Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T18:08:50.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘The modern idea is to bring the country into the city’: Australian Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900–1918*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

KATE MURPHY
KATE MURPHY*
Affiliation:
School of Historical Studies, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Australians strove to create a rural civilisation through state legislation to encourage rural closer settlement. The fantasy that Australia might one day support a rural population of perhaps hundreds of millions endured despite the overwhelmingly urbanised character of the nation and the harsh realities of its environment. This rural dream was present not merely in the discourse surrounding the rural settlement imperative, but also inflected the language and modes of urban reform, as planners sought to ‘ruralise’ the urban environment to reflect something distinctive about Australian life. Previous scholarship addressing the rural ideal in Australian history, as well as urban history, has failed to interrogate these links. This article illuminates the power and ideological reach of rurality in the Australian nation-building project and pushes the boundaries of ‘rural history’ by considering the ways in which reformers sought to extend a projected Australian ‘rural civilisation’ into the cities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 119 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Howard, Ebenezer, Garden Cities of To-morrow (East Sussex, 1985, first published in 1898 as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform), p. 9Google Scholar.

2. Ibid, p. 11, his emphasis.

3. After this period there was a loss of impetus, as noted by Spearritt, Peter in his ‘Sydney's “slums”: Middle Class Reformers and the Labor Response’, Labour History, 26 (1974), 66–67Google Scholar. On town planning in Australia see Hamnett, Stephen and Freestone, Robert, eds, The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (St Leonards, New South Wales, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See Freestone, Robert, ‘The Garden City Idea in Australia’, Australian Geographical Studies 20 (1982), 24–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The Great Lever of Social Reform: The Garden Suburb 1900–30’ in Kelly, Max, ed., Sydney: City of Suburbs (Kensington, New South Wales, 1987), pp. 53–76Google Scholar. See also Freestone, Robert, Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia (Melbourne, 1989)Google Scholar. On the political influences in the early English garden city movement, see Buder, Stanley, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York, 1990), pp. 14–19Google Scholar.

5. The Dacey Garden Suburb, one of the few examples of public enterprise in this regard, was designed by John Daniel Fitzgerald and John Sulman. It was facilitated by the Housing Act of 1912, which created a Housing Board with powers to acquire land, subdivide it, and erect dwellings. See Freestone, ‘The Great Lever’, p. 67. On objections to renting in the plans for Dacey, see Hoskins, Ian, ‘Constructing Time and Space in the Garden Suburb’, in Ferber, Sarah, Healy, Chris, and McAuliffe, Chris, eds, Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs (Melbourne, 1994), p. 9Google Scholar.

6. See Walker, David, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1999)Google Scholar.

7. Australia, its Land, Conditions and Prospects: The Observations and Experiences of the Scottish Agricultural Commission of 1910–11 (Edinburgh and Melbourne, 1911), p. 9.

8. Walker, David, ‘Shooting Mabel: Warrior Masculinity and Asian Invasion’, History Australia, 3: 2 (2005), 89.1–89.12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See Davison, Graeme, ‘The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the ‘drift to the metropolis”, History Australia, 2:2 (2005), 35.1–35.11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Neutze, Max, ‘City, Country, Town: Australian Peculiarities’, Australian Cultural History, 4 (1985), 9Google Scholar. See also Nile, Richard, ‘Images of Industrialism’ in Nile, Richard, ed., The Australian Legend and its Discontents (St Lucia, Queensland, 2000), pp. 286–296Google Scholar.

11. See McCarty, J. W., ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’, Australian Economic History Review, 8: 2 (1970), 112Google Scholar, and Ward, Russel, ‘The Australian Legend Re-Visited’, Historical Studies, 18:71 (1978), 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1901–1907 (Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Melbourne, 1908), p. 158.

13. See Waterhouse, Richard, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle, Western Australia, 2005), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; and Powell, J. M., An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 5Google Scholar. As Kate Darian-Smith has noted, the Australia that exists outside the capital cities is not a ‘cohesive social or economic unit, and defies definition in any meaningful historical, geographic or economic sense’. See her ‘Up the Country: Histories and Communities’, Australian Historical Studies, 33:118 (2002), 91.

