The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  Austerica thrives in the matted fringe of the entertainment business, as in the fake American accents on the radio and television, the crew-cuts in the Australian magazine illustrations laboriously plagiarized from American journals, and all the muddled Americana of the clothing fashion world. Advertisements of all kinds, displays, window dressing—all the visual trivia of modern Australia—are dominated by the Austerican outlook, for Austerica’s credo is that everything desirable, exciting, luxurious and enviable in the twentieth century is American. Therefore the more one copies America in every visual and aural detail, the better for all concerned. In pursuit of this idea, the good Austerican displays unerring judgement in selecting all the wrong things, all the worst aspects of many-faceted USA. He lives by the law of the American magazine, but not necessarily the best magazine, and never the latest copy. For the Austerican has one firm business rule which qualifies his desire to re-create America: he believes that the latest American style is just a little too glamorous for Australia. About two years old is usually just right.

  The Austerican is entirely aesthetic, confining himself to visual and aural imitations. When he builds a show-room he copies, not the air-conditioning, but the flashiest ornament he noticed on Wilshire Boulevard. The Austerican has no time for the great socialized enterprises of the USA, like the multi-billion dollar programme of super-highways which bind together the United States with their meticulous planning, clockwork techniques, continuous planting and their ban on wayside advertisements. He prefers the mad scramble of the commercial strip, with its screaming signs, flashing light, plastic stone and paper brick. The Austerican excels himself in the hotel business. He buys an old pub, paints the entrance hall shocking pink, gives the surly waiters new uniforms and changes the name from The Diggers’ Arms to the Waldorf-Vegas. Wherever there are cars you are likely to find Austerica unalloyed. If Austerican aspirations could be epitomized in a single object it would be a mauve two-year-old American convertible with ocelot upholstery and white sidewalls. After the Second World War American cars were subject to the sternest import restrictions, and they were one thing the Austerican could not hope to imitate. But some used-car lots decorated their hoardings with dollar signs, and one of the most entranced advertising slogans in all Austerica ran across the fence of the ‘Reno’ car lot in Richmond, Victoria: ‘Open up those golden gates—the biggest little used-car lot in the world.’

  Perhaps the Holden, General Motors’ Australian car, advertised as ‘Australia’s Own Car’, is the best example of Australia’s happy acceptance of second-hand Americana. With sales higher than all other makes put together, its body styling keeps straight on the track of its richer American cousins at a measured distance of two models behind, while it indulges the ravenous appetite for multi-coloured effects and disdains labour-saving mechanical innovations such as power braking or steering. ‘We’re not ready for automatic transmission yet in this country,’ explained one car salesman in an Ivy League suit when the 1960 model Holden arrived on an expectant market with its old gear lever intact. ‘General Motors are still selling coloured beads to the natives,’ remarked one non-buyer. His was a minority report.

  Austericans sometimes are frustrated people who imagine that their own country is restricting them and is unappreciative of their talents in mimicry. Some of them float in a dream of residing one day in the land flowing with homogenized milk and maple syrup. They live with a hopeless yearning for the dazzling Hollywood night and the Life life.

