The most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do.
Ten things this weekend (on the evolution of Australian exceptionalism) - Pt. I
Trent Parke - Chinatown, Sydney, 2005
Note: This week’s newsletter will come in two parts. This is part one.
One of the curious threads in Australian life is our long history of cultural cringe.
“The basis of the Australian ugliness, is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle - as she estimates the middle - of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.”
- The Australian Ugliness, Robin Boyd
And yet, amidst that ‘Australian ugliness’, are so many counters to the theory.
Glenn Murcutt’s Marie Short Farmhouse
Glenn Murcutt’s Fredericks / White House
Glenn Murcutt’s Magney House - Also now available on Airbnb!
Jesse Bennett’s Planchonella House
Archier’s Sawmill House
When Australian author Patrick White was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973, the press release said that his writing had “introduced a new continent into literature.” As if we’d only ever had one author to that point.
I have just started ‘The Cockatoos’ a collection of White’s short-stories. The writing is otherworldly.
…she gave the laugh she kept for those whose faults she had to accept…
…he felt what could have been a tremor of heaven’s own perverse love…
...she felt that warm surge of desire which only material things can provoke…
Trent Parke - Cockatoo
In Valerie Desmond’s 1911 book The Awful Australian, she wrote:
“In conclusion, it is only necessary to point out that so objectionable is the Australian accent that theatrical managers resolutely refuse to employ Australian-born actors and actresses. Though a few of these are possessed of talent—or what passes for talent in Australia—the managers prefer to import English artists of inferior merit, solely because they possess the essential qualifications that Australians lack—the ability to speak the English language.”
Trent Parke - ‘Bathurst Races, 2004’
It wasn’t until the 1980s that we got comfortable with Australian accents in our own TV advertising.
1. The history of that time in advertising is wonderfully documented in ‘How Australia Got Its Mojo’ which tells the story of the ad agency Mojo, and the role they played at a pivotal cultural moment.
Most Australians will know every single one of Mojo’s ads. But most people won’t know they all originated from the same Sydney ad agency during a ten year flourish of creative commercialism.
3. ‘I Still Call Australia Home’
3. And, most famously, 'Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie'.
I lived seven years in America and, conservatively, 1,000 different people would have quoted back to me some version of “shrimp on the barbie” upon first meeting me.
I’d long wondered why an Australian ad mentioned a ‘shrimp’ when Australians never use that word. But of course, the ad wasn’t for me, it was for Americans, for whom shrimp is the word.
Remarkably, the ‘Shrimp On The Barbie’ campaign took Australia from 78th to 7th on the list of the most visited countries by Americans. We didn’t have enough hotels in Sydney to house the influx of new visitors.
In ‘The Lucky Country’, Donald Horne wrote:
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”
Of course, this has not always been true.
4. In 1983, Australia won the America’s Cup for the first time. The pursuit of that America’s Cup win is superbly documented in the essay Australia 2.0.
“The old good-enough Australia, the Australia sheltered behind traditions of selfdeprecation, provincial self-doubt and sentimentally cherished defeats, has to go. Or it does if you’re serious about beating the Americans for the first time in 132 years.”
Following the win, The Australian Financial Review (AFR) wrote that Alan Bond had shown Australia was “a rough, egalitarian, success oriented society”, not a “lazy, isolated, self-indulgent society of parasites”.
5. And who better to embody that rough, egalitarian, success oriented society than our Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who locked in the winning celebration by telling the entire nation: “Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum.”
The America’s Cup win was symbolic of a shift in Australian culture, and an opening up to the rest of the world.
Wherever you looked we were punching above our weight, which is always one of our favourite things to do.
Around the same time we were winning the America’s Cup, we floated the dollar, introduced compulsory superannuation, deregulated the financial system, brought competition in for Australian banks, reduced tariffs, reformed industrial relations, privatised Qantas, and reintroduced Medicare. This set of reforms set the platform for the unbroken economic growth we’ve experienced for the past 29 years.
I think if there’s one legacy, it’s that we were able to legitimise success in this country, without people knocking you for it.
This was the beginning of the great Australian enlarging.
John Olsen, Sydney Sun
To Be Continued…