In contrast to the harsh intensity of the Australian climate in which it buffers, the verandah introduces a scale of entry and exit between the two spheres it occupies, creating a gradual incorporation into each realm. The typology makes its transitional nature well-apparent between its folding of space and program between an interior and exterior environment, exhibiting attributes of each, yet neither in their full capacity. As a peripheral edge, the verandah can be understood as a ‘halfway space’ in its expansion of the interior and exterior membrane, often strictly regulated between the outermost facade and the surrounding world. The verandah as a threshold therefore observes realms of transition between various conditions, ranging from tangible differences to embedded metaphorical references.
Intrinsic to its initial application is the verandah’s role as a mitigator of temperatures; projecting over walls and shielding its occupants and from the sun, rain and wind, to offer valuable shade in the relentless heat. To the degree in which the built structure encloses a space, the verandah’s permeability invites an openness to the air and elements, as “an intermediary space between the house proper, which is itself only half closed in, and the world outside - garden, street and weather”.¹ In the verandah’s success of practical use, it may be of surprise to consider alternative motivations that informed their construction, such as their response as a stylistic feature over need. In their apparently indiscriminate use of houses of all sizes and styles, “The meanest of single-fronted, single-storey terraces in Sydney or Melbourne had its verandah, even when this faced south and made the house consequently colder and darker”.² Hence, the extent of the gradient between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ is not linear, as the verandah itself often retained the most ideal of temperature conditions, regulating as much life within its edge, limiting the enclosed house to the bare necessities of existence.
PUBLIC - PRIVATE
No matter its singularity, or wrap-around existence, the verandah functions as a platform in staging everyday life. It is here, in mediating between the domestic and social worlds, that this cusp is central to the happenings of the day, as taking prevalence in Australian fiction literature that confirms the popular consciousness, “She liked to see what was going on; and said that in Australia most things happened on verandahs”.³ In its distinctive positionality between the public street and the private home, a new social condition is bred upon the shaded platform. In enabling encounters to be not-so-formal, and characteristically imbued with a sense of semi- openness; conversations are afforded a limited degree of privacy, yet sheltered from the immediacy of the rest of the world. To this effect, “verandahs are no-man’s land, border zones that keep contact with the house and its activities on one face but are open on the other to the street, the night and all the vast unknown areas beyond”, as novelist David Malouf recounts, “It has allowed my mother, with her strict notion of the forms, to bring a perfect stranger in off the street and settle her in one of our squatter’s chairs”.⁴ In traversing extremes, the verandah makes possible a middle-ground, relieving pressures of convention, and further contributing to an informal, laidback lifestyle.
PROSPECT - REFUGE
Biologically ingrained in human nature is to prefer environments where a clear field of vision can be obtained in the security of shade, shelter and perhaps concealment, also known as prospect-refuge theory.⁵ In the prospect of looking out, is the association of a view, and in the case of the verandah, carries connotations of the settler overlooking his pastoral expanse. The ‘hegemony of the gaze’ asserts sight as the “initial means of possession and control…and it is this ideology of the panopticon that empowered the European ‘landscanning man’ to claim possession of land through the act of seeing it”.⁶ Under the safety and refuge of the verandah, the wild, inhospitable Australian landscape is conquered, and in extending past this threshold, the ability to retreat back to an interstitial space, not completely removed from his association to worth and power, is continuously presented in the form of the verandah. At the leisure of refuge, and in contemplation of prospect, the settler makes sense of their environment, achieving an intimate sense of familiarity with the particular view afforded from their verandah. The subtleties of change in season, soil, agriculture and wildlife, gone unnoticed by a passing stranger, are made apparent through prolonged periods of observation of a particular scene.⁷ Supplemented by the increasing amount of time spent on the verandah by occupants, in comparison to the house, the inherent outward view provides a sustained view strengthening their relationship to the landscape and beyond.
WILDERNESS - SETTLER
If the private pastoral property inherited its association to civilization, its fringes place the verandah at the frontier between settlement and the unknown. The alienation of the landscape attributes geographic notions of ‘out’ versus ‘in’, as although it makes up the interior of the continent, the outskirts of civilisation has historically been considered the ‘outside’ country. Remarked by historian Charles Bean in 1910, “however far you search for the ‘outback’, there seems to be always an ‘outback beyond’, regarded by the people there as somewhere further inland as the true ‘outback’”.⁸ The Australian frontier placed settlers on the edge of what they considered to be between the domesticated and the untamed landscapes, yet it also forced their confrontation with the danger of the external country itself in order to make way for expansion of cultivated lands and settlements.⁹ In its role of prospect, the verandah ultimately serves as a perch towards the hostility of the wilderness beyond the confines of what has already been established.
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Tanya Dalziell, “Beyond the Verandah — Elizabeth Jolley’s ‘The Orchard Thieves’ and Drusilla Modjeska’s ‘The Orchard,’” Antipodes 11, no. 1 (June 1997). Page 51.
Mills, Ethel, “A Box of Dead Roses” [1901] in Giles (ed). 1987.
David Malouf, 12 Edmondstone Street (London: Digital, 2012). Page 20.
Brian Hudson, “The View from the Verandah: Prospect, Refuge and Leisure,” Australian Geographical Studies 31, no. 1 (1993): 70–78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8470.1993.tb00652.x. Page 72.
Tracy Spencer, “Getting off the Verandah: Contextual Australian Theology in-Land and in Story,” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 19, no. 3 (2006): 323–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/1030570x0601900312. Page 7.
Brian Hudson, “The View from the Verandah: Prospect, Refuge and Leisure,” Australian Geographical Studies 31, no. 1 (1993): 70–78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8470.1993.tb00652.x. Page 74.
Bean C E W., On the Wool Track: Pioneering Days of the Wool Industry (North Ryde, N.S.W.: Angus & Robertson, 1985).
Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, 2005). Page 24.