The Australian Ugliness (2 page)

Cruel but kind—a precise description of one element in the pervasive ambivalence of the national character. Here also are vitality, energy, strength, and optimism in one's own ability, yet indolence, carelessness, the ‘she'll do, mate' attitude to the job to be done. Here is insistence on the freedom of the individual, yet resigned acceptance of social restrictions and censorship narrower than in almost any other democratic country in the world. Here is love of justice and devotion to law and order, yet the persistent habit of crowds to stone the umpire and trip the policeman in the course of duty. Here is preoccupation with material things—note, for example, the hospitals: better for a broken leg than a mental deviation—yet impatience with polish and precision in material things. The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal opportunity for all men, except for black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks.

He got us.
He still gets us.
Boyd understands that like all peoples we are contradictory; he also understands what many subsequent social commentators and historians have forgotten, that we are responsible for ourselves.
The Australian Ugliness
offers the reality of Australia once the excuses and justifications and squabbles over history are stripped away. This book is written with precision and clarity. Half a century hasn't diluted the potency of the brew. Reading it is cleansing.

Of course, many things have changed since the first publication of
The Australian Ugliness.
Some of Boyd's beliefs about aesthetics and form were to be very quickly challenged, firstly by the rise of the Pop artists who celebrated the kinetic energy of mass culture, and then by the ascendancy of postmodern theories of architecture and art that destabilised traditional notions of the beautiful and of the functional. Boyd may have been just too good an architect, too fine an aesthete, to give himself over to the undisciplined energy and chemical rush of the ‘new world'. I don't share his suspicions of the grandiose, the gaudy, or of suburbia for that matter; and I possibly prize the vital over the sublime, desire the vigour of the ‘ugly' over the lassitude of the ‘beautiful'. (In my home town of Melbourne, for example, I am glad for the paean to both consumerism and wog aspiration that is the new Doncaster Shoppingtown—and I'd also give a nod to the new Epping Plaza—and I admire the boldness and anti-gentility of Southbank and Federation Square.)
The Australian Ugliness
was written on the eve of the sixties. The wogs, the war, the drugs, notions of the beautiful and the correct and the proper—so much seemed about to change.

Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil.
Boyd was not clairvoyant but he was remarkably prescient. He foresaw how, within a generation, migrants to Australia would take on the pioneer-settler ethos of the new world and recreate themselves anew, cast from an Australian consumerist mould. His criticisms of ‘arboraphobia' and of the denial of the continent's dryness in the planning of our towns and cities must ring more powerfully now than when the book was first published. In the twenty-first century, which has seen the rise of a vapid empty nationalism that feeds off our insecurities and cultural cringe (
What do you think of Melbourne, Mr Cruise? What do you think of our argument, Mr Hitchens?
), a book like this one reminds us that no, this isn't the best of all possible worlds. We can, we must, do much better.

For there is finally no excuse for the unrelenting ugliness, the dismal depleted landscape that confronts us as we drive from the airport into the city. The endless freeways that devour the greenery are partly at fault, as is the slipshod history of urban Australian design. But as the woman in Barcelona reminded me, the failures and blind spots of suburbia are now not only confined to the new world. The suburbs—a new-world legacy—foster the aspirations of people across the globe. Boyd's book, his arguments, arose from a specifically Australian context but carries warnings and admonishments and questions for anyone interested in built environments, in the histories of society and place. I recognise myself and I recognise my world in this book, all the ugliness and all the beauty.

THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS
ROBIN BOYD
FIFTIETH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION

INTRODUCTION

The ugliness I mean is skin deep. If the visitor to Australia fails to notice it immediately, fails to respond to the surfeit of colour, the love of advertisements, the dreadful language, the ladylike euphemisms outside public lavatory doors, the technical competence but the almost uncanny misjudgement in floral arrangements, or if he thinks that things of this sort are too trivial to dwell on, then he is unlikely to enjoy modern Australia. For the things that make Australian people, society and culture in some way different from others in the modern world are only skin deep. But skin is as important as its admirers like to make it, and Australians make much of it. This is a country of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.

