The “Dream Weekend”: Feminism and the Domestic Interior at the Merchant Builders’ Display Home (1977)

ABSTRACT

In 1977 the North American feminist artist Lynn Hershman conducted a three-day installation and performance piece titled “The Dream Weekend” at a Merchant Builders’ display home in Melbourne’s Vermont Park. The site-specific installation explored the aspirations and realities of the dream home through the staging of the life of a suburban woman in states of girlhood, confinement, and escape. Using new archival material, this paper documents Hershman’s project, exploring how a sharp feminist critique of the normative ideologies of the domestic interior was able to be staged and accommodated within the display home. Examining unpublished correspondence between the artist, the curators and personnel from Merchant Builders, this paper analyses the differing perspectives each brought to concepts of Australian suburbia and the progressive Merchant Builders’ home. It documents the conspicuously cosmopolitan and eclectically furnished interiors designed and styled by Nexus, a subsidiary interior design company of Merchant Builders. We argue that the Merchant Builder homes and interiors expressed new late twentieth-century subjectivities emerging from heightened environmental consciousness and individual identity. The complexities of the artwork’s siting drew out the complications, tensions, and collisions of this encounter between a progressive housing company and the feminist rejection of the suburban home.

Room to choose - homes to satisfy your needs - Spanish Mission, Australian Colonial, with or without Romanesque arches, L-shaped, U Shape, H Shape, boomerang courtyard, open courtyard, split-level, two storey, textured or non-textured bricks, timber cladding, Australian hardwood, western red cedar, plaster board, oil based stains, metal deck, terracotta tiles, ceramic tiles, rumpus room, billiard room, garden nursery, games room, family room, bar room, en-suite, master bedroom, entrance hall, logia, (sic) living-dining, separate dining room, porte cochere, granny’s flat, bunk beds, French doors, louvres, sliding doors, Georgian style windows, feature wall, BIRS, W I robe, dressing room, in group swimming pools, a gazebo, scoria rocks, railway sleepers, G & E barbeque, gas, lights, ducted heating, gas column, space heaters, exhaust fans, wall to wall indoor carpet, double bowl SS SS, wall ovens, rotisserie, cooking tops, ranges, E or S, cork, slate, quarry, UY, nil carpet tiles, shag pile, natural finishes, easy to clean surfaces, maintenance free, roll up or tilt up door, zoned living, natural teak, reproductions, garage, double sink, lock up, carport, workshop, boat … ., sauna, jet, patios, balconies, terraces, decks, outdoor living, outdoor furniture, cabanah, sound equipment, T.V. skylight, security system, door chimes, illuminated…., pantry, breakfast bench, deep freeze units, garbage compactors.Lynn Hershman, The Dream Weekend, 1977

Our houses are high-quality, up-market, sophisticated but friendly. “Merchant Builders Display Houses – Hostesses”, briefing document for employees, 1982               

“For the last five years Lynn Hershman has been putting art in all the wrong places,” declared Los Angeles art critic Sally Ballatore in her catalogue introduction to Lynn Hershman’s, Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia (September 1977). The catalogue was issued jointly by the directors of the Exhibition Gallery of Monash University and the Ewing and George Paton Galleries of the University of Melbourne as part of their documentation of a project by visiting American feminist artist Lynn Hershman.¹ “Dream Weekend” was a three-day performance and installation work by Hershman at a Merchant Builders’ display home on Burwood Road in Vermont Park. Audiences were bussed in from the Monash University Gallery. Local artists and even the gallery directors acted as occupants and tour guides in the interior. Hershman’s artwork described the metamorphosis and liberation of the suburban woman from her imprisonment within the display home. Each day’s performance occurred in a different part of the house. “Day 1 Through the Looking Glass” focussed on the exterior view of the house; on the front door, the front wall and a mirrored window that reflected the woman’s body back to herself. The first day evoked the descent into the consumer dream embodied by the home. Day 2 titled “Dream Becomes a Cage: Case Study of Kitchen” unfolded in the combined kitchen/family room. The theme of entrapment was suggested literally and figuratively. A large picture window was covered with a fabricated landscape view and a large image of a heavily made-up woman was annotated with the instruction “all entrances become traps.” The bedroom doorways on the edge of this space were partly blocked so that spectators could see but not enter the beds and installations which embodied the subject’s own dream state. On Day 3 titled “3^rd Dream State Dreams of Flying Night Dream-Escape and Change,” the woman performer fled the house and a mannequin hoisted far into the sky by a crane represented the liberation of the women subject. (Figure 1) The voyeurism of the tours aired the aspirations and realities of the “Dream Home.”

Figure 1. Lynn Hershman, “study, 3rd dream state: dreams of flying night dreams – escape and change,” the dream Weekend, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Merchant Builders was an architect-driven housing company that provided innovative design solutions for housing and suburban estates across the turbulent decades of 1965–1991. Founded by David Yencken and John Ridge, the company promoted a landscaped environment of indigenous plants, collective amenities, and energy efficiency in designer homes for everyday Australians. An advertisement by Merchant Builders’ promised consumers “The lasting rewards of intelligent design.”² Hershman’s 1977 artwork was in a recently completed display home, one of three in Vermont South intended to promote Merchant Builders’ new cluster housing estate. Forty-seven houses were projected for a landscape setting that eschewed individual gated allotments in favour of shared open space. The Burwood Highway display homes formed part of a larger display belt that ran across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs to the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges 50 kilometres from the city centre.

This paper documents Hershman’s performance and reveals the tensions and complexities of the art work’s siting, in which the “progressive values” of the Merchant Builders home could both accommodate a feminist critique and reveal strains and complications in the relationship between the progressive project home, cultural producers and consumer society. A previously unexamined archive offers new insight into understandings of the suburbs by the artist, by the gallery curators and by Merchant Builders. Detailed correspondence documents the negotiations between them. Of particular interest is the attempt by personnel of Merchant Builders to explain to Hershman the distinctiveness of Australian suburbia and the critique of contemporary housing offered by the Merchant Builders’ scheme. In order to participate in the market however, the company needed to seriously embrace marketing strategies such as the display home model. The display home format would provide the perfect stage for Hershman’s performance but the conversation around the company’s relationship to this format drew out the tensions in this alliance.

