The Australian Ugliness (16 page)

Again, faint stirrings of fresh air may be detected even in the suffocating atmosphere of the popular furniture market. The carnival spirit is always at its maddest here, yet the plastic-coated contemporary is in fact an improvement on the fashion it is replacing. For some twenty-five years domestic furniture had been built around a three-piece genoa velvet lounge suite with waterfall back and boxed arms, almost as wide as the seat, inset with little shelves and panels of scalloped, walnut-veneered wood. The new popular pieces of vynex, laminex, black iron and bright brass may be gross perversions of the international modern models, but they are lighter and cleaner, figuratively and literally, than the musty over-stuffed, varicoloured velvet and the dusty-pink chenille. At least they narrow very slightly the great gap between the carnival and rational design, carrying the popular furniture store a fraction closer to the better interior decorators' salons with their few spare, graceful pieces, from Denmark.

But in the time taken for the consolidation of every increase of sophistication in some restricted area there is a proportionately bigger increase in the population and its ready money, in the spread of the background ugliness. For every new presentable piece of furniture there is a piece of the old boxed velvet still being made and numerous ornamental pieces of metal and plastic being twisted into insane shapes. For every fine building there are still some hundreds of blatant features thrust forward unhappily by unloved veneer villas, and wanton little shops, and worried big factories. For every new member joining a tree-preservation society or a National Trust branch there is at least one more suburban pioneer sharpening his axe. For every new creative worker in the visual media there is at least one new Digger with an active, vocal antipathy to any show of creative originality, with a moralistic and often bitter resentment of anything of unfamiliar appearance.

The influences tending to extend and encourage Featurism into further follies are growing stronger. This is the nature of the prosperity. There is no attraction to the idea of upsetting the comfortable
status quo
by fundamental re-thinking on appearances, while loose coins in every pocket jingle eagerly to be spent on novel, exciting surface effects. As new industrial products, from cars to kitchenware, appear from time to time they follow an inevitable course of decline. They begin with an idea and arrive on the market cleanly and sensibly pursuing the idea. But as soon as the first flush of success passes they feel obliged to revive the newness. Yet all they can add is a new feature or two in the styling. So every year the radiator of the car grins wider, the handle of the refrigerator grows a bigger chrome escutcheon, the control panel of the stove gets more Martian, the sets of saucepans and bowls gleam with more jewel anodising, the concrete grilles get more complicatedly geometric, the colours more vivid, the tiles more random, and the light-shades—which always have brought out the worst in designers—get more frantically pointed, holed, ringed, striated, twisted and miserable. And all the time, in case anyone should begin crying for peace, the feature writers of the feature pages of the magazines and newspapers are coaxing and encouraging more, more, just one more golden crowning-glory feature, one more centre of attraction to set off one's feature wall, one more outstanding, dramatically different feature, another touch or two of splendour for everyman. It is the nature of the prosperity to make people feel not unsettled but unsatisfied, to accept with complacence the muddle and mess of the artificial backdrop to living but to feel a barely satiable urge to brighten it up. A genuine desire to have things looking gay and partyish is responsible for most of the conscious mutilation of the colonial architectural heritage. It is behind, for instance, the circus that is central Adelaide. The commercial party spirit is the reason for old masonry buildings having their stones picked out in different colours or faced with bright steel panels, for a charming colonial house in North Adelaide being painted sulphur yellow, for the shady, timbered, untidy natural banks of the river that recently ambled unmolested past the University being bulldozed and terraced with trim rubble walls and neat plants. It is the reason for the rainbow riot of Rundle Street: dark blue, green, orange, pink in a dozen shades, and candy stripes.

Consider the Red Lion Hotel, a pleasant relic of Adelaide's lustier days with the characteristic two-storey veranda. Its front to Rundle Street has not changed essentially for three generations. Drinkers still sit at tables on the first-floor balcony over the heads of the pedestrians on the footpath, and staghorn and ivy still hang above the heads of the drinkers. All that has changed is the atmosphere. The frail Victorian pomposity has left the cast iron and arches. Now they are part of a commercial party. The iron work is a smart charcoal and the wall behind is painted chartreuse, light grey, white and scarlet. The tables and chairs are a dozen different milky primaries and the four swinging bowls of floral Victorian ornament are now painted clear red, blue, yellow and green respectively.

