I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.
Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.
The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.
Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:
You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.
Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.
That’s got a lot to do with the city’s history, topology and climate and social forms that have grown out of them. The climate certainly didn’t encourage terraced housing, and the hills hugging the snake like turns of the Brisbane River led to a very heterogenous patterning of the built environment - with workers cottages in the valleys very close to grander homes on the cooler hill tops. Even post gentrification, you can still see distinct differences in the humility and grandeur of old houses on the same street as it rises and falls. All this led to both a much less closely settled and therefore more verdant urban landscape, and a much more fluid social pattern - where the rich and the poor lived - over a lot though not all of the city - in the same suburbs. The fact that the city’s economic history meant that heavy industry never established itself, and Brisbane remained an administrative and distributional hub rather than a manufacturing town also meant a far less fixed class structure. In a way, we were pioneers of the postmodern service industry centred civic economy.
So, even though housing prices are through the roof here in New Farm, it’s still a heterogenous sort of place, and although I can walk to town in 20 minutes, and there’s stacks of galleries, bistros and all that sort of pizazz, it’s a suburb. It’s just urban enough really - in terms of people on the streets and a critical mass for bars and shops and restaurants, that it’s effectively the best of both worlds. And I find that really attractive, particularly living on a big block surrounded by georgeous fig trees and this city’s fairly unique urban fauna.
Nor, when I was in High School at Kedron in the 80s, in a much newer suburb (combining older areas with the start of 50s sprawl and outside the 5km radius), did I ever notice an absence of community and all the other supposed alienating features of suburban life. Quite the contrary.
Of course, Brisbane is changing, and quite rapidly at that. Intensive apartment development in some areas is creating something resembling an “inner city” outside the CBD. And the culture is shifting, though that’s a topic for another post, perhaps. But, anyway, while I was searching earlier tonight for something only tangentially related to this theme, I came across this post from Linda Carroli, a progressive urban planning consultant. I actually knew Linda a little in the late 80s, when she had a continuing association with 4zzz-fm and I knew her sister through student politics.
Anyway, I thought this piece on her blog was a fantastic reflection on some of what remains distinctive and beautiful about Brisbane, but also a timely and impassioned call for us to rethink the dumbness of automatic antagonism and judgement between inner city and suburban cultures (if indeed there are such things). The whole post is really worth reading, but I thought I’d excerpt this snippet:
In any western city most of us live in the suburbs and it’s the suburbs that decide governments. We, as a city, might like to learn to deal with our suburbs more constructively rather than over-investing in every square centimetre of the central business district.
The consolidation-sprawl binary is tired and worn out. The discourse simply produces more of the same. Inner city living is not a virtue just because government has invested in infrastructure there or opportunistic developers build highrise residential towers hugging the riverbanks. There’s a pressing need to think about the city’s structure and shape more complexly than a binarism affords, and there’s more important things to say and do than slag off suburbs and the people who live in them. A binarism closes thought.
There’s more to a city than the five or so kilometres surrounding the CDB. A city is its people and the suburbs are the city, not just the central towers of elite business and residences that dominate the street life below. In the suburbs, there is a hum of life - different kinds of life - sounded in a different key.
What she has to say is also interesting from the point of view of the whole Creative Cities agenda. We, for instance, have a “Creative Brisbane” policy, and as I’ve pointed out before, there has been a genuine attempt to take festival culture outside its normal redoubts of SouthBank and the Valley. But I wonder how much in reality the cultural policy of a city takes in the ‘burbs. As Carroli suggests, something is happening to the city’s north. Some of my colleagues at QUT have an ARC project on Creative Suburbia. I’ll be watching its outcomes with interest.
Carroli concludes:
I tend to think it’s how we live that matters so much more than where we live. If we really seek an imaginary that serves the city, that values its people and that provides a hook for its identity, we might want to think more critically about what and who we omit from the picture and story of our city and its citizenry.
“in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.”
Yes and no. Paddington, just a few kms from the CBD, has the topography and feel that you’d have to go 30 km from the Sydney or Melbourne CBDs to find. But the Valley, on the edge of the CBD, could be in Sydney or Melbourne.
One thing that makes Brisbane different is that the (main) university is in the suburbs. So students share Queenslander houses with backyards in suburban Taringa rather than inner urban terraces in Carlton or Newtown. Does this make a difference to the vibe of the place?
This observation needs to be qualified by noting that the Real University is located just across the river from inner urban West End, Highgate Hill and Dutton Park, and so those precincts do include a student population who formerly made use of the ferries, and now make use of the Eleanor Schonell Bridge, to commute to the campus. It’s nonetheless worth noting that even in these areas there is a significantly higher percentage of detached houses with backyards than you’d find in Carlton or Newtown, or Fitzroy or Surry Hills, or Collingwood or Glebe, etc., as well as larger areas of public bushland.
