The Australian Ugliness (9 page)

Cast iron was the staple decorative element of the boom. Filigree ornamental iron had been imported from England in some quantity since the mid-century. A few houses, such as Corio Villa in Geelong, are standing still as wonderful examples of Victorian ferrous adventure: ‘Corio' is a complete English prefabricated iron house of charming intricacy erected in 1855. But in the eighteen-eighties iron was not used as a structure; it was a feature.

The terrace buildings of the time were plain and solid: stucco on brick or bluestone, and the ornament was confined to a perforated skin of iron standing in front of the front verandas. The Australian castings were somewhat coarser and closer in texture than those imported from England earlier in the century. Solid and void were about evenly matched in various floral geometric designs. The balustrades at lower and upper veranda levels offered the broadest scope, but from there the ornamental iron crept up the thin, fluted columns and edged along the upper bressumers, hanging in festoons like pressed wistaria. Sometimes native flora and fauna, or municipal coats of arms appeared suddenly in gaps in the scumble of iron, but the thin columns always remained grotesquely Ionic, with grossly oversized volutes staring like a possum's eyes across the shallow garden strip to the street. Thus a cast iron facade was formed, a lacework screen of iron which threw a pleasant speckled shade on the stucco wall behind.

At the same time there was a certain snobbish reaction to the practice. The richer mansions of the boom eschewed such cut-rate ornament as the sand moulds of the foundries could turn out. For them Italianate was the only accepted costume, and it sometimes inflated even single-storey cottages with extraordinary pretensions until they dripped with plaster encrustations round every marble feature.

The State of Victoria lustily developed Australia's devastating combination of unconcern with essential form and over-concern with features, but the origins were probably older than Victoria. Perhaps they grew invertedly out of the earliest miseries of the penal colonies. At any rate the pattern of Featurism, the concentration on frills and surface effects, was apparent as soon as the first native-born generation became of age to build its own houses, and the number of free immigrants grew to significant proportions. The engrossing desire for conspicuous wealth was noted as a dominant characteristic very early in the nineteenth century. The shame of poverty and convict origins was still a powerful element in a country where many were growing rich and already everyone who was able and willing to work could live in comfort. The Van Diemen's Land
Monthly Magazine
, in November 1835, noted ‘incongruities in buildings, furniture, dress and equipage, which we fear cannot fail to strike the observant stranger. This love of display, so inconsistent with the character and situation of settlers in a new country, may indeed have partly originated in each wishing to impress upon his neighbour a due sense of his previous circumstances, and standing in society. But, whatever the cause, the effect is too apparent.'

Was this, then, the origin? The desire of free citizens, practically all of whom had left the old country in some sort of personal cloud or dudgeon, to prove that they had been, back in that veiled past, men of some substance, accustomed to the richer things? But a few decades later, when the convict shame had faded considerably, a new motive for display appeared with gold: those who found it wanted to show off their good luck by throwing enormous parties, having their horses shod with solid gold horseshoes, and raising conspicuously useless features like towers above the roofs of their mansions, belvederes, and temples of love in their artificial lakes. Motives thus came and went, styles came and went; and only Featurism remained unchanged.

In the later part of the boom period the staple Italianate Georgian made way at times for a new popular genre peculiarly suited to Featurism: the Gothic Revival, a rich fruit of the union of ostentation and sentiment.

The Gothic Revival in Australia was a fabric of myths. Firstly, the most persistent myth in architecture: that in the days of the cathedrals the emotional expression of building reached shimmering heights inaccessible to the more materialistic generations of builders before and after. Secondly, the myth that this towering, flowering of architectural art was essentially English and lingered on in the blood of the lowliest Colonial, that it was indeed the only architecture which a truly upstanding patriot could consider. And thirdly of course the perennial myth that an ancient expression could be revived simply by copying the details. Perhaps a devout fervour did run through a medieval construction team, as the first myth holds, inspiring everyone from the tough old mason-architect to his most bucolic hod-carrier: a fiery spirit moulding the clusters of columns and sending them soaring irrepressibly into the dark vaults. Perhaps the ascensional spaces of the cathedrals were a simple, involuntary act of faith. But they were also a trial of strength between man and gravity, an adventure in construction. And this is the spirit, having nothing to do with religious or emotional expression, which marked the best of the Gothic Revival and almost justified its gross extravagance in ornament. But this spirit was rare, and Australia is full of Gothicky churches of crashing structural dullness stuck about with decorative features. Even before Ruskin published his
Seven Lamps
in 1849, most embryonic Australian cities had a cathedral or two with spire and pointed-arch windows roughed into shape in orange brick or timber slats.

