Creative suburbs? How women,design and technology renew Australian suburbs

What is creativity?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1976) defines ‘create’ as to ‘Bring into existence, give rise to; originate’, noting that ‘creation’ is a ‘product of human (esp. designer’s or actor’s) intelligence, esp. of imaginative thought’. ‘Creative’ is about being ‘inventive, imaginative; showing imagination as well as routine skill’, while the ‘creator’ is one who creates, thereby invoking both God and human beings. So it is when examining the etymology of the term: derived from the Latin creó to create, make; in the Christian period creatio meant God’s act of creation, ex nihilo creation from nothing. Creatio also meant begetting of children, creating, producing (see MyEtymology.com). Creativity has subsequently been attributed to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, women’s reproduction and to chance. Most recently, the term has become associated with the ‘Creative Industries’: those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property (CITF, 2001). There is also a useful distinction to be made between creativity and innovation, with creativity associated with producing new ideas, approaches or actions, and innovation both generating and applying such creative ideas.

The point of this linguistic excursion is not only to highlight the history and variability of the term ‘creativity’, but also to draw out its most cogent but also sedimented meanings. Thus today ‘creativity’: relates to God’s creation, the derivation of something from nothing; can suggest women’s reproductive labour in bearing and rearing children; involves the application of human imagination to create something new; and, since the 1980s, is connected to a symbolic economy of intellectual property valuation, employment and capital accumulation.

The next section of this article will argue that the image of Australian suburbs as lacking in all or some of these dimensions was shaped by the politics of those making these judgements and by an overly narrow use of the term ‘creativity’.

Demonizing the suburb

In charting the history of ‘suburbia’ as a term in Australia, Tim Rowse isolates the early 20th century as the time when intellectuals both extolled the cosmopolitanism of the city and began the negative portrayal of the suburbs, with their residents portrayed as narrow, self-satisfied, materialistic and parochial (1978: 5). Rowse argues that the historian Vance Palmer (1963), along with the dramatist Louis Esson (1973) and academics Frederic Eggleston (1932) and W.K. Hancock (1930), saw their hopes for an Australian socialist revolution in the 1920s thwarted by ‘villadom’ – the quest for a stifling materialism in the suburban house and garden. Louis Esson, for example, saw the possibilities of a genuinely Australian pastoral radicalism destroyed by the glib materialism and stifling conformism of suburban life (Gilbert, 1988). The suburbs were thereby identified with political conservatism as well as with a narrow, self-serving materialism by radical intellectuals of the early 20th century. It was a judgement driven by a socialist politics which had limited appeal to those who had chosen individual land ownership over state-sponsored collectivism.

These judgements by the political left were expanded in the interwar and post-war years to embrace a number of other suburban failings; in particular poor aesthetics, social conformity and mediocrity. Thus the architect Robin Boyd joined the satirist Barry Humphries and novelists George Johnston and Glen Tomasetti in seeing the suburbs as the repositories of bad taste, limited horizons, banality and sameness. In The Australian Ugliness (1960) – one of the most influential tirades – Robin Boyd railed against the mindless featurism of 1950s suburban dwellers who replaced Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian style with brick veneer and kitsch decorations, subordinating the whole to a random and tasteless collection of exaggerated parts. Before this indictment, Boyd wrote in 1947 on ‘Victorian modernism’ and, as an architect, utilized elements drawn from Frank Lloyd Wright to create inspired outer suburban house designs (Boyd, 1947). Boyd also chaired the Small Homes Service, from 1947 to 1954, offering low-cost, if standardized architecturally designed houses to post-war builders. But as time went on, Boyd was passed over for larger architectural commissions. Despite his role in creating suburban uniformity, he turned to critical writing and ultimately escaped off shore when his call for a unique Australian style met with silence (Freeland, 1968; Serle, 1987). Like the socialist critics who preceded him, Boyd had both genuine concerns for suburban house forms but also a professional interest in their transformation and vilification.

