THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN DREAM
Suburbia – for generations it has been the source of many Australians’ dreams as well as our nightmares. The history of housing policy has been a blend of attempts to progress the nation towards our ideal state, and to save us from the evils of what came before – slums, disease, immorality. Pain and suffering.
Earlier in this blog, we have talked about large-scale public ventures, like the construction of a national capital, the Garden City movement and other grand plans; however the story of individual states and the housing policies they undertook throughout the 20th Century had just as important a role to play in the shaping of our urban life, and of us as a society.
The conceptualization of Melbourne as a city was heavily influenced by prominent individuals – Oswald Barnett was an example of someone with considerable influence, bringing together the resources of charitable middle class households during the Depression era for what he considered charitable works, and persuading governments and the wider population to acknowledge the existence of slums and the misery they housed.
An unacknowledged reality was that these inner city suburbs also housed a lot of social capital, hard won by generations of the working poor who had maintained family and wider social connections through the waves of exogenous changes that had forced them first into the cities for work, then to war in 1914, and then into denser and less sanitary living conditions as the economy stalled in the inter-war period.
Public ideals of modernistic progress ran roughshod over the values and wishes of slum dwelling Australians, including recent immigrants, who had a way of life that departed from the dominant Anglo-Australian middle class view. Housing authorities like the Slum Clearance Board and later the Victorian Housing Commission (HVC) enacted a modernist vision of housing improvement, and whether it was flats or bungalows that were built by these authorities, their format and construction reflected the modernist ideal of ‘efficient and space-saving’ technological advancement (Pascoe 2001, p.89-90).
GENERATIONAL TRANSITION
In the documentary ‘A Place to Belong’ you can see that this new kind of housing provided to slum dwellers from the inter-war period onwards was nevertheless welcome. It would be inaccurate and unfair to portray that era’s housing transformation in simple binaries. The good will of visionaries like Oswald Barnett cannot seriously be doubted and it was only later that real conflicts of interest worked against the social fabric of the working classes, because, as we saw in the documentary, in the beginning most re-housing took place in situ or very near to the existing communities. And in the case of the housing for veterans program, the Lalor Co-operative housing project was beautifully explained and analysed by Moira Scollay (2012). That was an example of governments and community organisations coming together to empower working class people to create and shape their own communities. I was particularly touched by the account of a funeral in 2007 that brought together hundreds of the founding residents of Lalor – an anecdotal proof of the lasting power real social capital can weld even decades after the investments in time and effort are made (Scollay 2012).
At a national level the debate throughout the post-war era can be characterized, with hindsight, as a reaction to the destructive nature of war. World War 2 broke up families from all social classes – so Menzies era politicians would use housing to put families back together (Pascoe 2011, p.90).
It is interesting to note the revival of conservative politics in the 1990s was accompanied by nostalgic social and tax policies meant to re-create a 1950s ideal family unit. This 1950s vision hearkened back to a gentlemanly Victorian way of life that was idealized, and arguably never existed outside a very small group of aristocrats. The contemporary Australian Dream of suburban heaven is based on a fiction, which is itself based on an earlier fiction.
Reality in the 1950s of course was different, and although it improved over the long term, such gains were unevenly spread, both geographically and socially. Home ownership, a vaunted Menzian ideal, occurred at more than double the rate in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne than it did in traditional inner urban suburbs like Carlton (Pascoe 2011, p.91).
OTHER FACTORS
Housing policy could also be trumped by other state initiatives and larger economic and social change that has little to do with the Suburban Dreaming illustrated above. In ‘A Place to Belong’ we see how working class families’ fortunes followed a trajectory that could be seen through the prism of ‘feast’ and ‘famine’ – they got jobs in the expanding heavy and manufacturing industries [FEAST], but the rental housing market quickly lost its ability to cope and they were soon living in slums [FAMINE]. New HVA housing re-housed residents, mostly in the same areas [FEAST], maintaining family and social connections. A few years later, the expanding influence of the automobile meant that roads were prioritized – an example was the rail overpass that suddenly divided the Port Melbourne community [FAMINE]. General prosperity increased following WW2, and the baby boom generation had unprecedented access to education and opportunity [FEAST] – but the inner areas could no longer accommodate population growth, so much of the new generation had to move away from their traditional inner city communities [FAMINE]; for working class young people this was because the new Commission housing was being built further away where land was plentiful, and for the newly minted generation of middle class professionals, the gentrification of their historical home made property much more expensive, pushing them out to the fringes where they could afford to buy.
FINAL WORD
Land availability, the switch from predominantly rail transport to road transport, the subsequent transformation of the urban form, and generalized population increases were not, it must be admitted, deliberate policies of white middle class paternalism. One thing becomes clear, however, when examining the history of housing policy in the 20th century: at every stage, whether it was charitable institutions, expert opinions, or government policies, the culture of the working classes and immigrants have only ever been partly understood, and rarely taken into consideration by those with the power to effect change. As observers of history we would do well to acknowledge these successes and failures, to give us the best chance of acting wisely and sensitively in the future.
