Harvest of the Suburbs

HARVEST OF THE SUBURBS AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF GROWING FOOD IN AUSTRALIAN CITIES Andrea Gaynor HARVEST OF THE SUBURBS AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF GROWING FOOD IN AUSTRALIAN CITIES Andrea Gaynor CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii 1 Into the suburbs... 1 2 Fecund and fetid 1880-1918 19 3 ‘His own vine and fig tree’ 48 4 Prudence and preference: 1919-1937 67 5 Fear and pride: 1938-1954 99 6 The contemporary and the cautious: 1955-1973 131 7 Circles and cycles: 1974-2000 158 8 Conclusion: a diverse harvest 191 Notes 201 Select bibliography 242 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have generously assisted me in the course of researching and writing this book. I would firstly like to thank my oral history interviewees, correspondents and informants, for giving me their trust and taking the time to contribute to this project. I began this study as a PhD thesis in the History department at the University of Western Australia. I benefited from the support of my fellow students, and Charlie Fox, my supervisor, provided invaluable guidance and encouragement. I am also grateful to John Lack at the University of Melbourne, for granting me permission to use the re-encoded Melbourne University Social Survey database, and for taking the time to arrange for a copy of the codebook and database flat file to be made for me. I greatly appreciate the interest and helpful assistance of staff at some of the many institutions visited in the course of my research: I would especially like to thank the staff of the National Library (and in particular the Petherick Reading Room), the Australian Archives (Melbourne and Sydney offices), the Sydney City Archives, the Melbourne University Archives, the State Library of Victoria, the Battye Library, the Mitchell Library and the State Records Office of Western Australia. The staff of the Scholars’ Centre at the University of Western Australia also rendered valuable assistance in facilitating access to source materials. I also appreciate the assistance of Debbie Haynes and Robin Dalby, at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Perth Office), Laura Mecca (Co.As.It.), Lalitha Ramachandran (National Environment Resources Coordinator, Environs Australia), Mike Grimm (Quarantine entomologist Agriculture WA), Steve Ryan (GIS officer, Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Victoria), and Judy Horton (Communications Manager, Arthur Yates & Co.). Fellow postgraduate students David Nichols and John McKinley generously brought some relevant source material to my attention. Thanks also to those who took the time to discuss ideas for sources with me, including Patricia Crawford, Tony Dingle, Andrew Brown-May, Margo Huxley, Libby Robin, Patrick Mullins, Katie Holmes, Deborah Malor, Derek Smith and John Viska. Finally, thanks to my friends and family - especially my mother June - for their support, and to Jamie, for his encouragement and patience. This book was first published by University of Western Australia Press in 2006, and I am grateful for the support shown by UWAP over subsequent years. Publication was made possible with funding assistance from the Western Australian History Foundation and from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. For this electronic version, I would like to thank UWA Publishing for returning to me not only the rights to the book, but also the typeset and designed PDF, to which new forematter has been added. I would also like to thank the original consultant editor Jan Anderson and cover designer Zoë Murphy. iii CHAPTER 1 Into the suburbs... WHEN driving through the streets of almost any Australian suburb today, it is hard to imagine that they were once home to an assort- ment of agricultural enterprises—a dairy here, a market garden there, a piggery down by the river. As rows of more-or-less tidy front yards flash by, punctuated by stern walls and tangled native gardens, it is perhaps even harder to imagine that though the dairies may be long gone, every second or third suburban household, on average, still produces some of its own food. The observant will spot lemon trees reaching over eaves and passionfruit draped casually over side fences; more obvious are the tall beanpoles and grafted eggplants, often with origins in a southern European dream. But tucked away behind countless double carports, rickety gates and galvanised sheds, lurk ramshackle poultry coops, perhaps empty since the foxes from the local golf course got in, or busy with the sound of rustling straw as a young hen settles on the nest. Fruit trees—apples and a lemon in the cooler cities, oranges and a lemon in the warmer—are dotted along the back fence, a respectable distance from the small vegetable patch, where cherry tomatoes run rampant