The Architectural Imagination and the Colonial Tasmanian Homestead

Colonial homesteads occupy a pivotal place within Australian architectural historiography: claiming country, adapting to the continent’s environmental conditions, and as pastoral and agricultural enterprises generating wealth they were a focus of self-conscious architectural endeavour. Their making was supported by diffuse networks of financial, cultural and social capital comprising the British Empire, which Harriet Edquist has observed can be belied by “popular representations of Australian homesteads as isolated objects within an abstract landscape.” This article presents a reading of Ratho, an early homestead in Tasmania, from the perspective of its occupants and, especially, one daughter, Jane (née Reid) Williams, whose own story points to the complex webs of Empire that informed colonial experience and homestead building. It uses personal letters, diary entries and reminiscences to highlight the incremental design of the homestead in social settings, over water and on land, and to contextualise apparent allusions to originary architectural thinking in the building’s idiosyncratic Grecian colonnade which comprises knotted tree trunks fashioned as Ionic columns. The article explores a mode of architectural history attentive to the lived experiences of a colonial Tasman world.