A historical geography of housing crisis in Australia

ABSTRACT

Much of the current debate on Australian housing affordability suggests that it is a new ‘crisis’. Yet Australia’s housing history is littered with a series of housing crises, and since the early days of white settlement in Australia the availability of housing has been an ongoing governmental concern. The focus of this paper is on the 1940s housing crisis that contributed to housing becoming one of the cornerstones of the federal government’s post-war reconstruction agenda. This paper adopts a governmentality theory perspective to explore how Australia’s housing problems and solutions were constructed during this period, through an in-depth textual analysis of key documents produced at the time. The wider project of post-war reconstruction was understood to have important spatial dimensions. As a consequence, both the problematisation of housing and the design of housing policy as a solution to these challenges were distinctly spatial. While the present debate echoes many of the longer-run discourses characterising housing crises, the current axiom that markets are best placed to mediate housing affordability overlooks key lessons from the past: that affordable housing necessarily entails governmental interventions, and geographically imagined problematisations and solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing policy
• 1940s
• governmentality
• archival method
• post-war reconstruction
• rural housing
• population policy

Introduction: the 1940s housing crisis in Australia

In 2017, Australia is said to be faced with a housing affordability crisis (Mitchell 2017; Salt 2017). Rapidly increasing house prices since the beginning of this century have resulted in increasing social, geographical and generational inequalities when it comes to access to, and the distribution of, this essential resource. As community concern has amplified, politicians are scrambling to show that they understand the gravity of the situation (for example, Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison recently pointed to the impact of the housing crisis on national fertility (Massola 2017)) and to find solutions to this problem (such as Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the National Party Barnaby Joyce recommending that the solution to the housing crisis could be found in Australia’s rural regions (Kennedy 2017)). Yet this is not the first time that Australia has faced a housing crisis.

As the Second World War drew to a close and the Australian federal government focused its attention on the significant task of post-war reconstruction, the problem of a shortage of affordable and suitable housing was a major concern (Troy 2012; Macintyre 2015). The cumulative effects of the Great Depression and the channelling of building materials and labour into the war effort had produced a shortage of housing estimated to be in the range of 300 000 dwellings (Commonwealth Housing Commission (CHC) 1944b).¹ During this period, the quantity and quality of housing in Australia was extensively troubled. Dedman (1945), the Minister for Post-war Reconstruction, argued in his introduction to the second reading of the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement Bill (CSHA, 1945), that

…  the principal deficiency in Australian housing policy to date has been in respect of good standard houses to be let at rents within  … [Australian citizens’] capacity to pay.

The characterisation of the 1940s Australian housing crisis as a problem of a lack of dwellings, the high costs or ‘affordability’ of housing, and the poor quality of existing housing stock is well documented, as are the policy solutions that were pursued in response to this crisis (Berry 1999; Troy 2012; Macintyre 2015). Missing from such accounts is an in-depth and critical examination of how the 1940s housing crisis was constructed, especially as a series of geographical problems, and how solutions pursued in response to this crisis were justified. Such discrepancies are argued to be a feature of housing histories more generally (Jacobs 2001; Cole 2006). Responding to this gap in knowledge, I present an in-depth textual analysis of a range of documents from the post-war reconstruction period in Australia. The paper examines how the Australian housing crisis of the 1940s and the solutions proposed during this period were constructed. The 1940s housing crisis and the solutions pursued had an intrinsic spatial focus. Revisiting this past crisis in light of the present debate provides an important perspective on the manner in which regional problems and solutions are framed through governmental rationalities. Although the present debate seems fixated on finding market-based solutions to the current housing crisis, revisiting the 1940s crisis through a critical geographical lens reveals how, when housing markets fail (as history shows they are frequently prone to) governments necessarily seek to intervene in housing, in the process problematising people and places in ways that shape the character of subsequent solutions.

Housing histories

The importance of historical approaches to housing research has been widely recognised (Troy 2000; Jacobs 2001; Cole 2006; Dufty-Jones and Rogers 2015). As Cole (2006, 286) argues succinctly: ‘nothing serves a view of the future better than a sound grasp of the past’. One advantage of adopting historical perspectives and methodologies in housing research is that they offer more holistic understandings of the housing issues that confront populations and policy makers; both past and present (Jacobs 2001). They do so by bringing to such analyses important insights into the social, economic, cultural and political dynamics that are at play when housing problems are scripted and housing policies designed.

