• 1 Cancer Institute NSW, “NSW Skin Cancer Prevention Strategy 2012-15: Lessening the Impact of Cancer (...)
• 2 Peter Gies, Stuart Henderson and Kerryn King, “Ultraviolet radiation: nuts and bolts of the big sk (...)
• 3 University of Queensland, Department of Architecture and Queensland Health, Report on the Shade Ev (...)

1Control of sunlight rather than sunshade is a feature of contemporary architectural design in Australia, despite public health campaigns seeking to maximize shade protection because it can prevent skin cancer.1 The primacy of sunlight over shade is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Australia has diverse climatic conditions, but its cities share some of the highest levels of sunlight, ultraviolet radiation (uvr) and associated rates of preventable skin cancer in the world.2 However, in architectural practice and education, technical knowledge of shade is usually associated with maximising daylighting and solar access rather than its protective effectiveness.3 In this paper, it is argued that shade protection was a priority for northern Australian settlers in the state of Queensland and evident in their architecture until the 1920s when ideas about thermal comfort, race and climate elevated exposure to sunlight. The first section of this paper considers the prioritisation of shade in First Nations architectures and the cross-cultural exchange of colonial shade. Settler shade associated with beliefs around human health and the field of tropical medicine is examined next. The third section explores the 1920s shift away from a focus on deep shade to one of sun exposure. Finally, the paper considers more recent scientific concern with the architecture of effective shade.

• 4 Stephen Davis, “Documenting an Aboriginal Seasonal Calendar,” in Eric K. Webb (ed.), Windows on Me (...)
• 5 Cathy Keys, “Unearthing Ethno-Architectural Types – Categories of Societies, Meanings and Properti (...)
• 6 Terry Slevin (ed.), Sun, Skin and Health, op. cit. (note 2), p. xv; Donald Thomson, “The Seasonal (...)

2Australian people’s relationship with shade has evolved significantly since European settlement, and their architecture has reflected these changes. The indigenous people of Australia had developed, over thousands of years, cultural beliefs and practices that intimately connected them to the changing climate, weather patterns, and seasons found across the continent.4 They also had a range of architectural forms that supported their cultural beliefs and responded to seasonal conditions and immediate weather conditions.5 Shade structures feature proximately in the typological studies of First Nations architectures.6

• 7 Ralph Galbraith Hopkinson, Peter Petherbridge and James Longmore, Daylighting, London: Heinemann, (...)
• 8 Phillip P. King, Narrative of a Survey of the Inter-Tropical and Western Coasts of Australia: Perf (...)
• 9 Ralph Galbraith Hopkinson, Peter Petherbridge and James Longmore, Daylighting, op. cit. (note 7), (...)

3In the late 1700s, in the new colonies of New South Wales, European militia, convicts and explorers were exposed to far higher levels of sunlight than they had experienced before. Most settlers to Australia were from the northern hemisphere where cloud cover was higher, daylighting levels lower and daylight from southern skies significantly brighter than northern skies.7 Sunburn, heat exhaustion, dehydration, and blindness were some of the physical ill effects directly associated with Australian sunlight, heat, and glare.8 In the overcast, cloudy, temperate environments of northern Europe (and America), solar radiation levels and days of sunlight were relatively low. Building orientation and window design had focused on admitting south-facing daylight, direct sunlight and associated heat into interior spaces.9

• 10 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, London; Boston, MA: Routledge; (...)
• 11 Philip Cox and Clive Lucas, Australian Colonial Architecture, Melbourne: Lansdowne Publishing, 197 (...)
• 12 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow, op. cit. (note 10), p. 226.
• 13 Paul Memmott and Shaneen Fantin, “The Study of Indigenous Ethno-Architecture in Australia,” op. cit (...)