The display home format staged and stimulated consumer desire. In her publicity and performance, Hershman consciously mimicked the format, display strategies and advertising mechanisms of the display home. Advertised in the daily newspapers “using the Merchant Builders’ format, with copy and images” and an “annotated plan of the display home,” a questionnaire was also handed out to all visitors. The display home was kept open during its usual operating hours (Friday-Sunday, 1-5pm) and “should a sale take place, the commission would go into the project’s funds.”³ Hershman’s performances were conducted in a 1970s cosmopolitan interior designed by Janne Faulkner and Harley Anstee of Nexus. This interior design practice was originally founded in 1967 as a subsidiary company of Merchant Builders. As we will see, Hershman’s performance could be absorbed within the new social subjectivities of the late twentieth century; subjectivities evoked by the company, who styled themselves as an “alternative” provider in the housing market, through their address to burgeoning environmental consciousness, individual autonomy, and bespoke design. (Figure 2) The complexities of the artwork’s siting drew out the complications, tensions, and collisions of the encounter between a progressive project home company and the feminist rejection of the suburban home. These tensions were played out within the interior.

Figure 2. Merchant Builders Advertising Brochure for Vermont Park, c.1977/1978. Merchant Builders archive, University of Melbourne.

Conceptual Art and the Feminist Interior

Jointly curated by Kiffy Rubbo and Grazia Gunn as a shared project between The Ewing and George Paton Galleries at Melbourne University (henceforth EGPG) and the Exhibitions Gallery at Monash University, Hershman’s installation and performance was the off-site component accompanying a retrospective of her recent work at Monash. Sound, the Monash University broadsheet promoted the weekend tour to staff and students and highlighted the gallery show.⁴ The Ewing and George Paton Galleries on the edge of the arts enclave focused on inner urban Carlton hosted Hershman’s public lecture “The Floating Museum and Past Projects.”⁵

Under the leadership of Rubbo at the EGPG and Gunn at Monash, the two university galleries had become key sites for the city’s radical, experimental arts scene. Across the 1970s, the Melbourne University gallery (EPGP) was a centre for “alternative art practice in Melbourne”⁶ and a home for the women’s revolution in visual art.⁷ Although Gunn was only appointed to the Monash gallery in 1975, she was already a member of the Ewing Gallery Collective (established 1974) and was equally dedicated to innovative exhibitions and public talks. Hershman’s piece pushed and shoved at, as the deputy director of the Paton declared,”the definition of art in our for the most part, passive society.”⁸

Hershman had been invited to exhibit and perform in a city in which women artists, critics and curators were vocalising the limitations of art history, the art industry and conventional art media. Women were eager to work with the new mediums that had emerged and broken the hierarchy of the art canon. Numerous new art media erupted across the 1950s-1970s, as artists pushed back against formalist obsessions and the elite genres of painting and sculpture. These arguably more democratic media, including photography, performance and installation became the focal point of experiments in socially and politically conscious art.

Lynn Hershman (b. 1941) is now regarded as one of the late twentieth-century’s most influential new media artists.⁹ Educated first at Case Western University and then at San Francisco State University (graduating 1972), her art practice began in the late 1960s during a period of radical transformation of the visual arts. From the 1960s to the mid 1970s, a wide variety of new media labelled under the umbrella term Conceptual art were challenging the hierarchies and values of fine art. Experiments in live art (or performance art), events or happenings, installation and text works were key forms for a self-declared art as idea, in which concept was elevated rather than execution, formal resolution and finish. These media enabled art to leave the gallery and occupy the spaces of everyday life.

Unsurprisingly feminism – with its emphasis on women’s experience, politics and the everyday – was a key participant in the new Conceptual art.¹⁰ Hershman’s work brought several key strands together from the intersection of art and feminism. Feminist art notably transformed living spaces into works of art. The home was interrogated for the norms that set the horizons of women’s lives at marriage and family, entwining women’s daily lives with the commodities of consumer culture and stereotypes of womanhood. At The Womanhouse project in Los Angeles (1972) women artists occupied a disused building and used installations of domestic ephemera, rubbish, cosmetics, mannequins, and bodily fluids to transgress the expectations and traps of femininity and domesticity. Similarly, in her The Dante Hotel (1972–73) Hershman used the domestic-like interiors of a run-down hotel to stage a sound sculpture amid the physical detritus of women’s daily lives. She transformed public spaces into feminist sites. Other early examples of site-specific work include her use of Eleanor Coppola’s own house in Re: Forming familiar Environments (San Francisco 1975) and shopfronts with the project, 26 Windows – a Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller, New York (1976). She also launched an artists’ collective, The Floating Museum from 1975–77 to turn formerly non-functioning art spaces into redefined art spaces. Throughout the 1970s Hershman created a fictional persona Roberta Breitmore (1973–1978) who was performed by herself and three other women. Breitmore’s heavily made-up face caricatured the rules of femininity. This persona was an avatar of the artist and generated questions about the boundaries between self and social construction. Hershman brought these interests to Melbourne. Her work at the Merchant Builders’ home fused site specificity, audio, the fictionalised performer, and the staged nature of everyday life, all analysed with a fierce feminist gaze.¹¹

Just as she was embarking on her work for Melbourne, Hershman began attracting attention from feminist architects on the East Coast. She was included in the travelling exhibition and catalogue of the Women in American Architecture exhibition of 1976 –1977, originating from the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Hershman was included in the exhibition catalogue survey of contemporary women’s art by New York art critic Lucy R. Lippard:

In Lyn (sic) Hershman’s hotel room series, wax women sleep, bathe or wait, surrounded by the careless evidence of their daily lives. The viewer, or voyeur, intrudes on an intimate tableau and is invited to read the clues to the occupant’s histories. The clues and clutter (or lack thereof) in an interior space is like a book open to many overlapping interpretations, a collaborative activity, the woven container of more than one past and present.¹²

Lippard’s analysis followed the interests of white, liberal, second-wave feminism which from its earliest years had centred on the suburban home as a site of repression. The suburban woman’s private, frequently medicated unhappiness was exposed by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) in a deliberate challenge to “the dream image of the young American woman.”¹³ Lippard’s descriptions emphasised that women’s domestic experience could be remade as a counter-site, where social norms were both enforced and potentially transgressed, “to respond from a personal/communicative base rather than uphold the status quo.”¹⁴ Lippard declared that the ideologies of the art world “still act as repressive” but this new women’s work foretells an emerging world “where their experience as women will hopefully be valued more highly.”¹⁵The focus of white, liberal feminism on the home as a site of repression would be critiqued by Black feminism. As Patricia Hill Collins later argued: “US Black women’s experiences challenge(s) deeply held beliefs that work and family constitute separate spheres of social organisation. Black women’s experiences never fit the logic of work in the public sphere juxtaposed to family obligations in the private sphere.”¹⁶

