Post on 03-Feb-2022
The Figure: Beach, Verandah, Backyard
Mark Tuffy
A thesis submitted for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales
January 2007
Table of Contents
___________________________________________________________
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
1. Australian National and Cultural Identity 6
2. The Beach 9
3. The Verandah 15
4. The Backyard 17
Conclusion 25
Bibliography 27
Abstract
This research undertakes to examine factors that contribute to make Australian
national and cultural identity: shared history, narratives symbols, icons, places and
memories that are united by a single political and geographical boundary. In
particular, it considers the role of place on Australian national and cultural identity.
This is a timely exercise since Australianess is increasingly cited as a factor in federal
government policy development. In order to address such a broad and complex area,
the agenda has been limited to three specific locations: the beach, the verandah and
the backyard. These sites have been selected first because of their prominent iconic
status within the notion of Australianess and, second, because of the underlying
functional parallels that unite them. The present thesis contends that, unlike the
function-specific sites where identity is neutralised by globalised standards of
appearance, behaviour and harsh fluorescent light, the beach, the verandah and the
backyard are ambiguous zones of in between that provide escape, shelter as well as
spiritual sanctuary. The figures engage with the nominated locations in accordance
with the significance, the meanings that they ascribe to that particular site. These
meanings, however, vary greatly from person to person and from demographic to
demographic, hence, the grasp of a universally binding sense of identity becomes a
slippery proposition. National and cultural seity - the way we are and the way we
perceive ourselves as a unified collective - is conditional to a number of factors, the
most enduring and pervasive of these is the sense of place, the landscape, the way we
affect it and, reciprocally, the way it affects us. National and cultural identity is never
static, but remains in a state of perpetual evolution. It must be continually re-assessed
in order to remain abreast of the cultural palimpsest as successive waves and
generations of people from a variety of backgrounds, situations, ideas and forms of
expression inscribe notions of self into their immediate environment.
Introduction
The notion of national identity is complex and in an unremitting state of flux. Factors
shaping it such as history, shared aesthetic sensibility, collective memory and ethnic
diversity shift and mutate in relationship to one another, resulting in continuous re-
interpretation. Consequently, Australian national cultural identity is constantly
challenged and revised, old mythologies supplanted by new. It is unlikely then, that
permanent universal concurrence on precisely what constitutes Australian identity will
ever be achieved. Against a background of the deft but deliberate mobilisation of
national identity for political expediency, recent events such as the Tampa crises and
the Cronulla riots bear witness to the belligerent resistance by the established,
dominant cultural order to the inevitable expansion of the parameters of Australian
national and cultural identity.
This research undertakes to locate identity within place and, by extension, to explore
the dynamic between them. In order to address the ensuing issues, the focus will be
centered on rendering the figure in three fringe zones: areas of in between – loci
parenthesised by pressing temporal and corporeal concerns. Places where culture
meets nature, interior meets exterior and security meets the uncertain. These three
areas, all iconic of Australian existence and all well represented in Australian literature,
visual art and popular culture are, in the order in which this thesis addresses them: the
beach, the verandah and the backyard. These three identified zones are all central to
the concept of Australian identity and share conditions and qualities that are united
and made animate by the presence of people. The aim of this research is to
demonstrate both how these zones function and the way we function within them.
The figure is the catalytic element that both animates and describes the important
social and cultural functions of these sites as ‘loci Australis’. The research focuses on
the fringe zone, the figure in the landscape and the function of place and how these
sites and concepts help to make Australians who they are.
During the course of this undertaking, it became apparent that the need for an
appropriate method of visual articulation, one elaborating on the themes of my
research, was essential. In considering these sites and trying to understand why
Australians engage with them as they do, it emerged that it was the unique quality of
the light bathing the Australian landscape and the associated emotional response to
that light that inform and enhance the engagement with our environment. This
becomes abundantly clear, as Bernard Smith 1 has established, when we consider the
failure of early European painters to adjust their palette to accommodate the
appearance and ambient light of the Great South Land, resulting not in images of what
they saw, but rather, of what they knew: indeterminate, willowy flora rendered in the
drab northern light to which their sensibility was accustomed. In order to deal with the
problems posed by the rendering of light, thereby harnessing the emotional response
that it generates, the understanding and use of tone is paramount.
Within the context of Australian art history, the most prominent and notorious tonal
painter was Scottish-born Max Meldrum (1875-1955). Meldrum’s merits or otherwise
notwithstanding, his method of painting, and that of one of his more recently
celebrated students, Clarice Beckitt, (1887-1935) embrace their respective subject
matter in a manner that tonally expresses certain piquant, idiosyncratic qualities of
Australianess in a manner commensurate with the qualities of the nominated locations
pertinent to this research. Accordingly, the paintings produced during the course of
the research have been, to some extent, modestly informed by the work of both
Meldrum and Beckitt.
1 Smith, B. European Vision and the South Pacific 2
nd Edition, New Haven, London,
Yale University Press, 1985.