George Johnston in My Brother Jack (1964) along with Glen Tomasetti in Thoroughly Decent People (1976) satirize the suburban preoccupation with manicured gardens, domestic harmony and lawns. Such critical and ironic representation moved from literature into the new medium of television via Barry Humphries (1990), who mercilessly lampooned the conformity and banality of suburban life in Melbourne. For literary historian Robin Gerster:

the restriction of suburbia’s representations to satire and ridicule and the compensatory glamorisation of the inner city … have resulted in many distortions of suburban life … false claims about its uniformity … and have had the effect of disenfranchising its constituency (most Australians). (Gerster, 1990, quoted in Devlin-Glass, 1994: 167)

Such depictions of suburban life also trivialized the work and worlds of the women who occupied this space. For suburban life was quintessentially feminine in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Those intellectuals lampooning it not only privileged inner city living but also the worlds of men – paid work, the public arena and production – over the reproductive sphere of women. But, as the earlier discussion noted, such work can indeed be regarded as creative. The fact that it was not regarded in this way says as much about the patriarchal economies of the critics as it does about the urban form and lives they were satirizing.

These negative views of the suburbs have long been seen as pervasive in Australian intellectual circles. However, the impact such representations had on the planning and form of Australian cities was minimal, as consecutive conservative governments over the 1920s through to the 1960s courted the ‘Forgotten people’ of the suburbs and actively supported ongoing suburbanization (Hamnett and Freestone, 2000). Through taxation and wage regulation, financial support for home ownership, and by allowing land speculation and laying out radial public transport routes, state and federal governments created the environment in which the ownership of suburban homes could and did flourish (Davison, 1994; Greig, 1995; Kemeny, 1983).

The anti-suburban discourse was countered to some extent by writers extolling the virtues of a house in its own garden – such as Hugh Stretton (1970), Craig McGregor (1968) and Donald Horne (1971). Despite these alternative voices, however, it is those who see problems behind every back fence who are both more numerous and more vocal in intellectual and, most recently, in political circles. And it is more recent critics of the suburbs – dating from the 1970s – who altered the foundation of the debate: away from artistic representations involving moral, aesthetic and political judgements and towards social, economic and environmental facts. Now presented as social science, these new representations had very real impacts on the funding, design, appraisal and planning of contemporary Australian cities. While apparently more anchored in scientific research, such judgements still render the suburbs as non-creative and therefore ignore the innovation and creativity which is present there.

The shift began in the 1960s and 1970s and was supported by an array of systematic studies on the problems of suburban life. Thus there were damning sociological surveys of newly planned suburbs – such as Bryson and Thompson’s An Australian Newtown (1972) – and a welter of other studies that confirmed the Australian suburb as poorly served by physical and social infrastructure (Kemeny, 1981), the site of women’s isolation (Game and Pringle, 1979; Summers, 1975; Tennyson, 1978), teenage criminality, and a major contributor to environmental degradation (Newman and Kenworthy 1989). Such studies meant that the critique of suburbia moved from artistic circles to the political agenda and thence into planning practice. It was therefore the experience of, as well as studies of, poor servicing, social isolation, the environmental costs of sprawl and frustration borne of endless traffic that underpinned new Prime Minister (PM) Whitlam’s city-focused Department of Urban and Regional Development, PM Hawke’s ‘Better Cities’ and more recent policies to impose metropolitan growth boundaries, foster urban consolidation and suburbanize employment.

Overall though, these representations of Australian suburbs betray an ongoing hostility to the suburbs and especially to the creative work of women, artists and architects in them. Further, as the next sections will argue, such views are no longer relevant to the contemporary suburb.

Twentieth-century creative suburbs

The early 20th century was a time of rapid suburbanization in Australia but also when the role of women within its domestic economy came under intense scrutiny. As historians Jill Matthews (1984) and Kareen Reiger (1985) have documented, this was when the ‘family wage’ codified a man’s obligation to occupy the public sphere of paid work, earning sufficient wages to support his wife and children (in the 1907 Harvester Judgment), but also when the ‘servant problem’ – the decline of paid domestic work by women – accelerated innovation in domestic appliances, spurred the spread of ‘Domestic Science’ and stimulated the emergence of the housewife. Thus the 19th-century class-divided domestic economy – which relied on the paid work of servants – was progressively replaced by market-provided goods and services, and a devaluing of women’s work in the home as it was subjected to scientific expert advice and new domestic technologies. Various enquiries into this realm acknowledged that reproductive labour within the domestic sphere was indeed creative, in the sense that it involved both the production and care of children but also massive amounts of highly skilled labour. The fact that it was unpaid did not mean it was beyond scrutiny or regulation, only that it was rendered invisible within the formal economy. As one woman told the 1920 Basic Wage Commission:

