When I first came over for my visit in May, I was amazed at how different houses were than back home. Apart from the notion that overall they were bigger to my foreign, working class eyes, there were visual differences in overall architecture that made me boggle.
Aussies, those quaint houses you see in films and on television actually do exist. You know the ones, the high gabled, precipitously pointy rooved chalet styled houses you see in The Goonies and other New England/Canadian productions. You can see the same style up in the Dandenongs, around Olinda, but apart from the mountainous regions, you won't see this kind of building much at all.
They're everywhere here, and they almost did my head in when I first visited. Canada and Australia are very similar in a lot of ways, but seeing those buildings showed me more than anything else - even driving on the wrong side of the road - that I was Somewhere Else. That I wasn't in Melbourne anymore.
When I was in my teens, one of my most beloved teachers introduced me to fantasy novels. Amongst those was the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. In those novels there is a marked difference in the climates of the two continents; the North being colder and mountainous, while Southern was more tropical and flat, being covered with jungle.
Through the course of these novels, the Masterharper, Robinton, nearly dies, and so it's decided that he will retire to Southern. The Smithcrafters design a house for him that will make the most of the breezes that come in the afternoon. They include wide verandahs around the outside of the place and make sure the ceilings aren't too high to trap the heat in.
I always read the passage describing Cove Hold and saw the architecture reflected all around me. Australian houses often include verandahs, particularly in our cultural consciousness as featured in our "true blue dinki di" ads. They wouldn't show up in commercials if they didn't stir some recognition in us. If we don't have a verandah, we often have a widened eave - the roof doesn't directly meet the top of the wall.
Have a look at my old house as an example.
You can't see it here, but the house was also quite open plan, allowing breezes to flow through the place. Evaporative coolers (known as swamp coolers, at least in certain parts of the US) worked well here except on the most humid and hot of days owing to this airflow potential.
The house pictured above was a relatively new place - I only had it built ten years ago. Before that I lived in a 1950s house that didn't look too much different to the place above. It was weatherboard, not brick, wasn't open plan and originally had a porch and a trellised area, but in broad strokes it was similar to the above.
When I was first thinking about living here I didn't know if I could ever wrap my head around the alienness of what I was seeing around me. Could I live in a suburb that had such different overall looks around me? Or a town with such? This sense faded when I went out to stay in a riverside cottage, but I still remember that sense of being out of place.
It wasn't until I came back and things were getting colder that it all made sense. It all comes down to something we didn't get and Canada (not to mention mountains) gets in abundance - snow. Snow on a flat roof would sit and get heavier and heavier and heavier until the underlying surface gave way, making a hell of a mess beneath. I've already seen this in the prefabricated shopping malls (which do look like the ones back home) here. So I realised that the sharp angles were for the sliding of snow! I'm so clever.
Well, this footage may have helped.
footage from the Associated Press
It's a major urban clue indicating that you're not in Australia anymore, and is quite picturesque or jarring, dependant on one's state of mind when looking at them. It gives the place a European kind of feel, and makes this place almost magical after the flattness of Australia. I now live in a town dotted with little chalets, and how is that not amazing?
I may add to this post or make a followup when I can get a nice pic of what I see as a "typical" Canadian house to compare to the Australian one above.
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