4Historically, scholars have argued that the design, construction, and material choices informing new Australian housing and settlements drew heavily on precedents from the migrants’ homelands in the British Isles and tended to ignore the climatic realities of the new landscapes.10 After disembarking from ships most colonists and convicts upgraded from living under canvas to a simple one-roomed slab hut with few openings.11 Existing architectural histories note that “[…] as the [A]boriginal inhabitants of Australia had neither towns nor permanent dwellings, there was, as we have seen happen in India, no indigenous model or manpower to influence the immigrants’ ideas.”12 In this narrative, the living conditions found in First Nation “shelters” were discounted by the first European colonial officials and settlers. Instead, they applied the terra nullis doctrine to justify European settlement on Aboriginal people’s land, based partly on the apparent lack of permanent built forms.13

• 14 Fred Cahir, “Shelter: Housing,” in Fred Cahir, Ian D. Clarke and Phillip A. Clarke (eds.), Aborigin (...)
• 15 Cathy Keys, “Preliminary Historical Notes on the Transfer of Aboriginal Architectural Expertise on (...)

5We now know of the existence and extent of First Nation architectures and settlements experienced by European explorers and settlers to Australia, and there is growing research indicating an exchange of architectural knowledge on the moving settler frontier. Indigenous architectural forms supported their cultural beliefs, used minimal materials, responded directly to the climate with many forms providing daytime shade, and supported an outdoor-orientated lifestyle. While European settlers were reluctant to recreate indigenous people’s shelters, they did borrow from them.14 Effective sun shading was an essential property of daytime shelters across the continent. For example, descriptions of the Central Australian Warlpiri malurnpa or “bough shades” and yama-puralji or shade trees reveal design properties that not only thermally protected occupants from overhead heat loads and blocked direct sunlight, but also created effective shade protection (fig. 1). This was achieved by building daytime shade structures in existing vegetation, alongside dense foliage, where possible, to reduce the reflectivity of nearby surfaces; reducing the extent of skyview through low ceiling heights and enclosing screen walls; replenishing shading materials such as leaves, branches and spinifex over time to create shade and thermal mass; and the creation of thick side-on shade protection from wall screens, trees and vegetation. These design properties were used by the Warlpiri in the design of their shade structures to create cool, effective shade. Short-term European adoption of the materials and form of Warlpiri malurnpa by gold miners in the 1930s significantly reduced the shading qualities by lifting ceiling heights, replacing thick vegetation claddings with corrugated iron sheets and removing screen walls. In a pattern that would be repeated, the initial valuing of protective shade disappeared from living environments of later European settlers.15

• 16 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow, op. cit. (note 10), p. 226.
• 17 Will Carter, “Cabbage-Tree hats: A lost Industry,” The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 2 November (...)
• 18 Ibid., p. 13; John McGuire, Punishment and Colonial Society: A History of Penal Change in Queensla (...)
• 19 Will Carter, “Cabbage-Tree hats: A lost Industry,” op. cit. (note 17), p. 13.

6Early British immigrants to New South Wales have been said to have been “as slow to adapt their housing to the climate as they were their clothes.”16 However, in tropical and sub-tropical climates of northern Australia, there is evidence that explorers and settlers did respond quickly to maximise shade in terms of their dress and dwellings. One of the earliest forms of colonial adaption to the sun was the widespread use of a hat made by plaiting the dried leaves of the indigenous cabbage–tree palm (Livistona australis).17 These hats were light in colour and cooler than the leather or woollen caps, and military headwear brought over from the British Isles. Cabbage-tree hats were initially made by convict workers in Sydney and in Moreton Bay and were still being manufactured by male inmates in Queensland jails as late as 1868.18 The popularity of cabbage-tree hats in Australia eventually saw a cottage industry develop with hats into the 1880s.19

• 20 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales the Journal of Mr. Bass, by Lie (...)
• 21 George Worgan, “Letter to Richard Worgan, 12-18 June 1788,” with journal fragment 20 January 1788, (...)

