The Man Behind Kalgoorlie’s Grandest Buildings

Geoffrey Oswald Hawkins

Geoffrey Oswald Hawkins (1870-1936) was born on 10 July 1870 at Sandhurst (the town regained the name Bendigo from 1891), Victoria.  He was the third of twelve children born to Edward Jackson and Eliza Rebekah (nee Annear) Hawkins, who had married at Sandhurst in December 1866. Geoffrey was the brother of Ernest, Norman, Hester, Ethel, Stewart, Herbert, John, Grace, Basil, Violet, and Ruth. Geoff Hawkins’ father was a civil engineer around the Bendigo area, at Strathfieldsaye Shire from 1876 to 1882, when he moved to the Loddon Water Trust, hence to Inglewood (45 km north-west of Sandhurst) where he consulted to several trusts and shires. One of Geoff Hawkins’ relatives was Harold Desbrowe Annear (1865-1933), also born at Sandhurst, and later to become a renowned architect in Victoria.

In a somewhat complicated family relationship, Harold’s father James Desbrowe Annear married for the second time in 1863 to Edward Hawkins’ sister Elizabeth; and then Edward Hawkins married Eliza, the eldest daughter of James Desbrowe Annear in 1866, both marriages being held at All Saints Church, Sandhurst. Edward Hawkins passed away at Inglewood in October 1890, aged just fifty years, and it seems Geoff may also have been living there at this time, as he was appointed a ‘life governor’ of the Inglewood Hospital by 1895.  Details of Geoff Hawkins early education have not come to light, but it is likely that he attended school at Inglewood, and may have obtained further architectural training in the Sandhurst/Bendigo area. With a severe recession on the east coast of Australia in the early 1890s, Geoff followed an exodus of Victorians to the gold-mining boom of the ‘Western El Dorado’ at the Coolgardie-Kalgoorlie goldfields in Western Australia, where he arrived in April 1895. By October 1895 Hawkins was calling tenders for a hotel at Bulong (east of Kalgoorlie), and in this case he was acting as the Kalgoorlie agent for architects Moline and Summerhayes of Coolgardie. Hawkins must have impressed his employers, as by late November 1895 the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper carried notice of the partnership of architects Moline Summerhayes and Hawkins having an office at Maritana Street, Kalgoorlie.  Geoffrey Moline (1865-1943) and Edwin Summerhayes (1868-1944) were also

‘refugee’ architects from the eastern seaboard of Australia.

With dire sanitary conditions on the goldfields, by March 1896 two sisters of the St John of God nursing order were brought to Kalgoorlie, and by July the designs of a new St John of God Hospital were produced by Moline Summerhayes and Hawkins, with the estimated cost of the building at £3,000. At 88-90 Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie, the Grand Hotel of 1896 was also designed by Moline Summerhayes and Hawkins.

In the exceptional and expansionary conditions of the late 1890s, Geoff Hawkins became one of Kalgoorlie’s most prominent architects.  Another talented individual, Daniel Thomas Edmunds (1864-1925) moved from Mildura, Victoria to Kalgoorlie around 1896, and some of his earliest work in the WA Goldfields was in 1897, acting as Clerk of Works for Moline, Summerhayes and Hawkins on Parer’s Restaurant in Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie. Later in 1897, Dan Edmunds was working with Hawkins as Hawkins & Edmunds Architects, on John Heale’s Imperial Wine and Beer Saloon, also in Hannan Street.  It seems that in the cut-throat business conditions of the frontier town, architectural partnerships were hastily formed to ensure procurement of ongoing projects.  It is also evident that partnerships were established specifically to undertake large-scale commissions that required greater resources.  In September 1897, the Kalgoorlie Miner carried notice of dissolution of the partnership between Hawkins and Edmunds. Hawkins had ensured that he had alternative business opportunities should architectural work prove scarce, and Wises Directory of 1897 advertised Geoff and his next eldest brother Norman H. Hawkins at Boulder Chambers in Maritana Street, Kalgoorlie trading as ‘Hawkins Bros, Mining Surveyors and draughtsmen’.