The Australian Ugliness (3 page)
When most objects are truly and sensitively functional, this technological age will be civilized and as beautiful in its own way as the nicer streets of classical Greece.
The problem is universal, but the justification I claim for having written this book, after English writers had tackled the subject fairly thoroughly, is that I concentrate on the Australian aspect of it. For this reason, when it was first published some Australian critics said it was unpatriotic. Quite a number said it was also unfair because the ugliness of which I complained was not Australian but international. On the other hand, it was curious to note that among those who accepted the book were some who were not really interested in aesthetic or even visual considerations. They welcomed it simply because it was critical, and not very much criticism of Australia by Australians was being published then. Yet the smugness with which the majority of Australians appeared to regard their own country was building up a fierce reactionary distaste in a minority. Australians who did not see eye to eye with the conservatives in matters of cream-brick veneer and plastic flowers and censorship were inclined to blame the social establishment for everything else they found imperfect about this country, including any bush fires or droughts, and the flies, and the slowness of growth that must accompany under-population. This diffuse distaste has since found some healthy relief in a growing volume of criticism and satire. The pressure is reduced and it seems to be allowed now that one can criticize specific aspects of the land without condemning the whole. In fact, the more criticism that appears, the more acceptable and lovable Australia becomes to more people. Even an ineffectual vocal antagonism to complacency restores a semblance of civilized balance. In this spirit I feel obliged to reaffirm that the Australian ugliness is not only unique in several ways, but is also worse than most other countries' kinds.
That is not to deny that other countries have hideous aspects. The USA has become painfully conscious of âthe mess that is manmade America' (see page 39) since John F. Kennedy's occupation of the White House. He was the first President of the USA since Thomas Jefferson to be actively interested in planning and architecture, and Lyndon B. Johnson has carried on the campaign he began. An essential element of Johnson's Great Society is the cleaning up of the visual squalor that surrounds all American cities and permeates some. The American Institute of Architects lately has become almost obsessed with the desire to tidy up the urban background against which its members usually have to work. Among fairly recent books on the subject is a devastating photographic attack on the ugliest aspects of the urban scene, and on the devastation of the beautiful American landscape. It is the work of Peter Blake and is called âGod's Own Junkyard'. Its pictures tell something of the same old story that can be found in the following pages, but with an American accent. Whereas Australia throws old mattresses over the back fence, America piles old cars or even airplanes yards high between the highway and the view.
The British ugliness possibly has more in common with the Australian. For one thing, a great deal of its mess is second-hand American, as Australia's is, which makes it intellectually as well as visually offensive. The mind boggles at the stupidity of copying the trash which America itself is trying to eliminate. However, the opposition is strong in England. In fact the fight against the outrage of modern development began there and carries on aggressively in the face of continuing tree destruction, pole erection and the primary screams of billboards. As for national scores in the degree of bad conscious design, I think that Britain and Australia have in common more of it than most other countries. There is bad design in the USA of course, but probably not as much, proportionately, as in Britain and Australia. The bad American architect tends to be a little more adventurous, which gives a certain liveliness to his vulgarity. His British and Australian colleagues are inclined to be ineffably dreary at heart, and are conscious of this, so that they dress up the drabness with party trappings more desperately gay than the American ever uses. Yet in England, unlike America and Australia, there is always something of genuine beauty around the corner, a medieval church or a glimpse of field, hedge and honest stonework, even if it is hemmed in by rival service stations and haunted by the wiry ghosts of electricity and telephones.
So I think it is only fair and honest to admit that among the English-speaking nations with which Australia likes to compare herself she is very high on the list of conspicuous ugliness. And then, as everyone recognizes, English-speaking nations top the world list. A consistent vandalistic disregard for the community's appearance runs through them all.
Most Australians are proud of their cities; proud of the very fact that they exist when the rest of the world clearly thinks of it all as a sheep run, and proud also of their appearance. For each city has some good things and these make the images that linger in the mind of a lover. Thus the Sydneysider pictures his city from the Harbour or the Bridge, its new white offices piling up against the sky they are trying to scrape. He does not see nor recognize the shabby acres of rust and dust and cracked plaster and lurid signs in the older inner suburbs. The Melburnian thinks of his city as Alexandra Avenue where it skirts the river and the shady top end of Collins Street, which are indeed two of the most civilized pieces of urbanity in the world. He dismisses as irrelevant to this vision the nervy miscellany of the main commercial artery, Swanston Street, not to mention the interminable depression of the flat, by-passed inner suburbs. Most Australian children grow up on lots of steak, sugar, and depressing deformities of nature and architecture. Unlike the British child they are seldom exposed to the repose of pre-Featurist centuries. Unlike the American they seldom if ever experience the thrill of the twentieth-century idiom when it is in sole charge of an area large enough to constitute an environment. So the Australian child grows up ignorant, innocent, of the meaning of architectural integrity.
The Australian ugliness is never stagnant. Even in the seven years since first publication there have been new developments. For instance, a new kind of amenity has come to harass the holiday areas: the chair-lift. One of these now seems to run to the top of practically every beauty-spot, following a wide swath sliced through whatever forest is in the way. Wrecked trees lie where they fell in a mass of mud and twisted branches below, but one is invited to ignore these and admire the view beyond. This follows an old rule: as nature gets visually lovelier, man's habits grow visually viler. I regret that through ignorance I neglected to mention in earlier editions the tourist slums of pastel-tinted fibrous-cement and fairy lights which have been made, with the approval of the Queensland Government, on some of the once-idyllic coral islands of the Great Barrier Reef.
