SUBLIME SOULS & SYMPHONIES:
Australian PhotoTexts 1926–1966,  Eric Riddler 1993

introduction to this thesis |   table of contents  |   1926-1966 chronology of photo-books

Chapter 1  |   Chapter 2   |   Chapter 3  |   Chapter 4   |    Chapter 5  |   Chapter 6   |   Chapter 7  |   Chapter 8   |    Conclusion

CHAPTER FIVE: METROPOLITAN LIFE

5.1 The quest for a typical Australian city

Australia, despite the cultural dominance of the 'outback', is a very urban nation. Most Australians live in urban areas. Sydney and Melbourne are the largest and therefore most influential cities in Australian culture. These cities exhibit two different appearances. Sydney is the Harbour City, any book of images of Sydney has coverage of the Harbour and water-related leisure.

Melbourne is the Garden City. Its parks and gardens project the city's lifestyle. Sydney is a peoples' town, populated by a youthful and cosmopolitan society. Melbourne is the dignified mercantile city. Sydney's architecture is a mass of New York imitation mini-skyscrapers among a scattering of public buildings kept on from its years as a penal colony. At the peak of the post Gold Rush boom last century, Melbourne had the money to equip itself with a multitude of High Victorian edifices, giving birth to what Robin Boyd would term the 'Featurist Capital'.¹

Of the other capitals, Brisbane was the only one to really promote itself through these books. It was the tropical city, the colourful city, in its dress and to a lesser extent in its architecture. This became an advantage as colour publications developed with the advancement of colour printing technology. Like Sydney, its peninsular business district invited comparisons with New York, like Melbourne it was a city of (this time tropical) gardens.

The other capitals of similar size, Perth and Adelaide, were rather neglected in the field of quality photographic promotions. Hobart was, thanks mainly to Frank Hurley's work for the Tasmanian Government, given a little more publicity. It had the appearance of a provincial British town with its smaller scale, in both architecture and street traffic.

Then there is Canberra, created for a symbolic purpose, growing when it is bureaucratically correct to do so. What should have been a unified grand scheme was continually interrupted by external matters such as the World Wars and the Great Depression. Internal squabbling between architects and politicians combined with changing urban and aesthetic ideals over a long period delayed the city's arrival at symbolic grandeur until it was about fifty years old.

Newcastle stood alone as a provincial city at the turn of the century but by the Sixties Wollongong and Queensland's Gold Coast had expanded to rival it in size and importance, the former to suit industrial growth, the latter to suit tourism and speculative building.

Finally there are the rural cities, looking beyond their agricultural background to accommodate the national shift away from primary industry. Goulburn and Albury took advantage of the Hume Highway to promote themselves as centres for decentralisation.

Central West towns like Forbes and Orange and Northern towns such as Kyogle and Gloucester used Ziegler to promote themselves to potential settlers, both commercial and residential. Maitland is a late example, which had been usurped by Newcastle as the main provincial centre of New South Wales. It also saw itself as a major growth centre in a decentralised Hunter Valley industrial sector.

A particular concern which developed in phototexts as they developed was the state of Australian architecture, particularly on the domestic scale. In the early years of the phototexts their architectural criticism was passive, showing modern and historic architecture without much comment on their relative aesthetic value. Monuments were monumental, Greenway was historic and local houses were fine structures. Harsh criticism was limited to slums and even they were condemned in the accompanying text rather than by illustration, such as is found in the chapter on the Cumberland County Planning scheme in the first Sydney, a Camera Study.

In that case there is no hint of criticism in Hurley's coverage of Sydney's architecture but the text gives an example of a house in the oldest section of Paddington. One of the few exceptions was the photographic content of the 1949 publication This Land of Ours which had a small monochrome image of an inner Sydney slum beneath a large colour image of new North Shore houses.²

Paddington 1948 - photograph by David Moore	from This Land of Ours

In the nineteen twenties the older public buildings, by their pictorial impressiveness, dominated the photography of Australian cities. The Macquarie Book had shown Cazneaux's photographs of Greenway's architecture while other Art in Australia Limited books showed Pictorialist-style images of Town Halls and the like. The value of architectural nostalgia will be discussed later.

