by David Malouf
We live in close proximity here to a people whose way of looking at things is quite different from ours; and while they have not lived entirely without intervening in the workings of Nature, they have, in fact, dealt gently with it, and, in their long experience of the place, have learned a thing or two about how to live in cooperation with its strange and unpredictable ways. We now recognise this.
Nature once seemed all-powerful, a force before which man, with his puny strength, was entirely vulnerable. These days, in one of those odd reversals that occur in human thinking, it is Nature itself that seems vulnerable – fragile, precarious, constantly in need of our protection and care. Its resources no longer seem infinite. We need to preserve and protect them if we ourselves are to survive, and to do this we need to listen carefully to what the experts have to tell us, and to both sides when they disagree. To many people who care about these things it is already too late to save the continent and, as some of them insist, the planet itself. Eric Rolls, in his quiet and pragmatic way, is more reassuring. ‘It is not too late,’ he tells us, ‘to make corrections, the knowledge is available.’
It is partly because Rolls is by nature so reasonable, partly because he has himself been a farmer, that he is unwilling to ascribe all that has been done here to contempt for the land or to simple greed; nor does he put Nature’s needs at every point before our need to feed ourselves. ‘The greatest song of the land,’ he writes, ‘is the food it produces. One cannot blame European settlers for bringing in the livestock and plants that have done so much damage here, it would have been unnatural for them to settle in a new country without the feed that they knew.’
Rolls is passionate but he is neither evangelical nor apocalyptic. The important thing for him is that the way we use the land should be sensible and informed. But there are many people for whom nature in these last years has become the last repository of the sacred. Saving it, saving every last scrap of it, every species, every tree and plant, is a religious duty. The struggle between farmers and conservationists, loggers and conservationists, has become for them another and later version of the old fight between moral and spiritual purity on one hand and on the other the devil’s work that is inherent in the day-to-day business of being in the world. Evangelical and apocalyptic language, and a hectoring self-righteousness, powers their energy and gives shape to their rhetoric.
The fervour is understandable and may even be necessary; but self-righteousness is not a pretty phenomenon. Neither is religion when it develops an edge of fanaticism. I am thinking of those holy vandals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century who, out of pure Protestant zeal, knocked the heads off statues in Lady Chapels and smashed every stained-glass window in East Anglia. Our culture is subject to these waves of purifying zeal, and Australia has not been exempt in the past from outbreaks of radical purity.
Wowserism at the end of the nineteenth century led a crusade against drink, sex and every form of pleasure, and imposed a censorship here that lasted for more than sixty years. A fanatical racism once seemed inseparable from the very idea of nationhood. It would rigorously have excluded Asians, blacks, Jews, and such ‘inferior’ southern Europeans as Italians, Greeks and Maltese, in the attempt to preserve a purity of race that would guarantee for Australians an eternally white and, if possible, eternally Protestant history.
In their latest incarnation these puritanical exclusionists have chosen Nature as their sphere. Their aim is the expulsion from our parks and gardens and fore-shores of every bush, plant and flower that is not a bona fide native. Not so much out of concern for the health of the environment, the need to conserve water, for example – though that is sometimes a part of the argument – as for the health of the nation, our sense of ourselves as Australians. Only when the last non-native shrub and flower has been grubbed out of the earth, and our hearts no longer leap up at the sight of a daffodil or a bed of tulips at the Canberra Floriade, will we have broken free at last of the old superstitious nostalgia for Europe and be ourselves natives, at least in spirit, of our Australian land. This is the most fundamental form of an argument that only what belongs uniquely to this place, that derives all its elements from the life of the place, can be authentically Australian. That Australia must be kept free of all alien pollutants and influences. That if we, as individuals and as a nation, are to be unique, only the uniqueness of the land can shape us.
This may present itself as an authentically local passion, but is more culturally determined than its adherents suspect. What is new in it is the strong associations carried by the word ‘native’.
Once applied only to Aborigines, it was appropriated by the first generation of the native-born as a sign of their difference from settlers and other imports, and as a claim to belonging. We have long since given up that claim to it; we no longer speak of ourselves as ‘native’. Perhaps, as some of our radical conservationists use the term, we are meant to see in the exclusive claim of ‘natives’ to a place here, not only an argument about the land but a restorative gesture towards its original owners. The gesture may be a noble one, but is not, in its exclusiveness, in the spirit of Aboriginal practice in dealing with the world, which seems more concerned, in its pragmatic way, with what is present and on the ground; with re-imagining the scene to include all that is now in it, rather than looking back nostalgically to what was there twenty or even 200 years ago.
This capacity to re-imagine things, to take in and adapt, might be something we should learn from, something that comes closer than a nostalgia for lost purity to the way the world actually is, and also to the way it works. It might remind us as well of something we need to keep in mind: which is the extent to which Aboriginal notions of inclusiveness, of re-imagining the world to take in all that is now in it, has worked to include us.
