The Architecture of Van Diemen’s Land Timber

Abstract

ABSTRACTVan Diemen’s Land timber-getting enterprises, one of the colony’s early nineteenth-century commodity-based industries, provided a crucial infrastructure for colonial architecture, generating material, components, and revenue for building. Its own architecture was dispersed and disparate, with places of material production and consumption interlinked by tracks, rivers, and coastal and oceanic shipping routes. To date, its sites have been the territory of archaeologists and historians rather than architectural historians. Yet, physically intertwined and instrumental in the construction of the colony’s early landmark buildings, and intersecting with other networks of constructional, engineering, and architectural expertise, they offer a subject for architectural history-making grounded in the geo-political, socio-economic, and material realities of the region’s early colonial period. This article describes this infrastructure and its products, comprising sites, spaces, and structures locally, regionally, and inter-regionally, considering their implications for a re-framing of Australian colonial architecture.