The architectural content of a book was dominated by the condition of a city's architecture; take, for example, Frank Hurley's Sydney, a Camera Study. Sydney in 1948 was still caught in the austerity period. Few buildings had been built since the A.W.A. Building's completion as the Second World War began in September 1939.³

Unlike Melbourne with its plethora of public monuments from the Gold Rush Boom and Centennial gifts, Sydney's streetscape was looking rather tired. The General Post Office had lost its clock tower because of the air-raid risk (it was not to return until the 1960s). Much of Hurley's architectural imagery dealt with the Gothic architecture of the previous century.

	images from Frank Hurley's 1948 Sydney, A Camera Study

An odd example of the use of architectural photography from 1950 was the Ure Smith Miniature Australian Treescapes. The booklet was devoted to photographs which feature trees, rather than photographs of trees. Several of the images are architectural studies in which the buildings' gardens are used as part of the composition. Max Dupain shows the use of natural landscape with modernist architecture, Harold Cazneaux shows the cultivated gardens of the Georgian Revival. At a time when the spread of suburbia was destroying forested areas around Australia's cities, it is interesting that fashionable architecture was embracing the tree.

for more Treescapes - click here

By the mid 1950s the photographic industry had changed. Architectural photography had become the meal ticket of many modernist photographers, none so much as Max Dupain, although Wolfgang Sievers and David Moore were also significant. The local magazine Architecture, after an early dalliance with pictorialism when it was known as The Salon, had all but given up on creative photography, leaving pictorial coverage of modern architecture to its rival Building.

This changed with the lifting of wartime paper restrictions and by the middle of the decade Architecture had transformed into the glossy journal Architecture in Australia.

The increased pictorial content and the building boom made architectural photography the major force of post war modernism. Despite this, Oswald Ziegler's Australian Photography 1957 featured only one true architectural image, a Milton Kent photograph of the King George V Memorial hospital, completed almost fifteen years earlier.

The failure of Ziegler to accord architectural photography its rightful place as the dominant form of its time did not deter compilers of photo-texts from increasing the level of architectural criticism in books. Even if they were originally designed to present a beautiful face for Australia, the growing debate about this nation's aesthetic values became part of its image.

The 1958 edition of Sydney, a Camera Study concluded with a three page coverage of domestic architecture with captions that condemn everything from terrace houses to Moderne style villas of the late thirties (the same style championed in This Land of Ours).

The latter style, a late off-shoot of Art Deco, spent the fifties and sixties being reviled before an Art Deco revival in the United States which reached Australia via an article by Daniel Thomas in Art and Australia.⁴

The critic in Sydney, a Camera Study flattered the Georgian Revival style for its "charm and dignity". Moderne buildings were "ostentatious... showing the worst features of oversea [sic] design", a far cry from when they were "interesting", "attractive" and "admirably suited to the climate".⁵ The criticism was at its loudest in New South Wales, probably because many of the most significant works of this style were built in Sydney.

Local (overseas trained) architect Sydney Ancher interpreted Le Corbusier's decree that architects should follow the aesthetic principles of ocean liner design, leaving the Sydney harbourside of the 1930s with mansions that looked like ocean liners. Ancher later joined Harry Seidler as an exponent on Modernist architecture, leaving his early work without a defender.

Victoria had its own bete-noire buildings. Its Victorian era Italianate Style, bom of the post Gold Rush Boom, was an architectural reminder that Melbourne was Robin Boyd's 'Featurist Capital'.⁶ Condemned in such publications as the 1961 edition of Hurley's Australia, a Camera Study, time had given the so-called Boom Style a nostalgic value that inspired less vehemence than that displayed towards Modeme.

The criticism in 1961 was mainly aimed at the cluttered roof scape of Melbourne beneath the smooth lines of the I.C.I. Tower, the Commonwealth Government Building and the slightly older Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Robin Boyd's Australian Ugliness appeared before the Australian public in 1960, soon after the critical captions had first appeared. In the decade or so before The Australian Ugliness was published), there had been criticism pre-empting Boyd's work in such journals as Architecture in Australia and The Australian Artist.⁷  These journals were produced for a readership who were actually involved in the process of creating the Australian urban aesthetic. There was an increase in European migration which should have ushered in a new cultural awareness but, as Boyd observed, the migrants assimilated into Australian aesthetics faster than Australians could be influenced by theirs.

