The Australian Ugliness (14 page)

But this is not, of course, their aim; nor is there consistency in the aim. The generalizations already made are subject to regional variations. The suburban area of Sydney, like that of every big city, is subdivided by scenery and snobbery into different class regions. New areas are still as sharply divided in this regard as they were last century, although the difference between highest and lowest is now much less pronounced. Monied-class suburbs are created no longer. No new Vaucluse or Toorak is under construction. The leaders in industry, commerce and professions who formed them in times of low taxation now move up to make room for others of their kind in smaller houses or flats built on their tennis courts. New graduates to the uppermost levels of success have to be content with severely limited space in an area which confirms their successful arrival, or have to become (to use A. C. Spectorsky's word for New York's new rich) Exurbanites: they move beyond the suburbs to outposts of urban living in especially favoured semi-rural areas. It hardly needs emphasising that Exurbia in Australia follows America's lead down to the proportions of a martini, but that it is more scattered and less organized.

The recent growth of Sydney is mainly confined to three zones. Out west, the wooden villa, or Villawood Zone—to use the name of one of its central districts—sweeps from Liverpool north through Parramatta. It is a fairly typical Australian working-class development, repeating the dreary, ill-considered housing growth on the outskirts of every Australian town: the same cold comfort conservatism of villa design with the regular sprinkling of primary-tinted features. The Housing Commission of New South Wales, speculative builders and private owners compete with one another to reduce the bush to a desert of terra cotta roofs relieved only by electric wires and wooden poles.

The same approach extends south into the Tom Ugly Zone, to use the name of a landmark near its centre: Tom Ugly's Point, where the George River opens into Botany Bay. Here the familiar suburban techniques are more destructive because the houses are slightly more pretentious and the country which they strangle was obviously more beautiful before man arrived. The fibro frontier is pushed right to the water's edge.

The really depressing parts of Sydney, however, are in the North Shore Executive Zone. Here some of the most dramatically beautiful country available to suburban commuters anywhere in the world seems to draw out a delinquent streak in nearly everyone who builds. Out through French's Forest and along the spine above Pittwater one can find three or four of the most notable modern houses in Australia. They are nationally, and to an extent internationally, known by their photographs. But the photographs do not show their neighbours. The few thoughtful buildings of the area are all but lost in a wild scramble of outrageous Featurism clearly planned for the express purpose of extracting a gasp of envy from each passing sports car. By the placid water's edge on the road to Church Point, in one of the most charmingly tranquil home-building sites one could imagine, is a structure of multitudinous angles and rainbows of colour which exemplifies the assault on the North Shore. At this point the visitor begins to recall with some affection the paralysed conservatism of the Villawood Zone.

The pioneering spirit which transforms the natural environment is equally satisfied with transformation wrought on the products of the architecture and landscaping arts of earlier days. The decade before the Second World War in Sydney, and the decade after in most other capitals, saw the most violent destruction of historic colonial buildings. In that period Sydney lost many of its best old buildings, including Burdekin House in Macquarie Street: a three-storey stucco mansion of 1841, with two bland upper floors and a veranda-shaded ground floor. Burdekin House was quite the largest, best known and most handsome colonial house in Australia, and it had sufficient charming Regency ornamentation and craftsmanship to ensure the broadest popularity. Nonetheless it came in the path of progress and was demolished, although its fine columns were preserved. They were cut shorter and re-erected in their somewhat stumpy new proportions on the veranda of St Malo, a cottage at Hunter's Hill on the Parramatta River, which came under the protection of the National Trust of Australia. But still it was hounded: two decades later St Malo itself stood in the way of a new highway and soon it too was marked down for early demolition.

