Vale the Great Australian Dream: The death of the quarter-acre block

WHERE has the great Australian backyard gone? A cultural shift has seen the quarter-acre block and the idealistic view of suburbia vanish. Will we miss it?

Is it time Australians gave up their obsession with the traditional backyard? Some experts think so. Photographer: Liam Kidston.

IN 2004, an Englishman named Tony Hall, freshly arrived in Australia, was exploring his new surroundings when a peculiar phenomenon stopped him in his tracks. The houses … they had hardly any windows. “They just had a big garage in front,” the retired academic recalls. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

Intrigued, he got hold of aerial photos of one of the houses that struck him so oddly, in the Brisbane suburb of Carina, studied the sides and rear of the property and made a further shock discovery.

“There was nothing — the whole house had almost no outlook at all”.

The Great Australian Backyard was nowhere to be seen.

What Hall stumbled upon was not an aberration in the local planning system but a cultural shift that was seeing the cherished quarter-acre block vanish across the country.

Hall, an emeritus professor in urban planning at Griffiths University, spent 11 years tracking the death of the backyard, visiting suburbs across Australia for his book The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard.

According to Hall, big backyards died suddenly in Australia in the 1990s, and not, as people may think, in densely populated suburbs around our CBDs, but in greenfield developments on the urban fringes — a trend apparent to anyone looking out of an aeroplane window.

From above, he says, it was all trees up until the end of the 1980s. But by the end of the ’90s, barely a new house anywhere in suburbia had a decent-sized backyard.

The Brisbane suburb of Carina from above. Photo courtesy Tony Hall.

Hall cites a perfect storm of social and economic forces in the 1980s that fundamentally changed the way we live.

First, working hours went from among the lowest in the world to among the highest, depleting working families of their most precious resource — time.

“It’s an American idea, the workaholic lifestyle; you don’t take your holidays, you work at weekends, you work beyond your hours, you get very stressed out,” he says. “Kids live in childcare all day and don’t go outdoors and play.”

At the same time, the deregulation of the lending system made it easier to raise debt, fuelling a hunger for big houses, cars and TVs people had little time to watch.

The suburban backyard didn’t vanish because blocks became smaller. It shrank because houses became bigger, gobbling up space for trees, gardens, chook sheds and clotheslines and shifting the balance in favour of a life indoors.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average size of a block for a new house shrank only marginally in the 11 years to 2004, from 802m2 to 735m2.

But in the 28 years to 2013, the average floor area of a new house in Australia rose from 162.4m2 in 1984 to 241.1m2, an increase of nearly 50 per cent.

Australian houses are now among the biggest in the world, and Hall does not approve.

“You’ve got these colossal houses, no view out, metal fence all around, indoor air-conditioned, no natural light or windows, colossal integral garage out the front.

“I came to Australia because I understood it was this healthy outdoor lifestyle, all about barbies and swimming pools … Home and Away and Neighbours. So what’s this got to do with Australia?”

But there’s a wider picture, to do with changing demographics as well. The baby boom is long gone, and more people are either living alone or choosing to not have kids, or delay them. That means demand for the big backyard is less.

Demographer Bernard Salt agrees bigger houses have contributed to the decline in big backyards but says another important social trend has been happening concurrently; families have been getting smaller.

“There were four or five kids in a baby-boomer household wanting to play backyard cricket with the neighbours’ five or six kids, now there’s only two kids per household,” Salt says.

“So instead of an impromptu game of backyard cricket with the neighbours’ kids there are no neighbours’ kids — and in either case it’s more likely to be organised sport after school.”

Salt says while the quarter-acre block dominated our way of life for more than 60 years, it is an “almost-Norman Rockwell idyllic view” of Australia that could never be sustainable in a new and growing country.

“London doesn’t have quarter-acre blocks, New York does not have quarter-acre blocks, so it’s really an Australian oddity that evolved in the middle of the 20th century as cars evolved and as our cities took an extended shape; low density but very, very sprawling, from Adelaide through to Sydney. We worked out very quickly that this model was unsustainable,” he says.

That’s why, Salt says, planners around the country have been working to provide an “articulated supply” of different housing styles “and articulated means something for everyone”.

“There are more singles and couples today than ever before ... so we don’t need as high a proportion of the housing stock allocated to three-bedroom brick-veneer homes as we once did,’’ he says.

“There are other lifestyle choices which therefore suggest we need other housing choices.”

Salt concedes this new diversity has led to examples of bad, ugly and confronting design — houses that are too close together or surrounded by metal fences — but they’re the exception, not the rule.

“There might be some examples where we need to improve the regulations to ensure that we don’t get that level of density but overall you would have to say that this is what the market generally wants,” he says.

Ian Markos, CEO of the Master Builders’ Association of SA, agrees the current trends are marked-led. Builders build what clients want, he says.

