In his influential work Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), Ebenezer Howard described his idea for a new kind of settlement to be established outside London. Based on a perfect union of the advantages of the town and the country, the ‘garden city’ would produce the much-desired effect of ‘the spontaneous movement of the people from our crowded cities to the bosom of our kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and of power’.Footnote ¹ The garden city idea in Howard's original conception was to feature an agricultural belt separating ‘satellite cities’, the populations of which would be capped. It would provide an antidote for the problems of both urban and rural life: for the unhealthy, crowded conditions of cities, and for the isolation and lack of amusement bemoaned by the country. The two ‘magnets’ or attractions associated with the city and the country, human society and the beauty of nature respectively, would be joined. Howard likened the ideal relationship between town and country to the complementarity of male and female, declaring that ‘Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation’.Footnote ²

Howard's garden city idea wielded a strong theoretical influence upon the increasingly professional town planning movement which flourished in Australia from the early years of the twentieth century until the First World War.Footnote ³ However, the effect and application of this idea (and possibly the reasons for its failure) differed considerably from the situation in England, due to specifically Australian beliefs and conditions. In Australia, as in England, the garden suburb proved more achievable than garden cities. But while the English garden city movement had been deeply influenced by the tradition of radical agrarianism and the communitarian thinking of the 1880s, in its Antipodean application the movement took a much more conservative direction, largely due to Australians' rejection of the principles of leasehold ownership and co-partnership housing, in favour of private ownership. Most Australian garden suburb developments were private enterprises driven by the need for profit, and thus were not within the means of the slum dweller.Footnote ⁴ Dacey Garden Suburb (or Daceyville), which was established in south-east Sydney in 1912, was condemned as ‘unAustralian’ (to borrow Ian Hoskins' paraphrasing) by prominent figures in the town planning movement for offering only rental housing.Footnote ⁵

The original garden city idea was also less appealing in Australian conditions due to the palpable presence of ‘empty’ rural space to be filled on the continent. In contrast to England, back-to-the-land sentiment in Australia was based largely in an exhilarating sense of the seemingly limitless space available for expansion. The presence of these vast unpeopled tracts of land was also a source of considerable unease connected with the racial project of White Australia and the threat of invasion.Footnote ⁶ Visiting members of the Scottish Agricultural Commission observed in 1911 that they had ‘found the Australian public stirred, if not anxiously yet seriously, by the apprehension of danger from a Far Eastern source’. Footnote ⁷ In this context, the white rural man was imagined as a bulwark against the threat of the Yellow Peril, as well as against Australia's indigenous population, in the context of ongoing anxieties regarding the illegitimacy of white occupation.Footnote ⁸ Australia's failure to fill its ‘empty spaces’ with sturdy white defenders of the race was frowned upon by imperial observers and constantly lamented in local thought from the late nineteenth century. This anxiety was exacerbated by the accelerating ‘drift’ of rural populations to the city after 1900.Footnote ⁹

Australia had been an overwhelmingly urban nation from the time of European settlement, which had begun in the coastal colonial capitals, gradually spreading outward to country towns and rural areas.Footnote ¹⁰ Official definitions of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ varied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: it is likely that many settlements considered to be ‘urban’ contained only a few hundred inhabitants.Footnote ¹¹ However, the metropolitan leaning of Australia's population was patent. The first Commonwealth Year Book noted that ‘a feature of the distribution of population is the tendency to accumulate in the capital cities’. This propensity was such that by 1907 the population of each capital accounted for between nineteen and forty-six per cent of the entire population of its respective state: for example, 35.29 per cent in New South Wales, and 42.73 per cent in Victoria.Footnote ¹² The preponderance of the capital cities meant that the category ‘rural’ tended to refer, in popular Australian usage, to most towns outside the capitals, as well as the sparsely inhabited ‘Bush’.Footnote ¹³

Despite its urbanised character, Australia's dominant national ethos, expressed in the nationalistic literary and artistic outpouring of the 1890s, was firmly rural.Footnote ¹⁴ Australians looked to the spaces outside the cities for a sense of distinctive national identity.Footnote ¹⁵ The romanticised figures of the itinerant bush worker and the selector were seen to articulate ‘Australianness’ in an elemental sense. Consequently, the ‘abnormal aggregation of the population into their capital cities’, observed by government statistician T. A. Coghlan in 1896, was considered to be a worrying aberration in national development.Footnote ¹⁶ As Graeme Davison has shown, the authors of European settlement had viewed the concentration of population in coastal towns as an immature stage of development which would eventually give way to a ‘natural’ European landscape of evenly-spread farms and towns.Footnote ¹⁷ The failure of the landscape to evolve thus, either naturally or as a result of numerous legislative measures designed to encourage closer settlement from the 1860s onwards, occasioned considerable anxiety among both imperial observers and local governments.