7The first mention of a cabbage-tree hat in colonial records occurred in 1799. The hat was central to a complicated cultural exchange and breakdown in ritual gift-giving between the maritime explorer Matthew Flinders, his Aboriginal emissary and guide, Bongaree, and Aboriginal people on Bribie Island, Moreton Bay—a previously unmapped, sub-tropical region, far north of the colonial centre of Sydney Town. As communications broke down over the hat, Flinders shot an Aboriginal man in the back.20 The Flinders account is just one example of many indicating that during first encounters between Aboriginal people and new arrivals, Aboriginal people were curious about the hat-wearing Europeans.21

• 22 Phillip P. King, Narrative of a Survey of the Inter-Tropical and Western Coasts of Australia: Perf (...)
• 23 Ibid., p. 31-32.
• 24 Ibid., p. 130.
• 25 John Bingle, cited in J. G. Steele, The Explorers of the Moreton Bay District, 1770-1830, St. Luci (...)
• 26 John Oxley, cited in Ibid., p. 134.
• 27 Hector Holthouse, Illustrated History of Queensland, Adelaide: Rigby, 1978, p. 24 cited in Ross Fi (...)

8Hats were desirable to explorers both as ritual items of exchange and as shade providers. In 1818, during the maritime explorations and surveying of the northern and western Australian coastline, Phillip Parker King, supported by Bongaree, was distributing “red caps” as a form of ritual gift-giving to Indigenous people.22 The tropical sun was considered a threat to the party with King banning sea bathing to avoid “coup de soleil” or sunburn after an “indiscretion” early in the expedition.23 While restocking with supplies at the Dutch trading centre of Coepang, Indonesia in June 1818, King’s party purchased plaited straw hats, buying “all that could be made while we remained.”24 Explorations continued around Moreton Bay to establish a remote northern penal settlement. In early 1822, John Bingle explored Pumiston passage encountering a large delegation of Aboriginal people, “The old man of my yesterday’s acquaintance was the first to come forward […]. I had on my head a Calcutta hat, which I put on his head to his great delight...”25 In 1824, John Oxley’s hat was “stolen” while surveying the Brisbane River, just downstream of what is now Breakfast Creek.26 The following day, an Aboriginal man was shot by the exploration party while negotiating the hats return.27

• 28 “Lecture on Climate,” The Moreton Bay Courier, Thursday 30 August 1860, p. 4.
• 29 Margaret Maynard, “‘Cheerily Doth He Push Northward, the Black Coat and Shining Topper of Civiliza (...)

9As reported by Dr F. J. Barton in The Moreton Bay Courier (1860), settlers believed that while “a temperate climate, no doubt, is the most congenial to high mental attainment, and indeed to the most perfect development of the species,” the climate found in New South Wales was “salubrious.”28 Margaret Maynard has argued that in the southern states of Australia from the 1820s through to the mid-1850s, “the most characteristic aspect of Australian male urban dress for merchants and professional men was the use of lightweight white tropical gear. This consisted of coats, trousers and waistcoats of silk or thin wool accompanied by broad-brimmed straw hats. Lightweight slops (or readymade clothes) were worn by working men.”29

• 30 Robin Boyd, Australia's Home: Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, Carlton: Melbourne University P (...)
• 31 Geoffrey Blainey, A Land Half Won, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1983, p. 143-144.

10Initially, European colonists built dwellings that imitated those of Northern Europe. First Nations people in Australia built shade structures with low ceilings, and incorporated indigenous vegetation and trees to maximise shade quality. In contrast, early settlers cleared their landscapes of shade-giving trees and vegetation. House designs in southern states replicated planning for northern Europe south-facing sunlight. Among the wealthy, servants’ quarters and service rooms were placed along the northern face. Europeans attempted to block the bright sunlight in Australia with closed dark louvred shutters, verandahs, window-hoods and heavily lined curtains.30 High ceilings, verandahs and wide sun-protecting eaves became common features of colonial buildings around Sydney and in remote military settlements within 40 years of European settlement.31

• 32 Kay Cohen, Val Donovan, Ruth Kerr, Margaret Kowald, Lyndsay Smith and Jean Stewart, Lost Brisbane: (...)

11Sub-tropical conditions were experienced in the northern-eastern parts of the colony with Brisbane streets surveyed at 20 metres wide (66 feet) in 1840 so “that buildings could be kept out of the sun.”32 Early architects and settlers had begun to adapt house designs in the newly separated northern state of Queensland from the 1860s in response to the heat, humidity, seasonal cyclones, storm surges and flooding. From the 1870s houses were raised off the ground creating cool, shady, utilitarian spaces under the house (fig. 2).

