The Uncultured Herd and Us

The print version of this essay includes art work by Mia Schoen

‘Suburbia’ described a society which had neither a sense of tradition nor a spirit of innovation and change … Much anti-suburban writing was derogatory rather than analytical. ‘Suburbia’ soon became a convenient explanation for a variety of shortcomings. It enabled the critic to condemn his society without explaining why it had failed to approach the high ideals of nationhood formulated by an earlier generation ...

—David Walker, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity

I

Our house was built in 1972. Its previous owners were a couple who had bought it new: he had died and she was moving to a granny flat on her daughter’s property in a new suburb almost twice as far again from the city. The house is on a street originally constructed at the edge of a scheme to turn a creek ravine into a stepped series of sporting ovals via the importation of thousands of cubic metres of rubbish. Our neighbours, who’ve lived here the full thirty-six years, tell us it was a great day in the mid 1970s when they finally saw the bottom of the tip—meaning the smell and, probably, social stigma of living so close to refuse was coming to an end. The ovals were given shape, but subsidence patches have put them off true; they remain, green open space, like much of the extended reserve two minutes’ walk from our front door, no longer used for sport but only for dog walking, the occasional bloody trail-bike rider and the council’s every-few-months mowing tractor.

And so now we, who were once committed to the CBD periphery and the live shows and coffee shops and galleries, now live twenty kilometres from the GPO, in a lower middle-class suburb founded in the mid-nineteenth century as a village, and developed over the next hundred years as an outer suburb at the rail terminus. It didn’t really begin growing to any density until the 1950s, with the help of government agencies and then a couple of well-known developer-entrepreneurs. Depending on how you define suburbia, the suburbs beyond our house may well spread another ten Ks; it’s certainly possible to walk through streets of houses for a couple of hours in some outward directions.

We bought here, first because we liked it, and second because it was about half the price of almost anywhere else we could have seriously considered. This was four years ago, in the midst of one of John Howard’s barbecue stoppers, the furious increase in house prices. We now pay less on our mortgage than most of our friends do on rent.

We are in a suburban community and get on well with those of our neighbours we know. Whether we are genuinely of the community is hard to divine; it’s possible, perhaps, that there isn’t a community exactly but a collection of different associations based on age, ethnicity and other demographic details, overlaid and interlinked. I feel aware (not ashamed or proud, just aware) of my middle-class background and am uncertain whether we are slumming it—in the benign sense of that term, if there is one—or are perhaps early planters of the gentrification flag, alongside two friends in a similar income/education/class bracket who moved here last year.

What is perhaps most surprising about our relocation, however, is the reaction of people we know—not necessarily all ‘inner-city dwellers’, but perhaps most comfortable with that kind of identification—to this suburban location. It’s a 25- to 60-minute trip between our home and the centre of the city, depending on the time of day and the mode of transport (public’s quicker in peak hour; private at two a.m.). Yet the idea of removing to our domicile seems to many akin to crossing some alps into one of those little European duchies with its own stamps. One casual acquaintance asks me, whenever I see him in the city, how long we are in town and when we are going back (the inference being, I gather, that we will sometime load up our carriage with flour and stockwhips for four days’ journey). Others merely tell us we are ‘so far out’, presumably not in the groovy sense. Mia has at times been offered sympathy for her sentence in housewife hell. Most people we know had never been to our corner of the city until we moved there, and some still speak of it as if the reality of experience cannot dim the brightness of their preconceptions.

From this perspective, Mia and I—as entitled, surely, as anyone to take our place as members of the high-end urban ‘creative class’—are just plain making an absurdist statement in living where we do. Suburbanites by choice, and in an unfashionable suburb at that, we have rendered ourselves amusing or unique anomalies. We should have been content always to live in tiny brick homes, with squalid makeshift gardens, for the privilege of being close to a hotel where good bands play, so we can walk home drunk: heaven.

