Creature of circumstance: Australia's pavilion at Expo '70 and changing international relations

Subverting the expectation that expo pavilions incorporate recognizable markers of national identity, the Australian pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition, Osaka, was conceived around a set of direct and oblique references to Japanese culture. The exposition’s Japanese audience was the target of architect James Maccormick’s ‘East-West’ approach to design, which sought to enhance Japanese opinions of Australia and Australians. Working from briefing papers prepared by the Department of External Affairs, Maccormick used references to Japanese culture to address perceived Japanese perceptions of Australians as ‘coarse’ and ‘uncultured’. The pavilion’s ambitious engineering tackled the Japanese view of Australia as under-industrialized. These themes coalesced in the design of the pavilion’s canopy roof. Shaped from Australian steel as a stylized lotus and suspended from a giant cantilever arm, its hovering form appealed to purported Japanese interest in mastery over nature while showing what Australia could do with its natural resources. Drawing on archival research and secondary sources, the paper argues that the design of the Osaka pavilion bypassed the usual renderings of Australian national identity based in rural enterprise and nature imagery to demonstrate a new, pragmatic approach to national representation open to recurrent reconstruction according to changing contexts and circumstances. In referencing Japanese culture, the pavilion’s design not only highlights Japan’s growing economic and strategic importance to Australia but marks an important change in Australia’s outlook on its inter-societal relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Despite the significance of these shifts neither the pavilion design nor Australia’s participation in Osaka is discussed in the principal accounts of relations between Australia and Japan in the twentieth century.