New Zealand Architects and Australia’s Federation Architecture

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1887, Thomas Searell (1855-1938), Percival Selwyn Richards(1865-1952) and William Allen Tombs (1866-1928), architects trained in Christchurch, New Zealand, migrated to Melbourne, Victoria. A few years later they spread out to regional Victoria and Tasmania consolidating practices in the early 1900s in Ballarat (Richards), Geelong (Tombs), Hobart and Launceston (Searell). In those locations they became prominent practitioners, proficient in design discourses at the turn of the twentieth century which are now described in Australia as “Federation” architecture – a term that aligns design with the political realisation of Australia as a nation in1901. Yet the maintenance of personal connections and commonalities in their Australian buildings might be traced to the New Zealand architectural practice of Frederick Strouts who articled Searell in the 1870s and Richards in the early 1880s, and whose one-time assistant, Thomas Stoddart Lambert (1842-1917), articled Tombs in the early 1880s. At stake in this article, then, is the role of a larger region in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australian architecture. As such, the work of these regional NewZealand/Australian architects serve as a reminder of the limitations of nationalist frameworks that define our region’s architectural histories captured in stylistic terminology such as “Federation.”