The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  In the busy house-building years after the Second World War Melbourne packed hundreds of mediocre villas into the few private gardens which remained from the early days in the better inner suburbs. The mansions of the boom years came tumbling down. In the space of a few months in 1955 three of the biggest—Werndew and Leura in Toorak, and Norwood in Brighton—were removed with extraordinary diligence. Not only were the large structures wrecked, but almost every tree was removed from the remnants of the estates which these houses had managed to hold round themselves. In each case the site was presented by the real-estate agent to a moderately eager public as a raked-over desert cut into little rectangles and innocent of any trace of the thousands of pounds and years of craft-labour spent on the vanished monuments, all hint of dreams and continuity gone. Destruction of this sort continues, and will continue despite the formation of the National Trust organizations.

  The Trusts grew up in separate States in the early nineteen-fifties, like mushrooms in the raked-over ground, for the ordinary Australian’s antipathy to nature and history is matched by the fervour of minority movements. The continuing destruction presents a hazard to anyone writing about Australian architecture and wanting to cite living examples. Before the ink is dry a building which seems important, permanent and invulnerable may be trembling to the first blows of the wrecker’s mallet.

  Certainly, some of the big old mansions of the boom period managed to find useful occupations in the twentieth century and live on borrowed time. ‘Labassa’, in Manor Grove, Caulfield, Melbourne, one of the most crested and curvilinear of them all, is still standing (at the time of writing) as a rooming house with its urns and statuettes and marble insets almost intact. ‘Fortuna’ is also standing. This was the vast home which George Lansell built himself in Bendigo, Victoria, beside the gold mines that provided his fortune. Lansell built the house with three floors of reception rooms, music rooms, banquet halls and galleries. He put statuettes on the parapets of the flat sunroofs, statues in the hall, on the stair landings, and in the temple of love that was reflected in the artificial lake. He put stained glass in each window— ‘east, west, home’s best’ round a circular stair well window—and mosaics on the drawing-room walls. He brought a shipload of furniture and features back from his trip to the Continent. His bedroom suite, in solid wrought brass, was a prize-winning exhibit which he picked up at the Paris Exhibition. ‘Fortuna’ was probably the most Featurist house ever built. Now it is stripped down to some pretence of utilitarianism as an Army Survey Headquarters, and the strong southerlies blow a fine grey dust from the neighbouring mullock heaps over its broken plaster mouldings.

  One or two other early houses have been taken under official wings and appear to be safely protected and preserved more or less in their original state, giving some impression of living conditions in the successful strata of the first pioneer period. There is Kirribilli House at Kirribilli Point, Sydney, a high-roofed Gothic house with carved gable ends and a turreted porch. It belongs to the transitional period, too late for the early colonial simplicity and too early for the furbelows. It was built about 1855, threatened with demolition in 1919, saved by the Prime Minister of the time, W. M. Hughes, and eventually restored to a romantic version of its youth in 1957 by John Mansfield, architect, and Mrs Gregory Blaxland. It is now used as a residence for overseas guests of the Commonwealth and contains a sprinkling of Australiana and soft gold ornamentation. In Tasmania there is Entally House, a historic Georgian home of the Reibeys at Hadspen, acquired by the Tasmanian Government after the Second World War and converted into a national house, open for public inspection. In Melbourne there is Como House, above Como Park, Toorak, built about 1843. Como has fared better than any other colonial house in the country, for it has been preserved with its original furniture and furnishings practically intact. It was the first acquisition of Victoria’s National Trust. The original section is a white box wrapped prettily in a fragile two-storey veranda. Indoors, the rooms remain practically as they were, arrested in the middle eighteen-sixties when Charles Henry Armytage furnished it all, partially with fine, sturdy pieces, made by an undertaker across the river in Richmond.

  The notable thing about the fate of the less fortunate houses was not simply their demolition. In most cases they occupied big estates in inner suburbs grown extraordinarily rich and crowded; they had to go. But the way they went was significant. There was no attempt to preserve any part of them or any part of their parklike settings. The fences, shrubs, and the enormous trees of gardens established as long ago as a century went with each house. There was a clear intention to eradicate every sign that the land had ever been occupied. Bulldozers nuzzled out every stone, stump and blade of grass. Then the bared paddock was cut into the narrowest permissible lots and sold piecemeal. Very slowly over the months which followed the lots filled with medium-sized houses and midget blocks of flats, all of them as representative of the noncommittal Featurism of our day as the buildings they replaced were representative of an equally expansive, almost as Featurist, but slightly more committed, era. On a purely architectural-artistic level it could be argued that little or nothing was lost in these obliterations of the old by the new century. Only space, trees and continuity were destroyed. But it goes further than that. The really disturbing thing is that the new culture is certainly no improvement on the old. Nothing was gained or learned in those hundred years.

