Nearly 200 years before any couple tested a relationship by trying to assemble an IKEA flat-packed Billy bookshelf, prefabricated and portable buildings – including NSW’s Legislative Council – flooded into Australia.
Shipped from the United Kingdom, Singapore and Germany in wooden crates, some of these buildings came with instructions. Others didn’t.
These portable buildings were part of a Victorian-era “love of mail-order”, according to NSW Parliament’s collections and heritage co-ordinator Wes Stowe. A catalogue advertising the building that ended up becoming NSW’s upper house included fences, warehouses, dwellings, arcades, government buildings and military barracks.

Australia has more surviving examples of these 19th-century portable buildings than anywhere else in the world. It is estimated that 117 still exist across Australia, including around 17 in NSW.
“Elsewhere, almost none survive,” said Professor Miles Lewis, an architectural historian from the University of Melbourne who has been studying innovation and technology in architecture for decades.
He is part of an international lobby group that is campaigning for these portable buildings to be listed as a group on UNESCO’s world heritage list of treasures alongside the Opera House.
“We take the view that [the buildings] are as much as part of Britain and Germany’s history as they are of our history,” said Professor Lewis. “It is like the Parthenon. It is important to humanity,” said Professor Lewis.

Together, they represented an “international phenomenon of historical, economic and technical significance,” the group argues. Prefabrication stimulated new building techniques, prompting a range of patents.
For NSW, the mail-order council building was also a “good deal” at 1200 pounds, said Mr Stowe. NSW purchased it from a Victorian company that had paid 4000 pounds to import it from Scotland intending to store grain.
Intended as a temporary building, labourers worked night and day to ensure it was ready for the first sitting of the new parliament, with two chambers, on May 22, 1856.
Dr Jennifer Preston, the chair of the NSW Institute of Architect’s heritage committee, said the history of these buildings was intriguing.

NSW’s collection includes two cottages in Hunters Hill, called Carey and The Chalet, and the home of the Oxley family outside Bowral, known as Wingecarribee House. The latter was imported as a package deal including folding shutters, doors and marble fireplaces. Many were used as factories, including the Retort House at Sub Base Platypus park at Neutral Bay and the Grissell Building (now located on the old ACL site).

Many used tricks to make them look expensive, or were finely detailed, said Dr Preston. The supporting columns at Retort House have intricately detailed capitals and bases, she said. This was typical of Victorian industrial design. “It is lovely inside,” she said. Because they were portable, buildings like Grissell had moved over time. It is believed it was originally used for brewing on the Tooth site at Broadway, but Dr Preston said they were still looking for conclusive documentary proof.

Other prefabricated buildings used Victorian-era tricks to make them look more expensive. The legislative council, for example, appears to be made from Sydney sandstone. But Dr Preston said the facade is cast iron, which was finished to look like rendered masonry. According to research by Professor Lewis, some portable buildings arrived with instructions, including Roman numerals or markings.

Wooden portable houses exported to Melbourne during the gold rush were often stamped with Chinese characters. Professor Lewis wrote these included, ‘Lee’, which might refer to the maker, and terms like ‘double’, ‘connection’, ‘secure” and fixed’ that could refer to the method of assembly. They also included Chinese characters, including the words for ‘moon’, ‘sun’, ‘pearl’, ‘road’, ‘horse’, ‘bee’, ‘egg’, ‘vegetable’, ‘fruit’, ‘surplus’, ‘hero’, ‘prosperous’, ‘bitter’, that he thought could have provided some sort of sequence for identifying components.

At Wingecarribee, the struts were lettered from A to D, with A always being at the bottom with uprights numbered to correspond. Though the exterior was made of corrugated iron, it was said to be a grand home.
A member of the Oxley family wrote that the materials were imported “ready fitted, with a view to saving expense”. “The experiment turned out to be a very troublesome and unsatisfactory one, and little or no saving on the cost of erecting an ordinary brick one.“ Not all the finished buildings resembled the images promoted in the mail-order catalogues, selling everything from fences to churches, said Mr Stowe. “It is kind of like when you get Ikea furniture. And you look at the leftover bit, and you think, ‘Where do you fit?’”

