The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd Page A

breaking in a wild bronco to spoil some grass,’ wrote the New York magazine Architectural Forum in reply. Pained reaction to the English criticism reached from the architectural journals to the literary papers. Visually educated Americans had long been conscious of the mess, and they resented the Review ’s implication that it took someone from the cultural side of the Atlantic to notice it. Nevertheless, the outside criticism seemed to spur more self-examination, and the better magazines sometimes now are almost as outspoken as the English visitors were. And meanwhile the Review discovered that something just as bad was happening at home in England: a world of universal low-density mess was creeping over the once-lovely English landscape. Outrage , written by Ian Nairn, in June 1955 issued ‘a prophecy of doom’—the doom of an England reduced to a universal mean and middle state, with none of the real advantages of town or country and the disadvantages of both. Nairn pictured: ‘…an even spread of fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks, and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country and back into the devitalized hearts of towns, so that the most sublime backgrounds…are now to be seen only over a foreground of casual and unconsidered equipment, litter, and lettered admonitions.’
    The mess of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no respecter of a country’s age, but then in countries older than Australia other centuries still contribute something to the scene. Nowhere yet is it as extensive as in Australia.
    Like Sydney, all Australian towns and villages look their best in the longest view—from high in the sky—when the details of the mess are lost and the spaciousness and extent of the private domestic life can be appreciated best. The love of home can be seen in the great speckled carpets spread wide round every commercial centre. The carpet is coloured, somewhat patchily, a dusty olive in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne: the mixture of terra cotta roofs and greenery in the gardens, and silvery-grey in the north and inland where most of the roofs are corrugated iron or fibrous-cement. By night the carpets are black velvet sprinkled wider with brilliant jewel lights than any other cities in the world with comparable numbers of people.
    From the distance there is continuity, unity and the promise of comfort in the mushroom roofs and the bright background of tended green. But as the plane circles lower near the airport it is apparent that the green of the average suburb is a horizontal veneer no higher than the reach of a diligent gardener’s snippers: lawn, compact shrubs, annuals, nothing high enough to threaten with shade the pink terrazzo of the sun porch. And as the plane drops closer and lower still one can glimpse occasionally under the eaves of the mushroom roofs and see the battle of the colours and the decorative iron skirmishes. Still the sandblasted koala bears and the yacht-race scenes on the entrance hall windows are not visible. They are not seen until one has landed and is driving through the suburban streets, by which time it is difficult to avoid noticing also the featured columns supporting the corners of the entrance porches and the plasticized silky-oak featured front doors inside the feature porches, and the black plastic silhouette cockatoos featured on the feature doors.
    Featurism has low surface tension. It has the quality of penetrating ever further into the artificial make up. Ten years ago all park benches were dark green (sympathetic) or white (challenging). Then they too began to be featured in contemporary colours: a featured red bench, a blue bench. A little later the separate planks or battens of each bench were featured; red, blue, green, yellow alternating. This technique began about 1950 (as far as one is prepared to track it