 | CULTURAL ENDEAVOURS Cooktown has recently gained two new buildings for cultural institutions. Philip Goad looks at Rex Addison’s additions for
the James Cook Museum and Bud Brannigan’s Art Gallery and Interpretative Centre.
Photography by Patrick Bingham-Hall
| Review |
|
The Anchor Room houses the anchor jettisoned when the Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef in 1770.
|
Looking west over Cooktown from Grassy Hill.
|
St Mary’s Convent (1889), now the James Cook Museum, by F. D. G. Stanley.
|
North elevation of Rex Addison’s extension to the
museum.
|
James Cook Museum
Detail of the “mast columns”.
|
Timber stair, within Addison’s version of the slatted timber verandah.
|
Western end of the addition.
|
Looking out from the
gallery towards the deck.
|
An
exhibition space within the convent, with a
model of the Endeavour.
|
Looking from the mezzanine over the gallery, mast posts and punkahs.
|
Overall view.
|
General view with the anchor room to the left. The circles marking the floor represent the
warning fires lit by the Guugu Yimithirr people.
|
Looking across the existing James Cook Museum courtyard to the new deck, which has views to the Endeavour River.
|
Cooktown Art Gallery and Interpretative Centre
The gallery entry, with canopy propped on spotted gum posts, seen through the lush growth of the Botanical Gardens.
|
Metal sun baffles and deep overhangs contribute to the passive environmental strategy.
|
Approach from the north.
|
|
|
In a remarkable coincidence, Cooktown in far north Queensland has recently
acquired two new public buildings with substantial and sophisticated input from two
prominent Brisbane architects. For a town of 1,600 people, this seems surprising. Yet it
is also symptomatic of the rise in cultural tourism in the nation’s remote (and not so
remote) towns and landscapes. Buildings of distinctive, arguably signature, architectural
design, are given two tasks: firstly to house their exhibits and show them well, and
secondly, by virtue of their design, to market themselves as potential icons of their place.
As a place, Cooktown is indeed unique. Looking out from Grassy Hill, one stands
where Captain James Cook surveyed the landscape as he waited for his converted
collier, the barque HMS Endeavour, to be repaired. Today, Cooktown lies immediately
below, born from a 19th century grid with strange gaps where the locals demolished
buildings in the “clean-up” for Queen Elizabeth’s 1970 visit. Beyond, the Endeavour
River meanders serpentine-fashion to the ocean. Looking across the river, one sees a
landscape mostly unchanged since Cook and his crew took refuge there after striking
the Great Barrier Reef and crashing a great hole in their vessel on the evening of 11
June 1770. Cook’s unexpected arrival in this extraordinary landscape lies behind the
creation of the James Cook Museum in the town centre and the Art Gallery and
Interpretive Centre in the Cooktown Botanic Gardens.
Funded by a $2.3 million federation grant, the National Trust of Queensland has
refurbished and expanded the James Cook Museum. Initially co-ordinated by Trust
conservation architect Jinx Miles, the project was managed to completion by Nicola
Stairmand, Tracey Avery and their team. It was a challenging task. Not only did they
oversee the refurbishment of St Mary’s Convent, but they also catalogued, sorted and
culled a vast and chaotic collection of 15,000 artefacts. This also involved negotiating
the territorial pride that had built up as the community amassed collections that include artefacts of indigenous, maritime, pastoral, Palmer goldfields, Sisters of Mercy, Chinese
community, and local social history. The prize of the museum, however, has always been
the anchor and one of the six cannons jettisoned as Cook and his crew struggled to free
the Endeavour from the reef.
St Mary’s Convent, built in 1889 by the Catholic Church for the Sisters of Mercy, was
a major centre for the education of women until World War II. An imposing Gothic Revival
brick structure, it was one of a number of ambitious Cooktown buildings designed by
Scotsman F. D. G. Stanley for a town that boomed after gold was discovered in 1873.
