Australia was described by Donald Horne in The Lucky Country (1964) as the first suburban nation. From early on a high proportion of the population lived in cities and most city-dwellers did not live in the town centre; they occupied houses standing in their own ground in the suburbs. In the 1950s, when home building and home ownership boomed, critics of the narrow conformity of Australian life saw the suburb as symbol and cause of it.
A CALAMITY
The architectural historian Robin Boyd gives the history and significance of Australia’s Home (1952).
This is the story of a material triumph and an aesthetic calamity.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Englishmen began building houses on the east coast of this warm land of curious life and unknown vastness. They had selected, more by luck than exploration, the banks of a magnificent harbour, a place which posterity generally recognized as one of the best sites in the world.
It was about four centuries after the great community hall of the mediaeval manor house began to break into a collection of private rooms, and one and a half centuries before each collection of private rooms began to melt back into a single living space. It was two centuries after Queen Elizabeth had proclaimed the principle of a private house for every family. It was midway in history between Inigo Jones and Le Corbusier.
These Englishmen, marines and convicts, and their few women, had left the England of the Adam brothers; of tall, pastel-tinted rooms, gilded ornament and gleaming silverware; of Wedgwood and the water-closet – a state where domestic building for the privileged had reached physical and artistic maturity. Many of them, not having been privileged, knew nothing of these things. But all of them had the acquired English taste for privacy, and it was this taste which remained a prime motive through the subsequent generations of home-building.
Each family asked, when the day’s work was done, for isolation from the next family. Each member asked for the possibility of privacy from the remainder of the family. The nation was built on the principle that for every family there should be a separate house and for every person there should be a separate room.
The pattern of this culture, through the years and across the great distances, was fairly consistent. Each town was in essence a great sea of small houses around a commercial and industrial island. Each house was a group of compartments of varying size, each compartment serving a slightly different purpose. People cooked in one, ate in another, sat reading in another, tucked their children to bed in another, slept in another. There came a time when they performed the principal movements of the preparation for the day – shave, tooth-clean, toilet, shower and dress – in four different cubicles. They liked to have separate compartments for eating breakfast and dinner, and if possible a third for lunch. They liked one room for sitting by themselves and one for sitting with visitors.
In a land of rolling plains and wide blue skies, a race of cheerful agoraphobes grew up in little weather-sealed boxes. By the middle of the twentieth century, with the population just over eight million, Australia had nearly two million private houses with an average of five rooms each – more rooms than people. And of every ten people, five lived in a capital city, one other lived in a city of more than 12,500 inhabitants, and another lived in a big town; only about three lived in a non-urban area. Living in an urban area almost invariably meant living in a suburban area. In 1947 (census year) 93.5 per cent of Sydney’s 1,484,434 inhabitants lived outside the municipality of Sydney, and 92 per cent of Melbourne’s 1,226,923 lived outside the city in the vast ring of suburbs.
The suburb was the major element of Australian society. Factory, shop, office, theatre and restaurant were not radically different the world over. The interior of an Australian house could be given any atmosphere; it might be no different from the interior of an apartment in Rome or a flat in Regent’s Park, London. But in the suburb was experienced that essentially Australian part of town life which lay between work and home.
It was ‘Sunday Sport Not Allowed’, ‘Keep Off the Grass’, ‘Dogs Found Will Be Destroyed’, ‘Commit No Nuisance’, and countless other kindred elements of a half-world between city and country in which most Australians lived.
SUBURBAN REBELLION
In My Brother Jack (1964), the best-selling novel by George Johnston, the narrator, David Meredith, falls out with his wife over what should be planted in their suburban garden.
When I got back to Beverley Grove I dumped the sapling on the drive near the front gate and went through to the kitchen and Helen said, ‘David, where on earth have you been? You didn’t say you were going somewhere. I thought you were still up there on the roof, and when I went to call you for your cup of tea –’
‘I went out and bought a tree,’ I said.
‘A tree?’
‘A tree for the garden. I drove down to Goodenough’s Nurseries. Only six bob.’ I added proudly.
‘David, how marvellous!’ she cried. ‘Where is it?’
‘Out the front. Come and see.’
Her expression changed when she did see it, and admittedly it did look rather scruff y and limp and drab with its roots packed up into a big shapeless pudding of wet hessian.
‘Yes, but what is it?’ she asked. ‘It – it looks like a gum-tree.’