“the Real University”
ROFLMAO
Carroli’s stuff is very thoughtful. Makes me want to visit you Quincelanders even more. [It’s not the flu I swear]
Sean Carney, on the other hand, might find more buyers for his tripe were he to do the slightest research. Or perhaps he can explain to me how it is that a train travels from the CDB to Frankston along the edge of the bay without passing through Carrum:
http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/stop/view/19858
Oh wait… there IS a train. You remember when I said there wasn’t? Yeah, that was just me making shit up.
And what about Spring Hill? Parts of it are extremely suburban (e.g., the areas adjoining Water Street) despite being next door to both the Valley and the City. Nice old queenslanders.
FDB, Carrum Downs isn’t Carrum. There is no train line passing through Carrum Downs, the suburb sits on the other side of the Frankston Fwy and Frankston-Dandenong Road from the bayside Carrum. They just share a name because developers like to do that sort of thing to fool people.
True PDAA - the train will not drop Shaun off at his relative’s house. A couple of kilometres away are two different train stations, depending on where in Carrum Downs you are, and 4 bus routes run through or skirt the borders of Carrum Downs and run to the train line.
It’s completely arse-backwards anyway - these suburbs exist because of cars, not despite the deeply held wishes of suburbanites to live sustainably but oh gosh I just found myself here without a car.
Spiros, the Valley might feel “inner city” now. But before the “urban redevelopment” thing it was a largely vacant shopping precinct surrounded by declining light industry and warehouses with big pockets of streets with Queenslanders on them. That’s the point made in the post too - the “inner city” - here defined as densensess of population is being constructed in Brisbane for the first time. It was depopulated 15 or 20 years ago. Again, it’s not so much that there were student/artistic cultures etc. - of course there were - but that such cultures can co-exist with a built environment that’s much more “suburban” than people usually think.
Oh, and strip clubs and organised crime run casinos and pubs where lots of smack was sold, too.
But the Valley as a “music precinct” or an “entertainment precinct” is an artefact of recent history and urban change too. The music/arts thing started happening because there were lots of disused spaces that could be rented cheaply in the early 90s, before redevelopment really kicked off and at the height of the recession. With some exceptions - eg the Arena - most of the venues that feature bands without a “name” or local Brisbands are 90s creations. And the dance clubs are late 90s/early 2000s. To some degree this did leverage off the presence of gay pubs and clubs through the 80s, but again the “everyone goes to the Valley to get pissed” culture is really recent - it was quite a subcultural endeavour even about 5 or 6 years ago. Of course, there’s been the cycle of “residential and shopping crowds out culture”, which has to some degree been ameliorated by state action.
I think the main point (interesting discussion of Brisbane aside) is that it’s a mistake to view the urban/suburban dichotomy as one of two competing cultures with clashing interests (and I agree).
But don’t lose sight of the fact that the interests still do clash on a number of issues, particularly climate change: it’s just that the clash of interests comes about as a result of circumstance, not culture. Put another way, people who live in Carrum Downs really are more sensitive to a carbon price, not because their parents didn’t bring them up on lattes, but because you really do need a car to get around Carrum Downs.
on the other hand, we know that on balance, people generally (including Carrum Downs residents) would prefer to live in Burwood, say, or Coburg. we know that because even a smaller house is more expensive in Coburg than in Carrum Downs. Long-term, the answer is a) to allow more people to live in Coburg (and similar) by increasing the housing supply and making Coburg denser and b) to improve public transport to support that density. People can still choose to live in a big house in Carrum Downs and commute, but they should bear the costs of that carbon-intensive decision. Obviously there are transitional issues (current Carrum Downs residents didn’t know they were going to have their carbon taxed, and still don’t know how expensive that’s going to be) but those issues should be solvable.
Melbourne seems to have gotten this point with its 2030 plan – Brisbane has a way to go (not to knock Brisbane, which is a great city, just the planners).
jim - largely I agree, but don’t forget that a whole lot of people don’t actually want to live in Coburg. They want their big old eaveless wonder with boat and double garage AND to get around cheaply, as if this were possible in Coburg.
As to Brisbane’s suburban status — i’m three k’s out of the city and definitely in suburbia. I have breeding pheasant coucals in the backyard (juvenile spotted on the weekend)!
But, technically, even when I was living in most-definitely urban Potts Point (kings x) I was outside the boundary of the urb therefore, suburban. But here in Brisbane with the cippi that mark the boundaries of the urbs being many miles further out, I’m inside the urban limit of the city! And no praetor or consul can sentence me to death! Take THAT campbell newman, you and your “can do” lictors better get those axes out of your fasces!
I do want to point out, 20 years ago when i was growing up in urban Sydney, places like Marrickville were not really regarded as “inner city” … Stanmore Rd I guess was the boundary of it. Basically where you find the “federation” architecture of the inner-west or the east (e.g. Woolahra, Waverly, Kensington), was for me and my friends the start of the suburbs. How times have changed. I think even Strathfield is inner-city nowadays. At one point in 1983 I lived in Drummoyne and thought I was in suburban exile.
