Australia has some beautiful buildings. Some of the most beautiful are in the Gothic Revival style, such as William Wardell’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, or St Stephen’s Chapel in Brisbane that was designed by Augustus Pugin whose book Contrasts was published in the year after the city of Melbourne was founded. In fact, St Patrick’s was one of the most ambitious and largest Gothic Revival projects anywhere in the word during the 1900s. Henry Hunter, a Tasmanian architect, was a great admirer of Pugin’s architectural philosophy and one can see his influence in some Tasmanian churches. However, there are also ugly buildings in Australia that are rather soulless, mere glass boxes with no recognisable Australian features in particular and which could be anywhere in the globe. Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, wrote of experiences that we feel psychologically to provide us with excitement and a jolt of pain simultaneously, a perverse pleasure, because of the admixture of horror and astonishment. This horror and astonishment can describe our feelings whilst walking in some of our urban environments. Sir Roger Scruton lamented, ‘Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.’ Our architectural environment says a lot about who we are as a people. Are we soulless people living in nondescript boxes? Well, we certainly shouldn’t be.

Kevin Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation, argues that the fundamental crisis within the American body politic is a spiritual crisis. Roberts is, of course, right but it is also a crisis that is manifested across the English-speaking world. On 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill requested that the bombed out House of Commons should be rebuilt exactly as it was before the bombing took place. He said, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.’ Indeed, they shape our feelings, our sense of belonging, our multifaceted and multilayered identities and they shape our pride (or otherwise) in where we come from. The Anglosphere needs to find its soul once again and by promoting beauty in our architectural environment we can do just that.

The Liberal party and Peter Dutton could learn from Donald Trump. Trump has made it clear that the aesthetics of government buildings is a priority for him during his second term in the White House. On 20 January, his executive order ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’ made this clear. It stated that ‘recommendations to advance the policy that Federal public buildings should… respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government’ should be submitted to him within 60 days. It seems that Trump, on some level, understands that beauty matters, and our architectural heritage also matters. Indeed, beautiful buildings can uplift the soul and inspire pride in one’s country.

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury argued that we are naturally designed to have a positive response to beauty. Beauty is not merely aesthetic judgement but also moral one. Beauty also makes us happy. Aristotle defined happiness, as an ‘activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’. We need more Judeo-Christian ethics, virtue and beauty in our culture not less. Scruton argues that, ‘The beautiful and the sacred are connected in our feelings, and both are essential to the pursuit of happiness.’ The great Lord Salisbury believed, like Burke and Aristotle before him, that humans are at root religious animals. Benjamin Disraeli correctly argued that, ‘the most powerful principle which governs man is the religious principle’. Human beings will look for religion and faith and whilst Christianity is unfortunately in retreat faux religions will take its place. This can already be seen in the public sphere where Christian symbols are being replaced by woke flags. Wokism is getting one thing right, in that it is tapping into our fundamental human need for religious feelings. Conservatives have vacated this space and the woke-left and liberals are filling it. Thus, conservatives across the English-speaking world have been losing the battle of ideas about the meaning of life. It was reported that British MPs who took their oath of allegiance on a religious text voted against the Assisted Dying Bill. This is just one example. If conservatives across the Anglosphere wish to defend the dignity of the human person, they will have to promote a religious revival and promoting  that beauty in our architectural environment can be a vehicle for it.

Indeed, we can learn from the Gothic Revival movement which had its roots in England in the early-Victorian era. It advocated a return to building in the style of the Middle Ages. Indeed, much of the Australian architectural environment has been influenced by the Gothic Revival movement, be it designs of banks (ANZ Gothic Bank in Melbourne), academic institutions (The University of Sydney Quadrangle), churches (St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney) and people’s homes. The University of Sydney has some beautiful neo-Gothic architecture designed by Edmund Blacket. Do keep an eye out for the gargoyles, especially the kangaroo gargoyles, which are meant to ward off evil spirits, unfortunately they have not done a good job of warding off wokism and antisemitism on campus.

At the time of the Australian Gothic Revival some argued that Australia is too new a country for all this stuff. This is nonsense; Gothic Revival architecture in Australia has had a great appeal. It appeals to people because it shows Australians their roots and their history in architectural form as well as being patriotic and beautiful. Wardell, in an article for the Weekly Register in January 1850, went as far as arguing that that churches in the Gothic style comforted the poor. This was because their architectural style reminded the impoverished of a time when the poor were supported by ‘open-handed unsparing liberality of a Catholic monastery’ rather than the ‘hated workhouse hall’.

We don’t have to wait for the next election or for the Liberal party to take inspiration from Trump’s ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’ executive order, or from Wardell’s beautiful Australian architectural masterpieces as we conservatives can do our bit to beautify our own patch and replenish our individual as well as the nation’s souls.