• 33 John Sulman, “An Australian Style,” The Building and Contractor’s News, vol. 14, May 1887, p. 3.
• 34 Philip Goad, “Houses,” in Philip Goad and Julie Willis (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Australian Arch (...)
• 35 Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of the Queensland House,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cul (...)

12Architects in southern states used the Queensland house as an example of a “distinctive Australian style.” In 1887, John Sulman argued this style should be informed by “a climate sunny and bright as that in Italy, making shade a necessity.”33 In Queensland, the raised house was derived from earlier Australian settler housing that was predominantly single story, simple single-family detached form.34 The Queensland house was framed in timber and clad in timber weatherboards with living areas located beneath a large pyramid roof clad in corrugated galvanised iron. Verandahs wrapped around the single story elevated one story above the ground on hardwood timber “stumps.” The living space “under the house”35 was open and deeply shaded. Images of verandahs on Queensland houses at this time show the use of fabrics, vegetation, and blinds to reduce skyview and sunlight (fig. 3).

• 36 Ray Sumner, “The Queensland Style,” in Robert Irving (ed.), The History & Design of the Australian (...)

13Unique to Queensland, house elevation began with low-set houses. However, by the late 1930s, 28-37% of houses in North Queensland towns were high-set on timber stilts.36 An open-sided grid of timber pillars, sometimes enclosed by an exterior screen of open vertical timber slats, an overhead ceiling of timber structure and flooring, and an earthen floor defined the spatial qualities of “under the house.” (fig. 4).

• 37 Margaret Maynard, “Cheerily Doth He Push Northward, the Black Coat and Shining Topper of Civilizat (...)

15The Queensland house spread rapidly throughout the state. Dress and hats appropriate to the tropical conditions of north Queensland towns continued to be worn through to the 1890s. For men this included, “Oxford shirts, sleeves turned up at the wrists, snow-white moleskins, loose collars, bright ties, cummerbunds and felt hats, or helmet with puggarees (scarves worn to protect the neck from the sun).” Women in the 1870s and 1880s were still purchasing lightweight fabrics. “Indian muslins, Ceylon skirtings, Liberty cretonnes, zephyrs and embroidered silks etc. were commonly worn in the hot weather.”37 (fig. 6).

• 38 Terry Slevin (ed.), Sun, Skin and Health, op. cit. (note 2), p. xv.
• 39 C.E. Woodruff, The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, New York, NY: Rebman Company, 1905, p.  (...)

16The imported cultural practices of wearing hats and lightweight clothing and creating large areas of deep shade around, within and under the house were maintained for over a hundred and fifty years following European settlement in Queensland.38 These practices reflected widespread beliefs about the adverse effects of sunlight on human health. By the end of the nineteenth century, specialists in the field of tropical medicine, which had grown out of a concern for European survival on colonial frontierlands, were providing medical advice to European settlers living in tropical conditions. These doctors also made design recommendations for hospitals, military barracks and housing. Much of it revolved around avoiding the sun’s dangerous “actinic rays.”39

• 40 Dane Kennedy, “Climate Theories and Culture in Colonial Kenya and Rhodesia,” The Journal of Imperi (...)
• 41 Michael R. Albert and Kristen G. Ostheimer, “The Evolution of Current Medical and Popular Attitude (...)

17Actinic rays, a form of ultraviolet solar radiation producing photochemical effects, had been identified in 1889 as a source of danger to the human body by Sir Patrick Manson, a leading expert on tropical medicine from Britain. Actinic radiation found in the intense sunlight of tropical climates was believed to penetrate fair skin, paralyzing or damaging nerve cells and causing “neurasthenic” symptoms ranging from “outburst of passion” and fatigue to depression.40 Michael Albert and Kristen G. Ostheimer have argued that opinions at this time about ultraviolet light exposure or “actinic rays” were dynamic, reflecting increasing scientific knowledge and evolving social behaviors.41 Colonial verandahs built in the tropical climates of India were considered especially useful with the intense tropical sun and the “actinic power in the sunlight.” As early as 1868, architect T. Roger Smith advised members of the Royal Institute of British Architects that

• 43 Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climate Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics,” in J.M. M (...)
• 44 Margaret Maynard, “‘Cheerily Doth He Push Northward, the Black Coat and Shining Topper of Civiliza (...)