In outlining his garden city scheme to an English audience, Howard had called for the abandonment of the futile ‘back-to-the-land’ movement. The British garden city movement condemned the stagnancy of rural life, and sought a genuine alternative to both the urban and the rural. A 1918 pamphlet produced by the New Townsmen, the movement's revivified postwar manifestation, referred to the country as ‘disease[d]’.Footnote ¹⁸ While ideas about ruralityFootnote ¹⁹ continued to wield a strong influence on British urban reformers, tied up as it was with their understandings of English national identity, social reformers were encouraged to focus on improving cities or forging new kinds of settlements outside the cities, rather than on ‘returning’ to the land. In contrast, Australians (including prominent supporters of town planning and urban reform) continued to cling to the fantasy that Australia was, or was destined to be, a rural civilisation. C. E. W. Bean's In Your Hands, Australians, also published in 1918, was explicitly optimistic that Australia's future lay in millions of farms covering its vast spaces.Footnote ²⁰ British visions of Australia, as part of an economic hierarchy which envisaged Australia's role as primary producer for England's manufacturing industry, were influential in determining the discursive content and practical functioning of this rural dream. Sir Joseph Carruthers, a former Premier of the state of New South Wales and founder of the ‘Million Farms’ Campaign, referred in 1920 to Australia's sense of ‘being watched’ and judged by its mother country for having ‘only half the country alienated’.Footnote ²¹ Even the most pragmatic Australian statesmen found it difficult to abandon the rural dream entirely. In his speech to the second Australian Town Planning Conference in 1917, the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, stressed that it was ‘useless to rely on a “back to the land” policy’ to solve Australia's urban problems and ensure the future prosperity of the nation. Nonetheless, he soon slipped back into the rhetoric associated with the rural dream, despite himself: ‘we have bitten off an extra big bit of the world's surface, and everything depends on our ability to develop and to defend it. Only a large population and a preponderantly large country population, can enable us to do either.’Footnote ²²

Yet as suggested above, Australian urban reformers drew heavily on transnational tenets of town planning, predominantly those emanating from Britain but also, increasingly, those from the United States, that advocated the injection of ‘rural’ qualities into cities. Australians were influenced not only by the garden city idea, but also by other strands of planning thought such as the ‘city beautiful’ movement, which also featured a strong emphasis on ‘natural’ or ‘green’ elements of beauty and became blurred in public perception with the garden city idea.Footnote ²³ The city beautiful movement is often understood narrowly as a purely American phenomenon, but as Robert Freestone observes, the American movement was only one strand of a global proliferation of ideas about ‘aestheticised planning’ of cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and had taken its inspiration from earlier planning movements associated with nineteenth-century continental European cities.Footnote ²⁴

The planning ideal of ‘the country in the city’ was to a great extent historically contingent. In earlier periods, the country had been perceived as backward, and the city as healthful and civilised. But the intensification of urban crowding in London and other centres in the nineteenth century, along with new ideas about the impact of city life on human health and morality, bred new responses to the urban environment.Footnote ²⁵ British middle class aspirations for ‘rural’ or ‘natural’ urban surroundings, either through garden cities or ‘city beautiful’ planning, have been understood by Jeremy Burchardt as arising from anxieties about the dangers of urban life, physical, moral and political, which could be assuaged by the introduction of a comforting rural aesthetic into the environment.Footnote ²⁶ Influenced primarily by the British example, Australian urban reformers in Melbourne and Sydney sought to bring ‘nature’ into the artificial environment of the city not merely in a physical sense, by creating open spaces and planting trees, but also in the less tangible sense of creating a ‘rural’ feeling of community. However, the Australian impulse to ‘ruralise’ the city was informed not merely by inherited Romantic notions of the redemptive/restorative qualities of nature, but by a potent rural dream with an enduring political, economic and cultural currency that belied its infeasibility. The contention of this article is that far from detracting from Australia's urban question, the enduring rural fantasy was discursively and practically present in urban reform, marking its modes in various ways that ultimately distinguish it from the British town planning and urban reform movement in which Australian ideas were predominantly grounded.

