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... "There are still in Australian suburbia
many indigenous ingredients mixed up with the stone-veneer garden barbecues,
the flourishes of wrought iron and other features of the fashionable home
which seem like a distorting-mirror image of the advertisement pages of the Saturday Evening
Post. The essence of Australian suburban life is unreality: frank and
proud artificiality. To this extent it is English. In some countries, like Sweden,
the suburb may be supracountry. In America it may allow itself to be
coyly rustic. But in Australia
it is the city's bastion against the bush. In certain areas - parts of
Wahroonga and Castle Crag in Sydney, Beaumaris
and Blackburn in Melbourne, St Lucia in Brisbane - gum trees prosper among the
houses and a countrified air is not discouraged. But for the most part modern
Australian living is is represented best by the shorn look already noted. The
countryside in which the suburb grows is shorn of trees. The plot in which
the house builds is shorn of shrubs. The house itself is shorn of the
verandas which the colonists knew, shorn of porches, shelter and shade. It
sits in sterile shaven neatness on its trimmed lawn between weeded, raked,
brilliant beds of annuals, between the grey paling fences which separate each
private domain from its neighbours. Very little is planted in the first place
which is expected to be or is capable of growing high; and nature never can
escape the tidy gardener's shears. The pioneering spirit still means change
from nature, right or wrong, and the Australian suburban objective is still
to carve clearings in the native bush and to transplant on to naked soil a
postage stamp replica of the ruling idea in international high-life. ...
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