The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  For years Australians have been noted for seeking an answer from visitors. ‘What do you think of Australia?’ ‘How do our cultural achievements stand?’ ‘Is our work world-class?’ Amiable visitors respond by praising the high peaks of development. Less agreeable ones condemn the troughs, and the nation seethes with anger at them. For what was requested of the visitors was not criticism, favourable or unfavourable, of specific efforts, but something more fundamental: an assurance of how the averages stand, how the standards stand in the world scene. If one is not an initiator, if one lives by copying, it is essential to be reassured on such points at regular intervals.

  But what has happened to the wild colonial boy, the weathered bushman, and the sentimental bloke that they are reduced to this? The typical Australian of folk-lore was too well-adjusted to worry about others’ opinions of him; he knew where and what he was. Visitors built up a picture of him. ‘Quick and irascible, but not vindictive,’ said J. T. Bigge in 1820, looking at the first native-born generation. ‘Unenergetic, vain and boastful, coming too quickly to a weak maturity, too content in mediocrity,’ said Anthony Trollope in 1871. ‘They have no severe intellectual interests. They aim at little except what money will buy,’ wrote J. A. Froude in 1886. ‘They have too often the self-sufficiency that is gotten on self-confidence by ignorance,’ said Francis Adams in 1893. ‘They have in their underside,’ he added, ‘the taint of cruelty.’ Max O’Rell in 1894 agreed, but found Australians also ‘the most easy-going, the most sociable…’

  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.

  Cruel but kind; it is easy to present a picture of romantic repulsiveness in describing Australians. Those who love the country best are inclined to try to make the inescapable faults sound interesting to outsiders. Thus Colin MacInnes introduced Sidney Nolan’s paintings of Australia to the London public in 1957: ‘The People—the “Aussies”…have terrible defects: they are cruel, censorious, incurious, flinty-hearted, and vain as Lucifer at being all these things. But their virtues! Phenomenally brave, open-hearted, shrewd, humorous, adventurous, fanatically independent and, most blessed of all, contemptuous of fuss.’ Cruel again, but humorous at the same time: yet in fact Australia’s national failings are not as interestingly hateful as this. Thoughtlessness is closer the mark. The failings are most often the obtuse failings of adolescence, and as embarrassingly mixed and uninteresting as any adolescence to outsiders.

  In the mixture, the English ingredients are likely to be found as pure, semi-digested lumps. The essentially English foundations of the people and buildings are immediately recognized by visitors, especially non-English visitors. They note the dark brown hush of the conservative clubs in the bigger cities as well as the noisy habits of humour and slang, not to mention accent, which have distinct Cockney qualities. They also note the awe in which the Old Country’s aristocracy is still held, the immutable practice of utilising unoccupied English military gentlemen for Governors, the habit of appointing Englishmen to key cultural positions like the chairs of universities and the editorship of the Sydney Morning Herald, the way an authoritative command in an English accent can still make the toughest union man jump to it. They note that the difference between an English and an Australian accent is a class distinction, and that a visiting Englishman cannot really take seriously any intellectual or artistic idea expressed in the Cockneyesque whine of many highly educated, highly intelligent, but tone deaf Australians. The persistence of mother-country snobbery was the theme of Ray Lawler’s second play, The Piccadilly Bushman, following the outstanding success in London of his uncouth Australians and their seventeenth doll. The Bushman was judged moderately unsuccessful by Australian audiences, not simply because of certain demerits it had as a play. It was the theme that received the sharpest criticism. Most Australians decline to recognize the patronage in the British and American attitude in such enterprises as Vogue Australia or the Holden car, and do not wish to be reminded of the facts that their country is still known abroad as an artistic and intellectual desert, and that they themselves would never be taken seriously without their denying to some extent their Australian upbringing and background, and that highly talented Australians in any of the non-useful fields of art or science have to face a dramatic decision early in their careers. They can stay here in easy-going comfort with their talent and their frustrations both working at half pressure, or they may wrench themselves from their own country in order to develop themselves.

  J. D. Pringle, one Englishman who spent five years as Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, described in his book Australian Accent how the Englishman expects to feel at home but finds a foreign atmosphere and can never settle down to easy relationships with the Australian: ‘All too often the Englishman feels he is resented and the Australian that he is patronized.’ ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘the Americans, especially the West Coast American, finds nothing frightening or strange…no subtle class system, no sophisticated manners, no intellectual pretensions.’ Mr Pringle thus found a curious paradox: ‘Australians are strongly pro-British but tend to dislike individual Englishmen, while they like individual Americans but tend to disapprove of the United States.’ Yet there have been many visiting Americans who obviously felt that the opposite is true. In fact, until the Second World War any visitor was something of a curiosity and was liable to find anything but the easy-going democratic friendship which Australians claim to display to each other.

