Author Archive for Charles Pickett

Broken dreams and dioramas

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Photo by Jean-Francois Lanzarone, Powerhouse Museum

A couple of media stories set me thinking about the image of museums. One (which you may well have come across) concerned a museum and its touring exhibition which have gained an extraordinary amount of press. I refer to the Museum of Broken Relationships, founded by a Zagreb couple out of the ruins of their own relationship.

Artist Drazen Grubisic and film producer Olinka Vistica began collecting six years ago when dividing their own possessions. Books and furniture could be divvied up but what about a small wind-up white rabbit, for some reason a token of their former relationship?

The white rabbit became the Museum’s first artefact. It’s been joined by an array of artefacts encompassing the banal (mainly) to the profound and alarming. The collection includes an axe used to smash up an ex-lover’s flat, a teddy with “I love you” on its chest accompanied by a note reading, “I love you. WHAT A LIE! DAMN LIES, DAMN LIES!’ a set of brain scans, a tin of ‘Love incense’ (the label reads: ‘Doesn’t work’), and a red candy g-string.

With this unlikely collection the MOBR has progressed to a permanent and well-visited gallery in Zagreb plus a hugely successful touring show currently packing them in at Covent Garden, London.

Donations and accompanying labels are invited; most of the artefacts need the latter to work. My favourite label (accompanying a frisbee) reads

Darling, should you ever get the ridiculous idea to walk into a cultural institution like a museum for the first time in your life, you’ll remember me.

On one level the MOBR is completely trivial and opportunistic; on another its connection to some of our deepest feelings obviously gives it a strong appeal.

What does its success tell us about museums and their publics? Mainly that a lot of people would like a chance to be Tracey Emin. Or Glenn Close in boiled bunny mode. Or, less cynically, that a combination of voyeurism, interactivity and savvy curatorship is a sure fire winner. And that cultural/moral improvement is not essential to successful exhibitions.

By the way if you have artefacts to donate the MOBR can be contacted here.

Photography by Jean-Francois Lanzarone, Powerhouse Museum

The other muse-inducing source was a story in the New Yorker about the restoration of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. I don’t much like stuffed animals or skeletons so I haven’t visited this museum or many others of its genre, but dioramas are another matter. For a start they have an interesting history – for example some of the first European views of Sydney were created for dioramas, the travel docos of their day.

More significantly, the Night at the Museum movie franchise (the first edition thereof was set at the American Museum of Natural History) makes it clear that despite decades of change, the diorama and its artefacts remain a powerful part of the museum idea to a lot of people. Sure, if you have to watch Ben Stiller in a museum, it’s obviously going to work better if there are heaps of fake animals and people ready to escape their dioramas after hours.

I’m still not sure if the result is merely further evidence of the cultural irrelevance of contemporary US cinema (the mainstream part, anyway) – why didn’t they put Stiller in a museum which would have him chased by more interesting and various things? The trouble with this argument is that NATM 2 apparently (I haven’t seen it) centres on a battle to save the old dummies from the Smithsonian, where such things aren’t appropriately valued. To inhabitants of the post-Pompidou museum world, it’s a message worth thinking about, even if you don’t like dioramas.

Winners and losers: the Venice Biennale pavilion

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Photograph by Oleg Sidorenko. Shared by Creative Commons License

A far swag of the world’s most famous buildings are the result of design competitions – completed winners include Florence’s Duomo, the White House, the Paris Opera, the Westminster Houses of Parliament, the Reichstag (twice) and the Centre Pompidou.

Closer to home, winners include Federation Square, both Australian Parliament Houses, the Sydney and Canberra War Memorials and the Sydney Opera House. Compared to these, the just-announced competition for a new Venice Biennale pavilion is small cheese. But it has already generated plenty of heat, including a well-subscribed petition that the competition should be open to all Australian architects rather than merely those with an international pedigree.

A typical response came from Don Bates, one of the architects responsible for Fed Square:

We had never built anything before Fed Square…Had Fed Square gone down that [experience-only] route – and it’s a much more complex project than Venice biennale pavilion – then we wouldn’t have been selected…Coming up with something that really makes us rethink what an exhibitions space can be is about imagination. It’s not about previous history and background and a big CV and a big portfolio of projects that may seem similar.

There’s no question that numerous successful architects have gained their big break via competition. Among design archives held by the Powerhouse those of John Andrews and Ken Woolley document careers sparked by this way. Andrews was shortlisted in 1958 for the Toronto City Hall contest and worked with the successful entrant, setting off his glowing North American career. At the same time Ken Woolley was already involved with major projects for the NSW Government Architect, but in terms of public profile this achievement paled compared to his and Michael Dysart’s success in the 1958 Australian Women’s Weekly’s ‘Australian Family Home Competition’.

Photography by Jean-Francois Lanzarone, Powerhouse Museum

The Sydney Opera House is the best known Australian example of a competition career breakthrough. In contrast to Joern Utzon, Walter and Marion Griffin had already established careers in Chicago when the Canberra competition was won in 1914. But all three had ample opportunity to reflect ruefully on the pitfalls of ‘success’. They are far from unique, as politics frequently trump competition success and many of architecture’s biggest names – including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Zaha Hadid – have seen their competition winners by-passed.

Open competitions for public buildings remain the norm in many European nations; in France competition is compulsory for public projects of significant value. Jean Nouvel, like Utzon a serial competition also-ran until his 1981 breakthrough with the Institut du monde Arabe, is an example of the talent that can be unearthed this way. However the French system is often criticised for focussing architecture towards juries rather than clients.

