The Australian Ugliness Read Free

confused and so subtle that all but the historian or an intense student are likely to lose patience in the search. The climate of design is something like an uninhibited California. It is diametrically opposed to that of Sweden, where the average exhibited taste is cultivated and there are few who rise above or sink below. In Australia the artificial background of life is all highs and lows. A modernistic folly in multi-coloured brickwork may sit next door to a prim Georgian mansionette on one side and a sensitive work of architectural exploration on the other.
    If, with the utmost patience, one can penetrate the superficialities and can extract the elements of a consistent Australian school of design, one finds it is not definable in conventional artistic or architectural jargon, but is bound up with the collective character of the Australian people. It is not, as might be expected, a result of uniformity of the climate or the geography. Contrary to the established impression, Australia is not all blazing sun. The populous coastal crescent is mostly mild, and often freezing. The centre is a furnace, but few visitors to the cities complain of the heat. Most have occasion to complain of unheated rooms. Neither is the terrain monotonous nor the larder of building materials limited. An Australian town may be on a lake, a mountainside, a river, or may spread along behind a white ocean beach. After the first clumsy convict settlements, the whole world’s building products have been available most of the time and have been used at least as freely as in any country.
    The elusive quality in Australian design which can be called typical, and can be recognized if transported abroad, is not a fundamental original quality. It would be better to call it a thin but well-established Australian veneer on international Western culture. This veneer and its concomitant tastes are the substance of everything peculiar in Australian living practices and artistic habits. Which came first, the veneer or the habits, has never been firmly established. One may ask, for instance, are the sex-segregated public drinking habits maintained because the hotels have no pleasant facilities for women, or do the hotels have hideous facilities for women deliberately: part of the old cult of masculinity? Both veneer and habits have strong effects on the aesthetic pattern which runs from sky-scraper to plastic doyley; certainly they have a stronger effect than the direct geographic or climatic influences. But this book will make no attempt to separate chronologically the chicken of human character and the egg of habit. It is simply intended as, firstly, a portrait of Australia with the background in the foreground and, secondly, a glance at the artistic philosophy which permitted this background to be so shallow and unsatisfying.
    The recorded history of the visual Australian background has terrible gaps, but a few standard works of reference provide the essential information for anyone wishing to investigate the historical aspects which are cursorily referred to in these pages. On the old colonial work of the first fifty years, the book is The Early Australian Architects and Their Work , by Morton Herman (Angus and Robertson, 1954). The nineteenth century in New South Wales is covered by the same author in The Architecture of Victorian Sydney (Angus and Robertson, 1956). The cast iron age, with natural emphasis on Victoria, is described with beautiful illustrations in E. Graeme Robertson’s Victorian Heritage (Georgian House, 1960). Much of the charm of Tasmania’s past is recorded by Michael Sharland in Stones of a Century (Oldham, Beddome and Meredith, Hobart, 1952). South Australia still waits for a local inhabitant sufficiently enthusiastic about his native State to undertake the work. Western Australia and Queensland have nothing within stiff covers but the institutes of architects in each State have published illustrated collections of notable