The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  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.

  Thus the opposing factions were there in strength from the beginning. Those who sought elegance looked for it only in one direction—back across the months of ocean; but those who were required to create the elegance for them with bricks and sticks had no great love of the Old World—for if they had not been deported, they had fled from hunger. The release in architecture for the promoters’ nostalgia was thus often frustrated by careless workmanship and the crudest craftsmanship. Not until the eighties, when the sure hands of Italian workmen dwelt lovingly upon the details, and the nineties, when the Australian-born began hunting in their own forests for motives, did craftsmanship reach the stage of competence at which it may be overlooked. Long before this much of the city of Melbourne and most of the provincial cities had been sketched out and roughly filled in.

  Before building could begin seriously in the late eighteen-thirties, the raw land had to be cut and sold. The smartest people of Sydney and Tasmania came to pick up huge estates at Government auctions. Everybody of importance stood around the auctioneer’s tent on the great sale days, chatting brightly, perspiring gaily under what they believed was the latest London fashion, blowing earthy dust off their cigars and picking little gum twigs out of the French champagne. Between 1837 and 1847 the population rose from 500 to 5,000 and half a million pounds was paid to the Government for land along the Yarra river plains. Building was limited to the town area and the squatters’ homesteads of the outer country. The standard house was a single-storied box cottage, recognising only the necessity for immediate shelter. The few Government buildings in brick and local bluestone had more pretensions, and the churches from the first were openly competitive. The first and probably the best was St James’s Anglican Cathedral, by Robert Russell, a surveyor-architect who arrived in 1836, when Melbourne was still called Bearbrass.

  Thus Melbourne spent a conventional colonial childhood to the age of sixteen. Then suddenly she found the gold, and everything changed. Now she faced the future with supreme self-confidence, determined that from this day on only the world’s most elaborate garments would be fine enough. The soil blossomed into golden blooms of all styles of history. Great Renaissance public buildings reared up on every hill as a new constitution was proclaimed and the first Parliament was elected. In 1853 nearly two hundred new buildings arose each month. Spectacular international exhibitions offered self-congratulation on a grand scale. In 1867 Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh, looked in to a quarter-million-pounds entertainment.

  The eighties produced revived bursts of spending by the State and the investors. Speculation in land sent Melbourne bounding out across the low hills to the east. New suburbs opened with great mansions—two tall storeys of ball-rooms, banquet halls and galleries, plus a feature tower—set in rolling estates of foreign trees which usually flourished, on this new side of the world, far more quickly than in their native climates. Little houses flocked to the feet of the mansions—poor houses, but finely dressed for the occasion with weather-boards made to look like stone, and cast iron veils on the brims of their galvanized iron hats. Closer to the city, rows of terrace houses grasped all the accommodation that they could from mean slices of land. Big houses squeezed into deep, narrow lots, breaking the single-storey tradition by a second floor and a tower. In the city, office buildings shot up ten and twelve floors until the hydraulic lift power and the city fathers’ tolerance ran out. Rich building stones and fine timbers flowed into the port. But not bread alone was imported. Painting collections and musicians were brought from England for the exhibitions. Local groups of painters and musicians formed desperately bohemian clubs. Huge theatres were built.

  They were golden years for an architect like Joseph Reed who could catch their spirit. Reed’s life ran parallel to the history of the colony. He landed in 1852 in a ship full of diggers headed for the goldfields. Without much money or influence, he prospered in a society which rewarded enterprise. He became rich and powerful as the century grew; and then he collapsed, almost everything lost and his health broken, in the economic debacle of the eighteen-nineties. But after death he left behind more than one grey and hollow baroque mansion, the symbol of temporary luxury which was the principal legacy of most unsuccessful speculators. For he had climbed to success on buildings which will still be standing when we are dead. There is hardly a street in Melbourne in which his work cannot be found. The Town Hall was his, the first section of the Public Library, and several University buildings, including Ormond College and the first Wilson Hall, which was burnt in 1952. The city is still dominated to the north-east by his huge Exhibition Building. In Collins Street alone he did the Independent and Scots’ churches, the Bank of Australasia (now the ANZ Bank) on Queen Street corner and the old Bank of NSW, now demolished. The Trades Hall and Wesley Church are his, as well as numerous other churches, public buildings and houses in suburbs and provincial cities.