In Australia and other Anglophone societies this career path is under threat as limited competitions a la Venice Biennale become common. One reason is the possibility of an open competition producing no commercially, politically or aesthetically appropriate winner. As building regulations, approval processes and finance become more complex design is only one of the factors to be considered by competition juries. Big names and established firms have experience at negotiating these tangles.

But even established architects aren’t necessarily good at this sort of thing: Daniel Libeskind made his name with his winning design for the Berlin Jewish Museum, but his reputation or skills haven’t stopped him being sidelined in the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in New York, despite his Freedom Tower concept being chosen from an initial ideas contest.

Photography by MArinco Kojdanovski, Powerhouse Museum

At a less exalted level the Powerhouse’s neighbour the Ian Thorpe pool initially went to an open competition although none of the shortlisted entrants were judged to meet the required ‘functional and budget criteria’. The disappointed architects were even less impressed when a competition of three invited firms (none of which had entered the open contest) chose the Harry Seidler design.

However the main factor is Australian governments’ current preference for privately funded design and constructs contracts, removing the financial risk (and design) from the public sphere. Both the Sydney Olympics and the Barangaroo contests saw winners ignored in favour of private contracts. Of the Olympic venues only the Dunc Gray Velodrome design was a competition winner, while Barangaroo saw the corporate charms of Lend Lease triumph over the competition victor (dismissed as a ‘sub-division plan’ by Paul Keating). Barangaroo may yet prove the failings of this approach.

None of these considerations are relevant to the Australian pavilion, a small (320 square metres, only slightly larger than McMansion size) but prestigious project. On the face of it, perfect for an open competition.

Cities Reborn

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Photography by David Mist. David Mist Archive, Powerhouse Museum

There’s been some comment lately about the fact that for the first time, more than half of the human race lives in cities. At the same time, cities are being seen again in a generally positive light. Some, including London and New York, are growing once more after a few decades of decline.

It hasn’t always been so: a century ago town planners and politicians were arguing that crowded, polluted, slum-ridden cities should be replaced by low-density ‘Garden suburbs’, pub-less, factory-less expanses of cottages. Sydney has some of the world’s first planned garden suburbs – Haberfield, parts of Kensington and Botany – though they are now barely distinguishable from the rest.

During the 1920s Le Corbusier advocated a ‘Radiant City’ of parks and apartment blocks connected by freeways. This idea was not as absurd as it seems today; much of Modernist architecture was developed from the design of 1920s social housing estates in central Europe and many of these have been socially as well as architecturally successful – Siemensstadt and five other Berlin Modernist housing estates are now World Heritage sites. But this housing/planning model was not an adequate basis for a complete city.

The Museum’s collection holds an archive from an advocate of the Modernist city: Charles Frederick Beauvais was a designer for Singer, Crossley and other British car makers before moving to Sydney in 1937. During the 1940s Charles Beauvais became a newspaper and magazine favourite and in numerous illustrated articles he extolled the potential of transport technologies to transform city life. In 1947 the Atlantic Union Oil Company asked Beauvais to create a model city of the future for the Easter Show. Like most such concepts, Beauvais’ ideal metropolis consists of high-speed transport freeways connecting tall buildings and parks.

Atlantic Union Oil 'City of the Future' exhibition at Royal Agricultural Show, designed Charles Frederick Beauvais, photograph Russell Roberts, Sydney, 1947

By the 1960s and 1970s grand scale town planning was on the nose, and the future of cities was widely viewed with pessimism expressed in media as different as Jane Jacobs’ The death and life of great American cities and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
The dystopian city fantasy is a resilient literary and cinematic genre, but at the moment it is lacking a little potency thanks to a wave of feel-good celebrations of city life. This phenomenon is not unconnected with the middle class colonisation of the inner city; in Sydney the start of this movement can be dated with precision to 1968, the publication date of Rob Hillier’s book Let’s buy a terrace house.

The most prominent cities advocate of recent times is Richard Florida whose book The rise of the creative class argued that agglomeration of artists, curators, writers and boho types generally was the key to successful cities. Around the mid-000s Florida became something of a travelling circus, touring the world to pronounce on the creative buzz of city after city – I can’t remember his judgement on Sydney’s creative class. Still, it was brilliantly successful concept, if only because it made everyone in possession of a laptop or smart phone feel as if they were surfing the wave of history.

And Florida was correct in many ways, if misguided in his definitions of creativity. Cities are fundamentally economic entities. They succeed by bringing people together so that ideas, strategies, jobs, markets, alliances and enterprises can flourish as nowhere else. It’s sometimes proclaimed that the internet will make cities irrelevant, that people can be just as connected and creative on a farm or a boat. But the evidence so far is that today’s increased connectivity is making cities even more attractive and efficient, building on their inherent strength in connectivity and unplanned association.
The biggest cities used to be a Western phenomenon, but are mostly found today in the developing world. Sydney is barely a village compared to Sao Paolo (20 million residents) or Shanghai (23 million), cities which have redefined urban scale. And we still have the luxury of debating the relative merits of city versus country living, while across the world migration to cities is recognised as the only chance of escaping grinding rural poverty and subserviance.

The urban ideologies of the 20th century were focused on creating architectural monocultures, whether modernist or suburban. Yet part of the appeal of cities is their layering of eras and building types embodied in their architecture. Even a relatively young city like Sydney can give a buzz of juxtaposition and variety.
The planning policies of today are still largely focused on creating consistent urban and architectural scale. It’s arguable that this is a denial of the essential quality of cities and one of the reasons that Sydney and Melbourne suffer from a mismatch of demand and supply in dwelling types.

