Mittagong - Restoration Australia Series 3 Episode 8

Heritage devotees Val and John Jessop decide to buy and reassemble two old buildings - an old ghost town cottage and an old sawmill. What could be more difficult than that? (Season Final)

So we get to the final episode of series 3. John is from England via Africa and Val a Mittagong local with connections to the shale oil mining town of Joadja. They have already done a big renovation / extension, of an old school and church elsewhere. Now they plan another passion project to recreate a cute cottage with a fancy modern bit out the back.

Their business, Cotswold Furniture Collection, isn't mentioned in the show  but the end result of their involvement with the show looks like the sort of interior decorating magazine shoot that would be perfect advertising.

Their plan is to reassemble a house and sawmill shed from "flat pack" components. The house was moved from Joadja to Mittagong and at some stage was dismantled and the parts stacked in Willie Hall's salvage yard.

Willie is the secret weapon in their quest for a unique house - a particularly attuned builder, preserver of old stuff, and son of Peter Hall, the architect who rescued the Opera House. Hall is calm, quietly spoken and competent in all sorts of skills. He is the perfect foil to the fake drama of reality TV. He is actually real.

The sawmill was that of Alex S Blatch & Sons. It was still operating until 1998 when it had to close, supposedly because of the NSW ban on old growth logging according to one of the sons Graeme (SMH June 17, 1998). The Blatch family had offers for their "home-cut, wooden office, and corrugated iron shed from a local artist and a potter who liked the old, lived-in look," 

The sawmill was a landmark in Mittagong, and one of the last connections to the timber industry, that had for a century been the mainstay of the Southern Highlands.

But in the end it was cleared away for some drab townhouses.

Hall has a thorough grasp of good heritage conservation practice. He bought the house and dismantled it, presumably as a last option to prevent its loss. He took photos of the dismantling process and tagged the parts. He uses traditional construction methods and where parts needed to be replaced because of rot or termites, he used matching materials. He even has an old morticing machine to do the new mortice and tenon joints. This seems like a rare lost trade, but in fact is a simple piece of equipment to acquire and use today - its just that modern nail guns serve the same purpose with minimum effort.

So if a building has been moved from its original historic town and had a second life in another historic town, then dismantled and stored in for years before being moved again to a third site and reconstructed with building where it is married to modern materials, is it still heritage?

I suspect not, but Harrison goes on again about heritage practice needing to identify new building by cladding it in new material. But in this case it doesn't seem such an issue since so little of the build is actually original fabric or in its original configuration, while significant visual elements such as the cladding of both the sawmill shed and the house roof are done in new Zincalume removing any sense of heritage character. If there was no option but use new material, they still could have obtained proper galvanised corrugated iron for much the same price. At least then they could have some reference to Australian building heritage.

They have left some of the original internal wall finishes as a palimpsest of the layers of use and reconstruction, although the appearance is more of a contrived shabby chic, with mismatched boards, gaps and missing trim all over the place. It seems much was left behind when the house was dismantled.

With such a calm and competent builder, clients with patience and evidently adequate financial means and no council regulator or heritage advisor hovering over the building site threatening to close it all down if they don't use the right shade of Porters lime wash, there is little opportunity in the show for the usual fabricated drama. So instead it comes from the bushfires and the epidemic. 

As with the previous episode the virus keeps Harrison away but it is no loss as Willie makes a more authentic and personable narrator. What you aren't told however, is how this project is really just a bit of ordinary property development. The house/shed combo is squashed into a subdivided block next door to the Jessop's real house - a large and more prosaic late 20th century ranch style home on half a hectare. The original house on the block on the other side is now tight up against the fence, and the garden trees are all gone, making Mittagong a little less leafy.

The result is far more a pastiche of what passes for heritage on television, than actual restoration, but after the abominations on most of the renovation shows we don't really expect much more than this.

Cooroy, Qld - Restoration Australia Season 3 Episode 7

When Mel and Jack buy a derelict old Queenslander for $21,000 and move it to their land in Noosa it seems they've scored the bargain of the century, or at least a century old bargain.

There I was thinking this frustrating and infuriation program had finished and then I see there was another episode. And then another one I haven't seen as well. So as a completeist, I guess I should consider these too. Perhaps the show might still redeem itself.

Harrison begins by pointing out the obvious. The Queenslander is the quintessential, characteristic authentic true blue bonza beauty Australian historic architectural icon. Fair enough. 

To recap, the form comprises mostly timber  residential buildings with the decorative timber fretwork, wrap-around verandahs, set high on tall stumps to provide underfloor ventilation and protect the main structure from white ants (using tin ant caps). Another element adapted to a hot climate is the exposed frame and absence of lining. The single skin allowed the building to cool down at night and the gappy floorboards and high stance allowed air circulation, but it makes air conditioning practically useless.

