The Australian Ugliness (10 page)

Again, all over the world Featurism thrives in the presence of a quality which has always been a tap-root of ugliness in various fields: urgency. Commercial competition in itself need not lead directly to the demolition of a sense of unity and integrity in a city. This develops only when the level of commercial urgency rises high enough to bring the competition above the surface. Car design, for instance, goes through convulsive changes between Functionalism and Featurism. When rivalry in Detroit is keenest, or when British cars struggle hardest to regain some of their lost ground to Continental makers in places like Australia—these are the times of the Featurist styles, of the Cadillac symbols, when the tail fin is invented, and separate features are made of each headlight, taillight, stoplight and turning light. These are the times of the sudden kinks in every straight line, the feature panels of contrasting tone inset in the sides, three-tone paint finishes—all giving the lead in turn to the control panels of washing machines and room-conditioners and kitchen-tidies.

It takes an assured product and a confident advertiser coolly presenting unassailable facts to produce a functional design, a genuine style and a calm advertisement. These are things which are so rare as to be noteworthy whenever they appear in the Australian street, kitchen, magazine, or newspaper. Freedom from anxiety to please, freedom to overestimate the customer's intelligence, are kinds of freedom remote from modern Australia. The worst anxiety is usually at the promotional level, but it soon transfers itself along the line through architect, industrial designer, muralist, interior decorator, typographer—everyone feeling his duty to create a feature, no one unanxious enough to make a plain statement of fact.

PART TWO

3
ANGLOPHILES AND AUSTERICANS

Two things, then, are essential for the generation of the climate in which Featurism thrives. One is the desire to make things seem other than what they are. The second is inadequate facilities for the process of camouflaging.

There can be few other nations which are less certain than Australia as to what they are and where they are. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, a generation of Australians which is not too old to lead in politics and board-rooms still refers to England as ‘Home', to the Commonwealth as ‘The Empire', and to their own nationality as ‘British'. Most Australians, however, consider these terms pleasant enough but no longer realistic. The British lion, it is realized, is preoccupied with its own problems and not much help out here. There is even a trace of superiority in the popular attitude to England. The novelist, the late Nevil Shute, always gathered an eager audience when he discoursed on his favourite topic of the eminence of Australia next century, with a hundred million people and the spiritual leadership of the Commonwealth. But there are other busy people who do not picture Australia ultimately connected with Britain, but who would sign her up tomorrow to economic junior partnership with the United States in a ceremony tumultuously applauded by a million jiving teenagers.

The historical, cultural and economic justifications for both these attitudes are overlaid by a slightly neurotic condition brought about by loneliness. The physical isolation from the West is only partially alleviated by radio and jet travel. Australia still feels cut off from what she thinks of as her own kind of people, and the obvious cure of her loneliness, fraternization with her neighbours in Asia, is not acceptable. The immigration policy remains rigidly opposed to Asians and even its madly offensive, if unofficial, name of ‘White Australia Policy' is sacrosanct. Yet there are public men who have virtually dedicated their lives to reminding Australians that they live in warm Asian waters.

Thus Australia is pulled in three ways at once from three remote points of the compass, and with every tug there is inside herself an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes these forces are expressed openly in the culture. The self-conscious Englishness of the Gothic Revival of last century later expressed itself in a Tudor Olde Englishe look in some shop buildings. And always there was the Georgian, symbol of Good Taste and Breeding, for those most anxious to display their Englishness. On the other hand there was the self-consciously American Californian Bungalow style in houses after the First World War, not to mention here the dominating American influence at the sales-counter level. At the third point of the triangle are the Orientalism advocated by the late Hardy Wilson and the Japanese architectural-decorative style which developed late in the nineteen-fifties. Finally, representing the reactionary pull to all these influences, there are the self-consciously nationalist Australian styles: either New-Old Colonial or Log-Cabin Bushmanist.

Two important things to be noted about all these overt expressions of the subconscious tensions are that they are rare, and that only seldom are they Featurist. All the clear-cut unequivocal geo-cultural styles, including the Australian, have had about equal weight in the total scene, and each was very lightweight. Most of these in their heyday injected something like two per cent of colour into the body of the community culture. Their combined effect, however, was more than the sum of the twos. The overt expressionists were rarely Featurist because they had an idea, however removed from reality, which they wanted to convey, and to some extent they encouraged this one idea to rule the entire building. Their combined effect, on the other hand, merely reduced the uncommitted mass of people to a state of confusion. The simplest escape from this confusion for the ordinary builder and designer was to reject all strong suggestions of style, to carry on with the economic-utilitarian conventions, but to add snippets from one or more, or all, of the passing fashions, and to feature each snippet against an uncontroversial background. The resulting mixture, displayed in the passing fashions of the lounge-room and the shop window, accurately conveyed the uncertainty of the national psyche. The Featurist wants to belong, but where can he? In eighteenth-century England, nineteenth-century Australia, twentieth-century America, or twenty-first-century Asia?

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.