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Away from the cameras surveilling Sydney, public stairs remain among the few places where people “can still be private in public”, says architect Jennifer Preston.
As poet A. A. Milne wrote: “Halfway up the stairs isn’t up, it isn’t down … It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.”
And in the case of the Steps to Nowhere on Hickson Road, Barangaroo, they lead up and down, but will take you absolutely nowhere.

Dr Preston’s interest in Sydney’s stairs was prompted by walks near her home in Glebe. “I am a pedestrian – I walk a lot,” she explained.
When she climbed the Chapman stairs, sandstone steps that curl up from Parramatta Road and Arundel Street with “beautiful sculpted sandstone pillars”, she wondered who Chapman was and why the stairs were named after him. It turns out Michael Chapman was an Irish merchant born in 1802 who migrated to Australia where he rose to become a member of council and NSW Parliament.

“Urban stairways are contested terrain, where the public and private domains meet, overlap, and sometimes conflict,” Dr Preston wrote in one paper. As a result, there are often arguments over who is responsible for policing and maintenance. Dr Preston found complaints in the Sydney City Council archive about stairs being covered with “expectoration, tobacco juice, etc”. Others complained that the stairs were the “resort of people who continually lounge” about them.

Public urban stairways like McElhone rising from Woolloomooloo were places of contrast: beauty and refinement contrasted with the condoms and syringes she had found there.
“It leads upwards towards brightness, promise and adventure,” she wrote of the McElhone stairway. “It descends into shadow, the hidden and unknown. It is enveloped in the delicious scents of flowers, gardens and nearby baking, but is also plagued by the rank smells of urine, dampness and vomit.”

Over the years some steps such as Carahar in the Rocks were demolished, but clues remain, such as parts of their brickwork. On Hickson Road, the Steps to Nowhere are still embedded in the sandstone, but inaccessible.
Dr Preston’s research shows very few surveillance cameras have been installed on Sydney’s stairs, suggesting they are safer than they may feel.

Here are some of her picks for the best stairs to rack up steps, be a tourist in your own city and learn about Sydney’s history after colonisation (and snap some Instagrammable photos).

McElhone stairs: Connecting Woolloomooloo with Potts Point, the “heart thumping stairs” were also the location of a real life spy drama that saw secret documents – with instructions written in invisible ink by Russian spy Ivan Skripov. They were exchanged in a canister hidden behind a balustrade on the stairs. He was caught, expelled from Australia and the spy scandal went global. Like many of Sydney’s stairs they were named after a local businessman.

Fleet Steps: Often wrongly thought to relate to the arrival of the First Fleet, these steep and long stairs at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair were built to celebrate the arrival of the “Great White Fleet” in 1908. The arrival of American peace time fleet – a huge armada – brought record numbers of Sydneysiders out for a day described by some newspapers as the “greatest ever” in Sydney’s history.

Man O’War Steps: With a name like this, they should be huge. Though there are only eight or nine, the steps near the Opera House are full of history and very likely the oldest steps in Sydney, dating back to soon after colonisation. They were built to provide Governor Macquarie and his family with direct access to a jetty.

Chard stairs: Quite short stairs but Sydney’s “most beautiful”, says Dr Preston. They were initiated by William Chard, a local who was concerned that the widening of William Street had caused a huge drop at its intersection with Forbes street. Mr Chard wrote to the council – and to move things along, he paid an architect to draw up the plans. The steps contain detailed “little gargoyley faces carved in the 1930s”, Dr Preston said.

Argyle stairs: Described by tourists as leg pumping, the Argyle stairs in The Rocks have a majestic entry through an arch and lead up to the Harbour Bridge walk. They also feature in the Justice and Police Museum’s forensic archive (1910 to 1964). Curator Nerida Campbell says stairs are often the scene of accidents that “don’t turn out to be accidents”.

Agar steps: A massive set of 108 steps that link Kent Street with Observatory Hill. Tall and narrow with views towards the water, they are Dr Preston’s favourite. They have been portrayed by a range of Australian artists and some of the Victorian terraces that front on to the stairs use the landings as extensions of their own homes.

> Read full article and view more photos online, at this SMH link.