'The modern idea is to bring the country into the city': Australian Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900-1918

Rural History

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 119-136

  Murphy, Kate ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN SETTLEMENT; IDEOLOGY; REFORM PROCESS; RURAL HISTORY; RURAL POPULATION; STATE BUILDING; TWENTIETH CENTURY; URBANIZATION;

AUSTRALASIA; AUSTRALIA;

EID: 67649643449     PISSN: 09567933     EISSN: 14740656     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0956793308002616     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (East Sussex, 1985, first published in 1898 as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform p. 9.
2. Ibid, p. 11, his emphasis.
3. After this period there was a loss of impetus, as noted by Peter Spearritt in his 'Sydney's "slums": Middle Class Reformers and the Labor Response', Labour History, 26 (1974), 66-67.
4. On town planning in Australia see Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone, eds, The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (St Leonards, New South Wales, 2000).
5. See Robert Freestone, 'The Garden City Idea in Australia', Australian Geographical Studies 20 (1982), 24-48
6. and 'The Great Lever of Social Reform: The Garden Suburb 1900-30' in Max Kelly, ed., Sydney: City of Suburbs (Kensington, New South Wales, 1987), pp. 53-76.
7. See also Robert Freestone, Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia (Melbourne, 1989).
8. On the political influences in the early English garden city movement, see Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York, 1990), pp. 14-19.
9. 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.
10. On objections to renting in the plans for Dacey, see Ian Hoskins, 'Constructing Time and Space in the Garden Suburb', in Sarah Ferber, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe, eds, Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs (Melbourne, 1994), p. 9.
11. See David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939 (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1999).
12. Australia, its Land, Conditions and Prospects: The Observations and Experiences of the Scottish Agricultural Commission of 1910-11 (Edinburgh and Melbourne, 1911), p. 9.
13. David Walker, 'Shooting Mabel: Warrior Masculinity and Asian Invasion', History Australia, 3: 2 (2005), 89.1-89.12.
14. See Graeme Davison, 'The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the 'drift to the metropolis'', History Australia, 2:2 (2005), 35.1-35.11.
15. Max Neutze, 'City, Country, Town: Australian Peculiarities', Australian Cultural History, 4 (1985), 9.
16. See also Richard Nile, 'Images of Industrialism' in Richard Nile, ed., The Australian Legend and its Discontents (St Lucia, Queensland, 2000), pp. 286-296.
17. See J. W. McCarty, 'Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century', Australian Economic History Review, 8: 2 (1970), 112,
18. and Russel Ward, 'The Australian Legend Re-Visited', Historical Studies, 18:71 (1978), 173.
19. Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1901-1907 (Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Melbourne, 1908), p. 158.
20. See Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle, Western Australia, 2005), pp. 11-12
21. and J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 5. 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'.
22. See her 'Up the Country: Histories and Communities', Australian Historical Studies, 33:118 (2002), 91.
23. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne, 1954)
24. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 1958).
25. See also Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ed., The Australian Nationalists (Melbourne, 1971)
26. and Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972 (Melbourne, 1973), esp. pp. 60-70.
27. 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 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), p. 1.
28. Cited in McCarty, 'Australian Capital Cities', p. 112.
29. Graeme Davison, 'Rural Sustainability in Historical Perspective' in Chris Cocklin and Jacqui Dibden, eds, Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia (Sydney, 2005), pp. 38-55
30. Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid, p. 23.
31. New Townsmen, New Towns after the War: An Argument for Garden Cities (London, 1918), pp. 21-23.
32. '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 Sarah Whatmore, Terry Marsden and Philip Lowe, eds, Gender and Rurality (London, 1994), p. 4,
33. and Rachel Woodward, "It's a man's life!' Soldiers, Masculinity and the Countryside', Gender, Place and Culture, 5:3 (1998), 278.
34. C. E. W. Bean, In Your Hands, Australians (London, 1918).
35. Gary Lewis, "Million Farms' Campaign, NSW 1919-25', Labour History 47 (1984), 58.
36. 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.
37. Robert Freestone, Designing Australia's Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City Beautiful, 1900-1930 (Sydney, 2007), p. 46.
38. Ibid., pp. 4 and 33-4.
39. See Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Malden, MA, 2002).
40. Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change in England since 1800 (London and New York, 2002), pp. 46-8.
41. 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 Ian Hoskins, "The core of the city': Public Parks, Respectability and Civic Regulation in Sydney', National Identities, 5:1 (2003), 7.
42. 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':
43. see Judith Smart, 'War and the Concept of a New Social Order: Melbourne 1914-1915' (unpublished doctoral thesis, Monash University, 1992), p. 286.
44. On the Australian 'rural dream' see Graeme Davison andMarc Brodie, eds, Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia (Melbourne, 2005).
45. James W Barrett, The Twin Ideals: An Educated Commonwealth Volume II (London, 1918), p. 77.
46. Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890-1914 (St Lucia, Queensland, 1984).
47. 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.
48. J. C. Morrell, Town Planning, report to the Minister of Public Works (Melbourne, 1915), pp. 3 and 81.
49. On urban degeneration see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), especially chapter 16
50. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (Manchester, 1985), chapters 5 and 6, and Alfred Fried and Richard M. Elman, eds, Charles Booth's London (London, 1969).
51. Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping their Environment, Second Edition (Sydney, 1992), p. 121.
52. Charles C. Reade, The Revelation of Britain: A Book for Colonials, Auckland: Gordon and Gotch, 1909, p. 13.