The party spirit sometimes urges on tired little old buildings most inconsiderately, as on the two corners of narrow Union Lane and Rundle Street. On one side the old Belle Building has been pepped up with a ladder of persimmon-hued horizontal steel sunshades over the entire Rundle Street facade. This was painless enough, but on the other side an old brick warehouse, with its hoist still projecting willingly over the lane, has had teal green tiles pulled over its Rundle Street face like a party cap gone awry late in the evening. In King William Street, directly opposite the thoroughly over-ornamented but composed old Victorian Baroque ANZ Bank, it is possible for a student of Featurism to count nine different greens, ranging from lime to bottle, in the space of six narrow building facades. In Adelaide, rather more than in other capitals, the bright new party spirit is inclined to enter also the new office buildings. There is something festive about the three non-accessible balconies projecting at random from high on the face of the proud new Advertiser building, something of a party joke in the satiny, master-bedroom pink of the CML building, something reminiscent of a party drink in the bright little spots of cherry in the two-tone green glass walls of the Savings Bank of South Australia on the corner of Hindley and Bank Streets.

The span of the rake's progress of Australian taste can perhaps be seen most simply in a single little building: The Lady Franklin Museum near Hobart. Here is one story of its birth, as told by the late Hardy Wilson, long the doyen of Australian architectural theorists:

‘There was another artist whose name I have never discovered. I believe he was a visitor with an eye for the beautiful and a joyous disregard for usefulness. He designed Lady Franklin's Museum, which stands on a knoll in a Tasmanian valley, encircled by classic hills. The story of the building, as I imagine it, runs somewhat as follows:

‘One day, Lady Franklin, the wife of the Governor of that time, and this architect were riding through the valley when the beauty of the knoll and its surroundings attracted their attention.

‘ “What a wonderful site on which to place a Grecian temple,” cried the architect.

‘ “It is very beautiful,” replied Lady Franklin, “but how could a temple in this valley serve the folk hereabouts, who are as close to nature as their apple trees?”

‘ “Oh! as for that, your Excellency,” he said, “there is no difficulty at all. Let us make it a museum.”

‘ “But for what?” she exclaimed in surprise.

‘ “For apples,” said the architect, “a museum where apples which grow so well in this happy isle, shall be displayed in shining rows of every sort and flavour.”

‘And so the temple was built and is known as Lady Franklin's Museum. And to this day it is used for storing apples.'

This passage is taken from
Old Colonial Architecture in New South
Wales and Tasmania
, 1924, the monumental work of Hardy Wilson, who on his own proud confession was more interested in pictorial beauty than in historical research. His drawing of the museum, dated 1915, reflects the gilded romance of his story of the two riders in the valley. The little building is shown lifted on to a mountain top amid cypresses and classical fragments beneath a magnificent Baroque sky. There are no figures about to give scale, and the shed looks at least twice its actual size. The architectural proportions are rendered accurately and the details with loving precision. Otherwise everything in Hardy Wilson's drawing and description was wild misrepresentation. He even had the wrong name. It was originally the Tasmanian Museum—this was noted on a lithograph built in under the foundation stone on 16 March 1842. A year later it was known as ‘The Franklin Museum', and later it became ‘The Lady Franklin Museum'. The point of interest about its conception was not that it was a pretty little snobbish conceit of an implausible dilettante and a grand colonial lady. The truth was more remarkable for its time in Tasmania. The building was a functional expression of the improving democratic ideals of good Sir John Franklin and his sympathetic wife.

