Edmund Blacket, Medievalism and the Gothic in the Colony

Abstract

Edmund Blacket (1817-83) was an English-born Gothic Revival architect. This thesis uses the critical framework of medievalism to identify the function of multiple timeframes, real and imagined, within the Gothic style. It traces Blacket’s youth sketching Gothic ruins in the Yorkshire countryside, his construction of quintessentially English churches in the Colony of New South Wales, and his grand designs for the University of Sydney’s first buildings. This journey shows how Blacket’s use of the Gothic style spoke at once to a romanticised medieval past and the fragmented colonial present, as well as anticipating the Colony’s future.