by David Malouf
To take the immediate example of Old Government House. Far from being yet another example of servile colonialism, a nostalgic glance towards the Home Counties, its Palladian pretensions quite out of place in subtropical Queensland, mightn’t we see it as doing just what the same style had done for Burlington – claiming for this new place a continuity with the Classical world and its values (Governor Bowen, who built it, was a renowned classicist); imposing on the local landscape – in this case Brisbane’s old Botanical Gardens with their bamboos and Moreton Bay figs and hoop-pines and bunyas – the aesthetic order of Poussin and Claude, and in this way legitimising, domesticating within the arcadian world of those classical painters, Brisbane’s exotic flora and tempestuous late-afternoon skies?
Governor Bowen, who was fond of drawing a comparison, both topographical and climatic, between Queensland and Naples, might even have seen it as restoring the style to an original, ‘Mediterranean’ environment where it was more at home than it could ever have been in either southern England or the Veneto.
Of course, this kind of thinking is very far from the theories about building that have prevailed in our own century, in which architectural forms are related, in an organic way, to the landscape they stand in, or emerge directly from it. Only recently has Post-modernism, with its eye for the playfully eclectic, raised the possibility of a different way of looking at things; one that has allowed us to regard our older buildings with renewed interest, as products of an age when architectural design was a matter of spirited play – between landscape and culture, style and history, history and function; but strong play. Play with a purpose. Play as an act of bold appropriation.
I am speaking here of a time, the mid-nineteenth century, when Australia saw itself not as a primitive outpost of the known world but as a participant in all that was happening in an exciting and expansive age. It was remote certainly, but not for that reason either behind the times or out of competition with what was being done on the international scene. If public buildings in our cities presented a set of variations on past historical styles, this was not out of nostalgia for someone else’s history, or because the place lacked a history of its own, but because it saw itself as being up with the contemporary. Men built here as they were building at the time in Paris and Vienna and Budapest. On the same principle and in pretty much the same styles.
This feeling for period, and for period styles, was something new.
A sense of history, of what is still alive and accessible in past times and past objects, has not always been part of our sensibility. Until well into the nineteenth century, things were either ancient – that is, classical – or they were modern. Only the antique was capable of eliciting a romantic response, and this was almost entirely literary. Greek and Roman ruins were eloquent. They spoke to the heart, because they belonged to the world of Virgil and Homer.
No such associations were evoked by the gothic. The medieval world of heraldry and castles and tournaments and chivalry had not yet become, as it would be later, the repository of everything noble and picturesque, the great spiritual escape from industry and steam. Gothic buildings, which were invariably in a poor state of repair, were merely decrepit and old. Relics of a dead past and an age that, for modern taste, was primitive and barbaric. They were leftover rubble, taking up space that might better be filled with the living, with what belonged to the new world of light and speed.
When Victor Hugo began The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in 1829, the great cathedral that stood at the centre of his book was a dilapidated ruin. Solemn and neglected, in a style that spoke too clearly of ancient unrefinement and a brutality for which modern people of cultivation could feel only a fastidious revulsion, it was an embarrassment, an ignominious wreck. It was Hugo’s extraordinary imagination that restored its grandeur and mystery and made Notre Dame, with its fantastic waterspouts and gargoyles, its buttresses and high inner spaces, the embodiment, for a later generation, of the very spirit of Paris. The vast popularity of Hugo’s novel made Gothic (with a capital letter now) the high point of all that was finest in the recent past, and French Gothic the highest achievement of French civilisation. This was one of the great revolutions of the age.
But for the men who remade Paris and London in the 1840s and 1850s, the old was simply old: filthy alleys that clogged the city with foul odours, tenements that were the breeding ground of crime and every sort of infectious disease. They had no compunction about clearing away such rubbish so that these great cities could be what every city aspired to be – that is, modern.
Balzac had written evocatively of the old Paris, as Dickens did of London, but very little of what they describe survived their lifetimes. The wooden galleries of Lost Illusions, the original of Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House, the nightmarish bridges and walkways across which the Artful Dodger leads Oliver in Oliver Twist – all were swept away by the new science of town planning to make apartment blocks or residential squares for the expanding middle class, and thoroughfares, boulevards, for traffic, or to clear a path for the railways and a space for those temples to Progress, the big new terminal stations, the Gare de Lyon, the Gare d’Orsay, St Pancras, Euston. As late as 1871, when the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville were damaged during the Paris Commune, the authorities thought them not worth preserving, though they were by no means beyond repair.
To have none of these old relics to deal with was to a city’s advantage. The Australian cities, along with such newly laid out, post-industrial cities as Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne, which until recently had been little more than large villages, had the good fortune to be modern already, and Melbourne thought of itself as having the edge on Sydney because it had been planned from the start, whereas the elder city had grown up higgledy-piggledy and had much early rubbish to remove.
Vienna offers a good example of the way the age looked at things.
