The Australian Ugliness (7 page)

The cream Australia policy lasted for some twenty years, trailing off slowly after the Second World War. For the whole of that time cream was used habitually where other nations would have used white. Most kitchen equipment was not procurable in white enamel. As late as 1955 English manufacturers of stoves and other household appliances and sanitary-ware made special cream models for export to Australia. But by this time cream was losing ground to white or light grey as the neutral base colour, and green was being replaced gradually by a rainbow. Suddenly colour was triumphantly elevated as a feature in its own right alongside vertical boarding and split stone veneer. Now standard household equipment came white, but some manufacturers began making coloured refrigerators and washing machines. Then, as the once-black cars in the streets outside adopted two-tone and three-tone styling, household equipment dropped its reticence. Many manufacturers offered two-tone equipment and others provided interchangeable feature panels on the front of appliances where one's favourite fashion shade could be enshrined, easily to be changed tomorrow when it begins to pall.

Meanwhile, in the commercial streets, where Featurism thrives in the knowledge of its economic justification, the diversion of attention from wholes to parts grew steadily more agitated. Lettering and illustrations, crying for attention to the wares of each little shop, grew from fairly discreet sign writing to huge placards and cut-outs. Hardly a section of external wall in the shopping streets was left without commercial announcements as Australians grew after the middle of the twentieth century into the most vigorous and undisciplined advertisers in the world.

Australians now were more prepared even than Americans to allow anyone with something to sell to take control of the appearance of their country. Nothing like the Fifth Avenue Association, or the Hawaiian ladies' organization, or the American Government's control of advertisements on its freeways, could happen in Australia. The typical Australian small, prosperous town is all but smothered with advertising and in extreme examples of holiday towns like Surfers' Paradise, Queensland, or Belgrave, Victoria, the buildings disappear beneath the combined burden of a thousand ornamental alphabets, coloured drawings and cut-outs added to their own architectural features. And meanwhile again the industrial areas keep developing their own separate Featurist style: the featured administration block thrust forward towards the street in front of the plain businesslike works, the featured painting of snow-gums on the feature wall in the featured lobby of the featured administration wing.

And look more closely. Follow the successful Featurist with his neatly creased jacket-sleeves and his four-button cuffs when he leaves the office in his two-tone Holden (light pink with plum feature panel) and goes home to have tea in the feature room: the room he calls the sun-room: the one that he used to call the back parlour, the one the American now calls the family-room.

The room's main feature is not really the feature wall in the yellow vertical v-jointed
Pinus Insignus
boards, nor the featured fireplace faced with autumnal stone veneer, nor the vinyl tiled floor in marbled grey with feature tiles of red and yellow let in at random, nor the lettuce-green Dunlopillo convertible day-bed set before the Queensland Maple television receiver, nor any of the housewifely features hung on the walls; nor the floor-stand ash-tray in chromium and antique ivory, nor even the glass aquarium on the wrought iron stand under the window. The real feature of the room is the tea-table, groaning with all kinds of good foods set in a plastic dream. The table top features hard laminated plastic in a pattern of pinks resembling the Aurora Australis. The tablemats are a lacework of soft plastic, the red roses in the central bowl are a softer plastic, the pepper and salt shakers are the hardest of all. And, soft or hard, all this plastic is featured in the most vivid primary pillar-box red, butter yellow, sky blue, pea green, innocent of any idea of secondary or tertiary tints, and all strikingly prominent against the pale, hot pastel tints of the flat plastic paint on the walls; all vibrating like a chromatrope beneath the economical brilliance of the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. The main feature of the feature window is immediately apparent: the venetian blinds featured in a pastel tint. But look again and discover that this is more than one tint; every slat of the blinds is a different pastel hue.

And if you look more closely still you may discover, if this is a very up-to-date house, that every aluminium blade of the blind carries a printed pattern, perhaps of tiny animals done in Aboriginal style. Everywhere, the closer you look the more features you see, as in the old novelty picture of a man holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself, until the artist's and the viewer's eyesight fail.

The descent from the sky to a close view of modern Australia is a visual descent from serenity and strength to the violence of artistic conflict in a rich, competitive democracy. Featurism is not of course confined to Australia; it exists to some degree in every free and vital modern society, but in no other country is it more apparent, all pervasive and devastating in its effect. Peasant villages are not Featuristic, nor is Stuyvesant Town nor Stalinallee nor Regent's Park Terrace. A degree of freedom and unruliness is the first essential for its flowering.

If the devastation seems worst in Sydney, this is only because nature provided so much more to start with and the loss is so much more apparent. In fact, unruliness and ugliness within the precincts of a big, clean, progressive, self-respecting town could not be worse than in her competitive sister city, Melbourne, the capital of Victoria.

2
THE FEATURIST CAPITAL

Melbourne's city plan is a rigid, typical nineteenth century gridiron permitting long wide vistas down every street. And every block down the entire length of every street is cut up into dozens of different buildings, cheek to cheek, some no more than twelve feet six inches wide, few more than fifty feet, some only two storeys, some nowadays over twenty storeys and growing higher. And every facade is a different colour, differently ornamented, and within its two-dimensional limitations a different shape. It is a dressmaker's floor strewn with snippings of style.