Franklin, Governor of Tasmania from 1837 to 1843 and originator or supporter of many educational and cultural enterprises, was especially keen on promoting the study of natural history. Tasmania abounded in strange, unrecorded flora and fauna and the study of them should not have been above the educational level of the colonists. Franklin was disappointed but not daunted by his failure to impress the Secretary of State for the Colonies with this idea. He was not permitted to spend public money on the formation of a museum, but he and Lady Franklin built one. ‘The story of the museum at Lenah Valley, Hobart, exemplifies the common task of husband and wife,' writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick in
Sir John Franklin in Tasmania
. ‘Lady Franklin never considered herself more than an amateur of science—“I am hardly even a dabbler in science” she wrote once in her diary. But Sir John considered a natural history museum important for the colony, and Lady Franklin's museum is a visible expression of her devotion to her husband's interests.'

Lady Franklin selected the site, arranged for the design and the construction, and probably paid part of, if not all, the costs involved. At the same time it is apparent that she had plans to combine the natural history content with her own interests in art, which were not shared by Sir John. On 21 February 1841, she wrote to her sister, Mary Simpkinson, in England, asking: ‘Do you think you could procure for me a pretty little design for a “Glyptothek”? I mean nothing more than two or three rooms of small size, though good proportions, to hold a small number of pictures and a dozen casts of the Elgin and Vatican marbles.' Sometime the same year she bought ten acres of land low on the slopes of Mount Wellington in an area then called Kangaroo Valley and now named Lenah (Aboriginal for kangaroo) Valley. Here on a little knoll between two gullies, the museum, one stone room, was built in twenty-two months. Long before it was finished the Franklins were in political difficulties. In July 1843 Sir John was recalled in undeserved humiliation, as Professor Fitzpatrick explains. By 26 October when the building was formally opened, not quite complete but furnished with a small library and some specimens of natural history, the Franklins were out of Government House and living in New Norfolk. Next month, before leaving for England, they signed a deed transferring the museum and its contents and ten acres of land to five members of the Tasmanian Society in trust for any future college or university.

The building they left beneath the towering blue backdrop of Mount Wellington, in a clearing between eucalypts, wattles and tufts of sweetbriar, was a superbly executed reproduction of a very small Greek temple in the Doric Order and prostyle tetrastyle form—that is, three blind walls with a portico of four columns in the front only. The proportions were perfectly in style and the simple mouldings were as finely and lovingly carved as any classicist could wish. Almost certainly the workmen were convicts—they were put to work on most Tasmanian buildings of the time. In this case there must have been masons of long experience among them.

As to the architect, all that we know certainly is that he was not the gallant rider of Hardy Wilson's imagination. He might have been Mr W. Porden Kay, a nephew of Sir John's first wife, working in his little Colonial Architect's office in Hobart. And if this were so, it is possible that Mr Kay and Lady Franklin decided to base the design on the classic portico of the Old Sessions House at Spilsbury in Lincolnshire, a building which both remembered. The Spilsbury portico, however, is merely an appliqué design. In the museum the portico is extended in depth to form the whole building. It is a classical building, not just a classical front. On the other hand, the architect could have been James Blackburn of the Public Works Department, an architect who knew the Franklins. And it is conceivable that he was Sir F. Chantrey, in London, for Lady Franklin asked her sister to sound him out when she first conceived the idea.

Three years after the Franklins left Tasmania in 1846, Christ College was founded and the museum was duly handed over to it. The College authorities had control of the building for the next eighty years, and during the whole of this time they apparently were entirely uninterested and unsympathetic with the idea. The building itself was only an embarrassment. The rents from the rest of the estate which the Franklins left were not sufficient, or not used, for its maintenance. It was used as a store-shed for produce. Apparently apples were occupying it when Hardy Wilson called in 1915. Gradually the little building began to decay. Water from the edges of the roof streaked the walls and ate into the soft stone at the base of the columns. Occasional public protests at its treatment went unheeded. Cottages from the nearest suburb wandered up the hill and stood around awkwardly in the presence of decayed architectural gentility. In 1936, under an Act passed ten years earlier, Hobart City Corporation took responsibility for the building and in 1949 the Art Society of Tasmania reopened it as a gallery.