Car wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities

In Art and Suburbia Chris McAuliffe describes Graeme Davison as “the foremost historian of the Australian suburb” (1996, p. 44). This claim, although necessarily inviting debate, is no mere hyperbole. Since gaining a wide audience with The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne (1978), a revision of his 1969 doctoral study of Australia’s first suburban boom of the 1880s, Davison has deftly narrated the events, motivations and contradictions that have shaped the suburban forms in which the majority of Australians now live. While Australian urban history was a neglected subject in the 1970s, it now boasts many excellent works. Yet few have the interdisciplinary appeal typical of Davison’s contributions and few can be claimed to have added as much impetus to the emergent field of Australian suburban studies. With his latest book, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, a study of Australia’s second suburban boom of the 1950s and 1960s, Davison is likely to extend this appeal further and reach a general audience. In easy-going prose, and once again taking Melbourne as his subject, Davison describes Australia’s troubled love affair with the car from 1945 to the Kennett Government’s manic ‘automobilism’ of the 1990s. The narrative moves fluidly. Internal academic debates are avoided and the record of detailed research is submerged in endnotes. The book’s exclusive focus on Melbourne (a fact that ought be acknowledged in the title) enables a richness of detail, but also inevitably raises questions about Australian urban experience that lies beyond its range. While a case can be made for the national, and international, significance of Melbourne’s encounter with the car, Davison seems simply to assume this. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, he broadly succeeds in his aim of telling nothing less than a story of Australia’s “encounter with the project we sometimes call ‘modernity’” (p. xii). It is a story saturated in irony and ambivalence. In keeping with his previous efforts to counter patronising and deterministic representations of suburbs as ‘half-worlds’ for the vacuous, Davison challenges “terrace-dwelling intellectuals” who might “sneer at the delight of suburban Australians in their cars” (p. xi). He calls upon his readers to “make an honest and open-minded appraisal of how cars have both enriched and impoverished our lives” (p. xii). In so doing, Car Wars adds another layer to our understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of Australian suburbs with their mix of noble intentions and avarice, passivity and passion, democratic achievement and reckless wastefulness. A Melbournian whose life spans the period under study, Davison is