The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  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 flor
al 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.

  Again, all over the world Featurism thrives in the presence of a quality which has always been a tap-root of ugliness in various fields: urgency. Commercial competition in itself need not lead directly to the demolition of a sense of unity and integrity in a city. This develops only when the level of commercial urgency rises high enough to bring the competition above the surface. Car design, for instance, goes through convulsive changes between Functionalism and Featurism. When rivalry in Detroit is keenest, or when British cars struggle hardest to regain some of their lost ground to Continental makers in places like Australia—these are the times of the Featurist styles, of the Cadillac symbols, when the tail fin is invented, and separate features are made of each headlight, taillight, stoplight and turning light. These are the times of the sudden kinks in every straight line, the feature panels of contrasting tone inset in the sides, three-tone paint finishes—all giving the lead in turn to the control panels of washing machines and room-conditioners and kitchen-tidies.

  It takes an assured product and a confident advertiser coolly presenting unassailable facts to produce a functional design, a genuine style and a calm advertisement. These are things which are so rare as to be noteworthy whenever they appear in the Australian street, kitchen, magazine, or newspaper. Freedom from anxiety to please, freedom to overestimate the customer’s intelligence, are kinds of freedom remote from modern Australia. The worst anxiety is usually at the promotional level, but it soon transfers itself along the line through architect, industrial designer, muralist, interior decorator, typographer—everyone feeling his duty to create a feature, no one unanxious enough to make a plain statement of fact.

  PART TWO

  3

  ANGLOPHILES AND AUSTERICANS

  Two things, then, are essential for the generation of the climate in which Featurism thrives. One is the desire to make things seem other than what they are. The second is inadequate facilities for the process of camouflaging.

  There can be few other nations which are less certain than Australia as to what they are and where they are. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, a generation of Australians which is not too old to lead in politics and board-rooms still refers to England as ‘Home’, to the Commonwealth as ‘The Empire’, and to their own nationality as ‘British’. Most Australians, however, consider these terms pleasant enough but no longer realistic. The British lion, it is realized, is preoccupied with its own problems and not much help out here. There is even a trace of superiority in the popular attitude to England. The novelist, the late Nevil Shute, always gathered an eager audience when he discoursed on his favourite topic of the eminence of Australia next century, with a hundred million people and the spiritual leadership of the Commonwealth. But there are other busy people who do not picture Australia ultimately connected with Britain, but who would sign her up tomorrow to economic junior partnership with the United States in a ceremony tumultuously applauded by a million jiving teenagers.

  The historical, cultural and economic justifications for both these attitudes are overlaid by a slightly neurotic condition brought about by loneliness. The physical isolation from the West is only partially alleviated by radio and jet travel. Australia still feels cut off from what she thinks of as her own kind of people, and the obvious cure of her loneliness, fraternization with her neighbours in Asia, is not acceptable. The immigration policy remains rigidly opposed to Asians and even its madly offensive, if unofficial, name of ‘White Australia Policy’ is sacrosanct. Yet there are public men who have virtually dedicated their lives to reminding Australians that they live in warm Asian waters.

  Thus Australia is pulled in three ways at once from three remote points of the compass, and with every tug there is inside herself an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes these forces are expressed openly in the culture. The self-conscious Englishness of the Gothic Revival of last century later expressed itself in a Tudor Olde Englishe look in some shop buildings. And always there was the Georgian, symbol of Good Taste and Breeding, for those most anxious to display their Englishness. On the other hand there was the self-consciously American Californian Bungalow style in houses after the First World War, not to mention here the dominating American influence at the sales-counter level. At the third point of the triangle are the Orientalism advocated by the late Hardy Wilson and the Japanese architectural-decorative style which developed late in the nineteen-fifties. Finally, representing the reactionary pull to all these influences, there are th
e self-consciously nationalist Australian styles: either New-Old Colonial or Log-Cabin Bushmanist.

  Two important things to be noted about all these overt expressions of the subconscious tensions are that they are rare, and that only seldom are they Featurist. All the clear-cut unequivocal geo-cultural styles, including the Australian, have had about equal weight in the total scene, and each was very lightweight. Most of these in their heyday injected something like two per cent of colour into the body of the community culture. Their combined effect, however, was more than the sum of the twos. The overt expressionists were rarely Featurist because they had an idea, however removed from reality, which they wanted to convey, and to some extent they encouraged this one idea to rule the entire building. Their combined effect, on the other hand, merely reduced the uncommitted mass of people to a state of confusion. The simplest escape from this confusion for the ordinary builder and designer was to reject all strong suggestions of style, to carry on with the economic-utilitarian conventions, but to add snippets from one or more, or all, of the passing fashions, and to feature each snippet against an uncontroversial background. The resulting mixture, displayed in the passing fashions of the lounge-room and the shop window, accurately conveyed the uncertainty of the national psyche. The Featurist wants to belong, but where can he? In eighteenth-century England, nineteenth-century Australia, twentieth-century America, or twenty-first-century Asia?