Hannah's+wiki

'Collins street 5pm' John Brack, 1955
My name is Hannah, and welcome to my wiki page on Urban Australia. I chose this painting as my first representation of urban Australia, because it is an iconic painting by John Brack from the 1950s. Another eason i chose this is, urban Australia as we know it today is so different to John Brack's representation that i wanted to see a point of view from over 50 years ago. As my wiki project progresses,you will be able to see the development of urban Australia over time, and thats why i chose this painting.

"Suburban Sonnet" by Gwen Harwood She practices a fugue, though it can matter to no one now if she plays well or not. Beside her on the floor two children chatter, then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot boils over. As she rushes to the stove too late, a wave of nausea overpowers subject and counter-subject. Zest and love drain out with soapy water as she scours the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead. When the soft corpse won't move they seem afraid. She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

"Suburban Sonnet" was written by Gwen Harwood. The poem tells the story of a woman that has lots the creativity from her life and is now, forced into the daily routine of living in suburbia. The line "to no one now if she plays well or not" reflects her glum attitude towards life. She went from a more exciting life to living out the urban stereotype of a stay at home mum with two kids. Gwen Harwood chose to make this a sonnet instead of any other type of poem and I feel she did this on purpose. Sonnets have a set structure, just like life in suburbia does, but in this sonnet Harwood chose to change the strict rhyming rules in sonnets by not keeping an ABABCDCD pattern for the whole poem but instead changing the last 6 lines to an EFGEFG patter for the last words. I think she used two rhyming patterns in this poem to represent the two lives of the woman in the poem. She went from being creative and independent to living in strict, boring suburbia and I think Gwen Harwood found changing the strict rules of the sonnet to being creative and changing them. It is hard to identify the persona of this poem, but from my perspective it looks like Gwen Harwood herself is speaking. I did some background history and found that during the time Gwen Harwood wrote this poem she was living in suburban Australia with five children of her own. This poem could be her own expression of the boredom she is living with except that she is lucky because she still can write poetry and keep the creativity in her life alive, where some people aren't that lucky.



John Brack, colins street 5pm The painting is John Brack's point of view on Urban Australia in the 1950's. It is considered a companion to one of brack's earlier paintings "the bar", which is also a representation of Urban Australia, but this time from the inside of an Australian pub. "Colins street, 5pm" is famous for it's representations John Brack uses dull colors and only slightly different tones of brown and yellow to depict the serious tone of the painting. By having the people with stern faces in the foreground and having the people in the background not even having faces you get the feeling of conformity in urban Australia at the time. Everyone in the painting is wearing the same coat with the same expression on their faces, and the people in the background don't even have expressions, they are just a crowd following each other. The visual techniques that John Brack uses reinstates the idea of Urban Australia being very routine prioritized. The people leaving work at 5 am all following the exact same routine is an example of urban Australia being very constricted when it comes to lifestyle choices. This painting was done in 1955 so it is picking up on older stereotype then nowadays. In the painting the people travelling home from work are mainly men, which picks up on the obvious role that gender played in urban Australia of the 1950's. There are two parts of Urban Australia, the city, and suburbia. This painting looks like it was set in the city. When you think of suburbia usually you picture an image of a wife at home with to kids and the husband off at work. From my perspective this painting picks up this perspective because most of the people returning home from work are men. But there are a few women in the picture too which means that even though it appears that Urban Australia is very stereotypical, there were people who didn't fit into the perfect family stereotype.

In previous texts I have looked at about urban Australia, there is a stereotype of the white man going to work and then his wife at home with kids cooking dinner in a nice house. The text "neighbors" by Tim Winton gives a more modern perspective on suburbia.

"Neighbors" promotes a colorful image of the multicultural aspect of urban Australia and suburbia. "neighbors" almost breaks the barrier between the traditional Australian dream lifestyle in typical urban Australia and the multicultural aspect of another neighborhood, one with character and a variety of different cultures. In the line "They felt superior and proud when they're parents came to visit, and to cast shocked glances across the fence" promotes the barrier between the two sides of suburbia. For someone always living in the perfect suburban stereotype to see a neighborhood full of different cultures and races can be quite confronting and this is especially true with older generations. The young couple that are talked about in the text started off with they're closed ideas on society and grew within the neighborhood to learn to accept all people. The quote "the young man and woman had always lived all their lives in the expansive outer suburbs where good neighbors were seldom seen and never heard." gives us plenty of evidence of the wariness of the couple at first. The part "seldom seen and never heard" depicts the old fashioned idea of how children were to be seen but never heard. Even though the majority of the population live in urban Australia it seems evident from the text that they are still stuck in their old traditions. The word "expansive" talks about the Australia Dream, another old fashioned idea of a big house with two parents and usually two kids. This neighborhood is not made up of the stereotypical rich Australian but the average person. Migrants make up a large percentage of Australia's total population, yet when we think of urban Australia they are skipped over completely. Even though Urban Australia usually comes across as a cultural wasteland the text proves that there is a form of culture still alive in suburbia. The line "they all sat around on blocks and upturned buckets and told barley- understood stories - the men butchering and the woman plucking as demanded." describes the culture and the closeness of the community within the neighborhood. Australia advertises itself as a multicultural wider community yet the aspect of men and woman of different races coming together just to prepare food is often forgotten.