Many of the earliest secular buildings, including Francis Greenway's stables at Government House, Sydney, had a comparatively subdued Gothic intonation. The style was never one of the most popular in the chain of domestic fashions. It was always a little bewildering to the builder-designers, but it kept appearing in rather special work by architects, from Edmund Thomas Blacket's Greenoakes Cottage, 1846, at Darling Point, Sydney, to a few fretworked dolls' houses of the late eighteen-eighties. Even in the twentieth century, a symbol of Gothicism, the pointed gable, may be traced, always clinging to the architects' movements a little ahead of the vernacular. Even in small-house suburbs built after the Second World War the last weary skirmishes of the Battle of the Styles were being fought out. Above the walls of cream brick and weather-board, a hipped roof was still symbolic of the Georgian rule of taste, and a low gable of the Gothic, with all passion spent.

The English, Scottish and Australian Bank on the north-east corner of Collins Street and Queen Street, Melbourne, is probably the most distinguished building of the whole Australian Gothic Revival era, not forgetting the cathedrals. Sir George Verdon, a friend of Pugin and a dedicated Gothic-fancier, was general manager of the bank, and William Wardell, a pupil of Pugin and for years the Inspector-General (chief architect) of the Public Works in Victoria, was the architect. These close friends prepared the designs for an unstinted £50,000 building. Although it was probably the most Italian-looking thing in Australia until the espresso bars of the 1950s, it was described at the time, in the
Illustrated Australian News
, 3 October 1883, as ‘English of the fourteenth century, of the period generally known as, the “Geometrical decorated”.' The directors of the bank deserved congratulation, the
News
felt, for choosing an ‘English style of architecture'. When it was finished three years later it turned out to have a restrained Venetian Gothic exterior in red sandstone from Pyrmont, near Sydney, and an interior which was a richly imaginative combination of non-classical features. It is undamaged still.

The reinforced concrete columns of the banking chamber rise to a dazzling ceiling. This was the work of a Scotsman named Wells, who lived on the premises during building and worked under the scrutiny of Verdon and Wardell. In strongest contrast to the stuffy confusion which characterized most Victorian Gothic work, this is light, brilliant, open and coherent. Flying arches spring from the columns. The steel joists supporting the ceiling are exposed, with their lines of rivet-heads picked out in gold. Copper flowers and foliage sprout from the capital of each column. All this is painted in light blue, with many primary accents and enough gold leaf, the modern bank informs, to run an inch-wide ribbon round the equator. The fine mosaic of the floor is preserved, but covered at present. At the rear, diagonally opposite the entrance, the banking chamber opens to the shimmering white Tasmanian limestone ‘Cathedral Room', which is part of the next-door building in Collins Street: the old Stock Exchange of 1890, a conventional commercial palace by Collins Street's greatest Goth, William Pitt.

Three blocks west down Collins Street are two of the most elaborate flowers of the period: the Rialto and Olderfleet office blocks. But if these seemed rather over-ornate even to some of their more critical contemporaries, at least the maze of ornament was simply embroidery on a reasonably rational form. On the other hand, the next popular style after Gothic was far less embroidered but discarded all idea of rational form. This was the strange hybrid domestic style of red bricks, turrets, gables, bay windows and pointed spires of terra cotta tiles: every house a brimming bowl of features without leavening. By this time the convict shame was well buried and forgotten and the gold had long since run out. The motivation now seemed to be the desire for respectability, and this was somehow associated with England, ‘Home', and solidity in the contorted brickwork of the style spectacularly misnamed ‘Queen Anne'.

