The Australian Ugliness (6 page)

Sydney's third main visual contribution, the contemporary bar lounges, are a product of only the last two or three years and their influence throughout the rest of the country has not yet taken full effect. In these constructions Sydney has given vivid architectural expression for the first time in the twentieth century to Australia's phenomenal beer consumption and gregariousness. Other popular Australian mass activities have not yet produced distinctive architectural types, nor are they of a kind likely to produce new forms. Watching Australian football may have distinctive qualities as an experience: consuming two twenty-six-ounce cans of beer per hour while hemmed in to the bleachers by eighty thousand roaring rain-coated fans. But the stadia required for this activity are much the same as sports stadia the world over. Again, the distinctive habit of having night-club performers entertain two or three thousand people at a time has not yet produced its own building type. Sydney's new beer palaces, on the other hand, are unique.

The ordinary Sydney male drinking bars are not very different from those of any other Australian city. Late on any long summer afternoon, with the temperature and relative humidity both in the high eighties, hundreds of cream-tiled and stainless steel trimmed bars roar behind their street doors with the combined racket of glassware, beer dispensers, electric apparatus and amiable oaths. Below the solid jam of red male faces there is a jungle of brown arms, white shirtsleeves rolled to the armpits and slathers of beer held in enormous glasses; above face level are shelves of seldom-opened spirits and never-opened exotic liqueurs and a grey mist of cigarette smoke swirled by a mammoth chromium-plated fan past an inaudibly mouthing television screen.

This is the bar pattern throughout Australia, with minor regional variations. The new arrangements in the newest hotels of Sydney make a first attempt to civilize the beast. They start with the revolutionary concepts of providing for both sexes and for fresh air. The space set aside in the hotel is usually a very big room, the size of a nineteenth-century ball-room but with no more than a few square feet of free floor area. All the rest is occupied by small, square, metal-legged, plastic-topped tables and a great number of oddly proportioned metal chairs: of normal height but with plastic seats hardly wider than a hand's span. The big room usually opens through a glass wall on one side to a terrace, perhaps twice as expansive as the room, which is similarly packed with little tables and midget chairs. A muffled Dixieland rhythm from a four-piece band in one corner of the big room manages to rise at times a decibel or two above the level of the conversation of the brilliantly coloured throng perched on the pinhead chairs round the tables of beer glasses. Always there is a television set in view and in some cases, as at the hotel in Sylvania, a southern suburb, the bar terrace extends to take in also a view of a swimming pool.

The total facility is not exactly describable, in international parlance, as a beer garden, and it is certainly not a night-club. But it is somewhere between the two and the unvarying decorative style heightens the ambivalent atmosphere. The usual colouring is in saturated primaries. The usual materials are split stone veneer, chromium-plated steel, anodised aluminium, sprayed vermiculite plaster, crocodile-patterned hardboard and striated plywood, not to mention the customary plastics. Every element is separated from the next by a dramatic change in tone and texture and is divided within itself by violent contrasts of colour introduced in stripes, wiggles, or random squares.

Sydney is a summer city, tensed for action round an outdoor life. Every year, when the thermometer drops, winter comes as a bitter unexpected turn of fate. Now the wind thrashes rain among the pinhead chairs on the terraces and against the window-walls, and the drinkers in the unheated ball-rooms huddle closer in their woollens around the icy beer glasses on the plastic tables. Somehow it is a part of the architectural style to put two-tone crocodiled surfacing on the wallboards before comfort in the unseen air.

Sydney is the unconstituted capital of Australian popular culture. It is larger than Melbourne, older than Hobart and prettier than Perth, and it has by nature and by acquisition most of the things that visitors remark as typically Australian. Sydney is indeed the most proudly Australian of all cities, and the frankest admirer of American ideas. Sydney is alive, impatient to be even bigger and to short-cut ways to be smarter. It is a shop window city. It has more new houses and television sets with fewer new sewerage mains. It has more illustrated advertising painted on higher walls, more moving neon signs, the oldest rows of narrow terrace houses curving over twisting hills in the most picturesque slums. And in such modern palaces of amusement as the musical bar lounges, Sydney carries the contemporary style of the country to its highest intensity.

The Australian ugliness is bigger and better here, but in substance Sydney is only a sharper example of the general Australian townscape. There is beauty to be discovered here, in two categories, natural and artistic, but the trouble is that it must be discovered. The fine things, from the glimpses of magnificent landscape to the rare good buildings, old and new, are all but suffocated by the ugliness. The ugliness also falls into two categories: accepted and unintentional. Australia's accepted, recognized ugliness is no more than the normal blight which afflicts growing communities, especially rich, young, industrialized, growing communities. Part of it is the blight of age: the old buildings, the slum houses, the leaning fences, hoardings, structures of all kinds that were not very good in the first place and have long since outlived their prime, but are left behind to decay as development moves away to new fields. Another part is the blight of expediency: trees uprooted to save diverting a few yards of drain, the ill-considered and uncoordinated assortment of posts, hydrants, bins, transformers, benches, guards, traffic signs, tram standards, a hundred other necessary public appliances, and neons, placards, stickers, posters, slogans—all bundled together like an incompetently rolled swag with loops and tangles of overhead wires. This kind of mess, as made by any progressive community, sometimes is done unconsciously, without thought or care. But often it is done consciously, with a little regret, but with resignation to what seem to be the inescapable facts of industrial life. The mess is accepted without pleasure or complacency, yet without sufficient distaste to kindle a reaction. It is unfortunate, but it is not tragic.

