down) in the sudden light-hearted suggestion of a councillor of Prahran, Victoria, who convinced his fellow councillors that this would restore some much-needed gaiety to the drab green foliage of the parks and playgrounds. Within a few months almost every other council in the suburbs of Melbourne had followed Prahranâs lead, and later the multi-coloured paint spread throughout the country. It happened at about the same time that garden pergolas, which had been traditionally monochromatic, began to change many colours, each beam of the pergola featured in a different hot pastel hue. Later the most popular treatment for pergolas, trellises, fences, beer-garden screens and other similar garden adornments was to make them in a squared grid and to feature the inside edges of each square in a different primary.
Colour, this most striking single element in the modern Australian scene, is a comparatively new feature. It is a product of the last half of the 1950 decade, the do-it-yourself era, chemical advances, and the keen competition of the largely British-owned paint companies. Heavy advertising has encouraged the idea of happy family painting bees using lots of different pigments on walls and ceilings, and to pick out features. Ordinary colour-cards grew from six to sixty hues in this period. Multi-colouring brightens the creative task of redecorating for the amateur, and ensures the opening of a profitable number of partly required tins of paint. Again, pigment is relished by the pressing and printing machines which produce many modern surfacing materials. But, irrespective of practical and economic influences, strident colour is a direct popular cultural expression of easy living. It is a reflection of the money in the modern pocket, just as equally intense, but heavier, richer colours in wallpaper and gilded plaster reflected the last boom of the 1880 decade. Between the booms pigment was mainly something to hide dirt marks. A drab series of duochrome fashions reflected the comparatively flat progression of the country through the first half of this century. About 1900 the two acceptable colours were brown and cheese. After the First World War they were sometimes green and grey. Cream and green predominated on all paint colour-cards from the Depression to the war, although the theme was sometimes varied late in this period by the more daring cream and cherry or cream and sky blue in kitchens and entrance porches. Even the rakish jazz-moderne of the pre-war milk bar and picture palace was never a painted style. It indulged in colour only in the neon tubes.
The cream Australia policy lasted for some twenty years, trailing off slowly after the Second World War. For the whole of that time cream was used habitually where other nations would have used white. Most kitchen equipment was not procurable in white enamel. As late as 1955 English manufacturers of stoves and other household appliances and sanitary-ware made special cream models for export to Australia. But by this time cream was losing ground to white or light grey as the neutral base colour, and green was being replaced gradually by a rainbow. Suddenly colour was triumphantly elevated as a feature in its own right alongside vertical boarding and split stone veneer. Now standard household equipment came white, but some manufacturers began making coloured refrigerators and washing machines. Then, as the once-black cars in the streets outside adopted two-tone and three-tone styling, household equipment dropped its reticence. Many manufacturers offered two-tone equipment and others provided interchangeable feature panels on the front of appliances where oneâs favourite fashion shade could be enshrined, easily to be changed tomorrow when it begins to pall.
Meanwhile, in the commercial streets, where Featurism thrives in the knowledge of its economic justification, the diversion of attention from wholes to parts grew steadily more agitated. Lettering and
Colour, this most striking single element in the modern Australian scene, is a comparatively new feature. It is a product of the last half of the 1950 decade, the do-it-yourself era, chemical advances, and the keen competition of the largely British-owned paint companies. Heavy advertising has encouraged the idea of happy family painting bees using lots of different pigments on walls and ceilings, and to pick out features. Ordinary colour-cards grew from six to sixty hues in this period. Multi-colouring brightens the creative task of redecorating for the amateur, and ensures the opening of a profitable number of partly required tins of paint. Again, pigment is relished by the pressing and printing machines which produce many modern surfacing materials. But, irrespective of practical and economic influences, strident colour is a direct popular cultural expression of easy living. It is a reflection of the money in the modern pocket, just as equally intense, but heavier, richer colours in wallpaper and gilded plaster reflected the last boom of the 1880 decade. Between the booms pigment was mainly something to hide dirt marks. A drab series of duochrome fashions reflected the comparatively flat progression of the country through the first half of this century. About 1900 the two acceptable colours were brown and cheese. After the First World War they were sometimes green and grey. Cream and green predominated on all paint colour-cards from the Depression to the war, although the theme was sometimes varied late in this period by the more daring cream and cherry or cream and sky blue in kitchens and entrance porches. Even the rakish jazz-moderne of the pre-war milk bar and picture palace was never a painted style. It indulged in colour only in the neon tubes.
The cream Australia policy lasted for some twenty years, trailing off slowly after the Second World War. For the whole of that time cream was used habitually where other nations would have used white. Most kitchen equipment was not procurable in white enamel. As late as 1955 English manufacturers of stoves and other household appliances and sanitary-ware made special cream models for export to Australia. But by this time cream was losing ground to white or light grey as the neutral base colour, and green was being replaced gradually by a rainbow. Suddenly colour was triumphantly elevated as a feature in its own right alongside vertical boarding and split stone veneer. Now standard household equipment came white, but some manufacturers began making coloured refrigerators and washing machines. Then, as the once-black cars in the streets outside adopted two-tone and three-tone styling, household equipment dropped its reticence. Many manufacturers offered two-tone equipment and others provided interchangeable feature panels on the front of appliances where oneâs favourite fashion shade could be enshrined, easily to be changed tomorrow when it begins to pall.
Meanwhile, in the commercial streets, where Featurism thrives in the knowledge of its economic justification, the diversion of attention from wholes to parts grew steadily more agitated. Lettering and
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