by Robin Boyd
The first generation after Hobart’s founding in 1804 passed in savagery and beauty. The vicious slaughter of the Aborigines and the brutality to the convicts were accompanied by a gentle discretion in everything built. The prison at Port Arthur, fifty miles to the southeast on the Tasman Peninsula, exemplifies the early period, its relics of hideous inhumanity clothed now in mellow stone, gentle ivy and soft avenues of trees. In the simple matter of using bricks and stone, windows and doors suitably and without pretentiousness, the founders of Hobart could hardly do wrong and all subsequent Tasmanians could hardly do right. The city today is a monument to the destructive progress of twentieth-century Australia. The brutality of the foundation era is a closed book. Understandably, many Tasmanians wish not to be reminded of it. Historic documents have been left deliberately in some instances to rot so that the records of names, crimes and the awful penalties will be erased. Less methodically but as diligently the surface beauty of the early days also has been removed from all the more prominent places. The little houses have been wrecked without a second’s thought, or were brought up-to-date with applied ‘half-timbering’ in the early years of the twentieth century, and with pots of primary-hued paint in the later years. Until the end of the Second World War Arthur Circus on Runnymede Street at Battery Point, named after Governor Arthur, was one of the charming sights of Hobart: a little ellipse of roadway in the Bath tradition with houses once occupied by military officers surrounding the road at attention, facing a park in the central space. The houses were minute, making a sort of architectural fairy ring. But now the lawn is treeless, and many of the little houses have been ‘personalized’, as they say, with many shades of paint in harsh, bright colours. A tangle of poles and overhead wires criss-cross the ellipse and some traffic authorities threaten to cut a road through the middle to speed the passing sightseer.
At times like this the Tasmania of today appears to be an island determined to lose any identity it has or had apart from the mainland. This is the pattern of the times. The Featurism which began in the fashionable centres of Sydney, Surfers and St Kilda Road, now oozes out evenly, flatly to the furthest places where Australians live. The cool green mountains of Tasmania and the edges of the stony desert a thousand miles to the north are now bound together by the brittle bonds of fashion: Georgian for high incomes, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured plastics, paint and flat black steel welded into hard geometrical shapes. These self-consciously ‘contemporary’ things now make up most of the veneer which smothers any indigenous materials and any cultivated aesthetic whether the object is a smart church in Darwin by a southern architect, or a ski hut by a New Australian in the Australian Alps, or an espresso bar designed by its proprietor in Brisbane. These things are not in themselves important, for their power to attract will pass in a year or two, but the spirit behind them, the emptiness of spirit behind, shows every sign of permanence.
These things are not Australian inventions. The contorted black frames and the vivid colours and accentuated textural contrasts are only rough offshoots of international modern decorative design. The meaningless space-age shapes are found by the truckload in America—on juke-box and diner, in the sordid strip developments— but there they are the muddy fringe of a driving movement of modern design directed vaguely towards the confident (smug, if you like) American dream. The blazing discords of colour are common enough in the East wherever an ill-trained Oriental designer, unfeeling and ignorant of the basis of Western style, essays Western fashion. The inept mixtures of unrelated shapes and colours are found often enough in Europe when unsophisticated designers attempt to emulate the juke-box’s excitement but fail to follow the method in its madness. But nowhere else in West or East is the combination of smugness, ignorance and unsophistication sufficient to make a violent carnival style the ruling of the land. In Australia it is not only the commercial eye-catcher. It is accepted by strong-willed businessmen as the pattern for their offices, by the clergy for their churches. It is the summer dream of fresh young lovers planning the shape of their togetherness.