In parallel in these years 1976 and 1977 feminist artists in Melbourne were also working with the suburban domestic interior and probing it as a strait jacket for the creativity of the woman artist. In Kate Walker’s “Portrait of the Artists as House” (on exhibit at the EGPG August 1977) the text read: “We post visual messages to each other to break down our domestic ISOLATION. Our CREATIVITY survives domestic tedium by leaving a trail of clues about our attitudes and likes.”¹⁷ Artist Jenny Watson’s 1975–1977 paintings of the suburban house highlighted the mediating role of representation in her depiction of the home through Pointillist brushstrokes.¹⁸ Feminist photographers also reappraised the home as a source of women’s tender, intimate relationships. However, at this stage no other Melbourne artist or architect appears to have used the display home as a performative space to tackle these cultural myths.

Banality and the Mainstream: the Merchant Builders “Alternative” and Its Origins

In April 1977 Hershman wrote from the West Coast of the United States to Gunn in Melbourne, “I’d like to know as much as possible about dream homes, middle class needs and general consciousness awareness there.”¹⁹ Gunn wrote a six-page essay supplying some answers and informing Hershman about Merchant Builders. She wrote back and described the housing company’s place both within and outside the market:

Their housing projects are not designed around conditioned wants created by a sales market. Admittedly some consideration is given to the sales market, but this is more in terms of selling procedures and of becoming part of the system at work. Sales have never interfered with the firm’s unrelentless pursuit of the important elements which must be incorporated in a house and how best these can serve the lifestyle of the people living in them.²⁰

The accommodation of Hershman’s performance in the display home as a form of cultural production continued earlier innovations which had targeted advertising to both the broad market and to a smaller group of influential cultural producers. Before launching Merchant Builders in 1965, David Yencken had completed two motels, The Mitchell Valley Motel, Bairnsdale (1957) and The Black Dolphin Motel in Merimbula (1960). Yencken’s marketing of the Black Dolphin manifested the origins of his unorthodox approach to marketing, which in time influenced that of Merchant Builders. To attract a diverse clientele and avoid misaligned expectations of the Motel’s offering, Yencken commissioned advertisements in Nation, a new, niche magazine devoted to politics, ideas, and the arts in 1962.²¹ Immediately these advertisements began to have an impact and drew the attention of typically keen critics of suburbia such as Robin Boyd. In the words of Graeme Davison and Sheryl Yelland in Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, “the Black Dolphin advertisements cleverly appealed to an intelligentsia newly awakened, largely thanks to Boyd, to the aesthetic sins of ‘Austerica.’” But, Davison and Yelland continue, “the advertisements highlight a division between Yencken and Boyd’s commercial and educative purposes. They had sought to elevate the general standard of architectural taste but they had concluded by reinforcing a division between elite and popular standards.”²²

Reflecting on Davison’s words in 2017, Yencken saw a similar paradox in the work of Merchant Builders – a similar diffusion of artistic and design ideas playing out in a suburban context. Yencken was quick to point out that their attempts at an “alternative” was about “nurturing a tolerance for difference.” If suburbia as we knew it was setting the standard of what was normal in society – “a way of life” - then Merchant Builders was interested in what lay beyond the model of a “the nuclear family.”²³ We can find this again in the directness of their marketing, where they often questioned normative functions typical of a project home – a walk-in dressing room? - the question mark itself offering to those who fell outside the rubric of the nuclear family an alternative reality.

Merchant Builders were critically examining the Melbourne metropolitan condition by critiquing the ideas of Australian suburbia, including the story of how the suburbs took hold and played out in Victoria. Yencken was interpreting suburbia through the eyes of artists, interior designers, architects, curators, and writers as much as he was through the lens of the planners, developers, builders, and policymakers. He was striving to chronicle how Australia’s suburbs came to be; reveal their many physical and cultural dimensions; and encourage people to think about suburbia’s real and imagined place in their hearts and minds, and its place in Australia’s future.

This reformist analytical agenda was communicated to Hershman. In July 1977, Yencken produced a brief text on “Housing and Suburbia” as one of the research pieces written to inform Hershman of local conditions. Yencken explained that Melbourne has the highest home ownership rate in the world, but it conformed largely to the standard model of family homes on quarter-acre lots. He discussed the limitations of the “free market” model with its poor retail and social facilities, poor transportation connections, with “each suburban house and garden “a social island,” with a “monotonous” physical form which achieved its profitability “by sacrificing physical quality, natural relationships to the land and to open space, and above all, social interaction and communality.” He was scathing about the role of the display house “using every glamour trick, not just to sell the house, but also, consciously or unconsciously to attain cultural capital”; “If you buy this house you will have the status, the social image, the self-realisation you have always wanted.”²⁴

For many, the suburbs were perceived as a space of banality, conformity, ignorance, sterility and naivety, but for Yencken the problem of the suburbs lay with the regulator and regulations. He was acutely aware of the paradox that in attempting to be “innovative” they were in many respects reinforcing the binary condition and criticising the conservative and formulaic conditions of suburbia. The criticism, however, was directed squarely at the policymakers, not the consumer, as Yencken observed in an unpublished 1985 paper:

Innovation begins with the willingness to innovate. Australia and Australians have, at times, been labelled by the likes of Robin Boyd, Donald Horne, Philip Adams, Craig McGregor as featurist, unadventurous, lucky, and complacent - what you will. Perhaps at particular times, in particular circumstances it may seem so, but that is not my thesis. I start with the assumption that Australians show no unwillingness to innovate provided that the conditions are appropriate, and, thus, the risks are reasonable.²⁵

Prior to his development of Merchant Builders, Yencken had written a directive critiquing the general intolerance for new ideas and the intolerance of mainstream society towards difference.²⁶ He saw the suburbs as the site of social normalisation and the bungalow the stamp of normalcy. He was more interested in non-conformity and the spatial opportunities it brought than the “featurism” of suburban Australian homes that Boyd lambasted. Yencken and Hershman were finding common ground in questioning the Australian “way of life,” both driven by social and epistemological upheavals in the 1960’s.