  No one seriously argued that always it was necessary to remove the old house in order to subdivide the estate successfully nor that always, along with the house, every tree had to go. A reasonably alert office boy in an estate-agent’s back room could juggle most subdivisional plans to spare some of the garden, if that had been in the least desired by anybody concerned. No one appeared to consider any such thing, yet a normal healthy human being ordinarily can be expected to choose to make his home in a garden rather than a wasteland. It becomes necessary to analyse the pioneer cult to explain better this annihilatory urge and other allied phenomena of the Australian ugliness. In addition to the simple confidence that anything new one does today must be for the better, there are three less attractive qualities. These may be called Puritanism, Diggerism and Selective Blindness.

  The first of these is a quality of Australian life, varying only slightly from region to region, which grew up with suburbia and the preponderance of private homes and the emergence of an ideal, family-group image. The years between the gay eighties when private houses were few, and the grey nineties when the first waves of small villas swept out from the cities, was the period when the female community saw to it that the doors began closing on the rumbustious life of their wild colonial boys. As gaslight gave way to electric light the streets grew darker, for most of the new light was in the family parlour, and from this time on anyone who was not settling down with an anagram or a crossword puzzle by the fire had to start minding his manners. As the century and the suburbs grew, one by one the privileges of city life were forbidden to the growing hordes of city dwellers: early closing of bars and restaurants; banning of more books, films, magazines; more permits required to do more things, a general tightening of licence and a gradually growing habit of censorship, ever-increasing prudery on the surface while the male community grew more ribald and appallingly blasphemous under its breath. The puritan movement finally expanded beyond its object of protecting family life in the suburban developments, and came to mean the public denial of every natural requirement of the human animal. The visitor to Australia encounters this immediately on arrival at his airport or dock. He will notice strange, coy signs on twin doors. Usually they will be silhouettes in black plastic on white plastic panels, one depicting a Regency gentleman holding a lorgnette to his eye, and the other a crinolined lady. Sometimes one will be a cigarette trailing a curl of smoke, and the other a powder puff. There are popular variations on peculiarly Australian ciphers designed to avoid giving definitive names to the unspeakable rooms with the plumbing. Sometimes again the silhouettes will
be a top-hat and a bonnet respectively, or some other equally proper and irrelevant sex symbols. Sometimes the twin public lavatories of hotels, theatres and other places of lighter entertainment are given names, but whimsically oblique ones like Romeo and Juliet, or Dave and Mabel, or Adam and Eve, or even more peculiar twin titles, as in the confused case of the Springvale Hotel, Victoria: Dave and Eve. In the State Theatre, Melbourne, an ‘atmospheric’ design from the heyday of the cinema, the male convenience was originally labelled, in old Gothic type, ‘Gentleman’s College Room’. This must have seemed too much even for the motion picture business, for now the echoing white tiled space is labelled, ‘Gentleman’s Lounge’.

  It may be argued that these amiable idiocies are the product of suburban style, not a contributory cause of it. Yet their surrealist absurdity represents a philistinian-puritan denial of reality which is one of the wellsprings of the annihilatory approach to natural and historic facts. But if the female-inspired puritanism on the surface is the enemy of sensible development, the undercover male opposition is even more firmly set against any sensitive growths. Huddled whenever possible in the last refuge, the exclusively male bar, a sizeable proportion of the older generation of Australian men reaffirms the Digger tradition of the world wars in a stream of four-letter words which mean on translation: to the Devil with all sensitivity and sympathy. In the younger male, the Digger tradition often lives on in a more sophisticated way which merely takes the form of condemning epicurians, experts, connoisseurs, gourmets—all evidence of cultivated taste. Bill McIntosh has stated their attitude well. Mr McIntosh’s handsome face creased in a puzzled sulk became familiar to newspaper readers in half-page advertisements. ‘Wine Connoisseurs,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘they annoy me.’ (‘…all I know is Sienna Cream is my favourite sweet sherry.’)

  The third contributory cause of the Australian ugliness is a deficiency shared by the sexes. It is a special sort of cultivated, selective blindness. Perhaps it began as an involuntary defensive mechanism against the few ugly, hasty things in colonial and gold-rush times; then it grew into a habit, and encouraged more ugliness. Large elements of the Australian scene are invisible to the great number of people afflicted with the complaint. This explains several phenomena, including the faith in paint. It is quite misleading to imagine that paint is used so fiercely and vividly to improve the appearance or draw attention to the thing coated. Its prime purpose is only to be a symbol of tidiness. In Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, there is a little public park beside the municipal sportsground which was generously endowed last century with cast iron urns on masonry pedestals. For some years, apparently, the gay youth of the twentieth century enjoyed the sport of breaking off the urns. Mostly they snapped at the narrow stem, leaving jagged bases of various dangerous shapes. Later civic pride revived and a painter went through the park with a tin of pillar-box red, coating not only the few remaining urns but all the pathetic little stumps as well. Again, the appalling cabins of railway workers at Chullora, west of Sydney, and the shameful migrants’ huts at Holmesglen, east of Melbourne, and at Gepp’s Cross, north of Adelaide, are painted a variety of different colours. No one could want to advertise these hovels. No one could believe they look any prettier, in their contrasting hard-pastel tints, than the red stumps at Bacchus Marsh. But in this busy age ordinary taste has become so dulled and calloused that anything which can startle a response on jaded retinas is deemed successful: it draws attention to the fact that paint has been used and progress is afoot.

