Wooden Louvres

Another distinctive aspect of North Queensland architecture that is now confined to the realms of museums and kitschy heritage reproductions is the use of wooden louvres in place of windows with glass. This seems to have been especially favoured when verandahs were closed in to make additional rooms for growing families. Here are some of theose louvres at a restored house at the Townsville Palmetum.



My great-grandfather built his own house (or at least, he constantly expanded an old fishing shack he'd won in a game of poker) in Lucinda, North Queensland, and raised a family of four there. The front rooms were indeed enclosed verandahs, and I remember being fascinated by the beautiful hand-made wooden louvres that he had installed there. They were made with thick-ish pieces of timber painted a distinctly 1950s blue, and were opened and closed with a wooden rail set into the louvres themselves. They were remarkably effective at capturing any available breeze, each window being able to be positioned just-so. Not so effective, however, at keeping away mosquitoes. There were always gaps, and in the evening you could almost be carried away by mosquitoes, Lucinda being little more than a reclaimed mangrove swamp.
The house is still standing, though was sold many years ago. Last time I checked the louvres were still doing their job. Here's a pic from when my Aunty Audrey was still alive and living in it. This charming little ancestral shack would be worth a fortune now, being only a short walk from the beach.

Coloured Windows

I've been in North Queensland for the past couple of weeks, mostly at hospital attending to my Grandmother, with the occasional foray out into the real world. It has been a long time since I was in North Queensland (almost 10 years) and that meant that I could afford to view things with a certain detachment, even occasional fondness and nostalgia. I guess that because I was there for my Grandma and surrounded by family I hadn't seen for such a long time, images and objects kept coming up that reminded me of my childhood in the tropical North.
Right near the hospital in Townsville is quite a beautiful park featuring a range of varieties of palm tree, and at the entrance is an old restored school house that is an almost perfect example of traditional North Queensland architecture. It looks very like the house my Grandmother owned in Cordelia, and the thing that really hit me was the multi-coloured window glass. Each window was divided into 4 panes of glass, and each pane was of a different colour - exactly like the windows in Grandma's old house. This was once very common in old houses in the North, but they have almost all disappeared - wooden windows rot quickly in the tropical damp, and aluminium frames have been too tempting to pass up in most cases.
I'm not sure why these multi-coloured windows were so popular, or if they served any other than decorative purpose. I should imagine that the height of their popularity would have been the 1950s, though it could have been much earlier (their inclusion in this scrupulously restored house suggests that they carry a longer vintage).
So here they are, these lovely little coloured windows. A small feature, certainly, but one so completely unique and evocative that the very sight of them caused a tremor of nostalgia.