The Australian Ugliness (11 page)

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 their 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 heaven 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.

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.