The Australian colonial house. Architecture and society in New South Wales 1788-1842

Sydney : Hordern House in association with the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1997. Quarto, cloth covered boards, pictorial dust jacket, pp. 400, limited to 2000 copies, contains 24 colour plates and over 100 monochrome plates, contains in-depth academic text on the architecture of houses and buildings in New South Wales in the early settling of colonial Australia through to just prior to the Australian gold rush era. A richly illustrated tome showcasing some of Sydney’s iconic early structures.

A fine copy.

“The Australian Colonial House is the definitive study of early Australian houses and society during the first fifty years of settlement. Through the villas, cottages, bungalows and mansions examined in the book, an insight is given into the early society of New South Wales. Dr Broadbent describes the houses and their builders from the colony’s foundation in the late-eighteenth century to the disastrous depression of the 1840s. Broadbent analyses the origins of the most interesting houses in New South Wales and he brings history to life by populating his narrative with a variety of characters. These early houses are read as manuscripts, revealing the motives, and the follies of their builders, from Governor Macquarie’s deliberate flouting of the Secretary of State’s instruction in order to satisfy his and his wife’s architectural ambitions, to the vainglorious attempts of Sir Thomas Mitchell, with a new knighthood, seeking to recreate Old England in the Antipodean Bush.” – from the publisher