The Australian Ugliness (13 page)
And what is Australia's essential truth? Something too big and frightening to contemplate, thank you. For the present it is much wiser and safer not to be too definitive; and why need one be when all the trimmings anybody could wish for are available for the picking in the cultural markets overseas?
This is how one turns to Featurism. Not prepared to recognize where, when, or what he is living, the Australian consciously and subconsciously directs his artificial environment to be uncommitted, tentative, temporary, a nondescript economic-functionalist background on which he can hang the features which for the moment appeal to his wandering, restless eye. Thus he shapes his houses, industrial areas, towns and cities, often making them carefully, sometimes even beautifully in an indeterminate way, but almost always noncommittally. He knows that he can change the features tomorrow if necessary without much trouble. He does not care that the only thing of any meaning in art, the only creation, ultimately the only satisfaction in life, lies in understanding himself and making decisions accordingly.
The failure of Australia to come to terms with herselfâworse: her failure to have the least desire to come to terms with herselfâcan be largely explained in a phrase: the cult of pioneering. The early period of discovery, exploration and taming of the country coloured the national outlook till long after the frontier was pushed back out of sight of the corner window of Mon Repos in Hydrangea Crescent. And when Australia grew a little too long in the tooth to cling any more to the blanket excuse of youth a new pioneering period opened and revived the spirit.
The second period of pioneering, starting about the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, is less romantic than the first was, since it involves factories and subdivisions instead of sheep, gold and limitless acreages of the bush, but it is no less affecting to the participants. After half a century of coasting Australia is now a pioneer land again, conscious of her enormous potential and of the challenging work waiting to be done. As a pioneer land she has little time for introspective questioning, no patience with conservation, and little or no sentiment for hereditary possessions. As a pioneer, she adds to the indecisive quality of her new culture the devastating extra element of destructiveness. This ranges from spendthriftiness to arrant vandalism, and is directed against the various irreplaceable assets provided by nature and the nineteenth century and, in Sydney, the eighteenth century.
Despite the comparative flatness of the continent, the absence of high ranges and the lack of dramatic scenic contrasts, the object of the pioneering cult is to reduce everything possible to the same level. If sometimes this object is beyond the scope of bulldozers, at least cemeteries can be placed on the highest promontories and factories can fill the winding valleys.
Despite the lack of water, and the national fear of drought, and the general agreement that dryness could be the worst impediment in Australia's boundless future, the object of the pioneering cult is to remove all sight and sound of water from everyday life. The city waterfront is the place only for wharves and warehouses. Factories have always gravitated to the river valleys where they had wonderfully convenient natural drains for the disposal of dyestuffs, sewerage and industrial refuse. The lowness and the thicker undergrowth beside rivers and creeks also recommended their valleys as official or unofficial dumping grounds for suburban refuse.
Despite the natural tendency of the country to overheat, despite the blistering outback legend and the constant search for relief even in the milder areas during the hottest weeks of summer, the object of the pioneering cult is to banish all shade from everyday life. Every lot is cleared for yards in all directions before it is considered safe for building.
Despite the nation's lack of attractive, dramatic historic background, and the temporary look of most of man's feeble efforts to subjugate the natural elements, despite the political advantages of national symbols at a time when the northern Asian waters are growing uncomfortably warm, the object of the pioneering cult is to push aside old buildings, whatever their historic or architectural interest, without a moment's misgivingsâwithout the knowledge that there is any cause for a moment's misgivings, if the space is required for a car park or an unloading dock.
The object of the pioneer cult, in short, is to clear all decks for action, to reduce everything to the same comprehensible level so that something new can be put on it. The pioneer has never a moment's doubt that what he puts up will be better than what he tears down. In fact all he achieves is a more intense reduction of character in the background culture, allowing him even more freedom for the application of momentarily satisfying features.