‘It is a gum-tree. It’s a sugar-gum.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and for a moment or two she looked blank, and then, ‘Where are you going to put it?’ she said. ‘I mean, where do you want it to grow?’
‘There.’ I pointed. ‘Right there, smack bang in the middle of the lawn!’
‘Oh!’
‘Why do you just keep saying “Oh”?’
‘No reason … I mean, well, do you really think that’s the place for it, David? I mean, if it’s to be there, right in the middle of everything, I would have thought something smaller, or even –’
‘What’s wrong with a gum-tree?’
‘Well, if you want to know, darling, I personally think they’re rather ordinary. They’re so drab, David. I’d honestly prefer something decorative, especially for there, right in the front of the house, some nice flowering shrub, or camellia, or mock-orange. What would look lovely would be one of those Japanese dwarf-maples.’
‘Not on your sweet life, my dear! No dwarf anythings! I want a tree. A proper bloody tree! Do you realise,’ I said, ‘there’s not one tree growing in this whole damned street … on the whole estate if it comes to that? And this is a grove we live in, darling. It’s printed on the footpath at the corner. Beverley Grove. Don’t you know the definition of a grove? We’ve been letting them pull the wool over our eyes. The Beverley – Park – Gardens – Estate.’ I spaced the words with careful sarcasm. ‘It isn’t a park and it isn’t a garden and this isn’t a grove. They’ve got us here on false pretences. They can’t bloody well do that to us! Besides, this is our chance to be original. Let us be leaders of fashion, Helen. And let me point out – because old Goodenough told me this himself – that this thing you’re turning up your nose at – all right, I admit it does look a bit scraggy at the moment – but he assured me it’ll grow into a tree forty feet high in two years. A real tree! And what this damned place needs is a good firm far-sighted policy of reafforestation!’
I went round to the shed in the back yard then and got out the pick and shovel.
Old Joe Goodenough had been right – it took astonishingly. One could almost see it grow. At some stage I must have accepted that this tree had become very much more than merely a symbol of protest against suburban values. If I had not, in fact, planted it with malice aforethought, I very soon began to be aware that I was using it as a weapon with which to force a situation which I was not prepared to attack directly. I gave it much attention, forking, watering, manuring, – far more attention than I would give to the now-hated flower-beds which were Helen’s pride and joy. (One was always on the prowl, of course, trying to sniff out other sources of resentment.) It even came to the absurdly childish point where I would water the tree copiously and, in the case of a eucalypt quite unnecessarily, and deliberately neglect those beds which I had come to detest because of the little wooden label-stakes which Helen had lettered herself so neatly. I think I really hated them because of the affectation she had perpetrated in using only the botanical names for her flowers, and I would stalk the hated beds at dusk, spitting the words out under my breath: Phlox Drummon-dii, Tropæolum, Arctotis, Myosotis dissitiflora, Antirrhinum! God! what was wrong with forget-me-not or snapdragon?
As it worked out, it was neither Helen nor I who forced the issue in the end, although Helen was obliged to act as the intermediary.
‘David, I’m afraid we’ll have to do something about that tree in the front.’
‘Do what?’ I asked.
‘Well, what happened is that Mr. Treadwell from next door dropped in here this afternoon. He’s complaining about it.’
‘He’s what! It’s not his bloody tree!’
‘He insists you’ll have to dig it out. The roots are getting in under the cement of his drive.’
‘Oh, bollocks!’ I said. ‘His drive’s thirty feet away from the tree! Do you mean to tell me that roots can go thirty feet underground in a few bloody months!’
‘I’m not telling you anything, darling. I am simply repeating to you what he says. Treadwell is a perfectly nice inoffensive little old man, and he’s not a fussy neighbour, and he was most polite about it all. But you know he is a very keen amateur gardener himself and –’
‘Well, the old bastard’s got nothing else to do, has he? He’s on a Government pension. He doesn’t work. And what the devil has that got to do with our gum-tree?’
‘Because he also claims that a tree like that takes the good out of the soil, too – our own lawn is getting awfully patchy, darling – and if the roots get near his dahlia beds he –’
‘Oh, go to blazes with his dahlia beds. And what’s wrong with some upended cement slabs? The place is too damned neat as it is. It’s – it’s like having some damned woman walking around after you with an ash-tray in her hand, or plumping up the cushions the minute you stand up. My God! I’d like to have two whacking great Moreton Bay figs like those at the Turleys’, and then we could tip the slabs up the whole length of the street! Which might be a bloody good thing!’
