MVHA: Protecting Significant Mid-century Modernism in Moonee Valley

Moving to Protect Moonee Valley's Modernist Heritage

We're extremely pleased that Moonee Valley City Council has recently moved to commence a new study of post-war heritage properties across the borough. Council deserves real credit for this - it certainly places them in the vanguard of Australian local government in protecting its inventory of significant modernist and other major post-war building styles. Provided the process is properly seen through to conclusion.

This exercise has proven particularly fraught elsewhere - Bayside Council in Melbourne's Southeast sits on arguably one of the largest and most significant inventories of mid-century modernist residential buildings in Australia, and the heritage community was looking forward to the conclusion of their recent study extending protection to a number of buildings that are notable not merely on a local basis, but certainly on a national, and even arguably (given the preeminence of a number of prominent Australian architects within the international mid-century modernist movement) international scale.

2-3 Oriana Ct, Flemington
On the left is a genuine and apparently in tact Lend Lease Sundowner (an Aussie modernist classic), paired with a 1963 effort from Brine Wierzbowski & Associates

Unfortunately the response from affected property owners in Bayside was particularly ignorant and particularly shrill. To such an extent that Council staff appear to have been placed under severe political pressure by Councillors to turf out the entire basis on which heritage listing is supposed to be applied in Victoria. 

Bayside Councillors have shamefully and immorally voted to ABANDON the heritage study, and instead sought to implement a scheme whereby property owners may voluntarily nominate their properties for heritage listing, which of course none of them will, and which will result in no protections being applied to a number of highly significant buildings. Read more about the issue HERE.

The Sporting Globe Bar and Grill, Mt Alexander Rd, Moonee Ponds
We don't know much about the history of this building, but it's clearly late modernist, with a splash of 'Route 66'
We look forward to learning more in the study, it's the most significant retail building we've identified for nomination.

This is of course not the methodology that is supposed to be mandated by the planning process in Victoria, and it follows a similar debacle at the City of Boorondara.

In fact these schemes undermine the entire basis of heritage protection everywhere, and we call again on the Planning Minister to now take the initiative and seek to implement a regime that MANDATES what heritage studies need to have performed, and which mandates a methodology that ensures heritage protection must be applied to a significant property no matter how loud the owner screams.

39 Nicholson St, Essendon
A fascinating two storey brick veneer residence with unusual casement windows
(possibly inter-war)

What's in a Listing?

The idea that heritage listing negatively affects the value of a property is not, in fact, borne out in reality. Most listed properties sell at a premium, with the certainty and the certification offered by the heritage listing most usually a key driver of the outcome, and this has been borne out in numerous studies (pdf link).

Nonetheless, we can expect another round of "what, you can't list this old piece of garbage!" from property owners at the conclusion of Moonee Valley's pending study, and activists and Council need to be ready for all this in advance. Council will need to stick to its guns having commissioned this study or risk undermining its own credibility and legislated authority. It is very specifically Council's duty to apply protection to all the significant heritage properties under its remit, and that duty neither begins nor ends at any specified date.

This survey already comes sadly too late for at least one recognised property of note. The property at 14 Brewster St, Essendon was a brutalist building known as the 'Richardson House', designed by Graeme Gunn for L. H. Richardson in 1962 (and many thanks to our friends at the Mid Century Domestic Architecture in Australia Facebook Page for their support in compiling much of this data). The building won the Victorian Architecture Medal in 1966, but we all know that brutalism can be a difficult style for many to love. Unfortunately a quick check for this building on Google Earth today reveals the following image 😞

How You Can Contribute

Council is presently seeking input into the study, and have asked for YOUR nominations of any properties to include. Unfortunately they have muddied the waters a little by specifically calling for nominations of typologies that would usually be regarded as "inter-war" rather than post-war - Old English and Spanish Mission Revival being prominent amongst them, and these are two typologies that Moonee Valley is particularly strong in.

Therefore we urge readers not to be too worried about the actual dates of any of the sites you nominate, if you're in any doubt and you're definitely looking at a modernist building - INCLUDE IT, there are professionals who are paid good money to sort this stuff out and this is exactly what they are there for. More importantly, there is also an inter-war study happening in the background that was commissioned a few years ago, and we have been assured by Council that anything that's nominated here but is technically too early will go in to that study.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE INTERACTIVE MAP AND NOMINATE YOUR FAVOURITE MODERNIST BUILDINGS IN MOONEE VALLEY

NB, you won't find all the houses listed here on the actual map, as it was broken for some weeks, so we've submitted a number of properties manually. See the end of this blog post for a complete list of the "missing" properties.