  Joseph Reed won his position by solid work, keen business sense, and the sheer popularity of his architecture. In the young Melbourne which attracted him from England when he was aged about thirty, the appointment of an architect for major works was more often than not the subject of open competition. One story tells that Reed joined a firm of architects and assisted them to win a competition for Parliament House within a fortnight of his arrival. Certainly within two years he had established a private practice and had won a competition for the Public Library. He proceeded to build a substantial practice on his fortune in further competitions, on commissions for large public buildings like the Geelong Town Hall, and on appointments, made on the strength of his other successes, to official positions such as Architect to the University. He built up the first large architectural office in Melbourne. It has also become by far the oldest, for the modern firm of architects and town-planners Bates, Smart and McCutcheon is in direct line of descent from Reed’s partnership. David Saunders made a study of Reed’s life and methods at the time of his professional centenary, 1952, and described Reed as small, quick, full of energy, his artistic interest centred on music as much as, if not more than, on architecture. He had ‘one of the best violin collections in the world’, with two Stradivariuses. An employee recalled him as ‘an Australian terrier; liable to snap up at you with sudden violence then forget all that he had said and be helpful and kin
d’. He had his silk handkerchiefs embroidered with the names of his principal Melbourne buildings. He was an excellent draftsman and did many of the finished drawings of his designs.

  To judge his work aesthetically by today’s standards is out of the question. He was the supreme eclectic, the master Featurist. He worked in almost as many historic styles as he did buildings. Besides several variations of Gothic, he used Italian Renaissance, Romanesque, ‘French picturesque chateau styles’, and so on. The aims were to absorb the rules of the masters, to discriminate, to borrow gracefully. He was not tempted by individualism or interested in curious cults of romanticism which affected others of the late Victorian era. One may search his various buildings fruitlessly for the characteristic touches which distinguish some architects’ work and cut through stylism in any age. He was wonderfully irrelevant and proudly inconsistent.

  To select suitably and to reproduce accurately contented him. The general massing of his buildings was strictly according to the rules of the style adopted for that moment. The ornament was faithful, unrefined, impersonal. Much more critical comment on his non-original work could be made on today’s standards; and most of the above applies even if his work is judged on the standards of his own day, for his Victorian age was by no means free of architects of creative if usually misdirected individuality.

  There was, for instance, his contemporary William Butterfield, the fashionable English architect who found it impossible not to leave his touch over every foot of every church he built. One may imagine that Reed thought little of Butterfield’s Gothic Revival, the way he adapted an Italian manner of decoration, consistently colouring his interiors startlingly with tiles and marbles in zebra stripes, checks and chevron shapes. Reed felt no such need to be original, but he respected it in others. Butterfield was commissioned to design Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral about 1880. He never came to Australia, but sent out streams of plans and instructions. The data sent him could hardly have been carefully prepared. On one of his plans is the note: ‘Flinders Lane is assumed to be the East boundary.’ Flinders Lane actually was on the north. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that misunderstandings developed between him and the supervising architects. Finally Butterfield resigned, offended, refusing to reconsider. Work stopped on the building. Then Reed was approached, and he accepted an honorary position as ‘Cathedral Architect’. His organising ability saw the work through, and he did his best to make it ‘as Mr Butterfield intended’.

