Building Jerusalem at Botany Bay: James Barnet (1827-1904) and John Grant (1857-1928)

The Scottish Enlightenment had many distinguished sons in Australia, from Lachlan Macquarie and Alexander Macleay to Charles Nicholson and John Dunmore Lang, among many others. Far more than their English counterparts, who long thought of Australia as merely a penal colony, prominent Scottish emigrants saw the possibility of building a new Jerusalem at the Antipodes.In this paper I have chosen to contrast the careers of two such men, the architect James Barnet (1827-1904) and the trade unionist John Grant (1857-1928). Both grew up in the building trade and served their apprenticeships in Britain but went on to very different careers in Australia. One became the Colonial Architect of New South Wales, determined to give the rapidly-growing colony a distinguished public architecture, much of whose prodigious legacy remains to this day. The other became the leader of the Stonemasons’ Society and a pioneer of the Australian labour movement, equally determined to give his new country a legacy of a different kind, the foundations of a more progressive and socially just society. Between them they represent the two poles of nineteenth-century Australian aspirations, the individual and the collective, and their careers offer an illuminating contrast of the ways in which men chose to make their way in the new world, and of how that world might be transformed in the light of reason with a particular Scottish inflection.