Writing of an early moment in our history, Alan Atkinson, in The Europeans in Australia, speaks movingly of Bennelong’s relations with Phillip, and suggests that Bennelong may have made a larger leap in incorporating Phillip into his world, in opening his view of things to include all that Phillip stood for, than the Governor or any of his officers had to make to find a place for him.
They had come here expecting to find natives. They had an impeccable document that outlined how they should deal with them, and knew, either from previous experience or from their reading in Montaigne and Shakespeare and Rousseau, and from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, what a native might be, and from Cook and Banks what these natives might be. But Bennelong was not expecting this meeting. He had no preparation for it but his own capacity to observe, open his imagination, and respond.
What he made of Phillip, the room he made in his world for Phillip’s authority and for Phillip’s house as a ‘sacred site’ (he was eager, for example, that his daughter should be born in its grounds), speaks for an act of accommodation, of inclusiveness, that is an example to each one of us, and, considering all that followed, a shame to each one of us as well. But Bennelong, however weak he may have been in physical power, had behind him the strength of a culture that in being old had developed, in its long view of things, an extraordinary capacity to accept change and take in what was new and must be adapted to. It is in terms of that long view that what we have made here will be judged; and in the shaping of a collective consciousness, mixed but truly native, Bennelong’s inclusive view, his imaginative leap, may turn out to have been the most important element in that first and fateful meeting of two worlds.
4
Monuments to Time
The Brisbane I grew up in in the late 1930s and early 1940s was a sprawling, subtropical town with a style of domestic architecture that was all its own, and which comes as close as we get here to an urban vernacular. One-storeyed weatherboard, with a tin roof, verandahs, and, since the house sits high on stumps, an under-the-house closed in with lattice, it is a style that is directly responsive to the climate and to the city’s hilly terrain, and makes use as well of local timbers: hardwood for the weatherboard exterior,
hoop-pine for the interior tongue-and-groove. The same materials were also used, on a larger scale, for churches, including some high-pitched, turreted affairs that are their own form of antipodean Gothic.
If anything made me aware of being Australian, and specifically a Queenslander, it was the house I grew up in. I have written elsewhere of how its spaces determined early habits of living, of mapping the world, as well as my first sensory responses; of the way that living, as we did, in weatherboard houses on high stumps, creates a certain sort of consciousness.
They have about them the improvised air of tree houses. Airy, open, often with no doors between the rooms, they are on such easy terms with breezes, with the thick foliage they break into at window level, with the lives of possums and flying-foxes, that living in them, barefoot for the most part, is like living in a reorganised forest. The creak of timber as the day’s heat seeps away, the gradual adjustment in all its parts, like a giant instrument being tuned, of the house-frame on its stumps, is a condition of life that goes deep into consciousness. It makes the timber house dweller, among the domesticated, a distinct subspecies.
But the truth is that most people in my youth were ashamed of this local architecture. Timber was a sign of poverty, of our poor-white condition and backwardness: it made ‘bushies’ of us. Safe houses, as everyone knows, are made of brick – think of the Three Little Pigs. Timber is primitive. The fact that you could, on any day of the week in Brisbane, see a whole house being carted through the streets on the back of a lorry suggested that there was something impermanent, makeshift, about these dwellings, but also about the places where they were set down. Queensland was full of ghost towns whose houses had been carted off to make a new town elsewhere. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that our shabby weatherboards got a new lick of paint, a new name – Old Queenslanders – and Brisbane’s beautiful inner suburbs, with tin roofs flashing in the gullies among paw paw, mango and banana trees, or on hilltops among the original hoop-pines and bunyas, were recognised at last as ‘interesting’, even unique, and our comfortable weather boards as one of the distinctive forms of a domestic architecture that, variously produced from state to state, represents one of our most original achievements as Australians and a happy addition to the local scene.
Even when the basic style is imported, as in the case of the Sydney terrace, the up-and-down nature of the streets gives it a different rhythm from the British original, and the decoration a new and less formal accent. A Sydney terrace is not at all like a terrace in Liverpool or Newcastle upon Tyne. Not least in the profusion of the decoration and its sense of fantasy – lions rampant and couchant, and urns, Welsh dragons, flame-like filials – and the flamboyance with which its cast-iron balconies celebrate local flora in the form of ferns and lilies, or ethnic identity in thistles and Irish harps.
If we need a reference for such originality in the adaptation of an imported style, we might find it in the colonial houses of the United States, whose lovely incongruity lies in their being built in a correct Queen Anne or Georgian style but in timber rather than brick, and then painted bright yellow or emerald green or burgundy. It makes them, if we know the original, look problematical and wrong – a mistake, it might seem, or a provincial joke. But because of their lightness, the confidence with which they are set down in the new place and the rightness of their colours in the watery light, the old style translated becomes something fresh and original.
I took our weatherboard house for granted. I didn’t think it particularly beautiful – I barely thought of it at all. It was simply where we lived, the only sort of house I had ever known. What I did think about, and puzzle over, when I looked at Brisbane and asked myself what sort of city I was growing up in, was our public buildings.