An appropriate response doesn’t have to involve large scale rebuilding (though this was part of the repeopling of Sydney’s CBD). The mansions and large terrace houses of Sydney were abandoned by most of their owners during the early 20th century when servants became scarce and the suburbs more fashionable. Most of the big houses were recycled as boarding houses or flats; they’ve since been recycled yet again as homes, share houses or offices.

A similar career could await today’s McMansions and other suburban buildings. Walk-up flats, for example, for a long time the most-reviled of building types have recently been identified as one of the most sustainable. Low energy design and high thermal mass construction makes the red-brick ‘six-pack’ an unlikely exemplar of green suburban living and a design resource for sustainable urbanism.

If people feel good about cities, all sorts of things are possible.

Don’t renovate, detonate!

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Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

You might have seen in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald a piece about the Knock Down Rebuild (KDR) phenomenon. Across Sydney’s middle-ring suburbs – from Strathfield to Granville, Earlwood to Hurstville, Manly to Avalon – old timber, fibro and brick cottages are being purchased for ‘land value’, demolished and replaced with new homes.

I’d been looking out for some research on KDR; you don’t have to spend much time in the burbs to notice it. The basis of the Herald story was a study by the City Futures unit at the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW. Led by Bill Randolph, City Futures has for some years been producing unique insights into urban change in Sydney. Its investigation of building applications in several municipalities shows that the KDR phenomenon is biggest in Bankstown (627 applications for KDR between 2004 and 2008) followed by Ku-ring-gai (616), Warringah (580), Hornsby (408), Canterbury (388), Hurstville (385) and Fairfield (353).

Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

The district with the highest proportion of KDR dwellings is Strathfield, with 5 per cent built between 2004 and 2008. I know Strathfield a little (my kids attend school and preschool there) and the transformation of this former ‘Old money’ suburb is striking. Federation-period houses are being replaced by McMansions and other monster dwellings. Of course, it is central to the KDR phenomenon that the new homes are larger than the ones they replace, a big part of the reason that Sydney now boasts the largest new houses in the world.

In her new book (and exhibition) 52 Suburbs Louise Hawson gives a jaundiced summary of Strathfield: ‘Turns out the suburb is covered in mansions, built in the early 1900s when Strathfield was country and wealthy families required rural retreats. They are handsome but what really sent my camera snapping were some of the ridiculously grand old institutional buildings – Santa Sabina College and the Australian Catholic University in particular.

Aside from the beauties, Strathfield has its fair share of crappy old apartment blocks and crappy
new million-dollar homes’.

Despite all this the political and media focus has remained on the long-running argument about urban consolidation – the thirty-year old NSW Government policy to encourage medium and high density development in established suburbs, while restricting the growth of new suburbs on the city fringe. The rationale for urban consolidation is economic, social and environmental; higher density housing in old suburbs reduces the need for new transport, social and commercial infrastructure while containing the city’s environmental footprint. However it is not universally popular. Our new Premier Barry O’Farrell is member for Ku-ring-gai, site of the loudest recent protests against apartment development despite its aging and unusually dispersed population. (From the figures above it seems that the burghers of Ku-ring-gai don’t mind McMansions however). So it is not surprising that the Premier has promised to shift the development balance back towards the urban fringe.

Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

Yet the popularity of KDR means that most new houses are being built in established areas rather than far flung new suburbs like Kellyville, a long established focus for design and media commentary due to its concentration of large project homes. Shortage of building sites is less of a problem than proclaimed by the advocates of endless suburban expansion. In any case, large houses are declining as a proportion of new dwellings, simply because families with children are also a shrinking demographic.

However KDR is also undermining urban consolidation; blocks in older suburbs are often very large, up to 600 square metres, easily big enough for two new dwellings under dual occupancy laws, townhouses or terraces . Instead they continue to be occupied by one family. In addition, KDR is maintaining property values; how you feel about that probably depends on whether you are one of the slowly shrinking proportion of Sydney’s population who have scrambled onto the real estate escalator. And of course the new monster houses have the usual McMansion issues of energy and water hunger.

KDR has become a large part of the project home market. Blocks which are frequently deep but narrow are difficult when combined with the compulsory large garage in the front of the house. Bizarre floor plans are a common result, as is the usual project home problem of poor relation to aspect, sun etc. And finally there is heritage: councils (including Strathfield) assiduously list notable local structures. Even my house in Canterbury has a local heritage listing. But unless these houses graduate to the more exclusive state or national listings, a local listing does not guarantee protection. Unless you live in Ku-ring-gai, perhaps.

Osama’s lair

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Osama's hideout. Image from United States Department of Defense, public domain

The demise of Osama bin Laden is certainly the news story of 2011. Among the torrent of analysis, news stories and blogs this event has generated, bin Laden’s home of the past five or six years has attracted considerable comment.

Apparently part of the reason that this 3-storey concrete villa attracted the suspicion of the CIA was the building’s design, notably its tall surrounding walls and small number of windows. A White House spokesman was widely quoted: ‘Intelligence analysts concluded that this compound was custom-built to hide someone of significance.’

One doesn’t wish to query what is already received journalist wisdom, but my reaction on viewing photos of bin Laden’s hideout was admiration for its utter anonymity. Far from generating suspicion, it seems more likely that the generic character of bin Laden’s pile was a significant part of the reason that he could reside undetected in a Pakistan garrison town.

