World's End

Australian houses are notoriously ill-built. The problem is not so much that Australian builders are incompetent, or even necessarily that we have terrible architects or draftspeople, and it's certainly not for lack of money or materials. The problem is, rather, that Australian houses are generally designed in a vacuum, without reference to the climate, siting, or social context in which they will exist. Buildings are constructed so as to minimise the financial cost of construction and maximise the possible sale price. This combination usually results in enormous hidden costs in resource use both before and after construction. Brick veneer and plasterboard do a poor job of keeping warm air either outside in summer or inside in winter, and rather like a shopping mall,the emphasis is entirely on interaction inside the building rather than within the neighbourhood in which it is built.

I was thinking about this recently after reading Darran Anderson's "Why Every City Feels the Same Now":

Some time ago, I woke up in a hotel room unable to determine where I was in the world. The room was like any other these days, with its neutral bedding, uncomfortable bouclé lounge chair, and wood-veneer accent wall—tasteful, but purgatorial. The eerie uniformity extended well beyond the interior design too: The building itself felt like it could’ve been located in any number of metropolises across the globe. From the window, I saw only the signs of ubiquitous brands, such as Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. I thought about phoning down to reception to get my bearings, but it felt too much like the beginning of an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Anderson eventually moves on to talk about vernacular architecture. I was reminded of Port Essington ("World's End"), one of the British Empire's more spectacular, if mostly forgotten, failures. Looking at photos of the squat stone barracks baking in the tropical heat, I can only imagine the suffering of soldier's wives as they waited to die of disease or starvation, whilst the local people all around them enjoyed lives of plenty. After a couple of centuries of colonisation, it's now ironically the decendants of those and other Aboriginal people who are forced to live in substandard, poorly-designed houses that bake in the sun, unable to run the air conditioning units required to make these buildings somewhat habitable. Anderson notes that

Modernity’s catastrophe is best captured in the desire to build universal citadels that separate people from the particulars: of cause and effect, of climate, of the natural world, of local culture. To counter those trends requires more than just preserving different styles of buildings. Vernacular architecture reflects who the built environment is by and for.

In terms of resource use, the impact of "modern" architecture — the kind that is simultaneously from everywhere and from nowhere — is uniformly disastrous. But in this regard, it's not really any worse than the rest of our capitalist hellscape. David Farrier, in his essay "We’re Gonna Carry That Weight a Long Time", cites a 2008 MIT study that showed that even a homeless person literally sleeping in a cardboard box in the United States has double the world average "carbon footprint".

Clare Colebrook, in "End-times for humanity", reflects from the perspective of how this toxic system might come to a stop:

What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn’t the end of ‘the world’ so much as the end of ‘a world’ – the rich, white, leisured, affluent one. Western lifestyles are reliant on what the French philosopher Bruno Latour has referred to as a ‘slowly built set of irreversibilities’, requiring the rest of the world to live in conditions that ‘humanity’ regards as unliveable. And nothing could be more precarious than a species that contracts itself to a small portion of the Earth, draws its resources from elsewhere, transfers its waste and violence, and then declares that its mode of existence is humanity as such.

This is also the fear that drives so much of the brutality of the Australian state. In a review of the film "In my blood it runs", that is also a review of contemporary Australia's ongoing genocide, Lisa Stefanoff writes about Dujuan Hoosan and his battle to maintain knowledge about the world in the face of the hostility of the Australian state. White Australia is terrified of the truth that it is plundering the land and doomed to destroy itself. The ongoing apocalypse enacted upon the first people of the country is an attempt to destroy the evidence of a different way of living on and with this land and its other lifeforms. "Closing the Gap" never considers the yawning gulf between the sterile mainstream Australian "culture", and the rich cultures and deep embedded knowledge of first peoples, except in efforts to squash the latter and force conformity with the former.

Maybe if the officers of the British Navy had "closed the gap" between their ill-suited North Atlantic ideas of how to live, and embraced the knowledge of the local people instead, sixty of them wouldn't have ended up dead within a single decade, and their descendants might still be living in Port Essington eating wild fish and dancing every night.

=> Why Every City Feels the Same Now | At World's End (ABC) | Port Essington | We’re Gonna Carry That Weight a Long Time | Leaving our mark | End times for humanity | The Australian government is not listening: education justice and remote Indigenous futures