Australian Traditionalism and Architecture

A new article examines the activities of the Australian Traditionalist architect Adrian Snodgrass (1931–2025), see photo (from about 1957). It is Amit Srivastava, Peter Scriver, Cole Roskam and Anna Dearnley, “Beyond Sydney School: Australian Architects and the Encounter with Asia (1950s–1980s),” Architectural Theory Review (2026), available here (open access).  

Snodgrass was a member of a small Traditionalist group led by Harold Stewart (1916–1995), a poet, that met in a Sydney bookshop in the 1950s, mentioned in an earlier post here and discussed in Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop (2007), for which see post here. 

The article identifies Snodgrass as a Traditionalist, but does not investigate his Traditionalism beyond noting that his “exposure to these [Traditionalist] theorists provided an intellectual framework that his contemporaries, including [Alan] Gilbert and [Peter] Muller, would encounter through their friendship with him.” Gilbert and Muller, both architects, are also discussed in the article; it is not clear to what extent they were also Traditionalists. The article focuses on the travels of the three men and on their architecture.

Snodgrass traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1957 together with Barry Windsor (1930–1994), another Australian who was in contact with the Sydney group, and was presumably to some extent also a Traditionalist, at least in 1957. They found their way to Kataragama, a pilgrimage site for Buddhists as well as Hindus, where they joined a small Hindu group known as Kutti Kuttam (the Council of Cubs) because all its members were given animal names. Snodgrass became Punaikutti Swami (kitten) and Windsor became Narikutti Swami (young jackal). Kutti Kuttam followed Yogaswami (1872–1964), a Jaffna-born guru who had been inspired in his youth by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Most of its six members were Westerners.

Windsor remained in Ceylon for the rest of his life, but Snodgrass traveled to Japan with Stewart in 1963 and joined a Pure Land Buddhist group in Kyoto connected to Bando Shojun (1932–2004), a professor at Otani University, where he was ordained a priest. He then returned to Australia in 1975, completed a PhD, and spent the rest of his life as an architect, lecturer in architecture and religious studies at the University of Sydney, and writer on Asian art. His best known book was The Symbolism of the Stupa (1985), which starts with a reference to “the traditional Indian view,” footnoted to René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Mircea Eliade. He remained a Traditionalist, then. Together with Gilbert and Muller he established Regional Design and Research, which “represented the practical application of principles that Snodgrass had explored philosophically, Gilbert had developed ethnographically, and Muller had implemented through site-specific practice.” Gilbert worked on hotel design in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in mainland China. Muller's sites included the Bali Oberoi and the award-winning Amandari Resort in Bali. What these all had in common was that they provided international standards of comfort combined with distinctive local character.

The article concludes that 

What began as individual journeys of discovery by emerging architects seeking alternatives to modernist orthodoxy through sustained Asian engagement evolved into a collective reconsideration of possible alternative cultural and philosophical approaches to contemporary architectural design in what was already becoming an increasingly transnational world of practice.

What evolved into this reconsideration and various architectural projects also began as Traditionalism, and passed through Hindu and Buddhist practice on the way.

This post draws also on 

• Glen Hill, “Vale Adrian Snodgrass 1931–2025,” Architecture, Au 23 April 2025, available here
• Ramana Hridayam, “Swami Narikutti or Barry Owen Windsor (1930-1994),” available here  
• The swamis of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order, The Guru Chronicles, The Making of the First American Satguru (Kapaa, Hawaii: Himalayan Academy, 2011)

Australian Traditionalism: James McAuley

A new article by Jean Page explains the conversion to Catholicism and subsequent political activities of the Australian Traditionalist James McAuley (1917-76). McAuley (pictured right) is best known for his part in the 1944 Ern Malley hoax, discussed in Peter Kelly's Buddha in a Bookshop (2007), reviewed on this blog. But he was also one of Australia's leading readers and exponents of Guénon and the other Traditionalists.

McAuley's search for tradition led him to one of the most traditional (in certain senses) of all societies: New Guinea, which he first visited in 1944. It was not, however, the Papuan and Austronesian inhabitants who ended his search, but a group of French Catholic missionaries at Kubuna. After long conversations in 1951 with the aged Archbishop Alain Marie Guynot de Boismenu (1870-1953), which included discussion of Traditionalism, McAuley joined the Roman Catholic Church.