The building may have been larger than its neighbours, but similar ponderous villas can be found in great numbers across most of the world, especially its less prosperous parts. Concrete may appear non-domestic to Australian eyes, but it is the popular construction material of today’s world. Its materials are cheap and widely available, its labour intensive construction is not a problem in low-wage economies, and it is easy to add extra floors and rooms to concrete structures; the ends of reinforcing rods are often left exposed for this reason. Of course, it’s also easy to build very thick concrete walls.

Architectural flourish is seldom a feature of such residences but enclosure within a compound is, especially in areas where public space can be dangerous. Bin Laden’s mansion would not look out of place, for example, in the outskirts of Naples. To this one can add Pakistan’s highly patriarchal society, where domestic life is routinely hidden behind walls. There is no reason to disbelieve the spokeswoman for the Pakistani Foreign Minister, that such compounds are common in Pakistan.

Hideouts are an exotic sub-genre of architecture. Slate this week published a gallery of famous ones; bin Laden’s is modest compared to that of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug warlord assassinated in 1993. But the real Escobar showpiece is his Hacienca Los Napoles, a massive theme park and mansion constructed for his family featuring a zoo, lake and airport; it’s now a public park and tourist attraction.

Escobar’s Hacienca belongs to the architecture of power, as analysed by Deyan Sudjic in his book The Edifice Complex. Through violence and bribery, Escobar was able to humiliate Colombia’s civil authorities; the Hacienca was a means of flaunting both his wealth and immunity. Bin Laden never had this opportunity. He attempted to build a grand residence incorporating a mosque at Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was bombed before he could move in.

However bin Laden’s anonymous hideout shares features with the homes of the very rich. An ostentatious mansion was once a necessity for any self-respecting magnate, but the enclosed compound is now the favoured option. The main Sydney example is the Bellevue Hill compound of the Packer family, formed since the 1930s out of nine different properties. Examples elsewhere include the homes of Bill Gates, Michael Dell and George Lucas. The only available photos of such places are taken from prying helicopters. Fugitives aren’t the only people prepared to pay up for anonymity.

The league table: The world’s most popular museums and exhibitions

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Crowds at the British Museum. Image courtesy of Drumaboy shared with a Creative Commons license

The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of the world’s most popular museums and exhibitions is just out. For anyone who wants to know what brings people to museums in big numbers, this is required reading. You can download the pdf here

Some of the results are predictable: The Louvre remains the most visited museum in the world (8.5 million visitors during 2010) followed by the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum. In Australia the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art head the list with 1.8 million visitors during 2010. Next up is the National Gallery of Victoria’s two museums and the Melbourne Museum.

Image courtesy of PB-PSBear, shared with a creative commons license

Sydney’s top museum attraction is the Art Gallery of NSW though its usual third or fourth place in the Australian rankings is usurped for 2010 by Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (1.1 million), largely as a result of ACME’s hosting the hugely successful Tim Burton show from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

And it’s the exhibitions that make the most interesting reading. The Art Newspaper focuses on art museums of course, so natural history, technology and science museums are largely ignored. Yet numerous design and decorative arts exhibitions and museums make the lists. In fact the third most popular exhibition world-wide was Designing the Lincoln Memorial, which attracted almost three million visitors to the Washington National Gallery. No doubt the exhibition’s proximity to the actual Lincoln Memorial (no minor attraction in itself) helped, but other more esoteric design shows also did well.

Among these was MOMA’s Bauhaus 1919-33: Workshops for Modernity, the Pompidou’s Patrick Jouin, the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright and the Serpentine Gallery’s Jean Nouvel – big design names clearly have allure, even if a couple of them are still alive and working!

Most of the popular dec arts shows were frock affairs though interestingly retrospectives on YSL and Cartier at Paris and San Francisco drew fewer people than Hats: An anthology by Stephen Jones at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. This Victoria & Albert show did better in Brisbane than at its home museum in London.

In certain museums it is an item of faith that cultural phenomenon with mainstream popularity will produce popular exhibitions. The survey doesn’t contain much evidence of this. Instead, what is clear is the popularity of the difficult and the esoteric – for example contemporary art. Often dismissed as a minority taste, numerous contemporary art shows are a feature of the top 30 exhibitions, including those featuring Rebecca Horn, Regina Silveira, Marina Abramovic and William Kentridge (who we’ve been lucky to enjoy in Sydney thanks to the MCA and Biennale).

The survey is also further evidence of increased museum attendance world-wide, underlined by healthy attendances at museums in China, Japan, Korea, India and Brazil. In fact, the most popular exhibition in 2010 was the Tokyo National Museum’s Hasegawa Tohaku, marking the four hundredth anniversary of this home-grown artist. More than 12,000 people visited daily (one presumes 24-hour opening).

Although the usual blockbuster names are in evidence – Picasso, Van Gogh, Turner et al – scrolling down the list produced plentiful evidence than even apparently arcane subjects can draw hundred of visitors per day. For example: One hundred years of business in Italy (Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome) Curious George saves the day (Jewish Museum, New York) La Dolce Vita: 1950s Italian celebrities (Mercati di Tiaino, Rome) and The man with the case: A history of baggage (Borgo Medievale, Turin).

Too many exhibitions, not enough time.

Ruined

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Painting by B. Barzotti. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

I love ruins, and I’m not alone in this taste. A fair swag of the world’s most visited tourist sites are ruins: the Forum, the Great Wall, the Pyramids and so on – it’s an impressive list.