11 Inglebrae Court Essendon
'D.S. Series' Project Home. Designed by Cocks & Carmichael for Design 70 Pty Ltd circa 1968.

Moonee Valley Council Has a LOT More Work to Do

The other point is that in wandering around the suburbs for this study, it's become painfully obvious to MVHA that there are MASSIVE tracts of the borough that are choc full of obviously notable heritage buildings that are all completely unprotected. Entire streetscapes on of in tact period homes that the community would expect they should never lose are all completely without any sort of heritage overlay protecting them, and they are under threat from inappropriate development as we speak.

We had hoped that Council's "gap studies" approach, of which this study is the latest iteration, would be enough to ensure protection of all the necessary buildings. It's now painfully obvious that it won't, and our job moving forward will be to campaign for huge tracts of Moonee Ponds, Ascot Vale, Essendon and even Flemington to have in some cases some very large precinct overlays applied to them. More on this in our next blog post, and probably ad nauseum for years to follow.

 39 Brewster Street, Essendon
Smith, Tracey, Lyon & Brock (c.1959)

 Post-war & Mid-Century Modernism - Some of Our Favourites

We thought we'd close by including a selection of some of the places we've already nominated (nb the map was broken for some time, so we've supplied most of these to Council directly) that may help inspire you to do likewise for your favourite places in your own neighbourhood. If you have any questions about any of this, please contact us directly - [email protected]
But please hurry - nominations close on June 16.

12 Nicholson St, Essendon

46-48 Warrick St, Ascot Vale
This is a really bad photo, this double storey duplex (probably architect designed) is one of the finest and grandest examples of the type you will find anywhere. Better without solar ...

39 Lucknow St, Ascot Vale

Properties submitted by Moonee Valley Heritage Action not shown on Council's interactive map (again with thanks to Steven Coverdale and the good folks at his Mid-century Domestic Architecture in Australia Facebook Group - you can join up via that link - for their assistance in crowdsourcing many of the details here)

The Modernist Australia website is also a treasure trove that any lover of the style should also be familiar with.

FLEMINGTON

3 Oriana Court Flemington
Lend Lease Sundowner

2 Oriana Court Flemington
House designed by Brine Wierzbowski & Assoc. in 1963

ESSENDON
14 Brewster Street Essendon
'Richardson House' - DEMOLISHED

21 Brewster St, Essendon
designed by Clarke Hopkins & Clarke, 1965

31 Brewster St, Essendon
Smith, Tracey, Lyon & Brock (c.1959)
https://modernistaustralia.com/2017/01/31-brewster-st-essendon-vic/

17 Albion St, Essendon
https://modernistaustralia.com/2014/08/17-albion-st-essendon-vic/

41 - 43 Nimmo Street, Essendon VIC
(Already identified in MV Thematic Places Heritage Study, 2012-13)

11 Inglebrae Court Essendon VIC
'D.S. Series' -Project Home
Designed by Cocks & Carmichael for Design 70 Pty Ltd circa 1968.

STRATHMORE
53 Willonga Street, Strathmore
Albert Ross, 1963

43 Woolart Street, Stathmore
Ian Napier, 1966

1 Noble Avenue Strathmore
Doesn't look like much from the street, but pretty sure that it's by the legendary Ernest Fooks, built in 1951, so one of his earliest

31 Wickham Grove Strathmore VIC
'Abbey House' - Designed by Earle & Bunbury for William Abbey circa 1958

31 Wickham Grove Strathmore

33 Bournian Avenue Strathmore
Former Angus Abbey house, Earle and Bunbury 1958 - 61 with stage 2 designed by Reg Curtis 1968

269 Napier St (Corner Henshall Road) Strathmore
Macfarlane & Martin, ca 1961

KEILOR
18 Watson Rise, Keilor
Designed by Tom Paciocco, 1990 (POSTMODERN)

44 Horseshoe Bend Road &
15 Barwon Avenue Keilor
'Gallery' - Project Homes
Designed by Sergei Halafoff of Chancellor & Patrick Architects for Inge Bros. Pty Lty circa 1968
This house design was a winning entrant in the 1968 RAIA Competition

18 Borrell Street, Keilor

18 Borrell Street Keilor
'V375' - Service Plan
Designed by Jack Clarke of Clarke Hopkins Clarke for The Age RVIA Small Homes Service circa 1962

22 Garden Avenue Keilor
'Glen 5' - Project Home
Designed by John Chamberlin for Glenvill Homes circa 1969.

AIRPORT WEST
6 Patrick Court Airport West
'Farmhouse Prototype' - Project Home
Designed by Chancellor & Patrick Architects for Vindin Suares circa 1968.

