The Australian Ugliness (22 page)

To use the term innocent in any connection with the Rum Hospital may be questionable. As Morton Herman has recounted in
The Early Australian Architects
, this ingenuous-looking building with its two storeys of colonnaded verandas was the subject of extreme discomfort for good Governor Macquarie, and is linked historically, through Greenway, with St James's. The Government paid for the hospital not in money but by giving its three builders a virtual monopoly of the rum trade. The building cost some £40,000 but the monopoly was withheld from the builders. Macquarie was censured from England. In 1816 when Greenway was appointed Civil Architect and Assistant Engineer, his first commission was to survey and report on the structure of the hospital. ‘He tackled the job with the enthusiasm of a man determined to prove his superior abilities,' Herman writes. ‘It would be tedious to list all the defects he recorded with savage delight…Of the fronts of the buildings he said: “There is no classical proportion in the column, not being regularly diminished. Its shaft is set wrong upon its base; the cap is set wrong upon the column, and is of no description ancient or modern…” '

This was an architectural stylist's, if not a literary stylist's, description of a non-scholarly building whose designer did not consider himself important enough to see that his name was recorded somewhere for posterity's information. Under all the circumstances it is not surprising that the frustrated, vain, impatient Greenway entertained himself by castigating all evidence of incompetence that he could find. But in fact the hospital's innocent shattering of all the correct English rules of how a column's cap and base should go was a featherweight counteraction to the extraordinary strength of a design which was really too good to know better. Whether the unknown designer was an untrained tradesman or an inexperienced gentleman, and despite all the monkey-business in connection with the contract, the integrity of the Rum Hospital's design cannot be questioned. Its two storeys of evenly spaced windows, its round columns spaced their own length apart, and its plain hipped roof, together make up an example of unaffected, direct employment of simple building materials which could still serve as a model today.

Unassuming idiomatic building of this kind is still standing, far away from the professional or amateur designers, scattered wide through the outback. Out in an ochre paddock where there is no one to impress, where a group of sheds and silos cluster round a square black pool of shade under the iron veranda of a lonely station homestead, here one can still find some of the most genuine construction in all Australia. It is even accepted as charming in its own way by the modern city worker, because the sun-bleached materials and the sprawling informality of the farm-house cluster is symbolic of the basic strength and romance of the nation.

The ordinary modern suburban house of the speculative builder who is not too harassed by his competitors or his advertising agent is likely to be non-Featurist. Its materials, its brick veneer and high tiled roof, may be chosen usually for the stodgiest and most pompous reasons, but when the whole easy-going statement of the conventional Australian villa box with its projecting lounge-room is made in the lazy Aussie drawl of a brickie and his carpenter mate it has its own rough dignity. Without doubt the plainer examples will be held in some reverence as genuine products of their day by future generations of serious architectural students. Australia's vernacular villas fall short of their own best intentions only in the uncouth treatment of finishing and decorating. When a district of them is given a touch of control, co-ordination and stylistic direction, as in the Department of Works' housing in parts of Canberra in the middle 1950s, the social triumph of the nation's housing policy is justified artistically. In Narrabundah, by Captain Cook Crescent, the Australian dream comes close to breaking through the surface into reality. Unfortunately, however, the number of unfussed non-Featurist cottage-villas is diminishing as the small speculative builder-designers begin to succumb to organization-builders modelled on the American image: their houses often complete with American Colonial details.

Areas where the old non-Featurist development is general enough to make an environment have been eroded continuously, but fortunately some can still be found. It happened that certain pioneer districts lost their popularity after only a few decades of settlement and thereafter remained for all practical purposes suspended in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this way many outback townships have been comparatively frozen.

Perhaps the most accessible area still displaying the remains of the old vernacular is in Victoria. The drive between Melbourne Airport at Essendon and the city is as Featurist and forbidding as the drive to any other big city from its airport. But, conversely, the continuation of this drive in the other direction, from Essendon away from Melbourne along the narrow Bulla Road, in the footsteps of the first pioneers, is rewarding. These are the yellow plains which attracted so many of the earliest settlers in Victoria and so few of her subsequent citizens. The road twists crazily at intervals to cross sudden gorges, through arid, pretty, heartbreaking country dotted with little centenarian buildings. The place has hardly been changed, except by rot, since the middle of last century. A wooden hotel by the roadside decays like a sheep's carcass in the field behind it—a few of the original wooden shingles still clinging to what ribs remain of the roof skeleton. Most of the wall and fence construction was done in the basalt of the area, the hard, heavy rock known as bluestone. This is slightly variegated, ranging from a deep brown to grey, but the predominant colour is a dark slate hue, with a touch of blue. It is extremely durable but its hardness makes it difficult to work, and the early builders were usually content to leave it with an axed rock face.