A ruin is not a building damaged by storm, flood or earthquake. A ruin is a building abandoned to decay and neglect, sometimes before it was completed. In the West the passion for ruins reached a peak during the 1700s and 1800s, when the ruins of classical antiquity sparked a tourist craze and a belief that history was cyclical, a chronicle of the rise and fall of civilisations and empires. Architects produced elevations of their new buildings as the picturesque ruins of the future; others designed fake ruins, creating a false history for their clients.

Ruins demonstrate the potential transience and folly of every project or industry. The newer the building the more poignant is this fate. Hence modern ruins have a particular allure.

The disused Paddington Reservoir has been converted into a submerged public park, a project which has won its architects several awards and created a space which is both relaxing and ruined. However such projects are rare in Sydney, where buildings are seldom given a chance of becoming ruined. Recently I acquired an artwork from the Skygarden shopping centre; built at Pitt Street Mall in 1989, Skygarden survived less than twenty years before being demolished for the new Westfield Centre.

Modern ruins are more plentiful elsewhere. As well as its historic ruins, Italy also does an excellent line in modern ruins. A recent study documented more than 360 public buildings left uncompleted in Italy. The greatest concentration of these ruins was found in Giarra, a town of 27,000 people in Sicily. Giarra’s ruins include a polo stadium with seating for 20,000 spectators, a motorway bridge which ends in mid-air, an abandoned municipal swimming pool and a crumbling open-air theatre. With the townscape dominated by ruined structures, Giarra initiated a Festival of the Incomplete, inviting artists, film-makers and performers to interpret and celebrate its ruins.

Another hotspot for ruins is the USA. While Italy’s modern ruins are primarily products of political failure, deindustrialisation is the force in the US. Several cities have suffered dramatic losses of industry and population, leaving behind not only disused factories but department stores, churches, office towers, hotels, schools and other major buildings. The most spectacular example is Detroit, former capital of the US car industry, now increasingly famous for abandoned public buildings including its former railway terminal, Michigan Central, as imposing as New York’s Grand Central. About one third of Detroit’s city area is now ruined and abandoned.

Detroit’s cityscape of deindustrialisation has produced a small boom in photography and documentary making, as well as special-interest tourism.

International movements of industry and expertise are not new, but are certainly more common and fast than ever before. Detroit is far from unique. In its heyday Cadillac or Mercury cars were the most sought-after consumer products in the US. Today’s equivalents would probably be the products of Apple, designed in California but manufactured in decidedly less glamorous circumstances in China.

The moment when Detroit was truly doomed was not when it became cheaper to build cars elsewhere. More crucial was the moment when better quality design and production was also happening elsewhere. It might seem as preposterous as the Japanese and Korean car industries once did, but the odds are that Detroit’s fate will one day be that of Silicon Valley.

Old power station site pre Museum. Collection Powerhouse Museum

The future of every civilization lies in ruins. The Powerhouse was a ruin for twenty years. Are you prepared to bet that it will never return to that state?

The Trolley man Part 2

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Cindric sketch by Richard Goodwin, Collection: Powerhouse Museum

In May 2010 I published a Curatorial blog piece about Josef Cindric and his trolley.

Towards the end of his life, Cindric became something of a minor celebrity. Artists photographed and filmed him. Journalists speculated as to his life and the contents of his trolley. In her recent Sydney book, Delia Falconer summarises some of these myths:

‘On his death, a journalist would discover that he was Joseph Cindric, a refugee; and that his trolley did not contain poisonous snakes, as other journalists had speculated, but tools from his days as a shipwright and letters from a son in Europe with who he had lost touch after the war

After writing about Cindric I was impressed by the surviving popular memory of the trolley man, evident in the responses we received. I was also struck by how little still we know about Cindric – apart from the journalistic speculations mentioned above. So I began searching the migration and police records for traces. The archives documented Cindric’s encounters with bureaucracy and the courts, but the result is too partial and intermittent to be called a biography. It answers some questions, but raises many more.

Photography by Raymond de Berquelle. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

One conclusion can definitely be drawn: Josef Cindric’s life in Australia is a tale of migration gone wrong, of a fearful loner who conformed to none of the narratives and expectations of migration.

Slave
The earliest record I located was Cindric’s application form for migration to Australia, filled out at the Displaced Persons Camp at Ansbach, Bavaria, Germany (US Zone) in May 1948. According to this form, Cindric was born in 1906 at Sastavol, Yugoslavia and worked on his father’s farm from childhood. He did not attend school, could not read and could only sign his name.
In June 1941, two months after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Josef Cindric was sent to Germany as a ‘forced evacuee’. He worked as a coal miner there for four years. About twelve million people were sent to Germany from occupied nations to work during the war. Many were prisoners of war, others were abducted at random from the streets. By 1944 forced workers formed a quarter of the German workforce. Many of these people were literally worked to death, but as Cindric was not Jewish or from the USSR he would possibly have received a small wage and been granted a few liberties. However labour camps were built near many German coal mines and the miners’ working hours and conditions were extremely harsh.
At the end of the war Cindric worked in a gas works in Germany and then for a year or so polishing lenses, presumably for cameras or other optical products. By this time Cindric was living privately at Fondheim away from the Ansbach refugee camp. The selection officer who filled out his application form commented:

‘a good worker working in German economy & not content to sit in DP camps doing nothing. Accepted’.