THE TAMED MALE
In the 1950s Barry Humphries, who became Australia’s most famous comic, satirised the suburbs with his leading characters being Edna Everage, the confident and brash wife, and Sandy Stone, the tamed boring husband. Here is Sandy Stone on ‘A nice night’s entertainment’.
[Sandy, in pyjamas and dressing gown, is discovered seated in a shabby armchair. He addresses the audience.]
I went to the R.S.L. the other night and had a very nice night’s entertainment. Beryl, that’s the wife, came along too. Beryl’s not a drinker but she had a shandy. She put in quite a reasonable quantity of time yarning with Norm Purvis’s good lady and I had a beer with old Norm and some of the other chappies there. I don’t say no to the occasional odd glass and Ian Preston, an old friend of mine, got up and sang a few humorous numbers – not too blue, on account of the womenfolk – so that altogether it was a really nice type of night’s entertainment for us both. We called it a day round about ten-ish; didn’t want to make it too late a night as Beryl had a big wash on her hands on the Monday morning and I had to be in town pretty early, stocktaking and one thing and another.
Well, we got back to Gallipoli Crescent about twenty past and Beryl and I went to bed.
We were very glad we hadn’t made it too late a night on the Sunday because the Chapmans were expecting us over on the Monday night for a couple of hours to look at some slides of their trip. They’re a very nice type of person and some of the coloured pictures he’d taken up north were a real … picture. Vi Chapman had gone to a lot of trouble with the savouries and altogether it was a really lovely night’s entertainment for the two of us. Educational too. Well, round about ten I said we’d have to be toddling. You see, we didn’t want to make it too late a night because Tuesday was the Tennis Club picture night and Beryl had a couple of tickets.
Well, there’s not much I can say about the Tuesday, except that it was a really lovely night’s entertainment. We’re not ones for the pictures as a rule but when we do go we like to see a good bright show. After all, there’s enough unhappiness and sadness in the world without going to see it in the theatre. Had a bit of strife parking the vehicle – you know what it’s like up around that intersection near the Civic. Anyway, we found a possie in the long run just when we were beginning to think we might miss the blessed newsreel. The newsreel had a few shots of some of the poorer type of Italian housing conditions on the Continent and it made Beryl and I realise just how fortunate we were to have the comfort of our own home and all the little amenities round the home that make life easier for the womenfolk, and the menfolk generally, in the home. We left soon after interval as the next show wasn’t the best and I was feeling a bit on the tired side. Besides, Beryl was expecting her sister and her husband over for five hundred on the Wednesday and we didn’t want to make it too late a night.
So, Beryl and I went to bed.
Had to slip out of the office on the Wednesday lunch hour to get a few cashews to put round the card table. Beryl was running up a batch of sponge fingers with the passionfruit icing. There’s no doubt about it, Beryl makes a lovely sponge finger.
Well, the card night went off very nicely indeed, except that Beryl’s sister Lorna got a bit excited during the five hundred and knocked over a cup of tea and a curried egg sandwich on the new carpet. Oh, she was very apologetic, but as I said to Beryl later, being sorry won’t buy you a new wall-to-wall. And you know what curried egg does to a burgundy Axminster.
By and large though, all things considered, and taking everything into account, it was a pretty nice night’s entertainment.
They left early-ish. And Beryl and I went to bed …
WOMEN IN CHARGE
Before women’s liberation, men went off to work and women remained at home in the suburb in charge of house and children. This bred stronger women than the women’s liberation movement was willing to allow, as Craig McGregor reported in Profile of Australia (1966).
The most surprising feature of family life in Australia, for such an overtly masculine nation, is the way the family group is dominated by the mother. Indeed, the Australian family seems to be even more ‘mother-centred’ than the typical American family. A recent survey found that by far the most common pattern was one in which the mother both made the important family decisions and carried out the important family activities. Taken over all, mothers were responsible for half of all decisions and 40 per cent of all actions, while fathers were responsible for only 2 per cent of decisions and 15 per cent of actions. And joint activities by both parents were fairly rare compared with the amount of independent action taken by either the father or the mother. All this fits in with the everyday evidence about Australian families: the father appears to be the source of authority, but when one of the children wants to do something the reply is often ‘Go and ask your mother’ or ‘If it’s all right with Mum, it’s all right with me.’ Australian fathers take far less part in general family activities than their counterparts in many overseas countries. In America about 90 per cent of fathers take part in virtually all the main regions of family activity, but in Australia hardly any do. Boys and girls both regard their mothers, not their fathers, as the main source of praise and punishment and adolescents have more conflicts with their mothers than their fathers. All this emphasizes the important role of the mother, so that Australian families could well be called a ‘matriduxy’ – the mother does not rule, but she certainly leads.
