by Quentin Cockburn

Perhaps it was a portent of things to come.  We’d negotiated the thirteenth roundabout.  Each in its own way deferring the planned wisdom of traffic engineers for another gateway to a new subdivision, an industrial estate or a theme park; we’d grown used to it.  For Property values and ease of business.

You could see it from the distance.  The low horizon, the big, clear sky, and giving it the finger, with an assertion borne by insecurity, the incredibly ugly building.

The building, nicknamed the ‘the milk carton’ was impressively ugly, even from a distance.  It didn’t loom, it oppressed.  It proclaimed ‘the Power of One’ with a banality more hyperbolic than anything Bryce Courtenay could’ve imagined.

But so much of Bunbury had undergone the process of uglification.  We put a closer investigation on hold.  Which was wise.  Clearly the Council in Bunbury understand planning.   Arrival at Bunbury is an endurance test.  Even the Americans battle to match this ‘development’ traversty.  It seemed endless, uniformly ugly and the all encompassing sub text to Australia in the early twentieth century.  As the newly elected PM said we’re “Open for business” and bury the consequences.  Robin Boyd could never imagine this ‘Greatest Australian Ugliness’.  This ‘GAU’ belied the usual suspects, car-yards, liquor shops, tyre marts, Bunnings, servos and a localised exaggeration of space to make things seem even bigger.  Requiring a diversion, we made our way to the harbour, to savour for a moment the alternate world of boats, piers, and the eternality of the sea.  As we cruised the “new streetscape” of the marina precinct we marveled at the sterility and standardisation of type.  Where once were warehouses, a train line, working jetties and docks, the encrusted and oil begrimed relics of shipping, there is now now a miniature ‘Darling Harbour’, a putative ‘Docklands’.  The world standard waterfront development.  No different from thousands of others the world over.  Strangely reminiscent of the Liverpool Docks post Beatles, ersatz dock for ersatz schlock, and not a real human to be seen.

Scurrying from the harbour precinct we drove determinedly towards the ‘Milk Carton’.  We arrived in the main street.  The ‘Milk Carton’ is a marvel of its type.  The street frontage and sides devoted to ramps, air conditioning ducts, grills, vents and concrete. Zero connection to the street, or to the town.  We learnt that behind the towering crystalline steel and glass facade, office workers plied their trade, in triplicate, white, pink and yellow forms to their respective trays.

We asked who built it?  “Alan Bond” came the fatalistic reply.  Our subconscious snapped, QED.  Another bold statement by an enterprising BIG- thinking man.  The man who wrested the Americas Cup from the United States, who made one or two amongst us standard bearers of decency, philanthropy, and Arts.  Indeed for those who prospered through the era of Bond-age and Burke-ism there is beauty amid the ugliness.  The rest of “Old Bunbury” a bit like ‘Old Lowestoft’ is quaint.  The locals charming, good natured and conversational.  Though the landscape architects and urban designers had left their mark, theirs’ was a forlorn hope against the ‘Milk Carton’.  It stood for all time, an upended middle finger to notions of decency and taste community and township.  To proclaim loud enough to be heard in Mauritius, “Money is Power, and Power is GOOD”  .

And at the door of the edifice, opaque portal to the world outside, the inscription read,  ‘WA, towards a sustainable future’.