14. Palmer, Vance, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne, 1954)Google Scholar; Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 1958)Google Scholar. See also Wallace-Crabbe, Chris, ed., The Australian Nationalists (Melbourne, 1971)Google Scholar and Serle, Geoffrey, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972 (Melbourne, 1973), esp. pp. 60–70Google Scholar.

15. Australians have not been isolated in this impulse. Raymond Williams has commented that the term ‘country’ in the English language links the land and rurality to nationality. See Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London, 1973), p. 1Google Scholar.

16. Cited in McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities’, p. 112.

17. Davison, Graeme, ‘Rural Sustainability in Historical Perspective’ in Cocklin, Chris and Dibden, Jacqui, eds, Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia (Sydney, 2005), pp. 38–55Google Scholar; Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid, p. 23.

18. Townsmen, New, New Towns after the War: An Argument for Garden Cities (London, 1918), pp. 21–23Google Scholar.

19. ‘Rurality’ has been theorised by cultural geographers and others engaged in rural studies in the context of the ‘cultural turn’ in rural studies. The idea of rurality reconceptualises the rural as a dynamic discursive or cultural construction rather than simply a bounded space characterised by particular social, economic and political arrangements. Feminist and gender analyses in particular were influential in forging this new approach to the study of rural society. See for example Whatmore, Sarah, Marsden, Terry and Lowe, Philip, eds, Gender and Rurality (London, 1994), p. 4Google Scholar, and Woodward, Rachel, “It's a man's life!’ Soldiers, Masculinity and the Countryside’, Gender, Place and Culture, 5:3 (1998), 278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Bean, C. E. W., In Your Hands, Australians (London, 1918)Google Scholar.

21. Lewis, Gary, “Million Farms' Campaign, NSW 1919–25’, Labour History 47 (1984), 58Google Scholar.

22. Official Volume of Proceedings of the First Australian Town Planning and Housing Conference and Exhibition, Adelaide October 17 to 24, 1917 (Adelaide, 1918), p. 38.

23. Freestone, Robert, Designing Australia's Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City Beautiful, 1900–1930 (Sydney, 2007), p. 46Google Scholar.

24. Ibid., pp. 4 and 33–4.

25. See Hall, Peter, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Malden, MA, 2002)Google Scholar.

26. Burchardt, Jeremy, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change in England since 1800 (London and New York, 2002), pp. 46–8Google Scholar.

27. In a 2003 article Ian Hoskins quoted John Fitzgerald as declaring that effective urban reform for the future meant that ‘country conditions must, so far as possible, be combined with city conveniences’, but Hoskins did not fully explore the ideas in this statement, despite his obvious interest in qualitative space and its relationship to notions of national character. See Hoskins, Ian, “The core of the city': Public Parks, Respectability and Civic Regulation in Sydney’, National Identities, 5:1 (2003), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sarah Mirams has gone some way towards invoking the rural signification of certain urban reform measures – see her “For their moral health’: James Barrett, Urban Progressive Ideas and National Park Reservation in Victoria', Australian Historical Studies, 33:120 (October 2002), 260 – while Judith Smart briefly observed that proponents of urban and housing reform aimed to create a substitute for the ‘lost co-operative ethic of communality of lifestyle, associated with the pre-industrial world’: see Judith Smart, ‘War and the Concept of a New Social Order: Melbourne 1914–1915’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Monash University, 1992), p. 286. On the Australian ‘rural dream’ see Davison, Graeme and Brodie, Marc, eds, Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia (Melbourne, 2005)Google Scholar.

28. Barrett, James W, The Twin Ideals: An Educated Commonwealth Volume II (London, 1918), p. 77Google Scholar.

29. Roe, Michael, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1914 (St Lucia, Queensland, 1984)Google Scholar.

30. R. F. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Question of the Housing of Workmen in Europe and America, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers 1913, volume 2, p. 115.

