In the city of backyards, the Australian dream is changing

On a radiant northside morning, real estate agent Trent McDermott walks 26 groups, mostly young couples, through a modest timber home and out the back door to a vanishing Australian dream.

The yard is big but not onerous; the lawn green and neatly trimmed. Magpies chortle from a grand poinciana, which shades a child’s swing set. Pavers connect the porch with a Hills Hoist clothesline.

At a tick over 100 square metres, the Keperra home’s floor space is small by modern builds. But the drawcard for the morning’s prospectors is the quintessential rest.

“They want somewhere for the kids to run around, or they’ve got dogs – they want that space,” McDermott says.

“Myself included – when I bought a home I looked for the backyard. I wanted the house as far to the front of the block as possible. This is what most people want.”

Hopefuls Kylie and Owain add their own minds-eye touches: a trampoline for five-year-old Joanie; an outside table under festoon lighting. One day, maybe, a swimming pool.

With an asking price of mid-to-high $700,000s, the property seems vaguely attainable. But it is quickly apparent as the groups chat outside that the owner has already received bettering offers.

“It might be that we end up with an apartment or townhouse,” Kylie says, gathering Joanie to leave. “If we really wanted a backyard, I’m sure we could have one. But we would have to live further from our jobs and do more commuting.

“That’s like a different kind of lifestyle sacrifice.”

The sweet spot of affordability and traditional backyard has just moved a little further into Brisbane suburbia.

When this home was built in the late 1960s, backyards were a suburban norm, a place of cricket, play and barbecues; an aesthetic emblem, if often only wishful, of a certain Australian contentedness.

The idyll is so entrenched in the Australian psyche, performers whirling Victa lawn mowers pirouetted into the shape of the Olympic rings at the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 games.

But McDermott said younger people were increasingly shunning backyards. Some weren’t interested in having children. Others had been priced too far from work.

“Then you’ve got professionals,” he said. “They might be time-poor, or the kids have moved out – and they don’t want the maintenance.”

More and more, McDermott said, customers were seeking out the largest blocks of land they could afford so they could subdivide it later.

Unit towers swallowed Sydney and Melbourne’s inner- and middle-ring suburbs long ago. In Brisbane, too, aerial photographs from 1946 and 2021 show the march of subdivision and smaller “six-pack” apartment blocks.

Yet, the Brisbane backyard has been comparatively resilient. Large outdoor spaces abound, even in inner suburbs such as New Farm, Spring Hill and Woolloongabba. The city’s average lot size of 459 square metres – though rapidly diminished over the past decade – betters Sydney (423) and Melbourne (429).

Of all the big three capitals, Brisbane remained a bastion of “out the back”.

The distinct feel is in large part because Brisbane evolved with bigger lots from the beginning. The Queensland government’s first go at planning legislation, an anti-slum measure called the Undue Subdivision of Land Act 1885, mandated minimum lot sizes of 404 square metres, with 10-metre frontages. The laws effectively banned high-density forms of housing.

Where Melbourne and Sydney built rows of terraces, Brisbane built Queenslander cottages.

From the 1940s to the early 1980s, a typical Brisbane home had a footprint well under 200 square metres and was set on a block more than three times its size, according to Linda Osborne, a PhD research student at QUT.

Over time, the backyard lost core 19th and 20th century purposes. Toilets moved inside. So did laundries. Supermarkets with fresh fruit and vegetables negated an existential urge for vegetable gardens.

More recently, a new mantra of “densification” sought to absorb population growth while untangling inherent problems of unchecked urban sprawl.

But Osborne said these policies had been implemented haphazardly by state and local governments, leading to a generation of development that had prioritised speed and profits over sensible urban design.

Central to these frustrations was the rise in the 1990s of the housing estate, a phenomenon linked with longer working hours, the promulgation of airconditioning and soaring property prices in established suburbs.

In his 2010 book, The Life and Death of the Backyard, Queensland writer Tony Hall lamented inordinately big homes and garages built invariably to the edges of their lots.

Few homes had verandas, and instead of private spaces for play or veggie gardens at the back, new builds prioritised large and landscaped frontages for nicer pictures at sale time.

