Colonialism, Medievalism, and Sacred Spaces/Places: Gothic Revival Church Architecture in Australia (original) (raw)

Lecture, Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group, 10 April 2024.

Abstract

European settlers in Australia and New Zealand were powerfully struck by the alienness of the landscapes they encountered and the strangeness of the First Nations peoples inhabiting them. The aims of British colonial administrations included the replication of Anglo-Saxon culture (language, the arts, built environments, agricultural and pastoral practices, to name but a few elements), and the conversion of Indigenous peoples to the Christian religion. During the nineteenth century the preferred architectural style for ecclesiastical structures changed from the neo-Classical mode that predominated in the Georgian era to the Gothic Revival style, which was redolent of both the medieval ‘age of faith’ narrative of Christian dominance and a hierarchical, orderly society based on ‘godly’ principles. This chapter examines a range of churches and church-related sites (including cemeteries, chapels, and public monuments) and interrogates how the introduction of this arguably incongruous (even inappropriate) ecclesiastical architecture established overtly Christian sacred spaces that covertly disparaged and disestablished both the religions and sacred sites of the Indigenous Australian and Maori peoples. While Indigenous and settler relations followed different paths in the two nations, the ideology of European Christianity was emphatically opposed to, and exclusionary of, First Nations beliefs and practices concerning the sacred. Neo-Gothic architecture was a material demonstration of this opposition, in political, aesthetic, and theological terms.

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