Life in Subutopia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 1006, 28 November 1958, Page 10

Life in Subutopia

s6 HE taste of the common man in New Zealand, I think I can safely say, is very taw," said Professor Nikolaus Pevsner in a BBC talk after his return to London. "You recognise it in furnishing stores, in women’s clothes, and men’s ties as well." The criticism would have been easier to accept if he had been a little kinder about women’s clothes. In a country with only narrow extremes of wealth and poverty there is bound to be a large middle group whose dress is neat and comfortable rather than fashionable. But fashion can be found, and the young women who go daily to work could not seem so fresh and attractive if they were also dowdy. Our taste in furniture, alas, is less easy to defend. Its weakness is a prevailing ordinariness; too many homes are built around lounge suites covered with fabrics in floral designs-and indeed suites of all kinds for every room except the kitchen. Plainness, like fashion, can be found by those who really want it; but many New Zealanders are still uneasy in a room which to them looks half-empty, and prefer a clutter of furnishings and ornaments to the dignity of space. An individual choice and arrangement of furniture is a personal adventure which attracts’ few people. And yet, outside an overcrowded house, there will often enough be a garden laid out and cultivated with genuine artistry. People who love gardens cannot remain indifferent to their sufroundings; but the growth of taste is a slow process in a new country. The signs of something that we are making our own were not ovérlooked by Professor Pevsner. He was depressed by "the suburb which is Subutopia to a degree I had hardly believed in my worst dreams-miles and miles of timber bungalows, all neatly

built and neatly painted in gay, boiled-sweet colours." Yet he went on to say that the New Zealander has "never developed prejudices against what is new." Even more important, perhaps, he "knows no snobbery about the upper class Georgian setting." It may be better to be insensitive about style than to turn self-consciously to quaintness or afchaisrmmn. There is some hope that if New Zealanders build good houses, not with any aesthetic purpose but for practical reasons, they will gradually see the neglected side of their environment. Some of our worst difficulties are social. Gregarious people, with incomes that keep them roughly on the same economic level, fall into standardised ways of living. It is the aim of nearly every family to have a motor car and a home (often in that order), and to install in the home as quickly as possible a washing machine, a refrigerator, and some additional labour-saving devices. Without these amenities (they are generally described as necessities nowadays), a family feels socially inferior. This does not mean that their motive in buying luxuries is merely to keep up with everybody else (they want motor cars, etc, for their own sweet sakes); but social pressure is a real factor where conformity has become almost instinctive. In a relatively rich country, where national income is widely distributed, a standard of living high enough to include motor cars and refrigerators is practicable. But it does not leave much money for those additional interests and possessions which promote gracious living. Nor do those "extras" seem important to people who have made material comfort their highest value. The individual who wants his home to be an extension of his personality, and not merely a mass-produced shelter, will remain an eccentric for a long time to come-but not, we hope, too

long.

M.H.

H.