The Australian Ugliness (15 page)

It may be argued that these amiable idiocies are the product of suburban style, not a contributory cause of it. Yet their surrealist absurdity represents a philistinian-puritan denial of reality which is one of the wellsprings of the annihilatory approach to natural and historic facts. But if the female-inspired puritanism on the surface is the enemy of sensible development, the undercover male opposition is even more firmly set against any sensitive growths. Huddled whenever possible in the last refuge, the exclusively male bar, a sizeable proportion of the older generation of Australian men reaffirms the Digger tradition of the world wars in a stream of four-letter words which mean on translation: to the Devil with all sensitivity and sympathy. In the younger male, the Digger tradition often lives on in a more sophisticated way which merely takes the form of condemning epicurians, experts, connoisseurs, gourmets—all evidence of cultivated taste. Bill McIntosh has stated their attitude well. Mr McIntosh's handsome face creased in a puzzled sulk became familiar to newspaper readers in half-page advertisements. ‘Wine Connoisseurs,' he was quoted as saying, ‘they annoy me.' (‘…all I know is Sienna Cream is my favourite sweet sherry.')

The third contributory cause of the Australian ugliness is a deficiency shared by the sexes. It is a special sort of cultivated, selective blindness. Perhaps it began as an involuntary defensive mechanism against the few ugly, hasty things in colonial and gold-rush times; then it grew into a habit, and encouraged more ugliness. Large elements of the Australian scene are invisible to the great number of people afflicted with the complaint. This explains several phenomena, including the faith in paint. It is quite misleading to imagine that paint is used so fiercely and vividly to improve the appearance or draw attention to the thing coated. Its prime purpose is only to be a symbol of tidiness. In Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, there is a little public park beside the municipal sportsground which was generously endowed last century with cast iron urns on masonry pedestals. For some years, apparently, the gay youth of the twentieth century enjoyed the sport of breaking off the urns. Mostly they snapped at the narrow stem, leaving jagged bases of various dangerous shapes. Later civic pride revived and a painter went through the park with a tin of pillar-box red, coating not only the few remaining urns but all the pathetic little stumps as well. Again, the appalling cabins of railway workers at Chullora, west of Sydney, and the shameful migrants' huts at Holmesglen, east of Melbourne, and at Gepp's Cross, north of Adelaide, are painted a variety of different colours. No one could want to advertise these hovels. No one could believe they look any prettier, in their contrasting hard-pastel tints, than the red stumps at Bacchus Marsh. But in this busy age ordinary taste has become so dulled and calloused that anything which can startle a response on jaded retinas is deemed successful: it draws attention to the fact that paint has been used and progress is afoot.

Tram, telephone and electric poles, and the spiders' webs of overhead wires which are strung to them, are more in evidence in Australia than anywhere. They form a ubiquitous veil across the civic scene, but like the sides of one's nose they never register on the retina. They are kept out of focus; eyes see through and beyond them. Even the central city streets of the capital city of Tasmania are equipped with regularly spaced, split and crooked tree-trunk posts, garnished with loops and tangles of wires, insulators, lights, brackets, tram connections and transformers, leaning at any angle but vertical against smart shop fronts or poking through carefully designed and neatly finished stainless steel verandas. Plumbers work more in the open in Australia than anywhere else; in very few areas will the pipes freeze, and external plumbing is one British tradition which is universally respected. Moreover, the vent pipes of sewerage lines are required by building regulations in most towns to rise many feet above the highest neighbouring window, and they aspire Gothically above the roof-tops in competition with the intricate ladders of the television aerials.

But the pipes and the ladders and the wires are not seen. A house can be selected as a ‘Dream Home' by a national magazine though its sides are an angular espalier of drain, water, and storm water pipes, complete with towering vents and convenient inspection openings. A building can be admired for its shiny new grey-green glass curtain wall while some monstrous thing is stuck to its aluminium edging looking like a mad electrician's scrap basket, and immediately round the corner from the smart facade on the plastered side wall red and orange letters fifteen feet high announce once more the name of a popular brand of petrol.

