Rethinking Australian natural gardens and national identity1950—1979

摘要

In Australia following the Second World War, shifting dynamics between Britain and Australia alongside rapid social transformation and large-scale environmental change brought significant changes to Australian cultural life, prompting the renegotiation of Australia's national identity. Garden historians are increasingly aware that during this same period a new kind of garden also began to emerge in Australia.1 Over an approximately three-decade period spanning the r950s through the 1970s, garden writers and garden and landscape designers began exploring new concepts for Australian gardens and designed landscapes. Seeking a design ethos that would be recognized as identifiably Australian, they looked to Australian native flora and indigenous landscape themes for inspiration. The gardens that emerged differed markedly from the gardens and gardening practices that were part of Australia's Anglo-European cultural inheritance. They have been described anecdotally as 'backyards assiduously cultivated tomimic the Australian bush'.2 They formed a distinctive sequence of quadrilateral shapes amongst a complex suburban patchwork of 'micro-ecosystems' which mirrored the diverse heritages and traditions of Australia's post-war Anglo-Australian and migrant population.Unifying this diversity of gardening patterns in the post-war suburban landscape is the function of the garden as a space in which associations with specific homelands, cultures, and communities could be imagined and constructed.4 This follows historian Anne Helmreich's conception of the garden as both cultural product and 'artefact' of a particular set of cultural practices.5 The imagined gardens and the gardening literature which form the focus of this article also functioned as spaces in which a relationship with thenatural Australian environment could be explored and developed, and in which differentiation from a remote British culture could be articulated. In this regard, they functioned as a kind of'contact zone', in the sense defined by Mary Louise Pratt 'as social spaces where cultures' come together, whereby the garden provides a space in which relationships between cultures and between cultures and place can be negotiated.