Modernity

New TAA control room, Mascot Airport, Sydney, 1 August, 1962 John Mulligan(National Library of Australia)

Qantas Boeing 707-138 jetliner at Avalon airport in Victoria in 1959 (photograph Russell Smith) NLA

In the 1920s and 1930s, young women in Australia including Helen Blackburn, Millicent Bryant, Irene Dean, Joan Taubman, Freda Thompson and Nancy Bird Walton:

 took to the skies wearing clothes designed for both comfort and the extremes of temperatures, and stories and images of them in daily newspapers and women’s magazines portrayed them as female exemplars of early twentieth century Australian modernism.[iv]

 For these women and others who followed them, the sky was the limit. And they pioneered a cosmopolitan modernism and the formation of an international image of the modern woman.

Architecturally, airports conformed to the modernist ideals of purity and vitality of form. Technological efficiency was turned into an aesthetic. This is evident in John Mulligan’s image of Sydney International airport’s waiting room taken in 1970. Like some of the surrounding airport hotels, much of the airport is a ‘machine for viewing’.[v] These are liminal spaces that connect places. In a way the waiting room became for a while a new frontier. The frontier disappeared from the 1980s with the rise of globalisation and free markets. Marc Auge has suggested that towards the end of the twentieth century large airports have become one of the new transit ‘non-places’, like shopping malls – part of what he has termed ‘supermodernity’ – that are characterised by an overabundance of space and information.[vi] Canberra Airport is currently considering setting up an ‘aeropolis’, an airport city.

Sydney Air Traffic Control (National Library of Australia)

Heritage Sources 

Aviation technology and related facilities like airports have been showplaces for modernity, in terms of being the latest in industrial design, having the latest systems, and offering the greatest level of comfort and service to users. The technology therefore incorporates both the pursuit of the latest style, and the latest technology, to achieve the exacting standards that aviation demands.

Statutory authorities such as Airservices Australia, hold significant technical and construction information on Australia’s airport installations and other systems important to safe national aviation operations. These records include planning material, construction documentation (including blueprints), and details of progressive developments.

The pursuit of the corporate appearance of modernity can be examined by looking at collections of flight crew wear such as those found at QANTAS, the TAA Museum, the Powerhouse and the NMA. Other important material remains in private hands, such as the material held by Phil Buckley[viii] and Darren Carroll[viiii] in Australia and even Cliff Muskiet[x] in the Netherlands. All three maintain active websites.

The modernity theme is only addressed in a minor way through existing collections, although there are undoubtedly large archival resources. The significant development of a digital portal spanning the national collection would allow the public to gain a better idea of how aviation expresses concepts of modernity.