Charles Edward Woodruff, an American military physician, also recommended a range of behavioral changes and physical interventions so that “white” men could continue to live under dangerous conditions associated with actinic rays.43 Essentially, the best protection from the harmful effects of sunlight was considered the avoidance of intense daylight and the creation of living spaces that provided deep, dark shade. The Queensland house with its darkened interiors, shaded verandahs and deep shade under the house was ideal. Advertisements appeared in Queensland newspapers for Indian pith helmets, khaki suits, white shirts and trousers, Indian Terrai hats, doe skin helmets, and linen washing hats through to the late 1880s (fig. 7).44

• 45 David Walker, “The Curse of the Tropics,” in Tim Sherrat, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, A Change (...)
• 46 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, Me (...)
• 47 E.J. Brady, The Land of the Sun, London: Edward Arnold, 1924, p. 129-300.
• 48 See Nikki Henningham, “‘Hats off, Gentlemen, to our Australian Mothers!’ Representations of White (...)

18Early Queensland architects, not unlike colonial scientists and doctors before them, drew on their professional (European/American) architectural training, local practice, travels, political interest, and personal dwelling experiences, but also on contemporary theories of race and environment. Attitudes to the sun shifted significantly at the turn of the twentieth century when “[r]edeeming the Australian climate from the negative associations of tropicality was an important dimension of the nationalistic project.”45 Before this, the settlement of Queensland had become a focal point of “white” anxieties about British (or European) settlement of the tropics linked to concerns about “white” bodies functioning in the tropical conditions and the successful whitening of the whole continent.46 Occupation of the Australian tropical north was thought essential not only to economic productivity in the region but also to defense from hostile Asiatic neighbors to the north. 47 The country could not be “held” if there were no “white” men and women, living, working, and more importantly, breeding, there.48

• 49 For a summary of these findings, see Anton Breinl and W.J. Young, “Tropical Australia and its sett (...)

19These fears about the tenure of “white” occupation were to be tested and proven incorrect by science. The Commonwealth and Queensland governments funded an Australian Institute of Tropical Medecine, which opened in Townsville in 1910 under the leadership of recognized British tropical medical scientist Dr. Anton Breinl. Here, researchers studied the physiological effects of the tropical climate on the comfort of a working “white race.” Topics studied included defining the climate of Northern Australia, the effects of sunlight and heat, the effect of the tropical climate on a range of physiological indicators including body temperature, respiration rates, blood pressure, metabolic rates and the nervous system. In a paper covering these themes titled “Tropical Australia and its settlement,” published over three successive editions of The Medical Journal of Australia, Breinl and his colleague, W. J. Young, place the research findings within broader international research and discourses on tropical health.49

• 50 Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times, Sydney; Auckland; Lon (...)
• 51 Walter E. Roth, “Huts and Shelters,” op. cit. (note 6), p. 55-66.
• 52 Anton Breinl and W.J. Young, “Tropical Australia and its settlement,” op. cit. (note 49), vol. 1, (...)

20Readers were told that unique conditions in the Australian tropics made disease less threatening there, compared to other tropical regions of the world. These conditions included limited and defined periods of rainfall, periods of drought, the positive “sterilizing action of the abundant sunlight” and the “sparsity of the aboriginal population.” Despite the ongoing presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in European settlements and homes of Northern Australia, even after they had been subjected to outbreaks of some of the country’s harshest frontier settler violence,50 and despite document evidence of the diversity and sophistication of their dwellings,51 Breinl and Young told readers “in any part where a large white population exists, the black man has become extinct.” (fig. 8).52

• 53 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow, op. cit. (note 10), p. 14-64.
• 54 Anton Breinl and W.J. Young, “Tropical Australia and its settlement,” op. cit. (note 49), vol. 1, (...)
• 55 Ibid., p. 401-402.