If the smallest signs of a reversal of the normal Australian drift and a release from the ugliness could be detected, emotional despair would be out of place in describing the scene. But there is no indication of a general change. There are, though, little hints of improvement in certain somewhat restricted areas of culture. A return to the innocence of a pre-industrial peasant aesthetic is not to be expected, nor necessarily desired, but a step farther away from innocence, towards a more sophisticated sense of style, would at least clean up some of the surface and buffer the shock assault of each new fashion. And in the foremost field of fashion, in clothing, there have been changes during the boom years which indicate increased awareness and an embryonic sense of style overriding the whims of fashion. The ordinary Australian woman’s dressing may be as Featurist as ever and her collections of accessories and ornaments may still give visiting couturiers the vapours. But on the other hand more women now can afford to patronize better Australian dress-makers. And they can afford the more expensive and elegant materials which demand no fancy tricks in the cutting, no special feature inserts of richer materials, no festoons of art jewellery; in everyone’s eyes the materials themselves look enviable enough to make diverting features objectionably irrelevant.
The advance in men’s clothing has been more noticeable, and more significant because the very suggestion of attention to his own appearance is a retreat from the Digger’s earlier stand when he allied smart male dressing with unnatural practices. The fancy-stripe mid-blue shirt is now plain and white. The last bunch-shoulder, multi-stripe navy worsted suit, by which Australian tourists once could be identified anywhere overseas, has practically worn out. Before 1955 men’s tailoring was done as a country cousin version of Savile Row. Now it is American in pattern, style and cut, from the Ivy League stripe to the center (sic) vent. The tight, triple-toned brown Fair Isle pattern pullover, which was once wool’s greatest contribution to informal masculine wear, and was worn throughout winter beneath the multi-stripe navy suit, has been replaced by various looser, bulkier sweaters in plain colours, Even the convict cut hairstyle is losing popularity. Frequently now the hair is allowed to extend down the sides of the head close to the level of the top of the ear.
Again, faint stirrings of fresh air may be detected even in the suffocating atmosphere of the popular furniture market. The carnival spirit is always at its maddest here, yet the plastic-coated contemporary is in fact an improvement on the fashion it is replacing. For some twenty-five years domestic furniture had been built around a three-piece genoa velvet lounge suite with waterfall back and boxed arms, almost as wide as the seat, inset with little shelves and panels of scalloped, walnut-veneered wood. The new popular pieces of vynex, laminex, black iron and bright brass may be gross perversions of the international modern models, but they are lighter and cleaner, figuratively and literally, than the musty over-stuffed, varicoloured velvet and the dusty-pink chenille. At least they narrow very slightly the great gap between the carnival and rational design, carrying the popular furniture store a fraction closer to the better interior decorators’ salons with their few spare, graceful pieces, from Denmark.
But in the time taken for the consolidation of every increase of sophistication in some restricted area there is a proportionately bigger increase in the population and its ready money, in the spread of the background ugliness. For every new presentable piece of furniture there is a piece of the old boxed velvet still being made and numerous ornamental pieces of metal and plastic being twisted into insane shapes. For every fine building there are still some hundreds of blatant features thrust forward unhappily by unloved veneer villas, and wanton little shops, and worried big factories. For every new member joining a tree-preservation society or a National Trust branch there is at least one more suburban pioneer sharpening his axe. For every new creative worker in the visual media there is at least one new Digger with a
n active, vocal antipathy to any show of creative originality, with a moralistic and often bitter resentment of anything of unfamiliar appearance.
