Clive Lucas, a founding partner of Clive Lucas, Stapleton & Partners, has recently been appointed to the board of the National Trust of Australia.
Lucas has previously been a consultant to the Australian government for Cyclone Tracy in Darwin. He has also worked on several significant projects, including the Hyde Park Barracks, Old Government House, Kirribilli House and The Mint in Macquarie Street.
He was appointed OBE for services to architecture in 1977 and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal.
Architecture & Design spoke to him about what he hopes to achieve at the National Trust of Australia, working with the government after Cyclone Tracy and what some of his most rewarding projects have been.
What do you hope to achieve at the National Trust of Australia?
I wish to make it the most vital conservation body with reference committees with real clout. By this I mean it would be fearless, not constrained by politics or patronage – it would tell it as it is. Its reference committees would include the leading lights in the fields of building restoration, preservation and nature conservation.
What role do you think the National Trust of Australia should have?
It should remain essentially a ‘gingering group’ and its property management would be a secondary concern. By this I mean its main thrust would be to stand up for what ‘we have to have’ and what we have to maintain to be a civilised, sophisticated society. To have nothing preserved is like a person without a memory.
In the United Kingdom, the National Trust is not a ‘gingering group’. It is a body that manages vast rural estates, magnificent houses with priceless collections and large tracts of coastline and areas of national beauty.
This has created confusion with what the Trust does here. The Australian National Trust should be wary of accepting further properties unless they are endowed and unless they are exemplary, unless there is no other way of it surviving.
You were a consultant to the government after Cyclone Tracy. Nearly 40 years on, do you think the rebuilding efforts in the area were adequate?
Yes, I think they did keep all the historic structures in Darwin that were capable of restoration. Many, of course, were no more than a pile of stones. Anything left standing survived and was kept. The one tragedy was the very fine Hotel Darwin, which was later demolished for new development. You must understand Darwin was like a moonscape after Cyclone Tracy.
What important lessons were you able to take away from your involvement in the rebuilding?
When you get involved at the right time and have an understanding government, what you can achieve is almost unbelievable. At the time of Cyclone Tracy we had the Whitlam Government in Canberra. They introduced the idea of the National Estate and the idea that preservation was a national responsibility. Many heritage sites were put on a sound footing and important work was done in Port Arthur and other sites of national importance. A number of these are now inscribed on the World Heritage List. Without this sort of effort we would have had nothing to put on a World Heritage list.
You have won several awards. What has been the most rewarding award?
I have won a great many awards and many from the Australian Institute of Architects. They say I have won more of them than any other architect in NSW. It is now over 30 years since restoration awards were first introduced in 1975.
But tasks that seem impossible are always the most rewarding and to make the impossible possible.
Old Government House at Parramatta was something of a challenge. It was our oldest major house but it had been a school, a boarding house, you name it, and very much spoilt by insensitive restoration and misunderstandings. To get it back to the ‘age of Macquarie’ was quite a challenge. It is now on the World Heritage list and it won the Lachlan Macquarie Award in 2004.
Greenway’s masterpiece, the Hyde Park Barracks, was in many ways similar to Old Government House – much abused by alterations for numerous uses and restored in an insensitive and misunderstood way. It now too is on the World Heritage list and won the Lachlan Macquarie ward in 1992.
Lyndhurst, in Sydney’s Glebe, was another challenge. A fine house by colonial architect John Verge for the Macarthur Bowmans, it too had had many uses, including a soap factory and was not only derelict, but partially burnt out waiting for the fate of the North Western Distributor. It was Neville Wran who stopped the road and saved the house. It won the Lachlan Macquarie Award in 1990.
What if this could happen at Thompson Square, Windsor, where Australia’s oldest square is threatened by a highway thorough its centre, and this after a restoration carried out with funds from the Greiner Government.
Then there was the almost unbelievable task of restoring Sydney’s grandest Victorian house from a derelict ruin. I told my client Doug Moran he must be mad to buy it, but he said he wanted to do it, he had the money and he had the architect. And we did. It is now the most wonderful set of Victorian interiors in the land. The best restoration of 2012, said the Institute of Architects, and our ninth Lachlan Macquarie Award.
As a contrast there was Dundullimal, the wonderful 1840s slab house on the Macquarie River out on the Western Plains. It was termite-ridden, damaged by cattle and vandalised. It also looked impossible, but I had a willing client the National Trust, and funds from the National Estate. It was the best restoration of 1988 and won another Lachlan Macquarie Award.
If you weren’t an architect, what would you be doing?
I have wanted to be an architect since I was eight years old. I don’t think I could have done anything else.
I must say, as a student at Sydney University I was considered eccentric spending my time looking at our architectural heritage and by the time I left the university I had hitchhiked around Tasmania and driven around much of the early settled areas of the east coast and South Australia.
But it was not until I came back from working in London and was given the task of restoring historic Colonial buildings in Campbelltown, NSW and then Elizabeth Bay House, all owned by the NSW Government, that the practice took off.
There was the need for such a specialisation and it was not too long before I was working at Port Arthur on Clarendon in northern Tasmania and on most of the important early buildings in NSW.