When the medieval walls of Vienna were pulled down in the late 1850s to make way for the Ringstrasse, most of what remained of the pre-Baroque city went with them. What was raised in its place was ‘modern’. That is: the Opera House was neo-Baroque, the National Theatre and the two great Museums, as befits houses of culture, were neo-Renaissance, the Town Hall and the University neo-Gothic, and the Parliament Greek.
Now the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in point of fact, has no more direct relationship with ancient Greece than Australia has, or the United States; but classical Greek in the Kaiserlich and Königlich nineteenth century seemed as proper a gesture towards liberal democracy as it had been earlier for the Capitol in Washington and the Assemblé Nationale in Paris. In the same way, Gothic, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge and Marburg and Göttingen, seemed proper for a university, not only in Vienna but all over the world.
I have gone this long way about to create as precisely as I can the contemporary context – the idea of a city, and specifically a modern city – in which we need to place Australian buildings of the period if we are to see what their makers had in mind; the claim these government offices, and banks and stock exchanges and galleries and museums, were making for Australia as an internationally up-to-date place and as Europe translated. The claim was to the continuation of an ideal rather than an actual history. It was the same claim that was being made in Paris or Vienna, where after all a real history, if that was what you wanted, was already available on the ground.
What we are dealing with here is an Australia that saw itself, in cultural terms, not as colonial but as confidently provincial, standing in the same relationship to London as Dublin or Leeds or Edinburgh, or, to put it another way, as Palmyra or Baalbek or Leptis Magna did to second-century Rome. A lack of history can free you from history by leaving you free to play with the historical and construct an ideal history of the spirit or mind.
When I look again at Brisbane’s most triumphant building, J. J. Clark’s Treasury – it is now the Brisbane casino; we too have our playful mode – what I see is an attempt, a bold one, very forward looking and
ideas-driven, to claim for this site above the river, and for what till then had been a town of unsealed streets and only the most modest timber dwellings, the sort of Italianate possibilities that go with its grandeur of design; the entrepreneurial energies of Italian Renaissance bankers, the independence and enterprise of the Italian city-states. It is a matter of using style, conjoined with function, to exert force on a site, and to open up within it a whole range of social and economic possibilities. It would be quite wrong to see such a building as offering no more than a comfortable evocation of the European and familiar – to see it, I mean, as nostalgic. It is too commanding for that. It exerts too strong a force, establishes too many tensions, speaks too boldly of ambition and local power. Like the gem-like Customs House in the next bend of the river, its aim is to redefine the site by deepening its associations in a way that will make the building’s uses seem natural, sanctioned by long association, and in that way to appropriate a future for it. But its aim is also to make the site itself more complex and open to possibility, adding to climate and vegetation a cultural dimension, and shifting what can be seen – the site’s natural history – in the direction of what is there as yet only in potential, a future that will be determined not by nature or past history but by the calling of new forces on to the scene.
The scene.
If there is something of the theatrical, something of the stage-set about these buildings, then that surely is part of their intention. They are, like a stage-set, meant to be both a proper scene for action and an inspiration and guide to action, encouraging, by their very size and assurance, but most of all by the references inherent in their style, a grandeur and confidence of gesture that might push a man towards illustrious performance. In the same way, Gothic halls of residence, Gothic cloisters and quadrangles, were meant, by a kind of associative process, to encourage a devotion to scholarly excellence. The set was there – it was up to those who entered it to fill the scene with appropriate action.
These buildings have an air of magic as well as theatre about them. They were magic boxes, a good part of their function as galleries, banks, city halls, treasuries, parliaments being to give those who entered them access to power, which they would acquire by setting themselves in the line of a powerful continuity.
What I have been looking back to is a time when culture, as it was embodied in our long European inheritance, was the determining factor in the creation of our Australian world. In the choice between culture on the one hand and geography on the other, the nineteenth century comes down firmly on the side of culture; on what belongs to mind. Arguing from there made nineteenth-century Australia confident because powerful. Even over-confident. The idea grew up that if we could only keep ourselves pure, it would one day be our privilege, as a nation, to carry forward into history the British ideal.
But this ambition for empire, for a manifest destiny, came at a price. It introduced a note of anxiety, which deepened and has never gone away.
Strange as it may seem at this distance, we were most confident, most sure of where we stood, both as regards space and time, when we saw ourselves in a provincial relationship to a world that was itself central and stable. The desire to stand alone, to have a destiny and a history of our own, was inevitable of course, and necessary, but it destabilised us, introducing first a resentful sense of being marginal, of being colonial and irrelevant to the main course of things, then an endless worrying back and forth about how we were to ground ourselves and discover a basis for identity. Was it to be in what we had brought to the place or what we found when we got here? Was cultural inheritance to define us, even in the radically changed form that being in a new place demanded, or the place itself?
But the belief that we must make a choice is an illusion, and so, I’d suggest, if we are to be whole, is the possibility of choosing. It is our complex fate to be children of two worlds, to have two sources of being, two sides to our head. The desire for something simpler is a temptation to be less than we are.
Our answer on every occasion when we are offered the false choice between this and that should be, ‘Thank you, I’ll take both.’