The correspondence with Hershman drew out the tensions of an approach that used the mechanisms of advertising to market the different position taken by Merchant Builders. The site was located as the curators noted, within “a very intensive belt of display homes along the Burwood Highway about 12 miles out of town..”²⁷ Rubbo analysed the social imagery of the display home landscape in a letter to Hershman from July 1977. She described the Burwood Highway display homes: “there you can find your Spanish, Colonial, Ranch style along with eager beaver salesmen and donut and coffee stands.”²⁸ Curators Rubbo and Gunn emphasised the distinctiveness of Merchant Builders within the typical housing market, declaring, “The firm’s positive and progressive approach freed the project from the danger of relying on ill-considered stereotypes..”²⁹ Rubbo explained these tensions:

we have organised for a project home in this group which is, as the others, a product catering for a market but less extreme in its interior and is obviously architect-designed. The Merchant Builders house is part of this project home belt and is caught up in the question of suburbia and home ownership and all the issues which go with it.³⁰

In the same letter Rubbo’s comments revealed the delicate public negotiation of the Merchant Builders’ image, an image constructed within the market whilst engaging in its critique. She writes, “To ‘work off’ the homes with the kitsch interiors could lead to an alienation of the clientele and it would be difficult to steer clear of a smart, smug elitist position.”³¹ Merchant Builders were keen to avoid the perception of being arrogant and aspired to enter a genuine dialogue with the socio-cultural realities of the nation.

The Australian Dream and the Display Home Space

The Australian Dream, an ethos dominated by the notion of owning one’s own detached suburban dwelling, has always been a troubled one. Historians Graeme Davison and Richard White have both shown the centrality of owning a detached suburban house for both the psyche of the Australian nation, and government policy.³² Indeed, in the post-war period the Commonwealth Government published the Official Commemorative Book: Jubilee of the Commonwealth of Australia stating “What the Australian cherishes most is a home of his own, a garden where he can potter and a motor car … as soon as he can buy a house and a garden he … moves to the suburbs.”³³ “His” and “he” would appear to represent just one part of the dream - the marketing of the suburban dream filling the pages of post-war home-style magazines was aimed at the suburban “housewife” while further inscribing women’s identity within domestic space.³⁴

By the mid-1970s the dream of an isolated nuclear family withdrawn into a private dwelling, separate from the public and masculine geography of a commuter business district was changing under the advances of the women’s movement. The surviving Merchant Builders’ marketing copy documents the company’s avoidance of post-war gender stereotypes. Gender neutral language is used to describe the ease with which interconnected rooms foster the supervision of children.³⁵ The description of the activities of the interior sidestepped an older gendered division of labour inscribed into the naming of rooms or through the allocation of gendered activities such as childcare.

Yet Australian architects’ relationship with the suburbs has similarly remained fraught. This relationship has oscillated through extremes of hostility, ambivalence, and celebration, resulting in varying levels of engagement and disengagement over time, particularly with suburban housing. In post-war Australia, the display home was an integral part of contemporary culture, yet its history remains relatively underexplored. Previous studies of project housebuilders including Merchant Builders in Melbourne, or Pettit & Sevitt in Sydney have focused on the architects, the architecture, and the subdivisions and less on the display homes and their marketing as important repositories of cultural knowledge and significant sites for archival research.

The Australian display home was developed in the post-war period at a time of booming housing construction. Australian home ownership rose from 52.6% in 1947 to 63% in 1954 and to 70% in 1961 and then remained fairly stable in the following decades at 70%.³⁶ The formation, dissemination and popularity of the display home is generally accredited to the A.V. Jennings development company who produced their first display in 1934, but the model proliferated in the post-war housing boom.³⁷ The display home was a key marketing mechanism for home builders who used new financing arrangements that allowed consumers to purchase on spec. Architecture and interior were on display but so too was the full potential of the Suburban Dream, the lifestyle it would offer, or at least of how we might imagine and display that life. The display home became an extension of lifestyle magazines like Home Beautiful, while project housebuilders like Merchant Builders went as far as employing display home “Hostesses” with carefully considered scripts and actors from Melbourne’s Australian Performing Group - from the Pram Factory in Carlton - to assist in staging the whole experience. It becomes an entirely spatial and theatrical experience and a glimpse into the lifestyle that was being projected to potential buyers.

Hershman’s guided tour devised an uncanny simulation of the role of the “hostess” in the display interior. Merchant Builders employed women to open, maintain and explain their display interiors. An archival document survives of tips for the hostess. “For most of these visitors you will represent the only initial contact with Merchant Builders’ staff – which makes you the most important link in the sales chain. Our houses are high-quality, up-market, sophisticated but friendly. You have been chosen for the same attributes. Don’t forget it!”³⁸ Young couples, newlyweds, and young families were the target audience but these prospective buyers were in turn on display themselves as the hostesses monitored their every move and recorded their conversations, “Listen to visitors’ conversations in the houses … … .Listen for comments on the houses, their finishes or fitments whether good or bad … … be prepared to correct any wrong impressions or statements.”³⁹ The display homes become an important record of architecture’s own contemporary struggle as a form of cultural production in the suburbs but with their hostesses, their actors, display of goods, brochures and associated lifestyle magazines they become a significant record and repository of that cultural production on display. They are a form of total display where everything is considered.

Merchant Builders used this mechanism and advertisements as well as offering prospective customers a range of additional design services. Merchant Builders operated within the upper level of the project house market; in the $15,000 plus range in 1973.⁴⁰ When compared however to the cost of an architect designed home, estimated in 1970 to average $8,000–$15,000 with the upper range at $30,000, the Merchant Builders package provided house and land for a comparable price.⁴¹ The marketing material from Merchant Builders made a virtue of their design focus. They emphasised a total designed environment, from landscape to building to interior and employed the word “alternative” to offer a point of difference rather than an outright rejection of the prevailing dream homes. A surviving brochure documents how the company offered consumers additional design services beyond the plan and building package, including an “interview with the Architect to advise on siting and any design variations” as well as “landscape advice and interior design assistance.”⁴² Alan Pert and Philip Goad analyse the company’s “marketing mission” in their forthcoming book on Merchant Builders:

Therein lies the intriguing paradox of Merchant Builders’ marketing mission: the production of an aesthetically and intellectually progressive body of work versus the lumbering, often glacial pace associated with the task of shifting public taste and enacting policy reform. To its credit, for nearly twenty-five years, Merchant Builders held fast to its ideal of selling “the alternative”.⁴³

Dream Weekend Performance, September 16–18, 1977

In a similar vein Hershman would stage both analysis and an alternative. However, her work overwhelmingly focussed on the display home as a form of media that channelled, staged, and stimulated consumer dreams. Hershman described Dream Weekend as “an opportunity to study the Australian suburban dream temporally over three days and spatially at three “dream homes,” noting “Each site will explore the dimensions of perceived reality through the articulation of the dream state itself.”⁴⁴ The work would eventually occupy only one display home but her aspirations for the project remained unchanged. She set out her analysis in the catalogue:

The lure of the suburbs is a quest for a better life … . Suburban living depends upon the anonymous localized conditions or social islands which are built on the foundations of culture’s dreams.

