The Australian Ugliness

211 Pages·2010·1.88 MB·English

by  Robin Boyd

THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS
PRAISE FOR ROBIN BOYD
AND THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS
‘Effortlessly readable, sharply observant and witty, The Australian Ugliness is
an Australian classic. Robin Boyd’s prophetic, timeless work shows his
distinctive gifts as a public intellectual, a creative thinker, an architect with a
sense of history and a writer of rare talent.’ BRENDA NIALL
‘Robin Boyd was a social historian when political history was the vogue in
Australia. He was a long way ahead of his time. The natural and built
environments were not yet issues of common concern, but they were already his
special concern. Whatever he did had the mark of originality and flair.’
GEOFFREY BLAINEY
‘The Australian Ugliness remains an indispensible account of the built
environment on the biggest island. More than that, it is a passionate and
committed study of national character from which there is still much to be
learned.’ ALAN SAUNDERS
‘Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness is a classic of cultural criticism. Judging
by the unstoppable spread of treeless, wooden-fenced houses in outlying suburbs
and bad buildings in prominent places in Australian cities, it’s a voice that needs
urgently to be heard again.’ PATRICK McCAUGHEY
‘Incisive wit…Boyd portrays most eloquently Australian suburbia… the
merciless bulldozing of trees to turn farmland around our cities into the endless,
low-density sprawl of individual house subdivisions.’ HARRY SEIDLER
‘The Australian Ugliness remains a most important book. As our major
metropolises near five million population, the suburban sprawl with
unimaginative architecture creeps on relentlessly and green wedges shrink. Bold
new ideas are needed and Robin Boyd continues to be an inspiration.’ SIR
GUSTAV NOSSAL
‘Robin Boyd’s book clarified for all of us that Australian ugliness—how we
would bludgeon the land into fertility, cut forests so that power lines could go
through, so that cars could take precedence over everything… Conservatism
reigned supreme; it had to be like that regardless of whether it was logical,
whether it was appropriate, whether it responded to climatic variations…The
buildings were the same from Melbourne to Darwin, and they still are the same.’
buildings were the same from Melbourne to Darwin, and they still are the same.’
GLENN MURCUTT
‘Fifty years on, Robin Boyd’s brilliant analysis of the enduring, yet
underappreciated, place of the arts and creativity in Australia rings true. He
suggests there is “something about the Australian sun and meaty diet that
produces a high proportion of talented people”. The continuing international
success of our artists, actors and architects proves this. But, as Boyd argued, we
need to value creativity more: it is an essential part of the spirit of Australia.’
JULIANNE SCHULTZ
‘Robin Boyd wrote wittily of the post-war Australian suburbia that Barry
Humphries knew as a child, and which formed the basis of much of Humphries’
satire and, in turn, the satire of Kath & Kim. Boyd’s waspish observations about
the “material triumph and aesthetic calamity” of the suburbs apply more than
ever today.’ SIMON CATERSON
‘Remains remarkable…for Boyd, architecture means more than the fabrication
of shelters: it is the art that most explicitly measures humanity’s relationship to
nature…His book is less a work of architectural criticism than a scathing literary
satire; it belongs in a tradition inaugurated in the eighteenth century by Pope and
Swift, who also scourged ugliness and considered it a moral flaw as well as an
aesthetic failing.’ PETER CONRAD
‘As interesting and amusing and untechnical as a novel.’ SIR JOHN
BETJEMAN
‘Lucid, passionate and witty.’ GEOFFREY SERLE
ROBIN BOYD, 1970.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK STRIZIC.
ROBIN BOYD (1919–71) is arguably Australia’s most influential architect.
An idealist who believed that good design would improve the quality of people’s
lives, a tireless public educator and outspoken social commentator, he designed
more than two hundred buildings and wrote such classics as Australia’s Home.
The Australian Ugliness was first published in 1960.
CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS is the author of four novels: Loaded (made into the film
Head On), The Jesus Man, Dead Europe and the award-winning bestseller The
Slap, which is being made into a series by the ABC.
JOHN DENTON is a Director of Denton Corker Marshall, a proudly Australian
international architecture and urban design practice with offices in Melbourne,
London and Jakarta. PHILIP GOAD is Professor and Chair of Architecture, and
Director of the Melbourne School of Design, at the University of Melbourne.
GEOFFREY LONDON is the Professor of Architecture at the University of
Western Australia and the Victorian Government Architect, having previously
been the Western Australian Government Architect.
THE
AUSTRALIAN
UGLINESS
ROBIN BOYD
FOREWORD BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
AFTERWORD BY JOHN DENTON,
PHILIP GOAD & GEOFFREY LONDON
DRAWINGS BY ROBIN BOYD
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from
wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Robin Boyd
Foundation 2010
Foreword copyright © Christos Tsiolkas 2010
Afterword copyright © John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the
copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 1960 by F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne; second edition, 1961. Published in 1963 by Penguin
Books; revised edition, 1968; second revised edition, 1980. This fiftieth-anniversary edition published in
2010 by The Text Publishing Company.
Cover and text design by W. H. Chong
Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Boyd, Robin, 1919-1971.
The Australian ugliness / Robin Boyd.
ISBN 9781921656224
Architecture--Australia. Architecture and society--Australia.
National characteristics, Australian.
720.994
‘It is taken for granted that Australia is ugly…’
ANTHONY TROLLOPE