To some eyes, Queensland’s distinctive wood and tin houses lent Brisbane, and other Queensland cities and towns, a rather temporary, insubstantial air. Known as 'A Queenslander’, they seemed so much less solid and permanent than homes of brick or stone. Many Queensland houses were placed high in the air on tall stumps, as the supporting piles have been known as, and seemed likely to simply fly away.
The Queensland house was comparatively inexpensive when trees were plentiful, easy to move from place to place, and, in a relatively benign climate, single skin, unlined walls were all that were considered needed to protect dwellers~people~the dwellers within} from cold. Strong corrugated iron roofs stood up to heavy tropical rain and was re-usable if dislodged by cyclonic winds.
The verandahs sheltered people from the burning sun and caught any breeze that may have been passing in the steamy summers. Shades over window openings meant that windows didn’t need to be closed when humidity brought rain. Clever little revolving tin cylinders on the roofs pulled out hot air that had been drawn into ceiling spaces through decorative fretwork openings.
Although timber is not a particularly effective insulator against either heat or cold, air could flow along long central hallways in the typical Queensland house and also across the house from an open window on one side through open doors to the open window on the opposite side. The exterior of some houses were painted, others were just oiled. Some verandahs were built with elaborate and expensive iron lace; others simply with timber dowels and carved timber decoration in pediments over front stairs.
Despite the impression of seeming impermanence, the Queensland house has survived since its first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century. However, it has evolved. The simple two-room or four-room cottage has given way to large, sprawling dwellings. The pattern of the Queenslander home could be translated into the early types of kit-set homes.
Many were developed by companies in Brisbane and transported long distances as flat-packs on trains. Selections of verandahs, tongue and groove boards for walls and sheets of corrugated iron for roofs were ready at the destination for assembly. The public housing movement that produced workers dwellings adapted the ingredients to differing shapes and sizes suitable for lower-cost housing.
After the war, the Queenslander seemed out of date in a world of modem architecture. Brick houses, American ranch style residences and other imported styles began to populate new suburbs. However, Brisbane is a hilly city and even modem designs often adapted the idea of stumps so that houses could be close to the ground near the top of a rising allotment and high where the ground sloped away. In the late twentieth century, the old materials, tin and timber, were given new currency by innovative architects to create distinctly modem, light and airy Queensland houses.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when a drift back to the inner suburbs attracted a new generation, old Queenslanders were discovered by younger owners. They painted them lovingly and added various renovations to bring an old favourite into the modem era.
However they originated, whether from sugar planters houses in the West Indies, bungalows in India or high houses in Malaysia, the Queenslander still distinguishes Brisbane from other Australian capital cities.
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