II

Until very recently people have traditionally moved outwards. Until we came to where we are now, we had been renting in a lesser-known region of the inner city, in a 1930s wooden house built by our landlady’s father in a street the entire population of which, she told us on one of her uninvited visits, upped and moved to another rapidly developing fringe suburb in the 1960s. Allowing for hyperbole, this was no doubt how many postwar communities coped with the twin strains of community ties and aspirational pull; indeed in Britain during the creation of the postwar New Towns, whole neighbourhoods were transplanted to towns beyond the newly fashioned green belt. More commonly, young homemakers leapfrogging outwards into the expanding city edge would find community in shared demographics, interests and even a community spirit, predicated not on a love of suburbia per se but on mutual self-interest: issues surrounding home ownership, development (too much, too little, wrong type), recreation and socialising.

To define suburbia is, of course, to gather a number of suppositions under one umbrella and try to make them seem compatible. Australia, having often been lauded as the first suburban nation or as the birthplace of the suburb, usually nevertheless needs prompting to claim this honour. Of course, prehistoric cities had suburbs, as all cities since have had, so trying to tie this ‘first’ to any reality is merely to prop up a furphy. Perhaps there is more credibility in nominating Australia as the cauldron that conjured up the nineteenth-century leafy, middle-class suburb, even—considering its urbanisation emerged almost simultaneously with the railway—the modern commuter suburb. Perhaps it’s better to resign oneself to the fact that ‘firsts’ don’t exist. Yet it is plain that by the end of the nineteenth century suburbia was a flourishing art form in this country.

After the First World War, Australia also became the locus of a new type and style of suburb, one that would predominate throughout the twentieth century in some permutation or another. The garden suburb, in its genuine bastardised form (a miniature, conservationist version of the revolutionary garden city) was adopted and adapted with gusto by local planners along with a set of principles relating to open-space provision, scenic road layout, block size and house orientation, and even preservation of native vegetation in some instances.

This is where the Australian suburb as we now know it really took root: in the 1920s high-end visions of Percy Hope and Carl Klem in Perth, Saxil Tuxen in Melbourne and Walter Scott Griffiths in Sydney, Hobart and Adelaide—to name just four serious proponents of this new-fashioned suburban design. Tuxen was a particularly versatile and driven planner, whose little-known story adds a lot to understanding of the twentieth-century Australian suburb. Not only was he a key participant in the (largely ill-fated) plan for Melbourne by its Metropolitan Town Planning Commission of 1923–29, but he also lectured his fellow citizens, via radio and press, on the appropriate appreciation of nature within the city; the use and provision of transport; planning for housing all classes; the composition of street scenery; and much more besides. His legacy as a surveyor/designer of suburban landscapes lives on in subdivisions drawn up in his Queen Street offices over sixty years, taking in demographics and terrains as diverse as Park Orchards, Reservoir, Coburg and Mount Eliza. A skilled practitioner, he was as comfortable designing with the Victorian government as a client as he was creating speculator’s subdivisions for the highly successful real estate agent T.M. Burke or, indeed, any other farmer/mansion owner/syndicate with land contiguous to metropolitan development who saw the ripe time to sell. That many of his designs were barely on track to be populated within his lifetime was clearly a minor consideration for Tuxen, who subscribed to the common expectation among garden-suburb designers and advocates of his era that these inherently logical and egalitarian town-planning principles would come to be applied to entire metropolises. With this understanding, individual suburban subdivisions designed to the ‘correct’ planning standards could be seen as forming what Tuxen called in a radio address in 1927 ‘the mosaic of a great city’.

Tuxen’s own interests after the onset of the Depression began to diverge to more direct measures of societal improvement; he was an early and long-standing supporter and associate of the Brotherhood of St Laurence until his death in 1975. Yet his 1920s groundwork was perfect for the community-based movements of the Second World War and beyond—particularly those settlements with centralised shopping and civic precincts and direct communication to transport—which is to say, if he were alive today and a sufficiently sprightly 120 year old, he would also be able to tell the New Urbanists, that flourishing band of American designers borrowing gleefully and haphazardly from early twentieth-century design to promote walking, public transport and community, a thing or two about sustainable suburbs.