1. Australian Cultural Identity
‘This is the land where the unborn souls, strange and unknown,
that will be born in five hundred years, live. A grey, strange
spirit, and the people that are here are not really here: only like
ducks that swim on the surface of a lake. But the country has a
fourth dimension, and the white people float like shadows on the
surface…I say a new country is like a sharp wine in which floats
like a pearl the soul of an incoming people, till this pearl is
melted and dissolved…’
D.H. Lawrence, 1922 1
Given the shifting and restless climate of post-colonial Australia in the first decade of
a new millennium, any attempt at defining a comprehensive national cultural identity
must be considered perilous at best. In light of the manipulation of the perceived
traditional identity, imbued as it is with notions of ‘mateship’ and ‘Australian values’
by the incumbent federal government, it becomes apparent that the notion of national
identity can be both powerful and dangerous. Any construct of a national cultural
identity will inevitably be informed by historical contextualisation and political ‘spin’
and, therefore, subject to a broad aperture of prejudice and interpretation.
Consequently, such constructs must be viewed with a degree of caution if not outright
scepticism. This notwithstanding, a few simple truths abide. Australians generally are
not dissimilar to many other nationalities but, as Andrew Taylor has observed, rather
than similarity, ‘it is difference that constitutes identity’.2 Australia lies in the
southern hemisphere. Unlike the ‘new world’ in the northern hemisphere, Australia’s
seasons were in calendrical opposition to those previously experienced by the
incoming colonists. Being an island, Australian flora and fauna had evolved in
isolation beyond the comprehension of a northern hemisphere sensibility. Australia in
the eighteenth century looked, sounded and smelled different to anything encountered
north of the equator. It is both the different appearance of the Australian landscape
and the way Australians engage with it that identifies and defines it, and by extension,
how it defines and identifies Australians. Seventy six years after the observation by
1 D.H. Lawrence cited by Drew, P. The Coast Dwellers. Penguin, Ringwood, 1994, p.
36-37.
2 Taylor, A. Littoral Erosion: The Changing Shoreline of Australian Culture.
Australian Literary Studies, v.17 no.3 May 1996, p. 284-289.
2
D.H. Lawrence (see above) that Australians had failed to integrate with the land,
writer David Malouf wonders if ‘the paradox of having our lives simultaneously in
two places, two hemispheres, may be just the thing that is most original, most
Australian about us…our uniqueness might lie just here, in the tension between
environment and culture rather than in what we can salvage by insisting either on the
one or the other’. 3
Further to this, it cannot be overlooked that one of the more significant methods that
Australians have deployed in the construction of themselves is to elevate and promote
in their character that which is at variance with the British.4 Almost by definition,
Australianess is anything that is the direct inverse of Britishness.
‘Throughout its white history, Australia has obsessively defined itself in
opposition to Britain; Australia was what Britain was not and even those
attributes we shared –our common traditions- were said to be inflected
differently within an Australian context.’ 5
The historical dimension of Australian cultural identity has been galvanised by major
public events such as the bicentennial celebrations in 1988 and, more recently, the
Sydney Olympics in 2000, both of which were marked by a fervent chorus of
jingoistic nationalism. The bicentennial celebrations were boycotted by indigenous
Australians as a day of mourning. Twelve years later, however, the promotion of the
Sydney Olympics, which focussed global attention on Australia, appropriated
Aboriginal imagery and culture to define and market Australianess to the world.
‘Today, Aboriginal culture is tailored to fit an image of Australia’s cultural
sophistication that can be projected internationally. Its symbolic forms fulfil
certain requirements of the ‘mythology of nation: antiquity, spirituality,
3 Malouf, D. Boyer Lecture Nov 22 1998, http://abc.net.au
4 For more on this topic see James, K. in: Shaping National Identity: Representations
of The Ocean in Some Australian Texts. Papers (Victoria Park, WA), v.10, no.3, Dec
2000, p. 12.
5 Turner, G. Making it National: Nationalism and Australian Popular Culture.
Allen and Unwin, St Leonards. 1994, p. 95.
3
continuity, an expression of myths of creation and origin. Aboriginal art
especially has a strong metaphoric appeal as images of creativity and the
expression of a regional identity,… Aboriginal otherness is viewed as
something strangely exotic, something that swirls in ancient mythologies and
through a timeless attachment to the land. It is considered a positive value for
cultural growth in Australia and has been appropriated by cultural industries
in signifying ‘Australianess’ to the world’. 6
Interestingly, it has been suggested by Graeme Turner that fledgling transplanted
colonial societies, lacking the established culture that most old world countries enjoy
and distracted by the uncertainty of their existence and their future, struggle with the
development of a national identity. Turner further suggests that promotional hype
accompanying the bicentennial celebration was deliberately designed to counteract a
perceived sense of ambivalence towards it by Australians.7 In any case, significant
focus in the popular media was placed on that which identified the unique qualities of
the country. In these and other highly visual campaigns, Australia has been
represented overwhelmingly as a landscape, a nation of place: Uluru, Kakadu, The
Great Barrier Reef, Bondi Beach.
As a nation isolated by a vast expanse of ocean, Australians interpreted and re-
invented the landscape, the coast, investing it with a sense of their own identity - one
apart and independent from their colonial antecedents. Appropriation and interaction
with the landscape became a monumental index of identity. Images of the unique
Australian landscape, especially the outback, the bush and the beach, feature
prominently in the way Australians have come to perceive themselves. Importantly, it
is also the major strategy of how Australia the Brand is marketed internationally.