The interpretation of urban reform efforts as motivated by a desire to inject rurality into cities, as opposed to a simple conception of the ‘beautification’ of cities through the planting of trees and the provision of parks, has been explored only tacitly in Australian scholarship on urban reform, and has been similarly overlooked in discussions of the rural dream.Footnote ²⁷ This is surprising, given the relevance of the issue to one of the staple concerns of Australian historiography: the relationship between ruralism, urbanism, and national identity. The rural dream influenced the development of ideas about the city: Australian urban improvers anticipated that the ‘ruralised’ Australian city would reflect ‘national character’, and the language in which the need for urban reform was articulated drew on ideas and assumptions associated with the rural settlement imperative, as we shall see. While the notion of bringing rural elements to bear on urban environments were borrowed from London and elsewhere, Australian urban reformers saw such ideas as having particular relevance to Australian conditions and character. The result of this was that the ‘ruralising’ approach to the city became more marked in Australia, breeding a distinctive discourse of urban reform that privileged rurality in a more exaggerated manner than the wider transnational language of urban improvement.

That urban reform efforts in early twentieth century Australia drew so heavily on aspects of rurality is not surprising, given that the limited pool of middle class professionals involved in urban reform were also deeply interested in questions of rural settlement and exhibited an often explicit preference for rural life. Sir James W. Barrett, a leading figure in public life in Melbourne and prominent supporter of urban reform, asserted that ‘The farmer's knowledge of life is more fundamental, it is more far-reaching, and it is more solid, and for that reason people realise instinctively that social stability must find its ultimate basis on rural civilisation’.Footnote ²⁸ Barrett made this comment in the context of a 1914 speech to the Farmer's Convention in Victoria, where such sentiments were no doubt welcomed. However, at least before the First World War, it is undeniable that Barrett and other progressive reformers gave greater attention to that which was worthy of transmission in rural life, than to that which was commendable in urban life. This was due in large part to the influence of transnational ideas about the city, especially the example of American Progressivism, in Australian reforming circles. Nostalgic longing for country life was coupled with faith in the ability of professional ‘experts’ and modern technology to remake the city: an example of the ‘dualism’ of Progressive thought.Footnote ²⁹

An ideal of rural citizenship underpinned urban reform after 1900. To the minds of Australian urban improvers, the best environment for the creation of the ideal citizen was rural or semi-rural. Planning rhetoric stressed that the introduction of parks, gardens, and other ‘rural’ elements and spaces was not just about beautifying the city, but would ameliorate the negative effects of urban life on its citizens. It was projected that beautiful surroundings would have good moral effects, engendering civic pride and dignity and helping people to ‘realise in themselves a truer and wholesomer art of life’.Footnote ³⁰ The introduction of rural conditions into cities would also improve the health and physical vigour of citizens, aiding in the production of a ‘virile and efficient race of ambitious and progressive inhabitants for the future government and welfare of our country’.Footnote ³¹

In this stress on the moral and physical efficiency of citizens, and particularly working-class citizens, Australian urban reformers drew heavily on British ideas about the city and in particular the class-inflected theory of urban degeneration.Footnote ³² The influential notion of the ‘unhealthy’ city, originating in the context of 1880s London, may have been more imagined than real in Australian conditions. Geoffrey Bolton notes that the failure of Australians to see the possibilities of town planning and improvement, until news of British precedents arrived to inspire them, may be simply explained if the majority of town dwellers were, in fact, content with their environment.Footnote ³³ Nonetheless, many concerned Australians followed the directive of Charles Reade's The Revelation of Britain to ‘let every aspiring colonial apply the example of Britain to his own environment’.Footnote ³⁴ Middle class reformers in London hoped, in line with an understanding of the restorative and moral effects of nature, derived from Romantic literature and other sources, that a more natural environment might act to improve the moral and physical condition of the working classes and ease their dangerous discontent.Footnote ³⁵ In Australia also, the classed nature of the urban reform movement informed and defined the attitudes to citizenship which formed the mainspring of its utilisation of rurality.