5
The Orphan in the Pacific
The 1950s, precisely because they mark a watershed in the life of modern Australia, have become a disputed area. They are for some the last time in our history when old-fashioned frugality and a sense of duty mattered to people; when you could still leave the front door open while you slipped down to the shops; when it was still shameful to be divorced; when gentlemen still gave up their seats to ladies on the tram; when backyards in the cities still had a vegetable patch and a wire-netting enclosure for chooks that kept city folk in touch with country matters and made city kids aware of where eggs come from and that the chicken they were eating had once had a head – though not perhaps what any four-year-old today could tell them, which is where they themselves had come from, unless it was from under one of the cabbages their dad grew down the back.
It was the last time, too, when most Australians shared the same culture; that is, when there was no significant divide between high and low culture and none, certainly, between youth culture and the rest. When families had their own seats at the Saturday night pictures and were loyal to the Regent or the Metro whatever film happened to be on. When the races dominated the radio on Saturday afternoons and everyone had the number of an SP bookie. When rodeos were still a city spectacle, and English comedy shows such as Much Binding in the Marsh and Take It from Here, and vaudeville houses with their strong flavour of vernacular humour, had not yet been replaced by American sitcoms; when we still told Dad and Dave or Dave and Mabel jokes, most of them dirty.
At sixteen, as I was in 1950, I could mix Tex Morton, big band jazz, and Gladys Moncrieff in Rio Rita, with the Top Twenty, the Amateur Hour, the Lux Radio Theatre and the Borovansky Ballet, the surf every weekend, and the last episodes of The Search for the Golden Boomerang – all with no sense that I was doing anything but responding to what most interested and amused me. High culture was there – Australia in those years was still on the international concert circuit and in the late 1940s I heard almost every great conductor and instrumentalist of the day – but it was simply part of the mix. So were we. I had not yet discovered that names I had known all my life like Uscinski and Rasmussen and Reithmuller were ‘foreign’, or that my own name was as well. It didn’t feel foreign and was so common around Brisbane that most people did not take it that way. All very comfortable, it sounds, and secure and cosy. Still, I have other memories of the time that are none of those.
Like most young people, I saw the world as excitingly new and full of possibility, but what struck me in the adult world around me was a kind of anxiety at the centre of people’s lives, a sense of resentment, of disappointment or hurt; a prickliness, too, that could easily become mean-spirited mockery and contempt for anything ‘different’ – large gestures, extravagant emotions; a suspicion of everything ‘out there’ that might challenge our belief that the world we had here, however ingrown and pinched it might seem to outsiders, was the biggest, the fairest, the sunniest, the healthiest, the best fed.
What was it that had scared us? What were we afraid of?
Communism, of course. Reds, both outside and, more insidiously, within. The infection of Europe: all those recent horrors that we imagined might be brought in, like germs, with those who were fleeing from them. The sick disorder and obscenity of Modernism, and especially of modern art, whose cleverness and assault on traditional beliefs and values, we thought, were meant to make fools of us – well, we were not fooled! American culture and commercialism. But there were some of us who were also in love with it: American pop songs and musicals. American writing, American style in the way of Levi jeans and Cornel Wilde haircuts, American films – though much that we took to be American, as it came to us from the Hollywood dream factory, was shot through with the darker tones of Europe. It was in the popular and commercial form of the movies, held in such
contempt by local intellectuals, that we had our first contact with forms of Modernism – contemporary music, for example, or German Expressionism – from which we were otherwise protected.
It seems to me now to be a world that was forever crouched in an attitude of aggrieved and aggressive self-defence. Closed in on itself. A stagnant backwater and sullenly proud of the fact. A world that had not come to terms with wounds, deep ones, that something in the national psyche, or our Digger code, did not allow us to speak about or even to feel as deeply as we might need to do if we were to be whole again.
The lack of tradition in our writing for dealing with anything but the external life – manly action in the open – meant that the experience of the trenches, that moment in Western history when a break occurred in our long-held belief in progress and the benign nature of technology, went unexpressed here. There was no local equivalent of Wilfred Owen or of All Quiet on the Western Front. The horror, the deep pain of that experience, was not recreated here in the kind of imaginative form that allows a society to come to terms with itself by taking what it has suffered deep into its consciousness and reliving it there in the form of meaning rather than as muddle and shock.
We began to think of ourselves as having been betrayed – of our willingness, our good nature, as having been taken advantage of. At Gallipoli. In the last days of the war in France, when we had made so large a sacrifice but received so little acknowledgement of it. At the Peace Conference afterwards, where the British had thwarted our attempts to acquire the German possessions in the Pacific, and granted those that lay north of the equator to the Japanese, thus bringing one step closer what most Australians saw as a potential aggressor.
Events out there seemed to have developed a quality that reduced us, for all our larrikin know-how and swagger, to victims. There was the death overseas, among strangers as we thought of it, of Phar Lap and Les Darcy. There was the swamping of our cinema industry, which had begun so strongly and was so lively and confident, by the superior power, the money power, of Hollywood. There was the Bodyline series. All these blows, large and small, had shaken our confidence, made us draw back in distrust of the world, but also of ourselves and of one another.
