Abstract
In this chapter, a close reading of Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939) accompanies an examination of the hopes and failures of urban planning discourse in Sydney during the interwar period. Tennant engages with the uneven development of water infrastructure in Sydney, highlighting water’s imbrication with the city’s power dynamics. This chapter utilises the concept of ‘porosity’ to argue that Tennant’s novel both models and calls for a city made by its citizens. Spectacularly underestimated by critics, Tennant’s approach to content and form shows her interest in modern urban planning discourse, including post-war socialist housing experiments in Vienna and Le Corbusier’s utopian Ville Radieuse project of 1930.
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Notes
- 1.
City of Sydney Archives, NSCA CRS 51, Demolition books, 1900–1949.
- 2.
Tennant’s decision to begin the novel in 1912 is not arbitrary. 1910 until the end of World War I was the ‘heyday of the active planning movement’ in Australia (Freestone 2012: 79). Famously, in 1912 an international competition was launched to find a design for Australia’s new capital city, Canberra. The 137 entries from fifteen countries represented the best and most modern in planning theory and practice; Walter Burley Griffin’s winning entry epitomised the spirit of utopian city planning (Reps 1997: 2). In 1912, the New South Wales’ Institute of Architects was addressed by John F. Hennesy on the ‘most up to date and important subject’ of garden-suburb planning (qtd. Freestone 1987: 53). Additionally, 1912 saw the building of Kingsclere in Potts Point, which is most likely Sydney’s first apartment building.
- 3.
An exception here is a conference paper by Karen Attard (1998). In one of the few recent pieces of criticism on Tennant’s work, Attard reads The Battlers (1941) through the prism of nomadology, connecting characters’ nomadic lives with what she identifies as the nomadic traits in Tennant’s writing, specifically, qualities such as the rambling plot, large cast of characters and the importance of geography and spatiality over history and temporality. Though brief, Attard’s paper is one of the only examples of scholarly work that attempts to engage with and critically analyse Tennant’s craftsmanship as a writer.
- 4.
In the late 1970s John Docker argued that the work of Tennant and other 1930s and 1940s writers had been ‘suppressed’ by what he calls Australian ‘New Criticism’ and their text-centred approach (Matthews 1981: 72). Such an approach, Docker argued, ignored the importance of social context to Tennant’s novels. See Matthews (1981) for further discussion of Docker’s argument and Tennant’s critical reception.
- 5.
Some urban theorists have made porosity a principle of inclusive urban development. Architect and activist Stavros Stavrides argues that porosity ‘articulates urban life’, as it ‘loosens the borders which are erected to preserve a strict spatial and temporal order’ (2007: 67). Porosity also has links with Quentin Stevens’ Ludic City (2007), Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens’s (2007) loose space, and more tangentially, the psychogeographical dérive of the Situationists in the 1960s.
- 6.
Keating is responding to A Gentle Shipwreck (1975), Lewis Rodd’s memoir of growing up poor in Surry Hills in the first two decades of the century. Rodd writes that in this period, ‘progress afflicted Sydney’s town council’ (77). Rodd was Kylie Tennant’s husband, and the Cornish family of Foveaux was modelled on the Rodds.
- 7.
Tennant may have modelled Hutchison on Allen Taylor, ‘timber tycoon, shipowner and avid slum-clearer’, who became Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1905. In 1909, at the Royal Commission on the Improvement of Sydney, ‘Taylor spoke at length about traffic flow to Central Station, tramway access to the eastern suburbs and enhancing the effect that factories had on the values of, and therefore the rates payable on, city property. Not once did he mention the people who would be displaced to facilitate these boons’ (Keating 1991: 71).
- 8.
In ‘One-Way Street’, Benjamin argues that children are ‘irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry’ (1979: 52–3). Children, who are less indoctrinated to the capitalist system, can recognise and create meaning from waste in ways adults cannot.
- 9.
The same kind of dialectic informed the slogan of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1968, ‘sous les pavés: la plage!’ which literally translates to ‘under the pavement: the beach’.
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Brayshaw, M. (2021). Plans, Porosity and the Possibilities of Urban Narrative: Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939). In: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_5
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