Holistic understandings of housing studies are also made possible through historical approaches, which enable the discernment of the continuities and changes, and, from these, the trajectories and patterns, that connect past and present housing issues and the solutions that are pursued or jettisoned in response. Along with temporal scales, a focus on housing histories also allows for connections between geographical scales to be made. It is often not until we have the benefit of hindsight that the significance of those everyday, taken-for-granted, features of house and home, and their wider national significance, come into view (Greig 1995; Blunt 1999; Llewellyn 2004; Lloyd and Johnson 2004). The history of housing shows how the personal sphere of the home is indeed highly political; whether it is the colonial role of the British home and homemaker in Imperial India (Blunt 1999) or the way in which the domestic space of the home was strategically envisaged as part of a nation-building, Fordist economic agenda in post-war Australia (Greig 1995; Lloyd and Johnson 2004).

Yet, in their review of the utility of historical approaches in housing studies, both Jacobs (2001) and Cole (2006) have pointed to a problematic lack of housing histories generally and critical housing histories specifically. This state of affairs is attributed to the way in which housing research is funded through contracts from State and non-government bodies—the heavy emphasis on contemporary policy relevance positions historical perspectives as the indulgent waste of finite research resources (Cole 2006). However, as a result, ‘historical [housing] research, when it is undertaken, is narrow in focus and under theorised’ (Jacobs 2001, 130). Furthermore, without such critical historical perspectives, contemporary housing research—and the policy agenda it advises—is produced in a ‘context devoid of either time or space’ (Cole 2006). This critique applies especially to the manner in which the present housing debate has ensued, in ways that appear blithely ignorant to Australia’s past succession of housing crises.

Despite these limitations, since the 1970s research into housing histories in Australia has developed steadily (Jones 1972; Allport 1980, 1986; Freestone 1988, 2000; Barry 1989; Troy 1990, 2000, 2012; Greig 1995; Hayward 1996; Berry 1999; Dodson 2007; Flanagan 2015; Rogers 2015). A number of them are both theoretically robust and critical in their agendas (Allport 1986; Greig 1995; Berry 1999; Troy 2000; Lloyd and Johnson 2004; Dodson 2007; Flanagan 2015; Rogers 2015). Others, while of a less theoretical and/or critical bent, still provide important accounts, particularly of how policy aspects of Australian housing have developed. A critique that can be made of these histories is that they have tended to provide quite long-range chronological perspectives, frequently covering several decades of policy history (Berry 1999; Allport 1980; Troy 1990, 2012). Those that offer a more fine-grained temporal analysis do so with a view to the wider social policy agenda of the time (Jones 1972; Greig 1995; Freestone 2000). As a result, housing often collapses into the wider themes of social welfare or urban development or narrows down to focus on specific housing tenures (Barry 1989; Hayward 1996). I respond to such concerns here, focusing on a distinctive crisis in time and space, concentrating closely on the manner in which problems and solutions for housing were constructed.

Historical geographies of housing

Another important omission in Australian housing histories is a specific geographic sensibility. As is with the case of Australian housing histories, there is also a long, albeit small, tradition of historical geographies of housing. The spatial nature of housing makes it a logical focus of historical geographers, and the disciplinary focus on space and place manifests in a variety of ways in this literature. First, studies have focused on a miscellany of scales that range from specific rooms within the home (Llewellyn 2004, for instance, focuses on the changing design of the kitchen space in the early twentieth century) to the transcontinental (such as Blunt’s 1999 analysis of the role of the home and homemaking in colonial processes of British India). Second, many historical geographies of home are also characterised by their use of the case study location to provide an empirical fix. This produces not only a diverse range of historical periods of focus but also varied geographical sites ranging from Imperial India (Blunt 1999) to Communist Latvia (Gentile and Sjöberg 2010), from mid-twentieth-century Kenya (Harris 2008) to nineteenth-century Pennsylvania (Mosher and Holdsworth 1992). Last, a key contribution made by historical geographies of housing is the critical perspective offered on how housing and home are products of and important spatial resources—or technologies—within wider political-economic and socio-cultural processes at particular times in specific locations. Examples include Thale (2007) and Rose-Redwood’s (2008) analyses of how the introduction of allocating specific and identifiable numbers to each house became an important means of providing an order to and a means of managing rapidly expanding urban spaces in the USA during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

While there is a small and important tradition of housing histories generally, and in geography specifically, there are some notable gaps. First, historical geographies of housing as a sub-area of housing studies remain small, despite the substantial interest and investment in this field of research both in Australia and internationally. Second, not only are more housing histories needed, but these histories need to be of a more critical nature (Jacobs 2001). And while in the specific area of Australian housing histories there is a notable lack of sensitivity to geographical imagination in policy discourse, when we examine the historical geographies of housing there is a problematic absence of Australian analyses (an exception is Lloyd and Johnson 2004).

This paper responds to these various oversights. It builds on the traditions both within the housing histories and historical geographies of housing literatures, while also seeking to respond to the above critiques. In particular, this paper seeks to extend understandings of the 1940s housing crisis beyond the general account of the crisis as a matter of a lack of dwellings, the high costs or ‘affordability’ of housing, and the poor quality of existing housing stock. It does this by presenting an in-depth and critical examination of the specific ways in which the 1940s housing crisis was presented as, specifically, a problem of ‘environment’, and how the solutions pursued in response to this crisis were justified in particularly spatial terms.