Tyro Rex, interesting point about the shifting “boundary” between inner city and suburbia. Twenty or thirty years ago in Melbourne, this boundary would have been somewhere between Clifton Hill and Northcote on the northern side of town. These days it’s arguably somewhere between Thornbury and Reservoir.
There is an essay by David Nichols about the them vs. us tendency in Australian writing on the suburbs in the next issue of Meanjin. Among other things it points out (with data) that suburban living is not necessarily any less environmentally sustainable than living in the inner suburbs.
That Carney thing was both ridiculous on its own merits and utterly typical of the way The Age freaks out at the slightest hint that some form of life could exist beyond Yarraville, Coburg, Kew and Elsternwick.
oh, and I’m afraid that ‘lefties who sneer at the suburbs’ are certainly ten a penny, in Melbourne anyway. Greens are worse than laborites if you want to break it down by party. About 60% of the sneering I’m personally exposed to has to do with the location and catchment of La Trobe; much of the rest derives from uninformed, stereotypical ideas about how outer suburbanites live, where they work, what they consume and what they do for fun.
Of course there is nothing in the least bit ’sneering’ about labeling all residents of inner city suburbs as latte sipping tree hugging lefties.
Adelaide too. I’ve always read this as (now very dated) code for ’suburban values’, but now that Laura mentions it, there is certainly a chorus of sneering here as well about particular, actual suburbs. Many Adelaide people look at me strangely when I tell them where I live; it’s 20 minutes by car from the CBD, but because it’s old northwestern working-class ex-”rough”, they think if they want to visit me they’ll need to bring a can of mace and a tyre iron, not to mention a cut lunch.
And I hate to say it because I do love the show so much, but isn’t Kath and Kim a fairly direct product of lefties who sneer at the suburbs?
Since La Trobe’s “catchment” includes a high percentage of working class kids, kids from non-Anglo ethnic backgrounds and mature-age students, it reflects very poorly on those doing the sneering (especially if they’re pretending to be lefties).
Yes Paul. And about 45% of LTU undergrads are the first in their family to go to university. It rises to 65% if you don’t count older siblings.
So how it’s compatible with social progressivism to affect to look down upon a place like this has always been anr remains utterly beyond me.
pollytickedoff, I don’t agree that the whole inner city is tarred with any one brush. That’s part of the point. The Age and related media organs know and understand very well that the City of Stonnington is a longstanding nest of Liberal party vipers. The same roughly reality-based assessment just isn’t applied to the outer suburbs. Sorry to be labouring this point. For some reason I still harbour lingering shreds of care about what Fairfax thinks of people like me.
I’m still confused by the fact that Marrickville could be considered inner city. It seems anywhere that it is worthwhile walking beyond the garage is inner city, even when these are simply shops clustered around a station.
Which is strange, almost everywhere that urban sprawl has occured, it started with public transport before the cars even came along, even in LA where lassaiz faire gave the city street cars before mid century corporatism and social engineering encourage car use.
Thing is, if house prices near these stations and shop clusters have a noticable premium, this is a pretty clear sign that people prefer it. It’s just plain market economics speaking!
And if most of the world is using one-ply sandpaper toilet paper because there’s a limited supply of two-ply soft toilet paper (which becomes only affordable to a few), then there is no point dissing the one-ply paper or it’s users, or dissing the dissers and defending the one-ply as the superior form. It’s better just to make more two-ply.
In the case of walkable suburbs (which Marrickville and all these “inner city” places are) this might mean more public transport, and more importantly relaxing some of the euclidean zoning so that small shops can open easier, since at the moment the costs of rezoning and approval etc. means only the big supermarkets and big box stores can open, and they obviously want to restrict the ability of customers to walk elsewhere to where they might buy things that aren’t from Woolworths (usually with a carpark nullabor).
On the other hand, even the big developers are having a go, with that strange faux town centre at Rouse Hill, but that might end up a private sector Milton Keynes.
But it seems strange, car culture everywhere is the product of government assistance through tariffs and subsidies and free infrastructure, urban planning to encourage suburbanisation and encouraging big box stores and the like. Meanwhile, the massive markup for housing near stations and shops implies there is pent up demand for walkable suburbs with public transport, in part being held back by restrictive zoning.
Of all things, the “leftist, urban” ideal is being held back by restrictions on the market, and the “conservative, suburban” ideal is the result of government intervention!
There are undoubtedly loads of urban sneerers, but what hope is there of making a critique of suburbia without being tarred as one?
Is ’suburbia’ a coherent enough entity that it can be critiqued en bloc like that, though?
I don’t believe it is. The conditions vary so widely.
So maybe getting specific would be a good start FDB.
Also, being very clear about whether it’s cultural critique or some sort of environmental criticism being levied. They’re usually treated as the same thing.
“Also, being very clear about whether it’s cultural critique or some sort of environmental criticism being levied. They’re usually treated as the same thing.”
