Join us for the first talk in the Architectural History and Theory Seminar Series of 25/26 by John Macarthur.
This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.
Abstract
Sometime in the mid-1870s the residents of the Charters Towers goldfields in north Queensland, Australia began to call their emerging ramshackle town ‘The World’. Whatever irony there was in this naming soon took on another significance as a series of major finds saw Charters Towers supply a considerable proportion of the world’s gold. At the same time, the town’s newly installed electric telegraph enabled Charters Towers shares to be traded simultaneously there and in London, contributing to a period of share speculation as dramatic as the mining discoveries. Charters Towers quickly became the colony’s second city after Brisbane and its streets were rebuilt with substantial classical edifices, including banks and a shopping arcade that also housed the Stock Exchange. The Charters Towers Stock Exchange, like exchanges on other Australian goldfields, is a monument to a new, technologically enabled global economy as well as testimony to the enormous wealth being dug from the earth.
About John Macarthur
John Macarthur is Professor of architecture at the University of Queensland where he conducts research and teaches in the history and theory of architecture, and in architectural design. His research in the intellectual history of architecture has focused on the conceptual framework of the interrelation of architecture, aesthetics and the arts. His book The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, was published by Routledge in 2007.
Image: Mossman Street, Charters Towers, Queensland, Australia (c.1900).
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