by Robin Boyd
6
THE INNOCENT ERA
In some ways it is not hard to explain why Featurism caught hold in Australia with even fiercer grip than in most other countries. For one thing, the foundations of popular Featurism were begun in England during the expansion of the Industrial Revolution early in the nineteenth century, just at the time Australia was engaged in battering back the bush frontier and creating quick impressions of civilized conditions in the townships. Again, it is easy to see how the monotony, the infinite sameness of the eucalyptus bush, the awe-inspiring plainness of it all, encourages the thought of setting up features. It is easy to understand how Featurism flourished through the golden boom days when the successful gold-diggers collected European treasures to dress the crude colonial bodies of their structures, and the unsuccessful felt obliged to make a hollow pretence of success where it counted most: say, around the front door, or on the mantelshelf. It is understandable that the attitude persists now in a period of accelerating development, when Australia’s British roots, always thrown a little off-kilter by a Mediterranean climate, are entangled with American trimmings.
If somehow in the resultant mixture Australia often loses the reserve and critical capacity of the British, the flair of the Mediterranean and the sophistication of the American, she also loses a few degrees of the excess pressure of older countries. One of the nicest qualities of Australia is her impatience with discipline for discipline’s sake, and with politics, polish, theory, or work for their own sakes. The fact that Featurism is untenable in theory, and is disastrously undisciplined by intellect or ethics worries her not at all. That it is lazy man’s design is no concern to her. Featurism gives the required effect by the simplest means to people anxious to get on with the practical things of living. Featurism satisfies those who care least about appearances as well as many aesthetes who care most about beauty, and Australia has, by the law of reaction, a considerable number of the latter to counter the majority in the former class. All she lacks is any sizeable body of people, between the two extremes, prepared to contemplate natural and manufactured objects as they are without comforting masks or contrived eye-catchers. Australia is content with Featurism because it can make anything prettier without anyone building up a head of steam over principles. Featurism gives the desired effect without anyone having to work Saturdays to get the whole thing right. This is reasonable; anything more would be sheer fussiness.
Firm decision, strong motivation, self-reliance, an unequivocal statement: these are the essential ingredients for positive non-Featurism in any field of human expression. They add up to the rare invaluable quality that is at the heart of fine work in any field; the creation of whole designs, whether they be pieces of music or refrigerator-cabinets or the frozen packages inside. This quality is produced by a certain kind of talented man or woman given due encouragement, stimulation, time and money. Some countries, like the USA, recognize the kind of talent required immediately that it shows itself, and they feed it well. Australia does not. Perhaps the pioneer, the digger and the puritan will always resent this kind of talent, or perhaps the reason is simply that Australia at this time is moving too fast to notice if she tramples on tender buds of expression and initiative in the arts. In any event, constructive talent of the kind essential to the initiation of ideas in all fields is given lower rewards, proportionately to the country’s richness, than almost anywhere else. While every man who prints a magazine and every boy on the corner who sells it receives fair payment for his labours, the man whose writing appears in the magazine is often lucky if he clears the cost of his paper and postage. Australian newspapers with respectable circulations—half a million or so—are in the habit of paying the national oracle on any subject five or six guineas for a special article. The highest-paid Australian actors or actresses receive, while a season lasts, less than a competent carpenter is paid continuously. A municipal council in 1955 advertised for a refuse collector and an assistant architect simultaneously, naming a higher salary for the former. Perhaps a dozen painters and as many writers in the whole of Australia make their living solely by practising their art. Visitors from abroad are frequently flabber-gasted by being offered a fee for a television appearance of roughly the same sum as their hotel bill for one night, or by being offered nothing at all for a lecture to a richly clad audience. This is the pattern. Nearly everyone who has a part in the presentation of any form of cultural activity: the cameraman, the sound engineer, mechanic, printer, distributor, manager, agent, is protected by unions or professional organizations or trade practices which ensure him a fair share of one of the world’s highest living standards; but one member of the team frequently is paid very little or not at all. He is the one who supplied the creative idea which made possible the whole project. It is not simply a matter of resentment or meanness; the men of culture have shown themselves not to need money. Through many artless years they have indicated frequently that they are quite satisfied, indeed eager, if they are merely given an opportunity to express themselves. And so it has been assumed that a man who is egocentric enough to want to display his talent owes it to the community to display it freely and can be called upon to write, paint, lecture, and make sculpture or films in his spare time. Many talented and potentially creative Australians accept this laudable, charitable role in society. They do not starve. They make a good living at something else and practise their art as a hobby. Others leave the country. A list of successful Australians in creative fields in London and New York suggests that there is something about the Australian sun and the meaty diet that produces a high proportion of talented people: Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Loudon Sainthill, Albert Tucker among the painters; Eileen Joyce, Arthur Benjamin, Charles Mackerras among the musicians; Peter Finch, Robert Helpmann, Cyril Ritchard among the dozens in theatre. Australia still produces for export only a prodigious number of singers. Covent Garden has been called satirically an Australian Expatriates Club. Its director, farewelling the contralto Lauris Elms when she left to return home to Australia in 1959, said: ‘Come and rejoin your fellow Australians here when you can’t stand it any longer.’ It has been argued that the principal reason for the absence of original Australian television is the shortage of adequate writers; yet Iain McCormick won an English television Producers’ Guild award a few years ago for the year’s best script. He is one of a number of Australian writers, including Alan Moorehead and the late Chester Wilmot, who were not public-spirited enough to stay and pursue their writing at night while engaging in a normal, healthy job by day.
