13 August 2024

Down Coventry Place, one of those narrow South Melbourne side streets, is this highly significant cottage – it was prefabricated in Singapore ! It’s one of about 150 sent out here during the gold rush, this one about 1853, now one of only 4 left, and the only one on its original site (two of the others have been re-erected in Collingwood). Having been rendered, with modern windows, it was almost demolished in 2001, but someone with an eagle eye spotted it’s unusual construction, and it was added to the heritage register, and the owners had to build around it instead, hopefully they didn’t mind. What we see now is largely reproduction, since the external boards and the base of the framing was pretty decayed, so now it looks like it must have looked when it was new. The restoration work was by @rbaarchitects, who have some great progress shots Ive borrowed. Nobody knows who exactly created them in Singapore, might have been a British entrepreneur or a Chinese one, and the importer here may have been Chinese, but the timbers are Malay hardwoods, and the framing techniques, with expressed posts and ‘king post’ roof trusses, are also Malay (B&W pic). I’d also add the very wide eaves seem rather tropical. South Melbourne had the most prefab houses because it was outside the Building Act which mandated fire separating walls, so you could plonk them closer together. Many/most of them were in framed with corrugated iron walls from British foundaries, three of which are now the Portable Houses Museum nearby.

Discovered I have photos of some of the other remaining Singapore Cottages in Sackville Street Collingwood from 2013; theyre all gold rush era imports from the early 1850s, but these have all been relocated from their original sites, and had been variously altered, so their history is complicated. They ended up here because architect Andrew Muir had this bit of land, and rescued his first cottage from Mentone when it was about to be demolished in 1984 (it had been moved there in 1899 from somewhere else in Collingwood). He put that one up facing Sackville Street, then in 1995 rescued a more intact one from St Kilda, which replaced the first one in 2002, so that’s the one you see now (the first one is stored in bits). It’s just like the South Melbourne one, with 4 rooms and a short corridor, wide eaves, heavy timber truss roof framing and original markings including a Chinese character, and letters and numbers (it’s known as N4). I think he might have put the windows in the sort sides rather than the long sides though. The little three roomed one behind (pic 7) is made out of parts of 4 outhouses rescued in the 80s-90s from behind some (also) prefabricated iron houses in Brunswick Road, which he put together as one in 2004. And theres a third one facing Easy Street (last pic, streetview), also just like the South Melbourne one, which was rescued from Windsor in 1993, and rebuilt here in 2017 (but using bits from yet another one found in South Yarra). Clearly a long labour of love ! They’re all part of an application to the World Heritage List of all the ~100 remaining gold-rush era prefabricated buildings in Australia, led by academic Miles Lewis, who you can see in the 2nd last pic (from the age) with Muir and Barry Jones inside the smaller cottage when the bid was launched in 2021.

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