The total loss of buildings like Burdekin House was almost to be preferred to the mutilation to which other sensitive buildings of Australia's infancy have been subjected. Elizabeth Bay House, a fine building of 1832 by one of the most cultivated of the early architects, John Verge, is periodically threatened. At the time of writing it still stands. Its elegant oval hall, perhaps the most famous architectural detail in Australia, is now painted in a contemporary two-tone treatment of green and creamy yellow. Australia's oldest remaining building, Elizabeth Farm, Macarthur's homestead of 1793, the cradle of Australia's wool industry, is poorly painted, crowded by the suburban houses of Harris Park near Parramatta, and forgotten or unrecognized by most of its neighbours. There is no malevolence here; only a painful void where a national sense of history might be expected. But at least these two buildings still stand while many as significant and beautiful in their time are gone. Of all the hundreds of examples of early work illustrated by Morton Herman in his
Early Australian Architects
only twelve were in a recognizably intact state when he published the book in 1954. ‘No architecture in the world has been so maltreated,' he remarked. The mutilation took two forms: deliberate remodelling, sacrifice to some newer fashion; and wantonly careless additions: sleepout, fibro-cement screens to verandas, iron-roofed skillion blobs of various sorts buttoned on to the sensitive, or at very least careful, formal structure of the days before the home magazines.

In the busy house-building years after the Second World War Melbourne packed hundreds of mediocre villas into the few private gardens which remained from the early days in the better inner suburbs. The mansions of the boom years came tumbling down. In the space of a few months in 1955 three of the biggest—Werndew and Leura in Toorak, and Norwood in Brighton—were removed with extraordinary diligence. Not only were the large structures wrecked, but almost every tree was removed from the remnants of the estates which these houses had managed to hold round themselves. In each case the site was presented by the real-estate agent to a moderately eager public as a raked-over desert cut into little rectangles and innocent of any trace of the thousands of pounds and years of craft-labour spent on the vanished monuments, all hint of dreams and continuity gone. Destruction of this sort continues, and will continue despite the formation of the National Trust organizations.

The Trusts grew up in separate States in the early nineteen-fifties, like mushrooms in the raked-over ground, for the ordinary Australian's antipathy to nature and history is matched by the fervour of minority movements. The continuing destruction presents a hazard to anyone writing about Australian architecture and wanting to cite living examples. Before the ink is dry a building which seems important, permanent and invulnerable may be trembling to the first blows of the wrecker's mallet.

Certainly, some of the big old mansions of the boom period managed to find useful occupations in the twentieth century and live on borrowed time. ‘Labassa', in Manor Grove, Caulfield, Melbourne, one of the most crested and curvilinear of them all, is still standing (at the time of writing) as a rooming house with its urns and statuettes and marble insets almost intact. ‘Fortuna' is also standing. This was the vast home which George Lansell built himself in Bendigo, Victoria, beside the gold mines that provided his fortune. Lansell built the house with three floors of reception rooms, music rooms, banquet halls and galleries. He put statuettes on the parapets of the flat sunroofs, statues in the hall, on the stair landings, and in the temple of love that was reflected in the artificial lake. He put stained glass in each window— ‘east, west, home's best' round a circular stair well window—and mosaics on the drawing-room walls. He brought a shipload of furniture and features back from his trip to the Continent. His bedroom suite, in solid wrought brass, was a prize-winning exhibit which he picked up at the Paris Exhibition. ‘Fortuna' was probably the most Featurist house ever built. Now it is stripped down to some pretence of utilitarianism as an Army Survey Headquarters, and the strong southerlies blow a fine grey dust from the neighbouring mullock heaps over its broken plaster mouldings.

One or two other early houses have been taken under official wings and appear to be safely protected and preserved more or less in their original state, giving some impression of living conditions in the successful strata of the first pioneer period. There is Kirribilli House at Kirribilli Point, Sydney, a high-roofed Gothic house with carved gable ends and a turreted porch. It belongs to the transitional period, too late for the early colonial simplicity and too early for the furbelows. It was built about 1855, threatened with demolition in 1919, saved by the Prime Minister of the time, W. M. Hughes, and eventually restored to a romantic version of its youth in 1957 by John Mansfield, architect, and Mrs Gregory Blaxland. It is now used as a residence for overseas guests of the Commonwealth and contains a sprinkling of Australiana and soft gold ornamentation. In Tasmania there is Entally House, a historic Georgian home of the Reibeys at Hadspen, acquired by the Tasmanian Government after the Second World War and converted into a national house, open for public inspection. In Melbourne there is Como House, above Como Park, Toorak, built about 1843. Como has fared better than any other colonial house in the country, for it has been preserved with its original furniture and furnishings practically intact. It was the first acquisition of Victoria's National Trust. The original section is a white box wrapped prettily in a fragile two-storey veranda. Indoors, the rooms remain practically as they were, arrested in the middle eighteen-sixties when Charles Henry Armytage furnished it all, partially with fine, sturdy pieces, made by an undertaker across the river in Richmond.

