Queenslanders

Brisbane’s vernacular domestic architecture

A series of images from a decade ago, when I visited Brisbane for the first time. I was immediately entranced—admittedly with the exotica-attuned eyes of the newcomer—by the arrays of ‘Queenslanders’ peppered over the rearing and rolling hills of the city.

The Queenslander is one of those rare things: a form of domestic architecture distinctively associated with a particular city—just as there is with Shanghai and longtang/shikumen, Beijing and hutong, Amsterdam and its canal houses, and just as there isn’t particularly with London, Liverpool, Manchester or Milan, say.

Emerging sometime in the early 19th century, and appearing to draw instinctively from a few indigenous Pacific traits, if not indigenous Australian, as much as the British or European types, the Queenslander appears well-suited to this hot, sticky place.

It’s a simple construction, in timber and tin, with a large verandah girdling the square cruciform plan, open from front to back—and often left open—to allow cooling draughts to clear the house, as well as accommodating a few furtive glimpses of interior activity – or simply of views beyond, as in the image at the top.

The verandah props up long overhanging eaves of a pitched corrugated metal roof, which would sound like a drumkit…