After this conversion, McAuley remained a "soft" Traditionalist. He wrote articles with titles like "Tradition, Society and the Arts" (1952), and in 1954 objected to the plan to "develop" traditional communities, much as the soft Traditionalist E. F. Schumacher did, writing that "the world of industrial progress is a world of disinherited beings, cut off from the deepest sources of human satisfaction, restless and jangled, driven by unstilled cravings through a course of life without meaning or direction." He joined B. A. Santamaria (1915-98) in working against the influence of Communism in Australia.

The article, "Land of Apocalypse: James McAuley’s Encounter with the Spirit: the French Catholic Missions of the Sacred Heart, Kubuna and Yule Island, New Guinea," Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 37 no. 1 (2016), pp. 18-31, is available online.

Australian Traditionalism and Poetry

As noted in an earlier post, Traditionalism flourished and then withered in Melbourne, Australia, between 1952 and 1963, and perhaps lay behind Australia’s most famous literary hoax. 

All this is covered in Buddha in a Bookshop (North Fitzroy, Victoria: privately published, 2007) by Peter Kelly, himself a former Australian Traditionalist. The book tells the story of the  group that met in the Norman Robb Bookshop in Melbourne to listen to impromptu translations of articles from Etudes traditionnelles and to discuss the questions that they raised.

The group was led by Harold Stewart, a poet who had taken a job in the bookstore after becoming nationally famous in 1944. He and another poet, James McAuley, had decided to protest the direction taken by Australian modernism by tricking the leading modernist journal of the time, Angry Penguins, into publishing some spoof poems by a fictional "Ern Malley." As Stewart and McAuley were both readers of Guénon and Coomeraswamy, it is possible that Traditionalism lay behind their attack on modernism. It is also possible that anti-modernism led them to Traditionalism, or that the one reinforced the other.

According to Kelly, Stewart’s trick, as does sometimes happen with tricks, had unexpected consequences. Rather than making a point to Australia’s literary world, as seems to have been the intention, it provided the press with good material to make fun of the pretentions of intellectuals in general. In a further unexpected twist, the publisher of Angry Penguins was found guilty of publishing obscene works. Stewart left Sydney for relative obscurity in Melbourne, and never made the poetic career he seems once to have hoped for. And then finally, after some years, the spoof poems became famous again—for their poetic qualities. As Kelly says, they may have been intended as spoofs but they were still composed by two talented young poets who were well versed in the modernism that they were condemning.

The Australian Traditionalists never took to “the London group,” as they called the Maryamiyya. They disliked it as “authoritarian and reactionary” (p. 71), and were anyhow generally more interested in Buddhism than in Sufism. Stewart and some other Australian Traditionalists visited Japan in 1963, but then quarreled, for unknown reasons. The meetings in Melbourne stopped, the group fragmented, and Stewart moved permanently to Kyoto, where he lived modestly off his earnings as an English teacher. He died, a Buddhist, in 1995. The Ern Malley poems have since been frequently republished and have attracted much comment, including two plays and a novel, but Stewart himself is largely forgotten, and his Traditionalism generally unknown. McAuley, in contrast, became a Roman Catholic and a professor of English at the University of Tasmania, as well as a sometimes controversial right-wing commentator.

The first half of Buddha in a Bookshop covers the events summarized above. The other half deals with Stewart’s poetry and later life, and provides some comments on Traditionalism by Kelly.  The book is partly autobiographical, and gives a good flavor of 1950s and 1960s Australia. It is fun to read, though it would have benefited from slightly more thorough editing to remove the occasional repetition, and the second half is a little miscellaneous.

Guénon and gnostic anthropology

They say that after they retire, scholars sometimes write the books they always wanted to write. Joel S. Kahn, a distinguished anthropologist at the University of Melbourne who worked mostly on Southeast Asia, is now a professor emeritus and seems to have done just that.

