Thomas Wran, the Sculptor Who Discovered Australia

We have struggled to confront the physical nature of Australia. This reluctance has held back the expression of Australian themes in art and architecture. An experimental nineteenth-century work of architectural sculpture in a sandstone facade marks a significant cultural breakthrough, insofar as, in lieu of the Greek architectural orders, Australian birds and animals were used for the first time. For sixteen years, it stood in the very heart of Sydney as testimony to the uniqueness of Australian nature.

From afar, it looks very ordinary, this single-storey sandstone front topped by a triangular gable. Above the gate, a sign reads “Annandale Creative Arts Centre”. Behind it there is a plain brick hall of no particular interest. You hardly notice it or the other tell-tale discrepancies.

A foundation stone to one side announces that it is a Methodist church and was consecrated on September 16, 1891. There are further discrepancies but you have to be a detective or an archaeologist with a keen eye to notice them or conclude that some of the sandstone is not original. There is a slight disparity in the width of the upper gable and first floor. The fact that the church has two entrances is a further clue.

The two parts of the facade are so cleverly matched they appear to be all-of-a-piece, as though they belonged and were like that from the very beginning. You would be mistaken. The facade was not at all like that originally. Nor was it ever intended for its present location on Johnston Street, the main north-south traffic artery through the Annandale subdivision. What you are looking at is a cleverly contrived, reconstructed facade that was judiciously cobbled together following the Great Fire of October 2, 1890. The fire consumed a large portion of the centre of Sydney, north of Moore Street, between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets, resulting in an insurance bill of £750,000. If you look more closely you can still see broken string courses, incomplete mouldings over the heads of arched windows, and missing heads and body parts from some of the upper sculptures. The evidence is there if you take the time to look for it. The fact that the facade did survive and there was enough of it left was something of a miracle. Such was its importance that, at considerable expense, it was skilfully rebuilt in less than a year.

Take a closer look. What you see is startling and wonderful. Scattered across the lower first-floor front, and concentrated on the entablature of the two porches, is a veritable menagerie of Australian native animals and birds, all carved in exquisite detail. Even more surprising and astonishing is when, and by whom, they were carved. The facade did not belong to the church originally. Before 1891, the warehouse was a four-storey construction for dual occupancy with basement. It is barely recognisable in the present-day 81A Johnston Street facade.

The sculptures were carved by a gifted English sculptor who had recently arrived in Sydney, at the end of twenty-seven months spent as a selector at St Lawrence on Broad Sound, some 100 kilometres north of Rockhampton. Thomas Wran worked as a skilled sculptor in England before coming to Australia, having gained his professional reputation with a team of twenty-five stonemasons on the splendid St Mary’s Church at South Dalton in Yorkshire, sponsored by the 3rd Earl of Hotham. The church was designed by a leading English Gothic Revival architect, John Loughborough Pearson, who later designed Brisbane Cathedral.

The Wran carvings were completed in 1873-74. The choice of Australian subjects for architectural sculptures caused such a sensation, the Sydney Morning Herald published not one, but two, detailed reports, in which each sculpture was named and located. The report credited Mr T. Wran, “late of London”, assisted by his son Walton Wran and Mr Robert McCredie, jr, as responsible. The explanation for so much attention is obvious: the choice of native animals on an important facade was unprecedented. Up until that time, architects adhered strictly to a code of practice which demanded traditional Doric, Ionic and Corinthian classical orders for important public commissions. Correctness was greatly valued and liberties were likely to meet with hostile criticism, which is what happened in the notorious instance of the 1882 spandrel figures in James Barnet’s Pitt Street GPO facade by the Italian sculptor Signor Sani. It emerged later that Barnet’s chief mistake was his choice of contemporary realism in lieu of allegorical classicism.

Bull’s Warehouse on Pitt Street, as the deep, narrow-fronted four-storey warehouse structure was known, freely employed Australian fauna as sculptural decoration, something entirely without precedent in 1873. This is what makes it so intriguing—whose idea it was, and what motivated this daring stylistic departure, is pure conjecture. We don’t have reliable answers. What is clear is that it was the first occasion on which architecture publicly admitted that it was in Australia and Australian. And why, at this particular time, two decades before nationalism and a conscious Australian identity would become politically important?

There are a number of explanations. Thomas Rowe, its architect, was one of the most prominent and successful architects in the city. He would go on to construct a number of much larger structures on Pitt Street, but none with quite the verve or originality and beauty of detail. A little earlier, on August 22, 1871, architects got together and formed the New South Wales Society for the Promotion of Architecture and Art. The name soon changed to the Institute of Architects following a falling-out with the artists. This suggests Sydney architects were becoming more conscious and professional. About this time, articles appeared in the press which discuss the properties and use of local Australian materials in building construction, indicating a new level of awareness of their contribution in conveying a sense of place.

Rowe went much farther: he substituted native animals and birds instead of following the long-established practice of the Greek Doric and Ionic orders. In doing so, he created for the first time a truly authentic Australian architectural order. In effect, he endorsed the region and made architecture symbolically Australian. The ancient Greek orders of Doric and Ionic—the one having a broad capital with a jutting echinus topping a primitive masculine column, the other, with descending volutes that frame a row of ova—evolved in different regions, Doric essentially widespread in mainland Greece, Ionic on the shores of the Aegean and the islands.

In that moment, Rowe in collaboration with Wran created something no less than a symbolic statement of architectural independence which indicated a new creative orientation and freedom. It would take at least another decade-and-a-half for the French convict, sentenced to death for his role in the 1870 Paris commune, to develop his “Waratah order”, which, in a similar vein, and in much more highly stylised way, offered an alternative to the dominance of the Greek orders.

