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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