Private Faces in Public Spaces: The NRMA, 1920–51

Abstract

‘The road ran smooth and flawless, precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand.’ So begins Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel Oil!, rehearsing the inventory of metaphors that the road and motoring were germinating for bourgeois sociality in the 1920s. Metaphors of efficiency, rationalisation, the collective sense of an individualism realised at the wheel of the Ford. The road itself in its irreversibility seemed the very incarnation of Ford’s dictum of history as ‘bunk’:

You never look back; for at fifty miles an hour your business is with things that lie before you, and the past is the past — or shall we say, the passed are the passed?

(Sinclair 1926: 3)