21Elsewhere in the British Empire, European settlement and health had been thought to be threatened by the transmission of local tropical disease from Indigenous inhabitants to incoming settlers. Despite this idea, there were many examples outside of Australia of British tropical housing directly informed by the Indigenous architectures of the traditional inhabitants of settled lands.53 Tropical housing design was considered within the scope of the research by the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine. Breinl and Young noted that, “[t]he question of the construction of suitable dwellings in the tropics has been the object of a great deal of study and controversy.”54 Medical scientists and architects lamented the design conservativism of Northern Australian residents and the “unsuitability” of vernacular architecture and building materials. Of particular concern was the existing stock of unlined galvanized, corrugated-iron clad timber-framed dwellings. Good tropical house design was identified in the Far Northern Australian settlement of Darwin. Breinl and Young discussed the need to site houses to maximize prevailing breezes, and to build with broad verandahs, large rooms and well-ventilated roof spaces. They advocated changes in regulations and public interest calling for a new Queensland architecture that was responsive to climate.55

• 56 Paul Overy, Light, Air & Openness: Modern Architecture between the Wars, London: Thames & Hudson, (...)
• 57 A.B. Wilson, “Domestic Architecture For Tropical and Subtropical Australia,” in Volume of Proceedi (...)

22The notion that climate should be a key driver for an emerging Queensland architecture was reiterated in 1918, by architect A.B. Wilson in his paper, “Domestic Architecture for Tropical and Subtropical Australia.” Wilson noted the failure of internal living spaces of the vernacular Queensland house to meet human comfort needs in the tropical climate and the necessity for a new architecture—one that addressed not only aesthetics but also climate and associated human thermal comfort and sunlight. He recommended that local architects look to the architecture in California, North America where “we may find suggestion for further developments in our own work.” International understanding of the bactericidal effects of “actinic rays” or valuation of sunlight as hygienic was one of the key drivers and justifications for modernist architecture’s use of large glazed surfaces to let sunlight into buildings.56 In line with this thinking, Wilson advised, “Sunlight should be allowed access to each inhabited room… Separation also has importance as allowing privacy without covering windows to the exclusion of sunlight - the actinic value of which is desirable in regard to salubrity.”57 At this time, a significant shift occurred in architectural approaches to shade. An earlier vigilance against sun exposure was replaced by a notion of comfort that prioritized thermal moderation through ventilation and increased levels of sunlight in interiors.

• 58 Michael R. Albert and Kristen G. Ostheimer, “The Evolution of Current Medical and Popular Attitude (...)

23Although the first clinical observations associating long-term sunlight exposure with skin cancer were reported during the 1890s, the links had been poorly understood, largely ignored by the medical profession and generally unknown to the public.58 This was despite the work of Australian dermatologist Norman Paul, whose textbook, The Influence of Sunlight in the Production of Cancer of the Skin, was published in 1918. Paul found

• 60 Dane Kennedy, “Climate Theories and Culture in Colonial Kenya and Rhodesia,” op. cit. (note 40), p (...)
• 61 Simon Carter, Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health, Oxford: Berg, 2007, p. 11, 39-70; M (...)

24However, the dangers of actinic rays ceased to be discussed in tropical discourses in northern Australian from the early 1920s, nearly ten years earlier than in colonial centres of Africa.60 In Europe, and later Australia, sunbathing became popular after World War One in line with advances in “heliotherapy” which advocated the healing powers of the sun (fig. 9).61

• 62 Brant Vogel, “Climatic Determinism,” in Brian Black, David Hassenzahl, Jennie Stephens, Gary Weise (...)
• 63 Hippocrates, “On Airs, Waters, Places,” in Geoffroy E.R. Chadwick (ed.), translated by John and W. (...)