Under the veneer, practically all the impulses that lead to the culture of Australia are familiar in other prosperous parts of the world. Abstract art, prefabrication, mass-production and perverted Functionalist ethics provide the moulds that shape things in Australia, as they do wherever English-speaking people build communities. The extroverted flair of the Latin countries and the introverted refinement of Scandinavia are not to be expected. The chief characteristic is inconsistency; good and bad muddled together, sophistication and schoolboyishness, toughness and genteelness, all strongly marked and clearly isolated, but so cut up and mixed up that no one can be quite sure which in the long run predominates. Much the same can be said about the collective qualities of the Australian people. The national character is as cut up and mixed up as can be. Yet undoubtedly a distinctive quality does exist and is to some extent recognized by visitors immediately they arrive. Naturally, then, the visitor is inclined to look expectantly for more evidence or confirmation of it in the streets and homes and in all the popular arts and crafts. He is often disappointed, not because there is no Australian character in building and display and product-design but because it is so confused and so subtle that all but the historian or an intense student are likely to lose patience in the search. The climate of design is something like an uninhibited California. It is diametrically opposed to that of Sweden, where the average exhibited taste is cultivated and there are few who rise above or sink below. In Australia the artificial background of life is all highs and lows. A modernistic folly in multi-coloured brickwork may sit next door to a prim Georgian mansionette on one side and a sensitive work of architectural exploration on the other.

If, with the utmost patience, one can penetrate the superficialities and can extract the elements of a consistent Australian school of design, one finds it is not definable in conventional artistic or architectural jargon, but is bound up with the collective character of the Australian people. It is not, as might be expected, a result of uniformity of the climate or the geography. Contrary to the established impression, Australia is not all blazing sun. The populous coastal crescent is mostly mild, and often freezing. The centre is a furnace, but few visitors to the cities complain of the heat. Most have occasion to complain of unheated rooms. Neither is the terrain monotonous nor the larder of building materials limited. An Australian town may be on a lake, a mountainside, a river, or may spread along behind a white ocean beach. After the first clumsy convict settlements, the whole world's building products have been available most of the time and have been used at least as freely as in any country.

The elusive quality in Australian design which can be called typical, and can be recognized if transported abroad, is not a fundamental original quality. It would be better to call it a thin but well-established Australian veneer on international Western culture. This veneer and its concomitant tastes are the substance of everything peculiar in Australian living practices and artistic habits. Which came first, the veneer or the habits, has never been firmly established. One may ask, for instance, are the sex-segregated public drinking habits maintained because the hotels have no pleasant facilities for women, or do the hotels have hideous facilities for women deliberately: part of the old cult of masculinity? Both veneer and habits have strong effects on the aesthetic pattern which runs from sky-scraper to plastic doyley; certainly they have a stronger effect than the direct geographic or climatic influences. But this book will make no attempt to separate chronologically the chicken of human character and the egg of habit. It is simply intended as, firstly, a portrait of Australia with the background in the foreground and, secondly, a glance at the artistic philosophy which permitted this background to be so shallow and unsatisfying.

The recorded history of the visual Australian background has terrible gaps, but a few standard works of reference provide the essential information for anyone wishing to investigate the historical aspects which are cursorily referred to in these pages. On the old colonial work of the first fifty years, the book is
The Early Australian Architects and Their Work
, by Morton Herman (Angus and Robertson, 1954). The nineteenth century in New South Wales is covered by the same author in
The Architecture of Victorian Sydney
(Angus and Robertson, 1956). The cast iron age, with natural emphasis on Victoria, is described with beautiful illustrations in E. Graeme Robertson's
Victorian Heritage
(Georgian House, 1960). Much of the charm of Tasmania's past is recorded by Michael Sharland in
Stones of a Century
(Oldham, Beddome and Meredith, Hobart, 1952). South Australia still waits for a local inhabitant sufficiently enthusiastic about his native State to undertake the work. Western Australia and Queensland have nothing within stiff covers but the institutes of architects in each State have published illustrated collections of notable buildings.