The influences tending to extend and encourage Featurism into further follies are growing stronger. This is the nature of the prosperity. There is no attraction to the idea of upsetting the comfortable status quo by fundamental re-thinking on appearances, while loose coins in every pocket jingle eagerly to be spent on novel, exciting surface effects. As new industrial products, from cars to kitchenware, appear from time to time they follow an inevitable course of decline. They begin with an idea and arrive on the market cleanly and sensibly pursuing the idea. But as soon as the first flush of success passes they feel obliged to revive the newness. Yet all they can add is a new feature or two in the styling. So every year the radiator of the car grins wider, the handle of the refrigerator grows a bigger chrome escutcheon, the control panel of the stove gets more Martian, the sets of saucepans and bowls gleam with more jewel anodising, the concrete grilles get more complicatedly geometric, the colours more vivid, the tiles more random, and the light-shades—which always have brought out the worst in designers—get more frantically pointed, holed, ringed, striated, twisted and miserable. And all the time, in case anyone should begin crying for peace, the feature writers of the feature pages of the magazines and newspapers are coaxing and encouraging more, more, just one more golden crowning-glory feature, one more centre of attraction to set off one’s feature wall, one more outstanding, dramatically different feature, another touch or two of splendour for everyman. It is the nature of the prosperity to make people feel not unsettled but unsatisfied, to accept with complacence the muddle and mess of the artificial backdrop to living but to feel a barely satiable urge to brighten it up. A genuine desire to have things looking gay and partyish is responsible for most of the conscious mutilation of the colonial architectural heritage. It is behind, for instance, the circus that is central Adelaide. The commercial party spirit is the reason for old masonry buildings having their stones picked out in different colours or faced with bright steel panels, for a charming colonial house in North Adelaide being painted sulphur yellow, for the shady, timbered, untidy natural banks of the river that recently ambled unmolested past the University being bulldozed and terraced with trim rubble walls and neat plants. It is the reason for the rainbow riot of Rundle Street: dark blue, green, orange, pink in a dozen shades, and candy stripes.
Consider the Red Lion Hotel, a pleasant relic of Adelaide’s lustier days with the characteristic two-storey veranda. Its front to Rundle Street has not changed essentially for three generations. Drinkers still sit at tables on the first-floor balcony over the heads of the pedestrians on the footpath, and staghorn and ivy still hang above the heads of the drinkers. All that has changed is the atmosphere. The frail Victorian pomposity has left the cast iron and arches. Now they are part of a commercial party. The iron work is a smart charcoal and the wall behind is painted chartreuse, light grey, white and scarlet. The tables and chairs are a dozen different milky primaries and the four swinging bowls of floral Victorian ornament are now painted clear red, blue, yellow and green respectively.
The party spirit sometimes urges on tired little old buildings most inconsiderately, as on the two corners of narrow Union Lane and Rundle Street. On one side the old Belle Building has been pepped up with a ladder of persimmon-hued horizontal steel sunshades over the entire Rundle Street facade. This was painless enough, but on the other side an old brick warehouse, with its hoist still projecting willingly over the lane, has had teal green tiles pulled over its Rundle Street face like a party cap gone awry late in the evening. In King William Street, directly opposite the thoroughly over-ornamented but composed old Victorian Baroque ANZ Bank, it is possible for a student of Featurism to count nine different greens, ranging from lime to bottle, in the space of six narrow building facades. In Adelaide, rather more than in other capitals, the bright new party spirit is inclined to enter also the new office buildings. There is something festive about the three non-accessible balconies projecting at random from high on the face of the proud new Advertiser building, something of a party joke in the satiny, master-bedroom pink of the CML building, something reminiscent of a party drink in the bright little spots of cherry in the two-tone green glass walls of the Savings Bank of South Australia on the corner of Hindley and Bank Streets.
The span of the rake’s progress of Australian taste can perhaps be seen most simply in a single little building: The Lady Franklin Museum near Hobart. Here is one story of its birth, as told by the late Hardy Wilson, long the doyen of Australian architectural theorists:
‘There was another artist whose name I have never discovered. I believe he was a visitor with an eye for the beautiful and a joyous disregard for usefulness. He designed Lady Franklin’s Museum, which stands on a knoll in a Tasmanian valley, encircled by classic hills. The story of the building, as I imagine it, runs somewhat as follows:
‘One day, Lady Franklin, the wife of the Governor of that time, and this architect were riding through the valley when the beauty of the knoll and its surroundings attracted their attention.
‘ “What a wonderful site on which to place a Grecian temple,” cried the architect.
‘ “It is very beautiful,” replied Lady Franklin, “but how could a temple in this valley serve the folk hereabouts, who are as close to nature as their apple trees?”
‘ “Oh! as for that, your Excellency,” he said, “there is no difficulty at all. Let us make it a museum.”
