The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  Areas where the old non-Featurist development is general enough to make an environment have been eroded continuously, but fortunately some can still be found. It happened that certain pioneer districts lost their popularity after only a few decades of settlement and thereafter remained for all practical purposes suspended in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this way many outback townships have been comparatively frozen.

  Perhaps the most accessible area still displaying the remains of the old vernacular is in Victoria. The drive between Melbourne Airport at Essendon and the city is as Featurist and forbidding as the drive to any other big city from its airport. But, conversely, the continuation of this drive in the other direction, from Essendon away from Melbourne along the narrow Bulla Road, in the footsteps of the first pioneers, is rewarding. These are the yellow plains which attracted so many of the earliest settlers in Victoria and so few of her subsequent citizens. The road twists crazily at intervals to cross sudden gorges, through arid, pretty, heartbreaking country dotted with little centenarian buildings. The place has hardly been changed, except by rot, since the middle of last century. A wooden hotel by the roadside decays like a sheep’s carcass in the field behind it—a few of the original wooden shingles still clinging to what ribs remain of the roof skeleton. Most of the wall and fence construction was done in the basalt of the area, the hard, heavy rock known as bluestone. This is slightly variegated, ranging from a deep brown to grey, but the predominant colour is a dark slate hue, with a touch of blue. It is extremely durable but its hardness makes it difficult to work, and the early builders were usually content to leave it with an axed rock face.

  The typical cottage of the area is a diminutive bluestone box with a hipped galvanized iron roof and a veranda all round. This, unlike the Sydney model, has a separate roof tucked tightly up to the underside of the gutter of the main roof. Two of the earliest Victorian settlers squatted on the hard ground here in 1836. They were William Jackson and George Evans, members of John Pascoe Fawkner’s party of adventurers who came that year in the schooner Enterprise from Launceston. William Jackson’s brother was Samuel, the architect. He missed the first trip in the Enterprise but caught it on its second voyage and followed his brother out to the northern plains. The two of them built the first substantial shelter in the district: two rooms, one the living-room in white-washed pisé with a wide split-log roof, the other a skillion bedroom in wattle and daub. This house lasted only twenty-four years. Samuel Jackson had a native talent, probably very little training in England, and an unembarrassed primitive approach to the historic styles. He soon moved down to the centre of things at the river settlement which was to become Melbourne, and as one of the first two architects (Robert Russell was the other) he participated in the early building boom. Nearly all his buildings of this relatively unassuming early era were suddenly outgrown when gold was found, and most of his Melbourne work was removed or remodelled almost before the mortar was set. The only memorial he left in Melbourne which has not been badly treated by time is his panoramic drawing of 1841 showing the frontier town he was helping to build. It is said that he crouched inside a beer barrel erected on a wall of his own half-erected Scots’ church in Collins Street and drew what he saw through the slits in the barrel’s side as he removed and replaced one stave after the other while turning slowly round. The finished sketch is twenty feet long and about two feet high. It is in the National Historical Museum in Melbourne, and is a vivid illustration of the non-Featurist opening years: muddy, horsey streets inhabited by a few pelt-clad Aborigines and fashionably dressed townspeople, and a community of little eaveless-box houses and shops, one or two more substantial masonry buildings, and beyond them all the ring of straggly gum trees retreating slowly before this strange invasion.

  George Evans built more solidly than his neighbour William Jackson. He used the abundant basalt and his house is still standing firm, the oldest if not the prettiest of several bluestone buildings in the Sunbury area with the authentic early earthy charm. It is just out of Sunbury on the north side, away from Melbourne. Signboards term it ‘Victoria’s Oldest Homestead’. A stony road runs two-and-a-half miles to Emu Creek, a rocky seasonal watercourse, on the far side of which the old house sits among its barns, a picket fence and a bright cottage garden. There is an ornamental monument erected on the centenary: 17 August 1936. Unlike nearly all buildings which have survived a century or more in Australia, George Evans’ house is very well kept by owners conscious of its historical importance.

  Nevertheless it is possible to imagine what it was once like beneath the cream and green paint. It consists of two blocks, built at different times, set in a right-angled L. The walls are colour-washed basalt, and the roof, now galvanized iron but probably shingle or sheet-iron originally, is pulled down in a sad, droopy brim over the flagged verandas. The L turns its back to the afternoon sun like an Aboriginal settling for the night, and the rooms are strung in single file along the wings, approached through solid wooden doors from the verandas. The windows are stock colonial twelve-pane double-hung sashes. The house is called, with terrible nostalgia in this yellow-ochre country: Holly Green.

  Sunbury itself is a dark green patch in a valley of the bleached hills. It is atypical of Australian country towns, with its comparatively narrow roads and lack of an indisputably main street. Sunbury is a spoilt village. In a country where there are no unspoilt old villages this term can be complimentary, for Sunbury is only spoilt, not ruined, and it is still possible to see what it was in the pre-metal age, in Victoria’s quite early youth before gold and cast iron. The basalt buildings are only partially overwhelmed by advertisements. The shady trees still meet above the dusty yellow footpaths. Several shops look undisturbed after a century. One on the corner of Evans Road and Brook Road exemplifies an early nineteenth-century style which has disappeared from Melbourne: a two-storeyed shop with an almost inaccessibly narrow balcony on the upper floor cantilevered on projecting timber joists over the footpath.