That’s the source of the problem a lot of the time Laura. Why can’t I say “these recently built suburbs are extremely carbon intensive and their design flies in the face of virtually everything we know about sustainability” without someone saying I hate bogans having flat screens?
That question is answered in the negative in the post that’s linked to by Linda Carroli. I think she’s right - we’d all get on a lot better and all sorts of things in terms of urbanism could be shaped better if we started to realise that it’s a pretty useless binarism - except for polemical or status claiming purposes. Obvs it does have that function for the “sneer” crew.
Crossed with FDB! Same point!
Of course, the big irony here is that if actually DID grow up in the inner city - as I did - in the 1970s - when they were still working class/ migrant / indigenous ghettos with a few adventurous lower middle class (eg my folks): the snobs were the suburbanites.
basically, they wouldn’t send their kids round to visit your place cos West End was “scary” / full of wogs / full of crime/ full of Murris. “How can you bring your kids up here?” they’d sneer.
And NOW you expect me to reach out and embrace greater bogania and the (even worse) middle class sprawling Anglo leafy greeners??
How shall I put this: Bite my Latte.
Bite it hot!
Also, I think the point about Greens v. Laborites and attitudes is approaching a truth. Clive Hamilton and all his framing of “suburbs = affluenza = destroying teh planet” may have a significant degree of responsibility for this stoopid discourse.
But, also, a lot of The Age and SMH inner city snobs would be Liberal voters too. Showing how “teh left = inner city” is also probably a dichotomy that distorts more than it illuminates.
Indeed. What do Carrum Downs, Cabramatta and Caboolture have in common, besides not being inner-city?
Note also the point Carroli makes about the homogenisation of the cultures of Brisbane inner city suburbs, Paul. The “vibrant diversity” of the inner city is becoming something of a myth with gentrification and attempts to commodify it.
“Why can’t I say “these recently built suburbs are extremely carbon intensive and their design flies in the face of virtually everything we know about sustainability”
Maybe you need to name the recently built suburbs you mean. Again they are not all equal. Some that I live near have been built to be energy and water efficient with effective solar orientation and built in rainwater colelction and greywater reuse.
Population density in the outer suburbs is not much different to the inner ones, and while the houses are bigger, more people live in them. There are problems created by the lack of public transport, but the solution there is fairly obvious: provide it. It’s not that the architecture or land use is unsustainable.
I have relatives in a St Kilda who can’t have gas hot water or cooking, have to use a clothes dryer, need to keep the central heating on all the time, have no chance of growing their own food or collecting their own water, and drive much more than I do, 18kms from the CBD.
True of some new areas in Greater Brisbane as well.
Leftists sneering eh? What a load of BS.
My wife & I live in the suburbs. We are Green-tinged Laborites, Dem sometimes voting, empathising occasionally w/ some Libertarian views/fears, anti-abortion except in rare cases, vegetarian Progressive agnostics verging on atheism who love living on the fringe of the city (Logan? Brisbane?) in a suburb called Waterford West.
Our families see us as “leftists” but that’s primarily because we can’t stand the present CONservative leaders, nor John Howard & his cronies. We don’t sneer at the suburbs we live in…I tend to ring council & get up them if I think they aren’t doing their job.
The part of the suburban street we live in is as cosy & generally peaceful as the best of them…probably because we have long-term home-owners who are humble tortoises slowly paying off their mortgages for their modest houses, unconcerned about competing w/ their neighbours & therefore don’t have a tribe of kids in dark glasses partying outside a McMansion whilst holding up their mobile phones & iPods like invading androids…but rather some of us actually pick up the litter left behind by ignorant passers-by & that which crows & garbage trucks leave in their wake…& we tend to give a sh*t about providing bird attracting plants & cutting our lawns before they become jungles.
We have at least three neighbours who are Laborites. From what I gather, none of them trusted John Howard, particularly in his last term. We don’t talk much…just the odd “G’day” or nod. But if our corner is invaded or an event/accident occurs a few of us race to the scene. We tend to keep out of each others business because we don’t live in an American security compound, nor work for any intelligence services, nor treasure John Howard’s fridge magnet.
I doubt that any of my neighbours sneer. Nor do they seem to drink special coffees w/ puffy white stuff on top and such. Or whatever the heck a “latte” is. We’ve never been sneered at by people drinking that stuff. I know plenty of “Lefties” and none drink that stuff. Plenty like their grog. Most don’t drink as much as they used too…unless they’re told not to.
Shaun Carney is just another DIVIDER by the sounds of it. He’s gonna get a big surprise next election.
N’
laura and P’s C
I agree entirely about the sneering. There’s even a whiff of it here on LP occasionally. People do love to talk about their own group and how it’s superior to others. Inner city dwellers sneering at suburbanites: yes on the basis of assumption and prejudice. Is prejudice inversely proportional to knowledge?
Another factor, I think, is that a decision to rent or buy a house is very personal, and taken with care. Hopes and plans are involved.
Still, it’s sadly amusing to hear “lefties” sneer at the working class and underprivileged. Snobbery trumps ideology. Or ideology is worn as a thin patina all the more easily discarded.