A house is a contained environment that holds not only the paraphernalia of accumulated living but also the sensibility and emotional consciousness of its inhabitants. A house always exists in a context. By isolating and examining a single environment, a community consciousness is unfolded.

The tapestry of environment is woven of physical and invisible textures. Visible artifacts include furniture, architecture, decorations, even dust: the invisible, include sound, light, socio economic responses, time and dreams. Dreams are a brain’s way of providing what “real” life does not. They are our most valuable resource. Yet dreams can be manipulated and polluted, suffocated by a pillow of soft sell.

Vision is restricted as creative dreaming submits to serial monotony. Individuals isolated from interactive stimulus are deprived of alternatives that allow a greater awareness of unique physical and psychic perception.⁴⁵

Hershman transformed the display house into a media dream space through the addition of imagery, videos, sound, and performance. She inscribed a space of individual dreaming and the manufactured dreams of media industries. In the surviving plan of a CR2 Courtyard House variant (designed by Graeme Gunn), Hershman annotated different kinds of dream spaces.⁴⁶ (Figure 3) During the installation people would live in the master bedroom, now turned into an enclosure with “plastic separating unit doorposts encloses and cages live people.” A “continuous audio tape of random dreams” would be placed on the wall of the dining room and a television monitor in the living/dining room would be “playing videotaped interviews of local suburbanites, salesmen, interior decorators and prospective buyers about dreams.” Another television in the family room was “tuned to local programs” and a “backlit projection system shows spectators an “escape hatch’ window on the outside of home, visible on the street.” A “cardboard photographic cut out of suburban woman with mirror face speaks via an endless cassette about her dreams.” A “mirror with two holes bars” the entrance to the bedroom. In the second bedroom a “sleeping figure with wax face sleeps in bed” accompanied by “sounds of breath on endless cassette audio tape.”⁴⁷

Figure 3. Lynn Hershman, “annotated floor plan” study for the dream Weekend, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Dreaming was the central medium. The schedule for performance and installation was organised around the daily dream sequence with September 15, 1-5pm, Day Dreams; September 16, 1-5pm, Altered Dreams; September 17, 1-9 pm Night Dreams (flight Sequence 5-9pm) Daily 5-9 pm Escape Hatch Window. For the opening session on the Friday the three gallery directors would “act as saleswomen and hand out questionnaires.”⁴⁸ On Saturday 17th, artist Gary Willis would be a salesperson supplemented by Rubbo and Gunn if needed. Other people from the arts community, such as architect Greg Burgess and artist Dom de Clario helped out with the installations.⁴⁹

Each day mirrored a different dream state, one that could be manufactured by dominant cultural formations or undermined by the individualist dreams that would break open this consumer world. On the first day of the installation, a drawing of a young girl posted onto the window at the threshold of the house was titled “Through the Looking Glass,” signifying women’s disappearance down the rabbit hole of normative gender identity. (Figure 4) On the second day the dream state became “Caged Responses” as issues of isolation, commuting, frustration, alienation, boredom, and caged perspectives was brought to the fore. (Figure 5) On the third day the woman of the domestic interior broke free by “Realizing and Releasing the Magnet, Breaking through Consciousness”. (Figure 6) On this final day the home deals with,”creative dreaming, changes and alternatives”. (Figure 7) The woman was finally transfigured into the creative individual. (Figure 8)

Figure 4. Lynn Hershman, “study for day 1 through the looking glass, reflections of self,” the dream Weekend, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Figure 5. Lynn Hershman, “study for day 2 the dream becomes a cage,” the dream Weekend, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Figure 6. Lynn Hershman, “study for day 3 hand on backlit screen possible sky writing,” the dream Weekend, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Figure 7. Slide of Lynn Hershman, day 3 performance “dream Weekend Sept. 77 escape sequence,” the dream Weekend, Vermont Park, September 18, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

Figure 8. Slide of Lynn Hershman, day 3 performance of the dream Weekend, Vermont Park, September 18, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

The installation exposed the circular relationship between individual dreams and the generation of consumer desires from data collected on potential customers. Hershman used the sociological devices of surveys and questionnaires as focal elements on wall surfaces and in the interactions between the spectators and occupants/guides. In the bedroom next to the sleeping figure, the bedroom is papered with a “wallpaper of interviews with homeowners,” together with audio interviews and “large interview fragment framed.” Questionnaires would be handed out to “The Prospective Homeowner” who would circle their preference. They would be asked to describe what kinds of music Merchant Builder Homeowners listen to and asked to answer True or False (a mix of jazz, Cleo Laine and Beethoven) and asked openly feminist questions: “Women over 35 are not interested in electric juicers or can openers” and “women suffer no loss of personal identity through suburban life,” as well as broader questions about housing and the suburbs: “Is not having adequate housing a disadvantage?” or the question, (do) “Suburban environments need interactive community centers?”⁵⁰

Feminism’s insistence on analysing the social production of gender was realised through the artist’s reproduction of media systems and marketing devices. Her exhibition catalogue had observed her “eagerness to blend the what of artmaking with the how to use the communications media and commercial resources against themselves to challenge the destructive cultural patterns of obliterating creative potential.”⁵¹ By exposing the inner workings of media systems, the installation would promote consciousness raising, that revolutionary moment of transformation and awakening which was a key belief of North American second wave feminism. In another echo of the liberal orientation of North American feminism, the project affirmed an individualist model of liberation, which merged seamlessly with the individualist tenor of the artist’s identity.

