A-Framed Buildings

I'm a child of the 70s.
In fact, I was born in 1970, which tells you exactly how old I am. I've always found this to be a very convenient year to be born, because it's always easy to work out my age. I am bad at maths, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was born at the beginning of a decade, I'd have no way of working out how old I was from one year to the next. I don't know how other people do it.
Noe, the 70s was the golden age of A-Frame architecture. These alpine-inspired houses (and wasn't everything Swiss groovy in the 70s? Think fondue...) popped up everywhere, and I always longed to live in one. It was my special dream to have a tiny little room right at the top of the roof, possibly with a little balcony - probably inspired by the BBC production of Heidi, which was also very big when I was young.
I don't know why such houses were constructed in tropical North Queensland, where I grew up - there was never any snow to slide off their steeply sloping roofs. But people had them, and I was consumed with envy.
Of course, there aren't really many around any more - in fact, the only A-Frame buildings left tend to be church buildings. For some reason the A-Frame was big in Australian ecclesiastical circles - maybe because the structure carried a hint of sacred geometry, and because it was a cheap way of building a church that stood out in an age where spires and stone and vaulted arches were no longer possible.
There's a classic example just down the road from me at the Cabramatta Uniting Church. I always smile to see it, and I seriously think it should be heritage listed. The inside, too, is almost completely untouched - and let's face it, it doesn't see much wear and tear, with its minuscule and elderly congregation.
So let's save the A-Frames, and preserve some of the glory of the 1970s.

Pews

I love church pews.
There is something deeply satisfying about traditional church architecture, and I am never happier than when kicking back on a hardwood, un-cushioned church pew, preferably one with a stand behind the pew in front that holds one's hymn book and bible.
The average pew is an item uniquely designed to inflict the maximum agony in the least possible time. And any attempts made to render an old-fashioned wooden pew comfortable only serves to make it more agonising. I once spent the best part of a week paralysed from spending three whole days luxuriating on the cushioned pews at Pitt St Uniting for a conference. Never have I known such pain. And those damned cushions, latter-day additions, were what caused it. If my butt had been resting on that cold, hard wood, my mind would have warned me earlier that I was cruising for a bruising.
Pews are always at that perfectly unnatural angle which renders any attempt at slumping or making oneself comfortable utterly futile.
But for all their faults, there is nothing more comforting than a gloriously varnished pew, scratched and scuffed, possibly sporting a little bit of scratched-in graffiti (though this is largely absent from Protestant pews - it would seem that Anglican and Catholic kiddies are more inclined to deface church property).
Nothing breaks my heart more than to see churches selling off their pews in an effort to modernise (a sadly frequent occurrence at Anglican churches across Sydney), and replacing them with those insipid brown or grey upholstered-plastic chairs with fabric seats now ubiquitous in churches of all persuasions.
A friend of mine once dropped by a church that was renovating back in the 90s and scored some exquisite pews that were being sold off at $10 a piece. Occasionally, if I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll swing by their house to take a constitutional, forcing myself onto the narrow pew that now graces their living room. And I don't leave till the vertebrae in my back are singing, and I am clutching my sides with pain.

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.