Unintentional ugliness, on the other hand, has an element of tragedy, because it comes from better visual intentions. It is the ugliness that starts in a spark of revolt against the depressing litter of the artificial environment and ends in an over-dressed, over-coloured, overbearing display of features.

The Australian ugliness has distinctive qualities, but in substance it is the same as the thing that has been called: ‘the mess that is manmade America.' These were the words of the London magazine
Architectural Review
when it devoted an issue in December 1950 to a devastatingly illustrated attack on American urban and suburban culture. If a means of arresting this visual blight could not be found soon, the
Review
said, ‘the USA might conceivably go down in history as one of the greatest might-have-beens of all time.' These comments were not warmly welcomed in the USA. ‘One should expect a man breaking in a wild bronco to spoil some grass,' wrote the New York magazine
Architectural Forum
in reply. Pained reaction to the English criticism reached from the architectural journals to the literary papers. Visually educated Americans had long been conscious of the mess, and they resented the
Review
's implication that it took someone from the cultural side of the Atlantic to notice it. Nevertheless, the outside criticism seemed to spur more self-examination, and the better magazines sometimes now are almost as outspoken as the English visitors were. And meanwhile the
Review
discovered that something just as bad was happening at home in England: a world of universal low-density mess was creeping over the once-lovely English landscape.
Outrage
, written by Ian Nairn, in June 1955 issued ‘a prophecy of doom'—the doom of an England reduced to a universal mean and middle state, with none of the real advantages of town or country and the disadvantages of both. Nairn pictured: ‘…an even spread of fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks, and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country and back into the devitalized hearts of towns, so that the most sublime backgrounds…are now to be seen only over a foreground of casual and unconsidered equipment, litter, and lettered admonitions.'

The mess of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no respecter of a country's age, but then in countries older than Australia other centuries still contribute something to the scene. Nowhere yet is it as extensive as in Australia.

Like Sydney, all Australian towns and villages look their best in the longest view—from high in the sky—when the details of the mess are lost and the spaciousness and extent of the private domestic life can be appreciated best. The love of home can be seen in the great speckled carpets spread wide round every commercial centre. The carpet is coloured, somewhat patchily, a dusty olive in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne: the mixture of terra cotta roofs and greenery in the gardens, and silvery-grey in the north and inland where most of the roofs are corrugated iron or fibrous-cement. By night the carpets are black velvet sprinkled wider with brilliant jewel lights than any other cities in the world with comparable numbers of people.

From the distance there is continuity, unity and the promise of comfort in the mushroom roofs and the bright background of tended green. But as the plane circles lower near the airport it is apparent that the green of the average suburb is a horizontal veneer no higher than the reach of a diligent gardener's snippers: lawn, compact shrubs, annuals, nothing high enough to threaten with shade the pink terrazzo of the sun porch. And as the plane drops closer and lower still one can glimpse occasionally under the eaves of the mushroom roofs and see the battle of the colours and the decorative iron skirmishes. Still the sandblasted koala bears and the yacht-race scenes on the entrance hall windows are not visible. They are not seen until one has landed and is driving through the suburban streets, by which time it is difficult to avoid noticing also the featured columns supporting the corners of the entrance porches and the plasticized silky-oak featured front doors inside the feature porches, and the black plastic silhouette cockatoos featured on the feature doors.

Featurism has low surface tension. It has the quality of penetrating ever further into the artificial make up. Ten years ago all park benches were dark green (sympathetic) or white (challenging). Then they too began to be featured in contemporary colours: a featured red bench, a blue bench. A little later the separate planks or battens of each bench were featured; red, blue, green, yellow alternating. This technique began about 1950 (as far as one is prepared to track it down) in the sudden light-hearted suggestion of a councillor of Prahran, Victoria, who convinced his fellow councillors that this would restore some much-needed gaiety to the drab green foliage of the parks and playgrounds. Within a few months almost every other council in the suburbs of Melbourne had followed Prahran's lead, and later the multi-coloured paint spread throughout the country. It happened at about the same time that garden pergolas, which had been traditionally monochromatic, began to change many colours, each beam of the pergola featured in a different hot pastel hue. Later the most popular treatment for pergolas, trellises, fences, beer-garden screens and other similar garden adornments was to make them in a squared grid and to feature the inside edges of each square in a different primary.

Colour, this most striking single element in the modern Australian scene, is a comparatively new feature. It is a product of the last half of the 1950 decade, the do-it-yourself era, chemical advances, and the keen competition of the largely British-owned paint companies. Heavy advertising has encouraged the idea of happy family painting bees using lots of different pigments on walls and ceilings, and to pick out features. Ordinary colour-cards grew from six to sixty hues in this period. Multi-colouring brightens the creative task of redecorating for the amateur, and ensures the opening of a profitable number of partly required tins of paint. Again, pigment is relished by the pressing and printing machines which produce many modern surfacing materials. But, irrespective of practical and economic influences, strident colour is a direct popular cultural expression of easy living. It is a reflection of the money in the modern pocket, just as equally intense, but heavier, richer colours in wallpaper and gilded plaster reflected the last boom of the 1880 decade. Between the booms pigment was mainly something to hide dirt marks. A drab series of duochrome fashions reflected the comparatively flat progression of the country through the first half of this century. About 1900 the two acceptable colours were brown and cheese. After the First World War they were sometimes green and grey. Cream and green predominated on all paint colour-cards from the Depression to the war, although the theme was sometimes varied late in this period by the more daring cream and cherry or cream and sky blue in kitchens and entrance porches. Even the rakish jazz-moderne of the pre-war milk bar and picture palace was never a painted style. It indulged in colour only in the neon tubes.