To some people, Queensland’s familiar wood and tin homes lent Brisbane, and other Queensland cities and rural areas, a rather temporary, insubstantial air. Known as ‘Queenslanders’, they seemed so much less solid and permanent than those built of brick or stone. Many Queensland houses were placed high in the air on tall stumps, as the supporting piers were always called, and seemed likely to simply fly away.

The Queensland house was relatively inexpensive when wood was plentiful, easy to transport, and, in a relatively benign climate, single skin, unlined walls were all that were thought to be required to protect dwellers~people~the dwellers within} from the cold. Stout corrugated iron roofs withstood heavy tropical rain and could be re-used if moved by cyclonic winds.

The verandahs sheltered people from burning sun and caught any breeze that may have been passing during the steamy summer. Shades over window openings meant that windows didn’t have to be closed when humidity brought rain. Cleverly placed little revolving tin cylinders on the roofs removed hot air that filled ceiling spaces through decorative fretwork openings.

Although timber isn’t a particularly effective insulator for either heat or cold, air was able to flow down long central hallways in the typical Queensland house and across the house from an open window on one side through open doors to the open window on the other side. The exterior of some houses were painted, others were just oiled. Some verandahs were decorated with elaborate and expensive iron lace; others made do with simple timber frames and carved timber decoration in pediments over front entrance.

Despite the air of apparent 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 homes. The pattern of the Queenslander home can be translated into the early types of kit-set houses.

Many were created by companies in Brisbane and transported long distances almost as flat-packs on trains. Selections of verandahs, tongue and groove boards for walls and sheets of corrugated iron for roofs were ready at their destination for assembly. The public housing movement that produced workers homes adapted the basic materials 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After the war, the Queenslander seemed out of date in a world of modem architecture.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 fell 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 homes.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when a drift back to the inner suburbs attracted the attention of 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 the other Australian capital cities.

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