CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA 5. Sydney or the Bush? Chris Baker From the Monash University National Centre for Australian Studies course, developed with Open Learning Australia In the fifth week of the course, Chris Baker argues that while Australia is the most urbanized nation on earth, the ‘bush’ has had a great influence on the national psyche. What is it like to live in the great Australian cities today and how are they changing? Why does the bush have such an influence on Australian politics, and are Australians really exiles from the empty forests and plains of the interior? Chris Baker is a lecturer at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. 5.1 Suburbia 5.2 The Great Australian Dream 5.3 Triumph of technology 5.4 The bush 5.5 Urban and bush collide 5.6 Further reading 5.1 Suburbia Sydney or the bush!, all or nothing, as in making a do or die attempt, gambling against the odds, etc. Macquarie Dictionary Book of (Australian) Slang Most Australians live in the great suburban sprawl that surrounds the cities. For the average suburban dweller a quarter acre block of land, a Victa motor mower, a brick veneer bungalow, a Hill’s clothes hoist and the family car have traditionally defined the urban lifestyle. The great expanse of suburbia has resulted in Australian cities covering vast areas making them, in geographic terms, some of the largest cities on earth. Explore the Nation Gallery at the National Museum of Australia. Overall standards of living in the suburbs are high, with per capita car ownership ranking with the United States and the provision of services such as libraries, schools shopping malls, sporting and communication facilities, water and sewerage being provided to most Australians. Australia’s success in this respect is an indicator of our high standard of living. The two prime Australian cities, Melbourne and Sydney, have extensive tracts of suburbia, which can extend for up to 50 kilometres from the downtown centres. The suburbs have been seen as the ideal places in which to raise a young family with most suburban streets in Melbourne and Sydney typically inhabited by a wide range of ethnicities and social groups. Suburban pluralism is now the norm rather than the exception with an extreme spread of ethnic and cultural origins. 5.2 The Great Australian Dream © National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, 2005. All rights reserved. 1 The Australian dream of home ownership is centred on these suburbs where a range of housing is within the financial reach of most Australian families, although two incomes are now considered essential for the purchasing of a reasonable home. The first home buyer is mostly relegated to the distant but expanding outer suburbs. This ideology of home ownership in the great suburbs was strengthened in the post World War II period, largely reflecting the sentiments of Robert Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’ speech of 1942. Historian David Dunstan asserts that there is clear historical evidence that Australians evinced a passion for owning their own plot of earth and pile of bricks and mortar long before this. By the 1950s, thousands of young families had moved to the edge of the cities to the post war suburbs, initially without many of the urban facilities and services which later generations would take for granted. 5.3 Triumph of technology Today many visitors regard the Australian suburb as being an ideal living environment, one which is embedded in the Australian television program Neighbours and which now serves as an expression of the Australian way of life. The rise of the suburb has partly been due to the triumph of the technologies of communication: with the household phone, television, and motor vehicle being supplemented by the rise of the household internet-capable computer and the mobile phone. These technologies have helped the modern Australian suburban lifestyle although it can be argued that they have also diminished the sense of suburban remoteness and peacefulness, which in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave the suburb its great attraction. Some critics have sneered that the suburbs were conformist and monotonous but Australians have tended to vote with their feet and still flock to the far flung outer suburbs with their freeways, drive in supermarkets and multiplex cinema complexes. Australia, as the noted social critic Donald Horne observed, had become the ‘first suburban nation’. Hugh Stretton has also defined and defended the Australian suburb against the critics by espousing its virtues with ready access ‘ to work and city with private, adaptable self expressive living at home.’ Read ABC news story, ‘suburbia on steroids’. Since the 1990s there has been significant change in the Australian urban environment. Historian Graeme Davison has noted there is now both consolidation as well as sprawl. The phenomenon of rich outer suburb with poor inner suburb, prevalent in the post war years, has been replaced with rich outer suburbs and gentrified inner areas. Australian cities have tended to produce few ghettos with most social and ethnic groups mixing amicably in the suburban landscape. © National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, 2005. All rights reserved. 2 5.4 The Bush The bush is the term used to describe rural Australia, especially those parts which are remotely located or not closely settled. The bush is said to form the national character and ethos of Australians and embodies such virtues as mateship, stoicism, egalitarianism and a healthy disrespect for authority. More recently it has been associated with xenophobia, anti globalisation and racist attitudes, in contrast with the views of more cosmopolitan Australian urban dwellers. The bush has been the foundation of a distinctive Australian culture, especially as expressed in Australian literature, painting and popular music. Much as the frontier has shaped American self-perceptions so the Australian bush has created the Australian character. Some early expression of this are Dad and Dave, and the characters of Henry Lawson such as the Joe Wilson stories. Early Anglo Australian artist Tom Roberts painted a number of iconic works including The Shearing of the Rams and The Breakaway, which depict aspects of bush life in the late 19th century picking up on the romantic idealisation of rural Australia that accompanied the depression of the 1890s. The bush was also the spiritual home of The Bulletin, Australia’s first national literary magazine which not only described life in the bush but which also published bush writers. Australian myths and legends have also emanated from the bush. The bushranger Ned Kelly is perhaps the most famous of the Australian legends. Born in rural Victoria, Kelly was most famous for his last stand at the township of Glenrowan, in the heart of the Victorian bush. His legend lives on with many Australians seeing Ned as the embodiment of the rebellious anti authoritarianism associated with bush life. Ned’s bushmanship was legendary, as the Kelly gang roamed south eastern Australia living off the land before the famed last stand at Glenrowan in 1880. Explore the State Library of Victoria’s Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly exhibition. 5.5 Urban and bush collide The Australian bush has exercised a considerable influence on how outsiders see Australia and Australians, a perception which has been reinforced by the media and especially film which has drawn from the many colourful bush dwelling characters which populate Australian literature. Unlike multicultural urban Australia, bush people tend to be seen as mainly Anglo-Australians with a number of Indigenous communities scattered across the land. An aspect of the bush its sense of isolation, not only from the cities but also from the world outside, although with the emergence of cheap communications technologies and air travel this sense of isolation has diminished. Nevertheless the bush is seen as being disadvantaged compared with the cities, both in an economic and social sense. Much of the recent national political debate has focussed on the issue of addressing this disadvantage. Read more about Australia’s rural and regional affairs. Today, the bush is in transition: with its economy moving away from a reliance on wool, wheat and minerals towards a more diversified base. Many bush regions are active in seeking a tourist market and many new enterprises have sprung up to service the emerging markets of Asia. The bush is also the site of negotiations concerning native title claims, with numerous Aboriginal communities seeking to re-establish their traditional © National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, 2005. All rights reserved. 3 land rights and lifestyles. Many of these claims are in the outback regions of Australia, meaning areas which are distantly remote from the centres of population. The impact of distance on the Australian psyche has been explored by a number of authors, most notably Geoffrey Blainey in his Tyranny of Distance. Listen to Geoffrey Blainey’s views in the ‘The Great Divide’ ABC Boyer Lecture, 2001, on the divide between urban and rural life in Australia. 5.6 Further reading Suburbia ‘Rewriting Suburbia, cultural difference and the contested limits of nation’ by Emily Bullock, media-culture.org.au online journal http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.html Suburbia conference, 2002 National Trust of Australia (NSW) http://www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au/suburbia2.html Rural and regional issues Bush Telegraph and ABC