Vale Ronald Greenaway (1932-2016), the unspoken achiever of Melbourne surrealism

Ronald Greenaway -
Portrait of Charles Blackman in 1959 (1989)

Every so often, you come across a person seemingly bypassed by history. But never more did I have that sense, and a sense of how history robs itself through its obsession with "great", iconic artists, of which each generation is allowed but a handful, than the night I met Ronald Greenaway.

Ronald was neighbour to my parents in Camberwell for many years, and they were privvy to and indeed part of some of tumults of his later years.

I'm grateful of having had the opportunity to meet Ronald in person in what transpired to be his final weeks. It was at the opening of a retrospective of his works at Town Hall Gallery in what used to be the grandiose Hawthorn Town Hall, another spectacular result of a kind  of 'competition' between councils at the time  the Eastern suburbs was being developed in the 1880s to have the swankiest Town Hall.

Ronald Greenaway
- Albert Tucker at 9 Collins Street, Melbourne, Grooming his Pet Flea, Hector (1963)

It was there I had the pleasure of shaking Ronald Greenaway's hand and muttering a few appreciative words that I can't be entirely sure he heard, much less comprehended, for he didn't seem happy in small talk, nor indeed in talk at all. Ronald was by this stage so pallid, so extracted in all his dealings with the world, and so seemingly apologetic for them, it struck me I'd never before seen a man seemingly so ready to embrace the beyond, but that it was a rather noble effect, rather than the sad one you might expect.

Ronald Greenaway -
Upstairs at Cafe Osmonia, Lonsdale Street, Melbourne (1958)

Was there a sense of final achievement, of some real and tangible life's testament and legacy behind all this? The exhibition curators claim to have catalogued over 300 of his own works from Ronald's home collection alone.

For it's almost as if this accumulation of his life's works was enough to bring to resolution something major within Ronald Greenaway, for him to have passed so soon after its celebration. I had wanted to meet with him again with half a mind to writing him a fitting biography, but that's now clearly not to be. But a blog at least you shall have, sir.

Ronald Greenaway -
Albert Tucker in New York (1994)

For, every so often, you come across a person seemingly bypassed by history. And it's that sense that had gripped me so immediately at the gallery that night, the enormity of history's loss. Here was an artist, the peer of Nolan, Tucker, Blackman, Vassilief, Mora, painted all their portraits, whose shows were glowingly reviewed in The Age by Patrick McCaughey, part of the John and Sunday Reed set at Heide, whose work sits in the NGV collection, but whose life's work was being retrospected at a suburban gallery, rather than the that more iconic institution.

And it seemed to me there was a real story here. There were no paintings in the retrospective between around 1971 and 1988. And I know enough of Mr Greenaway's personal history to plug those missing years with any manner of intriguing possible tales, but all of which point to a figure of some fascination and complexity letting their light dim, allowing themself to possibly revel in obscurity, a retreat from the public to the personal as a realm within which one derives ones very identity.

Ronald Greenaway -
(detail of) Lamp, Jug and skull (1959)

Almost none of the post-88 works had been exhibited before. Ronald had tried to get permission from the Council to operate a gallery out of his home and been refused. His house proudly displayed a brass plaque that read "Ronald Greenaway Gallery" regardless. His house was by all reports a veritable salon of artworks covering every surface. His own and his erstwhile peers' work.  

So many of those peers are celebrated for their often nebulous contributions to the lumpen body of Australian surrealist practice at the NGV's Lurid Beauty exhibition - reviewed in my next post, now closed of course - wombat timing strikes again...

Ronald Greenaway - clockwise from top left - 
Lunar Favourite (1957), Boneyard Steeplechaser (1957), Rider (1956), Trophy for a Winner (1957)

But I have personally found it far more useful to read that exhibition in relation to someone who was never a leading exponent of the movement, but someone on whose own formative art, surrealism was an obvious and telling influence.

The story of Australian surrealism is the story of a formerly isolated and pre-modern nation being forced into modernity through the wave of globalisation ushered in by the end of the second world war. And for local artists seeking to ply their trades, this environment presented several certain and unique challenges.

