The Trials of James Barnet

Sculpture is not normally the stuff from which acrimonious public debates are made. But that is what happened in Sydney in 1883. It was such an intense controversy that it eventually destroyed the career of James Barnet, the state’s last Colonial Architect.

Barnet came from Arbroath, a small fishing town on the east coast of Scotland a hundred or so miles north of Edinburgh. After educating himself as an architect in London, Barnet came to Australia and worked for Edmund Blacket as his Clerk of Works. By dint of effort he was appointed Colonial Architect in 1865, a position he held until his resignation and the termination of that post by the government in 1890.

The Sani Reliefs Affair was largely responsible for ending the career of Australia’s most important nineteenth-century architect, who designed Sydney’s most prominent public sandstone monuments, including a host of country post offices, court houses and police stations that are today the pride of many a town throughout the state. The General Post Office was Barnet’s masterpiece and single most ambitious attempt to create a building conceived from the outset with a comprehensive decorative sculpture program, beginning in 1865–1874 for Stage 1 on George Street, running halfway across the northern Martin Place front, then with Stage 2 (1880–1885) turning the corner into Pitt Street, with sculpture to match. In scale and its combination of art and freestone sculpture it was unmatched at the time. The northern front of twenty-five arches alone measured 353 feet. If the George Street (77 feet) and Pitt Street (107 feet) parts are added, the total length of the sculpture over four storeys is a whopping 537 feet (164 metres).

Each of the post office’s three fronts was assigned a different role. George Street was strictly classical in intent; on Martin Place the sculpture was assigned a technical political mission but retained its classical format, this being to demonstrate the purpose of the post office and its universal reach internationally as a result of the latest telegraph technology connecting Australia with the world; while on Pitt Street, Barnet daringly assigned to Signor Sani the task of depicting a realistic record in alto relievo, the work and economy and social circumstances of the colony’s citizens.

Thomas Wran carved the twenty-four keystone heads along the northern front in situ depicting the continents, nations and Australian states which were now within reach of the telegraph. His style was coolly classical, at least superficially so, but on close examination, touches of humour were also present in the choice of distinguishing national emblems such as animals and plants, flowers and agricultural produce. His heads bear close observation for such information alone. Take Italy, for example, given that the state library, with its extensive colonnade connection to Venice, was Barnet’s inspiration. Above Italy’s ear Wran included the delicate profile of a maiden inscribing a scroll with a dedicatory tribute to “Barnet, Colonial Architect”.

Melbourne has fancied itself the Paris of the south. Sydney has never declared itself anything, nor sought to fashion itself on so glorious a proposition. Instead, it has relished its harbour location as a setting and source of natural glamour. Barnet, once again, was more forward thinking in his choice of imagery and ambition for Sydney, and saw Sydney more in terms of Venice as a marine creation born of the sea, with salt water running through its veins: oyster shells and pearls, if not a scantily-clad Venus, surfing her way through the Heads à la Botticelli. By the time the post office was under way, John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1853) had been in circulation for two decades and would undoubtedly have been read by a highly literate man such as Barnet.

Nothing quite like the post office carvings had been attempted in Australia before, with the ambition that sculpture, as on the Parthenon in Athens, was an inseparable element of architecture, that converted it into a comprehensible stone document encapsulating the mythology and spirit of Athens. The post office, a secular temple to the celebration of the telegraph, served for over ninety years as the city’s centrepiece and defining landmark. Few people today are aware of the pain and controversy that attended its birth, the trials and punishment meted out to Barnet as the reward for his idealism.

The controversy arose from the public outcry about a series of spandrel high-relief sculptures on the eastern, Pitt Street front, of the post office during Stage 2 of construction. They were carved by the recently-arrived Italian sculptor Tommaso Sani, a fervent admirer of Garibaldi and exponent of verismo-style realistic sculpture. Verismo, whose origins go back to the 1840s in Italy, favoured the common people as subjects, but came as a rude shock to the Sydney public in 1883, who saw themselves depicted going about their daily tasks dressed in the attire of the day. Many were scandalised and a great clamour burst which reached a crescendo of condemnation in August 1883, triggering a fierce debate in the Legislative Assembly to have the Sani spandrel reliefs cut out and replaced by blank ashlar masonry.