On top of the experience of Nazi forced labour, there is a dark shadow evident in the records. Cindric is described as ‘single (widowed)’ with two children. However his medical papers describe the children as ‘gestorben’ (dead) of unknown causes. Clearly a personal story remained untold in these records, one unlikely to be recovered. [National Archives of Australia, A11927, Item 51]

Refugee
Cindric’s acceptance for migration to Australian is significant considering that, in addition to his illiteracy and lack of education he had no English (although he had ‘fair’ German as well his native language) and no relatives or friends in Australia. Our post-war immigration policy was more accepting than its contemporary version, although with the significant difference of insisting on European ethnic heritage. In addition Cindric was in good health and had no criminal record. Like most post war refugees, Cindric signed a two year contract with the Australian government which obliged him to work where directed. Hence the immigration archives record Cindric’s first two years in Australia in some detail.

What follows is a chronology of Josef Cindric’s first two years in Australia, as recorded by staff of the Commonwealth Employment Service:

29 October 1948 Arrived Sydney on the Charlton Sovereign.

29 November 1948 Commenced work as a labourer with NSW Railways at Nyngan in western NSW.

12 May 1949 Went to Nyngan police, complained that

‘other migrants were going to do him harm. When I asked them about it they were very amused and said Cindric was definitely a mental case and imagined a lot of things…His working ability is very poor…He loses a lot of time and is likely to leave his camp of a night and not report for duty the next day. I have doubts regarding his sanity’

29 July 1949 Awol from railway work:

‘Mr Cindric, whose present whereabouts are unknown, is reported to have only a very limited knowledge of the English language, and…his commanding officers experienced considerable difficulty in making clear the necessity for regular attendance at work’.

2 August 1949 Applied for work at the employment office, Dubbo. Offered positions as a farm labourer on stations near Dubbo, initially refused then accepted a position at a station near Coonamble.

‘He only remained in the position for several days and left without notice. I was subsequently informed that this person walked to Quambone, a distance of 26 miles, and reported at the small hospital there… but walked, or in some way obtained a lift to Coonamble…he proceeded to the Police Station and there left his large portmanteau, overcoat and blanket’.

Cindric then hung around the town ‘making a nuisance of himself…I was of the opinion that this person was mentally deficient, and in my opinion should be immediately placed in an institution under observation’. Disappeared, leaving his possessions: “I fear that this person might take his own life’.

The station owner, WB Cornish, wrote: ‘The man you refer to stopped with me three days, then pretended sick…I have since heard that he said I was a good boss, but it was too quiet.’

30 September 1949 Director of Toric Lens Manufacturing Co, Sussex Street, Sydney confirms that ‘Cindric is working for us at this address and we are satisfied with him as a worker’.

31 October 1949 ‘Reported to Mascot Office (Commonwealth Employment Service). Has accom Yugoslav Club 36 Campbell St Sydney. Wants employment with Industrial Brick Co Roseberry. Mascot advised to see if Brick Company will accept’.

1 November 1950 Orange office of CES: ‘advise that since taking up duty with the Electricity Manufacturing Company Ltd of Orange on 28th June 1950, Cindric’s conduct and employment has been satisfactory.’

Known locally as Emmco, this former munitions factory employed large numbers of new migrants in the production of domestic white goods. Given the lack of sufficient housing in Orange, many Emmco workers lived at a camp on the town fringe.

16 November 1950 Orange office of CES: ‘For your information a deportation order was taken out against Cindric but since has been deferred. If his conduct and employment continue to be satisfactory no doubt a certificate to remain in Australia will be issued in due course’. National Archives of Australia, SP656/1, Item T3260

Gunman
Central Western Daily, 17 May 1951: ‘

A Yugoslav migrant had carried a home-made pistol because some Ukrainians had threatened to murder him, Orange Court was told yesterday’.

Cindric had made three home-made pistols from pipe, these were capable of firing a shotgun cartridge. Police had gone to a house where Cindric lived on the verandah after being told that someone had fired a gun there. Cindric said (through an interpreter) that he had been testing one of his guns: ‘

Some Ukrainians out at the Emmco camp had said they were going to kill me, so I get this and I kill them”.

A detective had visited Cindric two months previously (March 11) and Cindric told him ‘that he intended making a gun to shoot a man at Emmco camp’. Cindric had promised not to make more guns or to carry knives. Cindric had not been able to tell the detective the identity of the men who were threatening him.

In court,

Cindric said he had carried firearms and weapons in his own country, but he did not know if it was illegal or not…’I admit I am guilty. I was carrying the knife for self-defence also, as the New Australians at Emmco had many times threatened to kill me’’.

The magistrate said it was ‘evident that he was a very dangerous man to have in the community’ and he should be deported. Cindric was given two sentences of six months goal with hard labour.

Vagrant
After this the records are largely blank apart from Cindric’s encounters with the police. His record in the NSW Police Gazettes:

Orange, 16 May 1951: Carry an unlicensed pistol at night; have cutting implements in possession. 6 months hr served concurrently.

Released by remission from State Penitentiary, Long Bay 13 May 1952. Rail pass to Immigration Authorities issued.

Glebe, 7 May, 1956: Vagrancy; house-breaking implements in possession at night. 6 months hl on each charge, accumulative.

Released from Parramatta Gaol by remission, 6 March 1957.

Burwood, 21 March 1957: Vagrancy; house-breaking implements in possession. 6 months hl on each charge, accumulative.

Released from Parramatta Gaol by remission, 3 August 1957. Rail pass to Burwood issued.