The un-designed wires and poles do not mar the attractiveness of the street because they are not seen, because a street is not seen as a street but as a series of feature buildings to be viewed separately through the veil. The electrical and phone connections and the advertisements do not spoil each building for the admiring eye, because a building is not seen as a building but as a collection of features to be appraised separately: first curtain wall, then entrance doors, then lobby, then lift doors, then lift cage: unrelated in vision from the whole structure, and from the street, and from the city, and from the countryside.

In the darkness of the cultivated blind-spots some of the most painful damage is done to Australia in all innocence, as when, with the simple intention of making things nice for visitors who come to admire, scenic lookouts and beauty-spots are provided with desperately picturesque accoutrements of rustic stone and wood, and two brightly coloured concrete boxes which may be found, on close examination, to be marked with top-hat and powder-puff respectively. Bright colours are not intended to make lavatories more conspicuous, because it is assumed that they are invisible, but only to make them look nicer for anyone who requires to use them. The blind-spot contribution to the Australian ugliness occurs most frequently when the intentions are most honourable. Thus Tasmania, which is prouder of its age than most other places, which has an active National Trust and a Government which gives occasional recognition to the need for preservation, suffers worst from this somnambulistic sub-section among destructive practices. Private enterprise in Tasmania is not completely oblivious to the commercial possibilities of antiquity. At New Norfolk in the Derwent Valley, twenty-five miles north of Hobart, one of the prettiest places in all Australia, there is an enterprise called the ‘Old Colony Inn'. Unlike some other historic places which have been ravished by caravan parks, this establishment has been carefully contrived as a coffee house with a ‘rest chalet' and cabin accommodation especially devised for honeymooners. The publicity dates the basic building evasively as ‘one of the several gems of 1815 vintage' (New Norfolk was founded in 1808 by a party from Norfolk Island), but the date is of purely academic interest, for the original has been almost unrecognizably altered, choked with the tourist trappings of chintzy old-lavender charm indoors and outdoors. The inn is a typically Tasmanian display, unfamiliar on the mainland, of killing architecture with kindness.

Hobart would be a beautiful big town if it were not a pretty little capital city. The state of capitaldom gives too much importance to what man has done round the broken bays and thrusting headlands of the Derwent River's magnificent harbour below Mount Wellington. Nature's scale, set by this stately precipitous rock of four thousand feet, is magnanimous; but somehow everything in the town that rests at the mountain's wet foot is just under life size. From the roofs of most of the three- or four-storey buildings of the town centre it seems one could throw a stone down the funnels of the liners at the wharf. Narrow streets with midget footpaths climb and circle the rounded foothills. In the low lobby of the little Parliament House the Doric columns seem to have been thumped into the cellar for a third of their lengths to keep them in proportion.

The average house of the early days was a doll's house: two wide eyes and a central nose under a brimless hat. It stood close to the street behind a garden that had no room for trees. The combination of a consistently diminutive scale and a feeling of solemnity in the stonework produces a sort of lead soldier importance that is quaint, charming and distinctive.

The first generation after Hobart's founding in 1804 passed in savagery and beauty. The vicious slaughter of the Aborigines and the brutality to the convicts were accompanied by a gentle discretion in everything built. The prison at Port Arthur, fifty miles to the southeast on the Tasman Peninsula, exemplifies the early period, its relics of hideous inhumanity clothed now in mellow stone, gentle ivy and soft avenues of trees. In the simple matter of using bricks and stone, windows and doors suitably and without pretentiousness, the founders of Hobart could hardly do wrong and all subsequent Tasmanians could hardly do right. The city today is a monument to the destructive progress of twentieth-century Australia. The brutality of the foundation era is a closed book. Understandably, many Tasmanians wish not to be reminded of it. Historic documents have been left deliberately in some instances to rot so that the records of names, crimes and the awful penalties will be erased. Less methodically but as diligently the surface beauty of the early days also has been removed from all the more prominent places. The little houses have been wrecked without a second's thought, or were brought up-to-date with applied ‘half-timbering' in the early years of the twentieth century, and with pots of primary-hued paint in the later years. Until the end of the Second World War Arthur Circus on Runnymede Street at Battery Point, named after Governor Arthur, was one of the charming sights of Hobart: a little ellipse of roadway in the Bath tradition with houses once occupied by military officers surrounding the road at attention, facing a park in the central space. The houses were minute, making a sort of architectural fairy ring. But now the lawn is treeless, and many of the little houses have been ‘personalized', as they say, with many shades of paint in harsh, bright colours. A tangle of poles and overhead wires criss-cross the ellipse and some traffic authorities threaten to cut a road through the middle to speed the passing sightseer.