Suburbs can be lovely to live in. P’sC grows her citrons. Many attractive aspects, like with country towns or bushland. That’s where the central city folk can join with suburbanites: all sneering together at the ruralians.
cheerio
See, I don’t think it’s sneering at the working class or underprivileged per se. I think it’s sneering at well-off blue collar workers and the ‘unsophisticated’ stuff that they conspicuously consume.
Pav is right that Kath & Kim is archetypal, but it’s affectionate which makes all the difference. The Age et al are just resentful.
Really, what’s worse for the planet? Driving a ute or taking an annual European holiday
I think it’s sneering at difference, sneering at iggerance, sneering at location, sneering at how ya talk, sneering at ya aspirations; all of the above. Long ago, I loved discovering W. M. Thackeray’s “Book of Snobs”. It opened my eyes to the wide varieties of snobbery that the human persona can accommodate. Frankly, I find them all pretty damn disgusting. But who cares? Let snobs stew in their own juices, say I.
“The Castle” pokes gentle fun at the working (and/or crim) class, but I enjoy it. Perhaps we’ll agree to disagree on this.
I was happy to see you mention the sneering, laura, because I’ve heard both: the sneering, and the denial-of-sneering. And frankly, that just spits-me-to-tears.
cheerio
Damn and blast! Forgot to switch pseudonyms. HHMB was Ambi replying to laura. mi scusi.
a little quote:
“I have never ceased to be astounded when observing the preening and mating habits of fully grown specimens of the species Academicus Superciliosus. The behaviour patterns of one of the true members of the species are unmistakable. He is inflated with self-esteem and perpetually self-congratulatory as to the high vocation of the university teacher; but he knows almost nothing about any other vocation, and he will lie down and let himself be walked over if anyone enters from the outer world who has money or power or even a tough line in realist talk…”
- E.P. Thompson, “Warwick University Ltd” (1970); quoted by Mary Evans, “Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities” (2004)
OT but relevant to the phenomenon of sneering….
I’m with Lefty E.
Ambi, E. P. Thompson was himself a university teacher. Maybe his work on working class culture had something to do with the construction of this quote - I don’t know his personal bio. His animus against “Continental” theory was on show in some of his stuff though - good old British empiricism, wot? But:
(a) The stereotype of the snobby sneering academic is one of the least helpful around, because it almost automatically gets extended to “Ooh! You have a postgraduate degree! And you look down on me - look! I’m the authentic voice of the people… enough with the big words!” which is its own sneer and absolutely antithetical to actual communication!
(b) I’d venture to suggest that to the degree that it has any reality, it might largely apply to the male of the species!
I’d much rather take a leaf out of Mel Gregg’s book - literally - the one on affect and writing in cultural studies - and follow Richard Hoggett’s example of adopting protocols of communication which actually facilitate communication - through empathy.
The whole point of all this is to disrupt the binary between “teh people” and “teh elites” and not to bloody reinscribe it!
Also, what Laura said at #35. The urban/suburban dichotomy isn’t the same as a class divide. Again, if people read Carroli’s post, it often has a lot to do with claiming class and ethnic heterogeneity in the inner city makes it more cosmpolitan compared to class and ethnic identity in the burbs. Now, that’s way out of date, as has been intimated on this thread, on both sides of the supposed divide.
Fantasies about urbane renovators inhabiting an adventurous and exciting liminal zone in the inner city were always just that, and now they’re not even all that close to reality because the “diversity” proper to the inner city has been homogenised out of existence.
Yes, how quickly they forget Tyro.
Im serious about this, and let me boil it all down: suburbanites used to sneer and look down upon inner city folk - till it became cool to live there circa early 90s. This is simply a known fact for anyone who grew up within 3km of an east coast CBD. They’re now jealous, and projecting their ugly small-minded “keeping up with Joneses” rubbish onto us, “teh left” - or anyone but themselves.
Academic grrrl
yes, I know he was a university teacher. So he saw these snobs at close hand. Note that he didn’t write that ALL of his colleagues were snobs, he had merely detected some snobs, and they were doozies. I too have detected some, and they are doozies. Some are men and some (fewer) are women. If you’re looking for snobs, empirical observation is a good way to begin, I think. Field work. As to how they BECAME snobs, that’s much more difficult to ascertain.
I’ll now give some more of the quote.
“Superciliosus is the most divisible and reliable creature in his country, being so intent on crafty calculations of short-term advantages – this favour for his department, that chance of promotion – or upon rolling the log of a colleague who, next week, at the next committee, has promised to run a log for him, that he has never even tried to imagine the wood out of which all this timber rolls. He can scurry furiously and self-importantly around his committees, like a white mouse running in a wheel, while his master is carrying him, cage and all, to be sold at the local pet-shop.”
I don’t think old E.P. was taking a working-class standpoint on academic snobs, I think he was sad to see colleagues behaving like that. But perhaps his own studies of the workers showed him how ignorant some of his colleagues were, of real lives lived beyond the groves of academe?