The sense of isolation from Europe, or even America where things 'were really happening' was palpable. But the sense in which artistic practices still had a prominence within public discourse such that they were even capable of scandalising large sectors of society, which they certainly aren't accorded today, and in fact would not have been accorded in the same way in Europe or America at the time, was also an opportunity.

Ronald Greenaway -
Portrait of Ethel Malley,  Somewhere in St. Kilda 1943 (2002)

It's difficult to imagine that the Ern Malley scandal could have been anything other than an obscure academic hullaballoo anywhere or any time other than Australia in the 1940s. It was important time in our cultural history, and the players were literal pioneers. To them we owe virtually all our significant artistic and cultural heritage.

Thirty years after Gallipoli, these diggers were needed to storm the trenches of the national mindset that could have consigned Australia to colonial backwater as the rest of the world modernised and globalised into the mid-twentieth century.

That Ronald Greenaway was flitting around the scenes of what was really the formative period for a genuine Australian and specifically Melburnian bohemia makes his story an important one. And his artwork, I would argue remains a neglected and important body from the period.

His style, particularly that of his portraiture was often highly naive (in the art terminology sense - primitivist). And he owed an obvious debt in his formative years to cubism and through that surrealism. Repressed and deferred sexuality is everywhere present in Greenaway's early work.

Ronald Greenaway -
Portrait of Maxwell Wilcox, date unknown

Greenaway appeared, as others have commented, somewhat in the thrall of fellow Melbourne painter Maxwell Wilcox, whose portrait he most numerously painted, and with whom he traveled around Papua New Guinea, the country which was famously and literally placed at the center of the surrealist 'map of the world', with Australia not far off. Exotic animals help, one suspects.

Surrealist 'map of the world'

Ronald Greenaway -
Cups and Cakes, 1966)

And his repeated invocation of anthropomorphising figures owed an obvious debt to surrealist practice, but his use of colour and form  did increasingly deviate over the course of his career ever more radically from any surrealist aesthetic, and it was this that really singled him out for contemporary critical praise from Patrick McCaughey.

"In his time, Greenaway has cultivated a bold, almost harsh manner to accomodate an obsession with violent sexual fantasies. Every painting confronts the viewer with a bright, hard surface where no quarters is asked or given. One of his most recent paintings typifies Greenaway's black humour with its strident, hectic, manner.

Frequently the basis of these fantasies lies in the elimination of the distance between human beings and physical objects; vases sprout breasts or a human being sits like a plaster cast upon a chair. All such goings on give Greenaway's work a coarse vitality which is impressive."

-Patrick McCaughey, The Age, 24 August 1968

In his later years, Ronald developed his own unique, cartoon-ish style, featuring lurid and often violently clashing colours set in extremely chaotic forms, wherein the work's formal elements manage to resolve all this inherent tension. Greenaway's later works seem poised almost to explode from their own formal chaos, with only the artist's skill in resolving it all standing between us and a formal mess. The Hoodlums of Ryan's Lane is typical of this later style.

Ronald Greenaway
- The Hoodlums of Ryan's Lane (2007)

Ronald was born in Melbourne in 1932, attended Swinburne Technical College - which grew to become today's Swinburne University, and Melbourne University, where he took an MA. Ronald became, as we have seen, a key figure on the Melbourne art scene of the 1950s, just as it was becoming invigorated by the new strands of modernism it had been exposed to during the second world war, and by waves of immigrants like the Mora clan translating their experience of European bohemia to an antipodean environ.

Ronald Greenaway
- Daffodils and Jug (1961)

The Contemporary Art Society CAS) was a formative institution in the development of modernist art practice and dissemination in Australia, and in Melbourne in particular. Founded by George Bell in 1938, all of the leading lights of Melbourne's modernist scene were members. Tucker, Boyd, Nolan, Mora. In 1954, John and Sunday Reed had reinviorated the flagging society, establishing a new headquarters at Heide.

Through these years, Greenaway served variously as President and Secretary of the CAS, as well as editing its magazine, and he was made an honorary life member in 1971. As well as the NGV, Ronald's works are represented at Swan Hill and Newcastle Galleries.

Ronald Greenaway's contribution to the emergent, and reinvigorated Melbourne art scene in the post-war years was both significant and enduring. This author looks forward to a day when this fact is more commonly known and remembered.