The classic Queenslander is one of Australia's most iconic architectural styles, but the multicultural influences that make it unique are barely acknowledged.

While British colonial trends dictated the basic design footprint, the wooden houses of northern Australia owe their decorative finesse to an ancient Asian tradition.

To understand this unspoken orientalism, it helps to travel north — about 7,000 kilometres, in fact, to rural Cambodia.

A penchant for temples

As in many Asian countries, Cambodia's traditional buildings imitate the elegant nature of high Buddhist temple architecture.

Houses and communal buildings are decorated with ridges, horns and finials, intricate fret-work and ornamental embellishments intended to lift the corners of the roof as if to the heavens.

The wealthiest examples have a multi-gabled roof or a classic Chinese hip-gable construction.

A Queenslander look-alike in the Cambodian province of Kampong Speu. ( ABC RN: Antony Funnell )

Though often intricately adorned, their layout and build speak of a functionality and simplicity born of necessity: open-plan, timber-clad homes raised high on stilts to catch the breeze and protect against flooding.

The high-set cottages suit a tropical climate — a land of searing heat and torrential downpours, not unlike that of far-away Queensland.

Cambodian 'Queenslanders'

Some bear more than a passing resemblance to the iconic weatherboard workers' cottages that proliferated in the northern parts of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the village of Kampong Khleang, which sits on the edge of Tonle Sap lake.

Many tourists come to see the region's "floating villages" — collections of moored house-boats.

But the town is also home to an impressive array of what could rather cheekily be called Cambodian Queenslanders.

The similarities are obvious — the houses raised high on stumps, with ornate fretwork features, deep, covered verandahs, decorative cantilevered verandah-brackets and screens.

One could be forgiven for confusing the Cambodian village of Kampong Khleang with colonial Queensland ( ABC RN: Antony Funnell )

Looking down the dusty main street, it's not hard to imagine you've been plunged back in time to late 19th century Queensland.

While the two styles aren't directly related, they share two common traits: a vernacular build adapted to contend with the taxing tropical climate, and a reverential nod toward the majesty of Imperial Chinese design.

A Victorian taste for the Orient

Many parts of Asia still carry remnants of the architectural patina of European colonialism.

From the 1840s onward, places like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Phnom Penh began to look increasingly European in character, with new public buildings and wealthy residential dwellings borrowing heavily on European styles — neo-classical, Italianate and French Renaissance, for example.

But the tide flowed both ways.

Soldiers and civil servants of the British Empire brought back to England a taste for the exotic east that stretched well beyond rice and curry.

The Victorians, and before them the Georgians, not only imposed their design stamp on the world, but also borrowed the best of the architectural features they encountered.

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, built as a regal holiday residence in full Indo-Saracenic style, is the most famously ostentatious example of this.

The style of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton is tribute to Victorian Britain's fondness for oriental architecture. ( Wikipedia Commons )

But design appropriation also had a practical side.

It allowed the architectural virtues found in one part of the Empire to be pressed into service across a number of colonies.

The British famously co-opted the idea of a deep outside covered porch from India, turning the Hindi word varanda into the Anglicised verandah.

In the Australian north, that particular innovation was so well received that verandas soon became the norm, in many cases wrapping around two or even three sides of a house.

But the earliest examples tended to be more practical than decorative.

Photographs of Queensland colonial housing in the mid 19th century show a rather un-ornamental style.

The great change — the embellishment of the Queenslander — came around the 1880s and continued through into the Edwardian age.

This picture shows the Chinese influence on early Australian homes. ( John Oxley Library )

European expansion into China, and the opening up of Japan to foreign trade several decades earlier, renewed a dormant mania for all things oriental.

For the titled elite, "Chinese drawing rooms" became the fashion.

And for the common people, oriental mystique found its most obvious physical form in what we now know as the Victorian rotunda or bandstand.

Today, such structures are viewed as quintessentially British.

The bandstand, now an iconic Victorian structure, borrowed heavily from China ( Flickr: Peter Tarleton )

But like the traditional houses of Cambodia, the Victorian bandstand borrowed heavily on temple motifs.

Many were round or hexagonal like a pagoda, with the elegance and intricacy of stylised Chinese decoration: finials, fretwork (now cast in iron), ridge horns and often acroteria — those ornamental features that give the corners of the roof an upward oriental inflection.

In the colony of Queensland, those same features also found their way into domestic housing construction.

"Chinoiserie", the European interpretation of Asian artistic traditions, was all the rage.

Embellishing a building in the "Chinese taste" gave colour and distinction to the utilitarian nature of the weatherboard home.

Hence the Queenslander took its final magisterial form.

In the colony of Queensland, a European spin on Asian artistic traditions was all the rage. ( ABC RN: Antony Funnell )

In the 1990s, historical anthropologist Nicholas Thomas theorised that colonial Australia drew inspiration from Asia and India in part because of what they saw as a lack of indigenous vernacular architecture.

Numerous leading architects of the time like Harold Desbrowe-Annear and his one-time boss William Salway had experimented with Chinese styles and, in the case of Salway, had actually lived and worked for many years in Asia.

According to conservation architect and heritage consultant Amanda Jean, "Chinese symbolism" also found its way into what became known as Australian Federation design — an antipodean variant of the Queen Anne style that became popular in the southern Australian colonies from the 1890s.

"The picturesque features, the dominant roof form, conical tower, red roof tiles decorative ridge capping and finials, the use of timber brackets and fret work," she says, all combined to produce an architectural mix of "Chinese details with English tradition".

Forgotten or ignored?

While Victorian Britain's passion for oriental folly has long been acknowledged, even celebrated, the same cannot be said for Asia's influence on Australian colonial and federation architecture.

The historic influence of oriental symbolism on our early building design is, even today, largely overlooked or ignored.

The one exception is William Hardy Wilson who, in the early 1920s, spent several years researching design in China.

He subsequently wrote explicitly about the connection, which even at that time had been forgotten.

Wilson, says historian Zeny Edwards in an article on the influential architect for the National Library of Australia, "discerned a Chinese influence in the circular forms and strongly horizontal lines of many Colonial buildings".

But his was very much a minority voice.

High-set Queenslanders with large verandahs like this are littered throughout Brisbane today. ( Flickr: JBrew )

If such national architectural amnesia seems unusual, Ms Jean suggests it's important to remember the dominant theme of late colonial/early Federation politics — race.

In the early 1900s, just as the fashion for orientalist Chinese was quietly becoming an important aspect of Australian architecture, fear of the "yellow peril" was also gripping the nation.

And one of the first actions of the new parliament of Australia when it convened in Melbourne in 1901 was the passage of the Immigration Restrictions Act — the foundation stone of what became the "White Australia" policy.

Ms Jean describes this paradox as one which "allowed an Asian cultural art form to become deeply embedded within what is regarded as the first national Australian architectural style: a style which coincided with the height of British imperial rule, the declaration of the Federation of the Australian colonies as a nation in 1901 and introduction of the White Australia Policy, which served as an ideological function to keep out Asian migrants".

Fortunately for those who find pleasure in the eccentricities of Australia's architectural past, over time good design has proven more durable than bad politics.