Possibly, it was the presence of such a highly skilled and experienced sculptor as Thomas Wran, an individual who, moreover, had spent more than two years on the bush frontier of central Queensland, who, therefore, was intimately acquainted with Australian fauna, that encouraged Rowe to experiment. Rowe was a Cornishman, Wran came from Sussex. The two may have found a common cause, a shared vision and mission, to separate themselves emotionally from England. However you explain it, something clearly gelled between them. Whether it was personal chemistry or their provincial backgrounds, the result is singularly powerful and astonishing.

After 143 years, exposed in the open to all weathers and storms, and more recently, exposed to urban pollution, it is amazing the carvings are in such good condition and so much delicate detail survives. It also demonstrates Thomas Wran’s competence and professionalism and, one can infer, his utter commitment to the project, not only his skill in working the sandstone, but also his careful selection of the very best fine-grained durable yellow block. After all this time, the most deterioration one can see are fine cracks in the ring mouldings circling the columns and much more sustained and severe damage of the unprotected porch roofs.

But the sculptures themselves: the only word that fully does justice to them is magnificent. What Thomas Wran created is an early colonial masterpiece and national treasure.

It is not simply the individual sculptures alone, but the overall conception of the decorative scheme that is masterful. Each individual carving of an animal or bird has its own story—each is fitted with its own narrative—so they come alive in our imagination.

Wran was evidently fascinated by birds. One of his prize-winning sculptures before he left England was of a linnet, a small, drab-brown songbird. A more unlikely and challenging subject is hard to imagine. Birds are delicate creatures that soar and float, seemingly weightless—the direct antithesis of monumental stone. The facade has a parrot, a hawk with its prey, a kookaburra, a mopoke, another hawk or possibly kite, three birds devouring grapes, and a headless bird in the right gable. Ranged across the facade are a diverse selection of native animals including a native cat and prey, two ring-tailed possums, a koala, a dingo and a kangaroo rat.

One mystery surrounding Wran’s career in Sydney is how he, a relatively newcomer to Australia, was able to create such realistic sculptures. Wran arrived at Rockhampton aboard the Royal Dane on November 18, 1870. Until then, he had lived in London and in small to medium-sized provincial towns. One possibility is that he used the Australian Museum in College Street. The museum was a major popular attraction—a must for visiting royals. It was a short walk from Pitt Street to the museum, where Wran could study and sketch the exhibits in their glass cases. It would have been an easy matter for him to visit the museum and make his sketches and models, which he could check later and correct against the stuffed specimens. Whichever way he did it, the close detail and naturalism of the sculptures are remarkable.

Wran initially found accommodation in the city, but in June 1875, on completing the commission, he bought a property in Caroline Street, Balmain. Thus began the Wran family connection with the harbourside suburb. His name is also closely associated with the building company McCredie Brothers. What started with Bull’s Warehouse was continued on the General Post Office for which Wran executed twenty-four keystone busts representing Australian colonies and overseas countries which the post and telegraph reached. The post office sculptures are equally impressive and demonstrate Wran’s great ability to produce typical faces that are recognisable types.

One of his most intriguing sculptural creations is a coat-of-arms on the Macquarie Street balcony of the Colonial Secretary’s Building. Not content with the challenge of a large lion and chained unicorn, Wran carried the flag over the back of balcony, turning his sculpture into an impressive fully three-dimensional work. On the back, in an empty part below the folds of the New South Wales flag, he lightly chiselled, “T. V. WRAN Sculptor 1876”.

Sydney’s stonemasons are a forgotten and anonymous group. They rarely received recognition for their heroic labour, cutting and shaping the magnificent sandstone monuments that are so representative and key markers of the city’s identity. Thomas Wran is a rare exception. We know a great deal more about him than is usually the case for a stonemason, but even so, much of his life remains in shadow. He seems to have had a gift for publicity and was dedicated to his chosen field of architectural sculpture. We know that he struggled to find employment after St Mary’s, and worked as a painter, a plumber and a tobacconist. He never abandoned his determination to follow his vocation as a sculptor. In 1865 he entered prize-winning sculptures to the South London Industrial Exhibition, and, a little later, in the Anglo-French Workmen’s Exhibition in which he entered his sculpture of a linnet.

Perhaps his next most important contribution to Australian life, after Bull’s Warehouse, was his great-great-grandson, Neville Wran. Sculptor and politician share some qualities: not only their generosity and their determination to succeed, but in Neville something of Thomas’s artistic side, largely suppressed by the exigencies of law and politics, seeped through in unexpected ways. However, it is Thomas’s creative legacy, his discovery of Australia in sculpture we must be most grateful for—in breaking with the prevailing slavish adherence to English Palladian and classical models.

Patrick White’s observation in Voss, voiced by Laura, identifies the problem: “Everyone is still afraid, or most of us, of this country, and will not say it. We are not yet possessed of understanding.” Thomas Wran had every reason to be fearful. His family was barely settled in St Lawrence when their eldest, Eleanor, drowned. The tragedy affected them deeply long afterwards, the pain magnified by a brutal struggle to survive in a land utterly unlike anything they had experienced in England. In the sculptures we discern something altogether different, an intense focus on the qualities of each bird and animal, and a determination to portray them with absolute fidelity that comes close to a loving embrace.

In the past, animals were sacred symbols. Throughout Sydney, people were everywhere confronted by rampant lions and chained unicorns on massive coats-of-arms above the entrances of public buildings as tangible reminders of British rule. The significance of Bull’s Warehouse can be overstated, but it nonetheless marks a forward step in national awareness: in its bold, unprecedented departure from classical models in architecture it suggests pride in Australia and, in the face of personal tragedy, simultaneously a tribute to natural science and acceptance of Australian uniqueness.