In Suburbia: Recent Detours
It was once commonplace to read that Australians had an ongoing love affair with suburbia. When Nino Culotta discovered the joys of being a bricklayer in the popular novel, They’re a Weird Mob (1957), our infatuation reached fever pitch. To Nino, fresh off the boat from Italy, Australia stood revealed as the working man’s paradise, where a little honest toil allowed you to put a downpayment on a block of land and plan your dream home. With your new brick dwelling came a comfortable lifestyle – rooms for the kids, barbies with your mates, a double garage, maybe a swimming pool. Those were the days!
Almost 70 years later, that dream has soured. The soaring cost of real estate, fuelled by negative gearing policies that no politician dares touch, has priced young people out of the market. A pervasive housing shortage, abetted by years of government inaction has made matters even worse. Labor’s tentative steps to fix the problem are being blocked by the Greens, whose motto seems to be: “Utopia or nothing!”
It's an opportune time to take stock of the way contemporary Australian artists are looking at the suburbs - a topic that has been a consistent theme in local art, at least since the 1950s, when John Brack made pictures of new housing estates and happy couples posing in their lounge rooms. It marked a change of focus from landscape – which enjoys a kind of mythical force in Australian art – to the place where most of us actually live.