Suburbia – for generations it has been the source of many Australians’ dreams as well as our nightmares. The history of housing policy has been a blend of attempts to progress the nation towards our ideal state, and to save us from the evils of what came before – slums, disease, immorality. Pain and suffering.
Earlier in this blog, we have talked about large-scale public ventures, like the construction of a national capital, the Garden City movement and other grand plans; however the story of individual states and the housing policies they undertook throughout the 20th Century had just as important a role to play in the shaping of our urban life, and of us as a society.
The conceptualization of Melbourne as a city was heavily influenced by prominent individuals – Oswald Barnett was an example of someone with considerable influence, bringing together the resources of charitable middle class households during the Depression era for what he considered charitable works, and persuading governments and the wider population to acknowledge the existence of slums and the misery they housed.
An unacknowledged reality was that these inner city suburbs also housed a lot of social capital, hard won by generations of the working poor who had maintained family and wider social connections through the waves of exogenous changes that had forced them first into the cities for work, then to war in 1914, and then into denser and less sanitary living conditions as the economy stalled in the inter-war period.
Public ideals of modernistic progress ran roughshod over the values and wishes of slum dwelling Australians, including recent immigrants, who had a way of life that departed from the dominant Anglo-Australian middle class view. Housing authorities like the Slum Clearance Board and later the Victorian Housing Commission (HVC) enacted a modernist vision of housing improvement, and whether it was flats or bungalows that were built by these authorities, their format and construction reflected the modernist ideal of ‘efficient and space-saving’ technological advancement (Pascoe 2001, p.89-90).
GENERATIONAL TRANSITION
In the documentary ‘A Place to Belong’ you can see that this new kind of housing provided to slum dwellers from the inter-war period onwards was nevertheless welcome. It would be inaccurate and unfair to portray that era’s housing transformation in simple binaries. The good will of visionaries like Oswald Barnett cannot seriously be doubted and it was only later that real conflicts of interest worked against the social fabric of the working classes, because, as we saw in the documentary, in the beginning most re-housing took place in situ or very near to the existing communities. And in the case of the housing for veterans program, the Lalor Co-operative housing project was beautifully explained and analysed by Moira Scollay (2012). That was an example of governments and community organisations coming together to empower working class people to create and shape their own communities. I was particularly touched by the account of a funeral in 2007 that brought together hundreds of the founding residents of Lalor – an anecdotal proof of the lasting power real social capital can weld even decades after the investments in time and effort are made (Scollay 2012).
At a national level the debate throughout the post-war era can be characterized, with hindsight, as a reaction to the destructive nature of war. World War 2 broke up families from all social classes – so Menzies era politicians would use housing to put families back together (Pascoe 2011, p.90).
It is interesting to note the revival of conservative politics in the 1990s was accompanied by nostalgic social and tax policies meant to re-create a 1950s ideal family unit. This 1950s vision hearkened back to a gentlemanly Victorian way of life that was idealized, and arguably never existed outside a very small group of aristocrats. The contemporary Australian Dream of suburban heaven is based on a fiction, which is itself based on an earlier fiction.
Reality in the 1950s of course was different, and although it improved over the long term, such gains were unevenly spread, both geographically and socially. Home ownership, a vaunted Menzian ideal, occurred at more than double the rate in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne than it did in traditional inner urban suburbs like Carlton (Pascoe 2011, p.91).
OTHER FACTORS
Housing policy could also be trumped by other state initiatives and larger economic and social change that has little to do with the Suburban Dreaming illustrated above. In ‘A Place to Belong’ we see how working class families’ fortunes followed a trajectory that could be seen through the prism of ‘feast’ and ‘famine’ – they got jobs in the expanding heavy and manufacturing industries [FEAST], but the rental housing market quickly lost its ability to cope and they were soon living in slums [FAMINE]. New HVA housing re-housed residents, mostly in the same areas [FEAST], maintaining family and social connections. A few years later, the expanding influence of the automobile meant that roads were prioritized – an example was the rail overpass that suddenly divided the Port Melbourne community [FAMINE]. General prosperity increased following WW2, and the baby boom generation had unprecedented access to education and opportunity [FEAST] – but the inner areas could no longer accommodate population growth, so much of the new generation had to move away from their traditional inner city communities [FAMINE]; for working class young people this was because the new Commission housing was being built further away where land was plentiful, and for the newly minted generation of middle class professionals, the gentrification of their historical home made property much more expensive, pushing them out to the fringes where they could afford to buy.
FINAL WORD
Land availability, the switch from predominantly rail transport to road transport, the subsequent transformation of the urban form, and generalized population increases were not, it must be admitted, deliberate policies of white middle class paternalism. One thing becomes clear, however, when examining the history of housing policy in the 20th century: at every stage, whether it was charitable institutions, expert opinions, or government policies, the culture of the working classes and immigrants have only ever been partly understood, and rarely taken into consideration by those with the power to effect change. As observers of history we would do well to acknowledge these successes and failures, to give us the best chance of acting wisely and sensitively in the future.
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