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.