  Air transport, which cut the time of travel from Europe or America to about one-twentieth—one or two days by air against four weeks on the water—has had more effect on the antipodes than people of the northern hemisphere are likely to realize. A visitor now is less likely to find discourteous curiosity, and, be he British, Continental or American, his accent no longer will raise eyebrows or overmuch impatience.

  Australians hope, however, to astonish the visitor. Nothing is enjoyed more than seeing a look of surprise on the face of some new arrival who discovers glass sky-scrapers where he might have expected kangaroos. On the other hand the bush atmosphere is prized chauvinistically by people who would not dream of going beyond the suburbs except in a Jaguar. Much vicarious enjoyment is to be had savouring the beery swashbuckling legends of bushland, and contrasting imagined down-to-earth ways and manners with the effeteness of the English or the pampered artificiality of Americans.

  As if to assist the bustling modern visitor in getting a good, quick general impression, many of the more characteristic qualities of Australian cultural and social habits are concentrated at hotels, public eating and drinking places, and in public transport. In the ordinary course of living nowadays it might take a visitor months to meet a satisfying amount of the surly service from maintenance men, civil servants, and so on, for which Australia is known abroad. But the armour of casualness and Diggerism which still clings to many enterprises connected with travel immediately heightens the colour for visitors, while it distracts those who have ambitions to create a conventional tourist trade. As anywhere, taxi-men teach the visitor a lot about t
heir towns, intentionally and unintentionally. In Sydney the convention is for the passenger to sit in the front beside the driver, but he has the alternative of taking the back seat since he has to open the door for himself. In Adelaide, a city retaining some colonial graces, the driver leans across and opens the door to the seat beside him for his fare. In most country hotel dining-rooms the convention is for strangers to be crowded together into one table no matter how many other tables are empty and available. When a special effort at graciousness is being made, as at the Yallourn Hotel, Victoria, the waitress introduces the diners to each other by name so that they may chat uninhibitedly as she stacks them into as few tables as possible. Most people who have occasion to travel Australia’s highways retain favourite stories illustrating country hotel service. I recall a hotel in Yass, New South Wales, and a waiter with arms bare to the pits dealing out soup bowls like playing cards round the packed table and responding to my circumspect enquiry about the possibility of a glass of wine with the succinct phrase: ‘I think you’ll be stiff, mate.’ Many of the stories involve table wine—Australia’s great social subdivider— and usually centre on the expression of some rotund gourmet on being presented with iced claret or sparkling (sweet) sherry.

  It is possible to read into all this reflections of the Australian mythology, of mateship and down-to-earthiness, of the creation of a Diggerdom where all men are equally inferior. But a less complicated explanation of these habits and attitudes is that they ease the strain of the working day by reducing stretching, laundering, and care; and Australians generally have been free enough from want to be able to afford carelessness. Not caring has been a traditional Australian mental luxury stolen from conditions which made physical luxury unlikely. As Max Harris has written, ‘The “she’ll do”, “she’ll be right” phenomenon is not indicative of colonial laziness, but an attitude of the hopelessness or uselessness of doing any better. It is to be correlated with the other idea of “you can’t win”.’ But today the picturesque carelessness of the Australian scene is threatened. The horizon of attainable comfort is broadening for everyone and physical luxury is no longer out of the question for any healthy worker. This removes the justification for the philosophy of ‘near enough’. Now you can win. Now the old contempt for giving service, and contentment with a life of protracted smokeohs, are restrained by the continuous demands of labour-savers and leisure-occupiers run on hire-purchase.

  In the main cities a few sky-scraper hotels have been built. Some were designed in the USA, and some are being operated by American hotel machines. In the country the old hotel with a two-storey iron veranda wrapped around reluctance, impatience and primitive plumbing is feeling the cold draught from a new air-conditioned competitor: the motel. The growth of motels through the second boom period was watched by Australian travellers with almost touching faith. But as the business grew it seemed to develop to some extent in the shape of a craze: not exactly like the yo-yo or hula hoop, but at least a little like midget golf. In its approach to the public, in social and aesthetic values, in style, the motel often turned out to be a substantial offspring of the merry-go-round or the juke-box. Even the picture theatre in its heyday never sank to this level; it was merely outré in a pompous sort of way. The visitor might wonder at the frenzied appearance of many of the buildings to which he entrusts himself for the night. Why should anything with the serious public duty of housing weary travellers choose to deck itself in a buffoon’s costume of patchwork and particoloured trappings? There is, unfortunately, nothing mysterious about it. The raw colours, the checker-board painting of fibro panels, the jaunty skillion roofs and angled props to the eaves, the autumnal stone veneering and all the rest of the catchpenny style are not seen to be anything but normal, gay, smart Contemporary design.

