by Robin Boyd
THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS
PRAISE FOR ROBIN BOYD
AND THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS
‘Effortlessly readable, sharply observant and witty, The Australian Ugliness is an Australian classic. Robin Boyd’s prophetic, timeless work shows his distinctive gifts as a public intellectual, a creative thinker, an architect with a sense of history and a writer of rare talent.’ BRENDA NIALL
‘Robin Boyd was a social historian when political history was the vogue in Australia. He was a long way ahead of his time. The natural and built environments were not yet issues of common concern, but they were already his special concern. Whatever he did had the mark of originality and flair.’ GEOFFREY BLAINEY
‘The Australian Ugliness remains an indispensible account of the built environment on the biggest island. More than that, it is a passionate and committed study of national character from which there is still much to be learned.’ ALAN SAUNDERS
‘Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness is a classic of cultural criticism. Judging by the unstoppable spread of treeless, wooden-fenced houses in outlying suburbs and bad buildings in prominent places in Australian cities, it’s a voice that needs urgently to be heard again.’ PATRICK McCAUGHEY
‘Incisive wit…Boyd portrays most eloquently Australian suburbia… the merciless bulldozing of trees to turn farmland around our cities into the endless, low-density sprawl of individual house subdivisions.’ HARRY SEIDLER
‘The Australian Ugliness remains a most important book. As our major metropolises near five million population, the suburban sprawl with unimaginative architecture creeps on relentlessly and green wedges shrink. Bold new ideas are needed and Robin Boyd continues to be an inspiration.’ SIR GUSTAV NOSSAL
‘Robin Boyd’s book clarified for all of us that Australian ugliness—how we would bludgeon the land into fertility, cut forests so that power lines could go through, so that cars could take precedence over everything… Conservatism reigned supreme; it had to be like that regardless of whether it was logical, whether it was appropriate, whether it responded to climatic variations…The buildings were the same from Melbourne to Darwin, and they still are the same.’ GLENN MURCUTT
‘Fifty years on, Robin Boyd’s brilliant analysis of the enduring, yet underappreciated, place of the arts and creativity in Australia rings true. He suggests there is “something about the Australian sun and meaty diet that produces a high proportion of talented people”. The continuing international success of our artists, actors and architects proves this. But, as Boyd argued, we need to value creativity more: it is an essential part of the spirit of Australia.’ JULIANNE SCHULTZ
‘Robin Boyd wrote wittily of the post-war Australian suburbia that Barry Humphries knew as a child, and which formed the basis of much of Humphries’ satire and, in turn, the satire of Kath & Kim. Boyd’s waspish observations about the “material triumph and aesthetic calamity” of the suburbs apply more than ever today.’ SIMON CATERSON
‘Remains remarkable…for Boyd, architecture means more than the fabrication of shelters: it is the art that most explicitly measures humanity’s relationship to nature…His book is less a work of architectural criticism than a scathing literary satire; it belongs in a tradition inaugurated in the eighteenth century by Pope and Swift, who also scourged ugliness and considered it a moral flaw as well as an aesthetic failing.’ PETER CONRAD
‘As interesting and amusing and untechnical as a novel.’ SIR JOHN BETJEMAN
‘Lucid, passionate and witty.’ GEOFFREY SERLE
ROBIN BOYD, 1970.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK STRIZIC.
ROBIN BOYD (1919–71) is arguably Australia’s most influential architect.
An idealist who believed that good design would improve the quality of people’s lives, a tireless public educator and outspoken social commentator, he designed more than two hundred buildings and wrote such classics as Australia’s Home. The Australian Ugliness was first published in 1960.
CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS is the author of four novels: Loaded (made into the film Head On), The Jesus Man, Dead Europe and the award-winning bestseller The Slap, which is being made into a series by the ABC.
JOHN DENTON is a Director of Denton Corker Marshall, a proudly Australian international architecture and urban design practice with offices in Melbourne, London and Jakarta. PHILIP GOAD is Professor and Chair of Architecture, and Director of the Melbourne School of Design, at the University of Melbourne. GEOFFREY LONDON is the Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia and the Victorian Government Architect, having previously been the Western Australian Government Architect.
THE
AUSTRALIAN
UGLINESS
ROBIN BOYD
FOREWORD BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
AFTERWORD BY JOHN DENTON,
PHILIP GOAD & GEOFFREY LONDON
DRAWINGS BY ROBIN BOYD
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from
wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Robin Boyd
Foundation 2010
Foreword copyright © Christos Tsiolkas 2010
Afterword copyright © John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 1960 by F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne; second edition, 1961. Published in 1963 by Penguin Books; revised edition, 1968; second revised edition, 1980. This fiftieth-anniversary edition published in 2010 by The Text Publishing Company.
Cover and text design by W. H. Chong
Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Boyd, Robin, 1919-1971.
The Australian ugliness / Robin Boyd.
ISBN 9781921656224
Architecture--Australia. Architecture and society--Australia.
National characteristics, Australian.
720.994
‘It is taken for granted that Australia is ugly…’
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Christos Tsiolkas
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
1 The Descent into Chaos
2 The Featurist Capital
PART TWO
3 Anglophiles and Austericans
4 Pioneers and Arboraphobes
5 The Non-Featurists
6 The Innocent Era
PART THREE
7 The Pursuit of Pleasingness
8 The Ethics of Anti-Featurism
AFTERWORD
John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London
THE ROBIN BOYD FOUNDATION
FOREWORD
Christos Tsiolkas
A few years ago I was sitting in a friend’s apartment in Barcelona. She was living on a small street off the Parc de la Ciutadella, near the Arc de Triomf, walking distance from the tourist mecca of the Barri Gòtic. It seemed full of old-world character, with rows of ramshackle working-class apartments that housed the city’s immigrant population. Every evening we would hear music outside on the street: the frenetic beating of drums; th
e call and response of English- and Spanish-language hip-hop; the chanting of the Call to Prayer. Music, motion, life lived on the streets—everything missing, I said, from our cities back home. My friend, an expat, nodded her head in agreement at my criticisms of Australian suburbia. But a Catalan colleague of hers who had joined us for a drink rolled her eyes in frustration at our whingeing. ‘You haven’t seen our suburbs,’ she challenged me. ‘You’ve come in straight off the Metro and think that this is the heartbeat of the city. Well, ninety per cent of people in Barcelona don’t live here. They live in the suburbs, as I do, and the suburbs are ugly as sin. Let me take you there.’
She did take me there. And she was right; the suburbs of Barcelona—wave after wave of ugly grey concrete towers that begin where the boundaries of the tourist maps end—are ugly. But they are not ugly in the way our Australian cities can be ugly, in the way that our suburbs and towns are ugly. Europeans and Australians do not breathe the same air, walk the same earth, see with the same light. Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness reminds me that not only our landscape but also our history is unique, and that both have been crucial in creating this space called Australia. It is one of the remarkable joys of reading Boyd’s classic study of the Australian approach to shaping our environment that we are presented with a social history that explains us to ourselves. With pithy dry wit, with an exuberant passion for his subject, Boyd dissected the progress of architecture and urban design on the Australian continent. Fifty years after the book’s publication Boyd’s observations still resonate, still make sense of Australian sensibility and culture. In the devastating third chapter, ‘Anglophiles and Austericans’, Boyd begins to essay a description of the Australian character by observing that it is ‘Cruel but kind’. Then he proceeds to distil all my ambivalence, all my hatred and love for something called Australia and a people called Australians into one deadly accurate paragraph:
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 an
d 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.