Preliminary Historical Notes on the Transfer of Aboriginal Architectural Expertise on Australia's Frontier

Aboriginal architecture has only recently been recognised within the architectural history of Australia. This inclusion is of significance because it has the potential to reveal new interpretations of the architectures of post-European settlement in Australia. There is however much to be done, for from the 1940s to the 1980s architectural histories in Australia remained largely silent on the existence of Aboriginal architectures. Later texts acknowledged use of Aboriginal building materials in early settlement architecture but rarely revealed how these materials or the expertise behind their utilisation was transferred. Focusing on the use of building materials, this paper examines case studies aimed at exploring the incorporation of Aboriginal architectural knowledge into European settler architectures at two sites on Australia’s moving frontier. The first case study explores Aboriginal and European demand for Yuggera-speaking Aboriginal people’s pre-fabricated bark sheets during the 1840s as the frontier reached what is now south-east Queensland. The second examines European incorporation of Aboriginal architectural knowledge associated with spinifex and leaf bough shades in the 1930s as the frontier began impacting on Warlpiri-speaking Aboriginal people in Central Australia. This concern with the fusion of Aboriginal and European architectural material knowledge contributes to an alternative perspective of existing histories of Australia’s post-colonial architectures and invites further investigation by others