by Claire Moore cherishes a cup of tea as she drinks in the view of the river from the back verandah of a stately home amid August figs and an avenue of Queen’s palms.
“I think there is no more beautiful place in Brisbane,” says the former senator.
But despite the inherent ease with which Moore moves through the elegant 19th-century decor, it is not the oldest European residence in the city.
Once the domain of the city’s colonial elite, Newstead House is owned by the public and in recent years has hosted hundreds of weddings and served up some Devonshire teas for the city’s residents as well, and many a school group that succeeded with its wooden floors.
Closed for government-funded renovations in 2021, the 178-year-old building reopened its doors this month, $6.6m later, the exterior painted a vibrant azure blue and the interior wallpapered during a major Victorian era.
Now Moore, chairman of the house’s board of trustees, is looking forward to welcoming students and hosting weddings again.
“We want it to be a living museum,” she says. “His home is back at Brisbane.”
But the view from Newstead House’s wraparound veranda is a sobering reminder that it was no accident. For four decades from the 1940s, this spot offered a view of a neon-lit parabolic arch almost 18 meters high. Built by the man behind Melbourne’s Luna Park and perched atop a hill, Cloudland Ballroom became a landmark on the city’s skyline and psyche, with dances, concerts and debutante balls taking place on its sprung wooden floor and amidst its Corinthian columns, palms potted and twinkling. lights for generations.
Until, in the dark dark hours of November 7th 1982, Cloudland was suddenly and violently torn down by the infamous Deen Brothers. This was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, an era in which many of the city’s built icons were sacrificed on the altar of progress.
Ten years earlier, says Moore, Newstead House faced a similar threat.
The world war was brewing again and, with its extensive grounds, river frontage and proximity to the port, there was talk of turning the estate into a factory. In 1939, however, the state government put to rest any such talk.
“Newstead House is the only heritage place in Brisbane that has its own act of parliament,” says Moore.
There are some weirs upstream and on the other side of the serpentine river is another large old house which has recently been restored to its former glory – although not by the public purse.
The heritage-listed Town, or Lamb’s House as it has been known for much of its 120-odd-year history, sits atop the rugged cliffs at Kangaroo Point and is presided over by its new owner, Racing Queensland chairman and former -stockbroker Steve Wilson, “one of the great urban scenes in Australia”.
“He is blessed to sit high on this wonderful site looking down the ‘Brown Snake’ and across the botanic gardens to this brilliant city of ours,” he says.
This prominent park also made the derelict Home a public issue, the city watching in horror as the roof of the derelict building collapsed, its walls covered in graffiti and trash carpeting the floors.
Until, in 2021, the city forced its sale and Wilson and his wife, Jane – a prominent medical doctor and corporate director – bought the place for a principal sum of $12.75m.
Over the next two and a half years the Wilsons invested a figure of around $15m in restoring Town, not to mention splashing out the other $6.6m buying the nearby 19th century mansion.
This was by no means Wilson’s first foray into heritage revival. He supported the recent restoration of Queensland’s oldest theater in nearby Woolloongabba as well as one of the state’s oldest cattle stations, not to mention the former Wilsons Highgate Hill home of 38 years – designed by the same architect alongside west of Lamb House.
“I’m fighting hard for legacy,” says Wilson.
Wilson says he was driven by a sense of civic responsibility to hire a small army of specialist craftsmen, skilled in working everything from stained glass to clay tiles, to get the restoration done right.
“I think Home is a great sign of good architects responding to place,” says Wilson. “And places like that need to be restored in Queensland.”
Architect and heritage conservation expert David Gole, who worked on the restoration of Newstead and Lamb houses, says the projects show “a maturity in Brisbane and Queensland’s attitude and approach to its heritage sites”.
Speaking from Addis Ababa, where he is leading a decade-long renovation of Ethiopia’s landmark Africa Hall, Gole says Home’s “very public decline” has become a symbol of the risk to Brisbane’s heritage and a “chilling reminder ” on the days of the Deen Brothers. in which buildings were “lost” overnight.
Related: Built as ‘temporary’ wartime huts, the owners of these crumbling Brisbane houses are forced to preserve them.
“Instead, it has become a symbol that we are no longer willing to lose important places,” he says.
But Gole, a member of the Queensland Heritage Council, says the city has come a “long way” since those dark days, strengthening heritage protections at local and state levels.
“I think people in Brisbane have a strong sense of identification with the housing typologies here,” he says. “There’s definitely pride, civic pride, and you see that in the way people take care of their homes.”
In fact, the Department of Environment, Science and Innovation accepted the 22 recommendations of the advisory panel to promote heritage protection due to the near death of Home.
A spokesman says the department is “on track to implement all these recommendations by 2026”.
However, others are concerned about the fate of Brisbane’s architectural heritage. Historian and Brisbane Living Heritage director Christopher Dawson warns that the city’s character is “at great risk”.
Dawson says the public investment in Newstead House, although promising, was a “big surprise”, and described the private restoration of Lamb House as “a great thing to do”. But the first appears to be a “one-off”, he says, while the second is “not something that’s going to happen a lot”.
Brisbane’s Powerhouse arts center is a rare example of a major heritage site being kept “alive” through “events and interpretation” – but Dawson says he’s not seeing this kind of investment anywhere else.
He points to the once-famous, now languishing Boggo Road Prison, which he and many others have been campaigning for years to turn a “thriving dynamic space” into a “thriving dynamic space” artist studios, libraries, museums and community spaces.
“In Queensland, they seem very willing to invest in that way for the long term,” he says. “I think they see these big structures as losses over time and not something they can get a return on.”
But such “economic rationality”, he says, impoverishes Brisbane, and risks turning it into a “new slate city”.
And it’s not just the big structures that have been neglected – heritage houses, shops and streetscapes are being “overshadowed or redeveloped to the point of complete transformation” around the city in a “pro-development” culture of the value of the real estate. talents but heritage is not respected “at all”.
“Heritage is what makes a town special,” says Dawson. “But, often, inheritance does not make money”.
