The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd

thermometer drops, winter comes as a bitter unexpected turn of fate. Now the wind thrashes rain among the pinhead chairs on the terraces and against the window-walls, and the drinkers in the unheated ball-rooms huddle closer in their woollens around the icy beer glasses on the plastic tables. Somehow it is a part of the architectural style to put two-tone crocodiled surfacing on the wallboards before comfort in the unseen air.
    Sydney is the unconstituted capital of Australian popular culture. It is larger than Melbourne, older than Hobart and prettier than Perth, and it has by nature and by acquisition most of the things that visitors remark as typically Australian. Sydney is indeed the most proudly Australian of all cities, and the frankest admirer of American ideas. Sydney is alive, impatient to be even bigger and to short-cut ways to be smarter. It is a shop window city. It has more new houses and television sets with fewer new sewerage mains. It has more illustrated advertising painted on higher walls, more moving neon signs, the oldest rows of narrow terrace houses curving over twisting hills in the most picturesque slums. And in such modern palaces of amusement as the musical bar lounges, Sydney carries the contemporary style of the country to its highest intensity.
    The Australian ugliness is bigger and better here, but in substance Sydney is only a sharper example of the general Australian townscape. There is beauty to be discovered here, in two categories, natural and artistic, but the trouble is that it must be discovered. The fine things, from the glimpses of magnificent landscape to the rare good buildings, old and new, are all but suffocated by the ugliness. The ugliness also falls into two categories: accepted and unintentional. Australia’s accepted, recognized ugliness is no more than the normal blight which afflicts growing communities, especially rich, young, industrialized, growing communities. Part of it is the blight of age: the old buildings, the slum houses, the leaning fences, hoardings, structures of all kinds that were not very good in the first place and have long since outlived their prime, but are left behind to decay as development moves away to new fields. Another part is the blight of expediency: trees uprooted to save diverting a few yards of drain, the ill-considered and uncoordinated assortment of posts, hydrants, bins, transformers, benches, guards, traffic signs, tram standards, a hundred other necessary public appliances, and neons, placards, stickers, posters, slogans—all bundled together like an incompetently rolled swag with loops and tangles of overhead wires. This kind of mess, as made by any progressive community, sometimes is done unconsciously, without thought or care. But often it is done consciously, with a little regret, but with resignation to what seem to be the inescapable facts of industrial life. The mess is accepted without pleasure or complacency, yet without sufficient distaste to kindle a reaction. It is unfortunate, but it is not tragic.
    Unintentional ugliness, on the other hand, has an element of tragedy, because it comes from better visual intentions. It is the ugliness that starts in a spark of revolt against the depressing litter of the artificial environment and ends in an over-dressed, over-coloured, overbearing display of features.
    The Australian ugliness has distinctive qualities, but in substance it is the same as the thing that has been called: ‘the mess that is manmade America.’ These were the words of the London magazine Architectural Review when it devoted an issue in December 1950 to a devastatingly illustrated attack on American urban and suburban culture. If a means of arresting this visual blight could not be found soon, the Review said, ‘the USA might conceivably go down in history as one of the greatest might-have-beens of all time.’ These comments were not warmly welcomed in the USA. ‘One should expect a man