25Shifting ideas about the sun, notions of thermal comfort, health, and tropical architecture reflected the belief that climate might influence the form and construction of dwellings. Western traditions in climatic determinism have a long history, defining a theoretical approach where climatic conditions are thought to generate a cultural character, individual character, or racial traits. Climatic arguments have been used to justify colonial expansion, racial stereotyping, eugenics, and established forms of government.62 As early as the Hippocratic writings “On Airs, Waters, Places,” c. fourth century bce, it was argued that the character and health of people were determined by their local environment with character distinctions based on latitudinal climatic zones.63 Latitude took on a much stronger role in the climatic determinism of the eighteenth-century, with Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu. In L’Esprit des lois (1748), he argued that people’s distance from the Equator determined political foundations, moral composition and health. Temperate climates contributed to mental vigor, moral rigor and free government, while the tropics threatened the bodies and morals of those transported to the tropical colonies and justified the apparent superiority of Northern Europe.

• 64 Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Lois, Geneva: Barrillot et Fils, (...)
• 65 Ellen Churchill Semple and Friedrich Ratzel, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of (...)
• 66 G.R. Lewthwaite, “Environmental Determinism,” in Paul. B. Baltes and Neil J. Smelser, Internationa (...)
• 67 Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915, p. 9.

26In later centuries, this concept of tropical malaise in contrast to a European vigor was to remain influential. It was revived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the field of anthropogeography and historical geography. 64 Influenced by the works of Charles Darwin, Ellen Semple promoted Friedrich Ratzel's ideas about the influence of climate on culture and civilizations. The form of environmental determinism they championed theorized that the physical environment was the primary influence on human activity.65 This climate determinism66 was taken a step further by Ellsworth Huntington who wrote in Climate and Civilization (1915) he that “a certain type of climate prevails wherever civilization is high,” arguing that climate directed the course of human progress.67

• 68 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, op. cit. (note 46), p. 127.
• 69 Anton Breinl and W.J. Young, “Tropical Australia and its settlement,” op. cit. (note 49), p. 396. (...)

27The problem of progress and the Australian tropics was the focus of the 1920 Australasian Medical Congress held in Brisbane. After reviewing the ten years of research on Northern Queensland produced by the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine, Congress participants declared the region suitable for “successful implementation of a working white race.”68 Challenging longstanding debates about tropical settlement, medical doctors in Australia concerned with issues of environmental health began identifying housing as a physical tool in which to filter the tropical pathology, testing the physical comfort of men, but more especially women and children from the 1920s.69 These ideas and their findings were quickly disseminated into the broader public consciousness (fig. 10).

• 70 For a printed version of W. Wynne William’s presentation see, “Western Homes: The Women’s Burden,” (...)
• 71 See Daniel J. Ryan, “The Hygienic Holiday: The Country Women’s Association and the Reform of the Q (...)
• 72 Raphael W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics, with especial reference to Australia and its dep (...)
• 73 A.H. Baldwin, “Life in the Queensland Tropics: Suitability for Whites,” Queensland Geographical Jo (...)
• 74 “Houses in the Tropics,” Daily Mail, Sunday 3 September 1922, p. 8; “Western Homes: The Women’s Bu (...)

28Two years after the Medical Congress, and soon after the Queensland Country Women’s Association Conference held in Brisbane, the Daily Mail, in an article titled “Houses in the Tropics,” implored the State Government to explore “the design of a more suitable house.” This request was based on the findings of conference papers that concluded that, “the galvanised iron shacks which are at present so favoured in the north and west are a serious menace to the health of women and children.”70 Soon after, a new director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville, Dr. Raphael Cilento, was appointed. He began researching the relationships between health and housing in Queensland’s tropical north, generating a range of housing initiatives.71 A survey of northern homes in the early 1920s, found “white” women suffered unacceptably high levels of ill health with no access to domestic help.72 Debates about the suitability of northern Australia “for a white population” raged for some time.73 By the early 1920s, Queensland newspapers were reporting that poor housing design and excessive heat were impacting “white” women's lives while reinforcing the Australian Medical Congress finding that “the tropical climate does not constitute a menace to good health” and resulted in “an extremely healthy type of manhood.”74

• 75 Raphael W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics, op. cit. (note 72), p. 106-124.
• 76 F.H. Markham, Climate and the Energy of Nations, London: Oxford University Press, 1944; Clarence A (...)