A note on conceptual framing and method before I proceed with the empirical case: the analysis below adopts a governmentality perspective, reflecting the influence of poststructuralist theory in human geography (Prince and Dufty 2009). This perspective views housing as more than an infrastructure used to address the basic human need for shelter. Instead, housing is understood to be both a problem of government and a key technology of power, enlisted to respond to wider processes that seek to govern populations (Dufty-Jones 2012, 2015). Archival research techniques are suited to the ‘analytics of government’ required by a governmentality approach (Dean 1999; Flanagan 2015)—specifically the concern with analysing how governmental relationships are conceived and represented at the macro-policy scale and as a means of identifying the problematisations of governmental strategies. Archived documents—such as reports and other types of policy papers—are considered to be a rich source of data for the housing researcher (Jacobs 2001; Flanagan 2015). Because this research was interested in how the 1940s Australian housing crisis and the solutions to this crisis were constructed, policy documents relating to housing in the lead-up to and during the post-war reconstruction period were collected. A total of 27 documents published between 1935 and 1955 were sourced from the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) and the National Library of Australia (NLA). Documents were selected if they referred specifically to housing and/or housing policies. The archived documents collated were then analysed to identify how housing was constructed as a problem or as a solution during this period and organised thematically using the structure outlined in Box 1.

Box 1. Themes used in the organisation and analysis of archival documents

1. Problematising housing spaces—a lack of affordable and good-quality housing produces a decline in the national birth-rate

2. Problematising housing spaces—a lack of affordable and good-quality housing produces a physical and moral decline in the national population

3. Problematising housing spaces—a lack of affordable and good-quality housing produces political discontent

4. Problematising housing spaces—rural housing

5. Housing solutions—the need for government to intervene in the provision of housing

6. Housing solutions—using housing as a technology to produce positive bio-social outcomes

7. Housing solutions—the importance of ‘where’ to locate housing

8. Housing solutions—housing as a technology of government to decentralise population and industry, ‘stem the drift to the city’, and improve amenities in rural areas

Problematising housing spaces

From the outset, the agenda of post-war reconstruction in Australia had a decidedly spatial flavour. As the Director-General of the Department of Post-war Reconstruction² (DPWR), Dr H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs³ (1944, 1; emphasis added) argued,

…  administration of plans for post-war reconstruction in Australia present two major problems. One is the problem of the individual who will be affected by those plans and the second is the problem of the environment into which he [sic] will have to be fitted.

The debates leading up to and helping to define the housing crisis of the 1940s placed housing very much in Coombs’ ‘environmental’ category. The focus on housing reflected a wider break away from the philanthropic tradition of explaining poverty as the result of the personal inadequacies and moral failings of the poor (Garton 1990). In its place was an environmentally deterministic understanding of poverty. As the federal government’s Joint Committee on Social Services⁴ (JCSS 1941, 5–6) explained: ‘More modern opinion is that poverty is mostly not the fault of the individual but of the environment in which he [sic] lives.’ If the environment of an individual was the cause of her or his poverty, then the home was a central factor contributing to the problem of poverty. In this way, the housing crisis of the 1940s centred on the presentation of housing as a specifically spatial problem. The spatial problematisation of Australian housing during this period fell into two broad categories: (1) there were the negative social outcomes that were attributed as being an outcome of a poor housing environment;⁵ and (2) there were the negative spatial outcomes, specifically the internal migration trend of rural-based populations moving to metropolitan regions, that were attributed to poor rural housing.

Negative social outcomes

One of the central ways in which the 1940s housing crisis was constructed was in relation to the negative social outcomes that were seen to be a result of a shortage of good-quality and affordable housing. These social concerns are summarised in the excerpt below from Federal Senator Keane’s (1938) pamphlet Housing: The Soul of the Nation (18–19):

The home environment is so tremendously important. No humanitarian would be content with the present condition. Countless evils are arising from it. The herding of thousands into flats—merely a reproduction of the menace of congestion in a modern disguise—the falling birth-rate, the susceptibility to epidemics, the diminishing attraction of home life and of family life, the modern discontented outlook, the reported increasing tendency of children to ailments—these are but a few of the symptoms of the malady which it is our responsibility to cure.

Keane identified three key social consequences of a problematic ‘home environment’. First, there was the ‘falling birth-rate’; second, the effect of ‘bad’ housing on the physical and moral health of the population; and third, the political discontent that was understood to be a consequence of a lack of affordable and good-quality housing.

