editorial | Nathan Hollier

THE NEW AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS

FOR ROBYN BOYD, writing in 1960, Australian design and architecture were characterised by an “ugliness” arising primarily from the relative absence of any clear social plan for aesthetic development. The Australian experience, what might be called the overall ‘quality of life’ of people within the nation, was therefore, in Boyd’s view, sadly diminished. “Boyd’s overall critique”, states Natasha Cica in her Overland lecture, published in this issue, “exposed a number of important truths”. The “first” and perhaps most significant of these is “that democracy has an aesthetic aspect, and design has a democratic dimension”. Here Cica draws attention to the fact that the art of a particular society – and more broadly the aesthetic experience within that society – always reflects the particular structure of the society and the means by which it organises itself. The aesthetic experience within a profoundly undemocratic society is likely to be unfulfilling, at least for the majority, because the guiding aesthetic principles will be individually, rather than socially conceived.

Cica describes a new Australian ugliness, most evident in “the McMansionland of newer outer suburbia”, in which questions of cultural and aesthetic value tend to be reduced to market value: what matters is newness, bigness, expensiveness. This is a place of high consumption, high debt, relatively few social services and networks, and of individualistic aspiration. The basic features of the new Australian ugliness represent the fulfilment of Boyd’s fears regarding the social and cultural effects of a radically unplanned, individualist society. Put another way, Cica is describing the prevalence of “private affluence and public squalor”.

This phrase was made famous by John Kenneth Galbraith in his The Affluent Society (1958), a study of Western modernity contemporaneous with, though much more widely read and influential than Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness. Galbraith argued that in modern society the achievement of an ideal quality of life for any person is not compatible with unrestricted freedom for every person. As he explained, a family might drive its “mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked car” through run-down cities to picnic beside a polluted stream “and go on to spend the night in a park which is a menace to public health and morals”, where amid “the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings”. For Galbraith, as for Boyd, unrestricted individual freedom necessarily entails social deprivation, and so also cultural degradation.

The new, ugly, aspirational or radically individualist suburbia, the place where the reality of private affluence and public squalor is most evident, is also, Cica notes, the place where elections tend to get decided, the would-be heartland of both sides of politics. It is, for this reason, somewhat culturally sacrosanct. As Cica relates, to criticise this social and cultural reality is to be instantly branded ‘elitist’ by certain public figures and commentators, especially those on the Murdoch payroll.

Galbraith died on 29 April 2006. When the obituaries appeared I was reminded of the time when an ABC Radio National program host asserted, in order to bring his panellists and the audience back to reality, that “Galbraith is dead”. This was at the 2002 ‘It’s Time Again’ conference at Old Parliament House in Canberra, held to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government, a government strongly influenced by Galbraith’s Keynesian ideas. The mistake was understandable: Galbraith was at the time 94. But I wondered if the host’s perception was also influenced by the long-running, broad-based conservative campaign to suggest that the progressive, democratic, interventionist model of public policy, advanced by Galbraith and Whitlam, was a thing of the past.

In spite of this, Cica reveals a nostalgic enthusiasm for a social model in which rampant individualism does not rule supreme, an interest in an alternative social aesthetic, and a sceptical attitude towards the claims of the presently powerful, that this is as good as it gets: “Ah, modernism. Internationalism, multilateralism. The United Nations. Truth. The public – schools, hospitals, broadcasting, service, space, sector, interest. Peace, beauty and justice for all – not just those who can pay a privatised provider. Quaint, naïve ideas driving unworkable, failed structures – no?”

In the Australian context the alternative form of society Cica is describing ended, dramatically and bitterly, with the dismissal of the Whitlam government. As Prime Minister John Howard stated recently, the breakdown of the Keynesian, welfare-state social model, in the mid-1970s, constitutes “the great intellectual turning point of our lifetimes”. Yet even Howard would probably admit that this was not purely an intellectual turning point. It was, rather, part of an ongoing political struggle. As Raewyn Connell points out in her comprehensive account of the political nature of contemporary Australian society, there has never been a popular demand for neoliberal public policy. Rather, she argues: “A shift in capitalist strategy began in the major world centres of capitalism, and became decisive in the decade 1975–1985. Its main elements were accelerated internationalisation of the economy . . . a shift towards market discipline of the labour force rather than social compromise . . . and an ideological offensive against the welfare state and economic regulation”. “This”, she summarises, “is neoliberalism”.

Interestingly, there are signs that this ‘great intellectual turning point’ may not be as final as its apologists and boosters frequently insist. Reports suggest for example that a majority of Australians would rather have had increased spending on social services and other means of building their quality of life than on the individual tax cuts offered by Treasurer Costello in the last federal budget. The advertising firm Grey Worldwide found in its recent Eye on Australia report, based on in-depth interviews with six-hundred adults, that more than half of their respondents believed their quality of life had declined over the past two decades, and that an increasing number of Australians believe their lives are becoming less “fun”. The report also found, not unrelatedly, a growing distrust of big business.

In different ways, Katherine Wilson, Mark Dober, Ian Syson and Patrick Wolfe shed light, in this issue, on the contemporary means by which Australian culture is now being made subject to the ugly desires of big business, and some possible modes of resistance.

Click here to order

183 Contents

editorial

reportage | KATHERINE WILSON

literature | IAN SYSON

review | JEFF SPARROW

fiction | LAURIE CLANCY

profile | HAZEL LANG

poem | KATHERINE GALLAGHER

poem | BRENDAN McCALLUM