Modern homes, theoretically should be easier to look after than old-fashioned ones. I have lived in both and the modern home with its good lighting, light paintwork, polished floors, large windows, etc., shows every fleck of dust, every fingermark and calls for a high degree of house-cleaning. Modern cooking … is more varied and the more one knows of calories and vitamins the more the menu has to be studied. Modern clothing although less than our parents thought necessary, is made more often. All these things make living on a higher standard (of living) harder, not easier, the continual mending and making, cooking and cleaning that has to be done nowadays limits a woman’s capacities in caring for a family … according to present standards of cleanliness and comfort. (quoted in Reiger, 1985: 73)

The ‘modern’ housewife was therefore expected to cook creatively, manage the household finances, rear perfect children, build the local community, make and repair clothes, oversee the vegetable garden and fruit trees, and convert their produce into goods for home consumption and neighbourhood exchange, clean and wash, while also being attractive and sexually available for her husband. I would argue that at least some of this labour was highly creative – in at least two senses of the term: in begetting children and in the management of the household domestic economy, which required inventive labour in relation to food production and preparation as well as the design, making and repair of clothing. Innovation and management skill was also evinced in other forms of productive work – taking in boarders, home businesses and supervising servants – but for the sake of this argument, I wish to emphasize the creativity involved in being a housewife at this time: it was immense, often invisible (if subjected to professional regulation), undervalued and roundly satirized within the Australian patriarchal cultural economy (see earlier discussion).

In addition to women’s creative work in the suburbs, there were other more widely acknowledged examples of creative endeavours occurring in such spaces. One of the more famous was the Heide artist community in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne (Burke, 2004; Palmer, 1989), a place of creative retreat and extraordinary output by painters such as Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. There are also examples of individual architects designing suburban masterpieces, houses still extolled for their innovation in, for example, adapting European Art Nouveau to suburban Australia (Desbrowe-Annear), developing the American bungalow, in utilizing the Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright (for example, Walter Burley Griffin’s Castlecrag houses) and in applying Modernism to the suburban home (Harry Seidler, Roy Grounds, Kevin Borland) (Freeland, 1968; Johnson, 1980).

Thus, for example, Harry Seidler was Vienna-born but educated in England and Canada before studying at Harvard under Walter Gropius and Marcel Bruer. Arriving in Sydney in 1947, he proceeded to design a house for his parents in suburban Turramurra. On a sloping, rocky site he supported a flat roofed white box on thin pipe columns and a series of sandstone block walls. As Seidler noted in a 1998 ABC interview:

The ample site and desire for maximum interior spatial interplay resulted in a hollowed out square plan exposed on all sides. From the rectangular structure ‘tentacles’ reach out and anchor it into the surrounding land, opening the living space and sheltered terrace to the preferred northern orientation and the valley below. (Seidler, 1998)

Inside, the plan was open, with living and eating areas all one continuous space divided by function and open to a central light well and hand-painted mural. It was, in the words of architectural historian John Freeland, ‘a hugely sophisticated [example] of the International Style, quite different from anything then existing in Australia’ (1968: 273). It was to revolutionize not only domestic but also commercial architecture, as the International Style arrived in Australia via the suburban home!

Such examples are indeed important and trouble the characterization of Australian suburbs as design wastelands. But, it could be argued, they are isolated cases – the exemplary and often idiosyncratic efforts of elite architects. Their impact, however, spread via the mass-produced, well-designed houses of the Project Builders of the 1960s and 1970s. It was companies such as Pettit and Sevitt, Merchant Builders, A.V. Jennings, Lend Lease, Civil and Civic, Habitat and Program Industries that took architecture from the wealthy few to the house-buying suburban masses (Garden, 1995; Gartner, 1995).

