The Australian Ugliness (23 page)

Some of the main clues to the realities of Australian building are likely to be found in unrespectable buildings of this sort, rather than in the charming examples of Colonial monumental architecture which are still to be seen in preserved relics under the protection of organizations like the State National Trusts. And although modern Australia naturally is proud of her rising sky-scrapers and spreading factories, the visitor will not find anything particularly indigenous in the steel frames, aluminium curtains, and glass walls of the busy commercial and industrial buildings. He may eventually decide that Australia's main contribution to civilization during the twentieth century is in the experimental development of the unexciting region that is neither lonely nor busy: the suburb, where most Australians live, in private houses which many have built and many own, and where even those under-privileged by nature and by society may own a private domain with a certain degree of civilized comfort. It is in the suburb, the real Australia, the home of Featurism, that one must look first for any improvement in the Australian ugliness.

In the decade after the Second World War much of the national economy and most of the resources of the building industry were devoted to the provision of separate houses and the few small schools and shops which are scattered among them. The growth continues at slightly reduced rate. These single-house suburbs are a creation of this century: they are the late-nineteenth-century English suburbs cut down to one storey, stepped up several degrees in architectural temperature and made available not only to the middle class but to every class and category in society. For half a century Australia has taken for granted that every man deserves his own house and should be able to shape it in some special personal way.

Modern Australia is not entirely suburb; there is still the outback and the night-club, the woolshed dance and the art-film society; but it is mainly this half-way area, a crosshatched smudge on the map round each capital city and larger town, in which may be found all the essential drabness and dignity of Australia. Much earlier than those of America, the Australian suburbs demonstrated the attainable heaven of the common man's century, the little private detached castle, physically as comfortable as the latest mass-produced techniques could make it and as individual as your own necktie. The suburb is Australia's greatest achievement (not ‘proudest' achievement; there is little or no collective pride in the suburb, only a huge collection of individual prides). More people, per head of population, over a longer time, have enjoyed here the dear millstone of a detached house, separated from the next by at least eight feet, a private den for the family not visited by squire or servant. Statistics show that Australia—along with New Zealand, as usual in these things—has the highest number of privately owned separate houses per head, with the highest number of separate bedrooms, the greatest volume of running water in the most bathrooms, the tallest ventilating stacks to the most conscientious sewerage systems—all in all, indisputably the world's highest minimum standards of health and safety ordained by building codes. Ventilation, for example, is particularly well provided for. Most State or municipal building codes require every house to have permanent holes through the external walls of all rooms, and in some places even the spider-ridden darkness beneath the bath must be ventilated. However, all the statistics and regulations which prove the country's unchallengeable claims to one of the highest levels of suburban development do not mean that a new Australian house is bigger or better equipped than, for instance, a new American house. It is not. The statistical superiority merely shows that Australia started much earlier along the same road.

Australia never had much tolerance with the idea of very rich or very poor people, and, except on the harbour banks near Sydney, has not built many big apartment blocks. Residential architecture began with adaptations of English country houses, strongly coloured by Colonial experience in India, spotted on the hills round Sydney Harbour. On the sixty-feet-wide lots into which the town of Sydney was divided by Governor Phillip, little bald box cottages kept their own company, well apart from the neighbours and well clear of the border of bushland surrounding the settlement. From the beginning one of the dominant influences which helped to shape communities from primeval Africa to feudal Europe was missing: there was never a necessity to congregate for mutual protection. However, when Sydney and the other centres began to grow to towns of reasonable size the houses naturally began to draw closer together, not for safety but simply for convenience, to reduce walking distance.

The second half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of the terrace house; one, two, and sometimes three storeys high, the single-fronted, narrow houses pressed together with identical brothers in long lines close to the footpaths round the industrial areas. The terrace era ended with improved transport. As the suburban railway systems spread crooked fingers out from the city hubs into the surrounding farmlands, the concept of Australia's space as inexhaustible was reawakened in townspeople. Now the toiler of the industrial revolution saw for the first time an escape from the scaly environment of the factory. Here the worker who knew his worth, and none knew this better than the late-nineteenth-century Australian, could find a good reason for slaving at the bench. Out in the hills he could have a home which he could call his own without stretching the economic facts too far.

Thus in the late eighteen-eighties, as the cities fattened, the foundations of the suburban ideal were laid. These of course involved much more than a house for every family. They introduced a suburban lore that became known, some seventy years later, as the Australian way of life. By the time it was known by that name, recognized and extolled, by the time, in short, that it became self-conscious, Australia's popular culture was becoming inextricably tangled with the American and the lore was losing distinctive flavour, but in the meantime a number of characteristic qualities had become ingrained. There are still in Australian suburbia many indigenous ingredients mixed up with the stone-veneer garden barbecues, the flourishes of wrought iron and other features of the fashionable home which seem like a distorting-mirror image of the advertisement pages of the
Saturday Evening Post
. The essence of Australian suburban life is unreality: frank and proud artificiality. To this extent it is English. In some countries, like Sweden, the suburb may be supracountry. In America it may allow itself to be coyly rustic. But in Australia it is the city's bastion against the bush. In certain areas—parts of Wahroonga and Castle Crag in Sydney, Beaumaris and Blackburn in Melbourne, St Lucia in Brisbane—gum trees prosper among the houses and a countrified air is not discouraged. But for the most part modern Australian living is represented best by the shorn look already noted. The countryside in which the suburb grows is shorn of trees. The plot in which the house builds is shorn of shrubs. The house itself is shorn of the verandas which the colonists knew, shorn of porches, shelter and shade. It sits in sterile, shaven neatness on its trimmed lawn between weeded, raked, brilliant beds of annuals, between the grey paling fences which separate each private domain from its neighbours. Very little is planted in the first place which is expected to be or is capable of growing high; and nature never can escape the tidy gardener's sheers. The pioneering spirit still means change from nature, right or wrong, and the Australian suburban objective is still to carve clearings in the native bush and to transplant on to naked soil a postage stamp replica of the ruling idea in international high-life.