31. Morrell, J. C., Town Planning, report to the Minister of Public Works (Melbourne, 1915), pp. 3 and 81Google Scholar.

32. On urban degeneration see Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, especially chapter 16; Lees, Andrew, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1985)Google Scholar, chapters 5 and 6, and Fried, Alfred and Elman, Richard M., eds, Charles Booth's London (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

33. Bolton, Geoffrey, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping their Environment, Second Edition (Sydney, 1992), p. 121Google Scholar.

34. Reade, Charles C., The Revelation of Britain: A Book for Colonials, Auckland: Gordon and Gotch, 1909, p. 13Google Scholar.

35. Burchardt, Paradise Lost, pp. 46–48.

36. Walter Benjamin saw the experience of modernity as being defined by nostalgia: the ‘angel of history’ is blown by the winds of modernity into the future, but with its face turned to the past. See Alter, Robert, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113–16Google Scholar. Progressive reformers in America and Australia were influenced in particular by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888).

37. Hoskins, Ian, ‘Marking Time: History and Identity in Sydney's Centennial Park’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 21:1 (2001), 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Taylor, George A., Town Planning for Australia (Sydney, 1914), p. 16Google Scholar, my emphasis.

39. Cited in Anthea Hyslop, ‘The Social Reform Movement in Melbourne 1890–1914’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, La Trobe University, 1980), p. 360.

40. Morrell, Town Planning, p. 4.

41. Sandercock, Leonie, Cities for Sale: Property, Politics and Urban Planning in Australia (Melbourne, 1975), p. 14Google Scholar.

42. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 85.

43. Ibid, p. 67.

44. Barrett, James W., The Broader Aspects of the Town Planning Movement (Melbourne, 1918), pp. 1–2Google Scholar. See also his Eighty Eventful Years (Melbourne, 1945), pp. 90 and 94.

45. Goldie, Albert, ‘The Garden Suburb Idea’, The Lone Hand 13:74 (1913), 164Google Scholar.

46. Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, 1978), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

47. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 69.

48. Ibid, p. 90.

49. Hoskins found an emphasis on working-class respectability and stability reflected in the perceptions and activities of Dacey residents, as well as in planning rhetoric. See his ‘Constructing Time and Space’, p. 11.

50. The phrase ‘distinctly rural civilisation’ is from the Report of the Select Committee upon the Causes of the Drift of Population from Country Districts to the City, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council (Victoria, 1918), volume 1, p. 5.

51. Williams, John F., The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939 (Melbourne, 1995), p. 60Google Scholar. See also Matthews, Jill Julius, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity (Strawberry Hills, New South Wales, 2005), pp. 45–6Google Scholar, on the role of urban planning and modern transport systems in transforming Sydney into a fast-paced modern metropolis.

52. See Freestone, ‘From City Improvement to the City Beautiful’ in Hamnett and Freestone, eds, The Australian Metropolis, p. 30.

53. Hoskins, ‘Marking Time’, pp. 50–51; “It is inevitably a people's park’: Ceremony and Democratic Sentiment at the Opening of Centennial Park, 1888’, Studies in Australian Garden History, 1 (2003), 56.

54. See Hoskins, ‘Marking Time’ and “It is inevitably a people's park’.

55. Hoskins, ‘The Core of the City’, pp. 10 and 17.

56. On the English movement and national identity, see Meacham, Regaining Paradise.

57. See Hicks, Neville, ‘This Sin and Scandal’: Australia's Population Debate 1891–1911 (Canberra, 1978), especially chapter 6Google Scholar.

58. See Neutze, ‘City, Country, Town’, p. 13 and Davison, Graeme, ‘Fatal Attraction? The Lure of Technology and the Decline of Rural Australia, 1890–2000’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 9:1 (2003), 43 on the Decentralisation LeaguesGoogle Scholar.

59. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 122.

60. Ibid, pp. 46 and 49.

61. Gibbons, Robert, ‘Improving Sydney 1908–1909’ in Roe, Jill, ed., Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History (Sydney, 1980), p. 126Google Scholar.

62. Report of the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney and its Suburbs, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers 1909, volume 5, Final Report, p. xxviii.