The diminishing rate of growth of the nation’s population had been a long-standing concern in Australia. The cumulative effects of the significant loss of male life during the First World War, the 1918 influenza (‘Spanish Flu’) pandemic, followed by the Great Depression, meant that by the early 1940s more than 15 per cent of women had never married, and those who were married were delaying starting their families or were choosing to have fewer children (Macintyre 2015). The declining national birth-rate was an important social concern that commentators of the period associated with the problem of housing spaces. For example, social reformer and housing policy advocate Oswald ‘Oz’ Barnett (1944, 7)⁶ linked a declining national birth-rate with a lack of quality and affordable housing, arguing that ‘this tragic lack of decent dwellings is rapidly leading us along the road to national race suicide’. An environmentally deterministic understanding of housing and population growth was also presented by the CHC (1944a, 15), which reasoned that the ‘deplorable conditions’ of affordable housing stock available was ‘one of the major factors in the limitation of families’ and the ‘alarming decline in the Australian birth-rate’. The association of a declining national birth-rate and the ‘housing problem’ was further spatialised by being argued to be a greater issue in metropolitan regions than in rural areas. For example, Luker (1947, 86), a civil engineer and town planner in New South Wales (NSW), observed that the decline in the national fertility was ‘naturally more apparent in the capital cities than in the country’.

The concern surrounding the links between housing and the national birth-rate related more broadly to the White Australia policy.⁷ The influence of the White Australia policy during this time can be seen in the way that wartime Prime Minister John Curtin reminded Australians in 1941 that the continent remained ‘an outpost of the British race’ (Curtin 1941). With immigration a vexed issue during the reconstruction period, politicians and policy makers looked to the potential of natural increase as a means of population growth (Macintyre 2015). Furthermore, the experiences of the Second World War in the Pacific region had also left Australians (governments and citizens alike) feeling vulnerable. This sense of isolation was fed and made worse by the racialised nature of the Second World War and the backdrop of the White Australia policy (Saunders 1994). A larger population located beyond the metropolitan regions of the east coast was seen to be an important insurance policy for Australia’s defence in potential future wars (Meaney 1995).

The connection made between housing and the national birth-rate was also important in terms of re-establishing a heteropatriarchal domestic order as the Second World War drew to a close (Johnson 2000; Gorman-Murray 2007). As outlined above, housing was understood to be an important incentive to encourage women to leave the paid workforce and return to the home (Allport 1986; Lloyd and Johnson 2004). This was both to have babies, and thereby contribute to the overall effort of increasing the national birth-rate, and also to free up paid work within the formal economy for returning servicemen. In the long run this heteropatriarchal socio-economic order was also necessary to fuel the Keynesian–Fordist system of economic development that the Australian federal government was determined to pursue by providing both a labour force and a consumer market to generate and sustain economic growth (Allport 1986; Greig 1995; Johnson 2000).

The second social concern with problematic housing spaces in 1940s Australia was the understanding that a lack of affordable and good-quality housing produced both a physical and a moral decline in the national population. Physically, the housing problem in Australia was understood to produce health problems for all occupants of poor-quality and overcrowded housing. According to the Council of Social Services NSW⁸ (COSSNSW 1944, 9),

…  it has been shown that the death rate, infantile mortality rate and the death rates for measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, heart disease and diseases of the respiratory organs are usually all considerably higher in areas of bad housing than in areas of good housing.

It was also argued that the housing problem in Australia not only undermined the physical health of the national population but also citizens’ moral health. Substandard housing was seen to encourage ‘crime’ and ‘delinquency’, and also undermined ‘ordinary decency’ (COSSNSW 1944). Governmental concerns with the threat to ‘moral standards’ that the Australian housing problem posed were also related to a broader concern with population size. A decline in ‘moral standards’ was understood to undermine important social institutions such as ‘marriage’ and the ‘family’. Both of these were considered essential social institutions as they made population growth economically viable (Johnson 2000).

The final social concern about a lack of affordable and good-quality housing in the 1940s housing crisis was that it was understood to produce political discontent amongst the national population. This concern was related to broader challenges that liberal-democratic institutions were facing during this period, specifically the challenges that many democracies faced with the emergence of class-based political movements and socialist alternatives to government. These had steadily gained currency in Australia and other countries around the world since the late nineteenth century. For example, Barnett, Burt, and Heath (1944, 65,⁹ see Plate 1) noted ‘an increasingly bitter contest between an expanding capitalism on one side, with labour on the other side intent on wresting from capitalism a greater share of the fruits of invention and of efficiency’. Links between political discontent and the ‘housing problem’ were also made at this time. COSSNSW (1944, 8) explained that ‘Bad housing fosters the growth of anti-democratic opinion—the frame of mind of the “have not”.’ Barnett (1944, 2) argued that the fight for freedom was now being waged in regards to housing:

The fight is centring on the struggles for houses for the people, houses that are fit for human beings to occupy, houses that they can rent, or buy, at prices within their capacity to pay.

