Hunter Street

Zero Davey now stands at the corner of Hunter and Davey Streets. Its proper address is 15 Hunter Street but this is somewhat obscured by the title of the building. The proper address determines the street that Zero Davey belongs to most and this is usually the street that the building will face. According to the design professionals this address or site held the clues to understanding and then evaluating the effects of the development because in the laboratory the site contains the conditions for an experiment and describes what it is supposed to do.

230 _{An orchestra is a good example of the principle of general symmetry comprised of the music score (text),}

195 Consequently the site of 15 Hunter Street carried with it a set of obligations and these were already flagged for consideration in any development proposal. Addressing these obligations are among the first things that Zero Davey ‘does’ since it could not have done much else without first subscribing to the planning programme for the Cove. The following describes the importance of Hunter Street and how this importance is made durable (after Latour 1991) or in this case, made literally ‘into matter’.

The importance of the site to the laboratory rests on the importance of Hunter Street. Hunter Street lies at the northern end of the Cove and it is most significant as the earliest settled site in the city. In 1804 Hunter Street was a natural, sand causeway that extended out into the harbour towards Hunter Island, but disappeared each day with the rising tides (Hudspeth and Scripps 2000:12). This causeway was an outcome of the flow of a fresh water rivulet into the Cove and this is what attracted British settlement to the site. The “first significant

construction” was completed some sixteen years later when this natural causeway was raised into a permanent, built stone one (Hudspeth and Scripps 2000:13) and Hunter Street was born. At this point Hunter Island became the end of MacQuarie Wharf and Hobart Town became more serviceable. From Hunter Street the remainder of the docks and aprons were built as landform was reformed to build Sullivans Cove.

I would suggest that site [15 Hunter] and especially Hunter Street and the causeway are more important to the history of Hobart than anywhere else.

Hunter Street as a space within this city was so pivotal, and still is, to the development of the place.231

The causeway served as both a street for the first merchant traders in the settlement with 21 planned allotments, and also as what would become known as ‘the old wharf’ (Sullivans Cove Urban Design Study 1983:7). The remaining row of buildings and the working edges of Victoria Dock and Macquarie Wharf continue this early configuration of space today and this is also why Hunter Street is important in the urban design laboratory. As exemplified in the importance of the fish punts 9p. this continuation of ‘working spaces’ guarantee the shape of

196 the place (as docks, as streets) and are crucial in maintaining an authentic sense of ‘this’ place in contemporary design solutions.232

The causeway which then became the pier and then gave rise to the docks is still being used in the way it was pretty much conceived. I would go that one step further and say that that is a response to the geology, and that means to understand how ports are actually sanctuaries, and how the sense of enclosing or providing safe haven is the role of a port.233

Establishing the significance of what the site is leads to the establishment of what the site should do and in Sullivans Cove these decisions were based on both urban and geo- morphology. Important in the design framework is that the geomorphology pre-empts and hardens the built morphology and this means the natural formation of the land comprising Hunter Street is what first exerts pressure on Zero Davey.

The geomorphology not only pre-empts the urban and gives it something to fasten onto, but also provides a contrast to the urban morphology. These twin activities that are mapped and recorded over time provide the methods for collating patterns of development, for gauging the present character of the Cove and then determining ‘complementary developments’.234 In the planning documents urban change is translated into ‘time periods’, ‘Gant charts’ and into episodic ‘transformations’.235 _{These translations are possible because urban change is}

changeable enough that it lends itself to observable intervals or ‘layers’, unlike the less malleable, slower changing natural scale. By contrast buildings, streets, wharves and fish punts provide a kaleidoscope of change and this is evident in Sullivans Cove when what used to be stands alongside (and in stark reminder of) what is.

This contrast or layering is the first part of what ‘good urban design’ is and in Sullivans Cove the second part of good design is when these urban contrasts are added to or placed in further contrast with the seeming ‘non-change’ of geomorphology. In this way geomorphology

232 _{This clause reverberates through the phrase ‘Authentic working Cove’ that is repeated throughout the}

planning documents and rhetoric.

233 _{Design Consultant B.}

234 _{Design Consultants A; Design Consultant B.} 235

Sullivans Cove Urban Design Study (1983); Sullivans Cove Planning Review (1991) and Site Development and Conservation Plans Princes Wharf 1 and 2 (2000) respectively.

197 provides the deep structure of the design programme and urbanisation adds a softer, ‘human’ structure that is more malleable, less reliable and faster changing. Together these form a technology for determining what should happen at 15 Hunter Street.

It’s important to include morphologies that pre-empt urban morphologies – geomorphologies – the atmospheres and character of place, the sub-text to the form, which means that cities of course are a ‘built topography’.

It’s really recognising those sort of features which keep continuity but that’s not to say that individual structures can’t change within that pattern. It’s just that there are certain basics which are not just in the buildings but also in the landform.236

In comparison to the changeable urban, geomorphology appears never to morph and then it appears timeless. Geological time, compared to human time is slow and like a very old grandfather clock, the Wellington Ranges that ‘cradle’ Sullivans Cove, mete out a slow and steady pulse beneath the comparative urban rush.237 The changeable urban is not only put in contrast with the slower formation of natural land but it is also embedded in it and this has the effect of moderating or steadying the tempo of development in Sullivans Cove. By

embedding faster change (like development) in the slower changing processes that belong to the landscape, the urban design laboratory translates ‘timings’ into ‘spacings’ (Jones,

McLean and Quattrone 2004) and these begin with the site. Since this technology holds fast both the urban form and scale, attaching the urban to the natural is important.