6 Hogben, P. and Fung, S. Landscape and Culture, Geography and Race: Some Shifts
in Australian Architectural Commentary [online]. Voices (Canberra), v.7 no.2 Winter
1997, p. 5-14.
7 Cited by James, K. Shaping National Identity: Representations of The Ocean in
Some Australian Texts. Papers (Victoria Park, WA), v.10, no.3, Dec 2000, p. 12-22.
4
2. The Beach
Australia is the world’s largest island: an island continent. As such, Australia’s
political and geographical boundaries are, as one, defined by its coastal perimeter.
The length of Australia’s mainland coastline is 35,877 kilometres. If one takes into
account the islands surrounding the mainland, the littoral circumference is 59,736
kilometres, a great proportion of which is comprised of estuaries, mangroves, rocky
outcrops, headlands and sheer cliffs. More than fifty percent of Australia’s coastline is
comprised of sand dunes and beaches. 8
Australians have always had an umbilical relationship with the sea. The first
European settlers in Australia, convicts, were transported to the new colony at Port
Jackson by ship across the sea. For these convicts, the sea represented not only the
sole possible means of escape but also a supremely effective and demoralising barrier
against escape from what was often, but not always, an horrific ordeal of penal
servitude. Prior to the development of road and rail infrastructure, all the major
settlements in Australia were coastal ports and towns and the sole mode of transport
and communication between them was by sea. Moreover, coastal ports were the only
means of physical connection between these scattered Australian settlements and the
outside world. Early white Australians looked to the coastal horizon for ships bearing
news, supplies and resources from the mother country and, not least of all, for comfort
and reassurance against their profound isolation. In its infancy, the colony of New
South Wales was reliant on the outside world for survival. It is not surprising then,
that subsequent generations of Australians came to hold in veneration their forbears
who established a foothold of self-sufficiency in the ‘new’ land. Nor is it entirely
surprising that they have held up the resourcefulness and determination of these early
settlers as a template for the national character.
Traditionally, however, Australia’s metaphorical soul has been located in the bush.
The myth of the bush -the land- and that of those early generations of white
inhabitants, who struggled to come to terms with it, still retains tremendous currency
8 Australian Bureau of Statistics, http://www.abs.gov.au/
5
in the Australian psyche. This is especially so for many older Australians and also for
those many thousands of younger people migrating to the city each year, who have
grown up with and still retain familial connections to rural life. Indeed, the bush and
life on the land has continually been eulogised in popular culture via television
productions such as ‘Bellbird’, ‘Matlock Police’, ‘A Country Practice’ and more
recently, ‘Macleods Daughters’ which, despite featuring contemporary bushwomen
rather than the traditional laconic bushmen, is nevertheless cast in a sepia tone of
khaki nostalgia. However, despite this lingering romance with the bush and its
perceived ideals, the overwhelming majority of Australians reside, as they always
have, in urban and especially suburban situations along the eastern seaboard of the
continent. ‘Long after 1850, Australia was still a country confined along a shallow
south-east boomerang coast. This was where the biggest cities were; where
Australian character was formed. Not in the outback away from the ocean, but on a
long narrow land corridor…a land corridor less than 200 kilometres wide and more
than 2000 kilometres long.’9
Today, the population continues to move steadily coastward in ever increasing
numbers. This trend has recently exacerbated by an aging population of retirees
moving permanently to the family holiday house by the sea. As a result, these small
coastal towns and fishing villages have expanded exponentially, threatening to form
one continuous littoral urban sprawl. For these Australians, the definitive icon of
existence is the beach. During the course of the twentieth century, the Australian
population, attracted by the notion of a relaxed, hedonistic, ‘natural’ lifestyle by the
sea, developed a coastal culture that quickly and easily became representative of the
quintessential Australian existence. This coastal culture produced it’s own variety of
associated artefacts, what Kathryn James has described as ‘signifiers, clustered
around the concept of Australia’. 10
9. Drew, P. The Coast Dwellers. Penguin, Ringwood, 1994, p. 14.
10 James, K. Shaping National Identity: Representations of The Ocean in Some
Australian Texts. Papers (Victoria Park, WA), v.10, no.3, Dec 2000, p. 14.
6
The most powerful of these ‘signifiers of Australia’ is the surf lifesaver. Arguably the
single most dominant icon of the Australian identity, surf lifesavers arrived in the
Australian public consciousness in the period between the first and second world
wars. As early as 1932, the image of a surf lifesaver was used to introduce the newly
completed Sydney Harbour Bridge to the world, thus equating the iconic status of
them both 11
. That the surf club movement became popular in the period between two
major wars is demonstrated by the analogy between the surf lifesaver movement and
the military.
‘Life saving was a highly regulated activity and an emphasis on military like
discipline was considered an essential aspect from the beginnings of the
movement... lifeguards wore distinctive uniforms, ‘patrolled’ beaches, held
‘drill’ and went ‘on parade’. The combative vigourous nature of lifesaving
was stressed in which a war was waged against the unpredictable and
potentially life-threatening ocean. The life saver is clearly the successor to the
Anzac-a man who lays down his life to protect and save not only Australian
women and children, but also a way of life’. 12
This is not, however, a totally conclusive point of view. According to Douglas Booth,
the motives of the surf lifesavers were more selfish than selfless, locating their surf
clubs in a dominant position in order to provide for themselves ready access to the
best part of the beach.