In other words, freedom was understood to be not only a matter of the ‘right to work’ but also in terms of the ‘right’ to access affordable and good-quality housing.

Plate 1. Cover page of the pamphlet written by Oswald ‘Oz’ Barnett, Oswald ‘Ossie’ Burt, and Frank Heath (1944), We Must Go On: A Study in Planned Reconstruction and Housing (Melbourne: The Book Depot).

Poor rural housing as a ‘drift to the city’

The primary spatial problem with Australian regions during this period was a perceived ‘faulty distribution’ of the national population. As Prime Minister, Curtin (1944, cited in Conference of State and Federal Ministers, in Department of Post-War Reconstruction (DPWR) 1949, 3) argued: ‘too many of our people are concentrated in limited areas’. More specifically, the problem was that too many individuals were living in the metropolitan regions of Australia. According to the JCSS (1942, 16): ‘Australia today suffers from the fact that half the population is concentrated in a few metropolitan centres.’ Likewise, Luker (1947, 86) also identified that ‘the lack of balance between the urban and rural population is outstanding’. Again, the concern with the distribution of the national population was deeply connected with the White Australia policy and understandings of Australia as a bastion of British racial purity located in the South Pacific. From this perspective, a poorly distributed national population left the Australian nation-state vulnerable to invasion by the ‘Yellow Peril’ (Meaney 1995).

Following the wider concern with the distribution of the national population—and in addition to the social problems that a poor housing environment was considered to produce—a lack of housing and the poor standard of housing in rural areas, in particular, at this time were argued to be key causes of the problem of the population ‘drift to the city’. As the report by the CHC (1944b, 107) outlined, rural regions in Australia were seen to be deficient in terms of ‘modern’ amenities such as electricity, water, recreational facilities and health services. However, rural Australia’s greatest deficiency regarding general facilities was housing.

The problem of rural housing during this period was both a quantity and a quality issue. The shortage in housing, noted by both Ramsey (1945)¹⁰ and the CHC (1944a, 38), was understood to be a product of ‘distance from centres where building materials are manufactured’ and a general lack of labour, which resulted in higher building costs for housing in rural areas. As Ramsey (1945) further explained, this situation was aggravated by low rents, which acted as a further disincentive to build housing in rural regions. In addition to the problem of quantity, the quality of rural housing was also problematised. For example, Barnett, Burt, and Heath (1944, 16) argued that ‘country housing is too often of the “shack” type of shelter, hardly worthy of the name “house”, and certainly not worthy of being described as a home’. In a similar vein, Tully (1953, 1), an agricultural scientist in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) at the time, described housing in rural Australia as ‘our rural slums’. Both Tully (1953) and Barnett, Burt, and Heath (1944) argued that this poor standard of housing in rural regions amplified the rural population ‘drift to the city’.

Housing as a technology of government in the planning of a post-war reconstruction

The post-war expectation that governments should intervene in social and economic processes to optimise the freedom and opportunities of individual citizens led to a reworking of the relationship between housing and governance. Housing was not only a problem that needed solving in terms of post-war reconstruction. It was also viewed as an important mechanism to solve other government problems. This technical aspect of housing was perhaps no more obvious than in architect and town planner Rudduck’s (1947, 20)¹¹ commentary/speech: ‘Housing is an important instrument of planning social policy  …  and in the successful application of decentralisation.’ There were two ways in which housing was spatially rationalised to be a solution to wider government problems during this period: as a solution to both social and regional problems.

Housing as a solution to social problems

If ‘bad’ housing (costly and poorly structured and/or maintained housing) was a source of problematic social outcomes in Australia, then it was envisaged in the post-war reconstruction period that ‘good’ housing (affordable and new/high-quality housing) would provide the antidote to these same problems. In this way, ‘good’ housing was envisaged as a technology of government to counteract perceived negative social outcomes of poor housing, and thereby produce positive social outcomes. The link between ‘good’ housing and desirable social outcomes was made explicitly by Downing (1948, 86)¹², an economist who worked for the DPWR in the early 1940s, who argued that the ‘building of badly-needed houses’ formed part of the solution to a ‘vicious cycle’ of under-employment and over-crowded slum conditions that were seen to produce ‘crime, vice, disease and ugliness’. For the JCSS (1942, 3):

…  without provision of housing for all on such a scale we cannot hope to establish and maintain the proper standards of public health, child welfare, and morality, which are prerequisites to the building up of a healthy, virile and great people.

Government intervention in the provision of housing ‘for all’ would therefore assist in ensuring that the national population was healthy both physically and morally. The CHC (1944a, 15) also believed that ‘any government-sponsored dwelling’ would lead to the ‘satisfactory mental and physical development’ of those living within these home-spaces. Good housing was therefore used as a means of improving the physical health and morality of the national population. This, in turn, was argued to improve the ‘nation’s productive effort’ and its ‘power of survival’. Thus, housing was to be used to correct what was understood to be the prevailing national trend towards ‘racial extinction and national decline’ (Luker 1947, 99).

