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The Lodge
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The Lodge is the official residence of the Prime Minister of Australia in the national capital, Canberra. It is located on Adelaide Avenue, Deakin.
History
The Lodge is a modest, 40 room Georgian revival style mansion, located in 18,000 square metres (4.4 acres) of landscaped grounds.
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Encyclopedia
The Lodge is the official residence of the Prime Minister of Australia in the national capital, Canberra. It is located on Adelaide Avenue, Deakin.
History
The Lodge is a modest, 40 room Georgian revival style mansion, located in 18,000 square metres (4.4 acres) of landscaped grounds. It was built as a temporary measure to be '...occupied by him until such time as a monumental Prime Minister's residence is constructed, and thereafter to be used for other purposes...'. The Lodge was built over the period 1926–1927. It was built by J G Taylor of Glebe, a builder from Sydney, at a cost of £28,319. The Lodge was intended as one of a suite of official residences for prominent ministers in Canberra.
The first Prime Minister to live in the lodge was Stanley Bruce. He and his wife Ethel (they had no children) moved in on 4 May 1927, five days in advance of the official opening of the then Parliament House (9 May, also the day on which Canberra replaced Melbourne as the seat of government). Bruce's successor James Scullin (1929-32) had, while Leader of the Opposition, objected to the cost of running The Lodge and, true to his word, he and his wife lived at the Hotel Canberra (now the Hyatt Hotel) during his Prime Ministership. However the next Prime Minister Joseph Lyons chose The Lodge, and all subsequent Prime Ministers have used it as their primary place of residence, except for:
- Ben Chifley (Prime Minister 1945-49), who preferred the Kurrajong Hotel, where many Labor politicians of the era stayed, and where he later died, and
- John Howard (Prime Minister 1996-2007), who stayed at The Lodge when he was in Canberra for parliamentary or government business, but lived primarily at Kirribilli House, Sydney. The latter is a residence maintained for the official use of Prime Ministers when they need to perform official duties and extend official hospitality in Sydney.
Renovations
The building's interior has an American Colonial character, with stained wall panelling and exposed upper floor beams under the ceiling. The ground floor entrance opens into an entrance hall. To the left of the entrance is the dining room and service wing, which includes staff quarters. To its right are the formal reception rooms- a drawing room, study and sitting room/library (originally intended as billiards room). The staircase rises to a landing which contains office space for the Prime Minister's spouse, then divides into two flights leading to a hall opening onto a loggia above the entrance. On the first floor are the private apartments and guest accommodation, consisting of a study, six bedrooms, sitting room, a drawing room and a billiards/games room.
When Robert Menzies became Prime Minister in 1939, his family moved into the Lodge. Pattie Menzies undertook a thorough makeover of the residence. First, the makeshift children’s bedrooms on the front balcony, built for the large Lyons family, were removed. Worn carpets and furnishings were replaced and kerosene heaters installed.
The Lodge also underwent some heavy renovation in the 1960s. When Harold Holt was in office, his wife Zara Holt had a major makeover of the Lodge. All the curtains were discarded, and all the carpets ripped up. The floors were recovered with a dramatic emerald green carpet. The tall arched windows of the entrance were draped with crisp white curtains. A flagpole flying the Australian flag was installed on the staircase landing. Most controversial of all was the extensive work needed to transform the dark varnished Tasmanian mountain ash panelling of the walls of all three rooms. Once the stripping was completed, the walls were coated with a white gloss paint. These bright walls remained the backdrop of formal photographs at The Lodge for the next five prime ministers.
When Prime Minister John Gorton moved in, Bettina Gorton's practical abilities in farm repairs were soon called on to deal with maintenance issues resulting from some of Zara Holt’s more impractical decorating achievements. Repairs to a leaking ceiling that threatened the silk wallpaper in the ‘Swan Suite’, and toning down some of the more vibrant colours in furnishings and finishes, were among the work she had done. But Bettina Gorton’s lasting imprint on The Lodge was in the grounds. During the Gortons' tenure, a wall was built surrounding The Lodge, both as a security measure and to give some privacy from the encroaching traffic of Adelaide Avenue on the eastern side of the residence. Once the wall was completed, Bettina Gorton developed a garden of Australian native plants. Also the Gortons installed a swimming pool and a courtyard in the north east corner of the grounds.
Major work was also carried out in 1977-78 to upgrade the kitchen and staff quarters and to extend the main dining room. The Frasers occupied The Lodge nine years after Zara Holt’s refurbishment, and they found the house drab and unwelcoming. The once-glamorous wallpaper was peeling from the guestroom ceiling, and numerous cracks had appeared in the bathroom walls. Tamie Fraser thought the layout of the house was inefficient, the service area inadequate and, like every occupant since 1927, found the dining room too small for adequate official entertaining. Among the visitors entertained at The Lodge by the Frasers were the Prince of Wales, and then the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1977.
The first task Tamie Fraser undertook was to supplement the surviving settings of the 1927 white and gold Royal Doulton dinner service. It had a special pattern that had been designed by Ruth Lane-Poole in 1926 featuring the Prime Ministerial Monogram. The Monogram (consisting of the interwoven letters 'P' and 'M'), also appear carved into the backs of the dining room chairs. Interestingly, the man who handled Tamie Fraser’s order in 1977 had arranged for the manufacture of the original set fifty years earlier. Though this expensive purchase created a furore, it did not deter Tamie Fraser from battling to secure major renovations of the service wing and dining room in 1978. She chose architect Guilford Bell to oversee this remodelling and to redecorate the main rooms. Ten years after Zara Holt imposed her extravagant decorating scheme on The Lodge, Tamie Fraser returned the main reception rooms to ‘classic colours and style’, with cream painted walls and a white Berber carpet.
There was substantial restoration in the 1980s when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister. The most notable feature of the work done by Hawke's wife Hazel during her eight years at The Lodge was her work for The Australiana Fund and in her sympathetic restoration of the building’s interior. The Australiana Fund, started by Tamie Fraser, used donations to collect Australian art and furniture for the four official residences – Government House and The Lodge in Canberra, and Admiralty House and Kirribilli House in Sydney. Hazel Hawke was known for continuing this collection by finding and arranging for the restoration of The Lodge’s original Australian-made Beale piano. The piano, chosen for the Lodge by early Canberra designer Ruth Poole so that it fitted the original designs for the drawing room, had been used in the Canberra School of Music as a practice piano after it was removed from the Lodge. Hawke also fitted out a room on the mezzanine landing of The Lodge as her office, which she remembered as her favourite room where she spent most of her time.
When the Keatings moved into The Lodge in 1991, they made some changes to the furnishings, moving the massive William Rojo bookcase provided by the Australiana Fund into storage, and providing the Brown Room with new sofas. Unlike many of the earlier prime ministerial families, the Keatings preferred to treat The Lodge as a family home and did not often entertain official visitors there.
From 2000 to 2005, the reception areas of the residence were progressively refurbished with the assistance of interior designer Mary Durack. The two main reception rooms, the Morning Room and Drawing Room, were redecorated in a complementary theme rather than as two distinctive areas, as was previously the case. The dining room and foyer were also refurbished.
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