Inconvenient Truths: Framing an Architectural History for Cold War Australia

ABSTRACT

To date, Australia’s architectural histories have been silent on the Cold War politics of post-war modernism. For the most part, historians have documented production without considering the broader geo-political moment in which the nation found itself after World War II. Recent transnational architectural histories focus on relationships that the United States and the former USSR forged between themselves and individually with other countries. In so doing, canonical accounts of post-war modernism have been brought into question and architectural practice implicated in broader global shifts of power, economy, and control. Some historians have concentrated on transatlantic connections, others have drawn peripheral modernisms into relief as a series of successive colonial modernisms. This paper explores aspects of Australia’s post-war architectural production that might be regarded as inconvenient truths and implicated in a larger strategic geo-political and economic project. It suggests that the Cold War drew a net across Australia’s entire landscape – urban and remote, seen and unseen. Australia was a willing collaborator. Under the auspices of post-war recovery and with a new-found purpose in the region, projects of extraction, energy, defence, and diplomacy ‘rebuilt’ the nation with a labour force contingent on migration - and architectural modernism was intrinsic to that project.

Author’s Note

Research for this paper commenced, while the author held the position of Gough Whitlam Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2019-2020 and emerged from a graduate seminar on Australian-US architectural connections taught by the author in the Spring Semester of 2020. Special thanks to graduate students Justin Cawley, Imogen Howe, and Kevin Liu for helping to sharpen my arguments through criticism and discussion. Further acknowledgement and thanks are due to the broader SAHANZ community, whose scholarship over the last decade underpins much of the data presented here. This paper builds on the shoulders of that research. A much abridged version of this paper was presented at the 37th Annual SAHANZ Conference held virtually 18-25 November 2020.

Notes

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14. British engineering consultants Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners designed the test facilities and the work was carried out by the Kwinana Construction Group (KCG).

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17. Goad, “Mary Kathleen and Weipa,” 42–59.

18. Another important smelter site was Bell Bay, Tasmania (1955-), the first aluminium smelter constructed in the Southern Hemisphere after World War II.

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21. Saniga, “Cold War Manifestations in Australia,” 605.

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29. Bettie, “The Fulbright Program and American Public Diplomacy,” 12, 39–40, 60, 67.

30. Scriver & Srivastava, “Building a New University in Cold-War Australia,” 1–18; Scriver & Srivastava, “Institutionalising the Profession in Post-Colonial Malaysia,” 582–591.

31. J. Plimsoll, Memo to Watt, 18 February 1955, A1838, TS 383/1/1/1, part 1, NAA, quoted in D. Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: ANU Press, 2010), 140.

32. Gower, “Image Building,” 194.

33. M. Fowler, “Papuan Transformations: Architectural Reflections on Colonialism – The Modern Colony, the Purari, the Orokolo, and the Motu – cultural and architectural transactions, 1884–1975,” PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2004.