If the desire to settle down into the Suburban-Puritan society of the twentieth century produced Queen Anne about 1900, the desire to escape this stuffiness led to a violent reaction nearly four decades later. Meanwhile other minor fashions—Californian Bungalow, Spanish Mission, Tudoresque and so on—had all exercised some small influence on shaping a consolidated suburban villa-cottage style. The reaction to all this came gradually after the mid nineteen-thirties in the form of the ‘Modernistic', the jazzy ‘Moderne', a fidgety sort of iconoclastic, beatnik aberration which obtained, while it lasted, a firmer foothold in Australia than in any other country except France. Houses of the style are common in the white-collar suburbs which built up rapidly in a few years after the Second World War. In the typical application the house has two storeys, which in itself separates it from its neighbours. The external face of the brick-veneer walls is in a special, or many different special, coloured bricks. The most popular colour, known as ‘cream', is an undrinkable muddy yellow. The favourite special brick for features, porches or accents around windows, is the manganese brick: a rich, glossy brown. These are ideal for making miniature sky-scraper effects on the top of window openings or to break the skyline of the parapet walls which conceal the roof. The front corners of the house are rounded, and windows sidle around them, draped inside with cream lace festoon blinds. In the centre of each wall the parapet steps up in a little manganese ziggurat. The entrance porch has been done with the most special care and curves, and is trimmed with wriggles of wrought iron. As can be seen from this brief description, the whole is a combination of two different inspirational themes: the rectilinear aspiration of New York's technology and the graceful femininity of the Parisian furniture emporium. Inside, the houses have cream plaster walls, multi-coloured floral carpets, circular peach mirrors with scalloped edges, genoa velvet lounge suites and walnut-veneer cocktail cabinets supported on bent chromium pipes. A popular feature of the mantelpiece ornaments in this style is a Mephistopheles cast in plaster, very thin, about two feet high, and painted vivid gloss-red. This style, which is as Australian as the Old Colonial or spaghetti on toast, began reluctantly to decline about 1950, when the more formal, straighter version of ‘Contemporary' was in ascendancy.

At this time the Australian scene was undergoing another more important change, an injection of something like ten per cent of Continental European stock into its Anglo-Saxon blood. As numerous observers forecast, this transfusion was enormously beneficial to the patient in many fields, such as coffee-making, music, ski-ing and the stocking of delicatessen shops. But, contrary to some prophets, it did not assist in broadening or sharpening the taste as manifest in the suburban street. The experience of people in charge of official and unofficial bureaux of housing information, like the Small Homes Service of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, was that Continental migrants sought plans for small houses of the most conventional— Australian conventional—form. At the same time, successful migrants who built expensive houses in the richest suburbs commissioned replicas of the neighbouring modernized-Georgian mansions, and their New Australian architects expertly complied. In short, New Australians reinforced rather than weakened the somewhat smug spirit of suburbia which they discovered, notwithstanding that nothing less like their own traditional urban way of life could be imagined. The desire to belong, it seems, overcame any inherent distaste for the scattered suburban manner of living. Moreover they were prepared to be led by Australians in the matter of domestic architecture, since this was the one field of cultural activity in which the ordinary Australian was more practised than the ordinary European.

Thus various undercover desires, for respectability or for status, have led Australians of many periods to the desire for display in the background of their lives and have ensured a good reception for every passing flamboyant decorative device. But still this does not go far to explain the phenomenon of Featurism.

Well-adjusted people, whether peasants or princes, who are content to appear what they are, scorn display, and are not tempted by Featurism. Visually alert people, whether artistic or sophisticated, may need or want display but are aware that they should avoid it and are adept enough not to sink to it. Only when a community is not entirely well-adjusted and not very alert, when people want consciously or unconsciously to display and know not how best to display, only then is Featurism likely to prosper. Indeed it is then inevitable, because Featurism is the most elementary form of expression historically displayed by peoples emerging from primitive Functionalism. The symbol or the image, the miniature of the new aspiration, is applied to the old thing in the hope that it will tinge the whole old thing with new colour. And, to unalerted eyes, indeed a feature can succeed in suffusing the whole of the thing to which it adheres. The ordinary wigwam becomes an object of awe when a totem is added. The weather-board shed takes on a new aura with a wooden cross attached to the point of the front gable. Anyone without the technical, economic, or artistic means of achieving a desired quality in any article of use or of art naturally and inevitably resorts to the application of symbolic features: a bas-relief high up in the right-hand corner injects culture into a spiritless masonry facade; a single feature wall of expensive Japanese wallpaper imparts an air of luxury to an otherwise economical waiting-room.