The tradition of minimum payment for creative work is generally accepted not only by those who should be paying more but by those who should be creating more. However little an Australian ideas man is paid, his employer can buy syndicated American ideas for less—or better still can pick them out of imported magazines for nothing at all, plagiarism being the most expertly practised art in Australia. Under these circumstances most employed artists are not inclined to adopt a bold, demanding attitude. Instead they learn gradually to put into their work no more than the encouragement they receive in return.
This one aspect of under-payment for creative thinking is probably where Australian development differs most from the pattern in America, which many of her developers admire so much, where the man of ideas is a sort of prince of the community. The making of ideas in art, of firm decisions in design, the cultivation of self-reliance and unequivocal statements, are specialized activities taking experience, concentration, and time, as well as certain native talent. But this is not the sort of work that is as apparent as the work of choosing and devising attractive features to disguise the absence of an idea. Therefore Australia habitually economizes on the formative phase of any production. Hence the scarcity of motives in the Australian backdrop. Hence Featurism.
And yet Australia was not always like this. There was a time when Australians appreciated seeing their own reflection in the eyes of their own artists, actors, cartoonists, comedians. And there we
re times without salesmen, without urgency or anxiety or special policies and products to be put across, without market surveys or home-magazines or any other sources of compulsion on the maker to divert the way which things fell naturally in response to requirements. At these times there was no Featurism; just sensible construction.
Sydney’s and Hobart’s records for good building were hardly broken by a single vulgar display during some forty-five years before the other capital cities were founded. The universal structural system was a robust masonry wall punctured regularly but sparingly by upright double-hung sash windows and capped by a plain hipped roof. The style was purest in warehouses, stables and other utilitarian shelters. The old row of warehouses in Salamanca Place behind the Hobart waterfront still stands as evidence of a half-century when entire blocks in the two oldest cities were built simply to work. Buildings that were not entirely utilitarian, like inns, usually added one discreet feature: a semicircular fanlight over the entrance door. A tiny cottage at the corner of Hunter Street and O’Connell Street in Parramatta, New South Wales, is practically perfect as an example of the lightly ornamented, but beautifully balanced, whole designs of the period. In New South Wales the veranda was usually an integral part of the plan and structure and was given a flat plaster ceiling like the rooms inside. Usually, as in this cottage, slender wooden columns supported the veranda edge. In this case the lightly moulded columns, the six-panel door on the corner, its semicircular fanlight, the low veranda, the shuttered windows, are all in excellent proportions—which means they are excellently balanced in the Georgian tradition so that no part dominates to the disruption of the whole.
Not far to the north along O’Connell Street, across the river on the corner of Ross Street, there is a bigger house, Roseneath, of the same style and period. Roseneath suffers slightly from modern paint and electrical connections, but it is still perhaps the best remaining example of the single-storey pre-Featurist colonial house. Its evenly spaced veranda columns are slightly stouter, which robs the house of some of the fragile charm of the little corner cottage, but its wider door with semi-elliptical fan and sidelights, its twelve-pane windows and its low, flagged veranda protecting the three visible sides, provide a model of co-ordination and integrity.
The back blocks of Tasmania are practically undisturbed for a searcher after the old dignity that is lost behind the age of Featurism. The houses, the stone walls, the cylindrical oast houses, the stables, lofts, storehouses, pigeon towers, nearly all obey the most simple and rugged masonry lore, and each is shaped by ancient empirical rules to follow its own function. Even the pretentions were modest in the eighteen-twenties. A water-mill dressed like a gazebo on a rise by the river at Woolmers, in Longford, Tasmania, is octagonal in plan and has a Gothic arch on each side, but all is done so plainly and ingenuously that the little folly remains in harmony with the functional farm buildings. Wanstead, a lonely house on the Tasmanian midland plains, built in 1827, is a classic example of the two-storey homestead vernacular. Its foresquare plan and hipped roof are unrelieved except by the evenly spaced windows. A plain veranda applied to the ground floor is so lightly supported that the slim columns seem to be holding it down rather than up.
