In 1966 (fig 1), "[Myra] Hindley and her lover, Ian Brady, were jailed for life at Chester Assizes ... for the Moors Murders of Lesley Anne Downey and Edward Evans ... Hindley was found guilty of being an accessory."[1]
It was her "hand that led five children to death at the hands of the psychopath Ian Brady."[2] But "[n]ow having served twice the average life sentence, ... Hindley describes her plight like a trained sociologist: 'People have drunk in the hatred of me with their mother's milk'."[3] She "has grown worse even than her sins; she is an icon of horror."[4]
It's because I am a woman and it makes me the double devil. A woman is supposed to be the protector of children and when she does something to harm them it is perceived as far worse than a man's crime against them.[5]
Conventionally, the woman is the protector of children and the house is the site of the maternal and of children. The house that is not a home, that does not site the maternal or the domestic, is a site of horror; it is a contra-identity. It is an anti-house which denies the domesticated role traditionally assigned to woman. Just as the woman who harms children is a double devil, the house which does not support domesticity is equally perverse. It is an ugly house, it is the site of the bachelor. It is the New Zealand bach (fig 2), and in particular, it is Mike Austin's bach at Murray's Bay (fig 3).
"The bach (or 'small apartment' from the verb to bach, live as a bachelor) has become a characteristic local typology in New Zealand, where it is usually a simple seaside holiday home."[6] Mike Austin's bach at Churchill Road, Murray's Bay, is an architecture whose schizophrenia derives from its alternation between bach and house.
At home, in New Zealand, the "archetypal Kiwi bach"[7] is often posited as an origin of New Zealand architecture. It is frequently referred to as establishing a lineage for a specific architect's work, such as Vernon Brown and the Group,[8] around which New Zealand architecture attempts to construct its identity. If this identity is indeed sited within an architecture which denies conventional notions of domesticity, then the architectural discourse of New Zealand is founded within an unsettling ideology - an ideological rhetoric within which figures such as Myra Hindley exist (fig 1).
Architecturally, the bach constructs itself in terms of the sophisticated naivety and nostalgia of Laugier's primitive hut, an eighteenth century construction of the beginnings of Western architecture. Displaced within New Zealand, the Western primitive hut engages in the discourse of the colonial and architectural erasings of the Maori. Yet the pioneering hut is both the manifestation of the uncivilised and of the civilising forces which reconstruct a colonial landscape.
Persistent in its integral importance to New Zealand culture, the primitive hut exists as the bach. Ideologically constructed within notions of a pretended minimalist pragmatism, the bach constructs a stripped domestic economy deprived of feminine excess and civilising tendency - deprived of all accessories.
It is a makeshift aesethetic where the finished is unfinished: "vertical boards on the walls lack battens that would finish them,"[9] rough edges are not smoothed, nails are not puttied and the fibrolite of the garage is broken - before a car drives into it - anticipating and manifesting the disaster of the domestic, ensuring domesticity is a dangerous and violated site (fig 4).
Yet it is via the device of the accessory, (an abject site of shifting signification, which allows Hindley (fig 1) the "alternation between the logic of exclusion and that of participation," and allows her to appear at times to be neither woman nor criminal and at times both woman and criminal, to pass through the categorical genre which might, distinctively and categorically, allow her to exist within the "constraints of rhetoric"), which sites the bach within "a hybrid, bastard, or even corrupted reasoning," a state of oscillation "between ... types of oscillation" to be unsettling more than unsettled.[10] It cites this bach on Churchill Road as neither, both, and between oscillations of domesticity and the bach.
Sited as abject, Hindley's manifestation as horrific (fig 1) is integral to a disbelief that she can operate normally within the regulations of society. Dangerous because she is unknowingly unable to be controlled, her ability to slip between the legalities of a symbolic system enable her access to a semiotic which constructs her as unreadable and unknowable. Unable to be simply controlled, contained and ascertained in terms of the symbolic (as a "woman [who] is supposed to be the protector of children"[11]), she engages with a semiotic where gender difference and categorical boundaries corrode.