For Charles Pickett, curator of the Project Home archive at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, this industry was founded on the struggle to create pleasing and functional homes from limited budgets, space and materials, and to meet the aesthetic criticisms of suburbia noted earlier. During the 1950s and 1960s some of Australia’s best-known architects – including Robin Boyd, Harry Seidler and Ken Woolley – applied their talents to small project homes. Thus in 1965 Lend Lease commissioned Boyd to design six brick veneer houses, built as a display village. Merchant Builders was set up by Fawkner, Gunn and Yencken and they were particularly interested in native planting, employing Ellis Stone – a collaborator and student of the great Edna Walling – to landscape the gardens surrounding their homes. Their first display site, opened in 1965, had three designs built amongst mature trees, with gardens designed by Stone (Gartner, 1995). Here, then, was a set of original ideas transforming the housing market and neighbourhood character of suburban Australia: display villages of quality, architect-designed modern homes, the undergrounding of unsightly services and fine landscaping integrated into overall design. Such ideas were no longer one-offs, but through the project builder, became widely disseminated.

Thus in 1958 Ken Woolley and Michael Dysart won a national competition for the design of a low-cost house, later built at an exhibition village at Cherrybrook, Sydney. In 1961 they designed three exhibition homes for Lend Lease and then the Lowline and the Split Level for Pettit and Sevitt. The Lowline was the company’s first and most popular house. Displayed at Sydney’s North Rocks in 1963, it was widely replicated via the national work of the company. Founded in 1962, Pettit and Sevitt, like the other project builders, applied factory principles to house construction. By standardizing designs they reduced waste, by assembling portions of the house off site, they could build faster on site and because they purchased materials in bulk, they could construct cheaper houses (Sheehan, n.d.). Thus between 1961 and 1977 Pettitt and Sevitt produced 400 houses per annum, 3500 in total, spreading what became known as the Sydney School across the country. Such actions represented a meeting of Modernist design with contemporary building industry practice, making the dwellings affordable as well as stylish. But the results were not entirely uniform. Each client was interviewed and their sites inspected. As Ken Woolley noted of his time with Merchant Builders: ‘The architect can and does meet hundreds of purchasers and adapt his designs to their needs and so be influenced in his new designs’ (Woolley in Pickett, n.d.). Efforts to keep costs down meant working in conventional construction, the vernacular of the day, while the volume of production gave leverage over suppliers who then became more willing to make specials into standards, to push the vernacular forward (Woolley quoted by Pickett).

Architectural quality thereby meshed with individual client needs and mass production to create innovative, low-cost designs. Pettit and Sevitt and many other project builders did not survive the 1960s financial downturn, rising overheads, more competition and the shift in the tastes of their usual clients from the suburbs to the newly gentrifying inner areas of Australian cities; but their existence, approach and output further challenge the judgement that 20th-century suburbs were design wastelands.

Contemporary creativity in suburban Australia

Creativity – broadly defined – can therefore be seen on a number of suburban fronts: in women’s domestic labour in the early 20th century, with artist’s colonies and with innovative elite architects but also mass project builders later in the century. More recently, there has been the emergence of a creative economy within the Australian suburbs (see Collis et al., 2010; Gibson and Brennan-Horley, 2006; Gibson et al., 2002). But here I want to focus on some other manifestations of applied creativity in the contemporary suburbs – the mobilization of new technologies for enhancing social connectivity at Caroline Springs and ecologically sensitive design to minimize their environmental impact at Aurora, both in Melbourne. Such examples further trouble any characterization of the suburb as an environmental disaster zone bereft of design innovation.

Conclusion

This article has challenged the characterization of the Australian suburb as an aesthetic, design, social and environmental desert. Situating the various critics of suburbia in their appropriate discursive context was a prelude to directly questioning their characterization of the suburbs, first through a broader conception of ‘creativity’ and then through concrete examples of creativity and innovation. Thus, despite the depiction of the early 20th-century suburb as a place of profound conservatism, other investigations point to it as a site of women’s creative labour, especially within the home-based domestic economy of child rearing, home gardening and self-sufficient agricultural production. The lampooning of the post-war suburb as the place of smug, self-centred materialism and design banality was further shown to ignore not only the presence of artist’s colonies but, more importantly, the innovative work of Modernist architects, made available to the wider public through project builders. Finally, the examples of Caroline Springs and Aurora illustrate the ways in which new communications technologies and environmentally sustainable design have produced suburbs which clearly counter their characterization as social and environmental wastelands. The Australian suburb over the last century, then, has been a major site of both creativity and innovation.