<
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/feb/08/from-the-sublime-to-the-cringeworthy-tim-ross-on-australias-housing-dream-and-nightmare>
"Australia’s state libraries have opened their archives to writer, TV presenter
and half of the
Merrick and Rosso comedy duo, Tim Ross, to feed his passion
for post-second world war suburban architecture and an ongoing exploration of
Australia’s obsession with home ownership.
The trove of photographs the institutions unearthed became Ross’s inspiration
for a series of live shows touring the country’s state libraries from next
week.
The
Australian Dream? tour to Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Canberra
trawls through four decades of homebuilding and homemaking in Australia, from
the sublime to the cringeworthy.
There’s the simplicity of modestly sized yet groundbreaking architectural
designs such as Nino Sydney’s instantly recognisable Beachcomber home –
delivered in the 1960s for the price of two cars, and copied in virtually all
Australian holiday beach suburbs ever since – and Castlecrag’s iconic Glass
House, built with architect/owner Bill Lucas’s war service loan in 1957. Lucas
and his wife, Ruth, scandalised their affluent neighbours by flouting Walter
Burley Griffin’s mandate of stone, brick and concrete only for the Sydney north
shore suburb that bears his stamp.
In one of several short films Ross has made for the show, he visits the
community of Winter Park in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Doncaster, where
residents are still living the way the architect intended when the cluster
housing and shared landscapes estate was built in 1970. It was a concept out of
kilter with the accepted suburbia paradigm of the times.
“The Australian dream is based on a postwar quarter-acre idea, where the
government basically wanted everyone to move to the suburbs, get a mortgage and
a mower, and then you wouldn’t become a communist,” Ross says.
“It was all about control … And we’re still clinging on to it, in a bastardised
form.”
As families have gotten smaller over the last half-century, the houses we built
just kept getting bigger.
At an average size of 2,303 square feet, Australia now leads the world in house
size, well out in front of the other nations in the top five – New Zealand, the
US, Canada and Denmark. Eaveless multi-storey homes pushing to the property’s
very boundaries, built in greenfield sites stripped of all green, have been a
feature of new satellite suburbs in our major cities for the past several
decades."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
