Designing bush landscapes: history and place in Eltham and Castlecrag

摘要

The suburbs of Eltham, in outer-north Melbourne, and Castlecrag, on Sydney's Middle Harbour, are often associated with a certain visual effect, produced by the prevalence of bushscapes and informal, native gardens. Garden historian Peter Timms reflected on the cultural pressures that tie suburban horticultural styles to place when he opined in his history of ordinary Australian gardens that 'just as a rigidly formal parterre in Eltham or Castlecrag would look determinably out of place, so a wild native bush garden in [the Sydney suburbs of) Double Bay or Toorak would be an intolerable provocation'. There are compelling reasons for bracketing together Eltham and Castlecrag. Most obviously, they express common ideas about a sense of place: the Australian bush, in these set-apart sites, could ideally, and through varying degrees of mediation, become the garden. Despite their physical and temporal distance from each other, as well as their own idiosyncrasies, their makers shared from their beginnings several key attributes: a commitment to preserving the local environment while shaping it to human needs, the vision and presence of charismatic individuals — Walter Burley Griffin (1876-193 7), the architect most famous in Australia for his design of the federal capital, Canberra, and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) in Sydney, and Alistair Knox among others in Melbourne — and the ideal of the rural-inspired community, overtly anti-suburban in ideology, yet in reach of a metropolitan centre.I contend here that there is a further significant, but hitherto overlooked, connection between Castlecrag and Eltham: that of their shared relationship to notions of time and history. We have some idea as to why these small visionary enclaves emerged where they did: the north-eastern fringe of Melbourne was seen as the final frontier in the march of suburbia and a place in which land was available and costs had not become prohibitive; the land around Sydney