Thus, the ruralising of the Australian city was understood and articulated as a response to modernity and the social and political challenges of modern urban life. In this way, Australian elites followed an international trend to ‘look backwards’ to pre-industrial themes and aesthetics as a nostalgic response to modernity.Footnote ³⁶ It could be argued, of course, that parks, gardens, and other simulated ‘natural’ elements had long been a feature of cities. But the impulse was understood as being a firmly modern one. From the 1880s there was more public park space created in Sydney than at any time before or since.Footnote ³⁷ Urban reformers were explicit about the rural signification, as well as the modernity, of these measures. Taylor, the celebrated founder (in 1913) of the Town Planning Association of New South Wales, claimed, rather spuriously, that ancient cities had not included parks and open space. In contrast, he wrote, ‘The modern idea is to bring the country into the city by means of parks and open spaces and systematically group the houses’. An accompanying image of Hyde Park in Sydney was titled ‘THE COUNTRY IN THE CITY’.Footnote ³⁸ It was, arguably, the pervasive influence of the discourse about rural settlement in early twentieth-century Australian public life which led urban reformers self-consciously to refer to their efforts regarding city parks and gardens in terms of bringing to ‘the town a bit of the country’ as Barrett wrote in 1914.Footnote ³⁹

The rural signification of urban reform was not, however, confined to aesthetic measures like the ‘preservation of natural picturesque wooded lanes’ in cities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Reformers in Sydney and Melbourne sought not only to create a rural aesthetic in urban space, but also hoped to ensure the development of a healthy rural-style social body. The introduction of elements of rurality into cities would, it was hoped, counteract the modern urban process which was widely believed to cause the decay of community feeling and the isolation of the individual. As Leonie Sandercock has argued, two key aspects of town planning ideology influenced Australians who adopted town planning as a system for reform in the early twentieth century: the concepts of community, and of social integration.Footnote ⁴¹

The Progressive economist Professor R. F. Irvine, in the 1913 report of his Inquiry into the Question of the Housing of Workmen in Europe and America (undertaken for the New South Wales government) clearly subscribed to the ‘community’ aspect of town planning ideology. Irvine observed that one of the greatest advantages of co-partnership housing schemes adopted overseas was the ‘combination of city and rural conditions’, by which he meant not merely the setting but the community life:

The settlements established by the Krupp Steel Works in Essen, Germany, were praised by Irvine for the healthy community life they fostered through activities like concerts and classes. Each ‘colony’ featured its own market place, beer-hall, cooperative store, and music pavilion.Footnote ⁴³

In 1918 Barrett explicitly addressed this aspect of town planning ideology. The crux of the town planning and garden city movement, he said, was not the abolition of slums and the provision of good housing and open recreation space. The ‘soul of the project’ was, in fact, the problem of:

Albert Goldie also noted that aspects of the garden suburb idea, including the adoption of tree-lined streets, public squares, and recreation reserves, were geared towards engendering ‘a greater spirit of local pride, patriotism and enterprise . . . than is usually the case in suburban life’.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Paul Boyer noted of the response to the city in America from the early decades of the twentieth century, reformers shared the implicit or explicit conviction that city life should be made to ‘replicate the moral order of the village’ and that city dwellers should perceive themselves as members of cohesive communities joined by shared moral and social values.Footnote ⁴⁶ Town planning and garden city measures would instil in urban citizens more wholesome individual values and qualities, but also an ‘organic’ solidarity. While these ideas were borrowed, Australians felt they had a distinctive relevance to Australian conditions, given the rural character of the nation, as we shall see.

The second important aspect of English planning ideology which influenced Australian reformers was social integration, or the rejection of the principle of segregation of classes. In his 1913 report, Irvine endorsed the paternalistic attitudes of the English planning establishment in this regard. His report quoted Alfred Lyttelton, whose conception of the aims of the movement was that an environment should be created ‘in which men shall have an understanding of each other, in which the poor shall teach the rich, and in which the rich, let us hope, shall help the poor to help themselves’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The principle of social integration or variety was ‘expected to have a healthy influence upon the mode of life of all classes’.Footnote ⁴⁸ While such ideas were intrinsic to Fabianism and Christian Socialism, here they are suggestive of a more conservative hankering for the social structure of the country village, in which the poor could not proliferate in a segregated area, unobserved, and pose a threat to the respectable classes. Class conflict was a ‘city problem’ that might be curtailed by the housing of the workers in village-like communities where rich and poor lived in respectable concord together to the benefit of all. Such principles were applied in the building of Sydney's Dacey Garden Suburb.Footnote ⁴⁹