Some of these buildings—more every day in this building boom—are described in their company literature as streamlined ultramodern, and some of them are described in the limited local architectural press with well-deserved praise. Nowadays all the new ones are resolutely modern: some ultra-modern, some sensitive modern. But since even the best is intent on its own private problems, it usually adds to the confusion of the Gothicky, Greekish, or Italianate masonry left over from last century. Few of the plainest new buildings are big enough to create an environment. Usually they aggravate rather than ease the old visual tensions.

Meanwhile, because it is a proud and prosperous city, painting of the old buildings is always in hand. By this means even those which were not especially Featurist when handed down to us by the Victorians are converted to conform with the later twentieth century. Terraces of shops, for example, with which the poorer city streets and the inner-suburban shopping districts are lined, were usually comparatively broad statements beneath the urns which cluttered the skyline. Now each narrow holding within the terrace strip is featured by its separate owner or tenant in a different colour.

The predominance of small properties and the absence of a mutual visual goal has meant that the architectural atmosphere of the total environment has hardly changed during the period between ornamental arch and aluminium louvre. Melbourne's atmosphere is still essentially Victorian: in scale, in intricacy, and in Featurism. Other young cities in other parts of the world certainly are not free of the splintering effect on the street scene of commercial competition, but seldom are others so splintered into such small holdings and seldom is frank, blatant advertising so rampant. But, most important, probably no other city in the world was ever so exclusively and enthusiastically Victorian as the capital of the State of Victoria. Anything other than avid Featurism could hardly have been expected, considering the circumstances of its childhood.

The State of Victoria lived its youth in time and in turn with the queen who gave it her name. It was born, it thrived and subsided gracefully with her reign, growing from an explorer's mud hut to a quite highly civilized community in the half-century that was Victoria's—in the spirit, the letter, and in the image of Victorian taste and Victorian endeavour.

The older colonies in Australia—New South Wales and Tasmania—were established fifty important years earlier. They grew up between 1790 and 1840 in the manners of the eighteenth century to which their military governors were accustomed. Unstudied late-Georgian dignity thus persevered deep into the nineteenth century, unaffected by the chain of revivals reacting through Europe.

Victoria, too young to have witnessed this one coherent phase of Australia's architectural development, never knew intimately any style. She knew only the wonderful confusion of all styles which was Victorian. The Old Colonial had passed from the minds of the first builders in this new colony at Port Phillip Bay. All at once, with the opening of the new territory, the revivals of the century came crowding in on top of each other. Almost from the beginning every builder indulged in eclecticism unhampered by any local traditions or any special tastes on the part of the bewildered populace. The churches were mainly Gothic; the public buildings leant to Rome. But the houses and offices felt free to dip into history wherever their fancy led them.

The builders who overlooked the Old Colonial details were also oblivious to all lessons on the Australian climate learnt by the older men in New South Wales. In Port Phillip Bay the new settlers found a climate milder than any yet encountered on the new continent. The winter was grey, damp and depressing, but not uncomfortably cold for long periods; never cold enough to take leaves for more than three months from the English trees which they hastily planted. Even the fierce summer sun was accepted philosophically. Despite the lesson of the Old Colonials, verandas were not considered necessary. After some ten summers the need for protection became apparent. A veranda was often added thereafter, but it was separately pitched from light poles and sprang in a galvanized iron buttress to the wall line; it was never an integral part of the Victorian house.

The white man came to Victoria with the nineteenth century (in 1801, the first building, a block-house planted about with ill-fated fruit trees) but a successful foundation was not laid till the eighteen-thirties. In contrast to the older States, this foundation was the work of privately enterprising men under a cloud of official disapproval. Henty, Batman and Fawkner, men of opposed natures, intentions and ideals, pressed across separately from the harshly settled island of Tasmania, bringing fruit trees, seeds, vines, implements, livestock, some labourers, two builders and one architect: Samuel Jackson, of John Pascoe Fawkner's party. Fawkner and Batman each had such strong rival claims to the foundation of Melbourne that some historians, to make peace, have termed the former the ‘father' and the latter the ‘founder' of Melbourne. Each man was typical of his class in the sharply divided society that developed. Batman, the polite stockholder, the first of an army of wealthy pastoralists, applied what elegant English features he could to the mud and crackling branches of the wild land. Fawkner was the convict's son, the trader, the self-educated editor of the first newspaper which he stuck in manuscript to the window of his, the first, hotel. He was the fighter, the tough, fierce critic of authority, the forerunner to the radicals who later broke the oligarchical rule that persevered till the middle of the century. He had the spirit that built up trade unionism and wages and cut down working hours to degrees unheard of abroad, the religiously democratic fervour that brought manhood suffrage sixty-one years before it appeared in the United Kingdom, the spirit that led Victoria in 1859 to become the first parliamentary state in the world with a secret ballot at elections, the spirit that discounted experts and suspected artists of all kinds.