I am indebted to the above books for references in the text, and to Professor C. M. H. Clark's
Select Documents in Australian History
(Angus and Robertson, 1950) for the quotations from early visitors to Australia. Parts of Chapter Three, starting with the passage on Austerica, were first published in the Literary Supplement of
The Age
, Melbourne, in 1957, and parts of Chapter Four first appeared in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. The quotations from Ruskin are taken from
The Stones of Venice
and
Seven Lamps of Architecture
, those from Sir Geoffrey Scott are in
The Architecture of Humanism
, Rudolf Wittkower's is from
Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
, Le Corbusier's is from Chapter Two of
The Modulor
, and Piet Mondrian's is from
Plastic Art
. The mathematical ‘melody' in Chartres Cathedral is described by Ernest Levy in an MIT Humanities booklet, and A. S. G. Butler's comments are taken from
The Substance of Architecture
. Finally, the quotations from William Hogarth and Horatio Greenough are from two classic statements from opposite sides of the interminable debate. Hogarth's
The Analysis of Beauty
, edited by Professor Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), first published in 1753, details the rococo-aesthetic approach, and Greenough's
Form and Functions
, edited by Harold A. Small (University of California, 1947), first published a century later in 1852–3, states the rational-functionalist argument.

I warn you now: this whole thing is old hat. It was old hat when it was first published seven years ago and it is old hat now, but for different reasons. Its initial staleness was due to the fact that various English architects had discovered the ugliness of the technological age years earlier and had been writing about it and drawing it in the
Architectural Review
and elsewhere. It is old-fashioned now because the war against ugliness has become a cause which has wide support, especially among artistic conservatives, and when any cause gets as respectable as that it draws reaction out of the shadows to gibe at it. At this moment (but the situation may well change again in no time) urban, technological and mass squalor is in: ugliness au go go. It is, some say, a sort of Pop Art. For example, when a few architects in New South Wales published the latest broadside against non-design in 1966, called
Australian Outrage
, the critic Max Harris called them old fogies and found the photographs ravishing. ‘Vulgarism,' he wrote in
The Australian
, ‘is the very life force and dynamic of an affluent urban free-enterprise society…We have to incorporate outrage into our aesthetic. We can't stem the irresistible cultural tide, but we can change our aesthetic.'

This can be an acceptable proposition, in a certain half-light. Some of the early Functionalists around the turn of the century were truly anti-aesthetic and argued that honesty to the function was all that mattered. There was really no ugliness anywhere; just eyes which refused to break old habits. If we could all just switch over our aesthetic awareness in tune with the twentieth century, we would realize that the modern world of wires and poles, service stations and soft drink signs, cut-outs, whirlers, flags, fairy lights and mutilated trees, is a beautifully vital place, while real ugliness—first sensed in an unpruned tree—reaches a screaming crescendo in an open, virgin landscape. If Functionalism is a sound principle, then what could make more powerful visual sustenance than the service wires on their crooked poles and the jig-saw puzzles of advertising signs serving so truly the function of making suburban dollars?

If that argument appeals to you, please read no further. The argument which follows is that the ugliness in the streets of almost every city in the modern world is not art of any sort and is really not very pop either. It is as functional but as artistically heedless as an anthill and as accidental as a rubbish dump. No matter how one photographs it, draws it, looks at it, or describes it, it remains physically an awful mess. In any case negative, careless ugliness is not the worst thing. What really must concern us more is the positive, atrocious prettiness of bad design. The disease of Featurism, which sweeps Australia in epidemic proportions, is hardly less virulent and threatening anywhere that modern technology and commerce are in coalition. In describing the horrible Australian symptoms of this distressing international complaint, the one thing I have intended to prove is this: that every object made by man has its own integrity; that it should be an honest thing, made with an understanding of all its functions and with a sense of order. To learn how to make things like that is the main problem and duty of professional designers of all sorts; but this is a social problem too. To learn to appreciate sound design when it does appear is part of the essential artistic education of everybody; so it seems to me.