The notable thing about the fate of the less fortunate houses was not simply their demolition. In most cases they occupied big estates in inner suburbs grown extraordinarily rich and crowded; they had to go. But the way they went was significant. There was no attempt to preserve any part of them or any part of their parklike settings. The fences, shrubs, and the enormous trees of gardens established as long ago as a century went with each house. There was a clear intention to eradicate every sign that the land had ever been occupied. Bulldozers nuzzled out every stone, stump and blade of grass. Then the bared paddock was cut into the narrowest permissible lots and sold piecemeal. Very slowly over the months which followed the lots filled with medium-sized houses and midget blocks of flats, all of them as representative of the noncommittal Featurism of our day as the buildings they replaced were representative of an equally expansive, almost as Featurist, but slightly more committed, era. On a purely architectural-artistic level it could be argued that little or nothing was lost in these obliterations of the old by the new century. Only space, trees and continuity were destroyed. But it goes further than that. The really disturbing thing is that the new culture is certainly no improvement on the old. Nothing was gained or learned in those hundred years.

No one seriously argued that always it was necessary to remove the old house in order to subdivide the estate successfully nor that always, along with the house, every tree had to go. A reasonably alert office boy in an estate-agent's back room could juggle most subdivisional plans to spare some of the garden, if that had been in the least desired by anybody concerned. No one appeared to consider any such thing, yet a normal healthy human being ordinarily can be expected to choose to make his home in a garden rather than a wasteland. It becomes necessary to analyse the pioneer cult to explain better this annihilatory urge and other allied phenomena of the Australian ugliness. In addition to the simple confidence that anything new one does today must be for the better, there are three less attractive qualities. These may be called Puritanism, Diggerism and Selective Blindness.

The first of these is a quality of Australian life, varying only slightly from region to region, which grew up with suburbia and the preponderance of private homes and the emergence of an ideal, family-group image. The years between the gay eighties when private houses were few, and the grey nineties when the first waves of small villas swept out from the cities, was the period when the female community saw to it that the doors began closing on the rumbustious life of their wild colonial boys. As gaslight gave way to electric light the streets grew darker, for most of the new light was in the family parlour, and from this time on anyone who was not settling down with an anagram or a crossword puzzle by the fire had to start minding his manners. As the century and the suburbs grew, one by one the privileges of city life were forbidden to the growing hordes of city dwellers: early closing of bars and restaurants; banning of more books, films, magazines; more permits required to do more things, a general tightening of licence and a gradually growing habit of censorship, ever-increasing prudery on the surface while the male community grew more ribald and appallingly blasphemous under its breath. The puritan movement finally expanded beyond its object of protecting family life in the suburban developments, and came to mean the public denial of every natural requirement of the human animal. The visitor to Australia encounters this immediately on arrival at his airport or dock. He will notice strange, coy signs on twin doors. Usually they will be silhouettes in black plastic on white plastic panels, one depicting a Regency gentleman holding a lorgnette to his eye, and the other a crinolined lady. Sometimes one will be a cigarette trailing a curl of smoke, and the other a powder puff. There are popular variations on peculiarly Australian ciphers designed to avoid giving definitive names to the unspeakable rooms with the plumbing. Sometimes again the silhouettes will be a top-hat and a bonnet respectively, or some other equally proper and irrelevant sex symbols. Sometimes the twin public lavatories of hotels, theatres and other places of lighter entertainment are given names, but whimsically oblique ones like Romeo and Juliet, or Dave and Mabel, or Adam and Eve, or even more peculiar twin titles, as in the confused case of the Springvale Hotel, Victoria: Dave and Eve. In the State Theatre, Melbourne, an ‘atmospheric' design from the heyday of the cinema, the male convenience was originally labelled, in old Gothic type, ‘Gentleman's College Room'. This must have seemed too much even for the motion picture business, for now the echoing white tiled space is labelled, ‘Gentleman's Lounge'.