‘ “But for what?” she exclaimed in surprise.
‘ “For apples,” said the architect, “a museum where apples which grow so well in this happy isle, shall be displayed in shining rows of every sort and flavour.”
‘And so the temple was built and is known as Lady Franklin’s Museum. And to this day it is used for storing apples.’
This passage is taken from Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania, 1924, the monumental work of Hardy Wilson, who on his own proud confession was more interested in pictorial beauty than in historical research. His drawing of the museum, dated 1915, reflects the gilded romance of his story of the two riders in the valley. The little building is shown lifted on to a mountain top amid cypresses and classical fragments beneath a magnificent Baroque sky. There are no figures about to give scale, and the shed looks at least twice its actual size. The architectural proportions are rendered accurately and the details with loving precision. Otherwise everything in Hardy Wilson’s drawing and description was wild misrepresentation. He even had the wrong name. It was originally the Tasmanian Museum—this was noted on a lithograph built in under the foundation stone on 16 March 1842. A year later it was known as ‘The Franklin Museum’, and later it became ‘The Lady Franklin Museum’. The point of interest about its conception was not that it was a pretty little snobbish conceit of an implausible dilettante and a grand colonial lady. The truth was more remarkable for its time in Tasmania. The building was a functional expression of the improving democratic ideals of good Sir John Franklin and his sympathetic wife.
Franklin, Governor of Tasmania from 1837 to 1843 and originator or supporter of many educational and cultural enterprises, was especially keen on promoting the study of natural history. Tasmania abounded in strange, unrecorded flora and fauna and the study of them should not have been above the educational level of the colonists. Franklin was disappointed but not daunted by his failure to impress the Secretary of State for the Colonies with this idea. He was not permitted to spend public money on the formation of a museum, but he and Lady Franklin built one. ‘The story of the museum at Lenah Valley, Hobart, exemplifies the common task of husband and wife,’ writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Sir John Franklin in Tasmania. ‘Lady Franklin never considered herself more than an amateur of science—“I am hardly even a dabbler in science” she wrote once in her diary. But Sir John considered a natural history museum important for the colony, and Lady Franklin’s
museum is a visible expression of her devotion to her husband’s interests.’
Lady Franklin selected the site, arranged for the design and the construction, and probably paid part of, if not all, the costs involved. At the same time it is apparent that she had plans to combine the natural history content with her own interests in art, which were not shared by Sir John. On 21 February 1841, she wrote to her sister, Mary Simpkinson, in England, asking: ‘Do you think you could procure for me a pretty little design for a “Glyptothek”? I mean nothing more than two or three rooms of small size, though good proportions, to hold a small number of pictures and a dozen casts of the Elgin and Vatican marbles.’ Sometime the same year she bought ten acres of land low on the slopes of Mount Wellington in an area then called Kangaroo Valley and now named Lenah (Aboriginal for kangaroo) Valley. Here on a little knoll between two gullies, the museum, one stone room, was built in twenty-two months. Long before it was finished the Franklins were in political difficulties. In July 1843 Sir John was recalled in undeserved humiliation, as Professor Fitzpatrick explains. By 26 October when the building was formally opened, not quite complete but furnished with a small library and some specimens of natural history, the Franklins were out of Government House and living in New Norfolk. Next month, before leaving for England, they signed a deed transferring the museum and its contents and ten acres of land to five members of the Tasmanian Society in trust for any future college or university.
The building they left beneath the towering blue backdrop of Mount Wellington, in a clearing between eucalypts, wattles and tufts of sweetbriar, was a superbly executed reproduction of a very small Greek temple in the Doric Order and prostyle tetrastyle form—that is, three blind walls with a portico of four columns in the front only. The proportions were perfectly in style and the simple mouldings were as finely and lovingly carved as any classicist could wish. Almost certainly the workmen were convicts—they were put to work on most Tasmanian buildings of the time. In this case there must have been masons of long experience among them.