Glebe, 3 February 1964: Vagrancy. 6 months hr. Released from Parramatta Gaol 17 June 1964.

The court transcript for the third of these vagrancy arrests is still held by State Records. Cindric was sitting by the Leichhardt Canal in January 1964 at about 11pm when approached and questioned by Constable Tange, who ascertained that he had no home, work or money. Cindric claimed to have £15 from a taxation refund, but the constable testified that ‘

he had no money in his possession at the time. He said he sleeps all round…sometimes Leichhardt. He said sometimes he ate at the St Vincent De Paul. I asked how long since he slept in a house. He said…Before Christmas…about 2 months. I asked if there was anything wrong with him physically and he said no’.

Speaking through an interpreter, Cindric told the court that
‘I live where I pay…St. Vincents Hall…somewhere..everywhere. No money for hostel.’
His last job was 14 months ago, ‘I work for sugar company’.

He also revealed that he had applied for a US visa because ‘They give jobs in that country…I want to work on a ship…I’m getting a job on a ship. The American consul told me…2 weeks ago’.

When asked why he had not gone to the US, Cindric replied

I’m afraid I might not be very good…it might be too hard’.

Two things stand out from this brief record. One is that Cindric still required an interpreter after living in Australia for 15 years. Another is his apparent naivety. Asked to outline his employment history Cindric volunteers the information ‘

They lock me up in goal after Orange. I work there one year. The policeman found a knife with me…and said “What for do you carry knife”. I get six months for that’.

However, Cindric finished his testimony with a defiant note. Asked if he had ever been in a mental institution or ‘anything other than a goal’, he replied:’No. I’m not sick’.

The magistrate then reviewed Cindric’s criminal record, noted ‘It appears he doesn’t like work’, and sentenced him to another six months imprisonment with hard labour. One searches the transcript for any evidence of anti-social behaviour on Cindric’s behalf. But no work, no money was all that was needed to proved for a vagrancy charge.
[State Records NSW, 10/4514, Glebe Court of Petty Sessions)

The 1960s and 1970s saw a campaign against the Vagrancy Act from lawyers and civil libertarians. The high point of this campaign was the 1975 report by Justice Ronald Sackville , ‘Homeless People and the Law’ which investigated the effects of vagrancy and public drinking laws - both laws that made people a criminal for doing something that would be legal if done in a private house. Justice Sackville concluded: ‘

There is almost universal acknowledgment that penalties imposed on vagrants and drunks serve neither a deterrent nor a rehabilitative function. In fact, the criminal sanctions tend to perpetuate the very lifestyles there are designed to check’.

The Vagrancy Act was repealed in NSW in 1970 and replaced by the Summary Offences Act, which retained vagrancy as an offence. This was repealed by the Wran government in 1979, from which time homelessness was finally no longer a crime in NSW. However begging and drinking in public are still offences, though they are punishable with fines rather than imprisonment. In practice some beggars and homeless people still end up in prison because of their inability to pay fines. From the other side of this history, Cindric’s persecution for poverty is still a shock and is perhaps the most striking revelation of the archives.

Image courtesy Richard Goodwin. © all rights resevered

Eccentric
We already guessed that Josef Cindric was not a migrant success story. But we tended to assume that this was a result of individual eccentricity, embodied in his hand-made trolley. We didn’t know the extent of his rejection by/of his new country, which seems to have started almost immediately, with the conflict with other migrants at Nyngan. We can only speculate as to the background, though presumably wartime enmities were at its centre.

After the second conflict with other ‘New Australians’ at Orange, Cindric entered a cycle of imprisonment and poverty. There was now little chance that he would again be the ‘good worker’ he was in Germany. His alienation became complete. Cindric didn’t learn English. He didn’t become a naturalised Australian. He must have narrowly avoided deportion during the 1950s. But to some extent he was rescued by his trolley.

In the 1964 court proceedings, there is no mention of a trolley. Cindric must have started building these some time during the late 1960s. His trolley was not only a practical boon, giving him a means of carrying and protecting possessions. It also gave him a public identity and he become an object of sympathy and interest. Although Cindric seems not to have cherished his new role as a Sydney ‘eccentric’, it was certainly an improvement in his status. Combined with a more tolerant view of homelessness, Cindric’s trolley eased his last two decades of homelessness.

If he hadn’t built his trolleys he would be known to no one. Instead he survives as a symbol of ingenuity and stoicism, embodied by his last trolley.

Josef Cindric, 1994 Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Copies and collections

Published by Charles Pickett 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Erika recently wrote about ‘real vs. fake’ museum objects, using the example of repro fossils as an example. It’s an interesting issue: that museums continue to thrive in the digital age is largely due to their role as repositories of the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’.

But there’s a few interesting qualifications to this claim. One is that the Powerhouse’ ancestor, the Technological Museum, was founded as a museum of applied arts and manufactures – the latter by definition not unique. Another is the long history of copies and reproductions in museum collections. Reproductions of architectural elements and decoration were part of the collection of some the first public museums. As well as artefacts of classical antiquity, both the Altes Museum, Berlin and the John Soane Museum, London, featured casts and copies of classical sculpture and architectural decoration.

These museums were highly influential on the neoclassical architecture of the 1800s. The Powerhouse collection holds many examples of the 1800s fashion for architectural reproductions. Perhaps the outstanding work is the 1870s plaster casts of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistry of the Duomo, Florence.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

As classicism formed a set of principles and models for architecture and design, there was a sense that all the elements of architecture were copies, embodiments of timeless aesthetic principles. Hence reproductions could be of similar value to the originals, especially for educational purposes. However as twentieth century design placed greater value on originality and individual vision, copies and reproductions began to inhabit the same moral and economic territory as fakes and forgeries.

