From 460 metres above Sydney, the older suburbs remain a sort of still life and lawn, even though many are alive with the sound of medium-rise development.

But if McMansion​ is the future, then the view from the Google plane looking down on Kellyville and a host of other outlier suburbs displays shrivelled backyards, front yards occupied by double-door garages and nature strips reduced to a sort of Brazilian.

"Lawn in 2015 means less lawn," says David Blakey, 57, who started a greens keeper apprenticeship in 1975.

Over a lifetime of extraordinary intimacy with grass, he watched the Australian lawn shape the national landscape as it spread through the suburbs like bushfire only to wither under the combined weight of water shortages, rising costs, the rise of native vegetation, the full-frontal attack of conservationists, lifestyle and property fashion changes that saw video games replace backyard cricket and front yard footy, and swimming pools, cars, barbecues, patios and trees encroach on the proud suburban green sward.

"That's not to say the Australian lawn has passed its use-by date," he says.

"People still love their bit of manicured grass but a suburban lawn requires a lot more work than it did in 1975.

"Lawns are a bit like bloke's haircuts – in 1975 we wore it long and unkempt, cut it occasionally, left it pretty untouched unless you were going for a job. Now men get styled, shaved, beard trims, moustaches waxed. And the same with the lawns, now they have to be trimmed, cosseted, fiddled with, teased and styled and all every few days."

Blakey says the plethora of grass varieties now available is further proof that the Australian lawn will not die.

Interestingly, Blakey says the biggest change in a lifetime of tending bowling greens, cricket pitches, golf greens, cutting grass and selling mowers, has been the migration of grass varieties into Sydney of species once confined to the northern NSW of his youth.

"I'm not going on about global warming or anything, but I just say the varieties were all British when I was young but temperatures have gone up by a couple of degrees and they can't take the heat so all these grasses have come down south into Sydney," he says.

"They're hardier and can stand up to the sun and heat waves; they still need water but not as much."

The suburban lawn is Australia's most irrigated crop.

The Murray Darling system, the Snowy River, desalination, mine run-off, the cotton industry and a host of other water issues have been loudly argued over since Federation.

Meanwhile the suburban lawn has been quietly sucking the life water out of the country.

Not only has there been barely a whimper but lawn cleverly marketed itself as a necessary symbol of civic virtue.

Lawn exists in suburbia to be in the eye of the beholder but it is harvested by water companies, producers of lawnmowers, fertilisers, potting soil and purveyors of roll-out grass, lawnmowing franchises and franchisees, fuel merchants and others who have got together to establish a business that, according to historian Peter Macinnis​, could put the cost of the national lawn somewhere around the $10 billion mark.

Macinnis​, whose 2009 book The Lawn: A Social History, is a valuable contribution to Australian agricultural literature, says figures on lawn care are rubbery but the herd of mowers – about 30 models sell 40,000 units each year – competing for market share are a kind of proof that the lawn is hard to kill despite the efforts of climate change, drought and water restrictions.

Since Federation, Australia has been a big battlefield in the war between grass and lawn.

One is anarchic, the other servile. One is nature, the other man-made.

Lawn's roots were in Europe. It took off in Europe some time after the industrial revolution gave the newly rich a hankering to mimic regal trappings. An early form of conspicuous consumption, Europe lawns, particularly in France and England, displayed a commitment to an aesthetic far removed from fodder for beasts. Scotland, meanwhile, having destroyed the trees and being left with a lot of turf, came up with two games, golf and bowls, that could be played grass. By the Victorian era, however, the mower had been invented, so too had a number of sports and games – tennis, croquet, football –that demanded tamed grass. Suddenly the lawn began to speak to the aspirations and interests of the rising urban working and middle classes.

The lawn arrived in Australia in the late 19th century about the time acclimatisation societies were attempting to introduce exotic animals. It was, says historian Peter Macinnis​, all about taming the wild unknown.

"Australians in the late 19th century tended to call England 'Home'. The lawn was simply another adopted British manner, a way of taking 'Home' home," Macinnis says. "It was a way turning the wilderness into profit, a way of saying we don't like what God did in six days so we'll change it to suit our vision of ourselves."

In a newly egalitarian nation, the lawn was not everybody's cup of tea but it put down deep roots early. For a while after Federation – between 1908 and 1912 – a lawn even made it to the nation's coat of arms. That "Oh to be in England" feeling lingered long: Perhaps under the impression it was some sort of antipodean Oxbridge​, the University of Sydney was still telling undergraduates to keep off the lawn in the Quadrangle as late as 1962: it was the exclusive preserve of graduates but five years later undergraduates, who had taken to another form of grass, liberated the Quad lawn for following generations of students.

Outside the cloisters of academe, it was during World War I that the Australian lawn spread across the land.

Nearly 60,000 Diggers had their own lawns in Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, Belgium, and France but those who came home stayed in the cities, bought quarter-acre blocks and planted grass and waxed and waned as the 1920s, the Depression and World War II came and went.

Then, in 1952, Mervyn Victor Richardson produced his first Victa lawnmower in Concord and, in the deathless words of a Sydney advertising copywriter, grass turned into lawn in the comforting conformity of suburbs across Australia.

When the post-war migrants arrived, some carried in their own idea of lawn: Italians tiled Leichardt front gardens, Greeks painted concreted yards green and now Auburn's controversial deputy mayor, second-generation Salim​ Mehajer​ has put Astroturf out front of his Francis Street, Lidcombe, wedding nest.

The sense of structured sense of calm and order that came with suburbia also neatly deposited domesticity in confined spaces: women had kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms; the children had a yard tamed for child's play and pets by the men with mowers.

"The neighbourly observation, 'you're grass is looking a bit long, mate' was a also taunt that undermined masculinity in the suburban fastness," Macinnis​ says.

A customer at the John Deere​ franchise in the NSW mid-north town of Macksville, echoed a similar take: "Many ride-ons are sex substitutes for baby boomers retiring up here on a few acres."

While Blakey sees lawn's future as green, small and pimped. Macinnis​ believes cost and global warming – drought in California saw the actor Tom Selleck fined for illegally watering – will see xerophytic plants replace grass. "Brown is the new green," Macinnis​ says.