I can remember vividly when the Historic Houses Trust was formed by Neville Wran in 1980. It brought together a seemingly unrelated set of historically significant domestic properties, from Vaucluse House, then a rather moth-eaten house museum from the early part of the 20th century, to the showily restored and newly-public Elizabeth Bay House. The HHT put on a good show and raised a few eyebrows even then with a scholarly approach and sense of adventurously working things out from first principles and not taking anything as given.

When the Hyde Park Barracks, never really successful as a social history museum, passed to the HHT in 1990 this seemed a whole new avenue for the organisation – it wasn’t even a house. I was both excited and challenged when Tonkin Zulaikha Harford (as my practice was then) won the job of converting it into a museum. The project as it progressed proved a true education. At all times, the HHT curators demanded that we think every detail through – not from its finished appearance, which is, apart from cost, the aspect that most clients focus on, but from its reason for being. Why and not what was the thing we talked about endlessly and often late into the night. How this honed our own thinking and sharpened our design skills!

And this is what I most like about the HHT – here is a major cultural institution that thinks and reasons, not abstractly but with the aim of communicating with people, you and me, about complex and challenging issues. Issues which grow organically from their charter, but which reach widely across our contemporary society as well as into a past, which has shaped all of us. Who else goes from Victorian bed-linen to jail tattoos, who else would discard a house full of lovely antiques when they reasoned that the historic owners of the mansion were too poor to have afforded them, who else would fill a house museum with reproduction furniture you could actually sit on, not the usual roped off gilt chairs?

So when, after nine years on the HHT’s Exhibitions Advisory Committee, I was asked if I would be happy to be nominated as a Trustee, I was just as excited and challenged as I was in 1989 when we started work on the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Here is a chance to work with a group of real thinkers, cultural activists with a base in Australia’s architecture and an eye on the future – it will be an honour and a joy.

Peter Tonkin
Trustee
       
Peter Tonkin graduated as an architect with first class honours from the University of Sydney in 1977. He started his architectural practice with the NSW Department of Public Works, and joined Lawrence Nield + Partners in 1979, where his entry in the 1983 Overseas Passenger Terminal Competition was first prizewinner. The completed project went on to win an RAIA Merit Award and the Lloyd Rees Urban Design Award.

Peter joined Brian Zulaikha to form Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects known for its strong urban design. TZG’s projects include a specialist library for the Royal Blind Society, which won a merit award in 1991 from the RAIA, and the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, winner of two RAIA awards. TZG also worked on the refurbishment of Customs House and the multi-award winning solar-powered Plaza Lighting Towers for the Sydney Olympics. His most recent project was in collaboration with artist Janet Laurence for the Australian War Memorial in London, which was opened by HM the Queen in 2003.

Peter has taught architecture at the universities of Queensland, Sydney and New South Wales, as well as the University of Technology and has lectured extensively in Australia and New Zealand. He has been published extensively in magazines, newspapers and books and his work has won numerous prizes and awards in Australia and overseas.

First published in Insites, Autumn 2005