In Struggletown (1984) historian Janet McCalman writes on women in working-class Richmond in the first half of the twentieth century.
The working-class family was most commonly a matriarchy where women bore the major responsibility for the expenditure of the family income, the care of the children, the quality of family life. Women sometimes regarded their husbands as one of the children except that they slunk out to play at the pub or with the SP bookie. Battling against poverty bred often formidable middle-aged women who towered over their feckless and immature husbands. The vast majority of men regarded it as a matter of pride that their wives did not have to go to work, and their wives agreed with them: a working wife signalled masculine failure. None the less, men could resent their role as compliant and barely tolerated providers.
Novelist Tim Winton remembers the women in his family, as recorded in Good Weekend, 27 August 1994.
I grew up in an extended family where the matriarchs made all the running. Perhaps it was a genetic hiccup, but the women made all the plays and the men followed. The women had more drive about them, they had more of a hardness. They were stronger-willed and altogether more fierce as personalities. Their children feared them into middle age and beyond. I was always more fearful (or at the very least, watchful) of my grandmothers and aunts than their men. Most of them had the tempers and the tongues; they were more vengeful than their men and they were always the final authority. My grandmothers ran their families by sheer force of character, by brilliant organisation and hard work or by mean-spirited sabotage and humiliation. Their husbands, by comparison, were mild and ineffectual.
FREEDOM AND VARIETY
In Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) Hugh Stretton, a leading intellectual, defended suburban living which other intellectuals had mocked. Perhaps the suburbs were not the enemy of the independent spirit.
With good design, that allegedly monotonous and repetitive suburban quarter-acre can include an infinite variety of indoor and outdoor spaces, further increased if some of the partitions are flexible. Large or small, private or open, sunny or cool, paved or overgrown, efficient or romantic, the rooms in the house and the quarters of its garden can offer real variety of colour, use and mood. Suburb-haters, thinking of people without personal resources in ill-designed houses and gardens, too often undervalue the free and satisfying self-expression, the mixtures of community and privacy, fond familiarity and quick change and escape, which this miniscule subdivision and diversification of the quarter-acre’s spaces can offer to the lives it houses. Compared with it, the private realm of the city apartment is internally monotonous, and its owner more restricted in what he can make of it. He loses a whole field for self-expression, and many chances to adapt his environment to idiosyncratic needs. He has only one escape. That one may be into the crowded city’s full and valuable diversity, but he can’t go there undressed. The escape is to nowhere quiet or private, to nothing he can kick, dig up, re-plan, encourage to grow, or hang a wet shirt on. In many cities the landless city apartment is where the rich get most neuroses and the poor get most delinquents.
Above all the house-in-garden is the most freely and cheaply flexible of all housing forms. Tents are its only competitors. It can be altered and extended in more ways and directions, with less hindrance from laws or neighbours, to meet more changes of need, than any denser housing can be. Each owner has considerable freedom to choose his own degree of privacy, publicity or neighbourliness. This freedom to alter his house without changing his address is an underrated one.
Many people like gardens, and gardening. Nobody knows, but I guess that those who do what they like with their gardens, and like doing it, probably outnumber the reluctant conformists. And many more things than gardening go on behind those fences – there’s no need to catalogue the hobbies and small trades and storages, all the arts and crafts and mercifully private disasters that clutter people’s back yards. Children’s uses of them are probably the most valuable of all – and not only to the children. Home allows the widest variety of outdoor activities and constructions, especially the complicated, continuing, accumulating ones. The players can build their own scenery and sets, and keep them intact for serials. Collectors can house their zoos. Parents, children, visitors, and the relations between them, all share in the benefits. In some urban circumstances (or social classes) children can’t ‘go out’ without due notice, a change of clothes, and a minder. But private suburban gardens let them mind their own business, much of which (like writing some of this chapter) is consistent with keeping an intermittent eye or ear on children moving freely about the resources of their own and neighbouring children’s houses and gardens.
So – to sum up – you don’t have to be a mindless conformist to choose suburban life. Most of the best poets and painters and inventors and protesters choose it too.