The way in which these aspects of a broad rural dream were reflected in the reforming approach to the Australian urban environment raises questions about what we understand the ‘rural dream’ to be. Does it pertain just to the drive for rural settlement, or can it be understood as a broader desire for the creation of a ‘distinctly rural civilisation’ even in the city, the locus of modernity?Footnote ⁵⁰ Rurality operated as shorthand for past certainties, for static and solid truths among an elite who displayed an inclination to ‘look backwards’, an impulse which helped to define their modernity. However, this nostalgic tendency was not in essence a true longing to return to the pre-industrial: these were men interested in scientific management and planning, who wanted to preserve the values of the pre-industrial world but retain the material benefits of technology, in typical Progressive vein. This characteristic contradiction in elite responses to modernity was well exemplified in town planning. The 1909 report of the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney and its Suburbs, for example, while striving towards the principles of community and social integration described above, was, as John Williams described it, a ‘modernist tour de force. Sydney was meant to bristle with modernity’.Footnote ⁵¹

Furthermore, the rurality which urban reformers hoped to emulate in the urban environment was not a true, rustic rurality but a regulated and ornate one representing civilisation and progress. The notion of the ‘city beautiful’ in early twentieth-century planning theory, while owing much to elements of ‘natural’ beauty, was essentially a movement for harmony, formality and symmetry.Footnote ⁵² Just as the modern concept of the urban led Australian elites into panic about urban slums where arguably there were none, or at least not on the Old World scale, it was a constructed or figurative concept of the rural upon which their efforts to bring the ‘country into the city’ were based. This is illustrated by the case of Sydney's Centennial Park. While, as Hoskins has noted, there was an increasing tendency to plant Australian native plants, the ‘wilderness’ of the site was improved by way of the construction of a carriage drive, playing fields, and ornamental ponds.Footnote ⁵³ The dedication of the park in the Federation year (1901) made it clear that the site was intended to represent the taming of the wilderness, the triumph of modern civilisation, and the enlightened nature of the State and its reforms. It also privileged whiteness: the creation of the park excluded the Aboriginal community from Lachlan Swamp, which its members had previously frequented.Footnote ⁵⁴ Parks were to be well-lit, with clean seats and flowerbeds, and utilised by well-behaved and neat citizens, not larrikins and prostitutes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Urban park space, while outwardly democratic, thus operated as a space for the articulation of distinctive elite attitudes towards nature, history, and Australian identity and ideal citizenship.

As this suggests, it was anticipated that the ‘ruralised’ city envisaged by urban reformers and planners would reflect something distinctive about Australia's national ‘character’. Just as the early British town planning and garden city movement was embedded in ideas about the rural nature of ‘Englishness’,Footnote ⁵⁶ assumptions about Antipodean identities and values were stamped on Australian urban reform. Chief among these was the necessity for decentralisation. As described above, Australian public opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by much anxiety and debate about the issue of the uneven distribution of population between town and country.Footnote ⁵⁷ Decentralisation Leagues had been established in country towns in New South Wales and Victoria in the 1880s, and policy sought to encourage population away from the capitals until well into the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Irvine's town planning report to the New South Wales government called for a kind of suburban adaptation of the yeoman dream through an Act to provide rural villages for Sydney workers. He based this idea for a scheme of decentralisation on a Belgian example which utilised a rapid and cheap train system to allow industrial workers to live outside the city on plots of land suitable for vegetable and fruit growing and even the raising of poultry and other animals, under the tutelage of agricultural managers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Irvine praised municipal authorities overseas for encouraging development outside the city which, unlike urban life, was ‘not destructive of health or morals’:

This preference for the dispersion of the population from the centre, rather than housing solutions in the city itself, recalled the then four-year-old report of the Commission on the Improvement of the City of Sydney (1908–9). The Commissioners expressed a strong desire to get people out of the city proper.Footnote ⁶¹ Their report argued that the municipal authorities should be given the power to acquire land for the provision of new sites on which to build ‘healthy’ dwellings, along approved hygienic lines, for working-class citizens. Such actions, along with improvements in the transport system to carry workers to homes outside the city, would serve ultimately to make slums extinct.Footnote ⁶² One of the chief recommendations of the 1908–9 Commission with regard to the slum problem was that workmen should be encouraged to reside in separate houses in the suburbs, in preference to tenement buildings in the city.

