St. Mary's Cathedral

St. Mary's Cathedral, the Gothic Revival style church on the northeast corner of Hyde Park, towers oddly above its surroundings like it's been displaced in time and space. Viewed from in front of the south entrance, every other building its scale is a skyscraper, and though there are other sandstone buildings nearby, the cathedral's distinctively European Gothic architecture makes it unique. You'd think that stepping inside would be like stepping through a portal into any interchangeable Gothic cathedral in western Europe, but that's not really the case—something's a bit off.

The structure of the interior is almost cookie-cutter, with grand stained-glass windows depicting Catholic imagery, stately columns and arches, soaring wood-vaulted ceiling, and a font that looks older than the entire rest of the building (this version of St. Mary's was begun in 1866 after a fire, according to the cathedral's website). I've visited Gothic cathedrals in Europe and the physical similarities are unmissable. But there are key points where the similarities start to break down, and the most obvious instance is the actual construction material of St. Mary's: the native sandstone. The stone gives a warm ("honey colored") glow utterly unlike the cold gray stone of European Gothic architecture such as the Venetian Doge's Palace. I visited the latter when the weather was comparably warm, but the atmosphere inside was much cooler, the interior darker and solemner. When researching examples of Gothic architecture, I came across this cathedral near Birmingham, England, which is markedly similar in design to St. Mary's (down to the saintly heads at the bases of arches, also visible in the photo above); the visibly cooler-toned stone, lit by typical British daylight, lends a dimmer, grimmer, and older mood. St. Mary's emulates the traditional style but achieves an altogether different effect.

In the 19th century, Australian architects jumped on the Gothic Revival bandwagon like their Victorian British motherland. But in their emulation of empire trends, they had to utilize native materials and adapt to the Australian landscape. The cathedral is built out of Sydney sandstone, and the website notes that instead of the traditional east-west cruciform configuration, due to land constraints, St. Mary's is oriented north-to south. The website also notes that the architect, William Wardell, utilized "native flora throughout as a decorative element" though I was not able to see this for myself. The Australian cathedral stands at a crossroads of aspiring to its British colonizer roots and gesturing toward/reacting to its own unique environmental (and cultural) context.

I think this is indicative of not just historical Australian architecture (bearing in mind that St. Mary's was officially completed in 2000), but also Australian culture as a whole. White colonizers arrived on the continent and ever since then (concurrently and retroactively) have been reckoning with the land and its indigenous inhabitants. At times they have acknowledged and attempted to accommodate the original Australians in the endeavor to keep pace with the rest of the West—other times, they have steamrolled right over them. We have discussed some of the various atrocities wrought by the British immigrants and some of the reconciliation efforts, and we have seen some of them dramatized in Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australia (with varying degrees of factuality). Both of these movies are attempts to address the disconnect between white interests and indigenous culture, a disconnect which is exemplified more harmlessly and harmoniously in St. Mary's Cathedral. In the same way that the films struggle—one more than the other—to reconcile dominant (white) Australian culture to the realities of the cultural context, historical and ongoing, the cathedral attempts to marry British aesthetics with the native Australian landscape. When successful, the end result is not a colonial-legitimating, "self-congratulatory fantasy of a Happy White Australia"—or the envisioned staid façade of a European Gothic cathedral (Huggan 21). Instead, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, the result is an unexpected and unsettling illumination of the rift between white expectation and indigenous reality.

HED

Sources:

Dargue, William. "Coleshill." Birmingham Churches . . . from A to Y, 7 May 2013, ahistoryofbirminghamchurches.jimdo.com/parishes-in-the-diocese-of-birmingham-outside-the-city/coleshill-st-peter-st-paul/. Accessed 7 Jan 2018.

"History of the Cathedral – Living our heritage." St. Mary's Cathedral Sydney, www.stmaryscathedral.org.au/history-art/history-of-the-cathedral/. Accessed 7 Jan 2018.

Huggan, Graham. "Australian Literature, Race, and the Politics of Location." Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, and Transnationalism. Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 1-34.