  Most of the architectural history of the world could be adequately covered by an account of roofs, and most of the distinctive qualities of Australian building have been concentrated in the shapes and materials of roofs, designed in the country to give shade and to collect water and in the suburbs to give an air of permanence and to hold gargoyles. Corrugated galvanized iron and, more recently, corrugated asbestos-cement, are the staple materials of the north and the outback. From the air, the cities grow progressively freer of colour as one travels inland. The grey-white corrugated sheets give a non-Featurist coherence to man’s feeble assault on the outback, and practically unify many country towns. From the air, even a town as big as Alice Springs is a whole town. The iron roof is accepted in the country, and can be sentimentally regarded by an armchair bushman of the city. But when one transplants the sheltering corrugated iron parasol from a country house to a suburban cottage in Melbourne or Sydney it is judged hideous, as estate-agents attest. Then if it is moved again to a beach area it is judged highly contemporary and pleasing again, for Featurist aesthetics are sensitively relative to social position. Nevertheless, that elusive thing, the Australian national style of architecture, is most likely to be found, if it can be found at all, in the droop of a roof.

  A wayward example is at Geraldton, WA, over the Wicherina Reservoir. It is all roof, the biggest in the country, measuring no less than 17 acres. It is made of fragile corrugated asbestos-cement on a hefty wooden frame, and was built simply to reduce evaporation by protecting the water supply for Geraldton from the direct sun’s rays. Here, then, are all the ingredients of local colour: water so precious it must be housed, the local eucalyptus wood—jarrah—given the gruelling task of supporting wide spans while standing deep in water, and a favourite adopted material, asbestos-cement, all put together with bush carpentry and a bold idea. From the ground it seems nothing. The frame is flat, a few feet above the water surface, and the asbestos-cement sheets are loosely butted together without the usual laps,
for their only function is to provide shade and certainly not to divert rain water. From the air the whole roof can be appreciated as a model of Functionalism. It is straight on two sides where it abuts roads, but for the rest has a wandering perimeter following the natural contour of the water below. Indeed by moonlight it looks so wet that the pelicans of the area are continually breaking the sheets and killing themselves by landing at high speed, feet thrust forward in expectation of water. It is said that the reduced evaporation saves the drought-afflicted town annually about twenty million gallons of water, or £2,500. Nevertheless, the big roof probably would never have been thought of, or built, except for the Depression, when it was conceived to make work.

  Some of the main clues to the realities of Australian building are likely to be found in unrespectable buildings of this sort, rather than in the charming examples of Colonial monumental architecture which are still to be seen in preserved relics under the protection of organizations like the State National Trusts. And although modern Australia naturally is proud of her rising sky-scrapers and spreading factories, the visitor will not find anything particularly indigenous in the steel frames, aluminium curtains, and glass walls of the busy commercial and industrial buildings. He may eventually decide that Australia’s main contribution to civilization during the twentieth century is in the experimental development of the unexciting region that is neither lonely nor busy: the suburb, where most Australians live, in private houses which many have built and many own, and where even those under-privileged by nature and by society may own a private domain with a certain degree of civilized comfort. It is in the suburb, the real Australia, the home of Featurism, that one must look first for any improvement in the Australian ugliness.

  In the decade after the Second World War much of the national economy and most of the resources of the building industry were devoted to the provision of separate houses and the few small schools and shops which are scattered among them. The growth continues at slightly reduced rate. These single-house suburbs are a creation of this century: they are the late-nineteenth-century English suburbs cut down to one storey, stepped up several degrees in architectural temperature and made available not only to the middle class but to every class and category in society. For half a century Australia has taken for granted that every man deserves his own house and should be able to shape it in some special personal way.

  Modern Australia is not entirely suburb; there is still the outback and the night-club, the woolshed dance and the art-film society; but it is mainly this half-way area, a crosshatched smudge on the map round each capital city and larger town, in which may be found all the essential drabness and dignity of Australia. Much earlier than those of America, the Australian suburbs demonstrated the attainable heaven of the common man’s century, the little private detached castle, physically as comfortable as the latest mass-produced techniques could make it and as individual as your own necktie. The suburb is Australia’s greatest achievement (not ‘proudest’ achievement; there is little or no collective pride in the suburb, only a huge collection of individual prides). More people, per head of population, over a longer time, have enjoyed here the dear millstone of a detached house, separated from the next by at least eight feet, a private den for the family not visited by squire or servant. Statistics show that Australia—along with New Zealand, as usual in these things—has the highest number of privately owned separate houses per head, with the highest number of separate bedrooms, the greatest volume of running water in the most bathrooms, the tallest ventilating stacks to the most conscientious sewerage systems—all in all, indisputably the world’s highest minimum standards of health and safety ordained by building codes. Ventilation, for example, is particularly well provided for. Most State or municipal building codes require every house to have permanent holes through the external walls of all rooms, and in some places even the spider-ridden darkness beneath the bath must be ventilated. However, all the statistics and regulations which prove the country’s unchallengeable claims to one of the highest levels of suburban development do not mean that a new Australian house is bigger or better equipped than, for instance, a new American house. It is not. The statistical superiority merely shows that Australia started much earlier along the same road.