No society is consistent. The Victorian mind especially was split into separate compartments often at odds and conflicting. The discrepancy between Sunday and Monday was the most conspicuous example, as James Anthony Froude expressed it, of “that utter divorce between practice and profession which has made the entire life of modern England such a frightful lie”. We today are in no position to criticise the Victorians of hypocrisy, as what has happened since then has only heightened and intensified, not lessened the divisions. For all the saccharine sentimentality and piety, class inequality, widespread grinding poverty, unsafe working conditions and the exploitation of child labour in mine and factory, combined to shorten the lives of an invisible underclass.

Bourgeois industrial society was troubled by anxiety about the nature of human society and the universe. The Oxford debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, on the conflict of religion and science posed by Darwin’s theory of evolution as it affected the origins and status of mankind, proved a watershed insofar as it demonstrated the superiority of knowledge founded on systematic observation and rigorous testing of evidence over theological assertions based on ancient texts of uncertain provenance. The debate exposed the widening rift between religious belief and the world outside the church. These anxieties were reflected in bourgeois taste, with its insistent sentimentality and excessive congested decoration and the brutal reality of industrialisation that highlighted the increasing separation between art and engineering.

The divorce between practice and profession, between the upper class and classical learning, and bourgeois industrial society, is mirrored in the argument about classicism and Gothic Revival styles in architecture, and the new industrial infrastructure of iron-and-glass railway stations, bridges and factory buildings. In England, Augustus Pugin not only revived early English Gothic as the only possible style for ecclesiastical buildings, he also insisted on design extending well beyond architecture, to include vestments, ceremonial instruments and ritual, as a return to a mythical medieval past. He was not alone; William Morris at the Kelmscott Press also wished for a wholesale return to a romanticised Middle Ages. Against this was set the example of Crystal Palace as a model of efficient repetitive industrial modernity, standardisation, industrial progress that had outstripped tradition and pointed towards the complete industrialisation of Victorian life.

It was against such a confused background that the dispute over the carvings must be viewed because the General Post Office was, foremost, a pivotal example of the transformative impact on society of new technology. Barnet was unable to express technology directly but did so symbolically using sculpture to tell the story. This could be seen in the tangle of overhead wires, cross-arms and poles in the city streets outside. Within the post office, the mechanics of the telegraph were hidden where possible behind an elaborate sandstone Renaissance mask. Victorian taste determined that Barnet confine the expression of the technological revolution and instead use sculpture to explain the impact on society and life of a worldwide network of rapid telecommunication made possible by undersea cables using the language of classicism. This in turn meant a heavy dependence on sculpture to interpret and communicate.

The rancorous debate over the General Post Office was a collision between Classicism and Realism, between aesthetic values flowing from the rationalism of the Italian Renaissance harking back to the glories of ancient Rome, and the Romantic discovery of a heightened sense of the dignity of peasants and the labouring poor.

Sani’s chief sin was to show Sydney life in all its rude vitality, pietra viva, infused at times with a touch of humour. It was his eye for the double-standards practised during the daily round that got him into most trouble; his sly commentary on the mores and deceits of the present. People were embarrassed and angry when they saw themselves portrayed in unflattering terms.

But, from the standpoint of today, his record of life in all its variety informed by observation and close attention to detail is magnificent and invaluable—not that he always got everything right. There were a few mistakes, and for this he was unfairly criticised, and accused of creating sculpture that was a crude caricature and trod the floor of burlesque theatricality and worse.

Barnet became the main target, for it was he who had not only allowed the slip but had in the public mind commended and promoted the descent into poor taste, and moreover, should have known that what he did was in defiance of what good decorum permitted in the architecture of Sydney’s proudest new monument.

Beginning on George Street with controversy-free carvings, round the arches the figures in the spandrel reliefs represent the Arts, Science, Agriculture and Commerce by Walter McGill, described as an artist workman. The 1871 keystone heads represent Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Minerva. All are strictly classical and the attractive youthful females are notable for their scanty attire and bare breasts. Their nakedness did not provoke the slightest tremor of discord, since Greek art occupied a separate compartment in the Victorian mind quarantined from Victorian moral prohibitions. Greek sculpture and the Bible co-existed. Sexually repressive Protestant morality and aesthetics were trains that ran on parallel lines.

