...Caroline Barnes and Simon Jackson This paper offers a critical reading of Robin Boyd’s narrative of the Australian nation created for Australia’s pavilion at Expo’70. The critique offered is from an environmental perspective, using this example to lead into a broader reflection on Australian design history’s ‘modernity problem’. We argue that although the examination of Australia as a socio-cultural context for the practice of design continues to engage scholars, the will to profess the existence of progressive Australian design has precluded significant examination of design’s regressive effects. The current environmental crisis is, as Arturo Escobar argues, ‘a crisis of modernity, to the extent that modernity has failed to enable sustainable worlds.’[1] Design is implicated here for its contribution to environmental degradation, as is design history for accounts that validate designers’ development of concepts, processes and products that impose the unsustainable on societies. The latter is pronounced in Australian design history. When modernity and its cultural manifestations are understood as European inventions, admitting limited scope for cultural exchange, claiming historical significance for Australian design inevitably involves the uncritical application of imported principles.[2] The halting attempts to write Australian design history are mostly bound up in proselytizing for the values and benefits of the modern and eulogising designers’ efforts to force change in the...
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