“You know, there are some homes that are being built that are still solid brick,” Markos says.

“If the customer wants that, then that’s what they get. Motor cars are a good example. There was a push there a few years ago to go to smaller motor vehicles but you have a look at the amount of people driving four-wheel drives now, you know?”

What’s important, he says, is that people are given the choice to live the lifestyle they want to live, which is why the industry stands so vigorously opposed to the State Government’s “Environmental Food and Protection’’ zone, known otherwise as the Urban Growth Boundary.

“We didn’t believe there should be an Urban Growth Boundary,” Markos says.

“It takes away people’s freedom of choice, involves land-banking, it can put up the price of housing. We believe there needs to be a mixture of all kinds of development.

“If people want to have urban infill and they want to live close together and they want to be close to you know inner suburbs well then that’s great for them.

“But those that want to live out in the gum trees and have more space around them in a different style of home equally deserve that freedom of choice.”

Greg Troughton, CEO of the Real Estate Institute of SA, says people are already exercising choice.

“What we’re finding here in Adelaide, particularly with the older demographic, people are actually looking forward to downsizing,” Troughton says.

“My members are telling me quite often that people are actively looking for something that doesn’t have a backyard. I guess over time people have come to appreciate that mowing the lawn every second Sunday is maybe not their cup of tea.”

This reappraising of priorities is fuelling alternative styles of development to cater to people happy to trade off a big backyard for a “lock and leave’’ lifestyle and closeness to the city centre. And it’s not just singles or retirees.

In many cases, even couples with children are choosing to trade a big suburban backyard for a petite courtyard and a city apartment — a trend that’s been dubbed “Manhattanisation”.

“It comes down to a lifestyle choice,” Troughton says.

“Do you want to spend time out in the backyard with the lovely lawn or do you want to catch a lift downstairs and maybe go to a coffee shop in Grote St?”

Meanwhile, in a band of suburbs nearest the city, developers have been busy carving up big suburban blocks to build one, two, even three, new homes, on the land behind a pre-existing house in a style commonly known as a “hammerhead’’ because of the way the layout and side driveway access to the property at the rear resembles the head and handle of a hammer.

And we’re OK with that, too, it seems.

“If I had a dollar for everybody saying one of two things; I want to live close to the city and two, I don’t mind living close to my next-door neighbour as opposed to having a cricket pitch-length sort of difference between the houses,” Troughton says.

“Now it’s not uncommon to see even joint houses being built, with common walls and all the rest of it, so I think the demographic is definitely changing.”

And changing for good — he doesn’t see the backyard making a comeback in the inner-city suburbs, not while developers are practically banging down people’s doors, looking for blocks to divide and conquer.

“What I do see is councils making sure that there is enough common land in parks and things like that to ensure they can actually handle it,’’ he says.

“I can easily see Adelaide in the next 10 to 15, 20 years going very much the London way and that is lots of people living in one area and one common small area where you can go and read the book outside in the sun.

“People don’t need that great big backyard anymore to play backyard cricket like they did years ago. So I suspect we’re going to see more and more of the urban infill.’’

Demographer Salt agrees but says we should be sanguine, not sad, if big backyards disappear for good. “You can’t make people return to that idyllic, idealistic view of suburbia. It was romantic, it was charming, it’s very nostalgic but, I’m sorry, it doesn’t work in the 21st century,” he says.

SARAH LIST, backyard

Sarah List in her South Plympton backyard. Photo: Matt Turner.

ON a cook’s tour of Sarah List’s Plympton South backyard, chooks scratch happily in a shady cordon at the bottom of a large and grassy block.

“Do you have names for the chickens?”, SAWeekend inquires.

“Of course I do! They all have to have names,” she says.

“The black one is Eleanor, she’s the oldest one that I have, she’s a barnevelder, she’s probably my favourite. And then I’ve got Rita down the front here — she’s an ex-battery hen and this is Louanne and Madam, Andromeda, who I rehomed.”

This plucky brood of chooks, which also includes silkies Joan and Esmae, is a popular attraction at List’s home, which is set off a wide clean street, about 7km from the city.

Friends often stop by just to say hello, but List suspects an ulterior motive.

“There are a lot of people who have kids who are super curious about having chickens and what they’re like and holding them. I think mostly my friends with kids visit me because of that,” she says with a laugh.

The 39-year-old university lecturer is doing all she can to protect the quintessential Aussie backyard, even as her neighbours’ yards disappear around her.

List’s backyard technically starts around the front, where apricots, peaches and banana trees grow, reaches down the side of the house past grapefruit trees, before opening up onto a generous block where a huge Hills Hoist stakes its claim.

Out here, lime and orange trees stand over raised vegie beds, potted herbs and pumpkin vines.

