Australian Urban History: a Progress Report

Abstract

Australia was possibly ‘the first suburban nation’. Already at the end of the nineteenth century the American statistician Adna Weber noticed the peculiar demography of this ‘newest product of civilization’ whose population, he calculated, was more urbanized than any other country's. Yet the large coastal cities in which most town—dwellers lived were less densely occupied—more suburbanized—than the cities of Europe or North America. Here, Weber suggested, was ‘the representative of the new order of things towards which the modern world is advancing’. Later research on urban development has largely confirmed Weber's opinion. Australian city-dwellers enjoyed among the highest per capita incomes and levels of individual home-ownership in the nineteenth-century world and were among the first to display the low birth and death rates characteristic of ‘modern’ societies. They were early and enthusiastic users of railways, tramways and other forms of public transport. In 1900 about one in five Austalians lived in detached houses in the suburbs of the capital cities but by the early 1970s the proportion had risen to about three in five. A traveller flying in over Sydney or Melbourne now sees ‘the newest product of civilization’ spread out in a monotonous mosaic of green lawns, terra cotta roofs and sparkling backyard swimming pools.