‘…at least once every summer the lifesaving fraternity ‘appropriated the main
surf beach for their carnivals. The local club literally sealed the beach behind a
wall of hessian. Before entering this inner sanctum one had to pay a fee to watch
what was billed as a sporting spectacular but which struck me as nothing more
11
Crombie, I. Body Culture: Max Dupain,Photography and Australian Culture,
1919-1939. Peleus Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 93.
12
Crombie, I. Body Culture: Max Dupain,Photography and Australian Culture,
1919-1939. Peleus Press. Melbourne. 2004, p. 91.
7
than regimented drill interspersed with a few less than exciting beach sports. As
far as I was concerned, lifesavers had seized public space for private benefit’. 13
The prominence of the beach in the national psyche is manifest in the huge quantity of
beach-related merchandise and its presence in public rituals such as Australia Day
festivities, Christmas Day picnics, and New Years Eve parties. More recently,
healthy, clean-cut, ‘normal’ surfers are featured heavily in advertising. The
mainstream embrace of surfing and surfers, considered in previous decades as
irresponsible, long-haired, drug crazed subversives, has resulted in images of surfing
and surfers being used to market everything from fried chicken to mobile phones,
marking the completion of the commodification of beach tribalism. Companies such
as Mambo, Quicksilver and Billabong all market the surfing lifestyle and are all
producing handsome dividends for their respective shareholders on the Australian
stock exchange. Not to mention making multi millionaires of their original proprietors
who once existed on the peripheries of society, sustained by ‘a diet of dog food and
yoghurt’. 14
From the moment Captain Cook stepped onto the sand at Botany Bay, to the landing at
Gallipoli, to the recent race riots at Cronulla, many of Australia’s defining moments
have taken place on the beach. The beach comes with its own particular landforms,
weather patterns, architecture, vistas, smells, sounds, colours, activities, attire and
behavioural protocols. While in some circles, beach going and its attendant signifiers
such as a suntan, a muscular physique or brand name clothing and accessories can act
as assets of cultural capital and, hence, markers of elitism or exclusion15
, more
13
Booth, D. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf. Frank
Cass Publishers, London. 2001, Preface p. xx.
14
Jarrett, P. Tracks circa 1972-74.
15
See McDermott, L.J., Emmison, M.and Lowe, J. Changing Discourses and
Popular Attitudes to Suntanning in: Some Like It Hot: The Beach as a Cultural
Dimension. J.Skinner, K. Gilbert and A. Edwards Editors, Meyer and Meyer Sport
(UK), Oxford 2003, p.104.
8
generally, the accessible, egalitarian 16
quality of the beach renders it as an important
community space, a space that is emblematic of the peaceful amalgamation of many
diverse cultures, a friendly place for sharing and having fun. The beach is synonymous
with leisure and recreation; a place of refuge and escape but, equally, it represents a
boundary of containment. It is precisely this duality, this play between escape and
containment that makes the beach such a compelling site of engagement. The beach is‘
Australia’s true democracy’,17
an integral part of the Australian identity, ‘An interface
at which something both comes into existence and simultaneously ceases to exist’.18
The beach is a zone located between the land/culture and the sea/nature that has some
characteristics of both. Major metropolitan beaches perform both these roles at once,
acting as a medium connecting our spiritual selves to the urban landscape. The beach
is an irresistibly popular site that is loaded with meaning on many different levels,
serving many different needs and functions for a diverse range of people. However,
the collective relationship of Australians with the beach remains one of the single most
outstanding points of departure between them, and the rest of the world.
With specific regard to the studio practice developed during the period of candidature,
a body of paintings that relate to the categories of ‘in betweeness’ was produced. The
beach paintings isolate a figure or figures actively or passively engaged with their
deliberately sought environment (Figs. 1-6). The isolation of these figures is enhanced
by that nebulous aspect of the beach that provides sanctuary. This isolation is further
accentuated, within the paintings, by tight compositional cropping of the subject in a
situation that is otherwise suggestively expansive. The horizon or the absence thereof
is a metaphor for both escape and containment, governing the depth of space the
subject inhabits, locating the viewer and dictating the relationship between. The
16
Waddell contends that ‘although all are welcome, none are more welcome than the
blemish, fat and wrinkle free’. Waddell, T. The Not so Secret Life Of Us at Home and
Away: Cashing in on Beach Culture in: ‘Some Like It Hot: The Beach as a Cultural
Dimension. J. Skinner, K. Gilbert and A. Edwards Editors, Oxford, Meyer and Meyer
Sport (UK), 2003, p.54.
17
Pilger, J. A Secret Country Vintage, London, 1992, p.10.
18
Taylor, A. Littoral Erosion: The Changing Shoreline of Australian Culture.
Australian Literary Studies, v.17 no.3 May 1996, p. 288.
9
figures are perched at the edge, yet at ease. Like Galapagos Iguana, they have adapted
to their environment.