53. Burchardt, Paradise Lost, pp. 46-48.
54. 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 Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113-16.
55. Progressive reformers in America and Australia were influenced in particular by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888).
56. Ian Hoskins, 'Marking Time: History and Identity in Sydney's Centennial Park', Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 21:1 (2001), 46.
57. George A. Taylor, Town Planning for Australia (Sydney, 1914), p. 16, my emphasis.
58. Cited in Anthea Hyslop, 'The Social Reform Movement in Melbourne 1890-1914' (unpublished doctoral thesis, La Trobe University, 1980), p. 360.
59. Morrell, Town Planning, p. 4.
60. Leonie Sandercock, Cities for Sale: Property, Politics and Urban Planning in Australia (Melbourne, 1975), p. 14.
61. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 85.
62. Ibid, p. 67.
63. James W. Barrett, The Broader Aspects of the Town Planning Movement (Melbourne, 1918), pp. 1-2.
64. See also his Eighty Eventful Years (Melbourne, 1945), pp. 90 and 94.
65. Albert Goldie, 'The Garden Suburb Idea', The Lone Hand 13:74 (1913), 164.
66. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, 1978), p. viii.
67. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 69.
68. Ibid, p. 90.
69. 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.
70. 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.
71. John F. Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913-1939 (Melbourne, 1995), p. 60.
72. See also Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity (Strawberry Hills, New South Wales, 2005), pp. 45-6, on the role of urban planning and modern transport systems in transforming Sydney into a fast-paced modern metropolis.
73. See Freestone, 'From City Improvement to the City Beautiful' in Hamnett and Freestone, eds, The Australian Metropolis, p. 30.
74. Hoskins, 'Marking Time', pp. 50-51
75. "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.
76. See Hoskins, 'Marking Time' and "It is inevitably a people's park'.
77. Hoskins, 'The Core of the City', pp. 10 and 17.
78. On the English movement and national identity, see Meacham, Regaining Paradise.
79. See Neville Hicks, 'This Sin and Scandal': Australia's Population Debate 1891-1911 (Canberra, 1978), especially chapter 6.
80. SeeNeutze, 'City, Country, Town', p. 13 and Graeme Davison, 'Fatal Attraction? The Lure of Technology and the Decline of Rural Australia, 1890-2000', Tasmanian Historical Studies 9:1 (2003), 43 on the Decentralisation Leagues.
81. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 122.
82. Ibid, pp. 46 and 49.
83. Robert Gibbons, 'Improving Sydney 1908-1909' in Jill Roe, ed., Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History (Sydney, 1980), p. 126.
84. 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.
85. 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.
86. 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.
87. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 224.
88. Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping their Environment, Second Edition (Sydney, 1992), pp. 124-5.
89. 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.
90. J. M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 5.
91. For example, Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 93.
92. On the Heidelberg School, see Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (Melbourne, 1985).
93. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, p. 16.
94. 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.
95. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 60.
96. See Graeme Davison, 'Australia: The First Suburban Nation?', Journal of Urban History 22:1 (1995), 40-74. Australian garden suburbs typically featured larger blocks than their English counterparts: See Christine Garnaut, 'Towards Metropolitan Organisation: Town Planning and the Garden City Idea', in Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone, eds, The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (St Leonards, New South Wales, 2000), p. 17.
97. Progress Report from the Joint Select Committee upon the Housing of the People in the Metropolis, p. 12, evidence of John Baxter Huggan.
98. John Sulman on the Federal Capital of Australia (paper read before the Town Planning Conference), Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 268.
99. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 90.
100. Ibid, p. 92.
101. Graeme Davison, 'The Inner Suburbs - An Historical Perspective', Polis, 6:2 (1979), 41.
102. Second Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition (30th July- 6th August 1918) Catalogue, (Brisbane, 1918), p. 80.
103. See Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney 1842-1992 (Sydney, 1992), pp. 228-9,
104. and Paul Ashton, The Accidental City: Planning Sydney Since 1788 (Sydney, 1993), p. 42.
105. J. F. Hennessy, 'Garden Suburbs Planning', Salon: Being the Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, 1 (1912), 332.
106. Irvine, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, pp. 2 and 102.
107. Minutes of Evidence from the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney, p. 111.
108. Ibid, p. 126.
109. Report of the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney, p. xxvii.
110. Ibid, p. xxviii.
111. William Morris Hughes, 'The City Beautiful', in Art and Architecture 5:5 (Sep-Oct. 1908), 192.
112. Taylor, Town Planning for Australia, p. 9.
113. 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.
114. Art and Architecture, 5:6 (November-December 1908), 228.
115. Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 266-268.
116. Art and Architecture, 8:3 (May-June 1911), 268.
117. Art and Architecture, 5:6 (November-December 1908), 233.
118. See Hoskins, 'Constructing Time', especially p. 2.
119. Davison, 'Australia: The First Suburban Nation?', p. 51.
120. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 309.
121. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 454.
122. See Katie Holmes, 'Gardens', Journal of Australian Studies, 61 (June 1999), 152-162, and 'In her Master's House and Garden', in Patrick Troy, ed., A History of European Housing in Australia (Melbourne, 2000), pp. 164-81.
123. Cited in Art and Architecture, 5:5 (September-October 1908), 192.
124. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 340.
125. See also Robert Freestone, 'Planning, Housing, Gardening: Home as a Garden Suburb' in Troy, ed., A History of European Housing, pp. 125-41.
126. Hoskins, Constructing Time', pp. 6-8 and 4.
127. Bean, In Your Hands, pp. 22 and 62.