Housing as a solution to regional problems

The second way in which housing was envisaged as a spatial technology of government was as a solution to regional problems. Where to locate housing was of as much concern to Australian governments as the need to address the shortage in affordable and good-quality housing. The concern with where to locate housing (on a variety of spatial scales) was related to the broader governmental objectives of regional planning and reconstruction. Barnett (1942, 1) noted that in relation to housing and reconstruction in Australia, ‘there is the question of where to build’ (emphasis added). Similarly Barnett, Burt, and Heath (1944, 12) also observed that ‘the success of National Reconstruction depends largely on how and where we house our people’ (emphasis added). Indeed, a number of commentators at this time argued that the location of housing built through government schemes during this period was as important as addressing housing shortage. Luker (1947, 82–83) argued that ‘what is of greater significance is that they [the new houses] should be built in the right place’. This attitude was also expressed by Rudduck (1947, 1), who advised that

… the question of the location of housing schemes will, in the long run, prove of far greater significance than the passing shortage.

These attitudes were also reflected by government departments at this time. The CHC (1944b, 27) noted that ‘it is impossible to separate housing from a consideration of the broader aspects of the life of the people—from such questions, as how and where they earn their living, and how and where they spend their leisure’ (emphasis added). Similarly, the federal Department of Works and Housing¹³ (DWH 1949, 6) identified that one of the objectives of the first Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement was the ‘Decentralisation and development of country towns’. The concern about ‘where’ housing should be located was part of a broader anxiety about regional problems, and specifically the perceived ‘faulty distribution’ of the national population and the lack of spatial equity between rural and metropolitan regions. Housing was understood to provide a solution to these problems.

As politicians and policy makers responded to the housing crisis of the 1940s, housing was cast in the role of a technology of government that could be used to assist regional planning priorities of decentralising metropolitan-based populations and industries into rural areas. Through the provision of sufficient, affordable and good-quality housing, housing was also envisaged as a means of improving the attractiveness of rural locations. Because of this imperative, the provision of government-subsidised housing in rural locations became a priority. The DWH (1949, 6) elaborated the role of housing in pursing regional planning goals:

…  the Commonwealth readily makes funds available under the Agreement [the CSHA] to build houses in provincial towns, where new industries are to be established or transferred from metropolitan areas. There projects will improve the standard of housing in the country towns, attract labour to new industries in the country, and help to counteract the ‘drift to the cities’; that has reduced the population of our rural areas to an alarming degree.

Such an objective of a national housing program was also envisaged by the JCSS (1942, 16) which argued that

If planning of housing on a large scale is to achieve successful results, it must form part of a general scheme for the post war economic development of the country. Any scheme which leaves out of account the manner in which the occupants of new centres of housing  …  are to earn their livelihood will obviously fail.

Plate 2 and Figure 1 provide an insight into the regional planning priorities of the NSW Housing Commission. Plate 2, originally in the 1947/48 Annual Report of the NSW Housing Commission, was of a recently completed ‘fibro cottage’ in the town of Junee. The caption to the photo declared that ‘Government homes are being erected in more than a hundred country towns’, emphasising the extent and geographical dispersal of the Commission’s building program. The tree-lined street, wide frontage of the homes and ample pedestrian through space all depict an idyllic semi-rural living environment that fitted with the country-minded discourses of the day.

Plate 2. ‘Government homes are being erected in more than a hundred country towns. Photograph shows a timber-framed cottage at Junee’, 1948. Source: Housing Commission of NSW (1948), Annual Report 1947/48 (Sydney: Government Printer), 28.

Figure 1. Activities of the NSW Housing Commission in Country Districts, 1946. Source: Housing Commission of NSW (1946), Annual Report 1945/46 (Sydney: Government Printer), 8.

The map in Figure 1 is a pictorial account of the NSW Housing Commission’s commitment to decentralising housing. The map demonstrates the aspirations of the Commission to geographically disperse public housing allocations in NSW.

The provision of sufficient, affordable and good-quality housing in rural areas was thus necessary as a means of attracting people (as workers) to a region. Logically, then, in attracting workers to rural areas, industry would also willingly decentralise to such regions. As Barnett, Burt, and Heath (1944, 20–21) argued:

No large-scale scheme to house the people of the State can proceed without a plan to decentralise and recentralise industry and population  …  There must be a simultaneous development of industry and housing in country areas.

