Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 33, No. 2) on the theme of ‘Trans-Tasman Trips and Tropes’, edited by Julie Willis, Paul Walker & Katti Williams
The architectural histories of Australia and New Zealand, despite the long establishment of SAHANZ, have remained mostly distinct and separate. Focus for each has been on the understanding of the development of each place, as separate entities. This has usually followed a formulation: from Indigenous beginnings, through colonisation, to emergent modern nations. While there may be parallels to each nation’s designed and built history, they are rarely compared and the role each has played in the development of the other, in architectural terms, has been largely ignored. Yet, travel ‘across the ditch’ is as least as old as British colonisation, and substantial numbers of architects, construction firms, and client groups have made significant contributions to building and architecture in both countries. This Special Issue of Fabrications seeks papers considering and comparing the architectural histories of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand through moments and sites of connection between the two.
Under the editorship of G A Bremner and Andrew Leach, Fabrications 29:3, ‘The Architecture of the Tasman World, 1788-1850’ examined the shared history of south eastern Australia and New Zealand when the political entities of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales were barely minted and modern New Zealand was but a flash in the pan. Bremner and Leach noted that the nineteenth-century architectural history of these places ‘has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand’, and sought to elicit a more nuanced history by turning to a period when the region’s modern national identities were still nascent. For this new special issue, the editors would like to turn attention to a later period – 1850 to the present – and see how history might be written against the grain of the broad nationalist histories of both Australia and New Zealand by looking at the later period when those histories are dominant.
Submissions are due 30 November 2022.
More information can be found here.