  When all is said Reed’s work remains to mock the modern critic, because it still has a generosity and a scale which are proportionately beyond the capacity of today’s enterprise. And may it never be said that Reed failed to exploit his opportunities. His thinking was usually almost as big as the commissions he was given. His—and Melbourne’s—most spectacular building, the Exhibition, shows up his strongest as well as his weakest qualities. The building marked a first climax in Melbourne’s development. It was prepared in 1877 for the ‘first International Exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere’. An architectural competition was held and was won, as usual, by Reed, his prize being £300 and the commission. It occupied acres of land on the hill to the north-east of the city and its great dome, standing astride the cross of the plan, was claimed to be not only the biggest but also the most beautiful dome in the world. The main structure is brick, but the interior galleries and ceilings are wood, which was ‘grained’ to resemble stone. Most of this has been lately repainted grey, with the intent to camouflage the building as a backdrop to the almost continuous trade exhibitions now held there. The cherubs and other airborne, draped figures painted in the pendentives are still intact, however, preserved with reverence by the twentieth-century caretakers. They are ridiculous, of course, and they were recognized as ridiculous even at the time they were done, by critics in the Melbourne press. But despite all the building’s tawdry features, it still has a grandeur and magnificence of scale which cannot be experienced in any Australian building of this century. This is not simply the result of overpowering size. Reed knew better than most men how to handle the immense space. Within the style his proportions are confident; the parts are expertly scaled to the whole.

  In the Independent Church, Collins Street, in 1867, he introduced the device of Feature Bricks by sprinkling a broken pattern of creams and browns among the common brickwork for perhaps the first time in Australia. Decades later this became one of the ugliest fashions of the Victorian age, and it is still doing well in the suburbs after nearly a century. Reed had just returned from one of his trips to Europe when he entered the competition for the Independent Church. While in Italy he had decided that the Romanesque style was suitable for Melbourne’s climate. He prepared an alternative design in ‘Gothic’—virtually the same thing with the windows pointed—but the Independent Church authorities preferred the Romanesque one, probably because the novelty of the style seemed to feature better their independence. Reed had a feature for every occasion. He rode on the whim of the day, his work gradually growing through his four decades of practice more confident, coarse and ornamental. He shared the popular distaste for a plain surface. His decoration had the force of habit. It was something required by propriety to clothe a building decently. In his best buildings, like the Independent Church, the form is shapely enough to read through the clothing. In his worst, like the late Eastern Market, the form was inconsequential and negative, and suffocated by urns and frills.

  In 1887, in Queen Victoria’s colony, the gilded picture was completed with fireworks. The Jubilee of the Queen was celebrated with greater enthusiasm and extravagance than in almost any other part of her Empire. The next four years, marked with rich Victorian detail, was the time that the State of Victoria knew later, through the first half of the twentieth century, as the Boom Period. Future generations will probably know it as the First Boom Period. But even the second boom which started in the late nineteen-fifties has not so far washed away the colour of those days. The Victoria of today still runs in the mould made then. Entire streets in many inner Melbourne suburbs, sometimes entire country towns, still remain as built to the requirements and taste of the eighteen-eighties. When the land gave up the last of its gold and populations dispersed from towns like Bendigo, they left a Victorian pattern strong enough to dominate still the few chromium shop fronts and the slathers of lettering which are all this century has added. No matter what errors in advance planning were committed by the Victorians, their structures were magnificently solid and often their public buildings are adequate for the expected demands of the rest of this century. Nearly every inner-suburban shopping street will be dominated for years yet by a thin Italian Renaissance tower of a town hall built in the eighties. The inner suburbs’ residential streets are likely to remain much longer split into narrow slivers of land, wide enough only for a single room and a passage to the rear and covered to two or, rarely, three stories with one unit of a terrace development. The terraces were built two, three, or four at a time, but the units mostly separated into different owners’ hands early this century and the problems of collecting them back into one ownership for a sizeable rebuilding has not yet drawn out the bigger investors. The units continue to change hands one at a time, each new owner picking out his own cast iron trimmings in a new feature colour.

  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 th
e 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.’