This favouring of the tactic of dispersion or decentralisation also characterised the wartime Victorian Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People of the Metropolis (1914–15), which heard proposals that the government should ‘encourage the exodus of such portions of the population as would be willing and able to live at a distance from the present congested areas of the Metropolis’.Footnote ⁶³ As in the earlier Commission in Sydney, much attention was given to exploring the possibility of purchasing land for dwelling sites outside the city, in areas served by transit facilities, and to other proposals intended to drain population from the urban centre. The related idea that industry and residential areas should be kept separate, a common conviction internationally (the garden city idea being its ultimate expression), was repeatedly expressed by witnesses to the Victorian Commission. William Davidge, who had travelled from London to lecture on behalf of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association of Great Britain, reported that separation of industrial and residential areas was one of the ‘cardinal factors of town planning in modern conditions’.Footnote ⁶⁴ John Clayton, the town clerk of Melbourne, argued that the inner city should not be for living: with the aid of a map, he advised the Commission that ‘the residential houses must go outwards, and the factories could be established here [in the centre]’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such sentiments illustrate Geoffrey Bolton's observation that the 1908–9 Sydney Commission set the tone for a model to be followed by other Australian cities, in which the inner city would be ideally confined to commerce and business, a ‘dead heart’ to which citizens would travel for work purposes.Footnote ⁶⁶

The notion that industrial workers should be housed at a distance from their work, and that factories should not be near residential areas, suggested a feeling that industrial work was incompatible with life, or at least with the rest of one's life, in sharp contrast to attitudes regarding rural occupations. Work on the land was a whole life, a lifestyle, and ideally so: absentee landowners were strongly discouraged both in overseas ‘country life’ movements and in Australian sentiment.Footnote ⁶⁷ The push to encourage people out of the city takes on additional significance if we consider that the Australian understanding of the country or ‘bush’ has been ‘best defined as the whole area beyond the towns and cities’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In discussions of possible sites for residential areas outside the city, Heidelberg in Victoria was often suggested, the very name, owing to the fame of the plein air painters associated with the Australian Heidelberg impressionist school, being richly suggestive of wholesome rural living.Footnote ⁶⁹

Town planning solutions for Australia were articulated in terms of a distinctive national consciousness regarding Australia's landscape, climate, and history. For commentators on the urban problem, it was inconceivable that Antipodean cities could be allowed to ‘fall’ into Old World conditions of overcrowding and degeneration, given the character and youth of the nation. But this was the great fear. In reference to overhousing in the areas of Redfern, Surry Hills, Woolloomooloo, and Waterloo, Irvine feared that, ‘But for our good climate, there would be little to choose between life under these conditions and life in the worst existing slums of London’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Arthur Pearson, President of the Minimum Allotment, Anti-Slum, and Housing Crusade Committee, told a 1913 Victorian Select Committee (which became the Royal Commission) that the cramped conditions of inner-Melbourne were a ‘disgrace in a young country like this’. He had seen slums in the ‘Old Country at Dudley’ and in his opinion ‘we are tending that way here’.Footnote ⁷¹ The questions posed to witnesses also inclined to this view, as in the example asked by a Commissioner of Charles Tregear, in the context of discussions of slums elsewhere, ‘Being a young country, we want to avoid the conditions we see existing in the old world?’Footnote ⁷² Tregear readily agreed.

The idea that the New World possessed a unique opportunity to avoid Old World traps also manifested itself in the issue of home ownership. Witnesses to the Victorian Commission frequently alluded to the inclination in the Australian character towards independent living. This was a propensity which gave rise to the ideal of the single-storey, detached suburban home, a housing system suggestive of the liberty of wide-open spaces and the prosperity of life in the new democracy.Footnote ⁷³ One witness quoted a letter written by a Doctor Springthorpe to Victorian newspaper The Age:

According to the architect and town planner John Sulman, the Australian, ‘of whatever degree’, preferred the ‘cottage’ or one-story building to the flat or tenement.Footnote ⁷⁵ This preference was a mark of respectability. The development of an ideology that denigrated the city environment and its inhabitants, leading to an image of the city as a hot-bed of vice, radicalism and poverty, was a strong influence in culture by the turn of the century. In the proceedings of the Victorian Commission it was suggested to a witness, Fanny Maud Wilson, that the ‘decent people’ having left the city, only the ‘residue’ was left.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thomas Brown, a minister, commented that ‘It is the better class of working man who makes this change [to the outer suburbs]’.Footnote ⁷⁷ As Davison notes, in the period 1900 to 1920 the movement to the suburbs was indeed spearheaded by a ‘better class’ of clerical workers and skilled tradesmen.Footnote ⁷⁸