The beach is a transitional zone that is itself divided into successive sub-zones that
beach users use to define themselves. Demographic factors such as age, sexual
preference, marital status play an important role in determining who is to be found at
what beach or, what part of a beach. Whether they seek solitude or excitement, read or
gather worms, their moment is enhanced by their presence in a place of in between. On
a beach, even the most crowded metropolitan beach, each individual or group, sits
alone, rendered immune and seemingly oblivious to the milling, screeching, gawking
throng by defense techniques including strategic towel location and inter personal
physical dynamics involving complex body language19
.
19
For more on this see Booth, D. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun,
Sand and Surf. Frank Cass, London, 2001, p.9.
10
3. The Verandah
The verandah was not an Australian invention. The first known use of the word
‘verandah’ was in 1498 from a Portuguese account of a journey to India by Vasco da
Gama. 20
When the penal colony in New South Wales was established in 1788, British
expansion policy had already seen colonial outposts established in a variety of
locations including Africa, North America and India, locations that demonstrated a
diverse range of climatic conditions. As a consequence of this protracted colonial
activity, the British had at their disposal a wealth of strategic and architectural
experience at adapting to difficult or inhospitable environments. That is to say, that by
the time the British arrived in Australia, they were thoroughly familiar with the
potential uses and benefits of the verandah.
Throughout history the verandah appears in some form in nearly all hot climates.
Australian builders and architects incorporated the verandah into local building design
so effectively and consistently, that it became the basis of one of the only creditable
vernacular architectural styles. 21
The verandah was appropriated and integrated into
Australian life so completely that architect and author Philip Drew claims that ‘The
verandah is a source of Australian identity. More than any other people, Australians
are justified in laying claim to being the people of the verandah’.22
The first identifiable verandah in Australia is that added by the Lieutenant Governor
Major Francis Grose (the officer who oversaw the development of the rum corps
in1793) across the 22 metre frontage of the house built five years earlier by his
predecessor, Robert Ross. 23
Miles Lewis points out that Grose would certainly have
20
Lewis, M. The Australian Verandah. Paper in: Tirra Lirra Vol 7,No 4, 1997, p16-
24.
21
Vulker, J. All About Our Verandahs. Royal Australian Institute of Architects,
Manuka, ACT 1986, p. 11.
22
Drew, P. The Verandah:Embracing Place. Foreword. Angus and Robertson,
Sydney, 1992.
23
Lewis, M., ‘The Australian Verandah’ Paper in Tirra Lirra Vol 7,No 4,1997 p16-
24.
11
encountered the verandah in both America, where he had served in the war of
independence and India.24
It is often said of art and architecture that they reflect the
time and situation in which they were produced.25
In the very early days of the colony
of New South Wales, when disoriented new arrivals sat superficially on the surface of
a strange land, in between the old world and the new, their shelter and accommodation
amounted to little more than tents and the lean-to. These simple, improvised structures
stood as unwitting but effective metaphors for the tenuous and uncertain future of the
colony. The objective of the colonists was, of course, to replicate the old world in a
new location. ‘Life could only be centered by…the cultivation of English ways of doing
things, of English customs and architecture’ 26
Consequently, in a land that abounded
with open space and lush with exotic flora and fauna at that time undreamt of, the
colonists ultimately built tightly packed terraced houses pushed up against each other
in tightly compressed narrow rows.
Over time, as the colony became more established, etching itself into the foreshores of
the harbour, interaction developed between the landscape, the climate and the built
environment. One of the most functional and enduring devices whose presence was
seminally heralded even in the original structures erected by white settlers at this time
was the verandah. ‘This is how empire worked. The veranda was transitional, a
provisional shelter erected during a period of adjustment while colonial society found
its bearings in a new country.’ 27
It took however, several decades and the crossing of
the Blue Mountains before the authentic Australian adaptation of the verandah was
evolved to the point where it became more eloquently integrated with the local
24
Lewis, M. ‘The Australian Verandah’ Paper in Tirra Lirra Vol 7, No 4, 1997, pp.
16-24.
25
Elaborated in Drew, P. The Verandah: Embracing Place. Angus and Robertson,
Sydney 1992, p. 79.
26
Drew, P., The Coast Dwellers Penguin, Ringwood, 1994, p 4.
27
Drew, P. The Coast Dwellers Penguin, Ringwood, 1994, p. 5.