As the above quote by the DWH also noted, housing was also designed to ‘stem the drift’ of the national population away from rural areas by making rural regions more ‘attractive’. Improving the supply of affordable and good-quality housing in rural regions meant people would find metropolitan locations less ‘attractive’. For Barnett (1942, 1), it was ‘equally obvious that to stop this drift, or to reverse it, we must make the country more attractive  …  Good houses, with electricity, water and sewerage, must be provided in country districts.’ Barnett and Burt (1942, 86; see Plate 3) argued that ‘If we wish to stem the drift to the city, we must first of all provide the rural worker with decent housing at a rent within his capacity to pay.’

Plate 3. Cover page of the pamphlet written by Oswald ‘Oz’ Barnett and Oswald ‘Ossie’ Burt (1942), Housing the Australian Nation (Melbourne: Ruskin Press).

Again, rural areas were made the priority in terms of providing housing, despite associated costs:

In general if people are to live contentedly in extra-metropolitan towns they must, among other things, have houses as good or better than those offered in the city at comparable rents (or capital costs) …  Since the cost of building is generally higher in the country than in the city, if the community is serious about decentralisation it must be prepared to make some subsidy towards country building. (Ramsay 1945, 93)

The provision of affordable and good-quality housing in rural regions was also justified in terms of spatial equity. Spatial equity was measured in terms of what was available in metropolitan centres and ensuring that facilities and services in rural regions adhered to the same standards. The CHC (1944a, 38) maintained that ‘The standard of housing in rural townships must be improved—there is no reason why the standard should be inferior to that in cities and larger towns.’ The Commonwealth Housing Commission (1944b, 103) also argued that

We consider that, as far as possible, the housing standards in rural areas should be comparable to those in urban areas  …  We wish  …  to make it clear at the outset that we consider there should be no distinction between the country and town dweller in regard to standards of housing.

It was reasoned that if the Australian population could expect to find rural housing to the equivalent standard of that provided in metropolitan locations then it followed that they would naturally choose to live in rural regions over the city.

The 1940s marked a watershed period in Australia’s housing policy history (Troy 2012). Freestone (2012) describes the 1940s as the ‘highpoint for inclusionary housing policy’ in Australia. This was a period when governmental understandings of the role of housing were radically reshaped in Australia. Housing moved away from being viewed as a product that the market was best placed to provide and allocate, and was reimagined as a ‘right’ of every Australian—a right that governments were now prepared to defend. However, bound up within the idea of housing as a right was a deeper idea of the spatial. Housing was not only a problem of space and place but it also offered a unique way to govern spaces and remake places.

Conclusions

In his extensive account of Australia’s experience of post-war reconstruction, Macintyre (2015, 179) recounts, ‘Even before Coombs took up duties as Director-General [of the Department of Post-war Reconstruction], he declared that: “it is in the home that our reconstruction must begin”.’ The 1940s housing crisis in Australia made housing a central focus of post-war reconstruction efforts. However, the problems of housing—and the solutions needed—went beyond simply being a matter of a lack of dwellings, the high costs or ‘affordability’ of housing, and the poor quality of existing housing stock.

In providing a geographical perspective on a particular point in Australia’s housing history, this paper has sought to respond to specific gaps and the wider evaluations of this literature as lacking critical historical perspectives. In so doing, this paper has shown how housing was spatially problematised and rationalised as a solution to the wider challenges confronting the Australian federal government as it planned for what would become known as the ‘long boom’.

Housing was a problem of environment in that it was perceived that poor home environments prevented families from having children, produced both poor physical and moral health in the population, and led to wider political discontent. While rural spaces were understood to be less prone to the above social problems, housing was also a specifically rural problem in that substandard rural housing was understood to encourage a population ‘drift to the city’.

Good housing—housing that was affordable and of a high quality—was also presented as the solution to these problems. Good housing would improve the ‘mental and physical development’ of the national population. Furthermore, if the new housing that was needed happened to be built in rural regions—thereby bringing rural housing up to improved national standards—then problems of low national fertility and patterns of internal migration away from rural areas would be arrested and reversed in support of wider decentralisation efforts.

Jacobs (2001, 130) argues that while housing histories are of interest in their own right, this type of housing research is also ‘helpful in highlighting how past discourses and ideas retain influence on the way contemporary social commentators interpret concepts’. As the current debates around housing affordability in Australia escalate, it is easy to forget that Australia has previously experienced ‘crises’ in housing. Yet there are also important differences. The housing crisis in 2017 is not a product of decades of deprivation brought about by economic depression and world-wide armed conflict. Rather, it is the opposite: the result of decades of economic growth, coming at the end, not the beginning, of a ‘long boom’.

