the spread of fire and disease, this act established a minimum allotment size of 400 square metres, discouraging the speculative building of terraced housing.

However, it is the crucial but unanticipated contribution of architects to the Queensland timber tradition that most intrigued Don. He still describes his excitement at discovering drawings for schools designed by Richard George Suter, and later demonstrating that from the mid-1860s, the widespread adoption of outside studding as a distinctive local form of single-skin construction was not the work of carpenters but an innovation of Suter and fellow architect Richard Hugo Oswald Roehricht.6 Suter’s designs for the Queensland Board of General Education and the Anglican Church were distributed across the colony. They were an elegant and economical inversion of traditional construction – a local version of halftimbering, enhanced by painting to match the timber: dark for the hardwood frame and lighter shades for the softwood lining.

In 1976, on a field trip in central Queensland, Don was struck by the sophistication of three adjacent houses in Barcaldine. He made a playful bet with his travelling companion Peter Forrest, director of the National Trust of Queensland, that he could prove that these houses were architect-designed. At the time

the prevailing theory, as stated in Rude Timber Buildings in Australia,7 was that the tradition was established by rural carpenters. Don proved his case.

The houses, c. 1900, are probably the work of Eaton and Bates, who then had offices throughout central Queensland.8 In searching for regional variations,

Don documented the distribution of architects across Queensland.

In 1979, Don became a half-time lecturer at The University of Queensland. Supported by the empathetic head of department Ian Sinnamon (1935–2017), he taught design and continued his research. The student theses he supervised and electives he ran on Queensland’s architectural history form a significant collection of primary research. They include biographies, building types and regions, various branches of Queensland banks, the sandstone tradition in Warwick, the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane 1912–27, the fifties in Queensland, the architects of Roma and the Fassifern Valley connection to Russell Hall.

Many of his former students are prominent in the profession and continue to work in heritage conservation, including Margaret Lawrence-Drew, Stephen

Gee, Alice Hampson, Jamie Mackee and Tim O’Donnell.9

Don’s research resulted in two major publications produced in collaboration with his wife, historian Judith McKay: A Directory of Queensland Architects to 1940 and Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: A Biographical Dictionary. They are standard references on their subject and are yet to be replicated in other states. As the recipient of the State

Library of Queensland’s 2012 John Oxley Library Fellowship, Don resumed his research and is currently working on further volumes of the biographical dictionary. What distinguishes his research is his attempt to comprehensively identify all practitioners and not just those who are already well known. While his research is focused on Queensland, it is useful to researchers more broadly as many of the architects he documents were born, trained and/or also worked elsewhere. His research has been cited in more recent comparable compilations in Scotland, Ireland and South Africa. Nearer to home, Don’s work enables Queensland’s Heritage Register to identify architects for places across the state nominated for heritage listing.

As part of his research, Don has been active in collecting private architectural records for preservation. Initially seeded by an Australia Council grant, this led to the 1988 exhibition

Well Made Plans.10 Thanks to his initiative, UQ’s Fryer Library now holds one of Australia’s largest and most significant research collections of non-government architectural records. Don continues to assist with expanding the collection, often negotiating with would-be donors on the library’s behalf.

Don joined the Queensland Department of Public Works in 1989, practising as an architect until 2012 but also continuing his scholarly research, particularly into the history of the department and public infrastructure in Queensland. He has given many public lectures and written articles on the research he has undertaken, including on the Riverside Expressway (“Liking the unloved,” 2010), Brisbane’s public morgue (“Brisbane’s back door,” 2011), nineteenth-century bridges, Maryborough houses, Brisbane views and windmills.

As a leading architectural historian, Don has contributed to national publications, including numerous entries for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (2012). In acknowledging the latter’s major contributors, editors Philip Goad and Julie Willis name Don as one of the “great makers of Australian architectural history.”11 For his contribution to research, Don was made a Life Member of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand in 2008.

He has also received a series of Queensland awards, including the RAIA (Qld) President’s Award and the National Trust of Queensland’s John Herbert Memorial Award (with Judith McKay) in 1995 for Queensland Architects of the 19th Century and the State Library of Queensland’s John Oxley Library Fellowship in 2012. In 2013, UQ conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.

He is actively involved in the Australian Institute of Architects, serving on committees, delivering professional development talks and workshops, and preparing obituaries.

I have known Don for about 40 years as a professional colleague, friend and collaborator, and have always been struck by his passion, energy, intellect and curiosity. Leaving paid work has not dimmed his enthusiasm for research; if anything, it has freed him to focus on making Australian architectural history.

Footnotes

1. Robert Marsden Hope, Report of the National Estate (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1974). 2. Donald Watson, “Dating your own home” in National Trust of Queensland Journal, July–August 1976, 27–28; Donald Watson, “Dating your house,” National Trust of Queensland Journal, February 1978, 19–26. 3. Robert Martin and Lindy Crofts, Ipswich: A Townscape Study for the National Estate (Brisbane: National Trust of Queensland, 1977). 4. Donald Watson, “Clearing the scrubs of south-east Queensland” in Kevin Frawley and Noel Semple (eds), Australia’s Ever-changing Forests (Canberra: Department of Geography and Oceanography, Australian Defence Force Academy, 1988), 365–392. 5. The methodology is the same as developed by Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2012). 6. Later research by Watson identified that Roehricht used outside studding in 1864, for the temporary offices of the Great Northern Railway at Rockhampton, almost a year in advance of Suter. 7. Philip Cox, John Freeland and Wesley Stacey, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 64. 8. Donald Watson and Judith McKay, A Directory of Queensland Architects to 1940 (St Lucia: the University of Queensland Library, 1984), 75–76. 9. Other students included Anthony Battams,

Robyn Bennett, Paul Ferrier, Kevin Hayes, Susan Hug, Daniel Joynes, Christopher Osford-Jordan, James Seymour and Tracey Wells. 10. Donald Watson and Fiona Gardiner, Well Made

Plans: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings from the Queensland Architectural Archive in the Fryer Memorial Library, University of Queensland (St Lucia: the University of Queensland Library, 1988). 11. Philip Goad and Julie Willis (eds), The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xx and xxii.

The collection of William Hodgen, including this 1913 drawing of the Charleville Hotel, was one of Don Watson and Judith McKay’s early acquisitions for the Fryer Library. Image: Fryer Library, The University of Queensland: UQFL116

The 1988 exhibition Well Made Plans, co-curated by Fiona Gardiner and Don, showcased the drawings that Don had helped the Fryer Library to acquire. Cover: drawn by John Waller, plan by George Rae