Castellating the New World

‘Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it,’ wrote Watkin Tench of his companions on the First Fleet. Governor Phillip’s 1786 Commission had instructed him to build castles. Fitting their vision of the new into the old, settlers named the rocky outcrop above Middle Harbour as ‘Edinburgh Castle’, below which, in 1905, Henry Willis built ‘Innisfallen’, one of many would-be castles strewn around the continent. The newcomers’ lament that the local flowers were scentless and the birds songless had its parallel in the regret that settler Australia would never support a literary culture because it lacked ruins.

Walter Burley Griffin (WBG) and Marion Mahony Griffin (MMG) placed themselves in the middle of these matters when they launched the Greater Sydney Development Association (GSDA) in 1920. On one hand, they promoted and protected native flora and fauna; the women on the estate were blocking bulldozers fifty years before the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush who created the first Sydney environmental ban on a development. Yet the Griffins wrote of ‘pulpit rocks, grottoes, cascades and glades’ – the metaphoric language of the European landscapes, erased in the 1940s by the maligned Jindyworobaks.