12
landscape; long horizontal structures mirroring the outback horizon and reaching out
to the infinite. 28
A thoroughly utile space, the verandah serves many different functions. A verandah
may be used to define and obviate a front door or entranceway. As an environmental
control, it shields the exterior walls of a building from the sun and provides shade and
coolness. It shelters the entrance of a dwelling from rain. It may be used as auxiliary
accommodation and a place to dine and to sleep on hot summer nights. It acts as an
exterior thoroughfare. The verandah serves as a vantage point for information
gathering: a lookout for storms, bushfires or evildoers. It furnishes a place to greet
unexpected strangers and a safe place for children to play. Importantly, the verandah
acts as a neutral space that is neither outside nor in but like the beach between the land
and sea, is both at once. Less pragmatically, the verandah also acts as an effective and
lyrical allegory for the colonial experience: the house as the established mother
country, the verandah as an attachment, an horizontal afterthought surrounding a
vertical edifice, less solid, less secure than the central core. Further, the verandah is
connected to the landscape, whereas the house ‘stood apart from its setting in noble
isolation’. 29
Like the beach, the verandah is a space of relaxed informality - a place of in between,
a place to spin yarns. Where on the whim of the swell and the tide, the beach straddles
that ambiguous strip between the land and the sea, the verandah bridges that space
between the inside and the outside, between light and dark, confidence and
uncertainty, safety and the unknown. Like the beach, the verandah provides the ability
to be in one place while having access to the possibilities of another. It maroons the
participant in a twilight zone between the measured known and the unimaginable
infinite. It manifests that sense of excitement that is generated by being on the
precipice, on the boundary where the one thing ends and another simultaneously
begins, where we may participate with both or neither. Historian James Broadbent
points out that because it was in fact inaccessible from anywhere except from the
28
Drew, P. The Verandah: Embracing Place. Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1992, p.
79. 29
Drew, P. The Verandah: Embracing Place. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1992,
p.82.
13
main doorways, the early Australian verandah was certainly not an active interface
between the house and the outside world, easing the transition between the two.
Broadbent is clearly bereft of poetical sensibility, although he does concede that, ‘In
any case, during the decade 1830-1840 the verandah achieved first, acceptance, then
desirability.’ 30
Verandahs of some description may be found everywhere we care to look. Consistent
with the elegant metaphor described by Philip Drew of the beach as the landscape
equivalent of the verandah 31
, they are especially prevalent at beachside locations
where their primary function, that of providing shade, is an inexpendable utility and
where they are commonly disguised or incorporated with other utile structures such as
picnic shelters (Fig. 9) and kiosks or on a more elementary level, as beach umbrella or
even a hat.
Early Roman verandahs were built on the interior side of a quadrangular building to
describe the perimeter of a courtyard. They were known as arcades. The arcades in
the verandah paintings feature archways that are alluded to only by their shadow
(Figs. 7-8). Their presence is signified by their absence. It is symptomatic of the
global neighbourhood, that the familiar may be encountered in the farthest corners of
the world. Like both the beach and the backyard, verandahs too may be inscribed with
indelible sets of meanings that are transferred in the minds of immigrants to a new
land. The figures playing cards and chess (see Figs. 7 and 8) are ethnically consistent
with the heritage of the architectural device in which they are depicted. These are men
who exist in a space between an old world culture and a new one. That they choose to
gather and share their collective memories and experience under the familiar arches of
an arcade, a verandah, and that that verandah is itself situated in a concrete/grass zone
of a beachfront, comprehensively encompasses and links the deeply ingrained
meanings implied by the verandah with the numerous and diverse meanings that the
various zones of the beachfront holds for people of different ages, gender and race.
30
Cited in Lewis, M. The Australian Verandah. Paper in: Tirra Lirra Vol 7, No 4,
1997 p 16-24.
31
Drew, P. The Verandah: Embracing Place. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1992, p.
84.
14
4. The Backyard
One of the most entrenched iconic conventions of Australian national identity is the
backyard. Having evolved in isolation from a limited and culturally specific gene
pool, white Australia has, until recently, been characterised by pronounced cultural
homogeneity. This homogeneity has resulted in recurring patterns of use and implied
meanings in the inhabited landscape. Consequently, most backyards throughout the
greater part of the twentieth century replicated structures of functional and social
utility: vegetables were cultivated, wood was chopped and stored in the shed full of
spiders and tools. Other backyard standards included an incinerator fashioned from a
forty-four gallon drum, a lemon tree, a chook run, a corrugated iron water tank and
the dunny. 32
Finally, in keeping with the essential meaning of the word ‘yard’, the
perimeter was delineated by a boundary in the form of a fence. The backyard was an
area where nature met, and had primacy over, culture.
‘As the wood rots on the library floor we keep having to repair and reassemble
what we used to know, what we used to trust’ 33
Changes in the function and appearance of many backyards, particularly those in
urban areas, have been wrought by a number of developments. The introduction of a
reticulated sewer and the abolition of the chook run by most local councils on noise
pollution grounds, have lead to the demise of two former institutions of the backyard
of yesteryear. The rise and rise of the motorcar, which hailed the advent of the
driveway, the carport and the garage, and ultimately lead to many front yards being
permanently converted to parking spaces for the car, thereby reducing entire
streetscapes to nothing more than an unending sequence of garage doors, has also had
the effect of isolating residents from each other and effectively killing community.
Fuelled by the housing boom and television lifestyle programs, magazines and
32
See Ginn, J. An Emotional Connection to Land: An Exploration of the Suburban
Backyard, MA Thesis, RMIT 1988, p11.
33
Hill, B. The War Sonnets
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/stories/2006/1768858.htm
15
newspaper supplements, the role of the backyard today is increasingly one of social
status symbol: of display, a function formerly performed by the front yard.
Entertainment and prestige have replaced utility as the primary function of the
backyard.