It’s all part of a grander vision.

“I don’t eat any meat so I’m hoping I can grow most of what I need, which I guess is the advantage of actually having a backyard,” List, who rents the property from her grandmother, says.

“One of the things I’m really passionate about is the connection to the idea that food doesn’t just turn up at a shop, it takes some effort and if you buy a dollar loaf of bread, that has an impact on a whole lot of people down the line.

“I think people are losing that sense of connection. And our food production area is being taken over by houses, and having to import so many things, you know? It comes back to food security as well.”

List says she understands that for many families, maintaining a backyard is “a big undertaking” but believes the pendulum may have swung too far.

“The houses at the back, they have no yard at all and you know, if you’ve got kids, around here there aren’t a lot of parks. And kids aren’t walking to school, so I think from a health perspective it’s probably not a great thing,” she says.

List says the government could help protect suburban backyards by encouraging higher density development on main roads, with plenty of open spaces nearby.

“It’s really common in Sydney and in Melbourne, so why not here?” she says.

Developers, too, should try to strike a better balance between house and yard.

“I don’t necessarily mind them putting two properties on a block but I think maybe if they were well-designed you could have one that didn’t look like it was towering over people’s backyards ... then they would still have a bit more of a yard.”

Ultimately, List is hoping the death of the traditional backyard will force Australians to think about better home and garden design and a more efficient use of space.

“I’d like to see more rooftop gardens; it’d be nice to see more bees,’’ she says.

“My long-term plan is actually to start a food school which shows that people can keep things in smaller spaces.”

Even chickens.

“Keeping chickens is actually a lot easier than probably people would expect and kids would have a lot of enjoyment from having a pet like that,’’ List says.

“They’re outside all the time and they can be picked up, you can give them a pat, they eat your garden scraps and they’re kind of pleasant to have around as well.”

SARAH COOPER, city apartment

Sarah Cooper with her boys, Jasper 13 and Ari 7 in their city apartment. Photo: Matt Turner.

SEVEN-year-old Ari taps away on his video-game controller as mum Sarah Cooper leans in to ask a question. “You remember the backyard at the old house in Thebarton, don’t you? We had a trampoline, we had a yard but you never really used it, did you?”

Ari doesn’t break his focus. “I hated it,” he deadpans. Hate might be too strong a word; indifferent, perhaps.

Still, it’s fair to say the Coopers’ family life didn’t revolve around a backyard then and up here, in their 11th-floor apartment, off Flinders St in the city, it most certainly does not now. There’s not so much as a courtyard, let alone room for a trampoline.

The Coopers are among a growing number of Aussie families trading in their backyards for balconies and a breezy style of inner-city living that favours leisure over lawn mowing.

Cooper, 34, moved into the apartment with Ari and eldest son Jasper, 13, soon after the building was finished in 2014 and says it ticked all their boxes; affordable and close to school.

“It was quite hard to find something that was affordable, being a single mum,” she explains.

“All my family’s around here so, yeah, we were lucky. You know, I’ve always said in my life, at one point I want to live at the beach, at one point in the country and one point in the city, so I think this is our city.”

The apartment itself is neat and homey. Cooper’s room sits left of the corridor inside the front door and adjoins the only bathroom and a compact laundry that’s hidden behind cupboard doors. “It’s all you kind of need, really,” Cooper says.

Out the bedroom window, a stunning view of the city stretches all the way to the hills and coast.

Ari and Jasper’s bedroom is further down the corridor, which opens onto the biggest room in the apartment; the kitchen and living space and finally the balcony, one of Cooper’s favourite retreats.

“This is my thing, wine on the balcony and we just get the most amazing sunsets,’’ she says. “I spend a lot of my time out here, especially when we’ve got a million kids (visiting).”

She admits the apartment is “quite small, but you know we don’t really spend time in here, we watch movies and stuff if we’re at home but generally we’re out. We’re always at cafes, we ride our bikes everywhere, we go to parks”.

“Another reason I love it here is that when (the kids) are not here, I’m not in a big place, all by myself, I would hate that, and I would probably feel really lonely,’’ she says. “So I like this and I like having friends over. We hang out and we’ve got an amazing view and stuff so close.”

Cooper says having more inside and outside living space would be nice but it comes at a cost; moving “really north or really south” of the city.

Instead, next year, the family will move to a new apartment Cooper has bought at Bowden. “It’s not going to be heaps bigger but it’s my first place, it’s not my forever place,” she says.

As the children grow, Cooper says she can see herself taking another step up the property ladder but a house in the suburbs with a big backyard won’t be part of the equation.

“I would probably rather a courtyard or a big balcony with lots of pot plants,” she says.

But would she recommend city living to other growing families? “It depends on their situation, really. For us, it’s awesome. It really works for us,” she says.

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