The tenement system of housing adopted in American and European cities was considered in elite urban reforming circles to be below the character of the Australian. The author of the introduction to the catalogue for the Second Australian Town Planning Conference in 1918 regretted that despite the feelings of the town planning elite against development of this type, ‘The tenement house or residential flat is making conspicuous headway in Sydney’, supplanting the ‘one family one house ideal’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The planning ideal of dispersion of the population had failed to dictate practical local government action. Sydney City Council experimented with building flats and semi-detached housing for workers in Chippendale and Pyrmont around the time Dacey Garden Suburb was being built.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hennessy regretted that legislators had neglected the recommendations of town planning experts and progressive reformers in this regard:

For Irvine also, flat or tenement living was just slum living by another name and was responsible for destroying family life, which (like national character) would be ideally fostered in ‘self-contained, private, [and] sanitary’ cottages. Irvine was critical of New Yorkers for seeming to prefer tenement life, rendering their children ‘captives of a wholly artificial environment in which they grow into men and women whose thirst for amusement and distraction is insatiable’.Footnote ⁸²

Two witnesses to the Sydney Commission who had dared to express a leaning towards tenements as a solution to the housing problem were reminded of the feeling against this system amongst the working classes. Reverend Francis Boyce favoured tenements but when pressed, agreed that ‘for higher reasons’ he would like to see an increase of cottages in the suburbs rather than congestion in the cities.Footnote ⁸³ The commissioners again revealed their own feelings in the questioning. John Daniel Fitzgerald, the Progressive trade unionist, journalist, politician, and barrister, an outspoken supporter of urban reform, having told the Commission he favoured ‘workmen's mansions’, was asked, ‘You do not want to hoard people in the city if you can get them outside of it?’ He replied that the flat system was inevitable due to conditions of employment in the city, but that in an ideal city, factories would be moved as far out as possible, and the people would live in garden villages.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Commissioners concluded that as well as being costly, the provision of municipal dwellings in cities for the working classes was questionable ‘on physical and moral, no less than on aesthetic grounds’.Footnote ⁸⁵ W. H. Lever, the founder of Port Sunlight, was cited in the report to confirm that ‘The real remedy, and the only one, is dispersion from the centre and the development of suburban areas’.Footnote ⁸⁶

This rejection of European and American urban housing models in favour of dispersion of the population, while based in transnational ideas about the evils of overcrowding, was articulated in terms of a characteristic Australian sense of space and identity. Australian urban reformers seemed incapable of discussing the urban problem without reference to Australia's ‘wide open spaces’ and the desire of the Australian for fresh air and contact with the natural world. In a 1908 article, Labor member for West Sydney and future Prime Minister William Morris Hughes wrote that allotments should be made bigger the farther they were from the city, asserting that, ‘We have plenty of land; let us exhibit some semblance of intelligence and use it’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Taylor's Town Planning for Australia (1914) habitually linked urban reform imperatives to the question of the vast empty spaces of the new nation: ‘We see, in this “glorious land of open spaces,” our cities congested with physically-crushed and mentally-warped men and women’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The final report of the Victorian Commission declared urban crowding to be ‘morally unworthy of a country in which areas are naturally extensive and the population small’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Town planning ideology also held that cities should signify the character of the nation in their architecture and layout. An article by a student of planning in Art and Architecture noted of Australian houses that ‘The porch denotes our hospitality; the wide verandah and balconies, our freedom and natural love of the open air’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sulman similarly described how Australian cities should reflect the national spirit:

Australian cities also required show grounds where stock, produce, and new farm machinery could be exhibited, to reflect the agricultural/pastoral nature of the nation.Footnote ⁹² Another author writing in Art and Architecture in 1908 celebrated the fact that ‘the influence of the Australian bush . . . is slowly but surely having its influence on [the] home’ through architectural design and in the use of native plants in suburban gardens.Footnote ⁹³ This trend for articulating ‘national character’ in architecture and planning provided the context for the ruralising of Australian cities as part of the broader urban reform movement in the period.