The performance also relied, however, on the display home as a real place and as a working home. The catalogue declared that the project was “bringing us out from the gallery into the real world.”⁵² In an earlier Hershman project undertaken in New York in 1974, gallery goers were bussed out to three sites of temporary lodgings, including hotels and the YWCA. The question of the real however was made much more complex in Melbourne. The display home interior was mediatised through Hershman’s installation drawings and audio media, and through the staging of domestic living by fictional occupants, with fictional guides ushering visitors through as if they were participants in a display home tour. The interior was also an essential component of the authenticity of the piece. The Nexus interiors were left largely intact during the sitework. The curators noted that:

Lynn Hershman uses found or chosen environments as the framework for her projects. … In a way she borrows the resources for a time to communicate an experience which is susceptible to interpretation at many levels. Her assemblages are made up of familiar objects or materials which are placed within the existing environment, creating an evocative record of various relationships. By selecting elements that give the most resonance, her assemblages are provocative and often unsettling with an acute sense of past memories and present associations.⁵³

Hershman’s found spaces were described in the catalogue as “collectible raw materials” but the Merchant Builders’ interior was a carefully considered designed environment.⁵⁴ It emerged from an analysis of the limitations of the suburban house. Its designer status was part of its marketing appeal. The Nexus interior was not a simple proxy for the suburban display home. In part Hershman’s performance was in tension with the prevailing logic of the Merchant Builders’ homes. These tensions between the performed ideology and the design intent can be explored in the interior.

Emergent Subjectivities of the Interior

Hershman’s performance climaxed in the escape of the suburban women through a tiny bathroom window, as if she was escaping from a prison cell. In using the interior to stage the formation of conformist and liberated subjectivity Hershman formed part of a longer tradition that identified psychological interiority with the domestic interior.⁵⁵ Hershman’s presentation of entrapment, confinement, and escape embodied liberal, North American feminism’s critique of suburban repression. However, the Merchant Builders’ estates worked deliberately against the ideal of an isolated and withdrawn private nuclear family.

Surviving slides of her installation confirm that the Nexus designed interiors were left intact during the three days of the performance work. (Figure 9). The layout of the house and its relationship to the landscaped setting worked to promote connectivity. In later interviews Nexus designer Janne Faulkner identified the interconnected room spaces and relationship to the environment as distinctive design features of the Merchant Builders’ interior. These shaped the response of Nexus. She remarked on how the interior designers worked to highlight the fluid passage through the home: “This flow of rooms was a distinctive Merchant Builders difference, and we kept the finishes minimal to enhance the simplicity of the spaces.” Function and mood would be signified by a variety of lighting fixtures.⁵⁶ Textiles and finishes also worked to reinforce the connections between the internal and external natural environment, particularly through responses to light and colour:

Natural light played an important part in the interiors, so walls were mostly painted white with curtains and blinds often in off-white calico or cotton. Coloured stains on Victorian Ash timber were used and were very successful. All rooms opened onto gardens and the colours of the Australian landscape became integrated into the interior design response.⁵⁷

Figure 9. Slide, the dream Weekend performance, September 16–18, 1977. George Paton gallery archive, University of Melbourne Archives.

The architectural design of the courtyard house further centred the home around garden spaces. Continuities between the two environments were promoted thorough floor furnishings as Faulkner remarked, “we used quarry tiles and continued them out first of all to the veranda, and then to the landscape beyond.”⁵⁸

These interior choices and the architectural design of simple interior white walls, timber work and a landscape focus offered Merchant Builder clients a “rustic urbanism” that was not solely identified with suburbia. Ben Highmore has coined this term as a way of describing the attraction of a country look for both inner-city dwellers and inhabitant of new estates on the metropolitan periphery of 1960s and 1970s London. ⁵⁹ Highmore is not entirely able to account for the emergence of this aesthetic although he notes increased travel by Britons to Europe and a parallel passion for Mediterranean peasant food. His strong focus on class as an explanatory category further suggests that the desire for a countrified look in the inner city might be status emulation. But what did this approach signify in Australia? The simple materials and landscape focus might be interpellated within the regional style identified by Robin Boyd in 1967 as elements of a new Australian domestic architecture, “characteristically of natural brick and rugged timber built in a direct and uncomplicated way – but freely, not packed into a rigid box.”⁶⁰ Boyd infers that this is an incipient national expression of identity.

In Australia, a new consumer preference for rustic urbanism, however, could signify a growing environmental consciousness. In the late 1950s Boyd’s newspaper columns had decried the despoliation of built and natural environments in Australian cities; plundered, stripped, and bulldozed by developers and municipal councillors. Readers wrote into The Sydney Morning Herald, praising Boyd’s “excellent and accurate observations.”⁶¹ A citizen led preservation movement was emerging and the Merchant Builders estate signified these progressive values.⁶² In parallel to preservation demands for the natural environment of cities, inner city communities and taste makers pursued a keen awareness of colonial heritage. Some rooms in other Vermont Park display homes featured strong heritage elements in furnishing choices as well as displaying authentic colonial furniture.⁶³ These were not merely stylistic choices but expressions of shifting values about the natural and built environment.

Hershman’s work emerged from the late twentieth-century mass produced consumer culture of North America, but Merchant Builders also addressed these issues of mass and bespoke production. In part, the Nexus interiors signified a designer ethos through careful attention to every element as part of a larger whole. Faulkner emphasised that all interior components were considered design choices “right down to the last tea-towel and ornament.”⁶⁴ This subtle integration can be seen in surviving photographic documentation of Hershman’s performance. Orange and white accents weave through the room from the orange plates displayed on white shelves to the orange notes in a jar of poppy flowers on the kitchen bench. (Figure 9) The designers’ use of simple white walls, timber features, quarry tile flooring, Japanese paper globes, Scandinavian textiles and traditional kilims, the mix of plain country furniture with sometimes statement European designer pieces, aligns Nexus with the cosmopolitan eclecticism developed by Conran at HABITAT.⁶⁵ Like Conran, Nexus pursued a mix of standardised furnishings, some focal art works, and the occasional stand-out piece of designer furniture. Faulkner’s buying trips to Europe secured limited edition prints of well-known modern European masters such as Picasso and Matisse. Nexus bought statement furniture pieces in Melbourne from Design 250 who stocked brands such as B&B Italia and Cassina, as well as sourcing black leather and chrome furniture from OMK Design London.⁶⁶ Faulkner insisted that in the display home market this cosmopolitan mix of objects was a distinctive element of the Merchant Builders’ brand: “We used completely different things to anybody else, so it was a very different look.”⁶⁷ (Figure 10; Figure 11)

Figure 10. Janne Faulkner and Harley Anstee, Nexus Interior, Merchant Builders Long House, Vermont Park. Photograph attributed to Neil Lorimer, c.1977. Merchant Builders archive, University of Melbourne. Used with permission.