The decline of classicism as an architectural authority has changed the reasons for this museological practice, but it remains common in various forms. Recently I acquired a reproduction of a mural designed by Douglas Annand in 1948 for a milk bar at Wynyard called Patricia’s. The repro mural was produced for the exhibition Modern Times. We have in the collection Annand’s design for the mural plus a photo of the completed milk bar – hence our model maker Iain Scott-Stevenson was able to create what seems an accurate reproduction of the original mural.

Photography by Max Dupain. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Not everyone agrees that contemporary reproductions are worthy of acquisition. I commissioned another architectural repro for the exhibition Visions of a republic: The work of Lucien Henry. Given that almost nothing that Henry designed is still extant, it seemed worth recreating part of the pressed zinc ceiling he designed in 1890 for the Hotel Australia. We had Henry’s designs in the collection and after weeks of searching I managed to find a photo of the ceiling. Finally I was able to borrow some parts of the only other ceiling produced to the same design, at the former George Patterson House, now the Establishment bar on George Street. These parts were used to create moulds for new ceiling panels.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The repro ceiling was commissioned and catalogued as an object in the Museum’s collection, but it was not treated as such during dismantling at the conclusion of the exhibition. There’s no doubt that reproductions – even those created at considerable expense – divide opinion within museums. Perhaps a visit to the John Soane Museum should be prescribed for the doubters.

The Fibro frontier

Published by Charles Pickett 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

House at Monterey, Sydney. Photo by Andrew Frolows. Collection:Powerhouse Museum

The NSW Ombudsman Bruce Barbour has just released a report about asbestos and its terrible legacy. According to the report asbestos-related disease will soon be killing more people in Australia than car and traffic accidents. Although production of asbestos products was discontinued during the 1980s, decades can pass between exposure to asbestos dust and the onset of cancers. By 2020 it is expected that more than 13,000 people will have been diagnosed with the lung cancer mesothelioma, which is invariably fatal.

I have an interest in this subject because in 1997 I published a book titled The fibro frontier: A different history of Australian architecture. Fibro was a good book for me. It wasn’t the first book I’d written but it was the first to give me a real reputation outside the Museum. It was also a good book for the Powerhouse, which co-published it with Transworld Publishers. Along with Australian Dream, Beyond architecture and others, we had a good decade of titles which engaged with design and culture in unusual ways. Unfortunately detours into vanity publishing eventually killed all that.

Wunderlich ‘Durabestos’ catalogue, 1955. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

Fibro is not primarily about asbestos and its consequences. It focuses on the architectural and social impact of fibro, arguing that the fibro house is the most distinctive expression of Australian domestic architecture. When I was working on Fibro we considered calling the book ‘Fabulous fibro’ though fortunately we changed our minds, aware that fibro is anything but to people suffering from asbestos diseases.

But I’ve had plenty of occasions to ponder the relationship between fibro – asbestos-cement – as the building material which by the 1960s clad one third of houses in NSW and fibro as the material which condemned thousands to a painful death. I’ve spoken at conferences of asbestos disease lawyers and I’ve written expert witness opinions for law firms acting for and against James Hardie, Australia’s main manufacturer of asbestos products and the company which for decades avoided its responsibilities towards cancer sufferers, setting a new low in corporate behaviour. Many careers have been built on the basis of asbestos-induced suffering, not a comfortable thought even for someone on the fringes of that bonanza.

Gideon Haigh points out in his award-winning investigation Asbestos House: The secret history of James Hardie Industries:

‘Fibro has a rightly honoured place in Australian life, history, culture, even aesthetics – Charles Pickett’s 1997 book The Fibro Frontier is a splendid introduction’. But Haigh also argues that fibro’s cultural and architectural significance is not necessarily dependant on the suffering it produced: ‘That asbestos has improved lives and taken lives are separate propositions’.

The amount of asbestos fibre in fibro was reduced during the 1950s and 1960s because of rising costs and a need to increase the material’s flexibility. But James Hardie did not seek to completely replace asbestos until the company’s future was on the line during the late 1970s; until then the company preferred to cajole, obfuscate and threaten its critics and plaintiffs.

Today there are still thousands of houses clad or lined with fibro. In addition many brick or timber homes have fibro used under eaves, in gable ends and ceilings while asbestos often turns up in unexpected places such as tiles, floor coverings and insulation. Fibro is generally safe when left alone but as the Ombudsman points out, no coordinated warning or inspection system exists to reduce the risk of people unintendedly releasing asbestos dust when renovating or altering their homes. There are no laws preventing home owners from working on their homes regardless of the presence of asbestos.

Mesothelioma is not just incurable; it is also capricious and pitiless. Many people (including my father) frequently exposed to asbestos dust suffered no adverse consequences; others were condemned from fleeting encounters. After picking off many who mined asbestos, made asbestos products or worked as builders, mesothelioma now ravages home renovators who carelessly meddled with fibro. In its terminal stages mesothelioma is brutally painful, rendering every breath a struggle against pain. As a judge of the Dust Diseases Tribunal wrote:

‘Those who suffer it reach a stage where it is necessary to fight for every breath, with every breath accompanied by pain so dreadful that the only way to avoid it is not to breathe. The choice between breathing and not breathing is no choice at all’.

If you have renovation ambitions, remind yourself of that frequently.