  The genuine wonders of America pale against the American ability in projecting herself overseas in an enviable, desirable image from every angle. If the projection is true for three-quarters of the way, about a quarter of the total perhaps is not in fact as perfect as it seems in the magazine-film-television presentations. One of the great strengths of America is the gentleman’s agreement throughout the mass-communications industry to maintain a continuous stream of mutual congratulation. The big companies like to take the minutes of their ‘commercials’ on television reminding audiences that all they want from life is to continue being one of the essential providers to Americans of the world’s best way of life. ‘This could happen only in America,’ announces the National Association of Manufacturers in its programme showing new industrial processes, ‘because we have a free competitive system.’ A first principle of the American way is the unhesitating acceptance that American home life and housing are the best in the world. Other well-housed nations like Sweden look at the acres of derelict walk-up apartments surrounding every old American city and hide a polite Scandinavian smile. But Australia, mouth open, blind to the extraordinarily high average of her own standards, swallows the American unofficial propaganda intact. Every intelligent American is, of course, as aware of faults in his own country as all Australians are aware of Australia’s shortcomings. Where he differs is that he is only self-critical, not self-destructive. He recognizes faults and difficulties, but he sees them set against a sunny background, an ever-broadening horizon, and unwavering lines on millions of graphs rising firmly and steadily. Although there are numerous differences between the Australian and the American ways of living, the standard of well-being is much the same in each country at every level of occupation and worldly success—provided one balances cheaper swimming pools against more accessible beaches and intangibles like more variety against a more leisurely rat-race. But the Austerican doesn’t believe this. The Austerican, like the American, accepts the American National Association of Manufacturers’ version. If any American or Austerican is asked to describe a ‘Typical American’ he is likely to cite a thirty-year-old Ivy League college graduate junior-executive with a pretty wife, two cars (one an Oldsmobile; the other ‘one of the low-priced three’), a Ranch Style house, two children, a Cocker Spaniel, a small swimming pool and some wholesome hobby like 3-D photography. On the other hand, the Australian, even in the prosperity of the nineteen-sixties, retains a backlog of pessimism built up in the first half of the twentieth century when little prospered except the spirit of suburbia. Thus if you ask an Australian to name a ‘Typical Australian’ he does not take the Australian equivalent of the optimistic American model, but a tradesman living in a Housing Commission estate, treating his harassed wife and sniffling child in an ill-mannered way and bettering himself only by supporting union action for shorter hours. The Australian is inclined to survey his surroundings not only without the American’s rose-coloured spectacles but with grey sunglasses that cut out all the highlights.

  These respective national attitudes are very relevant to the design of everything which makes up the background culture of the two countries. The unassailable optimism of the American climate breeds confidence in design; the American consumer is extremely pleased with something that looks American. But the Australian customer is by no means attracted to anything that looks at all Australian. This is an essential commercial principle to be borne in mind in any design, especially for the lighter side of life, especially for the leisure trade. For this reason, the capital of Austerica is the capital of Australian holiday resorts: a town called Surfers’ Paradise on the Pacific in the south-eastern corner of Queensland, centrally situated on a fifteen-mile stretch of glorious beach with a floating population of some 150,000 holiday-makers.

  Surfers, as it is popularly called, is something of a phenomenon. It is one of the few nationally recognized resorts, attracting people from two and three States away. It grew up in the nineteen-fifties around a nondescript little beach hotel which happened to have this unlikely carnival name: Surfers’ Paradise. It is a musical comedy of modern Australia come to life. It is a fibro-cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint. It has some big hotels, Lennon’s and Chevron, but mostly it is souvenir shops, wooden night-clubs with ‘fabulous floor shows’, bikini bars selling floral wisps of bathers and Hawaiian shirts through windows open to the footpath, ill-lit cabarets, over-lighted cafes, indoor planting, outdoor denuding, beer gardens, signs, hoardings, posters, neons, prim
ary colours—purple, green and orange straight from the brimming pot. The strident signs of the motels are rivalled by those of the shops of the ‘Financiers’, ‘Subdivision Specialists’ and the eager drive-in banks. By day the illusion is disturbed by a little too much unpaved, dusty, yellow earth between the roads and the footpath, but it comes into its own in the warm evenings, lit by pulsating neon signs or, where there is nothing to advertise, simply by festoons of globes. At night it could be any American tourist town, from the smells of open-air grilling to the sounds of splashing from numerous flood-lit swimming pools.