World War II saw the evacuation of the Sisters and, while the building was returned to
them, it was never used again for its original purpose. By 1960, the building, much
deteriorated, was to be demolished “as a public safety measure”. After lobbying by
Raphael Cilento and others, the Church donated the building to the National Trust in
1969 and since 1970 it has operated as a museum.
The current project restored the building and replaced its roof. Geoff Morton
undertook the building conservation work while Stairmand, Avery and their team
reconfigured the collection’s curatorial direction, making sense of its complex cultural
diversity. In one upstairs gallery, for example, there is a suspended indigenous timber
canoe, a mock-up of original fragments of a Chinese joss-house, and, in the corner, a
beautifully curved timber lattice screen to the spiral stair leading to the girls’ attic
dormitory. At the rear of the building, a large corrugated iron army hut and ramshackle
verandah have been replaced by the Endeavour Gallery, a new space designed to display
the anchor and the cannon, and to outline the story of Cook and his crew’s seven week
stay. The architect for the additions was Rex Addison, selected for his extensive design
experience in Papua New Guinea. The result is a fine building that is low maintenance,
ecologically sustainable, and eminently suited to Cooktown’s sub-tropical climate.
Addison admired the Stanley building’s predictable Victorian character, its generous
dimensions, and the fact that even in a hot climate the old building, elevated above the
town, was relatively pleasant to be in. His design strategy was twofold: firstly, that there
should be a “reasonable conversation” between old and new; and secondly, that he
would enter into the spirit of the Endeavour story, that his building in plan, form, siting,
and detail would resonate with imagery of the barque, and thus complement Bill
Haycock’s exhibition design. Addison also reinstated his own slatted version of the rear
timber verandah. A band of timber flooring with a skylight strip above was inserted
between “old” and “new”, and the gallery designed to occupy the footprint of the old tin
shed. The height of the addition, with its arched roof, was determined by the need to
screen an unattractive church behind the museum. The base of Addison’s corrugated
iron-clad building employs the same heritage-listed stone that lines Cooktown’s kerbs.
His additions, modest and carefully scaled, are subtle, not doctrinaire, in their difference.
Inside, Addison’s tactics are more forthright. His interior is lively, tactile, and, in his
words, “bristling with signs of occupancy”. Inspired by the Endeavour, Addison teased
out the naval metaphor. He began by looking at F. H. Chapman’s Architectura Navalis
Mercatoria (1768), a book of 18th century drawings of ships, masts, sails and rigging.
Nautical references abound and, thankfully, these are not cloying but impart richness
and meaning. The most striking aspect of Addison’s interior is his “mast” columns,
wrapped in rope at their bases and supporting an intricate series of bracing, props, and
mechanised punkahs which swing to and fro – even sounding an obligatory creak to
evoke the sound of a ship at sea. Aware of the famous punkahs at Brisbane’s Tattersalls
Club, Addison’s punkahs – his first – also form part of a strategy of passive
environmental control. The masts’ third function is to hold the building down in a
cyclone. For me, seats around each mast were the only things missing from these
beautifully designed supports. The gallery walls are lined with marine ply, angled to give an echo of the list of a ship under sail. Above the line of this boat-like interior, the
brilliant blue walls and ceiling echo the vault of the sky. The outdoor balcony, opening off
this space and shaped like a ship’s prow, points to the river as do the boards of the
(ship’s) decking. These boards make their way inside the dehumidified glass-enclosed
room that contains the Endeavour’s anchor and cannon – the only artificially controlled
environment in the building. Elsewhere, the floor is concrete, coloured with red pigment
to signify the earth, and broken only by a series of black circles. These circles indicate
the fires lit by the Guugu Yimithirr people to warn those upstream which, by chance, also
assisted in guiding the Endeavour up Wahalumbaal birri, as the river was then known.
The Endeavour Gallery thus tells two stories, that of the hosts and that of the visitors. All
was enriched by consultation with the local Indigenous people and by the accounts of
local Senior Elder Eric Deeral, whose hand prints also became part of the exhibition.