Austin's bach too has, at least, an awkward relationship with social perceptions of normality. Neighbours are disturbed by the tilted windows which unsettle the horizon (fig 5), colleagues are "a bit embarrassed" and the building is given a reputation as "the ugliest house in the bay."[12]
Occupying an abject space designated as chora, the bach refuses a description enforced by conventional domestic notions of the feminine and of settlement.[13] It is a "retreat from the social expectations and explicit rules of the suburb"[14] and of the family. It is built outside "the jurisdiction of the health inspector and town planner."[15] It is constructed as an avoidance of notions of stability, security and the legitimate. Devoid of notions of propriety, it is improper and without property, claiming land by the act of building rather than by ownership.[16]
Kristeva's use of Plato's chora is implicated within the pre-Oedipal as a receptacle which is manifest as a shifting (and rhythmic) articulation. It is a shifting which displaces a fixed correlation of occupation, possession and ownership, criminal and victim. It is indiscrete, lacking clear boundaries and propriety, causing disparity between notions of house, home and bach.[17]
For Derrida, chora is also implicated as movement, explicitly as oscillation between oscillations (rather than objects), but Kristeva's psychoanalytical connections, and the unsettling possibilities of a (New Zealand architectural) discourse founded on a sinister domesticity, invite abject possibilities.
For Kristeva these abject possibilities are sinister.
It is ... not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system [and] order. [It is w]hat does not respect borders, positions [and] rules ... [It is t]he traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience.[18]
It is when Myra Hindley (fig 1), the "embodiment of what most of us call pure evil," writes "to the mothers of the children she helped kill ... [and] prays for them regularly."[19] It is the Hindley who is "the reformed Myra, Christian, Catholic and truly sorry."[20] It is when "[s]he breaks down in sobs, not seemingly at the thought of ... [her] crime, but rather of having deprived the child's mother of a body to bury in a Christian fashion."[21] It is the disturbing and unsettling of the symbolic, the slipping between semiotic and symbolic states, which finds abjection. It is when the domesticated house is renovated to re(dis)cover its former status as bach.[22]
Posited as an identity for New Zealand architecture, the bach becomes a validated domestic, venerated in the works of Vernon Brown and the Group. Not unaffected by this semantic transgression, the bach at Murray's Bay becomes entrapped by an encroaching ideological and physical suburbia. It becomes domesticated, a house, but in becoming that which is most opposed to its identity, its manifestation of the domestic is perverse (fig 6). Its
cupboards were quite strange, some of the cupboards were only the depth of the wall so they accessed the inside of ... [the] wall ... [yet] the [cupboard] doors themselves were lemon yellow and the surrounds were white ... it was just too, too domestic ... I wanted to paint it the same colour as the windsurfer ... Bahama blue.[23]
The domestication of the bach stimulates its undoing - the lemon yellow of the domestic is painted Bahama blue, the exotic is reclaimed within the domestic, an eternal referral to an imagined colonial unsettling.
Rediscovering the bach enables an unearthing which unsettles the clarity and ease with which the discourse of New Zealand architecture dismisses itself.[24] It displaces the bach as origin reinscribing itself within other mythologies of architectural beginnings - the tent (fig 7) and the cave (fig 8).
One partner wanted this space to be a tent, the other a cave, and the wall separates the tent from the cave. But this wall is punctured with sliding doors so that the cave becomes a tent and vice-versa.[25]
The bach disturbs notions of conventional domesticity and architectural finish and re-examines issues of gender and culture sited within the post-colonial (fig 9).
Perpetrating a Western origin of architecture within "a time [which Wigley describes as] of innocence, a primal scene of uncorrupted naivety, a Garden of Eden in which was built the first shelter, a simple hut, a pure, unadorned, building,"[26] the bach
installs the[se] sign[s] of appropriate representation: [the Garden of Eden and Laugier's primitive hut. It] ... creates the conditions for a beginning ... But the institution [on which the bach relies (that of colonisation) is] ... a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition ... it communicates 'the immediate vision of the [bach] ... freed from the discourse that accompanied it, or even encumbered it.'[27]
This allows the bach to be read as intrinsically of New Zealand - appropriate to claim as a national architectural identity and beginning of architecture.
Contextualised within the colonial, the bach is both a beginning and a continuation of European cultural priorities within architecture - yet it is also a break from this tradition; it is displaced, distorted, dislocated and repeated and so apparently frees itself from the notions of civilisation which are integral to ideas of colonisation. Yet its break from this tradition is manifest in the architecture of the very civilising tradition it supposedly frees itself of - or attempts to escape from.