Figure 11. Janne Faulkner and Harley Anstee, nexus interior, Merchant Builders Open House, Vermont Park. Photograph attributed to Neil Lorimer, c.1977. Merchant Builders archive, University of Melbourne. Used with permission.

Specialist and market-oriented design publications placed Merchant Builders and the Nexus interiors within a contemporary canon of design authorship. Designer and magazine editor Babette Hayes in her 1978 style guide Design for living in Australia included Nexus and a display home interior within the pages of profiles of branded architectural and interior design firms. Remarking on the brief for the Cocks and Carmichael designed project home, Faulkner observed that they strove “to keep furniture within the budgets of the prospective buyers and as interchangeable as possible, so that rooms could be used for different purposes from those displayed.”⁶⁸ The Nexus fittings and furniture choices in the project home interior were not discordant notes in Hayes’s Design for living in Australia. The designer interiors of the book expressed a particular aesthetic of late modern rustic urbanism which frequently incorporated heritage approaches.

Faulkner like Conran stressed individual choice. Conran had argued that his eclectic interior displays allowed “mixing things and expressing one’s own personality.”⁶⁹ As design historian Judy Attfield observes of taste, it “is a much wider manifestation of a consumer society in which people form their identity through their unconscious attitudes to things, as well as through their consciously chosen lifestyles and the accoutrements that go with it.”⁷⁰ However in this period in the late twentieth century, the assertion of individual identity encompassed more than consumer choice. As Hershman’s performance piece indicates, the idea of individual liberation and self-realisation was also a form of subjectivity. Whilst heavily identified with the women’s movement, recent research on 1970s Britain has recorded the widespread presence of “popular individualism” and a greater desire for personal autonomy.⁷¹ With Merchant Builders’ emphasising both “progressive” values (to quote Yencken) and bespoke design offered through individual appointments with designers, these interests speak to broader shifts in society and subjectivity. Both Hershman’s performance work and the Merchant Builders ethos reflected these changes.

Conclusion

Hershman’s three-day installation and performance has been somewhat forgotten - lost in the archives until now. Through Hershman’s exhibition we are able to explore the significance of the domestic interior within the late twentieth-century cultural production of suburban and artistic Melbourne. Like the domestic interior, these representations revolved around new and shifting relationships between inside and out, the private and public, the mainstream and the alternative.

Key actors in the Merchant Builders and Hershman performance work defined the Merchant Builders’ offering through its opposition to normative project home culture. In Yencken’s words the display home was used to sell “cultural capital” and social status, whilst gallery director Kiffy Rubbo had dismissed the standard display home interior as “kitsch.” Perhaps Rubbo was using kitsch to define the aesthetics of mass culture, an aesthetic distinction which Merchant Builders also fought against by foregrounding design, environmental values, and individual customisation, with a slightly contrarian underpinning.⁷²

Hershman’s work advocated for the liberation of the individual woman subject. Her individualism and edgy, artistic piece were perhaps absorbed within the design and modern art aesthetic signified in the Nexus interiors. Exploring this dialogue between an international feminist artist, the dream states of her interior installations and the reality of a suburban display home produces a new perspective on the work of Merchant Builders, revealing a sharp sense of their critical role in the project home market. As well, this investigation has enabled speculation on the subjectivities embodied in the progressive project home. “Dream Weekend” at Vermont Park was an exhibition of colliding worlds where curators, Grazia Gunn and Kiffy Rubbo brought together in bracing abrasion, feminist conceptual art with many of the elements that made up the new social and cultural production of suburban Melbourne.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank staff at the University of Melbourne Archives for their helpful assistance and to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hershman currently works under the name Lynn Hershman Leeson. This paper uses Lynn Hershman, the name under which the 1977 work was produced.

2. Undated advertisement, c.1978/1979, Merchant Builders Archive, University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Design.

3. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter Kiffy Rubbo to Lisa Ponti, October 19, 1977. University of Melbourne Archives.

4. “A Look at Suburban Dreams,” Sound, no.26–27, September 1977, n.p. accessed October 30, 2023, https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/2748706/27–77.pdf.

5. Judy Annear, “Not careful? The Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1979–1982,” in When You Think About Art: The Ewing & George Paton Galleries 1971 –2008, ed. Helen Vivian (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2008): 66.

6. Annear, “Not careful?” 64.

7. Janine Burke, “A home for the revolution: the Ewing and George Paton Galleries and the first phase of the women’s art movement, 1975–1980,” in When You Think About Art: The Ewing & George Paton Galleries 1971 –2008, ed. Helen Vivian (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2008): 178–189.

8. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Meredith Rogers to Lynn Hershman, December 9, 1977. University of Melbourne Archives.

9. Hershman has been the subject of numerous monographs. See Peter Weibel, ed. Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2016) and Meredith Tromble, ed. The art and films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

10. These two books provide a broad overview to the North American/Global feminist art movement and the Australian scene: Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 2007) and Anne Marsh, Doing Feminism: women’s art and feminist criticism in Australia (Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2021).

11. See Meredith Tromble, ed. The art and films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

12. Lucy R. Lippard, “Centers and Fragments: Women’s Spaces,” in Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre (New York; Whitney Library of Design, 1977): 186–187.

13. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 2010): 7. For recent reassessments of Friedan’s significance and legacy see Jean Calterone Williams, “Building a Movement: Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique,” Radical History Review 80, (2001): 149–153. At this point in 1977 the dominant feminism in anglophone Australia and the USA was mainstream, white liberal feminism. Although there were socialist feminisms (Sheila Rowbotham, UK and some Third World feminisms) and in 1977 the Combahee River Collective statement of North American made Black feminism prominent, there was no large-scale mainstream debate over the differences in feminism which flared up and took centre stage in the 1980s as “difference” feminisms emerged. When “feminism” is used in this paper it refers to second-wave, liberal feminism.

14. Lippard, “Centers and Fragments,” 197.

15. Lippard, “Centers and Fragments,” 197.

16. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York and London: Routledge, 1992): 228.

17. Shown as part of “An Exhibition of a Postal Event,” George Paton Gallery, 27/9/77–28/10/77 in Helen Vivian, “An archive of Postmodernism,” in When You Think About Art, 28.