Slow urban growth in the 1930s and 1940s meant many of these places, like their companion regions in other Australian cities, did not develop strongly until the 1950s and 60s, by which time a new, individualistic consciousness had developed, and new modes of suburban life were being envisaged. Often, these revolved around car ownership and use, and Australian cities’ third major wave of urban expansion was, as we are so often reminded, often underresourced, particularly in terms of transport but also—as Whitlam saw and, in many cases, came to remedy—in sewerage and other basic facilities. As an early-period Canberran, Whitlam knew the frustrations of (sub)urban plans unfulfilled. Simultaneously, the ‘trendies’, in many cases young people returned from European forays, were gentrifying the inner city in the hope of reliving that experience of a nineteenth century built environment.

The sixties and seventies were not merely the routine unrolling of numb and unrestrained ‘dead worm’ designs to ‘make cars happy’ (to pinch, twice, from the New Urbanists’ grab-bag of catchy but slightly-off-the-mark phrases). Sometimes developers got it incredibly right: Ron Sloane’s recruitment of planner Paul Ritter and architect Bill Kierath, for instance, to make the densely housed yet spacious Perth suburb of Crestwood in the 1960s. Or the Merchant Builders’ and others’ adaptation of cluster housing to retain natural bushland—just as their spiritual forefathers half a century earlier had attempted to do—with small housing lots, shared driveways and an emphasis on foliage and organic design. And the unknowns who designed our area, with open space a premium, unusual ‘street pictures’ (old town-planner parlance) and large, landscaped gardens. These are ideals many are still trying to recapture: the suburb’s essence of the rural-urban mix.

III

To mangle a cliché, the more the attitudes to suburbia change within Australian society, the more they stay the same. A stroll through Meanjin’s back issues, as the journal both reflected the society and impacted upon it, stands as a gauge of change since the 1940s. The most typical attitude in the 1950s and 1960s is adequately revealed by John C. Alexander in 1962, during one of the magazine’s regular trawls through (what it saw as the lack of) Australian intellectual and artistic endeavour. Here Alexander makes a casual allusion to our ‘desperate suburban mediocrity’, which understandably, for him, strikes a ‘deep sense of horror in the heart of our more sensitive artists’. The ghost of early twentieth-century playwright and poet Louis Esson (who jovially cocked a snoot at the ‘suburbs … the tabby-cat, and the garden hose, and slippers, and afternoon tea’ but who also spoke darkly of a suburbia where ‘all is repression, stagnation, a moral morgue’) is heard loud and clear in mid-century Meanjin just as it was elsewhere in Australia. Peter Kirkpatrick, who quotes the Esson song above in his book The Sea Coast of Bohemia, also discusses in that history the view towards suburbia of the Australian bohemians of Esson’s generation. Citing David Walker’s mid-seventies study of the early twentieth-century stride towards a national identity, Dream and Disillusion, Kirkpatrick typifies this attitude as creating two camps: ‘the uncultured herd’ of suburbanites ‘and us’. This is, of course, often the core element of Australians’—even Australians who live in the suburbs—attitude to Australian suburbs.

The early 1970s sees suburbia-as-life-sentence Meanjin gems such as Judith Rodriguez’s 1971 poem ‘Afternoon suburb, framed by kitchen’ (wherein the grotesque, wasteful and artificial suburban environment is at least one of the things described as a ‘strange-featured, sly-pulsed residue of rape’). In the late 1970s a shift had occurred in treatment of the suburb as a (generic) place; Tim Rowse, in 1978, was far more benign, at least by dint of even-handedly discussing the biases of its harshest critics and a very sympathetic rendering of ideas from some of the smartest of its supporters, notably the Adelaide economist and social critic Hugh Stretton. Stretton—much like the abovementioned Ritter, though the two are very different in other respects—sees the best suburban environment as one crafted for children, families and the development of social intercourse and play. Ahead of his time, Rowse puts forward the now much more commonplace argument that to denigrate suburbia is to denigrate women; a huge shift from the conceptualisation of suburbia as misogyny writ in built form. The difference across this decade is marked, and it’s Stretton’s championing of suburbia, as well as his arguments on behalf of the domestic home’s integral (though underrepresented in official figures) place within the wider economy, which has made some of that difference.

