Danny Katz: Australia's affinity with the backyard

The suburban Aussie backyard used to be so big. It was a vast expanse of patchy, weedy grass with a couple of old trees on the side, a rusty Hills Hoist plonked in the middle and somewhere down the front, if you looked really hard, tucked away in a tiny corner, a house.

Nobody knew what to do with all that backyard. It was too big to mow, too huge to water, so it just became a place where kids played backyard cricket and adults burned dead leaves on weekends for fun.

There were distant parts of the backyard that you’d never even explored – scary parts where the Morning Glory grew. That stuff would grab you by its tendrils and drag you into its lair. You couldn’t even bitch about it from far away – it could read lips.

Then one day in the late 1990s people started waking up in their cramped little homes, their arms bunched in tight, their knees jammed against their chin – and they looked out the window at their vast backyard, the Hills Hoist twirling happily in the morning breeze, waving assorted pairs of undies in its Hills-Hoisty hands.

And these people said to themselves, “This is ridiculous! Why is my house so small and my backyard so big? I’m going to do something about this!” But they said it silently in their head, in case the Morning Glory was listening.

So builders were brought in to knock out walls, push out sides, pop little extra rooms onto the back like boxy haemorrhoids. Trees were cut down and mulched. The Hills Hoist was yanked out and dumped in a skip. The Morning Glory was poisoned and died slowly, reaching out its tendrils for pity and a drink of water, but it got neither.

The suburban Aussie backyard was half the size now, but it was a bit more manageable. People grew smaller gardens, put down nice decking, turned their homes into an “entertainer’s paradise” even though they never ended up doing any entertaining, but at least they had the option if they ever did.

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Then one day in the mid-2000s, people were lounging around in their patios and they gazed out at their garden and thought, “Why do I have all these plants? What’s the point of plants? They just photosynthesise and make oxygen – and who needs oxygen when you could have a home theatre, a guest annexe and a sculpture studio and foundry?”

So builders were brought back to knock out more walls, push out more sides, build more haemorrhoid-rooms, until the backyard was solid house. All that was left was a tiny strip of “Zen courtyard”, just big enough for one person, if you balanced on one foot on a Japanese river pebble.

The big, expansive suburban Aussie backyard was no more. But one day in the early 2010s, people started poking their heads out of their back windows and thought, “You know what would be nice? A bit more greenery. Hey, maybe I should build a vertical backyard up the side of the house! Yeah, with patchy, weedy grass, a couple of sideways trees, a sideways Hills Hoist …”