The bach's situation within paradise is also culturally marked inhabiting fringes of culture and nature. It manifests notions of the primitive as "[a] porch, a view, a sea or mountain breeze, combined with basic washing and cooking facilities ... [It is] an escape to paradise."[28] This is idealised in a picture (fig 9) which is, for Mitchell and Chaplin,
enlarged beyond all others. It shows a man sitting on the verandah of a hut surrounded by flax and scrub - the precursor of the Auckland architects' house of the 1940s ... This simple building might even be Adam's house in Paradise.[29]
This relocation of "Adam's house in Paradise" in New Zealand, displaces the serpent and the feminine, embodied in the figures of Eve and Myra Hindley (fig 1), and architecturalised within notions of excess and accessory.[30]
Stripping the hut of that excessive to the Rationalist discourse, which contextualises Laugier's primitive hut, enables the bach to exist beyond the iconography of domestic comfort and civilisation. Denied the civilising constraints which are sited within femininity,[31] the bachelor pioneer naively identifies its iconography as outside of the symbolic.[32] Ornament is inappropriate to the pioneer. Yet excess (as nostalgia and memento) is integral to the (New Zealand) pioneering spirit. "[N]othing [is] original or new in this building - everything comes from somewhere else."[33]
The floor ... slopes as it is the roof of the original bach ... the angled windows ... are from another part of the old house and were originally designed to be vertical ... The window seat comes from another house on the same site ... [and] the pipe handrails [which] were despised when the bach was a house ... are now re-used (fig 10).[34]
These 'things' act as souvenirs and mementos, to displace the civilised. They are signifiers of absence.[35] Thus ornament is validated in terms of absence, realising that
Others have lived here and reminders of them are built into the colours, textures and decoration. Of course only the owner knows of these references.[36]
Known only by the 'owner/builder,'[37] the bach is constructed within an intimate discourse of nostalgia. Disguised by the generic prescription of the bach, as constructed of "everything [which] comes from somewhere else," the nostalgic can exist unknown.[38] The ornamental condition is ambiguous. It exists as an accessory whose signification is subject to shifts in its construction. The bach is constructed of materials which are able to be mistaken and misread as both and neither pragmatic and nostalgic, useless for any other architecture because they mean it belongs somewhere else.
The ideology of the bach also operates within a discourse of nostalgia.[39] It is an eternal re-enactment and desire for the colonial condition. As an escape to paradise, the construction of the bach echoes nineteenth century perceptions of New Zealand as God's own country,[40] as nostalgia for the virgin paradise Eden. The bach then manifests leaving a home which is not paradise. The journey from the villa to the bach re-enacts the voyage from England to New Zealand, to paradise, to a colonial frontier.[41] It is a retreat from civilisation to what Thompson describes as "a more primitive existence ... the protagonists must travel away from their normal homes and habits to rediscover nature and themselves at the bach."[42]
The bach then, as a device which enables one "to rediscover nature and themselves," is intrinsic to a process of self identity and perpetrates New Zealand's reliance on constructions of nature as essential to its identification (fig 11).[43]
Constructed on the sea edge, facing the sea, the bach looks both away from New Zealand and at a nature which constructs New Zealand's identity. Yet Austin's addition is to a house from which the seaview has been obstructed. To reclaim the bach, the effaced view must be restored. Pushing up through the roof of the house, the bach recaptures glimpses of the sea/land frontier (fig 7).
Manifest between the frontiers of colonisation and the wilderness, the bach locates itself between culture and nature assuming both a nature and a culture - a nature in need of or able to be colonised and a culture from which one desires to escape. Yet in New Zealand, the nature/culture opposition is distorted and displaced by both the architecturalising of the bach and a Maori culture which endlessly negotiates its site as between European oppositional constructions of nature and culture.[44] Extremes of nature and culture are simultaneously manifest via a colonisation which establishes the pioneering hut as nostalgically reconstituted as the bach. Not unlike Hindley's abject occupation as accessory (fig 1) (both male and female, criminal and innocent), the bach simultaneously constructs the colonising moment and flees from it.[45]
The bach describes a fear of domesticity, the manifestation of the civilisation of which it is and from which it pretends to escape, the "domestic drudgery"[46] which turns Hindley into a criminal. It constructs the domestic as opposing the freedom embodied in the masculated condition of the pioneer. As a site of masculinity (or the definition of a New Zealand European masculinity), the bach asserts its linguistic and cultural origin as an abbreviated form of the word bachelor. The bachelor is an unmarried man, a man who, according to Thompson,
without the assumedly civilising influence of a wife ... [is] taken to be undomesticated and lacking in the necessary housekeeping and culinary skills required to live in a 'proper' manner, so 'to bach' or 'baching' referred to a rather basic level of living. Many men lived like this in the pioneering days when there were neither proper houses nor 'proper' women available to run such homes.[47]
This construction of the feminine as a civilising force appropriate to the domestic 'proper' (encoding the domestic within suburban regulatory bodies and social etiquette), encodes the bach as a domestic im-proper; an architecture which does not properly belong within the domestic. It is a site which defines masculinity, as inscribed within an awkward relationship to a domestic proper. It "signifies an escape from the constraints of the family, and typically ... lacks those items that make a house a home."[48] At odds with conventional notions of the domestic, the bach inscribes a domestic which is dependant on notions of masculinity, the ugly domestic of the bachelor existence. It is a masculinity which prescribes the domesticating role of the feminine as accessory.
