PETER FREEMAN The Wallpapered Manse. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Shortlisted for the 2014 NSW Premier’s History Award, this is a fascinating story of renovation and the recovery of more than just a house.
Moruya’s old Presbyterian manse was for years derelict and uncared for. In late 2009, when it was offered for sale, Peter Freeman, at the urging of his wife, Tanya, contacted the Historic Houses Trust and a project to restore the building began. Freeman is himself a conservation architect and the author of 12 books on the subject of architectural restoration.
This book is the story of the people who built the manse and the church, of the ministers and their families who lived there, and the people who cared for it. As well, it’s the story of the town, Moruya, and the forces that shaped that town, including the history of its Indigenous inhabitants and their relationship with the incomers:
This story of the Presbyterian manse in Moruya is essentially a story of European culture and faith evolving, developing and expanding in a new country. But it is also the story of absence and dispossession …
In this respect, it echoes some passages in Don Watson’s The Bush, which also describe the advent of Presbyterianism (in Gippsland) and the subsequent alienation and dislocation of Indigenous groups.
The surveyor Samuel Parkinson was sent to the area to establish the site for a settlement in 1850. The new town was first called Gundary, a name derived from a large local pastoral holding, itself named after a local Koori clan, the Gundaree. Gundary gave way to Cobowra and eventually became Moruya – both names originating from Indigenous groups in the region.
The arrival of Presbyterian clergy in the area was largely the project of the well-known (or notorious) John Dunmore Lang. The church – St Stephen’s – built in 1863, and the manse (1865) were the result of the evangelism of Lang and his friends, the Rev Patrick Fitzgerald and Mrs Helen McKie. Fitzgerald was to be the first incumbent:
A visitor arriving at the newly completed manse … would have found a smart and diminutive colonial Georgian cottage sitting high on a granite knoll to the south west of the small settlement of Moruya. The manse would have been newly painted and a ‘pointed’ picket fence would have surrounded the manse and its neighbour to the south, St Stephen’s Presbyterian church.
Various ministers were to inhabit the manse until in the 1940s the parish came to be shared between Presbyterians and Methodists. The last Presbyterian parson left in 1942, after which the manse was leased and then bought by the Bartlett family. After Gladys Bartlett died in 1994 the house remained mostly unoccupied.
The book details the various attempts of its inhabitants to modernise the manse – usually by applying another layer of wallpaper (for example, Ernest and Ruby Henderson, who arrived in 1916, covered all the walls and the existing paper with hessian and then applied new wallpaper throughout), although there were extensions and structural alterations along the way as well.
The archaeology of the building, and the history of the place and its people are unpeeled along with the layers of wallpaper and while the historical background is fascinating, allowing the accounts of the manse’s inhabitants to recreate and illuminate the times they lived in, it is when the restoration project begins in 2009 that this book really comes into its own.
The most striking feature of the manse, when it came to be restored, was of course its wallpapers, which covered every wall. Some walls had four, and some six layers:
The first papers were applied to the internal kauri lining without the use of a newspaper or cloth base layer. The … pattern was a diamond-shaped diaper (… repeated geometric forms) … or trellis pattern, with a black, red and green centre surrounded by a brown and white palmette string.
The restoration was meticulously planned and carried out. When it came to renovation, the floors needed to be relevelled, the roof needed rebuilding and there were termites and rising damp.
A fundamental intention was to recreate the original Georgian characteristics of the building. The front verandah was rebuilt; joinery and woodwork were carefully repaired; many coats of paint were removed, as were many layers of linoleum. And while the wallpapers had to be removed, due to the fragility of the walls themselves, it was decided to keep friezes that displayed the original patterns. As well, the immediate environment needed to be examined:
The first task was to understand the existing landscape and to supplement the existing plantings so that the landscape remained traditional in form and intent, sympathetic to the old manse building.
The book is lavishly illustrated, with photos showing the derelict ‘renovator’s delight’ that faced the restorers, detail of the wallpapers as they came off, the restoration in progress and the elegant result – the rebirth of a smart colonial Georgian cottage. There is an extensive and interesting Endnotes section, but the Index is rather sparse.
Peter Freeman The Wallpapered Manse Watermark Press 2013 PB 168pp $49.95
You can buy this book from Abbey’s here.
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