A History by Design

Brisbane Growth

  

Concreting Stanley St, South Brisbane, c1924, in response to urban growth and the rise of the motor car.

It would take another 13 years, however, before Brisbane erected its first set of traffic lights.

Fryer Library, DU78.4.S6 B7 1925

Brisbane in the 1920s and 30s was, as many contemporary accounts attest, a paradoxical place, at once languid and busy, as if suspended on the threshold of modernity. Kathleen Ussher captured this ambiguity in her 1928 impressions of a visit to the city's Botanical Gardens:

 Clumps of bamboos and feathery palms are silhouetted against the quickly fading afterglow of a gorgeous sunset, and one forgets for the moment that Brisbane is a twentieth-century city, a busy work-a-day metropolis of the New World... a port of no mean standing. No! Her river is a river of dreams, bearing us into a land of enchantment ... [1]

In 1933, Charles H. Holmes found Brisbane "rather suggestive of broad acres. Here you get that 'there-is-always-to-morrow' feeling, due doubtless to the influence of the warmer clime." [2] Frank Clune, in contrast, found it "the busiest town in the world, all with the picnic spurt, hurrying to go somewhere," while for C.B. Christesen, "it is not a city of a hurrying million, such as Sydney, but here there is striking evidence of a great city in the process of development." [3]

Christesen was drawn to the bright lights of Queen Street, the grandeur of the new City Hall and the feverish atmosphere of the wool market. But it was away from the centres of administrative and commercial activity where the most striking evidence of Brisbane's progress in these years could be found. Although most Brisbanites did not grow prosperous under the sway of an economy dominated by mining, sugar and pastoralism, their city certainly expanded, especially in the 1920s. From an estimated population of 209,946 in 1921, Greater Brisbane was home to 284,758 people by 1929, and 325,890 by 1938. [4]

Unlike the growth spurt of the 1880s, interwar expansion did not markedly alter overall population density but led instead to greater suburbanisation. This was largely the result of improved transport systems and new town planning ordinances which raised the minimum area of residential allotments in new subdivisions from sixteen to twenty–four perches. [5]

The sense of permanence and solidity that had come to characterise parts of Brisbane's commercial centre and the well–to–do river suburbs began to permeate outwards along and between the transport corridors linking the dozen or so separate residential hubs which surrounded central Brisbane. From 1925 to 1929 alone, 2191 land survey applications were processed, covering a total of 7740 acres (3132 hectares) of Brisbane. [6]

In the same period over 13,000 new dwellings were built. [7] Infrastructure soon followed. By 1929 Mayor William Jolly could boast that it seemed "almost incredible that what was a wilderness a little over a hundred years ago had been transformed into a great and beautiful city, equipped with all the conveniences and comforts of modern civilization." [8]

In the 1920s, Brisbane grew along and between the existing transport corridors. Larger residential blocks and rising incomes facilitated more expansive dwellings in many suburbs. This house in Kedron, though a modest two-bedrooms, demonstrates the sense of roominess that came to characterise the tin and timber villas of the interwar years.

 Click to view zoomable images

Plans for Kedron residence, 1924. Architects: H.W. Atkinson & A.H. Conrad

Fryer Library, Conrad & Gargett Collection, UQFL228, Job 292

Despite the building boom, something of the older flavour of Brisbane suburbia survived and indeed, in some respects, flourished.

In 1851 John Dunmore Lang had written that "there is no place I have ever seen in all our Australian colonies, with the single exception of Sydney, in which there is so great a number of beautiful and interesting villa sites." [9]

The villa, a comparatively expansive and detached dwelling set in gardens, became a defining feature of the Brisbane suburban ethos. "The many hills in and around Brisbane are dotted with villas and comfortable cottages," observed Thiel in 1922, "while the ranges…in the background are thickly carpeted with verdure and studded with dense forest... " [10]

Expansion in the 1920s reinforced this pattern. Villas in the form of elevated timber and tin bungalows proliferated, and gardens abounded, combining European flora with plants from the tropics and the remnants of the native vegetation:

"Both in the city and suburbs many of the streets are lined with palms and trees, and the almost total absence of frost enables use to be made of such gorgeous tropical vegetation as the poinsettia, Poinciana, jacaranda, bird of paradise tree, bauhinia, weeping fig, cocos palm and frangipani." [11]

Across the city, backyards new and old boasted vegetable plots and fruit trees from which householders stocked their larders. Hens were still a common sight; indeed a 1927 census turned up 141,000 of them, 1202 in Kelvin Grove alone. Over in Nundah there were 1377 cows. [12]

Livestock aside, Holmes was impressed by the visual amenity of this suburban culture:

"Brisbane's homes on their high latticed legs, close to which cluster flowering shrubs, palms, and ferns, appeal immensely to the southerner visiting this golden city of the sun. They look so cool. Roses are in every garden, where poinsettia, poinciana, jacaranda and crimson and pink bougainvillea vie in loveliness." [13]

It was the combination of the built and natural environments which most caught his attention. Whereas in 1919 Fox had looked down from Mt Coot–tha and seen a carpet of dark green clothing the earth, Holmes looked down in 1933 and noticed "a city silvered with blue iron roofs and split by a broad waterway." [14]

  

Expansion of Brisbane Tramways, 1885-1957

Fryer Library, JS8262.A2 G7 1959

As it developed St Lucia retained more remnant native vegetation than many other suburbs, and its houses were more diverse in style. This residence, built on St Lucia Road (later Sir Fred Schonell Drive), features double gables on the front elevation and a traverse gable running parallel to the street. While the influence of the Californian Bungalow is evident in the deep front verandah and exposed roof timbers, the steeply-pitched roof is more characteristic of earlier bungalow styles. The plan also provides for a garage, a rare addition at this time.

Plan of proposed residence at St Lucia, 1924. Architect: A.H. Conrad

Fryer Library, Conrad & Gargett Collection, UQFL228, B57

 Click to view zoomable image

This iron–roofed metropolis with its bustling markets and torpid, chook-ridden suburbs covered a large area by contemporary standards. As a 1933 handbook described it, "the city and suburbs form a vast amphitheatre, broken in two unequal halves by the river, with mountains two thousand feet high forming its western background and with the blue waters of Moreton Bay its eastern boundary." In total, the amphitheatre comprised some 385 square miles (100,000 hectares), an area larger than the municipal limits of greater Sydney or Melbourne at that time. [15] Despite the population growth and an increase in block sizes, by the mid-1930s only 185 square miles (48,000 hectares) of this expanse had been developed. [16] In Brisbane, so the promotional brochures boasted, there was still plenty of room to grow.

Brisbane homes, observed visitor Charles Holmes in 1933, looked so cool. He may well have been describing this home in Stevens Street, Yeronga, designed in the 1920s. Its elevation, deep north-facing verandah, casement windows and voluminous roof cavity combine to exude a sense of coolness. Yeronga was an old settlement by European standards, but in the 1920s its proximity to the river, the railway network and the Yeronga State School made it one of the more popular centres of southside suburban development.

Plan of proposed residence at Yeronga, c1923. Architects: H.W. Atkinson & A.H. Conrad

Fryer Library, Conrad & Gargett Collection, UQFL228, Job 301

 Click to view zoomable image
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