$21,000 to purchase it and another $100,000 to have it cut in half, transported a couple of hours away to the farm and stuck back together on new stumps was the initial cost and the couple gave themselves a budget of another $100000 to do everything else including basic septic, power and all the repairs. Its a bargain for what has become a rare collectible. 

Inner Brisbane houses in derelict condition have been selling for million dollar prices for years and the fashion for Federation and Edwardian weatherboard houses has become a regional status symbol.  

It would seem that chopping them up and shifting them to another site is a standard way of 'conserving' historic Queenslanders.

Years ago we dropped into the collection of relocated historic buildings at Caboolture Historic Village  where we asked the information person where we could visit well preserved historic towns nearby, only to be told "we dont do heritage in Queensland". 

Smaller timber houses in country towns and farms have always been a bit mobile. Demographic changes, shifting industries like mining and saw milling, and redevelopment of old residential areas, have seen houses follow employment around the country.

Harison is concerned that the restoration doesn't "make a mockery of the old building". He thinks replacing termite-eaten wall boards and the decayed fretwork brackets (even with like for like) "chips away from its old soul, not just the way it looks but the way it feels". Well he didn't have such qualms when the millionaires gutted their Miller's Point palaces.

The show tries to create drama and urgency by inventing deadlines. But this is Queensland. Things take a while and there is no rush.

Makes me wonder what the owners get out of the show. Is it just ego or narcissism. Melissa did credit the show with spurring them on to complete the building. She is given credit for historical sleuthing that led to finding the family of the original owner and builder Henry (Heinrich) Frederick Lindenmayer known as "H F".

As well as a 1941 penny found under the boards that survived the trip down from  Binjour,  under the lino they found old letters from  Lindenmayer.

Except it was the "ABC" who did the tracking down according to the local paper. Presumably they meant Fremantle Media. A quick search on Trove shows there have been a number of recent corrections to newspaper articles referring to the Lindenmayers of Binjour, an obscure enough topic that they must have only beed done in connection with the show - so it seems some detailed research has been done.

Somewhere along the way they also found Stanley and Hilda Opperman at their Binjour corner store, a museum piece in itself, complete with its collection of old tins. Stanley's grandfather and great grandfather helped build it and his dad was born in the house with the help of midwife Mrs Bertie Lindenmayer.

The Binjour Plateau was settled by German immigrants in 1909 who were encouraged to emigrate to Australia by the Apostolic Pastor H F Niemeyer, as part of his efforts to establish the Apostolic Church community in Queensland. Much of the population derived from closer settlement schemes that began in 1918, and despite the preference for soldier settlement and suggestions that German settlers were interred as enemy aliens during the war, Lindenmayer obtained one of the settler blocks.

Lindenmayer's property was called Euroa, a cattle stud of some note producing prize bulls such as " Euroa Zane Grey 2". H F was the big man of the town, sitting on the various council, cotton and dairy boards and prize winner with his AIS (Australian Illawarra Shorthorn) cattle. So the claim that this was a simple unpretentious house might be a little unfounded.

It was later "Norris's place" Frederick Norris passed away in 2014, leaving scattered family in the Binjour-Munduberra area and a Norris Corner Road to remember hi by, and a fleeting reference to a house now hours away that was once his home.

Some other myths are related by the Oppermans; that it reflects German traditional building style, such as the cross bracing and steep roof (for the snow?), and that they built the single skin to save money but would line it when they could afford to.

Harrison also drops comments a few times about the painted vj boards. It seems having exhausted his architectural terminology early on in the episode the 'V' jointed vertical lining boards are all he has left to show off his expertise. Despite a richness of endemic Australian vernacular building styles, we have only an impoverished vocabulary to describe and analyse them. Yet this house in particular has such unusual features compared to any modern building and most of the southern vernacular. A glimpse of the circular saw blade sign to the town entrance and a later visit to the timber mill provide some unstated explanation for the extensive and almost complete use of timber in the house, since this was a significant timber cutting and milling area - although the original location at Binjour was perhaps not so heavily timbered originally.

It is only in the last minutes of the show that we see much progress, and by this time Covid19 lockdown has prevented the host from making another visit. So when the film crew captures the finished restoration Mel and Jack are left to show us around on their own. Despite a little hammy reality show acting for the camera, their enthusiasm for the project comes through at last. 

They couldn't do a timber floor in the bathroom because of building codes as Harrison proclaimed a little earlier, so they end up with an open tiled area at the end of the closed in back verandahs. I actually don't think they were too bothered about building codes considering the other design quirks of the house.

A lot of the termite chewed boards were replaced and a picture window (as they were once called) is set in the kitchen wall to give them the same lovely view they had in their shed. Not a bad result. 

Two elements were missing from the episode. There was really no money/time blow-out drama and no feared heritage advisor or council officer. And it was better for it.