The Royal Bank of Queensland is a heritage-listed former

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...

at 12 Railway Street,

Lowood Lowood is a rural town and Suburbs and localities (Australia), locality in the Somerset Region, Queensland, Australia. In the , the locality of Lowood had a population of 4,082 people. Geography The town is on the Brisbane River, west of th ...

Somerset Region The Somerset Region is a local government area located in the West Moreton region of South East Queensland, Australia, northwest of the City of Brisbane. The region is centred on the town of Esk, which also serves as the council seat. Somer ...

Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...

, Australia. It was built from 1901 to 1917. It is also known as Bank of Queensland Ltd, National Bank of Australasia, and now as a dental surgery. It was added to the

Queensland Heritage Register The Queensland Heritage Register is a heritage register, a statutory list of places in Queensland, Australia that are protected by Queensland legislation, the Queensland Heritage Act 1992. It is maintained by the Queensland Heritage Council. As ...

on 21 October 1992.

History

This small timber building was erected in Main Street, Lowood, between 1901 and 1917, as a branch of the

Royal Bank of Queensland The Royal Bank of Queensland was a bank in Queensland, Australia. History The Royal Bank of Queensland commenced operation in Brisbane in February 1886. In 1917, it merged with the Bank of North Queensland creating the Bank of Queensland (19 ...

Ltd. Lowood had emerged as the centre of a thriving farming district after the rail link to

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in Suffolk, England. It is the county town, and largest in Suffolk, followed by Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds, and the third-largest population centre in East Anglia, ...

was opened in mid-1884. In 1901 the Royal Bank, established in

Brisbane Brisbane ( ; ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and largest city of the States and territories of Australia, state of Queensland and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia, with a ...

in 1885 as a competitor to the

Queensland National Bank The Queensland National Bank is a former bank in Queensland, Australia. History In 1872, the bank was established in Brisbane. In December 1914, the bank had its head office in Brisbane with branches throughout Queensland at Allora, Queensland, ...

, opened a branch at Lowood. For the first two decades of the 20th century it remained the only banking establishment in the town. In January 1917 the Royal Bank and the

Bank of North Queensland The Bank of North Queensland was formed in 1887 in Townsville with branches in Sydney and London. In 1893 there were branches in: Ayr, Cairns, Charters Towers, Cooktown, Herberton, Normanton, Rockhampton and Thursday Island and agencies at Mar ...

(established in

Townsville The City of Townsville is a city on the north-eastern coast of Queensland, Australia. With a population of 201,313 as of 2024, it is the largest settlement in North Queensland and Northern Australia (specifically, the parts of Australia north of ...

in 1888) merged to form the Bank of Queensland Ltd, with the Lowood branch retained under the new name. In mid-1917 the Lowood bank building, complete with a brick and concrete strongroom which weighed close to 40 tonnes, was re-located to the present site in Railway Street. In 1922 the Bank of Queensland in turn merged with the

National Bank of Australasia The National Bank of Australasia was a bank based in Melbourne. It was established in 1857, and in 1982 merged with the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney to form National Australia Bank. History In 1857, Alexander Gibb, a Melbourne gentleman ...

, and the building remained a branch of the National Bank until 1986. In 2015, it functions as a dental surgery.

Description

This single-storied

weatherboard Clapboard (), also called bevel siding, lap siding, and weatherboard, with regional variation in the definition of those terms, is wooden siding (construction), siding of a building in the form of horizontal boards, often overlapping. ''Cla ...

building fronts Railway Street in the centre of Lowood. Rectangular in plan, the building has a

corrugated iron Corrugated galvanised iron (CGI) or steel, colloquially corrugated iron (near universal), wriggly tin (taken from UK military slang), pailing (in Caribbean English), corrugated sheet metal (in North America), zinc (in Cyprus and Nigeria) or ...

hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downward to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope, with variants including tented roofs and others. Thus, a hipped roof has no gables or other vertical sides ...

with a shallow hip to the front verandah and a skillion to the rear office and workroom. The building sits on concrete stumps with the

verandah A veranda (also spelled verandah in Australian and New Zealand English) is a roofed, open-air hallway or porch, attached to the outside of a building. A veranda is often partly enclosed by a railing and frequently extends across the front an ...

at street level and the land sloping away to the rear. The verandah has decorative carved timber arch

brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...

with corner

quatrefoil A quatrefoil (anciently caterfoil) is a decorative element consisting of a symmetrical shape which forms the overall outline of four partially overlapping circles of the same diameter. It is found in art, architecture, heraldry and traditional ...

design and cross-braced

balustrade A baluster () is an upright support, often a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe-turned form found in stairways, parapets, and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle. Common materials used in its ...

with a circular pattern. The ceiling is lined and a projecting vestibule has twin timber doors with a

fanlight A fanlight is a form of lunette window (transom window), often semicircular or semi-elliptical in shape, with glazing (window), glazing bars or tracery sets radiating out like an open Hand fan, fan. It is placed over another window or a doorway, ...

above. The interior has

tongue and groove Tongue and groove is a method of fitting similar objects together, edge to edge, used mainly with wood, in flooring, parquetry, panelling, and similar constructions. A strong joint, it allows two flat pieces to be joined strongly together to mak ...

boards to the walls, a flat boarded ceiling and partitioning has been installed to separate the surgery, reception and a toilet. The building has double-hung

sash windows A sash window or hung sash window is made of one or more movable panels, or "sashes". The individual sashes are traditionally paned window (architecture), paned windows, but can now contain an individual sheet (or sheets, in the case of double gla ...

and a rendered masonry

strongroom A bank vault is a secure room used by banks to store and protect valuables, cash, and important documents. Modern bank vaults are typically made of reinforced concrete and steel, with complex locking mechanisms and security systems. This article ...

is built into the southeast elevation adjacent to the surgery and is used as a store. A metal sheeted

shed A shed is typically a simple, single-storey (though some sheds may have two or more stories and or a loft) roofed structure, often used for storage, for hobby, hobbies, or as a workshop, and typically serving as outbuilding, such as in a bac ...

sitting on metal posts and a weatherboard and fibrous cement toilet block are located to the rear of the building. Metal sunshades are attached to the northwest and southeast elevations.

Heritage listing

The former Royal Bank of Queensland at Lowood was listed on the

on 21 October 1992 having satisfied the following criteria. The former Royal Bank of Queensland Ltd building at Lowood is important in demonstrating the pattern of Queensland's history, being associated with the rural expansion of the Royal Bank of Queensland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is important in demonstrating some of the principal characteristics of a small, early 20th century, timber bank building in rural Queensland, retaining a substantially intact exterior and what appears to be the original masonry strongroom. It exhibits aesthetic characteristics valued by the local community, in particular the streetscape contribution of its decorative timber facade.

References

Attribution

External links

{{commons category-inline, Royal Bank of Queensland, Lowood Queensland Heritage Register Buildings and structures in Somerset Region Former bank buildings in Queensland Articles incorporating text from the Queensland Heritage Register Royal Bank of Queensland