I don’t mean to go OT, I’d just suggest that many of us have our own little snobberies; and that many of them are not only based on ignorance, but lead to ignoring.
Lefty E “the big irony here is that if actually DID grow up in the inner city - as I did - in the 1970s - when they were still working class/ migrant / indigenous ghettos with a few adventurous lower middle class (eg my folks): the snobs were the suburbanites.”
Everyone can be a snob in this game, LE. The sneerers can in turn be sneered at by the sneerees. It’s terrific, really. We all WIN!!
Ok, so maybe Im not helping to break down the divide here
, but frankly, Im still pissed after all these years! And Im not going to take this ahistorical garbage from Carney.
My family copped a bucketing for moving into ‘wog-town’ in the early 70s. And not from yer poor oppressed bogans from Inala or Woodridge - Lord no. Exclusively from the upper middle class parents of my school friends who lived in the leafy green burbs of Kenmore, Moggill etc, and sent their kid to the selective public school regrettably located (in their view) in the south Brisbane “slums” in which I had the great fortune to grow up.
They’d drive through with their noses in the air as if they might catch something. But *I’m* a snob??? For living exactly where I grew up, minding my own beeswax?
lets not forget - moving to suburbia wasn’t originally some poor 2nd rate choice for lower class folk, who then got bucketed by inner city latte swillers for living in shit boring places. Suburban living was the dream, the main game - you’d made it out there! Losers, itinerants, blacks, wogs, deros lived in the inner city - the unrespectable . And boy, they weren’t afraid of telling you that either.
Gentrification turned all that around - well fine, but thats no excuse for historical amnesia on the roots of any “sneering” across this particular divide.
It was all the other way, not so long ago…. And like Mark - Im not convinced it has come back at them in turn - i frankly think its projected.
Now, if anyone wants me, I’ll be polishing the French clocks at Keating Towers.
Hmm. I grew up in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney when they were on the edge of farmland - they are now almost inner-city compared to the outer edges of the sprawl. As soon as I could, I moved to the inner city and feel that I couldn’t bear to live in suburbia again. That’s not a matter of sneering at the people who do live there. It’s based on how isolated I felt as a teenage girl growing up in a location which was increasingly dominated by cars, where you had to catch an infrequent bus or walk 2km to get to the nearest shopping strip. As you were walking, you’d be lucky to pass one other person on the street (who’d be a stranger). I lived in London for a decade, which is an immense city but one which doesn’t have this same distinction between inner city and suburb - the distinction in Australia is very much about roads and cars and distance between houses (not necessarily size of housing blocks - many houses in London are terraces but on big blocks of land with extremely long gardens). And walkability. I walk everywhere and the moment I walk out of my house I see several other people, also walking. In the course of a 10 minute walk, I’ll pass close to 100 people on any day, many of whom I know to nod hello to. It makes for a very different sense of community.
But not all ‘the suburbs’ lack walkability, community, and other nice things that are good.
It’s the indiscriminateness of the sort of sneering Mark pointed to originally that *I* am sneering at.
Lefty E, let us compare shoulder chips: I grew up in the country and upon arriving in the city at an impressionable age got sneered at by everybody. Most city folk, no matter where they live themselves, project their fantasies upon country folk and assume that one is either a drooling redneck hick with six fingers on each hand or the snotty daughter of a land-grabbing grazier with money hanging out of the pockets of his R.M. Williams moleskins. Indeed, one often sees this sort of thing even on this otherwise very fine blog.
Ambi — I think the EP Thompson analysis is actually more about Britishness (both his and his targets’) than it is about academics.
One speaks of sneering as if it were a bad thing.
One alternative to sneering is sympathetic condescension.
I know which of these I prefer.
Jeez Pav, if I’d known you were such an Okie from Muscogie I’d have brought my banjo and laid on some erm, chittlins or somesuch.
etc.
PS Just joking. You’re the bezt!
Lefty E, I knew some people who moved from Kenmore to West End in the 90s (acquaintances of friends). Couldn’t stop complaining about teh awful blackfellas and homeless people cluttering up Boundary Street. Of course, as a number of people have suggested, rising real estate values have given them the homogeneous quasi-heterogony they desired along with a dose of “diversity” if not the number of people on the streets who’ve been reinforced by the processes of displacement that go along with the rising “value”.
Conversely, a lot of the “West End is my anarchist commune forevah” folks (not mentioning any names) folk don’t always necessarily display the values of empathy and negotiating diversity that they claim are being trashed.
The social dynamics in such areas - as with the burbs - are far more complex than can be usefully captured by these dichotomies, and it’s right to historicise them as well.
Is heterogony actually a word?