  Tram, telephone and electric poles, and the spiders’ webs of overhead wires which are strung to them, are more in evidence in Australia than anywhere. They form a ubiquitous veil across the civic scene, but like the sides of one’s nose they never register on the retina. They are kept out of focus; eyes see through and beyond them. Even the central city streets of the capital city of Tasmania are equipped with regularly spaced, split and crooked tree-trunk posts, garnished with loops and tangles of wires, insulators, lights, brackets, tram connections and transformers, leaning at any angle but vertical against smart shop fronts or poking through carefully designed and neatly finished stainless steel verandas. Plumbers work more in the open in Australia than anywhere else; in very few areas will the pipes freeze, and external plumbing is one British tradition which is universally respected. Moreover, the vent pipes of sewerage lines are required by building regulations in most towns to rise many feet above the highest neighbouring window, and they aspire Gothically above the roof-tops in competition with the intricate ladders of the television aerials.

  But the pipes and the ladders and the wires are not seen. A house can be selected as a ‘Dream Home’ by a national magazine though its sides are an angular espalier of drain, water, and storm water pipes, complete with towering vents and convenient inspection openings. A building can be admired for its shiny new grey-green glass curtain wall while some monstrous thing is stuck to its aluminium edging looking like a mad electrician’s scrap basket, and immediately round the corner from the smart facade on the plastered side wall red and orange letters fifteen feet high announce once more the name of a popular brand of petrol.

  The un-designed wires and poles do not mar the attractiveness of the street because they are not seen, because a street is not seen as a street but as a series of feature buildings to be viewed separately through the veil. The electrical and phone connections and the advertisements do not spoil each building for the admiring eye, because a building is not seen as a building but as a collection of features to be appraised separately: first curtain wall, then entrance doors, then lobby, then lift doors, then lift cage: unrelated in vision from the whole structure, and from the street, and from the city, and from the countryside.

  In the darkness of the cultivated blind-spots some of the most painful damage is done to Australia in all innocence, as when, with the simple intention of making things nice for visitors who come to admire, scenic lookouts and beauty-spots are provided with desperately picturesque accoutrements of rustic stone and wood, and two brightly coloured concrete boxes which may be found, on close examination, to be marked with top-hat and powder-puff respectively. Bright colours are not intended to make lavatories more conspicuous, because it is assumed that they are invisible, but only to make them look nicer for anyone who requires to use them. The blind-spot contribution to the Australian ugliness occurs most frequently when the intentions are most honourable. Thus Tasmania, which is prouder of its age than most other places, which has an active National Trust and a Government which gives occasional recognition to the need for preservation, suffers worst from this somnambulistic sub-section among destructive practices. Private enterprise in Tasmania is not completely oblivious to the commercial possibilities of antiquity. At New Norfolk in the Derwent Valley, twenty-five miles north of Hobart, one of the prettiest places in all Australia, there is an enterprise called the ‘Old Colony Inn’. Unlike some other historic places which have been ravished by caravan parks, this establishment has been carefully contrived as a coffee house with a ‘rest chalet’ and cabin accommodation especially devised for honeymooners. The publicity dates the basic building evasively as ‘one of the several gems of 1815 vintage’ (New Norfolk was founded in 1808 by a party from Norfolk Island), but the date is of purely academic interest, for the original has been almost unrecognizably altered, choked with the tourist trappings of chintzy old-lavender charm indoors and outdoors. The inn is a typically Tasmanian display, unfamiliar on the mainland, of killing architecture with kindness.

  Hobart would be a beautiful big town if it were not a pretty little capital city. The state of capitaldom gives too much importance to what man has done round the broken bays and thrusting headlands of the Derwent River’s magnificent harbour below Mount Wellington. Nature’s scale, set by this stately precipitous rock of four thousand feet, is magnanimous; but somehow everything in the town that rests at the mountain’s wet foot is just under life size. From the roofs of most of the three- or four-storey bu
ildings of the town centre it seems one could throw a stone down the funnels of the liners at the wharf. Narrow streets with midget footpaths climb and circle the rounded foothills. In the low lobby of the little Parliament House the Doric columns seem to have been thumped into the cellar for a third of their lengths to keep them in proportion.

  The average house of the early days was a doll’s house: two wide eyes and a central nose under a brimless hat. It stood close to the street behind a garden that had no room for trees. The combination of a consistently diminutive scale and a feeling of solemnity in the stonework produces a sort of lead soldier importance that is quaint, charming and distinctive.