Any sensitive visitor should be warned. He will be perplexed by the apparently senseless destruction of some old structures. He will ask what madness is it that causes the real-estate agents to direct a complete devastation of land before it is offered for sale, not content even to leave the degree of destruction to the individual tastes of the homebuilders. One can perhaps understand the mass destruction in the case of cheap land in the outer suburbs on the fringe of the bush. The gum trees here are probably too plentiful to command any respect, and the job of clearing is considered as inevitable for a homebuilder now as it was last century for a farmer. Once the Housing Commission in Perth was persuaded by a tree-lover group to spare some of the native bush in an outer-suburban subdivision. The Commission agreed to leave two gums in each front garden. But six months after the estate was opened every tree had been removed by the occupiers.
Modern Australians have no especially psychopathic fear of the gum or the wattle, but no two trees could have been designed to be less sympathetic to the qualities of tidiness and conformist indecision which are desired in the artificial background. The Australian bush was made in one of nature's more relaxed, even casual, moods. Everything is evergreen, yet this term is often ironic, at least in relation to the ubiquitous gum tree. Certainly the eucalypt is not deciduous, but it is sometimes blue, often olive-grey, and occasionally brown. Measured against a fresh green European ideal, the Australian bush presents a slovenly scene. The grass grows long, ochre and rank. Most eucalypts are undisciplined in the extreme, their branches straggling wildly with disconnected tufts of leaves. It is quite impossible to trim one into the shape of a rooster or a kangaroo. They do not drop their leaves suddenly and predictably, but all through the year in a slummocky way, and are likely at unexpected moments to add to the dry brown mess at their feet a dead branch or length of bark which one of them has discarded, having finished with it. The wattle and other native trees are almost as indolent in their habits, lounging at drunken angles on the shabby, crackly, threadbare ochre carpet. The vertical limp leaves and the hungry earth consume whatever water they receive so avidly that within minutes after a rainstorm everything looks as dry as before and the yellow dust is free to rise again. It is all most unpleasant, measured against the European ideal. It is faintly frightening: not that it menaces, but simply because it is so unfamiliar, so strangely primeval: as different again from the European or North American landscapes as a tropical jungle. It disturbs the white Australian, the expatriate European, remembering, it seems, even at generations removed, his own northern lands where even the wild woods are civilized, with neat, compact trees changing beautiful hues, yellow and red, as bright as any painter's colour-card, and a layer of moist leaves, green grass and daisies on the weedless ground like a lovely Axminster carpet.
But the Australian landscape can be corrected, at least in the more populous coastal fringe, where the European plants do so well that a deciduous tree grows several feet in a season and a mature-looking, pretty garden can be created from bare soil in two or three years. The prolificity of leaf and bough has been the trees' own undoing. Undoubtedly it has contributed to the irreverence of Australia's attitude to nature. Trees are often planted in the streets, on the ânature strip', as the six-feet-wide lawn between footpath and traffic-way is called. Plane trees are popular, but after each season when they sprout hopefully the shoots are pollarded back again to the knuckles by diligent council employees and the trees become grotesque arthritic knots of wood. Next season when it sprouts again the tree turns into the desired shape: a tidy green ball supported by a neat stick like a tree in a story-book illustration decorating red-roofed dolls' houses.
Contrary to the virility of many exotic plants in Australian soil, the smaller indigenous flora is fragile and delicate. Australian wild-flowers are brilliant in colour and intricate in design, but usually spindly, diminutive and defenceless against weeds once the ground is broken and the foreign growths are introduced. They have great difficulty in prospering even when they are wanted. As they are generally not wanted, they have vanished entirely from cultivated areas, despite the efforts of a few small associations like the Native Plants Preservation Society of Victoria.
Thus progress is measured by the number of acres transformed from the native state of sloppiness to the desirable state of clipped artificiality. One exception to this rule proves the absence of psychopathic discrimination against native plants. The West Australian flowering gum, luxuriant, dark green and compact, is often accepted into the exotic deciduous family. This shows that the white Australian has nothing against gum trees on racial grounds; it is simply unfortunate that so few of them are neat enough in their habits to be acceptable. The bush is so far removed from the European image that one cannot contemplate attempting to come to terms with it in suburban society, to meet it at least half-way down the garden path. A principal article of suburban faith is that these primitive landscape elements must be eradicated from the home environment in the same way as one would deal with a disgusting-looking tramp seen weaving his way in through the front gate.