On St Martin’s Lane, Stage 1 construction was obstructed by the Tank Stream and it was only after the McCredie Brothers devised a solution by building a large arch that work was resumed in Stage 2 in 1880 after a delay of six years. The sculpture on the principal north front was delayed and photographs taken in 1874 show the keystone blocks uncarved. On the right side of the main entrance, the keystones begin with Australia and New Zealand, then Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, then skip around the southern hemisphere to Africa and South America. In the main, the keystone heads are classical and Caucasian except for Australia, Africa and South America. Australia is quite unexpected—it is an Aborigine. The new Parliament House in Canberra lacks anything so remarkable and has no comparable symbolic recognition of the First Australians.

The two arms of the post office out to George and Pitt streets are separated by the main entrance arch which has a statue of a seated Queen Victoria, below which are the two female figures of Great Britain and Australia reaching out towards each other, in Sicilian marble carved by Giovanni Fontana in his Chelsea studio; underneath is the Royal Arms of Great Britain and Ireland carved in Pyrmont sandstone by Thomas Wran.

On the left side the keystones represent the northern hemisphere: Europe, Asia, Russia, Italy, Germany, the United States of America, Canada, India, France, Belgium, Austria, Polynesia. Again, the heads are recognisably idealised Caucasian except for Polynesia, which is another ethnic portrait.

The sculpture is a revealing historical document in stone, largely unrecognised and ignored as a graphic portrait of the Victorian mind. The twenty-four Sydney keystone heads on the General Post Office reveal important differences of orientation in the Victorian geographic mindset, compared to Gilbert Scott’s Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, London. The Hyde Park memorial celebrates Britain’s position in the world, its extensive empire and achievements, with each continent uniquely apotheosised by large human figures and animals. Sydney looks back and outwards, and references its position in a geography of nations and states, but this is done quite differently in comparison to the Albert Memorial, which is concerned foremost with death and memorialising Prince Albert. What they do have in common, Scott and Barnet, is a concern to unite architecture and sculpture as a single monumental art work. With the advent of Modernism in the twentieth century, architecture and sculpture would go their separate ways, to the detriment of each other.

Settlers were acutely conscious of their remoteness and isolation from the centres of power and felt threatened by invisible external forces. The recent Maori Wars were a reminder of how insecure white occupation was. Looking at the list of countries and continents that were included is extremely suggestive of what Victorians thought was important to their world. If we today were to draw up a similar list, it would be very different and would include China, Japan, Indonesia and Antarctica to name just a few examples of how our geopolitical view has been revised. Perhaps even the moon?

Today, the iconic image of the earth seen from the moon helps us recognise that the earth is a lonely blue planet surrounded by black. The post office keystones are the nineteenth-century equivalent, and locate Australia in the world. What is especially notable is the absence of British Empire jingoism.

Pitt Street was the beginning of Barnet’s trials. Up till then he had not strayed far from classicism, but when he turned the corner, he left it behind for realism. Till then he had depended on Fontana, an academy-trained sculptor from Rome working in London, and Thomas Wran, a sculptor from Chichester on the Sussex coast. After two years in Melbourne and exhibiting sculpture in the Melbourne International Exhibition, Tommaso Sani (1839–1915) arrived in Sydney in 1882. An Italian from Florence, he had worked as a pointer assisting sculptors working off a clay marquette. He brought with him the revolutionary spirit of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, a central figure in the story of Italian independence. Art and revolutionary politics intersect in the personality of Sani. He was accompanied by a compatriot, Luigi del Vescovo, who accompanied Sani to Melbourne’s International Exhibition.

To fully understand the background to Sani’s Pitt Street reliefs it is necessary to go back and explain earlier Italian developments, namely the verismo movement and its origins in the rediscovery of Italy’s strong vernacular culture, strengthened under the new Risorgimento in opposition to the external influence from Austria. Verismo was the vehicle in art which raised Italy’s consciousness of its indigenous culture and the vitality of the common people in contributing to this culture. Vicenzo Vela, who was influenced by the 1840s realism of Lorenzo Bartolini, was its leading exponent. Realism was not new, reaching back to Caravaggio, whose presence is felt in nineteenth-century Italian operas such as Cavalleria Rusticana and La Bohème which feature violent emotions.

