The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  Unintentional ugliness, on the other hand, has an element of tragedy, because it comes from better visual intentions. It is the ugliness that starts in a spark of revolt against the depressing litter of the artificial environment and ends in an over-dressed, over-coloured, overbearing display of features.

  The Australian ugliness has distinctive qualities, but in substance it is the same as the thing that has been called: ‘the mess that is manmade America.’ These were the words of the London magazine Architectural Review when it devoted an issue in December 1950 to a devastatingly illustrated attack on American urban and suburban culture. If a means of arresting this visual blight could not be found soon, the Review said, ‘the USA might conceivably go down in history as one of the greatest might-have-beens of all time.’ These comments were not warmly welcomed in the USA. ‘One should expect a man breaking in a wild bronco to spoil some grass,’ wrote the New York magazine Architectural Forum in reply. Pained reaction to the English criticism reached from the architectural journals to the literary papers. Visually educated Americans had long been conscious of the mess, and they resented the Review’s implication that it took someone from the cultural side of the Atlantic to notice it. Nevertheless, the outside criticism seemed to spur more self-examination, and the better magazines sometimes now are almost as outspoken as the English visitors were. And meanwhile the Review discovered that something just as bad was happening at home in England: a world of universal low-density mess was creeping over the once-lovely English landscape. Outrage, written by Ian Nairn, in June 1955 issued ‘a prophecy of doom’—the doom of an England reduced to a universal mean and middle state, with none of the real advantages of town or country and the disadvantages of both. Nairn pictured: ‘…an even spread of fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks, and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country and back into the devitalized hearts of towns, so that the most sublime backgrounds…are now to be seen only over a foreground of casual and unconsidered equipment, litter, and lettered admonitions.’

  The mess of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no respecter of a country’s age, but then in countries older than Australia other centuries still contribute something to the scene. Nowhere yet is it as extensive as in Australia.

  Like Sydney, all Australian towns and villages look their best in the longest view—from high in the sky—when the details of the mess are lost and the spaciousness and extent of the private domestic life can be appreciated best. The love of home can be seen in the great speckled carpets spread wide round every commercial centre. The carpet is coloured, somewhat patchily, a dusty olive in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne: the mixture of terra cotta roofs and greenery in the gardens, and silvery-grey in the north and inland where most of the roofs are corrugated iron or fibrous-cement. By night the carpets are black velvet sprinkled wider with brilliant jewel lights than any other cities in the world with comparable numbers of people.

  From the distance there is continuity, unity and the promise of comfort in the mushroom roofs and the bright background of tended green. But as the plane circles lower near the airport it is apparent that the green of the average suburb is a horizontal veneer no higher than the reach of a diligent gardener’s snippers: lawn, compact shrubs, annuals, nothing high enough to threaten with shade the pink terrazzo of the sun porch. And as the plane drops closer and lower still one can glimpse occasionally under the eaves of the mushroom roofs and see the battle of the colours and the decorative iron skirmishes. Still the sandblasted koala bears and the yacht-race scenes on the entrance hall windows are not visible. They are not seen until one has landed and is driving through the suburban streets, by which time it is difficult to avoid noticing also the featured columns supporting the corners of the entrance porches and the plasticized silky-oak featured front doors inside the feature porches, and the black plastic silhouette cockatoos featured on the feature doors.

  Featurism has low surface tension. It has the quality of penetrating ever further into the artificial make up. Ten years ago all park benches were dark green (sympathetic) or white (challenging). Then they too began to be featured in contemporary colours: a featured red bench, a blue bench. A little later the separate planks or battens of each bench were featured; red, blue, green, yellow alternating. This technique began about 1950 (as far as one is prepared to track it down) in the sudden light-hearted suggestion of a councillor of Prahran, Victoria, who convinced his fellow councillors that this would restore some much-needed gaiety to the drab green foliage of the parks and playgrounds. Within a few months almost every other council in the suburbs of Melbourne had followed Prahran’s lead, and later the multi-coloured paint spread throughout the country. It happened at about the same time that garden pergolas, which had been traditionally monochromatic, began to change many colours, each beam of the pergola featured in a different hot pastel hue. Later the most popular treatment for pergolas, trellises, fences, beer-garden screens and other similar garden adornments was to make them in a squared grid and to feature the inside edges of each square in a different primary.

  Colour, this most striking single element in the modern Australian scene, is a comparatively new feature. It is a product of the last half of the 1950 decade, the do-it-yourself era, chemical advances, and the keen competition of the largely British-owned paint companies. Heavy advertising has encouraged the idea of happy family painting bees using lots of different pigments on walls and ceilings, and to pick out features. Ordinary colour-cards grew from six to sixty hues in this period. Multi-colouring brightens the creative task of redecorating for the amateur, and ensures the opening of a profitable number of partly required tins of paint. Again, pigment is relished by the pressing and printing machines which produce many modern surfacing materials. But, irrespective of practical and economic influences, strident colour is a direct popular cultural expression of easy living. It is a reflection of the money in the modern pocket, just as equally intense, but heavier, richer colours in wallpaper and gilded plaster reflected the last boom of the 1880 decade. Between the booms pigment was mainly something to hide dirt marks. A drab series of duochrome fashions reflected the comparatively flat progression of the country through the first half of this century. About 1900 the two acceptable colours were brown and cheese. After the First World War they were sometimes green and grey. Cream and green predominated on all paint colour-cards from the Depression to the war, although the theme was sometimes varied late in this period by the more daring cream and cherry or cream and sky blue in kitchens and entrance porches. Even the rakish jazz-moderne of the pre-war milk bar and picture palace was never a painted style. It indulged in colour only in the neon tubes.

  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 m
ainly 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.