What About The Bleeding Earth?
BY Robert Arculus
If you want to see architecture at its most visceral, Robert Arculus suggests you look up
Terracotta doesn’t get on the news much. The last time it had a significant media profile was eight years ago, when fist-sized balls of hail came cracking across Sydney, whiffling through windshields, banging into bedrooms and generally causing a great deal of commotion. The next day Channel Nine showed row after row of red-tiled suburban rooftops, punctuated by gaping black holes and tightly stretched blue tarpaulin. Unlike now, it was a good time to be renting.
Australian cities are full of terracotta. And brick. Ruddy, ochre-capped domiciles are an iconic feature of our urban landscape. It’s worth asking why, because this ceramic love affair is not especially widely shared internationally. The answer is because it’s easiest to build with whatever’s close to hand, and both terracotta and brick are made by heating up clay. And clay is everywhere in Australia. There’s probably no other continent with such an abundance of the stuff.
Clay. Australia has it. And it’s worth asking why that is, too.
If anything, clay is even less prepossessing than terracotta. Most people would be happy to go through life with their clay-experience limited to making ill-formed primary school ashtrays. But clay does have an exciting side. It’s made of very, very tiny crystals – little bundles of silicon and oxygen linked into slender sheets. These sheets slip and slide all over each other, which is why clay feels so fine and slick between your fingers.
To get such tiny crystals, you need to take a rock and weather it for a long, long time. Australia used to have a lot more rocks than it does now. Australia used to have whole mountains: not the gentle undulations of the Victorian Alps or the flat-topped cliffs west of Penrith, but proper mountains, big craggy snow-capped Matterhorns and Annapurnas. Not any more, though. Instead we have clay. And also iron, because there was a lot of granite in the mountains, granite has a lot of iron in it, and iron has a tendency to get left behind.
It also tends to go rusty, as any bike-owner knows. And that’s why Australia’s deserts are red: they’re full of rusty iron. That’s why clay is red, too.
Australia has red clay because it is an old country.
Except that’s not the whole story. Europe has also seen many mountains rise and fall, but their soil is rich, black and comparatively clay-free. The difference is glaciers, which have repeatedly churned all over Europe, and everywhere else they could reach, too. Glaciers function like bulldozers, scraping down to the bedrock and shoving any available clay into the ocean.
Most of Australia hasn’t seen a glacier in 250 million years. It’s been too hot.
Oh, and also too still. If Australia had been ramming into other continents then we might have thrown up some new mountains, and then there’d be big catchments and rivers to wash the old ones away. But that didn’t happen either.
Old and hot and still. And thus clay.
And then people come along and look for something to make into roofs and walls, so they dig the clay up and put it in ovens, which forces those crystal sheets to rearrange themselves into nice waterproof (though not hailproof) patterns. And then they use it to make cities. Which means all those brick and terracotta homes have been pieced together from the sunburnt remnants of ancient mountains, albeit somewhat indirectly.
This goes quite a way in explaining why having a piece of paper proclaiming the somewhat nebulous idea of ownership over a property has long been considered the Great Australian Dream. It is actually a piece of Australia.