I’m inclined to agree with Laura, and to sneer mostly only at the sneerers (and to regret the younger incarnations of myself who were also more inclined to sneer). I appreciate the historical view from Mr Elitist, though. For myself I’ve chosen one of those much sneered at ‘impersonal’ high density developments near a transport hub in what is still mostly a suburban part of Sydney - but I’ve found a real sense of community here, and I’m about to move across the road into an award winning fabricated ‘town centre’ development that is much the same, only better (a major advantage being that it gets winter sun on the balcony, meaning I won’t need a clothes drier in the coldest months).
There’s plenty of sneer about this kind of place - I’ve copped it from the urb’s and the ‘burbs. But as Laura implies, not all of these things are as much alike as they seem from the outside. I like other people in close proximity, a cafe around the corner and not having to run a car, which are the main reasons I wouldn’t prefer a house on a quiet street somewhere; and I like to have money left over after rent to buy food and books, which is why I’m looking for high density outside of the inner city.
Yes, who could forget the great Kenmoron influx!
And absolutely - they pasteurised it over time to their blander tastes.
And as for those Anarchists , well trust me, they were all newjacks themselves anyway!
No no no — I already have a banjo*. The civilised visitor is the one who brings the guitar.
Of course. it’s what you’re feeling when you’re in terrible pain about several quite different things.
*Not really. My dad did, though!
If by ‘ Leftie’ you mean Marxist - and if by ‘ sneers at’ you include marginalization by ignoring, then there actually are some examples.
Marxists routinely ignore riots like Palm Island and Macquarie Fields in favor of agitation for some Revolutionary party of the proletariat for example.
It seems to make little difference to them that many of their precious local ‘proletariat’ live in huge suburban mansions and send their kids to private schools.
So I think we have to re-define leftie, leftist and left here quick-smart so as to exclude highly dangerous Marxists for short - from the vast majority of the left. The vast majority of the left is sensible and decent and either democratic or libertarian socialist.
Also, in terms of undermining the apparent dichotomy…
I was born in Maitland and raised there and in Newcastle, and now (regrettably) live in Sydney. We are now buying a flat to live in in Ashfield, because the walkability and cycleability of the inner west (the “inner city”) is most similar to what I grew up with in regional NSW!
It’s amusing that car free living could be undertaken without a conscious choice vry easily when I was in Newcastle, but it is a challenge and a half in the most populous urban centre for thousands and thousands of kilometres unless one chooses some of the remaining (and increasingly expensive) suburbs on train lines.
So the thing is, it’s not even closeness to the CBD (Parramatta is walkable), or Urban-Suburban-Regional. It’s really that all my previous places of residence were pre-war suburbs, before the late 20th century social experiment of car culture, and now people are speaking with their money and returning to these pre-war suburbs, and I’m buying up near the spawning ground of elitists like Angus Young and Tommy Roudonikis.
“Kenmore to West End … Couldn’t stop complaining about teh awful blackfellas”
In their defence, they wouldn’t have seen anything dark or substantive in Kenmore. Even the houses there are blonde brick veneer.
I know, Spiros. I’m an alumnus of Kenmore State School - we lived there before we moved to Kedron. Mum’s VW Beetle used to get the occasional rock thrown through its windows because of all the “Shame Fraser Shame”, “It’s Time” and “Go with Gough” stickers.
Lots of people have made fun of the suburbs - at least since Barry Humphries, although Dame Edna has sort of triumphed there, and we all enjoy it and acknowledge the truth of it - nowhere is perfect. The left (intellectual elite) contrasted Australian suburbia with romantic notions of European sophistication and couldn’t wait to escape the arid and tasteless conformity of so many of the post-war suburbs.
Now, like nuclear power enthusiasts embracing climate change, they’re reaching for a new way to attack the suburbs, hence the recent attack on gardens in Arena Magazine by some maniac called Robert Nelson, who writes:
“There is a causal chain of environmental disasters shackled to the suburban garden. Because we have gardens we have low-rise buildings, jealously regulated by setback provisions in order to protect the privacy of neighbouring gardens. The setback legislation guarantees the perpetual maintenance of low-density cities. And because we have an urban sprawl by this legal resolution, we have an ineffectual public transport system, with a consequent reliance on automotive transport. The reason for so much of the fumes in the city - the exorbitant generation of greenhouse gases, with its incaculable damage to the environment - is the suburban garden ….They are, in effect, an institution of private good against the public good or - more accurately - an institution of current taste against the future good, against the prospects of generations to come, against the biosphere and planetary survival”
Nelson goes on with pages of this apocalyptic tripe without providing either evidence, or any indication that there are many alternative ways of having gardens and being environmentally responsible. So I’m guessing that he just doesn’t like suburbs.
“Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life.”
Far out Mark, you have done very well indeed. I am in enemy territory here in inner-north Melbourne, and I can report to you frequent sneering of the outer suburbs - north, west, east and south - and their inhabitants who, you would think, are all completely consumption-oriented, detached from their communities, and in possession of McMansions of appallingly bad taste. Go to any high street around here and ask cafe-goers “What kind of people live in Caroline Springs (a relatively new housing estate)?” and a small but firm minority will come out with something along the lines of “Idiots”. Perhaps it is different in Brisbane?
