26 C O N T E X T 8 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 4 a skilled engineer, architect and surveyor, does not appear to have trained at Woolwich, serving instead in the Bombay Horse Artillery from the age of 18. Building developments in the English dockyards were closely followed by the Royal Engineers based in Sydney and subsequently by the Colonial Architect in 1885, who visited four dockyards while in England, Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Portland. The collection of Gother Kerr Mann’s surviving drawings held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney includes hand-coloured drawings of a patent dock designed for the Thames by Charles Lungley of Deptford. This remarkable dock, which had a prefabricated metal framework, was not built in Sydney; the Fitzroy Dock was built out of the solid sandstone standard building forms around the British Empire. Their standard barrack designs developed for use in theWest Indies in the 1820s were used in Australia for both barracks and military hospitals. Tropical fevers led to the death of many soldiers during peacetime. The designs were developed to increase the flow of air, at a time when foul air was thought to spread disease. The Guardhouse on Cockatoo combines a portion of a barrack room from Major Smith’s standard plan for a barrack for the West Indies, submitted to the Board of Ordnance in 1824, with a porch and guardrooms more commonly found within an English barrack compound. The commanding Royal Engineer in Sydney, Major Barney, had served in theWest Indies and is known to have had copies of Major Smith’s plans. Three buildings survive in Sydney that predate Major Smith’s 1824 barrack designs – the former Military Hospital on Observatory Hill (now the National Trust Centre) and the two surviving pavilions of the Rum Hospital – indicating that an earlier prototype for a military hospital or barrack existed which has yet to be identified. At the time, the layout of a hospital and barrack were almost interchangeable, with the exception of small rooms at the end of the wards for the surgeon and dispenser. In the late 1840s William Denison advocated improvements in the design of English barracks, including improvements in ventilation, the installation of reticulated water and bathing facilities, and providing sports grounds and reading rooms. His barrack at Woolwich implemented the idea of crossventilation used in the tropics, omitting the central corridor and making use of a wide arcade, as well as including a revolutionary air-heating and cooling system powered by steam. Such luxuries were not available to the soldiers stationed on Cockatoo Island, nor in the new Victoria Barracks in Sydney or the new Barracks at Newcastle (NSW). The climate is, however, somewhat warmer in New South Wales than in England. In the West Indies and in Australia verandas had become a feature of the designs for the military. The convicts were not so lucky. Their austere barrack building on Cockatoo Island had high-level vents, not windows, and no veranda. Convicts were not permitted a view of the outside world when confined to the barrack at night. Of the convict barrack buildings constructed at the penal settlements in the Australian colonies, only the separate apartments on Maria Island off the coast of Tasmania feature the extensive verandas similar to those that graced the officers’ quarters and soldiers’ barracks. The surviving convict barrack on Cockatoo Island, although it has been substantially modified, would appear to be the most intact surviving example of a convict barrack designed by the Royal Engineers in Australia. It shows the contrast between the standards of accommodation provided for the convicts and their military guard. The use of typical plans by the Royal Engineers at the various outposts of the British that forms Cockatoo Island. Mann resorted to the use of gunpowder, rather than quarrying, to speed up progress of the Fitzroy Dock, which survives today, although it has been lengthened. Items such as the caisson, the pumping machinery and the steam hammers were all manufactured in England. Unfortunately, none of this steam technology survives, having long been superseded. The extensive workshops, located adjacent to the dock, survive in an altered condition. An upper floor has been added and later workshops appended to the rear. The Steam Workshop is clearly based on a design by Captain H James for the Steam Factory at HM Dockyard at Portsmouth, published in the Royal Engineers Papers in 1853. Steam power was pioneered in the English dockyard workshops, being used to manufacture such items as copper sheeting for lining ships’ bottoms and to pump out the dry docks. The Royal Engineers were responsible for the spread of many building construction techniques and A view of Fitzroy Dock from the escarpment with Sydney Harbour Bridge in the distance
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