Even more profound were the changes wrought by dramatic increases in the general
population combined with a pronounced ongoing migration towards coastal areas,
placing tremendous pressure on the availability of urban space and resulting in the
introduction by many municipal councils of ‘medium density’ housing: the death
knell for many a backyard. Moreover, increased diversification of the ethnic
composition of the population have introduced other sets of memories and inscribed
meanings of self and place into the landscape of the backyard. This shift represents a
broadening in the concept of Australianess and is conveyed in the first instance by
differences in both the appearance of the house and use of the yard that surrounds it as
the new inhabitants begin to erase the identity of the previous occupants in order to,
consciously or otherwise, reflect their own cultural heritage and values. For example,
in many suburban enclaves existing federation bungalows have been renovated to
include Mediterranean features such as Corinthian columns, archways, white render,
concrete and terra cotta tiled yards front and back. ‘People invest places with a host of
social and cultural meanings that reflect their cultural backgrounds, including, of
course a world view shaped by experiences of ethnicity, race, gender and class.
These cultural conversations demonstrate how various forms of belonging are
articulated, how individuals fashion cultural difference and identity into ways of
living and being and how memory and desires and yearnings for belonging are made
manifest and get inscribed, physically and materially, within place’ 34
. The house and
its attendant yardage is a fundamental fabric of the expression of identity and self.
This dilution of the established cultural homogeneity is part of an ongoing, unending
cultural palimpsest. With the integration of diverse cultural communities and the
imprint made by their collective memories, experience and nostalgia, comes a
34
Allon, F. Translated Spaces/Translated identities: The Production of Place,
Culture and Memory in an Australian Suburb. Paper in: Jumping the Queue: New
Talents 2002, Espak, G. T.; Fatnowna, Scott and Woods D. editors.] JAS, Australia's
Public Intellectual Forum, no.72, 2002, p.102.
16
different representation of Australianess that has often met with resistance. The
collective narratives inscribed on the landscape - in the backyard - is, like all history,
subjective; it is written by the dominant and the powerful. When these inscriptions are
challenged or eroded with the passing of time, their ultimate impermanence and
uncertainty exposes the slippery and elusive concept of a fixed, static national
identity.
‘While some people cling to a nostalgia for a stable and secure ‘national
identity’ that represents the ‘way things once were’, the connection between
physical place and cultural identity is no longer so straightforward as it once
may have been, and is unlikely to ever be again’. 35
Like both the beach and the verandah, the backyard is a place of in between. It too
acts as a buffer zone between culture and nature, urban and rural, private and public.
The backyard is a space in which is expressed a relationship with the landscape that is
particular to Australia, a site where the blurring of the new world and the old occurs.
The backyard is a state of mind. For adults it provides a secure shelter from the
external world, a refuge for contemplation, a sacred sanctuary where a sense of self
and place is brought into interaction. For children the backyard is a place of
exploration, not only in and of the backyard itself, but also of the broader Australian
landscape and the associated sense of identity that the landscape imbues. It is in the
backyard where children (and adults) discover a sense of space, the smell of the flora,
the sound of the fauna and the colour of the light. In the backyard, they are exposed to
a sensuous indoctrination of place that shapes forever the way they measure the world
and themselves against it. It is a place where games are invented and played, where
successive pets live, die and are buried, where wave after wave of experience and
memory is laid down and, over time, erased.
‘Such places are created and recreated, in some way transformed or eroded by
time yet still deeply significant as the perceived basis upon which Australian
personhood is constructed. These places are the junction at which personal
35
Allon, F. Translated Spaces/Translated identities:The Production of Place, Culture
and Memory in an Australian Suburb. Paper in: Jumping the Queue: New Talents
2002, Espak, Garbiella T. Fatnowna, and Woods D. editors JAS, Australia's Public
Intellectual Forum, no.72, 2002, p.104.
17
memories and larger myths come together; the memories may be joyful, painful
or, as is the case for most of us in recalling the places of our past, they might
be bittersweet. Yet, in a profound way, these memories evoke a sense of
belonging, of home’. 36
For many city dwelling Australians, the backyard is a ‘sacred site’, a conduit to
facilitate daily spiritual engagement with nature. The backyard has traditionally
represented a small part of the bush transported to the urban backdoor, a symbol of
the enduring legacy of the mythology of the bush and the swagman where are
performed every day rites and rituals that represent an emotional connection to the
landscape. The backyard is a place where the outside and the inside are brought to
compromise. The pop group Australian Crawl observed in song that ‘the backyard
was full of furniture and the house was full of plants’, highlighting the Australian
propensity for blurring the distinction between outside and in. The backyard presents
the opportunity of escape, a ‘Claytons’ holiday at the back door.
‘These contemporary Australian engagements with ‘nature’ and the ‘rural’
perpetuate an Arcadian vision, a longing to recover a personal, national, and
mythic Golden Age, interwoven with a desire for the ‘lost places’, remembered
and imagined, that lie beyond the city’. 37
The Australian national identity has been signified by a number of immediately
recognisable narratives, stereotypes and locations that resonate with the collective
imagination. Benedict Anderson has argued that ‘the nation is an imagined
community a geographically and culturally dispersed set of political coordinates held
together by a shared collection of narratives, identities and symbols. In Australia, the
common and shared repertoire of narratives and tropes through which the Australian
36
Mulcock J. and Toussaint, Y. Memories and Idylls: Urban reflections on Lost
Places and Inner Landscapes. Transformations, No.2, March 2002, p. 4.
http: //www.cqu.edu.au/transformations
37
Mulcock J. and Toussaint, Y. Memories and Idylls: Urban reflections on Lost
Places and Inner Landscapes Transformations, No.2, March 2002, p. 103.
http: //www.cqu.edu.au/transformations
18
nation has imagined itself are recognizable and familiar’ 38
. One of these is the
Australian backyard.