Such buildings formed the familiar background of life in their day. Few of them were consciously designed and none knew fashionable architects. They were the equivalent of the glass-walled contemporary suburban style of this day. But they were not, of course, the only kind of buildings. A decade before the rot set in during the eighteen-forties, one of the most polished architects ever to live in Australia, John Verge, was at work on his elegant houses round Sydney. Against the plain masonry background of common building, the houses of Verge and the more talented of his colleagues were the features of their day. However, they differed in an important respect from most of the features that began to disturb the scene a decade or so later: they were not pretentious. They were designed mostly in the fashionable English style, the late Georgian or Regency, not for the reason which exhumes Georgian in the late twentieth century, but simply because it was the manner in which their designers were born and bred. Moreover, each of these feature buildings was within itself balanced, without dominating features, a whole building.
One can stand today in Macquarie Street, Sydney, on the corner of King Street, and see the two kinds of building which made the first Australian urban scene. On the south side of King Street is St James’s Church, the first fine feature building in Australia, the piece of jewellery. Opposite, across Macquarie Street, are the Mint and, further north, Parliament House. These are two remaining parts of one building: the old Rum Hospital of 1812, one of the last representatives of the anonymous veranda-shaded background, the black velvet. Neither the gem nor the black velvet is in quite as good shape now as when it was built. The Rum Hospital lacks its central body and St James’s has had several additions since the first service in 1824. But none of these alterations destroys the complementary effect of the two designs. Each wing of the Rum Hospital is a whole thing because it is innocent of features. St James’s is a whole thing because its features are controlled by the masterly hand of Francis Greenway, probably the most talented and certainly the most famous architect in Australia’s history.
To use the term innocent in any connection with the Rum Hospital may be questionable. As Morton Herman has recounted in The Early Australian Architects, this ingenuous-looking building with its two storeys of colonnaded verandas was the subject of extreme discomfort for good Governor Macquarie, and is linked historically, through Greenway, with St James’s. The Government paid for the hospital not in money but by giving its three builders a virtual monopoly of the rum trade. The building cost some £40,000 but the monopoly was withheld from the builders. Macquarie was censured from England. In 1816 when Greenway was appointed Civil Architect and Assistant Engineer, his first commission was to survey and report on the structure of the hospital. ‘He tackled the job with the enthusiasm of a man determined to prove his superior abilities,’ Herman writes. ‘It would be tedious to list all the defects he recorded with savage delight…Of the fronts of the buildings he said: “There is no classical proportion in the column, not being regularly diminished. Its shaft is set wrong upon its base; the cap is set wrong upon the column, and is of no description ancient or modern…” ’
This was an architectural stylist’s, if not a literary stylist’s, description of a non-scholarly building whose designer did not consider himself important enough to see that his name was recorded somewhere for posterity’s information. Under all the circumstances it is not surprising that the frustrated, vain, impatient Greenway entertained himself by castigating all evidence of incompetence that he could find. But in fact the hospital’s innocent shattering of all the correct English rules of how a column’s cap and base should go was a featherweight counteraction to the extraordinary strength of a design which was really too good to know better. Whether the unknown designer was an untrained tradesman or an inexperienced gentleman, and despite all the monkey-business in connection with the contract, the integrity of the Rum Hospital’s design cannot be questioned. Its two storeys of evenly spaced windows, its round columns spaced their own length apart, and its plain hipped roof, together make up an example of unaffected, direct employment of simple building materials which could still serve as a model today.
Unassuming idiomatic building of this kind is still standing, far away from the professional or amateur designers, scattered wide through the outback. Out in an ochre paddock where there is no one to impress, where a group of sheds and silos cluster round a square black pool of shade under the iron veranda of a lonely station homestead, here one can still find some of the most genuine construction in all Australia. It is even accepted as charming in its own way by the modern city worker, because the sun-bleached materials and the sprawling informality of the farm-house cluster is symbolic of the basic strength and romance of the nation.
The ordinary modern suburban house of the s
peculative builder who is not too harassed by his competitors or his advertising agent is likely to be non-Featurist. Its materials, its brick veneer and high tiled roof, may be chosen usually for the stodgiest and most pompous reasons, but when the whole easy-going statement of the conventional Australian villa box with its projecting lounge-room is made in the lazy Aussie drawl of a brickie and his carpenter mate it has its own rough dignity. Without doubt the plainer examples will be held in some reverence as genuine products of their day by future generations of serious architectural students. Australia’s vernacular villas fall short of their own best intentions only in the uncouth treatment of finishing and decorating. When a district of them is given a touch of control, co-ordination and stylistic direction, as in the Department of Works’ housing in parts of Canberra in the middle 1950s, the social triumph of the nation’s housing policy is justified artistically. In Narrabundah, by Captain Cook Crescent, the Australian dream comes close to breaking through the surface into reality. Unfortunately, however, the number of unfussed non-Featurist cottage-villas is diminishing as the small speculative builder-designers begin to succumb to organization-builders modelled on the American image: their houses often complete with American Colonial details.