History tells us that housing holds a unique place in the Australian psyche. An important part of this wider national imagination around housing is the role it plays in making our urban and regional environments work—economically, socially and culturally—for the Australian people. Unlike much of the 2017 debate, which is premised on the hope that market-based mechanisms can solve affordability problems, a key lesson from the past is that housing necessarily entails governmental interventions, with geographically imagined problematisations and solutions. As politicians grapple with today’s housing crisis it is important to remember that housing is not only the problem but, for many Australians, is also the solution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Rae Dufty-Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1667-331X

Notes

1 The CHC was the second of the three Commissions established by the Department of Post-war Reconstruction (DPWR). The CHC was created in 1943. It was given a wide charter which included investigating and reporting on:

The necessary actions to provide adequate housing, especially in areas where acute shortages existed. Ensuring inexpensive housing for persons of limited means and replacing slums and substandard dwellings. The social aspects of housing, including the provision of community services, the adoption of housing plans to town and regional planning, the location of industry, etc. Possible economies in building construction and in the prices of dwellings. The need for housing research.

2 The DPWR was established in December 1942. Its primary functions were to develop plans for the transition from a war-time to a peace-time economy both for individuals in the services and in war production and for the economy itself. The DPWR was essentially a planning and coordinating department and this role is demonstrated by its first and primary function:

 …  to plan, where necessary in collaboration with other Commonwealth Departments, for post-war reconstruction, particularly in relation to:

1. the re-establishment and advancement of members of the fighting services; and the transfer of workers from war to civil employment.

2. the maintenance and expansion of employment and the national income and the prevention of unemployment.

3. the prevention of want, the raising of the standard of living, and the attainment of social security.

4. the development and conservation of the resources of the Commonwealth.

5. the use or disposal of buildings, materials, etc. assigned to war purposes and no longer required for those purposes. (National Archives of Australia 1987)

The DPWR remained active until 1950 and was run predominantly by H. C. Coombs, a Keynesian economist (later to become the first Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia).

3 Dr Coombs was Director of Rationing in 1942 and in 1943 became Director-General of the Department of Post-war Reconstruction until 1949.

4 Following a visit by the Prime Minister (R. G. Menzies) to Britain, the JCSS was created in 1941. Impressed by the war effort in Britain, Menzies sought to strengthen Australia's war effort and envisaged the JCSS, through its investigations and recommendations, as a means of advising this strategy. The terms of reference for the JCSS were ‘To enquire into, and from time to time, report upon the ways and means of improving social and living conditions in Australia and rectifying anomalies in existing legislation’ (National Archives of Australia 1978). The JCSS produced nine reports between September 1941 and July 1946; the two reports this research focuses on are: The First Interim Report (May 1941) and The Fourth Interim Report: Housing in Australia (May 1942).

5 Cf. Freestone (2000) regarding similar tropes emerging in housing debates in early twentieth-century Australia.

6 Oswald (‘Oz’) Frederick Barnett was a social reformer who sought to practically apply his Methodist principles. He was concerned, both as an activist and researcher, with the inner-city ‘slums’ of Melbourne. His master's thesis (1931) on Melbourne's ‘slums’ gave him additional authority on these issues. His research and activist work resulted in the Victorian Premier at that time visiting these areas and appointing a Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board. Barnett was also involved in the early years of the Victorian Housing Commission. He made frequent contributions on the issues of housing and poverty through public addresses, newspaper articles and pamphlets. This document is one of those many pamphlets.

7 The White Australia policy was an umbrella policy of non-European exclusion that dominated Australia's formal stance on immigration and Indigenous affairs from 1901 until the multicultural policies of the 1970s (Kamp 2010). It is important to recognise that the White Australia policy was both a population and an industry policy. That is, informed by ideas of racial superiority, the White Australia policy sought to engineer the composition of the Australian population to be primarily Anglo-Celtic. However, it was also part of the early labour tradition in Australia with the agenda of protecting the wages of male workers (Jupp 1995).

8 An advocacy group, the Council of Social Services of NSW was established in 1935. This report was written for the CHC as a contribution to the Commission's investigation of the housing issues in Australia.

9 Oswald (Ossie) Walter Burt was a solicitor and company director who became involved in the housing campaigns of Oz Barnett's in 1934 and was part of the groups that lobbied the Victorian government to establish the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board in 1936. He wrote this document with Barnett and We Must Go On with Barnett and Heath (see below). This document was the sixth of a series of pamphlets to be published by the Research Group of the Left Book Club of Victoria. The objective of the Club was to ‘learn the facts of matters of immediate importance, and to make these facts as widely known as possible’.

10 Alexander Maurice Ramsay was a public servant who worked briefly for the DPWR but is better known for his work as the General Manager of the South Australian Housing Trust.

11 Grenfell Rudduck was an architect and town planner who provided theoretical and technical advice on planning for housing, and worked for the regional planning branch of the DPWR.

12 Richard Ivan Downing was an economist who worked for the DPWR in the early 1940s.

13 The Department of Works and Housing was established in 1945. Its expanded role in housing was to provide a federal administrative body for the CSHA and other housing policy issues.