The backyard has always been a reliable barometric indicator of the way Australians
live and perceive themselves. Fiske, Hodge and Turner have identified the backyard
as a location where ‘The openness and friendliness of the Australian people is linked
with the outdoors as the natural location for social interaction’. 39
While the
‘openness and friendliness’ of Australians during the Howard era is certainly
questionable, institutions such as the backyard barbecue remain a prominent social
ritual. Relaxed and informal, the backyard is a metaphor for the perceived Australian
character and as such is one of the foremost sites of effective expression and
perpetuation of the Australian Gothic.
The old world culture of colonial England has been so thoroughly and effectively
transferred to the new world, that generations of Australians have grown up with
inherited ways of seeing, thinking, and behaving, surrounded by stately and elegant
architecture that appears strangely dislocated and discordant with its surroundings, the
phenomenon that Malouf alludes to when he refers to ‘the tension between
environment and culture’ (see above). So dominant and overwhelming was the British
colonial culture that it marginalised everything including the very ground on which it
was built.
In the series of paintings entitled Backyard (Figs. 10-12), the intent is to underline the
old world culture transported to a lush South Pacific location and to reclaim the
backyard as a part thereof. That is, to undertake the reconciliation of identity with
place. In these paintings, the figure represents the new culture, the backyard is the
natural environment. Important to these paintings is the local ambient light and the
implied heat of summer. The figure reclines in a wicker chair, dwelling in a shallow,
tenuous space cropped by a paling fence, and engages, via the backyard, with his
38
Benedict A. in: Allon, F. Translated Spaces/Translated identities: The Production
of Place, Culture and Memory in an Australian Suburb. Paper in: Jumping the Queue:
New Talents 2002, Espak, Garbiella, T. Fatnowna, and Woods D. editors JAS,
Australia's Public Intellectual Forum, no.72, 2002, p103.
39
Fiske, J., Hodge, B. and Turner, G. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular
Culture. Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1987, p. 43.
19
contiguous universe. Although comfortable and well adapted to his environment, his
pedigree nonetheless remains clearly indebted to the British Raj.
20
Conclusion
This object of the present research was to establish the connection between identity
and place and to explore, by means of a body of paintings, the dynamic between them.
Three fringe zones were considered where culture meets nature, interior meets exterior
and security meets the uncertain: the beach, the verandah and the backyard. These
locations were selected for their comparable paradigms within the context of the
ongoing development of the Australian sense of national and cultural identity. More
precisely, the aim of this research was to demonstrate how these zones function and
the way we function within them. While not intended to be a comparative study, the
working hypothesis was that these cited locations resonate with the collective
Australian consciousness in a way that they do not with inhabitants in other countries
and, in doing so, serve as markers of difference for Australia and the way Australians
engage with the landscape.
The three iconic sites examined are generally agreed to be heavily invested with
symbols and signifiers of Australian national and cultural identity. This exegisis has
briefly described some of their shared paradigms. The formula for national identity is
a complex recipe with many ingredients. With the passing of time, generations come
and go, and their prejudice with them, the remaining constant that unifies these sites
of identity, the most essential component that results in the production of an identity
that is not found elsewhere, is the landscape and that relationship Australians have
with it ‘…people overseas think of Australia as a young country and expect it to feel
young… it doesn’t…there is a curious feeling of age and permanence…’. 40
Craig
McGregor here acknowledges the stealthy psychological pervasion of the landscape
on the psyche of the new Australians, those that have arrived since 1788. Bruce
Beresford conveyed a similar allusion to the ethereal, compelling, ambivalent
seductiveness of the landscape in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The Eastern seaboard of Australia is a lush, green and exotic part of the South Pacific,
a location that was appropriated by European colonists who, with incompatible tools
40
McGregor, C. Profile of Australia. Penguin, Sydney, 1974, p. 21.
21
and responses, reinterpreted and reconfigured it after their own likeness,
superimposing upon it a European sensibility that is at times absurdly incongruous.
The two are yet to be seamlessly conflated. It has been noted by journalist John
Pilger, and also, more recently by writer and satirist John Doyle,41
that complete and
full meaning of Australianess will only become fully manifest with the reconciliation
of the indigenous population. Moreover, to extend the analogy, Australia seems
stranded like a beach whale in yet another zone of in between by divisive federal
government policies. Domestically, unresolved issues of reconciliation with the
indigenous people, an unwillingness to divest itself of an anachronistic monarchy and
pursue a republic and, globally, reconciliation of itself and the outside world such as
America and Europe and also, as a western country located at the bottom of the Asian
peninsula, between East and West.
41
Doyle, J., The Songlines Conversations On Big Ideas Radio National 10th
January
2007. http://abc.net.au/rn/bigideas
22
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