Once the pioneer's aesthetic direction is adopted, practically nothing that is natural to Australia fits in. One by one everything that is native has to go, even if one has to hold a hose all evening to keep the English grass green and the daphne alive. Most suburban councillors who make wood carvings out of the plane trees on the nature strips, and most subdividers who shave their bits of forest bare before offering them for sale, are probably, at home, nice family men not inclined to regard themselves as arboraphobes. But the councillor, as politician, senses the desires of society and is keen to satisfy them with the municipal axe and saw, and the subdivider wrecks his little piece of Australia not, he will tell you, to satisfy his own taste, but on accepted business principles. He knows from experience that mostâ not all, of course, but mostâbuyers of outer-suburban allotments see greater possibilities for their Semi-Contemporary homes and the kind of clipped garden they admire on a barren paddock than on one covered with untidy trees that will crack the concrete drive (when they can afford a drive) and will block the drains (when eventually the area is sewered) and will drop bark and leaves on the lawns and the beds of annuals (assuming there will be water enough to spare to keep a garden alive).
A rule of thumb could be stated for the guidance of visitors, oversimplifying the case but giving a key to the different characters of Australian cities: the more beautiful the area, the more contemptuous the citizens are of nature. Thus Sydney, with a philosophy of overabundance, tramples down the attractions of its harbour reaches and its rococo coast. When one inlet is filled with brown bricks and asphalt there is always another, green and virgin, round the next cape. If this tree is hacked down another will soon sprout in the warm sun, and when the dust and rust of the city grows too sordid to bear there is always the white beach, which is not very satisfactory for building or car parking, to lie on for an hour or two of health.
Melbourne, on the contrary, used to show a tendency to preserve the few better things provided by tight-fisted nature. Most beach foreshores were reserved for public use last century. The Yarra River runs through parks or by a boulevard for much of its meander through the flat suburbs. This principle, however, succumbs to any real pressure. In 1962 the first section of a much-needed freeway to the eastern suburbs was built along the river's north bank at Richmond. The planners of this new road never faced up to the real problem: how to move back a strip of factories which had encroached almost to the river's edge. Instead they allowed the road to take the line of least resistance and to sidestep into the water, knocking over the last gum trees on the bank. A small forest of concrete piles paddling in the shallows and a cantilevered roadway overhead have now removed the last trace of dignity from the poor Yarra in this part. Nevertheless, this little grey trickle can be seen by visitors, drivers or pedestrians rather more easily than the great blue stretches of Sydney Harbour can be seen from Sydney's streets. On the other hand, Sydney people perhaps are not such rabid arboraphobes as the citizens of Melbourne and the smaller cities. Even in some of the poorer suburbs a number of trees can be seen between the houses. But one has the impression from the untidiness of the gardens, compared with the neatness of the gardens of more denuded cities, that the trees are there simply because no one has weekend time to chop them: everyone is down at the beach. Sydney people love their beaches, their harbour and their Blue Mountains. They know that they have at hand some of the world's most magnificent stretches of water and most dramatic twists of headland. But these things are left strictly for playtime. The long-established practice of allowing private ownership of the waterfront near the city has effectively cut off this precious possession from the workaday life of the city and from the sight of the visitor. The stranger who has seen it from the air feels almost continuous frustration at being so near yet so far from the wonderful dark blue stretches of water. He imagines the wide views which he can only glimpse through slits between the brown cliffs of houses and flats ranged shoulder to shoulder round the harbour banks. When he finds a charming inlet that has not been commandeered by cottages, it is usually cluttered with boatsheds and broken-down piers. He looks at a distant green headland, standing with its tanned feet in the blue ocean, and sees it through a tangle of overhead wires and crooked poles. He stands on the high points of the surrounding country, like Mt Kiera above Wollongong, and sees the suburbs' stealthy crawl like dry rot eating into the forest edge. He sees more trees being bulldozed from the yellow clay of the housing developments, as if the estate-agents and builders are determined to make all the coast match the now-barren, windswept sands of Botany Bay.