Meanjin in the early 1980s—in fact, the first issue of 1980—included the redoubtable Craig McGregor defending suburbia as part of a pop culture palette: from ‘love, work, family, sport’ up to ‘birth, fucks and death’. In response from the other end of the decade, John Tranter’s poem ‘Debbie & Co’ name checks (like a later version of one of Barry Humphries’ early monologues) all the commercial trappings—brand names and icons—of an afternoon at the ‘Council Pool’ where ‘piss-tinted water slaps the tiles’ but which, for all that, can’t help being bucolic.

By 1990 we see Robin Gerster conducting an overview of ‘The place of suburbia in Australian fiction’. Gerster titled his piece ‘Gerrymander’, for what he saw as collusion by those who would favour either the (central) city or the bush to exclude the suburbs ‘and in effect … the majority of Australians who live there’. Gerster had a rich field of satirists and haters to draw from; George Johnston, whose merciless railing against his home in Beverley Grove is that famous startlingly contradictory turning point of My Brother Jack; Patrick White; Helen Garner, who is admittedly primarily a critic of the suburbs only by the putatively subversive lifestyles in her fiction that infer the reverse of stifling suburbia (even if they are often nonetheless stifling) and so on. Gerster did not point readers in the direction of those who would explore suburbia with some sympathy and even, at times, empathy: John Morrison, whose stories were published in Meanjin in the 1960s; Glen Thomasetti, whose Thoroughly Decent People is a classic of its time (and remains compelling); or Christopher Koch’s sublime novels The Boys in the Island and The Doubleman, which both paint sympathetic and exotic meanings into Hobart’s postwar suburbia. This is particularly true of the former, wherein at night the lights of distant houses ‘dance in a silent frenzy’ and the outer suburbs resonate in fantasy with ‘the sound of a tune … a car’s far hum in the deeps of night … the cool country dark carrying the breath of those areas of otherness’. Here there is a primal attraction to the city’s edge and its possibility.

In the almost two decades since Gerster’s survey, numerous books have tackled suburban life with sophistication; for instance, Steven Carroll’s trilogy of life in twentieth-century Glenroy, the wonderful Tim Richards and Hampton, or Wayne Macauley’s marvellous Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe—a satire not of suburbia per se but of planning, bureaucracy and community tension. Yet even given these marvellous books and many others, in Australian stories any conception of the suburbs other than as prim, cardboard falsehood must be explained to a lurid extent. Because everybody knows the suburbs are a place where nothing happens and where nobody (interesting) lives.

Perhaps suburbia’s greatest misfortune was that it was given a name. As a concept, it seems to be based not on what it is but what it is not: the filling in the sandwich between city and country, distastefully neither one nor the other. What strikes me as strangest about suburbia’s critics’ approach is that it regards all suburbia, wherever it may lie (and this is, of course, a debatable subject) as the same beige graveyard of the imagination. Why bother discovering anything about the differences within a place that’s not really a place at all, but a morass of indistinguishable places? Suburbia’s critics remind me of my time as an undergraduate at the University of Sydney, where my fellow students who had never been to Melbourne were disturbed by the idea of a field trip to that place because ‘it’s just another city’. Anyone who thinks suburbia is all the same doesn’t know what they’re looking at, or just doesn’t know what to see when they see, for instance, the crafted village squares of Caroline Springs in Melbourne, or the module model suburbs of Elizabeth, South Australia, or the huddled settlement of Rokeby, Hobart. A few years ago a very good Max Gillies show raised a laugh by introducing (Gillies’ version of) Geoffrey Blainey as the author of a history of Camberwell: as if anyone but the most pissant historian would write a history of a middle-class suburb. As it happens, Blainey’s foray into local history is an important book that suggests the larger story of an urbanising nation—and is a very worthy and readable account of a fascinating place. But it does not do, of course, to wax even slightly lyrical about places everyone knows are rank, and while I believe the randomly cited suburbs I mention above are worth knowing for their form and history and community and layout, I name them here in part purely because I know it’s an impossible sell. Suburbs are, of course, rarely tourist destinations: indeed, they’re seen as the opposite of nice places to visit people wouldn’t want to live in.