18. See Jenny Watson, House Painting Blackburn (1975–77) reproduced on p.119 of When You Think About Art or Jenny Watson, House painting Box Hill North (1977), collection of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

19. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Lynn Hershman to Grazia Gunn, April 23, 1977. University of Melbourne Archives.

20. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Grazia Gunn, “The Dream Home and Suburbanism.” Undated (c. April-August, 1977). University of Melbourne Archives.

21. See Graeme Davison with Sheryl Yelland, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004): 101–102.

22. Davison with Yelland, Car Wars, 101–102.

23. See Alan Pert and Philip Goad, ed. The Total Environment: Merchant Builders (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, forthcoming).

24. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. David Yencken, “Housing and Suburbia,” July 27, 1977, 1–2. University of Melbourne Archives.

25. David Yencken, “Problems for the Innovator” (1985). Unpublished paper, private collection.

26. See Pert and Goad, ed. The Total Environment: Merchant Builders.

27. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Kiffy rubbo and Meredith Rogers to Ian North, July 28, 1977. University of Melbourne Archives.

28. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Kiffy Rubbo to Lynn Hershman, 22 July 1977, 2. University of Melbourne Archives.

29. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Kiffy Rubbo, Meredith Rogers and Grazia Gunn to Lynn Hershman, undated (c.April-August 1977). University of Melbourne Archives.

30. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Kiffy Rubbo to Lynn Hershman, July 22, 1977, 2–3. University of Melbourne Archives.

31. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Letter from Kiffy Rubbo to Lynn Hershman, July 22 1977, 3. University of Melbourne Archives.

32. Graeme Davison, “The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb.” (Canberra, ACT, Australia: Urban Research Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1993).

33. Emery Barcs, “The Australian Way of Life,” in Official Commemorative Book: Jubilee of the Commonwealth of Australia, ed. O.L. Ziegler (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1951): 42.

34. Justine Lloyd, and Lesley Johnson, “Dream stuff: the post war home and the Australian housewife, 1940–60,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 2 (2004): 251–272.

35. Undated advertisement, c.1978/1979, Merchant Builders Archive, University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Design.

36. Statistics for the years 1947 to 1961 are reported by Susan Sheridan, Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Post. War Years (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002): 79. For the 1970s see Parliament of Australia, Alicia Hall and Matthew Thomas, “Declining home ownership rates in Australia,” https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook46p/HomeOwnership.

37. Don Garden, Builders to the Nation: The A. V. Jennings Story (Carlton, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992): 20.

38. Merchant Builders Display Houses – Hostesses,” September 17, 1982, Merchant Builders Archive, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.

39. “Merchant Builders Display Houses – Hostesses,” September 17, 1982, Merchant Builders Archive, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.

40. Pert and Goad, ed. The Total Environment, 144.

41. Cost estimate for a project home by Ken Woolley. See Babette Hayes and April Hersey, Australian Style (London/Sydney: Paul Hamlyn, 1970), 111.

42. Undated advertisement, c.1978/1979, Merchant Builders Archive, University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Design.

43. Pert and Goad, ed. The Total Environment, 146.

44. Lynn Hershman, Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia (Melbourne: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries in conjunction with The Exhibition Gallery, Monash University, 1977): 13.

45. Hershman, Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia, 11. Merchant Builders Archive, University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Design.

46. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. “Annotated Floor Plan,” included as part of package from Kiffy Rubbo to Lisa Ponti (Domus), 19 October 1977. University of Melbourne Archives. All quotations from this drawing.

47. The quotations in this paragraph are all taken from the annotations on the plan, which can be seen in Figure 3.

48. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. “Schedule Dream Weekend.” University of Melbourne Archives.

49. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. “Schedule Dream Weekend.” University of Melbourne Archives.

50. University of Melbourne George Paton Gallery, Location: L69/11, Reference Number: 1990.0144, Volume/Box: Unit 8, File 1, Lynn Hershman. Undated Questionnaire, with instructions for typesetter, included as part of package from Kiffy Rubbo to Lisa Ponti (Domus), 19 October 1977. University of Melbourne Archives.

51. Hershman, Dream Weekend, 3.

52. Hershman, Dream Weekend, 6.

53. Hershman, Dream Weekend, 3.

54. Hershman, Dream Weekend, 6.

55. See for example, Penny Sparke, “Introduction,” in Interior Design and Identity, ed. Penny Sparke and Susie McKellar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 2, Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London: Routledge, 2007) and Georgina Downey, Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2.

56. Jan Howlin, “Indesign Luminary Nexus Designs,” Indesign, March 2, 2018, rpt of Indesign #57.

57. Janne Faulkner, Robin Boyd Foundation, Open Day - “Rethinking the Suburban Dream,” November 20, 2017.

58. Janne Faulkner, Robin Boyd Foundation, Open Day - “Rethinking the Suburban Dream,” November 20, 2017.

59. Highmore, Lifestyle Revolution: How taste changed class in late 20th Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023): 59.

60. Boyd quoted by the Women’s Weekly supplement of Expo 67, quoted in Sheridan, Who Was That Woman? 89.

61. See Karen Burns, “Robin Boyd, Meanjin and the problem of culture, 1948–1961,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 9, no.2 (2019): 34.

62. David Yencken was involved in the development of heritage consciousness and policy. As Chair of the Australian Heritage Commission, he commissioned The National Estate in 1981: a report of the Australian Heritage Commission (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1982).

63. Hayes and Hersey, Australian Style depicts a number of extant colonial interiors furnished in a mix of old and new furniture.

64. Jan Howlin, “Indesign Luminary Nexus Designs,” Indesign, March 2, 2018, rpt of Indesign #57.

65. Highmore, Lifestyle Revolution, 10.

66. Janne Faulkner, Robin Boyd Foundation, Open Day - “Rethinking the Suburban Dream,” November 20, 2017.

67. Jan Howlin, “Indesign Luminary Nexus Designs,” Indesign, March 2, 2018, rpt of Indesign #57.

68. Babette Hayes, design for living in Australia (Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978): 125.

69. Conran quoted by Highmore, Lifestyle Revolution, 59.

70. Judy Attfield, “Redefining Kitsch: The Politics of Design,” Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 3, no. 3 (2006): 208.

71. Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, “Telling stories about post-war Britain: popular individualism and the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s,” Twentieth Century British History 28, no. 2 (2017): 268–304.

72. Attfield, “Redefining Kitsch,” 205.