And then the most brutish form of vandalism, the slaughter of wildlife, is increasing, and getting uglier in its execution. Plastic flowers, which seemed only a passing joke in 1959, are now a universal menace. Something of the tragic artistic vacuum which is at the core of the Australian ugliness is symbolized in the cheap, vivid, unearthly colours of the imitation annuals blooming in plastic imitation cut-glass vases on Australian mantelpieces. The difference between these thin flowers and the abundant plastic monsteras and philodendrons of a Hilton hotel foyer indicates the difference between the Australian and the American uglinesses.
Another difference is symbolized in the product that is advertised as Australia's Own Car, General Motors' locally produced Holden. In this new printing of the book I owe that car a conciliatory word, since the 1967 model is so immeasurably improved from the awkward thing that was the current model in 1960, shown on page 15. Yet that thing was such an unspeakably crude example of cynical (or perhaps ignorant) commercial design that I think there is historical justification for not revising the rather harsh opinions of it written at the time. Even now it is not necessary to alter the observation that General Motors, in conformity with the best practices of Austericanism, always cunningly continues to keep their colonial model two years behind Detroit's fashion lead. No blame attaches to General Motors for this. They are not in the business to elevate Australian taste or her cultural independence. No one in his right mind could expect a popular Australian car at the point of sale to be anything but a pale copy of Detroit style, unadventurous and unoriginal even when of better design. On the other hand, there is every reason to expect that soon after it reaches the street it will be adorned with a remarkable collection of entirely original Australian accessories, including plastic draft deflectors, bobbles or a fringe round the rear window, football-striped cushions on the back shelf, red reflecting sticky-tape on the bumper bar, and a variety of comical yellow transfers on the windows, including one showing a curvacious Aboriginal lass above the caption âGenuine Australian Body'.
Revised 1968
Outside the little oval window the grey void is gradually smudged across the middle with deep tan like a nicotine stain. The smudge grows lighter, becomes an appalling orange, then lemon. Streaks of pink break free from it and float into the grey above. Having thus set for itself a suitably pompous background, the sun now rises. Its golden light strikes the underside of the plane, which for a few minutes longer remains the only other solid object in the colour-streaked void. The interior of the plane rustles and stumbles into life, and pink eyes stare out for the first glimpse of Australia. The sun has used only the top half of the universe for its performance. The bowl below the horizon is still filled with an even, empty greyness. Then a broken line appears near the rim of the bowl, as if drawn hesitantly in pencil, and below this line the grey is lighter. The travellers from the north perceive that the pencil line is sketching the junction between a quiet ocean and a silent continentâthat above the line up to the horizon is land and that this land is for all practical purposes as flat as the water. Soon the plane begins to descend and some details grow clear. Darwin appears as a little peninsula with a spatter of white roofs, and the predominant colouring of the land emerges from the grey. It is a dusty combination of ochres and puces.
Any visitor arriving by air from the north looks down on thousands of square miles of this colouring before he reaches the eastern coast and a touch of green. From Darwin to the region of Bourke in central New South Wales he crosses over country which is burnt brown and patchy, like a tender sunburnt skin, with sections of darker brown and blood red and blisters of lighter ochre. The palest suggestion of an olive tint is as near to green as this northern landscape goes. It is not treeless; the shadows of trees can be seen, but they are dry eucalypts, spare, blue-grey, with their thin, gentle leaves hanging limply, vertically, with no real intention of providing shade or a good display to aerial travellers.
Unlike most countries, this red backland of Australia looks from the air satisfyingly like its own maps. Most of the trees cling to the wildly vermiculated creek beds and mark them as firm dark crayon lines. Near the rare settlements a white road darts zigzagging in long straight draftsmanly lines. Every element stands out clearly: a tiny black square of water, a spidery track, twenty or so buildings at a station headquarters, their iron roofs dazzling white.
This is the Australian Never-Never, the back of beyond; hard, raw, barren and blazing. Yet it is not malevolent in appearance. There is something deceptively soft about its water-colour tints of pinks and umbers. And it is a subtle desert, insinuating itself into the background of Australian life, even to the life of the factory worker in a southern city or the sports-car enthusiast who never leaves the bitumen. Its presence cannot be forgotten for long by the inhabitants of its fertile fringe. It colours all folk-lore and the borrowed Aboriginal mythology, and in a more direct and entirely unmystical way, two or three times every summer, it starts a wind of oven intensity which stirs the net curtains of the most elegant drawing-rooms in the most secluded Georgian retreats of Vaucluse or Toorak.
On the northern edge of this great red heart, on the far side of this back country of Australia, the white man has scrabbled on the surface and made a foothold at Darwin, an outpost of southern Australian culture. This the visitor who arrives by air sees first in a reception lounge inserted into a hangar at the airport. He sees numerous primary colours in paintwork and brilliant plastic chair coverings, richly polished wood trimmings, spun light fittings of bright copper preserved in lacquer, black wrought iron vases shaped like birds screwed to the wall at eye-level and holding bright little bunches of pink and orange flower-heads.
The springs are deep beneath the washable plastic upholstery. The air is cool, conditioned. After his quick but sticky leap across the equator the visitor finds crisp white tablecloths again, and marmalade in sturdy plated dishes, and showers, hot water, piles of snowy towels surrounded by square yards of glazed ceramic tiles. Here is a good introduction to Australian ways, and it is a cheerful and compact example of the visual style which rules everywhere that man has made his mark on this continent: the style of Featurism.