IV

So they do, but why? As the environmental panic is becoming increasingly frantic, critics suggest that Australians, on the whole, lack the guts and imagination to cram themselves into something higher density and less wasteful. If suburbanites were a little more open to the idea that less is more—much as those privileged few in the inner city, where block sizes are tiny but café society is readily available—then we could pack more people into smaller cities, as they do in Europe. Public transport would become more viable (because there would be less choice about whether or not to use it), walking or cycling more plausible and various other services would be more efficient and cheaper. These notions all seem so eminently sensible, one wonders why the law wasn’t passed yesterday to make it happen, and numbskull democracy by this estimation seems to be the only bar. Market providers of housing and housing estates will plead that consumers are simply not interested in anything more compact in new housing: the attitude seems to be that if you’re going to live in the suburbs, and thereby accept some restrictions of mobility and/or access to the centralised culture of our metropolises, one thing you can have as compensation is a large block of land, and perhaps even a large house to go on it.

Recently I visited a prestige housing estate at the city’s edge where attempts had been made to re-create a small block of inner-urban streets close to the new suburb’s central shopping and civic heart. It had the air of urban infill that might have replaced, say, a factory in Zetland. Right down to the step-pavers at their side, these structures were designed to minimise a household’s carbon footprint and, not irrelevantly, increase vendor profits handsomely. Indeed, while the block space was minimised, these terraces themselves were spacious to the degree that they often featured a luxuriousness of odd, inexplicable unassigned space. There are two ways to interpret this: either as a kind of tokenistic element of waste or as a means to offer individualistic appropriation or stamping. Either interpretation sheds light on the planner’s, designer’s, architect’s, vendor’s and commentator’s habit of regarding the consumer/resident as a queer fish, prone to grabbing a cipher for something it thinks it ought to have, including a luxury of excess.

The condemnation of suburbia as environmentally wasteful is, to my mind, merely one more manifestation of ‘uncultured herd’ v. ‘us’. It is entirely true that many suburbs are car-dependent, poorly planned, filled with energy-wasteful housing and too many ugly, litter-spewing McDonald’s outlets. However it is also true, now that the inner-city areas of Australian cities are the conspicuous consumption centres of our society, that while denser nineteenth-century areas of our cities might arguably contain greater potential for environmentally sustainable living, this is really only taking place piecemeal, predicated on individual conscience and motivation. Additionally, food has to be trucked in to the inner areas and sewerage and other waste transported away and treated; the hinterland is marshalled into service of the metropolis; the separation of people and their hidden-away support systems is reinforced. As commentators have noticed—the redoubtable Canberran Professor Patrick Troy among them, for the last two decades or more—greater density brings its own problems, not least issues of groundwater and stormwater run-off but also pressure on other systems. In any case the genuine dichotomy of those who would cajole the majority into higher density, at least at certain (one- or two-person household) stages of their lives, is that as much as they criticise suburbia as wasteful, the current style of home ownership is a core principle of this nation and, naturally, the reason many chose to migrate here. It won’t go away without a serious struggle.

In the 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect with a notable lack of interest in cities or their planning, put forward his conception for future living: Broadacre City. It was, in fact, only a city in the sense that it … well, actually, it wasn’t a city at all, though a number of social commentators in recent years have drawn parallels between Broadacre City and the occasional, accidental and probably temporary ‘edge cities’ at the suburban limit. Wright envisaged a new kind of living on large, agriculturally productive one-acre home sites linked by technology: cars on roads, and at least in one artist’s conception, privately owned helicopters for Dad to get to work. Whereas genuine planners of an earlier era had hoped to combine the garden and the city in interlinked or adjoining open and living spaces, Wright saw the creation of sprawling, seemingly eternal smallholdings as the future lifestyle choice for Americans.

Wright was wrong, and that is not merely a pun. But some aspects of the dispersed mixedness of his vision accidentally have application in the present. The Sydney-based academic Ted Trainer, a visionary and, it has to be said, high-road idealist, has presented a bizarre but marvellous vision for future suburbia—the ‘radical conserver society’—in his 1996 book Towards a Sustainable Economy. Here Trainer, in a scenario that is easily parodied but also for many surely attractive, paints a future suburban society in which roads (notoriously, a third of the land used in constructing cities) are pulled up for co-operatively managed agricultural land; barter and sharing predominate over waged work; and somehow—for many, this might well prove the hardest of all Trainer’s tenets to swallow—a resilient community will develop from shared interest in local environments, harvests, construction and repair work, and the like.

