William Light's home demolished in 1926: idea of Adelaide's founder living in hut dented by John Tregenza in 1980s
Historian Dr John Tregenza (right) challenged the 1927 technical assessment of William Light's home by Dr Charles Fenner (left) who followed the traditional line set up by figures such as Jeanne Young who directed the model of Light's home presented to the public as a wood-and hessian hut (as published in the Adelaide Observer in 1916, top middle).
Images courtesy Thebarton Historical Society and State Library of South Australia
The home of William Light’s on the corner of Winwood and Cawthorne streets, Thebarton (later Southwark), in Adelaide’s inner west was demolished in 1926, amid the conventional wisdom that he lived in a very small thatched cottage with taller parts later attached to the building.
This fed into a morbid fascination about the paradox that Adelaide’s founder died a pauper in miserable circumstances. This thesis had been influenced by Register newspaper editor-in-chief William Sowden and jingoistic political activist and writer Jeanne Young around 1916.
In the early 1980s, Thebarton Council formed a committee to look at rebuilding Colonel Light's cottage as the smaller hut version that had become the conventional wisdom, fed by the wood-and-hessian model of Light’s cottage as presented to the public under Young’s direction in 1916. Historian Dr John Tregenza, with a master of arts from Adelaide University and philosophy doctorate from Australian National University, was on the Thebarton Council committee in the 1980s decided to do deeper research.
Tregenza wonder why a cottage, however small, belonging to an artist like Light, so well acquainted with the finest European architecture, would lack some style and symmetry. The only substantial previous article on Light’s cottage was in 1927 by Dr Charles Fenner, the education department's superintendent of technical education, in a paper presented to the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society.
Fenner was concerned about the loss of Light’s cottage but followed the Sowden and Young line about its form. Fenner was a printer and geologist by training, not a historian, and Tregenza found flaws, confusion and inconsistencies in his assessment of Light’s cottage. Tregenze saw discrepancies between Fenner plan of Light’s cottage and the bigger house remembered by Marjorie Boden who lived there around 1918-24.
Aside from a vague appeal to “tradition”. Fenner’s main argument in favour of Light occupying a small original section of building, relied on an argument about the style of bricks used in both sections of Light’s home. Fenner claimed the brick used to build the “front additions” were made later than those used to construct the rear of the house. The bricks of Thebarton cottage were known as "sloppy" bricks: hand-made in wooden moulds. The bricks of the newer portion of the house were a different later type. This information, Fenner said, came from an employee named McGrath of Colton, Palmer and Preston—the firm that demolished Light’s house.
Trengenza referred to Noris Ioannou, whose Ceramics in Australia (1986) had the most exhaustive account of early brick making in South Australia. Ioannou inspected the bricks, taken from the wreck of Light’s home, in the Royal Geographical Society collection and confirmed they were “sloppy” bricks. But bricks used to construct the front portion of the house were a superior quality achieved by a better “sloppy” technique. The clue to their source was an advertisement in the Southern Australian in November 1838 by J. T. Scown, a brickmaker operating on land beside the River Torrens at Gilberton owned by Light's friend John Morphett: “In a couple of weeks a pug mill will be erected and at work ... when J. T. S. hopes to be able to make as good Bricks as are made in England”. By 1839, Scown was selling “about 70,000 a month, at £3 to £3.10s. per thousand".
A lack of physical evidence remaining meant Trengenza couldn't fully refuted Fenner’s arguments about Light home but he was sure that he had seriously challenged “the tradition established by Jeanne Young, elaborated by Charles Fenner, and more recently supported by Derek Whitelock, that it was no more than an ungainly hut. Light was far from being a pauper, and the evidence strongly suggests that he built a well-proportioned house commensurate with his leading status in the early South Australian community.”