These were pressing problems, Hall said, because residential green spaces had a higher purpose when it came to matters of biodiversity, carbon sequestration, drainage and microclimates. Instead of being treated as a disposable consumer good, backyards should be seen as community assets.

“[Diminished green space] does not appear to have been encouraged by planning policy and procedures, [but] it was definitely not prevented by them,” he said. “The policies offered very little resistance.”

In the Greater Brisbane area, the effect has been bigger homes on smaller blocks.

“During COVID, when we were working from home, I think a lot of people realised how inappropriate their houses were,” said Rachel Gallagher, a PhD research student at the University of Queensland.

She said a good deal of newer builds were unnecessarily big. Some had poor ventilation, or were positioned in ways that guaranteed they would be too cold in winter and too hot in summer.

For lots smaller than 450 square metres, Queensland building codes stipulate an “outdoor living space” – that is, a backyard – of least 16 square metres. This is only about the size of a single garage.

In addition, a building’s footprint must be no larger than 50 per cent of the available block. But Hall said the remaining space was too often taken up by the front and thin strips at the sides.

“For people buying a suburban house, the focus has become one of investment,” he said. “A particular house form that maximises floor area at minimum cost has evolved in response. Little priority is now given to planted space around the house, as it is not seen as an investment.”

To save backyards, he called for building footprints of no more than 40 per cent of the lot and the relaxation of minimum street setbacks. Building closer to the street meant more room at the back.

“There’s another question, too,” Gallagher said. “Do we really want garages to be the most prominent aspect of our homes?”

The pressures and opportunities of population growth are already well upon the city of backyards.

In the late 1960s, south-east Queensland had a population of about 1 million. By the corresponding decade this century, the region could have 7 million.

The latest draft SEQ Regional Plan, released on Wednesday, forecast Brisbane alone would need 210,000 more dwellings by 2046. As most greenfield sites had been used up, almost all the new builds would be on existing blocks.

For adherents of the traditional backyard, this spelled trouble in the shape of duplexes, terraces and apartments.

But was this necessarily a bad thing?

Brisbane City Council thought so. In 2018, under the stewardship of then-lord mayor Graham Quirk, it vowed to “protect the Brisbane backyard and our unique character”.

This was the so-called townhouse ban, which applied only to low-density suburbs. Curiously, the new SEQ Regional Plan calls for more townhouses.

“All development is political,” Gallagher said. “In terms of the SEQ Regional Plan, the point of that is to outline the state’s overarching interests. And I would ask, are backyards a state interest? I think housing affordability and housing security is probably a more pertinent question for people.”

The plan does not mention the backyard. Faced with a housing crunch, state and local governments are prioritising supply over traditional notions of the suburban idyll.

“We have already seen a very substantial change in the kinds of houses that people live in – smaller blocks, greater density and smaller households,” Deputy Premier Steven Miles said on Wednesday.

“That is what this plan envisages, and that is how we can keep it affordable.”

The broad SEQ goal is “gentle density”, a pleasant-sounding way to describe everything in between the least dense (a single, detached house) and the most dense (apartment high-rises).

But the Brisbane mix would be different. While diversity targets had not yet been finalised, the draft plan proposed concentrating population growth into high-rises like those planned for Kurilpa.

“That way you can keep all the good things about Brisbane,” Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said. “You can keep the character, you can keep the bushland and the environment, and you can keep the backyard, but also have more people moving into the city.”

Writing in The Conversation in 2020, RMIT researchers Thami Croeser and Lucy Gunn said well-designed density was, in fact, a good thing. Australians loved going to Europe, and it was density that gave those cities their buzz.

More people living in an area meant more walkable services, shops, bars and restaurants.

The pair estimated that Paris averaged about 213 people per hectare, and Barcelona 156. By comparison, Australia’s two densest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, averaged 38 and 50, respectively.

Osborne said Copenhagen in Denmark offered good blueprints for high-density living. Apartment blocks, often four or five storeys, were built with enough space between them for communal gardens, mature shade trees and spaces for entertaining.

“This design is higher density, practical, beautiful and sustainable,” she said. “It could, and should, be done in Queensland, especially on larger and greenfield sites, but it requires political will that I fear is lacking.”