The typical cottage of the area is a diminutive bluestone box with a hipped galvanized iron roof and a veranda all round. This, unlike the Sydney model, has a separate roof tucked tightly up to the underside of the gutter of the main roof. Two of the earliest Victorian settlers squatted on the hard ground here in 1836. They were William Jackson and George Evans, members of John Pascoe Fawkner's party of adventurers who came that year in the schooner
Enterprise
from Launceston. William Jackson's brother was Samuel, the architect. He missed the first trip in the
Enterprise
but caught it on its second voyage and followed his brother out to the northern plains. The two of them built the first substantial shelter in the district: two rooms, one the living-room in white-washed pisé with a wide split-log roof, the other a skillion bedroom in wattle and daub. This house lasted only twenty-four years. Samuel Jackson had a native talent, probably very little training in England, and an unembarrassed primitive approach to the historic styles. He soon moved down to the centre of things at the river settlement which was to become Melbourne, and as one of the first two architects (Robert Russell was the other) he participated in the early building boom. Nearly all his buildings of this relatively unassuming early era were suddenly outgrown when gold was found, and most of his Melbourne work was removed or remodelled almost before the mortar was set. The only memorial he left in Melbourne which has not been badly treated by time is his panoramic drawing of 1841 showing the frontier town he was helping to build. It is said that he crouched inside a beer barrel erected on a wall of his own half-erected Scots' church in Collins Street and drew what he saw through the slits in the barrel's side as he removed and replaced one stave after the other while turning slowly round. The finished sketch is twenty feet long and about two feet high. It is in the National Historical Museum in Melbourne, and is a vivid illustration of the non-Featurist opening years: muddy, horsey streets inhabited by a few pelt-clad Aborigines and fashionably dressed townspeople, and a community of little eaveless-box houses and shops, one or two more substantial masonry buildings, and beyond them all the ring of straggly gum trees retreating slowly before this strange invasion.

George Evans built more solidly than his neighbour William Jackson. He used the abundant basalt and his house is still standing firm, the oldest if not the prettiest of several bluestone buildings in the Sunbury area with the authentic early earthy charm. It is just out of Sunbury on the north side, away from Melbourne. Signboards term it ‘Victoria's Oldest Homestead'. A stony road runs two-and-a-half miles to Emu Creek, a rocky seasonal watercourse, on the far side of which the old house sits among its barns, a picket fence and a bright cottage garden. There is an ornamental monument erected on the centenary: 17 August 1936. Unlike nearly all buildings which have survived a century or more in Australia, George Evans' house is very well kept by owners conscious of its historical importance.

Nevertheless it is possible to imagine what it was once like beneath the cream and green paint. It consists of two blocks, built at different times, set in a right-angled L. The walls are colour-washed basalt, and the roof, now galvanized iron but probably shingle or sheet-iron originally, is pulled down in a sad, droopy brim over the flagged verandas. The L turns its back to the afternoon sun like an Aboriginal settling for the night, and the rooms are strung in single file along the wings, approached through solid wooden doors from the verandas. The windows are stock colonial twelve-pane double-hung sashes. The house is called, with terrible nostalgia in this yellow-ochre country: Holly Green.

Sunbury itself is a dark green patch in a valley of the bleached hills. It is atypical of Australian country towns, with its comparatively narrow roads and lack of an indisputably main street. Sunbury is a spoilt village. In a country where there are no unspoilt old villages this term can be complimentary, for Sunbury is only spoilt, not ruined, and it is still possible to see what it was in the pre-metal age, in Victoria's quite early youth before gold and cast iron. The basalt buildings are only partially overwhelmed by advertisements. The shady trees still meet above the dusty yellow footpaths. Several shops look undisturbed after a century. One on the corner of Evans Road and Brook Road exemplifies an early nineteenth-century style which has disappeared from Melbourne: a two-storeyed shop with an almost inaccessibly narrow balcony on the upper floor cantilevered on projecting timber joists over the footpath.

Most of the architectural history of the world could be adequately covered by an account of roofs, and most of the distinctive qualities of Australian building have been concentrated in the shapes and materials of roofs, designed in the country to give shade and to collect water and in the suburbs to give an air of permanence and to hold gargoyles. Corrugated galvanized iron and, more recently, corrugated asbestos-cement, are the staple materials of the north and the outback. From the air, the cities grow progressively freer of colour as one travels inland. The grey-white corrugated sheets give a non-Featurist coherence to man's feeble assault on the outback, and practically unify many country towns. From the air, even a town as big as Alice Springs is a whole town. The iron roof is accepted in the country, and can be sentimentally regarded by an armchair bushman of the city. But when one transplants the sheltering corrugated iron parasol from a country house to a suburban cottage in Melbourne or Sydney it is judged hideous, as estate-agents attest. Then if it is moved again to a beach area it is judged highly contemporary and pleasing again, for Featurist aesthetics are sensitively relative to social position. Nevertheless, that elusive thing, the Australian national style of architecture, is most likely to be found, if it can be found at all, in the droop of a roof.

A wayward example is at Geraldton, WA, over the Wicherina Reservoir. It is all roof, the biggest in the country, measuring no less than 17 acres. It is made of fragile corrugated asbestos-cement on a hefty wooden frame, and was built simply to reduce evaporation by protecting the water supply for Geraldton from the direct sun's rays. Here, then, are all the ingredients of local colour: water so precious it must be housed, the local eucalyptus wood—jarrah—given the gruelling task of supporting wide spans while standing deep in water, and a favourite adopted material, asbestos-cement, all put together with bush carpentry and a bold idea. From the ground it seems nothing. The frame is flat, a few feet above the water surface, and the asbestos-cement sheets are loosely butted together without the usual laps, for their only function is to provide shade and certainly not to divert rain water. From the air the whole roof can be appreciated as a model of Functionalism. It is straight on two sides where it abuts roads, but for the rest has a wandering perimeter following the natural contour of the water below. Indeed by moonlight it looks so wet that the pelicans of the area are continually breaking the sheets and killing themselves by landing at high speed, feet thrust forward in expectation of water. It is said that the reduced evaporation saves the drought-afflicted town annually about twenty million gallons of water, or £2,500. Nevertheless, the big roof probably would never have been thought of, or built, except for the Depression, when it was conceived to make work.