This is no less the case for Hunter Street because it is ‘a very important’ natural landform in the life of the Cove. As part a sand causeway, the first street and first wharf in Hobart, Hunter Street is now part of the wall of Sullivans Cove. The landform bends the will of the site towards maintaining the wall and this means that the occupier of this site would need to put a brick in the Hunter Street ‘bookend’. While this makes sense from a geological point of view, above the landform at street level, Zero Davey stands at the corner of two streets.

236 _{Design Consultant A; Urban Design Consultant B.}

198 Davey Street was added later and is regarded by all of the design professionals as inconsistent with the landform and therefore illogical in a spatial sense.238 This inconsistency comes from interrupting the natural contours of the Wellington Ranges and the earliest development of settlement with a four lane highway system.

Hunter Street by comparison is a much quieter two lane street that blends into the concrete wharf aprons. The speed for vehicles is limited and it offers parking to service the building fronts along one side of the street as well as the boats in Victoria Dock along the other.

Consequently Zero Davey sits at the corner of two very different things. While it ‘properly’ belongs to Hunter Street, in its name, the way the building faces and its alignment (see below) it chooses to belong more to Davey Street. Much of the tension that followed the

development of Zero Davey stemmed from the way Hunter Street claimed, but did not completely receive this privilege with the development of Zero Davey.

Hunter Street as it marks the original causeway and ‘beginning’ of the city meant that the site of 15 Hunter Street was to play a role in ‘book-ending’ the northern end of the Cove by repairing a hole in the wall. For this reason Zero Davey had to be ‘built’ because Hunter Street is not only part of the wall, but the oldest part of the wall, and the site of 15 Hunter Street completes it. While Hunter Street as the oldest street had witnessed a lot of change, it had also increasingly become ‘deactivated’ in urban language as activity disappeared.

199 Consequently despite its importance in shaping the Cove, the opposing ‘southern bookend’ of Salamanca Place was more important in terms of activity. Therefore ‘reactivating the

northern bookend’ was also a planning priority and the following describes the role that 15 Hunter Street should play in this.239

9.2

The ‘Hunter Street Revival’

So far when Zero Davey engages with Hunter Street it becomes part of the natural shoreline before the reclamation of land mapping the causeway that was then made permanent and the cornerstone of the city. At the same time Hunter Street is part of the urban morphology and is charged with bringing people back to that part of the Cove. Attempts at reactivating the northern bookend were designed to attract use in order to encourage economic activity and halt the deterioration of the street by increasing security (Planning Review 1991:28). This was because by the closing quarter of the 20th century Hunter Street was a line of ‘postcard pretty’ but largely disused warehouses. De-industrialisation had brought a lack of activity that along with the pedestrian deterrent of an arterial by-pass and an immediate relation with the cold southerly winds made Hunter Street the wrong side of the Cove during the 1980s and 1990s.240

A fire had destroyed the first buildings along the street and this made the street itself the earliest built structure of the Cove (Hudspeth and Scripps 2000:12). Activity remained concentrated in Hunter Street until the late 1830s when competition between the Battery Point merchants on the southern side of the Cove and the Hunter Street merchants for

improved facilities lead to a decision to develop what became the Salamanca warehouses and the new ‘Princes Wharf’ (Hudspeth and Scripps 2000:7). The completion of the Salamanca edge formed up the new symmetry with Hunter Street and these activity zones are the ‘bookends’ of the Cove today (Sullivans Cove Urban Design Study 1983:11).

Many of the factories and warehouses forming the Hunter Street bookend fell into disuse in the 1960s (Planning Review 1991: 18-21). During this time the fruit industry started to decline and the closure of the Hobart Gas Company in 1977 continued this trend so that by

239 _{Sullivans Cove Planning Scheme (1997); Urban Design Framework (2004).}

240 _{That is, Hunter Street was the wrong side of the Cove if it is assumed “that space which is relevant in an}

200 the 1980s Hunter Street was barely active, save for Victoria Dock and MacQuarie Wharf (Hudspeth and Scripps 2000: 330). The next factor reported to have significant effects on this part of the Cove was the 1984 Davey Street extension.

With the construction of the Brooker Highway in the 1960s Davey Street became set to operate as part of the city by-pass system (Sullivans Cove Urban Design Study 1983:25). This meant Hunter Street that had served as the edge of the Cove was now sliced through to allow for city and southern bound traffic and through this process of transport infrastructure the place was ‘simply changed’.241 However support for the authentic character of the Cove included its walling, or spatial containment along Hunter Street and the extension was considered under the conditions of the laboratory to have corrupted this natural and traditional pattern.

That single impact [Davey St extension] has probably had the greatest impact on the scale and character of the built form history of Hobart.

To my mind this road had rent asunder the built fabric of that end of the Cove.

242

The Derwent Region Transport Study projects have conflicted with some of the principles proposed in [urban design] studies and this shows the impact of powerful single issue authorities working in isolation from a broader planning framework (Sullivans Cove Planning Review 1991:11).

At this time the University campus re-invented a factory and warehouse for the purposes of urban design and architecture and this made an early contribution to the ‘Hunter Street Revival’. However, part of the difficulty and continued lack of activity in Hunter Street was that the Salamanca bookend being close to residents of Battery Point, protected from the weather by the Battery Point hills as well as unfettered by major transportation works, was

241 _{Design Consultant B; Urban Design Consultant B.} 242 _{Design Consultant A; Site Development Consultant.}