among the silverbeet. The —1— HARVEST OF THE SUBURBS Anglo-Australian convention of a front yard devoid of food plants or animals largely conceals the cornucopian places within Australian suburbia, but growing food for the table has formed part of the experience of countless suburbanites. It is an activity rich in meaning, that can tell us much about the values held by Australians living in suburban areas, as well as providing a window onto often unremarked urban ecologies. In spite of its abiding popularity, there has been little sustained reflection on the ways in which suburban Australians have gone about and understood keeping animals and gardening for food. Arcadian backyards have been woven into narratives in autobiographical mode, as potent symbols of the ‘natural’ simplicity and innocence of child- hood. They have also, very occasionally, been the subject of scholarly analysis. Most academics who have ventured to write historically about Australian backyards describe a transition—usually portrayed as more-or-less complete—from pre-Second World War ‘production’ or ‘utility’, to various postwar uses described in terms of ‘recreation’, ‘display’ or more broadly, ‘consumption’.1 Kim Dovey declares that ‘the backyard has been transformed from a place of production to one of consumption. The vegetable garden and solar clothes dryer are displaced by swimming pools, electric clothes dryers and designer landscapes.’2 Deborah Malor talks of ‘the move from no-frills function to manicured leisure centre’.3 Even George Seddon—probably the most-quoted of writers on Australian backyards—asserts that ‘The function of the back yard changed from production and service to recreation, and in the more up-market homes, to display’, though Seddon also acknowledges that the changes have not been universal.4 However, the portrayal of a simple transition from production to consumption—from vegetable patch to swimming pool—is somewhat flawed, as a substantial proportion of suburban households continue to produce some of their own food. The containment of (prewar) backyard spaces and activities within the terminology of ‘utility’ or ‘no-frills function’ is also inaccurate, as it implies that these spaces were purely instrumental—useful, but not meaningful. Several authors have noted that for much of the twentieth century, the design and maintenance of most front gardens revolved around predominantly middle-class concerns with order, decency and —2— INTO THE SUBURBS… respectability.5 John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, in Myths of Oz, go even further, claiming that whereas the style of the front garden was ‘determined by canons of middle-class decency and taste’, the backyard, with its vegetable garden and fowl pen, seemed to effortlessly disregard those canons ‘in the name of practicality’. They suggest that the wilful ‘neglect of imposed standards of taste’ suppos- edly found in Australian backyards is evidence of a working-class and rural discourse of Australianness, which ‘constructed the family and the nation in its own specific ways’. This discourse is opposed to a new ‘middle-class interest in vegetarianism, whole foods and “health” as a lifestyle’ which is seen as responsible for the return of the vegetable garden to Australian backyards, and which, with its ‘materialist middle-class values’ somehow threatens the ‘Australianness’ of the backyard.6 But whilst the features and practices of Australian backyards were conceptually aligned with ‘the rural’, there is little evidence that they were purely—or even primarily—working-class places. Rather, throughout the twentieth century, the productive backyard has been the domain of the middle class and those skilled workers in steady employment who formed the backbone of the settled, ‘respectable’ working class. For these people, home food production has long been a source of food valued for its freshness, purity and health-giving qualities. Perhaps it is not so easy, then, to neatly assign fowl coops, fruit trees and vegie patches to the category of working- class and rural functionality. When asked why they grow fruit or vegies or keep chooks,7 most people will say that they ‘just enjoy it’. One of the challenges of my research, then, was to account for this satisfaction: what lies behind it? How has this changed over time? These questions are inseparable from the others that drive this book: who has grown their own food in Australian suburbs? For what reasons? What techniques and materials did they use? With what impacts—positive and negative? And perhaps most importantly, as an activity incorporating social, cultural, economic and ecological dimensions, what can food-producing places and activities tell us more broadly about the changing conditions and concerns of life in Australian suburbs?

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