Stansbury House - 1950
32 Fourth Avenue Shoalwater WA
History
The Building Department of the City of Rockingham provided us with copies of several alteration & renovation plans & permits for Stansbury House, but was unable to locate the original building application, as the City's records don't go back far enough. The earliest information in the city's archives dates from 1954, when a building application was made to extend the existing garage.
Luckily, with the help of the Kent Street Museum in Rockingham, where they keep electronic copies of the City's historical rate books and council minutes, we obtained a copy of the Council Minutes of 24 October 1950, in which the original building permit was approved.
Landgate provided us with the first Certificates of Title (June 1950 & December 1950) and with an areal photo from 1953, which shows the original shape of the house.
Although construction of the house started in 1950, the owner-builder, Albert Weightman Risbey (1909 - 1965), only moved in in 1953,
An elderly by-passer told us that the house was once referred to as the Stansbury House, but we haven't found any other sources to corroborate this statement (none of the original occupants had Stansbury as a surname and we were unable to find a link with the English village of Stanbury). However, the meaning of the word 'Stansbury', according to Google, is 'stone fortification', 'stone fort' or 'place of stone', which could very well refer to the unique building technique, so we decided to stick with the name, regardless of the historical accuracy.
Plans
Building Technique
The Building Permit, approved on 24 October 1950, was a permit to build a 'monocrete dwelling'. Monocrete is a building method utilising modular bolt-together pre-cast reinforced concrete wall panels. ''Mono' refers to the fact that each wall was poured in 1 piece, at full height.
This method was devised in the 1920s by T W Fowler (1988 - 1942), a retired surveyor and farmer of Werribee (Victoria). The 'Fowler Precast Concrete System' (patented in 1926 - application number 1926003982 ), involved the casting of a complete wall section, with doors and window openings, conduits and other features, flat on a bed of sand, next to the house, using steel rods for reinforcements.
Once set, and after removing the frames, the walls were lifted in position with a crane. This new method of building with concrete didn't really start gaining popularity until the development of the mobile crane in the late 1940s. Ready-mix concrete also came about around this same time. The mobile crane allowed large panels to be lifted into place with much greater ease than before. One wall could weigh up to 4 tonnes. The use of concrete in this way reduced both costs and construction time.
The first monocrete houses had zero insulation and struggled with condensation & mold, freezing cold in winter and baking hot in summer. Fortunately, from 1947, full length insulation cores were added to the concrete slabs (visible at the top of the walls inside the attic of Stansbury House). These insulated monocrete houses are wearing their age extremely well.
The foundation of the house was made of Coffee Rock. Coffee Rock is a hardened gravel stone that forms from the precipitation of iron and humates from groundwater. Coffee rock can be found in low-lying wetlands, estuaries, back-swamps, salt marshes, and tidal flats in Western Australia.
Monocrete houses were very popular after WWII (with builders and materials scarce in post-war Australia). However, research done by the Rockingham Museum, checking the building applications in the historical council minutes, shows that only 2 such Monocrete dwellings have been erected in the Rockingham area, between 1949 & 1960, Stansbury House being one of them. The other one, a smaller version of Stansbury House, is in Carlisle Street, Safety bay (unfortunately in bad condition).
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The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957),Thu 19 Aug 1937, page 10
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West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954), Friday 13 June 1947, page 9
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Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1883 - 1930), Tuesday 28 October 1919, page 5
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Sunday Mail (Brisbane, Qld. : 1926 - 1954), Sunday 20 March 1927, page 22 (2)