Blue, Green, Red and Purple: heritage o heritage
Betty Collins’s poem suggests that now is the time for some re-building in the Australian city, Adelaide.
sorry about the sardonic laughter -
beneath it there are tears,
o Adelaide.
I admit to giggles over the ‘approved’ colours in every shade
and nuance of baby-poo
but
why
o Adelaide,
do you cling to yesteryear?
No good can come of it.
It was but yesterday
the refugees from Europe came -
they fled the cold, the dark -
But took it with them wheresoe’er they went
They made
huddled rows of beetle-browed dirty coal-fired cottages
with tiny windows;
they made
unwieldy multi-partitioned many-roomed mistress-enslaving
mansions
They made narrow lanes for night-carts
And they made pseudo-classic Town Halls.
Great Heavens, o Adelaide,
great heavens richly blue
sweep ceaselessly over the arc of the red earth
the fertile hills
the dry and stony glorious wildernesses.
The hot blue earth
is swinging widely on eternity's orbit -
Is it not now time to plough?
For our children, and our children’s children?
May I send you some contemporary architectural periodicals?