BBB
Sneering “at” even.
BBB
And the post explains why it might be, BBB!
I’ll enter the sneering stakes. I grew up in Port Melbourne in the ’70’s when it was still a working class suburb with factories and docks. When I went to a selective high school I was sneered at for coming from (and I quote) ‘dirty Port Melbourne’ and the fact that (god forbid) my father was a plumber. Don’t let anyone tell you that the class divide wasn’t alive and well in the ’70s. Now it’s one of the most expensive suburbs in Melbourne and my old family home recently sold for over a million. And of course, all the suburban renovators would love a plumber in the family.
Carney’s articles made no sense to me, which is a pity because I usually like his work. First he explained how he stopped taking public transport because it took too long and that that was proof that Oz was forever in love with cars. Then when the Age received letters saying it didn’t need to be that way, he claimed that was proof that the Left sneered at the suburbs and that this was a problem for Labor. A series of non-sequitors.
P’s C
As usual, you hit two nails on their heads.
Yes: EPT was reacting against a peculiarly British form of hauteur and condescension and deliberate, cultivated ignorance. But I’m afraid I’ve seen very similar in Australian academe. Perhaps only 5% of the academics. And of course I’m not suggesting snobbery is unheard of in the wider world.
Yes, yes, yes!! to your reminiscences of the sneering at rural folk. In my cae we moved from city/suburbs to rural/regional some decades ago: from Melb to Gippsland. Ever since, I’ve been repeatedly astounded by the ability of urban folk to hold wildly inaccurate and highly prejudiced beliefs about rural folk. Sad, just sad.
We were not at all surprised that Victoria got de-Jeffed in a Sate election vote where rural voters turned against Jeff (just enough to have him unseated eventually); and not surprised that city pundits just didn’t see it coming.
RARA !!!
I agree that the whole notion of “sneering” is one great big straw argument.
Respect for outer-suburban dwellers does not mean that I have to agree with all of the choices they entail, or want to be best friends with all of them.
I personally value proximity to cultrual and recreational precincts, and public transport, more than I value space and car transport. Always have, always will, and most (not all) of my friends are similar.
But I don’t expect that everyone makes the same decisions as I do and frankly I’m glad that they don’t. I would like to be able to modify the impact of some peoples consumption choices (including both petrol-guzzling cars *and* OS holidays) but I don’t think that these preferences are illegitimate or unsophisticated per se.
Oh please, you haven’t had any experience of sneering until you’ve moved from Victoria to Tasmania. The Victorians all made two-headed jokes and asked if there was radio down here, the Tasmanians just bluntly told us to naff off and then settled into extensive sneering. Mind you I’ll take the Tasmanians over the Victorians who laughably thought they were superior at the time because…..never a question that was answered.
I would challenge Laura to show that more people live in the ever-larger ‘average’ suburban home. Across the board in Australia, the house size is increasing and the number of people living in them decreasing. As I think (from memory and can’t check at work) more Australians live in the suburbs than anywhere else, it would seem to be reasonable to challenge your assumption there, Laura.
I live rurally, and would point out that the categories of suburb / city are completely useless for covering all the people in Australia who live rurally or in small towns. I’ve lived in lovely Hobart as a student and worker for 10 years, and apart from walking to work, don’t miss city life living at all, and the suburbs are pretty much my idea of hell - the worst of both worlds. I now live 44 km out of hobart on a small block of land (<15 acres). My neighbors are tres redneck salt-of-the-earth types (logging contractors, quarry workers) and have been nothing but kind to the two lesbians who moved in with a greens sticker on their car.
Clive Hamilton’s attitude and way he expresses the issue is a major problem, but there’s no denying that the market-driven rapid expansion of home size, continuing poor design and use of materials, and consumer lifestyle that we are all guilty of are major drivers or our unsustainability. In fact most of the gains made in energy and water efficiency through new building standards have been cancelled out by the increase in average home size.
this link from ABS gives a nice inkling of the problem.
I don’t blame or sneer at anyone, regardless of where they live, and I think it’s stupid to blame people for their flat screen or whatever when its so very clear what a huge role the very paradigm of our western consumer society plays in moulding people’s decisions in this area.
I do give a two-fingered salute to the people in their SUVs down here who have stickers saying “we need tracks as well as roads” - which translates to “we have a god-given right to remove all barriers that impede our entry into natural areas so we can trash them in our enormous gas-guzzling idiot-mobiles”
So, I said:
“Population density in the outer suburbs is not much different to the inner ones, and while the houses are bigger, more people live in them.”
In terms of dwelling types, census data supports the claim that more people live in larger houses:
Australian Bureau of Statistics http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/939bff64e38e18ddca256e9e002912f0!OpenDocumentsays:
Average number of people per dwelling
(high rise) 1.8 separate house (2.8)
Average number of people per bedroom
(high rise) 1.0 separate house (0.8)
And on the outer/inner subur