Built for the most part between Separation, in 1859, and the late 1880s when Brisbane was not much more than 20,000 souls, they were of stone, local sandstone. Big, imposing monuments to – to what?
In a variety of styles – Italian Renaissance, French Renaissance, Palladian – that had little to do with the real history of a place that had only recently been reclaimed from densely wooded, subtropical rainforest, they were, it seemed to me, incongruously and pretentiously plonked down where they simply did not belong.
They were impressive, certainly, you could not miss that. Or their confidence. Solid gestures towards the future, they were landmarks of a city that had not yet come into existence, the ‘grand centre of civilisation’, to steal Darwin’s phrase, that would one day grow up around them and, leaving behind at last the memory of tin-roofed stores and weatherboards and verandahed pubs, be equal at last to what their buildings had in mind. They belonged to Time rather than Space. To a city that even in my youth had not yet seized the occasion to appear.
If our flimsy wooden houses were the product of geography, of a response to climate and to the peculiar topography of the place, these grand public buildings were the product of history, of that form of it called culture. But to what extent could one think of them as local and Australian rather than as impressive reproductions of a more real and authentic Over There?
That others of my generation shared these doubts is revealed by the number of these grand old buildings that were pulled down in other places in the 1950s and sixties to make way for architecture that was more modern, more ‘appropriate’.
The results, in Sydney for example, were devastating. Half the nineteenth-century city was destroyed. It might just as well have had its heart ripped out under the fury of aerial bombardment. The line of buildings that still remain along Macquarie Street and around Bent and Bridge Streets, and the single block of the Queen Victoria Building, show us something of what was lost.
Other places were barely touched. In Adelaide most of King William Street has survived, and so has North Terrace. And until the oil and mineral boom of the late 1960s, Brisbane too escaped. Brisbane and Adelaide were poor. Sydney, in the decade of the Southern Vandals, had the misfortune to be rich.
So what I have to say is in some ways an attempt at reparation, a late tribute to what, forty years ago, I did not recognise because I did not have the eyes as yet to see what was there.
I had known these buildings for as long as I could remember. A nervous ten-year-old, I had stood in the middle of the big empty ballroom at Old Government House on a cold winter’s afternoon and bowed my way through the studies and solo pieces I had chosen for the AMEB music exams. On hundreds of afternoons on my way home from school, I had waited for the West End tram outside the old Treasury Building on North Quay. Among so much that was merely patched together, and rotting and peeling, they had such an air of permanence, these old buildings: the Customs House, the Post Office, the State Parliament. They were the nearest thing we had to something ancient and historical.
What disturbed me most, I think, was that I had always found them beautiful, even moving, but I distrusted their beauty and could not understand why I was moved. If I do now, it is because I have liberated myself from the narrow assumptions about what is appropriate, or authentic, that prevented me then from seeing what these buildings were doing, what they were for. To see that I had to look elsewhere.
In the early eighteenth century Lord Burlington and his followers had begun to build country houses in England in the style of the Venetian architect Palladio, a style that was already 100 years out of date when they took it up, and itself a kind of folly; a fantasia, though a very restrained one, on Classical themes, which Palladio had translated from an imaginary South, all bosky groves and warm honeyed light, and set down among the misty valleys and hills of the Veneto. Burlington translated the style a second time, to the Home Counties, where it established itself so thoroughly, in the form of winged villas and arcaded loggias, that it became the prevailing British style for the next century and a half.
That the style did not at first sit easily with the English climate is suggested in Pope’s gentle mockery of those who built, as he says:
Long arcades through which
the cold winds roar,
Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door.
What were the English Palladians doing with this late Renaissance version of the Classical? That it was Classical gives us the clue.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England were a time when the Classical world, and particularly Augustan Rome, the age of Virgil and Horace, represented the ideal of elegance and achieved order and beauty, and a model of what the civilised and civilising spirit might achieve, not only in poetry but in all the arts. Palladianism was the equivalent in architecture of the heroic couplet – of Pope’s Moral Essays and The Rape of the Lock, works whose tone might be playful, mock-heroic as well as heroic, but whose intention was always serious. It was an attempt to claim for eighteenth-century England a continuity, not an historical continuity, but one of the spirit, with Augustan Rome, that would encourage Roman ways of thinking and feeling, Roman virtues, on English soil. In this the particulars of climate and place were irrelevant. It was a matter of mind, of imagination, and Palladio had already shown the way. If Classical forms could be translated from the heat and glare of the South to misty Venice, then why not to misty Buckinghamshire?
The point of these pedimented villas and domed rotundas was not to express place but to redefine and transcend it. By setting a Palladian building down on English soil, what might be coaxed from the English landscape were the qualities of an Italian one; not as they existed in any real place, even in Italy, but as they appeared, along with the usual Virgilian and Arcadian associations, in the idealised landscapes of Poussin and Claude.
It is in the light of this view of architecture, this way of using it to exert a force on the sites it occupied, that I came to look again – but really for the first time – at my Brisbane buildings.
