John Horbury Hunt — Yarranabbe

John Horbury Hunt arrived in Sydney from New Brunswick in January 1863, joined the practice of Edmund Blacket within weeks, and over the next forty years produced the most architecturally adventurous body of late-Victorian residential work in Australia. Cloncorrick at Darling Point is one of his Sydney domestic survivals.

John Horbury Hunt was born at St John, New Brunswick — the Canadian Maritime port that was, in the mid-nineteenth century, a substantial timber and shipbuilding town. He began his architectural training in 1856 in Roxbury, near Boston, under the architect Charles F. Sleeper, and continued it under Edward Clarke Cabot, one of the most accomplished New England designers of the period. He was twenty-four when he sailed for Sydney, arriving on 5 January 1863 aboard the Tropic.

Within weeks of arrival he had joined the practice of Edmund Blacket, the colony's leading architect of churches and the dominant figure in Sydney building of the previous twenty years. By 1865 Hunt was Blacket's chief assistant; by the late 1860s he was effectively running the practice's domestic and ecclesiastical work; and in 1869 he opened on his own account.

The work

Hunt's first independent decade — the 1870s — produced a sequence of Gothic Revival residences in Sydney and the New England district, of which Cloncorrick at Darling Point (1884) is among the surviving Sydney examples. The early-to-mid period work is composed in a Free Gothic mode that reads at first as continuous with Blacket's vocabulary but is characterised, on closer inspection, by a more aggressive massing, sharper brick detailing and a willingness to break the symmetry of the elevation in ways that the colonial Gothic had not previously attempted.

The major country-house commissions came in the 1880s. Booloominbah and Trevenna at Armidale — both built for the White family of New England pastoralists, and now both campuses of the University of New England — are among the largest and most ambitious country houses ever built in Australia. St Peter's Anglican Cathedral at Armidale, of the same period, is one of the most accomplished pieces of Gothic ecclesiastical building in the country.

From the early 1890s, Hunt's work moved into the territory for which he is now best remembered: the Australian adaptation of the North American Shingle Style, the loose, asymmetric, deeply gabled mode that had emerged from the work of H. H. Richardson and McKim, Mead & White on the New England coast. Hunt's most accomplished essay in the Shingle Style is The Highlands at Wahroonga (1891), built for Alfred Hordern. It survives, on the Register of the National Estate, as a building with no real precedent or successor in Australian residential architecture.

The collapse, and the legacy

The 1890s depression destroyed the architectural market on which Hunt depended. His practice collapsed; commissions dried up; he survived the last decade of his life in increasingly straitened circumstances. He died in the charity ward of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown on 27 December 1904, at the age of sixty-six. A small group of professional friends arranged a private burial at South Head Cemetery, sparing him a pauper's grave.

His reputation has been rebuilt steadily across the twentieth century, and he is now understood to have been the most architecturally adventurous of the late-Victorian Sydney designers — a figure of comparable importance to Verge in the previous generation, and to Wilkinson in the next.