Trainer’s ‘normal workday’ in his conserver society includes hypothetical activities such as:

8 am … Worked in home workshop; fixed chair; helped Mary repair bike. Walked to local library: watched ducks on pond …

11 am … Helped pack nuts in food co-op. Discussed local water catchment plan (we all vote next Saturday) …

5 pm … Bottled plums. Took surplus to neighbourhood workshop. Brought home some surplus carrots Annabel had left there. Browsed through thatching book: we do the goat house roof tomorrow. Chopped wood. Helped Mike shift the bees.

Arrived at from a base of what he sees as economic necessity, but surely also guided by his own idealistic preferences, Trainer’s utopia is a mix between Amish society, a share-house fridge roster and William Morris’s News from Nowhere. The shallow trappings of the consumer society will break down, says Trainer, as people realise it is more interesting and important to share Annabel’s carrots (as I said, it is easy to parody—but that doesn’t make it silly) than it is to, for instance, waste non-renewable fossil fuels on going on overseas holidays or, for that matter, importing exotic out-of-season produce from other parts of the world. Trainer’s radical restructure dismisses as irrelevant the question of pursuit of ‘the arts’ and culture, the placement of which many of us no doubt would find of central importance to his new social vision; these will not change under the new regime, he says. He also announces firmly that there is to be no compromise: this is the sustainable conserver economy, and while there will be plenty of cherry picking, none of it will be made figuratively from the social cure prescription.

Whether anything like Trainer’s conserver society takes root remains to be seen (and entails, of course, you, me and everyone we know heeding his call). But in one respect, Trainer and Patrick Troy are interestingly aligned: both see the potential for suburbia’s reconfiguration as productive agricultural land. For Troy, this is a feature of suburbia that has gone into abeyance since the Second World War. For Trainer, it is a demonstrable fact that a mere portion of the average suburban block could support the adult who lives on it. Flat roofs, nature strips, parkland: all could become useful food-production spaces, and a practical, waste-free version of Wright’s specious Broadacre City, a genuine blend of farm and town, could emerge.

Some local greenthumbs let their growing abilities spill out of their own quarter-acre block, into surrounding reserves and lanes; a walk through most marginal open suburban space will reveal this truth. I blame old people with time on their hands, and too many gardening programs on television. Community building projects often harness the potential of gardens and crops to repair social bonds; in other places this appears to happen spontaneously, perhaps only sporadically, but nevertheless with dedication and no little skill.

VI

I bring up this urban-agriculture solution in part only because, like Troy, Trainer, Stretton and another academic I admire—this one a historian, Perth’s Andrea Gaynor—I find it immensely appealing, just as I enjoyed William Morris’s nineteenth-century tale of a perfect future society of craft-loving provincials. Trainer’s vision seems to me to be a type of sci-fi at least as achievable as the higher density anti-suburban cities so often mooted today. While I would certainly not hate to plant a demon seed of radical societal change in your mind, assuming I am introducing you to Trainer and co., I do not wish to hi-jack the Trainerist line, but merely to observe this: suburbs are not, in their own form and style, wasteful and polluting (and nor are they the sole habitat of the consumerist zombie). They are places of enormous potential. The denigration of the suburbs on environmental grounds is misguided; in many regards, it’s the old culture war on the attack again, dressed up this time in a scientist’s white coat.

I began with a quote from David Walker’s book on the search to establish a national identity in early twentieth-century Australia. The writers and intellectuals Walker discusses were hostile to what they saw as a suburbia of complacent and selfish pettiness, where nothing was vivid or valid. I used it because, as is by this stage probably clear, I don’t really think much has changed in a century. The denigration of suburbia is just another brand of Otherism, nowhere near as bad as racism or sexism (after all, suburbanites can still ‘pass’) but as pervasive. To say this denigration exists is nothing new.

But why does it still need to be said?