INTERWAR INTERPRETATIONS 1921–1945

After Australian troops returned from the hellfires across Europe, the nation yearned for peace in the Pacific. The government accelerated strategies to settle thousands of war survivors in basic but comfortable homes and gardens where they could raise families. Boosted by the Anzac share of defeated Germany’s punitive reparations, the government subsidised mortgages for qualified servicemen and supply-side programs to develop new garden suburbs of bungalows on quarter-acre blocks.

Winthrop Hall, University of WA, by Rodney Alsop, 1932 (Duncan Sharrocks/DT).
Burnham Beeches, the Nicholas family's Dandenong mansion; architect Harry Norris, 1933 (SLV).
Australian National War Memorial, Canberra; architects Emil Sodersten with John Crust, 1941 (Frank Hurley/NLA).

Topics surveyed in Chapter 7 of Australian Architecture are:

—Interwar suburbs

—Swathes of standard bungalows

—Building Canberra’s institutions and suburbs

—The Griffins’ post-Canberra projects

—War memorials

—Designs for cars

—Spanish Mission and Mediterranean themes

—Fantastic cinemas

—Moderne mansions

—Interwar blocks of flats

—New materials and construction systems

—Interwar Functionalists

—Modern commercial and government buildings

—Functional Moderne hospitals

—Education research and communications

—Wartime infrastructure

—Imagining new living styles after the war