At times like this the Tasmania of today appears to be an island determined to lose any identity it has or had apart from the mainland. This is the pattern of the times. The Featurism which began in the fashionable centres of Sydney, Surfers and St Kilda Road, now oozes out evenly, flatly to the furthest places where Australians live. The cool green mountains of Tasmania and the edges of the stony desert a thousand miles to the north are now bound together by the brittle bonds of fashion: Georgian for high incomes, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured plastics, paint and flat black steel welded into hard geometrical shapes. These self-consciously ‘contemporary' things now make up most of the veneer which smothers any indigenous materials and any cultivated aesthetic whether the object is a smart church in Darwin by a southern architect, or a ski hut by a New Australian in the Australian Alps, or an espresso bar designed by its proprietor in Brisbane. These things are not in themselves important, for their power to attract will pass in a year or two, but the spirit behind them, the emptiness of spirit behind, shows every sign of permanence.

These things are not Australian inventions. The contorted black frames and the vivid colours and accentuated textural contrasts are only rough offshoots of international modern decorative design. The meaningless space-age shapes are found by the truckload in America—on juke-box and diner, in the sordid strip developments— but there they are the muddy fringe of a driving movement of modern design directed vaguely towards the confident (smug, if you like) American dream. The blazing discords of colour are common enough in the East wherever an ill-trained Oriental designer, unfeeling and ignorant of the basis of Western style, essays Western fashion. The inept mixtures of unrelated shapes and colours are found often enough in Europe when unsophisticated designers attempt to emulate the juke-box's excitement but fail to follow the method in its madness. But nowhere else in West or East is the combination of smugness, ignorance and unsophistication sufficient to make a violent carnival style the ruling of the land. In Australia it is not only the commercial eye-catcher. It is accepted by strong-willed businessmen as the pattern for their offices, by the clergy for their churches. It is the summer dream of fresh young lovers planning the shape of their togetherness.

If the smallest signs of a reversal of the normal Australian drift and a release from the ugliness could be detected, emotional despair would be out of place in describing the scene. But there is no indication of a general change. There are, though, little hints of improvement in certain somewhat restricted areas of culture. A return to the innocence of a pre-industrial peasant aesthetic is not to be expected, nor necessarily desired, but a step farther away from innocence, towards a more sophisticated sense of style, would at least clean up some of the surface and buffer the shock assault of each new fashion. And in the foremost field of fashion, in clothing, there have been changes during the boom years which indicate increased awareness and an embryonic sense of style overriding the whims of fashion. The ordinary Australian woman's dressing may be as Featurist as ever and her collections of accessories and ornaments may still give visiting couturiers the vapours. But on the other hand more women now can afford to patronize better Australian dress-makers. And they can afford the more expensive and elegant materials which demand no fancy tricks in the cutting, no special feature inserts of richer materials, no festoons of art jewellery; in everyone's eyes the materials themselves look enviable enough to make diverting features objectionably irrelevant.

The advance in men's clothing has been more noticeable, and more significant because the very suggestion of attention to his own appearance is a retreat from the Digger's earlier stand when he allied smart male dressing with unnatural practices. The fancy-stripe mid-blue shirt is now plain and white. The last bunch-shoulder, multi-stripe navy worsted suit, by which Australian tourists once could be identified anywhere overseas, has practically worn out. Before 1955 men's tailoring was done as a country cousin version of Savile Row. Now it is American in pattern, style and cut, from the Ivy League stripe to the center (sic) vent. The tight, triple-toned brown Fair Isle pattern pullover, which was once wool's greatest contribution to informal masculine wear, and was worn throughout winter beneath the multi-stripe navy suit, has been replaced by various looser, bulkier sweaters in plain colours, Even the convict cut hairstyle is losing popularity. Frequently now the hair is allowed to extend down the sides of the head close to the level of the top of the ear.