Foundations and landmarks

It is more than fifty years since anyone attempted to comprehensively describe the history of Australian architecture. In 1968, Sydney academic J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History was a landmark publication. The timing of its release was intended to celebrate 180 years of building on the continent since formal European invasion, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. As with any ambitious documentary exercise, Freeland’s book was greeted with a mixture of admiration and scorn.

The same might be reserved for Davina Jackson’s new book, Australian Architecture: A history, which bravely sets out to map an even greater time range. It tries to make sense of today’s architectural scene and to fill in some of the gaps that she has identified along the way. To a large degree, Jackson succeeds. That this book was written during the first two years of Covid-19, when access to archives and libraries was severely limited, is no mean feat. Australian Architecture is thus to be welcomed and the author congratulated. Its publication will invite public interest with its easy and approachable writing style and the attractive selection of archival images and colour photographs. At the same time, it will stir, even annoy, historians and scholars with some of its claims and frustrate with the lack of a clear narrative framing.