  Surfers has some impressive natural attractions: magnificent scenery in the hinterland, the wide, white beach, and a prevailing cool wind which is almost as effective as San Francisco’s ocean breeze on the other side of the Pacific. Summer and winter the wind blows off the water from the east, gathering strength nearly every morning about ten-thirty, taking the hot edge off the dazzling sunlight. But it blows a low cloud of sand over the beach, driving the local inhabitants into the township for their coffee and real-estate deals. There, in glass-fronted offices, the accepted dress is the lightest cotton shorts and shirt. Waitresses at an espresso bar wear some sort of reduced sarong. A stockbroker stands on the footpath outside his office-shop on the yellow Pacific Highway dressed in black bathing trunks, briefcase and a flapping floral shirt. Everywhere in the streets, shops and cafes, chocolate-brown limbs bulge out of short sleeves and shorter trouser-legs. There is a feeling of adventure and excitement, rare enough in Australia. You might call Surfers a sort of cream, or thick skin, skimmed off the top of Australia’s mid-century boom. It is rowdy, good-natured, flamboyant, crime-free, healthy, and frankly and happily Austerican. It sets out to be a little Las Vegas. It is proud of being a poor man’s Miami. See the names of the motels and guesthouses flashing against the starry black sky: ‘The Las Vegas’, ‘Honolulu’, ‘Edgewater’, ‘Beachcomber’, ‘New Orleans’. Drive down Sunset Boulevard. Read the menus at the ‘bar-B-cues’ beneath the dusty palms: ‘Southern Fried Chicken’, ‘Chicken in a Basket’, ‘American-Style Pancakes and Maple Syrup’. Eat at the ‘Los Angeles’, ‘Bar 20’, or the ‘Chuck Waggon’. Rent a house in ‘Florida Gardens’ near the district known as Miami.

  Or you may wish to buy a block for your dreamhouse on Paradise City, one of the subdivisions of reclaimed land behind the town. Paradise City was opened and offered in 1960 by Bruce Small Enterprises. The four-colour, six-page brochure for this ‘sub-tropical haven…as rich in earthly blessing as Man and Nature could devise’, told a story of typical modern Australian enterprise which no parody could better. Mr Bruce Small visited Miami, USA, in 1958, the brochure reported, and there, ‘on the lavish holiday coast fringing the Everglades, he studied the great land reclamation projects in which the area abounded. His imaginative mind was seized with the parallel that existed on Queensland’s own Gold Coast—land awaiting development at the hands of a bold and enterprising builder…Bruce Small was fired with just such enthusiasm that had motivated Australia’s first gold pioneer. He, too, sped home to bring his vision to reality…’ Some of the principal propagandists for the happy state of Austerica are self-appointed and acting in an honorary capacity: for instance the journalists of the jabbering centre pages of the newspapers. For years before television came to Australia—it was politically delayed until 1956—the little screen represented high-pitched excitement to Austericans. They used to read in the ‘Star-Dust’ gossip columns of the dailies and the women’s weeklies chatter about the private lives of American and British television ‘personalities’ who had never been seen or heard in flesh or shadow in Australia. If there seems something of moon-madness in this, it followed a thoroughly familiar pattern. Australians are well conditioned to vicarious delights in the entertainment field. For about two years before My Fair Lady was staged in Australia its score was barred by its copyright-holders from radio and television and record shops, although a market existed in illegal tapes and smuggled discs. Notwithstanding that the enjoyment of the stage-show was denied her, the Australian woman was tempted during this trying period with numerous drapers’ advertisements for ‘My Fair Lady Fashions’. Unlike the gossip journalists, advertisers are propagandists with a clear ulterior motive, continuously exploiting and egging on the Austerican attitude. One model of the Vauxhall, advertised in the New Yorker as distinctively British, was advertised in Australia as ‘The most American-looking car’ on the non-dollar Australian market. Developing the same theme, a sports-trouser manufacturer advertises his ‘American-Style’ product with the caption, ‘The best you can buy with Australian money,’ and another Ivy League tailor announces: ‘The Slim American Look, backed by a hundred years of British craftsmanship.’ But the best, unimpeachably authoritative and almost official mouthpiece of Austerica is, of course, commercial television.