63. Second Progress Report from the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis and in the Populous Centres of the State, Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1917, volume 2, part 1, paper no. 28, p. 23.

64. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1917, volume 2, part 1, paper no. 29, p. 241.

65. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 224.

66. Bolton, Geoffrey, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping their Environment, Second Edition (Sydney, 1992), pp. 124–5Google Scholar.

67. In the 1918 Victorian Select Committee on the Drift to the City, concerns had been aired that despite the intentions of the Closer Settlement Act of 1904 to populate the countryside, absentee landlords were becoming more common. See Minutes of Evidence from the Report of the Select Committee upon the Causes of the Drift of Population from Country Districts to the City, Unit 58, 11878/P1, Victoria Public Records Office, p. 108.

68. Powell, J. M., An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 5Google Scholar.

69. For example, Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 93. On the Heidelberg School, see Astbury, Leigh, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (Melbourne, 1985)Google Scholar.

70. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 16.

71. Progress Report from the Joint Select Committee upon the Housing of the People in the Metropolis, Victorian Parliamentary Papers volume 1, 1913–14, paper D, no. 4, pp. 1–2.

72. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 60.

73. See Davison, Graeme, ‘Australia: The First Suburban Nation?’, Journal of Urban History 22:1 (1995), 40–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Australian garden suburbs typically featured larger blocks than their English counterparts: see Garnaut, Christine, ‘Towards Metropolitan Organisation: Town Planning and the Garden City Idea’, in Hamnett, Stephen and Freestone, Robert, eds, The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (St Leonards, New South Wales, 2000), p. 17Google Scholar.

74. Progress Report from the Joint Select Committee upon the Housing of the People in the Metropolis, p. 12, evidence of John Baxter Huggan.

75. John Sulman on the Federal Capital of Australia (paper read before the Town Planning Conference), Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 268.

76. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 90.

77. Ibid, p. 92.

78. Davison, Graeme, ‘The Inner Suburbs – An Historical Perspective’, Polis, 6:2 (1979), 41Google Scholar.

79. Second Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition (30th July- 6th August 1918) Catalogue, (Brisbane, 1918), p. 80.

80. See Fitzgerald, Shirley, Sydney 1842–1992 (Sydney, 1992), pp. 228–9Google Scholar, and Ashton, Paul, The Accidental City: Planning Sydney Since 1788 (Sydney, 1993), p. 42Google Scholar.

81. Hennessy, J. F., ‘Garden Suburbs Planning’, Salon: Being the Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, 1 (1912), 332Google Scholar.

82. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, pp. 2 and 102.

83. Minutes of Evidence from the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney, p. 111.

84. Ibid, p. 126.

85. Report of the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney, p. xxvii.

86. Ibid, p. xxviii.

87. Hughes, William Morris, ‘The City Beautiful’, in Art and Architecture, 5:5 (Sep-Oct. 1908), 192Google Scholar.

88. Taylor, Town Planning for Australia, p. 9.

89. Final (Third) Report from the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis and in the Populous Centres of the State, Victoria Parliamentary Papers 1918, volume 2, paper no. 19, p. 6.

90. Art and Architecture, 5:6 (November-December 1908), 228.

91. Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 266–268.

92. Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 268.

93. Art and Architecture, 5:6 (November-December 1908), 233.

94. See Hoskins, ‘Constructing Time’, especially p. 2.

95. Davison, ‘Australia: The First Suburban Nation?’, p. 51.

96. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 309.

97. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 454.

98. See Holmes, Katie, ‘Gardens’, Journal of Australian Studies, 61 (June 1999), 152–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘In her Master's House and Garden’, in Troy, Patrick, ed., A History of European Housing in Australia (Melbourne, 2000), pp. 164–81Google Scholar.

99. Cited in Art and Architecture, 5:5 (September-October 1908), 192.

100. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 340. See also Robert Freestone, ‘Planning, Housing, Gardening: Home as a Garden Suburb’ in Troy, ed., A History of European Housing, pp. 125–41.

101. Hoskins, ‘Constructing Time’, pp. 6–8 and 4.

102. Bean, In Your Hands, pp. 22 and 62.