Sydney was unprepared for Sani. The reaction to his realism and sculpture of ordinary people in modern costume triggered a public reaction which took Barnet by surprise. The opening shot in the battle over the Pitt Street reliefs was fired when a committee of three—W.W. Wardell (an architect who counted as his friends Pugin and Cardinal Newman), Henry Dangar (a barrister, politician and sportsman) and Frederick Du Faur (a fellow of the Royal Society and a Trustee of the National Gallery)—was asked in February 1884 to report to the government. Its report was laid upon the table of the Legislative Assembly in August 1884.

A crucial debate took place in the Assembly on the evening of March 27, 1885. Barnet, conscious of the uncertain position of the carvings and of political manoeuvring, had left Sydney for England in January, to return in December 1885. His objective was to meet Giovanni Fontana and approve the statue of Queen Victoria over the post office entrance and gather further evidence on realism to support his defence of the Sani reliefs. The Assembly debate was conducted in Barnet’s absence. Barnet cleverly calculated that this would sow confusion and add pressure, and so delay any decision to remove the carvings. As with Jørn Utzon much later, Barnet’s trial was political, but Barnet was more experienced and skilled than Utzon in the tactics he adopted.

The debate proved acrimonious and the record of proceedings in Hansard was disseminated in the newspapers. The majority voice favoured the destruction of the Sani reliefs. Dangar thought “we have bowed a little too much to the Colonial Architect”, while Mr Macintosh noted that only “one fourth of the community was opposed to the retention of the carvings where they now are”. He was answered by Mr Piddington, who “did not think the carvings deserved the slightest consideration at the hands of any man of taste”, and so on. Mr. Cox thought them “atrocious” and unworthy on such a handsome building; while Mr De Salis said they should not be removed “in Mr Barnet’s absence”. In the end, the decision was left to the Postmaster-General, James Norton, to decide after the scaffolding was taken down. Postmaster-General was a revolving sinecure post and appointments rarely lasted a year.

By 1886, Barnet was ready to land his counter-punch. He listed examples he had seen during his grand tour of Italy, Austria, Germany and France and recent examples in London. It was a well researched statement that served to demonstrate that his office as Colonial Architect was not only highly professional, but also dictated a degree of literacy on the subject in addition to responsible financial management.

The final trial of Barnet came in early 1889 and centred on the rivalry between architecture and engineering, a division typical of the Victorian era inasmuch as it was symptomatic of a rift between thinking and feeling. It arose over the military defences for Bare Island at the entrance to Botany Bay, when Barnet’s authority as Colonial Architect was challenged by the newly appointed engineer, De Wolski, who was set on establishing a separate department with himself at its head.

As the government was already committed to abolishing the post of Colonial Architect in favour of competitive designs, thereby reducing the office establishment, Barnet retired to Glebe. Ornate public buildings were no longer in favour. It was said that court houses were an extravagance “scarcely ever used and a nuisance and expense to the colony”. With this change, expenditure on public works came under increasing parliamentary scrutiny. Barnet was accused of gross neglect of his duties, and having “allowed his role as an architect to override his duty as a public servant”. But Barnet had by that time retired. It was an ignominious conclusion to the brilliant twenty-eight-year career of a hard-working, honourable man. Much the same fallacious fiscal justification was adopted in the 1990s, a century later, to hollow out the Government Architect Office and reduce it to an empty shell and outsource design, while the government engaged in a scandalous sell-off of the public architectural heritage.

Sani found his reputation and career ruined. Unable to work, he died in miserable circumstances at Paddington aged seventy-six. Wran and McGill survived to fifty-nine, longer than most men exposed every day to sandstone dust.

The bitter controversy over the Sani reliefs is not isolated, but typical of the insecure position of art and aesthetic matters in Australian society. Over and over, the same drama has been re-enacted with different actors, but the same tragic outcome, most notably the Sydney Opera House, arising from a concert of forces which obstruct and bring down anyone with a great vision.

Barnet’s vision for Sydney was to deliver rich experiences, generous noble public spaces; architecture invested with sculptural value that spoke to a gracious civilised life for all its citizens to share. It is a legacy we can look back on with pride and not a little envy. Although Barnet conceived Sydney in largely architectural terms, it was equally important to him that architecture was the embodiment of permanent civilised values.

Philip Drew is a Sydney architect and critic