  Australia never had much tolerance with the idea of very rich or very poor people, and, except on the harbour banks near Sydney, has not built many big apartment blocks. Residential architecture began with adaptations of English country houses, strongly coloured by Colonial experience in India, spotted on the hills round Sydney Harbour. On the sixty-feet-wide lots into which the town of Sydney was divided by Governor Phillip, little bald box cottages kept their own company, well apart from the neighbours and well clear of the border of bushland surrounding the settlement. From the beginning one of the dominant influences which helped to shape communities from primeval Africa to feudal Europe was missing: there was never a necessity to congregate for mutual protection. However, when Sydney and the other centres began to grow to towns of reasonable size the houses naturally began to draw closer together, not for safety but simply for convenience, to reduce walking distance.

  The second half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of the terrace house; one, two, and sometimes three storeys high, the single-fronted, narrow houses pressed together with identical brothers in long lines close to the footpaths round the industrial areas. The terrace era ended with improved transport. As the suburban railway systems spread crooked fingers out from the city hubs into the surrounding farmlands, the concept of Australia’s space as inexhaustible was reawakened in townspeople. Now the toiler of the industrial revolution saw for the first time an escape from the scaly environment of the factory. Here the worker who knew his worth, and none knew this better than the late-nineteenth-century Australian, could find a good reason for slaving at the bench. Out in the hills he could have a home which he could call his own without stretching the economic facts too far.

  Thus in the late eighteen-eighties, as the cities fattened, the foundations of the suburban ideal were laid. These of course involved much more than a house for every family. They introduced a suburban lore that became known, some seventy years later, as the Australian way of life. By the time it was known by that name, recognized and extolled, by the time, in short, that it became self-conscious, Australia’s popular culture was becoming inextricably tangled with the American and the lore was losing distinctive flavour, but in the meantime a number of characteristic qualities had become ingrained. There are still in Australian suburbia many indigenous ingredients mixed up with the stone-veneer garden barbecues, the flourishes of wrought iron and other features of the fashionable home which seem like a distorting-mirror image of the advertisement pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The essence of Australian suburban life is unreality: frank and proud artificiality. To this extent it is English. In some countries, like Sweden, the suburb may be supracountry. In America it may allow itself to be coyly rustic. But in Australia it is the city’s bastion against the bush. In certain areas—parts of Wahroonga and Castle Crag in Sydney, Beaumaris and Blackburn in Melbourne, St Lucia in Brisbane—gum trees prosper among the houses and a countrified air is not discouraged. But for the most part modern Australian living is represented best by the shorn look already noted. The countryside in which the suburb grows is shorn of trees. The plot in which the house builds is shorn of shrubs. The house itself is shorn of the verandas which the colonists knew, shorn of porches, shelter and shade. It sits in sterile, shaven neatness on its trimmed lawn between weeded, raked, brilliant beds of annuals, between the grey paling fences which separate each private domain from its neighbours. Very little is planted in the first place which is expected to be or is capable of growing high; and nature never can escape the tidy gardener’s sheers. The pioneering spirit still means change from nature, right or wrong, and the Australian suburban objective is still to carve clearings in the native bush and to transplant on to naked soil a postage stamp re
plica of the ruling idea in international high-life.

  Sometimes the early architects tried hard to reach a compromise with the Australian climate and the indigenous materials, but the exotic model usually dominated. The ruling styles came in turn from England, Italy, Holland via England, Spain via California via New York. The flow of fashion may be traced from adaptations of the laws of unoffending Georgian taste in the first half of the nineteenth century, through exotic romanticism in the second half, through promiscuous plagiarism in the first half of the twentieth century, to general Americanism in the second half. But while the pattern of imposed fashion has thus fluctuated over the years, the basic policy of tidy artificiality has remained unchanged since the moment when Governor Phillip’s sailors of the First Fleet leapt ashore and made the first clearing by the beach. The white man is still a foreigner in Australia, still looking at the fragile greys and ochres of the landscape through European eyes. And in common with his contemporaries anywhere else he is also still a stranger to the industrial age. ‘We can’t bear its ugliness when it’s not turned on,’ the Featurist aesthete says of the one naked, unaffected, unprettified thing in his living-room: the television screen. He puts beautiful Oriental cane doors to fold over the glass tube when visitors come. A sense of reality would appear to be the last thing desired. This may be consistent with the avoidance of realities in other aspects of Australian life, with the prim censorship and with ostrichisms like the blue laws which rule the Australian night. But is it what the Australian really wants?