The result is Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics and Reformers (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2015). In this book, Kahn tries to go beyond what he sees as the sterile secular/religious dichotomy by finding resources in Western culture that might allow us to take Asian religion seriously. For this purpose, he looks at what he calls (following Jeffrey Kripal) the "Gnostic current" between the two world wars, the basis of so much that has happened since. And from this current he takes four key writers: René Guénon, Alexandra David-Néel (the feminist, anarchist explorer), Erwin Schrödinger (the Austrian physicist), and Hermann Hesse (the German poet and novelist). The book has eight chapters. Two are introductory, then each writer gets one chapter, and then two conclude.

This looks like an absolutely fascinating book. First, for those interested in Traditionalism, Guénon is put in company that he is not usually found in, but company that immediately makes intuitive sense. Second, for those interested in anthropology, a leading anthropologist is attempting something new, rather radical, and perhaps important. And third, Traditionalist thought is being taken in an unusual but productive way: not as pure truth, and not as purely marginal, but as an important stream of modern thought.

Ananda Coomaraswamy Essay Prize

The heavily Traditionalist and Maryami Philosophy and Religious Studies program at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia, has announced an Ananda Coomaraswamy Essay Prize.

• Two winners will collect books and postage to the value of $200 from Fons Vitae Publishing and $200 from World Wisdom Books (the in-house publishers of Frithjof Schuon).
• The prize calls for "essays that explore . . . the meaning of traditional symbols." Examples given include the drum of Śiva, the Rainbow Serpent of the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the shofar, and the hijab "in the mystical traditions of Islam."
• There are academic and non-academic alternatives: the prize has two categories, postgraduate and "open."

New peer-reviewed Traditionalist journal

Dr Timothy Scott of La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) has just announced the creation of a "a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal in the field of Traditional Philosophy and Religious Studies," called The Eye of the Heart.

The announcement of this journal was carried by the ListServ of the Section for the study of Islam of the American Academy of Religion--the #1 body for academics teaching about Islam in US universities, to which many non-American academics also belong.

It's interesting to see further signs of Traditionalist activity in Australia, but it's especially interesting that the journal is peer-reviewed. There are two points about peer-review. One is that it improves the quality of articles. The other is that it gives respectability in university circles. Academics have to report their activities to university administrators, and in this context a peer-reviewed article counts for a lot more than one that is not peer-reviewed. The journal, then, is both a sign of Traditionalism gaining (or attempting to gain) respectability in mainstream academic life, and of Traditionalism "coming out." For years, many academics have been in some sense Traditionalists, but have usually kept this to themselves.

However, the editors have given themselves a let-out. According to the Call for Articles, "articles that do not fit the academic criteria for peer-review but are deemed of value will be published under a non peer-reviewed category."

Traditionalism in Australia

The following was peviously posted on the old Traditionalists.org addenda page.

Guénon and Coomaraswamy were being read in Australia in the 1940s by two "classicist" Australian poets, James McAuley (1917-76) and Harold Stewart (1916-95). The two were responsible for Australia's most famous literary hoax, when in 1943-44 they composed parodies of the modernist verse they both detested, and had their parodies published in the leading avant-garde magazine, Angry Penguins, under the pseudonym "Ern Malley." Ironically, Ern Malley is probably more read today than either McAuley or Stewart.

In 1953, McAuley condemned Traditionalism as a "gnostic heresy" (Maritain's phrase) and converted to Roman Catholicism. He later became known as one of Australia's leading anti-Communist intellectuals. Stewart went on to lead a small Traditionalist group in Melbourne which met regularly in an avant-garde bookshop, the Norman Robb Bookshop, from 1952 until 1963. The group disliked the "high-handed and elitist" attitudes of the Schuonians, and only one of its members joined the Maryamiyya. Several of the others became Buddhists of the Pure Land school, including Adrian Snodgrass, later a professor at the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney. After Stewart moved definitively to Japan in 1966, the group ceased to exist. My thanks to Peter Kelly for this information.

Further reading: Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop (forthcoming); Michael Ackland, Damaged Men: The Precarious Lives of James McAuley and Harold Stewart (Allen and Unwin 2001); Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair (Faber & Faber, 2003). See also http://www.ernmalley.com/.