The Traditional Queenslander Home
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011To some people, Queensland’s familiar wood and tin houses lent Brisbane, and other Queensland cities and rural areas, a rather temporary, insubstantial air. Known as 'The Queenslander’, they seemed a little less solid and permanent than homes built of brick or stone. Many Queensland houses were placed high in the air on tall stumps, as the supporting piles have been known as, and it was fancied they seemed likely to simply fly away.
The Queensland house was comparatively cost-effective when timber was plentiful, easy to move from place to place, and, in a relatively benign climate, single skin, unlined walls were all that were thought to be necessary to protect dwellers~people~the dwellers within} from the cold. Stout corrugated iron roofs stood up to torrential tropical rain and could be re-used if dislodged by cyclonic winds.
The verandahs sheltered people from burning sun and caught any breeze that might be passing in the steamy summer. Shades over window openings meant that windows did not have to be closed when humidity brought rain. Clever little revolving tin cylinders on the roofs pulled out hot air that filled ceiling spaces through decorative fretwork openings.
Although timber is not a particularly effective insulator for either heat or cold, air was able to flow through long central hallways in the typical Queensland house and across the house from an open window on one side through open doors to the open window on the other side. Some exteriors were painted, others were just oiled. Some verandahs were built with elaborate and expensive iron lace; others made do with simple timber frames and carved timber decoration in pediments over front stairs.
Despite the impression of seeming impermanence, the Queenslander has survived since it first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. However, it has evolved. The simple two-room or four-room cottage has given way to much larger, sprawling homes. The pattern of the Queenslander house could be translated into early types of kit-set homes.
Many were created by companies in Brisbane and transported long distances almost as flat-packs on trains. Selections of verandahs, tongue and groove boards for walls and sheets of corrugated iron for roofs were ready at their destination for assembling. The public housing movement that produced workers homes adapted the ingredients to differing shapes and sizes suitable for lower-cost housing.
After the war, the Queenslander seemed out of date in a world of modem architecture. Brick houses, American ranch style residences and other imported styles began to populate new suburbs. However, Brisbane is a hilly city and even modem designs often adapted the idea of stumps so that houses could be close to the ground near the top of a rising allotment and high where the ground sloped away. In the late twentieth century, the old materials, tin and timber, were given new currency by innovative architects to create distinctly modem, light and airy Queensland houses.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when a drift back towards the inner suburbs attracted a new generation, old Queenslanders were discovered by younger owners. They painted them lovingly and added various renovations to bring an old favourite into the modem era.
However they originated, whether from sugar planters houses in the West Indies, bungalows in India or high houses in Malaysia, the Queenslander still distinguishes Brisbane from other Australian capital cities.
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