  For years Australian leisure has been taken against the steady recorded beat of an all-American hit parade, but till 1956 a high proportion of the entertainment on the evening air was of Australian origin. When television came, the greatest mesmerizer of them all, it neutralized the last insulating effect of the Pacific Ocean for an ever-growing number of steady viewers. Before four years had passed television was dominating the entertainment field and American programmes were dominating television. These were not the sensitive, experimental, or intellectual programmes of the New York studios. They were the half-hour snippets which Hollywood grinds out especially for British and Australian audiences: mostly ‘Austerity Westerns’, made to a cynical formula for assured popularity. These films crowd the peak viewing hours, and leave Australian material room only in token corners of the programmes.

  The television invasion did not happen without letters to the newspapers, or raised voices in Canberra, or talk of quotas, or patient explanations by the television station proprietors of the economic difficulties. But even while the argument proceeded it was understood by everybody that the Australian mass audience was delighting in the Hollywood throwaways. Meanwhile, the better educated section of the community usually was evading television altogether, for a variety of reasons including intellectual snobbery and the odd self-denying puritanism of the country. So the children’s watching hours were and still are filled with dusty Californian violence and sudden death, and cryptic conversation loaded with hints of more unspeakable evils out in the tin shed. Who could believe there is anything degrading in these stories? For the victims are always male. Australian censorship, always sensitive in matters of sex, Catholicism, and family life while expansively tolerant of brutality between males, is careful to snip out every scene of women being struck, thus safeguarding the Australian girl’s illusions. Then, two or three times a week, Hollywood briefly drops its guns for a view of the Family Room, presenting a picture of enough sweetness and light in toffee-coated human relationships to dissolve any callouses which tender minds might have developed through the earlier torture scenes. The effect of all this is apparently as paralysing to Australia’s television performers as it is numbing to the viewers. Whenever youths and girls do get an opportunity to appear in live performances they change sooner or later into cowboy clothes. Singing, one of Australia’s most notable native talents, is done silently. As the recorded voices of California’s favourite singers roll on along their relentless, changeless hit parade, young Australians occupy the screen, mouthing the words and engaging in desperate soundless antics in a sort of last rite of American worship.

  As every producer knows, the mass audience rejects the possibility of any Australian entertainment being entertaining. To most teenagers, the idea of an Australian culture clearly evokes all that is stodgy, shaggy and shudderingly boring, while America represents all that exciting, glamorous, sparkling, neon-lit fun.

  So the Austerican influence spreads out from centres like Surfers, on the air and in the movies, magazines, comics, all the time-killers, along the country highways with their rearing motel signs: ‘Pan American’, ‘Bellair’, ‘San Fernando’
, flashing to the solid beat from teenage dance spots: ‘Campus’, ‘Embers’, ‘Ivy Club’, rushing in to fill the vacuums in every vacant corner of the Australian mind. The most fearful aspect of Austericanism is that, beneath its stillness and vacuous lack of enterprise, is a terrible kind of smugness, an acceptance of the frankly second-hand and the second-class, a wallowing in the kennel of the cultural under-dog. The Austerican knows he can’t do more than imitate feebly the atmosphere he craves. He knows his country is not America, as the over-enthusiastic Anglophile, in his morning suit at a Government House garden party in a temperature of a hundred in the English poplar shade, knows it is not England. They know—all Australians know very well—that here is a country far removed in space and time from both the Old Country and the rich country, with its own separate, special truths, values, realities and strengths.

  And what is Australia’s essential truth? Something too big and frightening to contemplate, thank you. For the present it is much wiser and safer not to be too definitive; and why need one be when all the trimmings anybody could wish for are available for the picking in the cultural markets overseas?

  This is how one turns to Featurism. Not prepared to recognize where, when, or what he is living, the Australian consciously and subconsciously directs his artificial environment to be uncommitted, tentative, temporary, a nondescript economic-functionalist background on which he can hang the features which for the moment appeal to his wandering, restless eye. Thus he shapes his houses, industrial areas, towns and cities, often making them carefully, sometimes even beautifully in an indeterminate way, but almost always noncommittally. He knows that he can change the features tomorrow if necessary without much trouble. He does not care that the only thing of any meaning in art, the only creation, ultimately the only satisfaction in life, lies in understanding himself and making decisions accordingly.