While most of the architectural photographs in the photography books were aimed at modernity or landmarks, as the years passed there was a growing nostalgia for historic buildings of lesser value. On the most part the nostalgia was dismissed in favour of progress and the clean lines of the new buildings but by the sixties it was becoming an important part of Australia's cultural heritage.

After Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness it was only a matter of time before Boyd's followers produced a pictorial coverage of the nation's aesthetic values.

In 1966 Ure Smith produced Australia Outrage, a book so fiercely critical of The Australian Ugliness' that even Boyd protested against its intransigence. Don Gazzard, its editor, was a young architect determined to continue the Modernist style of architecture against the wave of the mellower domestic architecture that dominated Sydney in the sixties. David Potts supplied most of the photographs but others came from departmental sources such as the New South Wales Department of Main Roads. Mark Strizic contributed several photographs of Melbournian Outrage. (see sample pages below)

One of the things the book found outrageously ugly was the way practical architecture and design were presented to the public. Telephone booths, bus shelters and the large road sign at Villawood (a.k.a. The Meccano Set') were presented as neglecting form following function.(see sample pages below)

Other photographs protested against the intrusion of advertising and vandal attracting buildings upon the landscape, echoing images used to argue the case for the County of Cumberland Planning Scheme some eighteen years previously. In the Boyer lectures the following year, Robin Boyd pointed out that condemning telegraph poles as being against functionalism was, in fact, contradictory, as telegraph poles are nothing if not functional.

Inevitably the fibro bungalow came in for some strong J'Accuse style condemnation. Gazzard shows a picture of a typical suburban street, lined with such dwellings and telegraph poles. In a rather patronising manner, the photograph is left to speak of its own outrageousness; there is no explanation of how it is seen to be ugly or outrageous. The reader is evidently assumed to be above suburban aesthetics, something that Robin Boyd's wittiness managed to avoid.

Pages from Australian Outrage

Thus in 1966, forty years of relatively uncritical promotion of "interesting" and "progressive" Australian cities was being challenged. Regardless of how extreme Gazzard's opinions may have been, and in terms of architectural critics he certainly had his predecessors such as Florence Taylor's massive slum-clearance and city-realignment pipe dreams.

The rejection of the notion that pictorial books had to accord the better aspects of a city with greater attention than the faulty ones was an important milestone in the lead-up to the political debates, union green bans and community activism which rejected the direction of urban development in the 1970s. Proposals for two of the most significant developments involved in these debates, Sydney's Rocks and Woolloomooloo redevelopments, were featured in phototexts by Ziegler in the sixties and seventies as examples of the nation's progress.

Following Life at The Cross in 1965, Inner City regions, hitherto regarded for their potential as slum clearance and redevelopment, became the subject of a new generation of phototexts. Sydney's The Rocks and Paddington and Melbourne's Carlton were among the areas so covered in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The " gentrification" of the Inner City had begun.

1. 'Sydney Tomorrow" by an official of the Cumberland County Council in Frank Hurley, Sydney, a Camera Study, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1948.
2. George Farwell and Frank H. Johnson, 272/5 Land of Ours, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1949. The photographers of the houses are not identified.
3. 'A.W.A. Building', Building, Volume 65, Number 386, October 24, 1939, Pp 14-25, 79-81.
4. The American revival owed a lot to the work of Bev Hillier, as did Thomas's article "Art Deco in Australia" in Art and Australia, Volume 19, Number 4, March 1972, Pp 338-351.
5. Albury, Ziegler-Gotham, Sydney, 1949, Forbes, Oswald Ziegler, Sydney, 1951 and Farwell and Johnson, op cit 5.4 2, 1949.
6. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1960.
7. The Australian Artist was a journal produced by the Victorian Artists' Society between 1947 and 1949, not to be confused with the current (1992) journal Australian Artist.