Suburbia also came to be linked in various ways to Australia's rural identity and its perceived distinctiveness. While in the post-1945 period, as Hoskins and others have described, the suburb was often viewed as a domestic, stultifying space representing a ‘negation’ of the bush, in the early twentieth-century town planners and urban reformers understood it as a quasi-rural space.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Davison notes, the bourgeois ideal of the picturesque suburb ‘merged with the essentially rural ideals of the aristocratic mansion and estate, on one hand, and the yeoman cottage and small holding, on the other’.Footnote ⁹⁵ A life lived in relative proximity to the city was not necessarily one divorced from the land. It was suggested by the property developer Richard Stanton, who was responsible for the garden suburbs of Haberfield and Rosebery in New South Wales, that people had only to move eight or ten miles out of the city (where they could garden, grow vegetables, and keep poultry) in order to receive the physical and moral benefits of ‘country life’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The importance of urban people understanding the value of the land and its fruits was an underlying strand in the proceedings of the Victorian Commission. R. Pearse, the Mayor of Ballarat, said that ‘I have been a working man all my life, and I have grown enough potatoes on my land to do my family for our own use, and when I see places that have never had a shovel put into the soil, I cannot help thinking something is wrong somewhere’.Footnote ⁹⁷ As Katie Holmes has suggested, home gardens were viewed as beneficial for contented citizenship, and particularly feminine citizenship.Footnote ⁹⁸ Hughes was of the opinion that all houses should have gardens because ‘a house without a garden is just a house; it is not a home’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Home gardens were also linked to issues of ownership, independence and respectability: it was generally agreed in the evidence presented to the Victorian Commission that people would be more inclined to make their land productive and ‘beautify’ their residences by growing flowers if they owned the property, which should be (of course) detached: John Garlick of the Local Government Office in New South Wales told the Victorian Commission that ‘The ideal way to house the people is in single-family cottages each fully detached from its neighbours on both sides . . . having the maximum of light and air and sufficient land to provide space for both flower and vegetable gardens’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Hoskins has described how in the establishment of the Dacey Garden Suburb much emphasis was placed on qualitative space, for example the moral and physical benefits of gardens and parkland. He also linked calls to improve the urban environment and reduce crowding in the inner city to a distinctive national consciousness regarding Australia's spaciousness.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Hoskins fails, however, to note that the quality or character of this improved ‘urban’ space was one heavily influenced by the rural dream. The ideal of the dispersion of the population into suburbs, preferably garden suburbs, rather than tenements or flats, represented an essentially anti-urban approach to urban reform that was couched in ideas about a unique Australian character, landscape, and environment. In this way, elite fantasies about Australia's rural identity and future were imprinted on urban reform. The rural dream was discernible in concrete forms, if we are to understand certain reform efforts as being aimed at bringing ‘country’ elements into the city in the form of parks and gardens; but it was also discursively present, in the sense that people understood the tragedy of Australia's urban problem in terms of the potentiality of its unutilised lands.

In 1918 Bean reiterated the desire of the Australian town planning and urban reform movement to inject elements of rurality into the urban environment. If urban concentration was to remain as an unfortunate fact of modern life, he reflected, then ‘the more those cities resembled the country towns and the country itself the better it would be for the nation’. The preservation of ‘“country” conditions in our cities’ would form the basis of ‘bodily health’ and morality for citizens.Footnote ¹⁰² Australian adherents of town planning ideas were optimistic that changing the urban environment to make it more natural or ‘rural’, in line with the ‘true’ character of the nation, would produce more efficient, valuable citizens. In this, they drew on transnational ideas in urban reform. However, Australian public figures believed these ‘modern’ ideas had particular relevance to Australia, due to its purportedly rural character and history. While Australians tended to overstate the distinctiveness of their identification with the rural, their sense of the uniqueness of Antipodean conditions fostered an approach to cities which, although grounded in borrowed ideas, took on a more marked ‘ruralising’ tendency which sought to make cities part of a projected rural civilisation. The resulting discourse of urban reform was heavily influenced by this enduring rural dream, in contrast to England, where the garden city movement and the wider urban reform movement had turned its attention away from ‘back to the land’ sentiment. This recognition of the connections between urban reform and rural settlement policy in early twentieth-century Australia blurs the traditional distinction between urban and rural history, and tells us something about the ways in which Australians melded transnational responses to the challenge of the city with intensely nationalistic perceptions of the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and identity. Bringing the ‘country into the city’ would ensure that Australia would retain some of the national distinctiveness thought to emanate from the areas beyond the metropolis, as it was catapulted into modernity.