29In 1925 the findings of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine’s research and Cilento’s views on climate and race were widely disseminated with the publication of his book, The White Man in the Tropics (1925). In this book, while Cilento campaigned for a tropical dwelling surrounded by a wide verandah for shade, he stressed the need for improved ventilation above walls and in gables to improve airflow.75 Cilento’s book and Queensland’s unmistakably, healthy, growing population had, by the 1930s, effectively silenced concerns about the perceived environmental limits on European settlement in Northern Australia. No doubt lingered about the potential for white triumph in the tropics. However, international concerns about the productivity of “white” tropical workers remained, particularly among distant British and American commentators (fig. 11).76

• 77 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, op. cit. (note 30), p. 93.
• 78 Jose Manuel Almodovar Melendo, Jose Maria Cabeza Lainez and Juan Ramon Jimenez Verdejo, “Nineteen (...)
• 79 Cathy Keys, “The 1950’s Elevation Debate and the Tropical Queensland House: Tropical Storms, ‘Prog (...)
• 80 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, op. cit. (note 30), p. 94; Walter Ralston Bunning, Homes in the Sun: (...)

30Architectural historian Robin Boyd noted that it was in the late 1920s and early 1930s that house designs shifted from a universal attempt before this time to block the “un-English qualities of the Australian climate” where the “sun was shunned.”There was “an accent on shade” to houses that drew the sun deep into living spaces through large unshaded north-facing plate-glass windows.77 This shift reflected the international Modern Movement in Architecture, which prioritized designing with the hygienic properties of the sun.78 By the 1930s, house plans in Melbourne had been flipped to take advantage of northern winter sunlight, and plans included sunrooms, “sun-decks,” and large windowed living rooms. By the late 1940s, the elevated Queensland house had fallen into disfavor among professional architects. Changes in building regulation permitted the enclosing and permanent occupation of verandahs and spaces under the house. These ventilated, shaded interstitial zones were lost, and hot, dark interiors were created.79 The southern prioritization of the sunlight and thermal regulation over deep shade in architectural design spread rapidly throughout northern Australia with the post-war housing boom.80

• 81 University of Queensland, Department of Architecture and Queensland Health, Shade for Sports Field (...)
• 82 David J. Turnbull and Alfio V. Parisi, “Effective Shade Structures,” Medical Journal of Australia, (...)
• 83 Aurel F. Moise and R. Aynsley, “Ambient Ultraviolet Radiation Levels in Public Shade Settings,” In (...)

31In the late 1990s, the design of shade resurfaced in Australian architectural discourse. A series of guidelines for the provision of shade were published, advocating public involvement in the design process, site usage patterns and the importance of understanding sun paths and differences in sun exposure based on regional variation.81 However, physicists David J. Turnbull and Alfio V. Parisi at the University of Southern Queensland warned that these guidelines were not based on adequate quantitative research into UVR and tended to focus on the aesthetics of shade structures rather than the effectiveness of the shade provided.82 Subsequent research into how UVR interacts with both natural and built shaded environments stressed the need to understand the nature of, and protect against, diffused or scattered UVR.83

• 84 Idem, “Shade Provision for UV Minimization: A Review,” Photochemistry and Photobiology, vol. 90, no (...)

32The main design recommendations to come out of this critical shade research highlighted the need to design shade with attention to minimizing the reflectivity of nearby surfaces, reducing the extent of skyview and designing with an understanding of shade characteristics such as the decreasing effectiveness of shade-creating materials over time; disparity between personal thermal comfort in winter for “warm shade” and dangers of high levels of ultraviolet exposure; need for good foliage density and low canopy in tree shade; and the need for built shade to be accompanied by dense side-on shade protection from trees and vegetation.84 Design criteria for effective shade is not widely known in the architectural community nor among the general public despite a long history of shade provision in the early architectures of First Nations peoples and the Queensland house.