Addison’s building is a small yet masterful addition. He practises with the lyrical and
expressive touch of a Ralph Erskine, and with the sureness of someone intimate with a
place’s climate and materials.
In 1770 Cook’s stranded party had included botanist Joseph Banks, naturalist Daniel
Solander, and botanical artist Sydney Parkinson. During this brief interlude they recorded
many botanical and fauna specimens, including the “kangaru”. In 1972, inspired by their
work, English-born botanical collector, artist and farmer Vera Scarth-Johnson (1912-
1999) began to draw many of the same plants and bequeathed her drawings to the
town. Government funding was found for a building to house a permanent exhibition of
her drawings as well as an important collection of snakes and reptiles commemorating
herpetologist Charles Tanner (1911-1996). Described as “nature’s powerhouse”,
Cooktown’s new Art Gallery and Interpretive Centre, designed by Bud Brannigan, is a
simple yet robust shed. Clad in corrugated iron and with a thrusting canopy propped off
two massive spotted gum posts, the building’s great virtue is its discreet siting between
two granite outcrops in the Cooktown Botanical Gardens.Wallabies and bush turkeys
wander innocently through the undergrowth and across the two entry approaches from
the car park or the gardens and track to Finch Bay. A modest budget determined the
simple arrangement of spaces within: two gallery spaces (one temperature controlled),
store and workspace, lobby, cafe, and outdoor terrace. Minimal window openings, metal
sun baffles, broad eaves, Zincalume-finished Custom Orb ceilings and vinyl floors
constitute the elemental palette which in its detail suggests compromise in construction.
While Scarth-Johnson had briefed Brannigan for something “slick”, the building’s
austerity is not enough for any special effect. But over time, with the context of the
gardens and an emerging sense of curatorial management, the recessive nature of this
building will work in its favour.
Given the 2001 RAIA national awards, where similar buildings in Broken Hill and the
Pilbara received high commendation, it is clear that the success of architecture resulting
from this recent phenomena of cultural tourism and interpretative projects depends in
part on local circumstance and the presence of inventive briefs and innovative curatorial
practices. Of the two buildings, James Cook Museum has the more challenging
curatorial agenda. Addison’s self-described “loose-limbed” additions also sport most
poetically with the place, its buildings, its landscape, and its collections, and above all its
inimitable climate where the wind is alternately blessed and cursed. In one museum
exhibit, a nun dressed in black woollen habit from top to toe, hoping for some brief
respite from the unbearable heat, moaned in her diary, “Lord, send a breeze.” In typically
laconic fashion, Addison recounts a slogan competition held by local residents to attract
visitors to the town which perhaps best summed up this magical place and its seasonal
monsoonal blasts: “Come to Cooktown – it’ll blow you away.”
Philip Goad is a professor of architecture at the University of Melbourne
|
| Project credits |
Endeavour Gallery,
James Cook Museum, Cooktown
Architect Addison Associates. Curators Nicola
Stairmand and Tracey Avery. Exhibition Designer
Bill Haycock. Structural Engineer Salmon
McKeague Partnership. Mechanical, Electrical, and
Fire Engineer Bassett. Hydraulic Engineer Neil Blair
Builder Petrie Builders. Client National Trust of
Queensland. Funding Commonwealth Government
Federation and Cultural Heritage Projects program.
|
| Project credits |
Cooktown Art Gallery and Interpretative Centre
Architect Bud Brannigan Architect—project team
Bud Brannigan, Stephen Chandler. Landscape
Architect Siteplan, Cairns. Interpretative Designer
Bill Carter. Gallery Constultants Cairns Regional Art
Gallery. Structural Engineer Tod Group. Services
Engineer Bassett Consulting, BRW. Builder Terry
Martin, Cairns. Cook Shire Council Project Officer
Ian McCrae. Wet Tropics Management Authority
Project Officer John McIntyre
|
|
