From the sublime to the cringeworthy: Tim Ross on Australia’s 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.

“We can’t blame people today for the dreams and aspirations that we were sold in the 1950s,” Ross says. “This was where the idea of having all the mod cons came from and set us up for wanting all these things.

“It’s just that in the 50s we couldn’t get them because they weren’t around. People didn’t build modest houses in the 1950s because they wanted modest houses. They built what they could afford.

“Now the idea of a lemon tree to piss on, or a place to grow vegetables [in the back yard] has disappeared completely.”

Ross believes a collective unease with the Australian landscape developed over time into a “bizarre hatred” of trees by government, councils and developers.

“There’s also a sense of ‘we need more’. We’ve retreated to our devices, so we’re spending more time at home. We’re worried about the world. We don’t want houses that interact with the streets, because we’re distrustful of other people … and I don’t think we’re as kind as we used to be.”

How did it come to this?

Prof Alan Pert, the deputy dean of Melbourne University’s architecture, building and planning faculty, says Australia’s postwar immigration boom was fuelled by the promise of home ownership, a concept out of the reach of most Europeans in a postwar environment.

“You couldn’t go and buy a bit of land and build a house,” he says.

“Suddenly you arrive in Australia and you can do it. The land was affordable and the idea of building a house on it, again, was affordable. And there was ready finance to do it. People were getting jobs, there was a culture of optimism built around growth and change. And there was an abundance of available land.

“That’s not the case any more.”

At Melbourne’s Winter Park, designed in the late 1960s, the normal rectangular grid lot subdivision design was rejected by developers Merchant Builders in favour of a layout where individual modestly sized homes are connected through a series of communal walkways and pergolas, shared car space and generously sized shared outdoor spaces. Today’s Winter Park community continues to live as its Victorian architect, Graeme Gunn, who died last October, intended.

Pert says Merchant Builders’ designs were seen as radical for their day, yet have the potential to take on particular relevance in the current housing crisis.

Gunn was an architect who created a sense of magic out of the everyday, says Pert, who will release a book on Merchant Builders, This is not Subtopia!, later this year.

“[Gunn] recognised that the single private house was an important Australian cultural tradition but suggested that there were other ways of thinking about community and shared space.

“Australia’s suburbia has been led by easy subdivision and no trees for decades. But Merchant Builders went out looking for landscapes with mature trees that other developers just would not touch. They were doing everything that every other developer was trying to avoid, anything that was going to give them a headache in terms of construction.”

A national obsession

Almost three-quarters of the Australian population still live in a single family home. Only about 3.8% of our housing stock is social housing, Pert says, and that makes Australia something of an outlier. In Singapore, about 80% of housing is government owned or subsidised. In the UK, public housing makes up 26% and in other European countries, that figure can be as high as 40%.

But in Australia, home ownership has become a national obsession.

“That is very different to other cultures, where housing is not seen as an asset, it’s seen as an important piece of social infrastructure,” he says.

While building more social housing and affordable high-density domiciles are obvious contributions to the housing crisis solution, Australia’s approach to apartment design still falls well behind Europe, Pert says, in terms of accommodating diverse and complex family and community groups.

Ross says the quarter-acre suburban dream Australia was sold has left us with a deep suspicion of high-rise living.

“I think we’re still selling those places short. We’re not selling them cheaply but we’re selling the idea of them short.”

Ross recalls when the first high-rise social housing came into play in Victoria, families with children under 12 were not permitted to apply.

“That’s a really good indication of how we were viewing families living in apartments,” he says.

“Clearly that’s changed but, when we look at the history of apartment living, lots of those apartments were in bohemian areas, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney – Kings Cross, St Kilda – and it was far more exciting there than what was happening in the suburbs. That’s where the action was, that’s where our stories were, that’s what the culture was happening.”

Ross grew up in the 1970s in a modest home in the Melbourne seaside suburb of Mount Eliza with his parents and two brothers.

His parents never referred to the home they built as “our first home”.

“It wasn’t an investment, it was just our home,” he says. “With the ability to be able to create wealth by buying and selling, I think we’ve forgotten that the home itself is the important thing. Our idea about our homes is all about property now, not about the joy of what happens inside them. That’s what we’ve lost.”

• The Australian Dream? will be at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane from 14 February (sold out) to 15 February; the State Library of Western Australia in Perth from 28 February (sold out) to 1 March; the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney from 21-23 March; the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne from 28-30 March; and the National Library of Australia in Canberra on 4 April