Sometimes the early architects tried hard to reach a compromise with the Australian climate and the indigenous materials, but the exotic model usually dominated. The ruling styles came in turn from England, Italy, Holland via England, Spain via California via New York. The flow of fashion may be traced from adaptations of the laws of unoffending Georgian taste in the first half of the nineteenth century, through exotic romanticism in the second half, through promiscuous plagiarism in the first half of the twentieth century, to general Americanism in the second half. But while the pattern of imposed fashion has thus fluctuated over the years, the basic policy of tidy artificiality has remained unchanged since the moment when Governor Phillip's sailors of the First Fleet leapt ashore and made the first clearing by the beach. The white man is still a foreigner in Australia, still looking at the fragile greys and ochres of the landscape through European eyes. And in common with his contemporaries anywhere else he is also still a stranger to the industrial age. ‘We can't bear its ugliness when it's not turned on,' the Featurist aesthete says of the one naked, unaffected, unprettified thing in his living-room: the television screen. He puts beautiful Oriental cane doors to fold over the glass tube when visitors come. A sense of reality would appear to be the last thing desired. This may be consistent with the avoidance of realities in other aspects of Australian life, with the prim censorship and with ostrichisms like the blue laws which rule the Australian night. But is it what the Australian really wants?

No one can answer this question because the Australian, in common with most people in the world, has never seen so much as a glimpse of the alternative. Featurism is continuously sold to him by the unofficial international propaganda machine for conspicuous consumption: not merely by the overt advertisers, but by the mutually boosting mass-communication decorators: the
Houses and Gardens Lovely
magazines from far and near, the syndicated home-maker tips in the women's pages of the daily press, the decoration service of the paint and wallpaper and appliance companies; everyone selling the thought: you can never afford a good home but you can always afford another nice feature.

Nowhere in Australia is there a significant sign of an escape from the shallowness of this approach. On the contrary the drift seems to be downwards again. The crusader spirit which followed the Second World War produced eventually a high point in co-ordinated progressive endeavour early in the nineteen-fifties, when it was possible for the master plans for the bigger cities to be adopted by popular consent and for Elizabeth, Australia's only experiment with a new town in the European sense, to begin building north of Adelaide.

Elizabeth, as already noted, started with some idealism. If it had not the most imaginative site—the flattest of treeless plains when there were pleasant slopes nearby—it had at least the full treatment of satellite town-planning theory. But look at Elizabeth now after some eight years of construction, with about sixteen thousand people living in the scientifically spaced separate houses, with its civic centre and shopping malls. Here is a horizontal slice of pure contemporary Australia, all the best and worst of it, and most of the unique qualities of it. English migrants make up much of Elizabeth's population. There could not be a better place for them to assess the typical Australian way of life while they are making up their minds whether or not to identify themselves with the new country. Apart from a few three-storey flat blocks under construction near the centre, almost the whole of the town is single-storied. Among the bungalows, as the English occupants call them, an attic design appears at rare, regular intervals. Otherwise the town presents a rippled sea of low pointed roofs with a surface some twelve feet above the plain and extending a mile or two in every direction, unbroken but for pipes, wires, and television antennae. In designing the houses the State was benevolent. The South Australian Housing Trust did its best to conceal its formidable powers. Confronted with a rare and wonderful opportunity to create a unified environment, an Australian suburb with visual direction, the Trust instead calculated with all the science at its command a balanced reflection of the average established Australian taste. Anxious not to expose itself to the criticism that it was regimenting people into soulless barracks, it produced a variety of designs, ranging from a low glassy Contemporary to the attic style already mentioned, with its touch of the Tudor. The proportion of each style in the mixture was apparently calculated to be relative to the proportion of acceptance of the style in the community at large. One result is that the charge of creating a monotonous, controlled design has not appeared among the criticisms of the Trust. So successful has the Trust been in this regard that it is difficult to tell where its design ends on the Adelaide side of the town. And it is difficult to pick out the free lots in the neighbourhoods where normal private design and construction are permitted.

Elizabeth, so Australian, is the visual antithesis of new towns in Europe which have been based on similar international town-planning theory. It is also the antithesis, socially as well as visually, of European urban housing as found in the Hansa district of West Berlin. On the fringe of the iron curtain, at the same time as Elizabeth was being planned, a number of world-famous architects were invited there to contribute one design each to a park to be spotted with multi-storey flats. The appearance of the complex when opened in 1957 was co-ordinated, controlled and exciting—very conspicuously so, for the propaganda effect of consciously progressive housing on eyes behind the curtain was even more important to West Berlin than progressive housing. Here families lived in the smallest possible huddle of rooms as high as fifteen stories above the lawns but almost within feeling of the pulse of a city's life. In Elizabeth each family has a quarter or more of an acre to itself, a lawn for its own games, and some seventeen miles to go to the nearest rumble of urban stimulation. Compared with the Hansa development on any intellectual or aesthetic or artistic or stylistic basis Elizabeth is a complete and derisive failure. Yet on a social basis it promises a prospect for family life second to none in its economic range anywhere in the world: as healthy as any, more private than many, and more capable than most of sustaining nonconformist life.