Introduction to Street Furniture

1. Heritage listing of street furniture

St Paul's Young Men's Club - Art Gallery was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992 having satisfied the following criteria. The place is important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of Queensland's history.

Completed in 1911, the former St Paul's Young Men's Society Hall is important as an example of a purpose-built hall and meeting rooms for a church-based club. A brick building with restrained Federation detailing, it exhibits aesthetic characteristics valued by the community, particularly as part of a group of civic buildings in the vicinity of the Limestone St/Nicholas Street intersection. It was closely associated with patriotic groups during World War I when it was used as a soldiers' rest room.

It is also closely associated with the work of Ipswich City Council in providing important cultural services for the community - a library and later an art gallery. It is a good example of the work of prominent Ipswich architect George Brockwell Gill, showing his skill in designing a small community building on a limited budget. The place is important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a particular class of cultural places.

Completed in 1911, the former St Paul's Young Men's Society Hall is important as an example of a purpose-built hall and meeting rooms for a church-based club. It is a good example of the work of prominent Ipswich architect George Brockwell Gill, showing his skill in designing a small community building on a limited budget. The place is important because of its aesthetic significance.

A brick building with restrained Federation detailing, it exhibits aesthetic characteristics valued by the community, particularly as part of a group of civic buildings in the vicinity of the Limestone St/Nicholas Street intersection. The place is important in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period. It is a good example of the work of prominent Ipswich architect George Brockwell Gill, showing his skill in designing a small community building on a limited budget.

The place has a strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons. It was closely associated with patriotic groups during World War I when it was used as a soldiers' rest room. It is also closely associated with the work of Ipswich City Council in providing important cultural services for the community - a library and later an art gallery.

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2. Charitable donations and the founding of the hospital of street furniture

Scappi was considerably wealthy, but did not live a life of luxury, rather donating a lot of her money to charitable causes. She is known to have donated money to the convent of the Repentite in 1597; this was a religious institute whose mission was to help prostitutes.

At the time, she specified that should she later choose to join the convent, this payment should be considered a down-payment. Though hospitals existed for the knights, women in need of care had no where to go. Scappi is thought to have treated women in her private home, but 1625, using her resources, she endowed the ospedaletto, also known as La Casetta, the first hospital dedicated exclusively to women.

In her will, she describes her motivations for founding the hospital: "As inspired by the Lord, eager to help and cure those wretched women who have fallen ill and who, bereft of everything, cannot receive treatment in their homes, driven by mercy for their misery." For this, and her many contributions to helping women, Giovanni Bonello who researched her life in a series of articles for the Times of Malta, calls her "the very first feminist in the history of a male-dominant Malta." The hospital started in a house called Santa Maria della Scala, after a renowned hospital in Sienna.

This hospital's coat of arms was engraved on Scappi's tombstone. Later, the hospital relocated, and was officially named Santa Maria della Piet. The hospital was subsidised by the Order of St John in 1631.

In his book History of Gynaecology in Malta, Charles Savona-Ventura explains that "The advent of the Knights of St John in 1530 and the establishment of the Island as a maritime base brought prostitution to the Islands creating an ideal environment for the spread of venereal disease." In fact, Malta's high venereal disease infection rate had earned the island a grim reputation. In 1979, an anonymous author wrote: "There is no place in the whole world where venereal disease attacks faster and spreads easier than in Malta, for here it is a compound of all the poxes in the world.

" Scappi's hospital came to be known as the "spedale delle donne incurabili", the hospital for incurable women. This is because many of the women who came to be treated were prostitutes with venereal diseases, which were incurable at the time. They were usually treated with mercury, and some patients died of mercury poisoning.

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3. Use of street furniture

This tactic was used by British soldiers in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising. Mouse-holing began to appear in military tactical manuals in World War II.

With mouse-holing, combatants are able to move around an urban battlefield under cover, without needing to expose themselves to enemy fire or observation. A typical passage is large enough for a single file of soldiers. Large, unrestricted holes can compromise the structural integrity of the building, and offer little cover from opposing forces.

During the Battle of Ortona in 1943, the Canadian Army, which gave the tactic its name, used it to great effect, breaching the walls of buildings (houses within Ortona shared adjoining walls) with weapons such as the PIAT or Teller anti-tank mines. The soldiers would then throw in grenades and assault through the mouse holes, clearing the stairs with grenades or machine-gun fire, and making their way up or down; then, the adversaries would struggle in repeated close-quarters combat. Mouse-holing was also used to pierce through walls into adjoining rooms, sometimes catching enemy troops by surprise.

Creating a series of mouse-holes in a series of adjoining buildings, the strategy also allowed the troops to progress through the town, building by building, without entering the streets where they would face enemy fire. While some sources attribute the strategy to the Canadian forces, a British training film of 1941 had already illustrated the concept. Similar to tunnels used in rural battlefields, mouse-holes can also allow forces to infiltrate behind enemy lines, providing a significant tactical advantage.

In some cases, a mouse-hole will be camouflaged with furniture, especially when they are created to aid a defending force or a clandestine operation. When used in defensive positions, mouse holes often join and combine with tunnels. This was used by the Red Army of the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad, where it allowed troops to consistently infiltrate areas to the German rear that were supposedly cleared.

The ubiquitous availability of the Panzerfaust in the last months of the war made all sides use it to quickly breach buildings from unexpected directions. The tactic was used heavily by anti-coalition insurgents during the Iraq War who would connect houses converted into fortified bunkers by creating holes in walls in order to evade and ambush coalition troops. In addition, coalition snipers would utilize mouse-holing as a method of being able to fire at enemy fighters from further within rooms and other structures, thereby concealing their position.