Yet the bach is itself an accessory. Extra to the domestic, the bach is an architectural excess, a domestic accessory which denies domesticity. It is an escape from a symbolic and feminised domestic. It fetishises, and nostalgically constructs, a seepage into a desired, but feared, semiotic existence. But this access to the semiotic is controlled and limited. Access itself is sited within the symbolic. The bach is not a pioneering hut in an unknown, dangerous uncolonised land. It manifests domestic inconvenience, a condensed domestic economy, lacking space, water, comfort and walls (fig 12). Its awkwardness is planned and contrived - it is sited within a masculinity which has difficulty with conventional notions of domesticity.
The bach at Murray's Bay maintains the spatial indiscretions which characterise the "archetypal Kiwi bach." It defies notions of boundary. It disables the compartmentalisation of the domestic which allows it to be kept, tidied, feminised. Neglecting conventional notions of functional segregation, the living area spills into a kitchen (fig 6), the laundry lines a hallway corridor (fig 13), the fireplace (fig 14) frames a bedroom cupboard (fig 15).
The bach also sites a femininity which is deprived of censoring operations of the symbolic. It is depraved, horrific and sinister. It threatens domesticity, and the masculinity which redefines the domestic. The feminine this anti-house inscribes, denies a maternal which conventionally maintains and preserves the domestic intact. It denies the female role as protective, nourishing and affectionate - housing a woman (fig 1) whose "overriding fear of settling down into the domestic drudgery assumed by her older friends"[49] attracted her to "the psychopath Ian Brady"[50] and involved her "in the torture and murder of three children and ... [the] killing [of] two others."[51]
As the manifestation of the abject femininity which inhabits the bach, Hindley perpetrates a culturally enforced affinity to the maternal and the domestic, enticing a belief in an orthodoxy which one discovers as false, too late. She appears to be something she is not. Fearing "domestic drudgery," Hindley crosses the boundaries of propriety.[52] She ignores her societal constitution as a "protector of children" and commits "a man's crime," occupying the bach.[53]
Both authorising and fleeing from the symbolic culture of New Zealand architecture, the bach constructs itself as an accessory which is both intrinsic to and a distraction from a symbolic culture. Yet the accessory is difficult to control within the prescriptions of the symbolic. Hindley's literal imprisonment controls her unexpected nature as a woman and as one who entices and lures children to their deaths. Yet "all the specialists on whose consultations the parole Board relies for its decisions - psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors and priests - passed her long ago as fit to go out into the world."[54] It is something beyond symbolic logic and reason which retains her there. She forces others into a semiotic reasoning and existence; an existence which constructs the horror of Hindley's release and maintains her detention within the institution of the symbolic.
As accessories, both the bach and Hindley constantly invite misreadings. She is "a terrified resentful young girl ... clearly at odds with her devotion and determination never to betray Brady" and the "so many different variations of her crimes [which make] you wonder if this is the truth or simply the latest version?"[55] Likewise the New Zealand bach is manifest in contradictory constructions, and different versions of the latest truth (fig 16).
Myra's case comes up for review next year and, unlike her partner in crime - who believes he should remain behind bars for the rest of his life - she is keen to persuade the authorities it is safe to release her. It is rumoured she has already held secret talks with the Home Office about plans for her future, and her desire is to be rehabilitated in New Zealand [in a bach].[56]