  Some of the bad motels make their substantial contribution to the mess by the Australian roadside in the old spirit of defiant carelessness: red and yellow is good enough as a bright colour-scheme; she’ll be sweet. Some others are done with the new anxious care, but only a businesslike care for detail, without as yet any knowledge or any wish to buy knowledge of visual design. The effect in these cases is as distracted and discordant as the results of carelessness, and rather more fearful in implication because of the neater and more permanent, self-satisfied finishes. The new careful Australian has as yet no apparent understanding even of the cynical ways of using design to serve business. In the case of the American motel, for instance, there are three precisely shaped and balanced symbols. Outside, on the highway, there is the eye-arrester, the car-stopper: a monumental illuminated structure done in the richest carnival style. This is the symbol of a good time, promising vaguely exciting justification for jamming on the brakes. Once the driver has stopped, however, the jazzy tinsel no longer strikes the right note. Now, as he hesitates before signing the register, his confidence has to be built up. So the porte-cochère and the office block are made in a firm, undeviating Functionalist manner. This symbolizes efficiency and good accountancy. Then, once he is hooked, he may be allowed to relax, so he is given something soothing, familiar and cosy. The bedroom wings are made Colonial Georgian: symbol of gracious living. This sort of design approaches the limit in exploitation and prostitution of the art of architecture. But at the same time it is deliberate, studied, ordered, and for these reasons only is preferable to the often illiterate, always ill-considered and utterly undisciplined roadside style of Australia, where the carnival symbolism is the only symbolism, and often is unconscious at that.

  The American flavouring in Australia is today more evenly assimilated than the pure English elements. It is the American now who comes from Mecca. The comparative similarities between Australia and America, socially, historically and in size, are clear. At times like the gold rush period a century ago when many from California transferred to the Australian diggings, and the Second World War when many American soldiers were based in Australia, a strong feeling of identification with the United States has been apparent. Naturally Americanism has been no less pronounced than in other parts of the world, and in the years after the Second World War the American influence in popular arts and superficial character amounted to mesmerism. The west coast of the United States was the model in the minds of many people who were in a position to shape Australian development. What Paris was to the nineteenth-century land baron, Las Vegas was to the knight of commerce and industry in the middle of the twentieth century. Thousands of shops with their sloping windows and signboards, and hundreds of little roadside factories with their tiled faces striped with stainless steel and tiles: acres and acres of the new non-residential expansion round the cities were built in Drive-In Style, a confused austerity recollection of the Californian dream. When this approach extended to the richer parts and the professional level it resulted in manifestations of the Cadillac cult as rich as could be found anywhere in the world. Most new hotel lobbies, office foyers, and places of luxurious entertainment are found to display the special kind of arbitrary lushness best represented by the shapes of that enviable car with its heavy swell of comfort and the almost scientific restraint of its vulgarity. But the essential thing to be noted about American influence in Australia is that, unlike the English, it never survives the ocean crossing intact. The most mesmerized imitators of America always add a trace of Australian accent and subtract a measure of sophistication, tending continuously to transform Australia into a state which can be called Austerica.

  Austerica is on no map. It is, as an Austerican advertisement would say, not a place but a way of life. It is found in any country, including parts of America, where an austerity version of the American dream overtakes the indigenous culture. As its name also implies, it is slightly hysterical and it flourishes best of all in Australia, which is already half overtaken by the hysteria. Austerica’s chief industry is the imitation of the froth on the top of the American soda-fountain drink. Its religion is ‘glamour’ and the devotees are psychologically displaced persons who picture heav
en as the pool terrace of a Las Vegas hotel. Its high priests are expense-account men who judge the USA on a two-weeks’ hop between various Hilton and Statler hotels and return home intoxicated with conceptions of American willingness of labour (judged by the attitude of martini waiters), the average American standard of living (judged by a weekend at the managing director’s house on Long Island), and American godliness (judged by a copy of ‘Guideposts…an inspirational publication’, which is left by the bedside for every one of the hotel guests of Mr Conrad Hilton).

  It is inevitable that Australia should be drawn deep into the aura of American influence in this second half of the American century. However, there is a difference between being stimulated by ideas from another country and copying the detailed shape of its thinking, habits and fashions. The former is normal international cultural exchange, and America makes no bones about being in this market. She absorbs ideas from outside with avidity, but she changes and develops them. Australia’s method of copying America, on the contrary, is in the second category: the Chinese copy, the parrot’s imitation, the little boy mimicking his big brother’s actions without fully understanding what he is doing. As this is one of the best ways to kill one’s own national identity, Australia today, culturewise (to use a favourite Austerican means of expression), is sinking out of sight into the Pacific.