In 1998 the novelist David Malouf celebrated Australians’ discovery of a style he called “loosely Mediterranean”, one he thought epitomised by people eating at pavement tables. But where they dined was only the beginning of it. Australians now ate dainty and stylish dishes, drank wine and dressed up or stripped off for display. They had come to accept their own bodies and were thoroughly at ease in enjoying themselves. Australia, he said, had become a place “where play seems natural, and pleasure a part of what living is for” – a contrast with what he saw as the more limited possibilities in the British and Irish Australia of his youth.
The 1980s was the critical decade in the emergence of this way of living, thinking and feeling and, as Malouf recognised, the country’s foodways were among the most vivid illustration of a new cosmopolitan sensibility. “Do not overload any meal with cream or butter,” the Melbourne chef Stephanie Alexander advised, as she went about her mission of dismantling notions of taste entrenched by almost 200 years of chops, stews and roasts. Alexander emphasised cooking with fresh and seasonal ingredients, a larger number of small courses rather than the piling up of large portions, and the idea of a meal as a “ceremony” that had “a beginning, a middle and an end”.
As Malouf had suggested, restaurant dining had become one easily recognisable mark of the new refinement, a turning of the back on the world of beer, pies and blue singlets. Victorians could from 1987 even buy alcohol in cafés and restaurants without ordering a meal as well; such a community clearly had the world at its feet. The cosmopolitan citizen could tell her Shiraz from her Cabernet Sauvignon and knew how to pronounce both focaccia and roulade. Salad, meanwhile, was no longer shorthand for iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes and grated carrot. Alfalfa, chives, snow peas and mustard cress now graced the bowl, which might also include warm duck or lobster.
“Eating Italian” meant something more exotic than spaghetti bolognese, while with the appearance of Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai and high-quality Chinese restaurants, chicken chow mein ceased to be the Asian culinary frontier. These changes were the result of a restaurant revolution that climaxed in an increasingly sophisticated national culture of fine dining. The nouvelle cuisine was taken up in Australia but in the hands of local mimics it became synonymous with pretentious presentation, stingy portions and high prices. Yet it also “taught a lighter, fresher style of cooking” and innovative restaurateurs took up the cause and adapted it to local conditions.
The new cosmopolitanism also influenced what Australians were doing at home. They were embracing new and not-so-new technologies such as the microwave, the electric knife and the sandwich-maker. In many households, the venerable Sunbeam Mixmaster, possibly still wearing a floral cover, was forced to surrender to the food processor as pride of the kitchen bench. Chicken, once for a special occasion, was becoming a regular dish, regarded as healthier than red meat. Fruit juice was embraced as “healthy”. Pasta, once ignored as a suspect foreign dish, was becoming a staple and an expression of unpretentious cosmopolitanism. And the reverberations of the salad revolution were also to be felt in the home.
Another ambiguous measure of the new cosmopolitanism was the change in Australians’ drinking habits. The development of the wine industry had long been treated as a mark of civilisational sophistication, a habit that continued into the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1987, per capita consumption increased from 17.3 litres to 21.3 litres, while there was a spectacular growth of exports from 1986, stimulated by the low dollar – they tripled in volume between 1986 and 1988. On the eastern seaboard of the United States, the arrival of good-quality bottled wine presented a new and unfamiliar image of a country known mainly through the recent success of Crocodile Dundee; Walkabout Creek seemed an unlikely place to find a nice glass of chardonnay. In Australia, cheap cask wine accounted for almost two-thirds of table wine sold, and white wine was four times as popular as red, but tastes were becoming drier as Chardonnay came to replace Riesling as the most favoured drop. Wine cooler – a mixture of wine and fruit juice – enjoyed popularity especially among young women for whom it was a sweet, cheap road to oblivion. Boutique or pub-brewed beers provided a means of combining cosmopolitan sophistication, contempt for Alan Bond and John Elliott, and the love of drink still most commonly associated with the old Australia.
The cosmopolitan identity of the inner city needed a bête noire, and in Sydney, a city with well-differentiated regions of affluence and poverty, this position was occupied by “westies – who are dags because they wear jeans on the beach and always bring an esky”. The term “bogan”, emerging in the mid-1980s, lacked a specific regional flavour, but it too provided a way to talk about class differences as a matter of cultural style rather than material deprivation – in a society that still nurtured the idea that anyone prepared to “have a go” would do nicely. Without cosmopolitanism, there could have been no bogan or westie, for these identities took their meaning from their relationship with one another. To be cosmopolitan was to hold a licence for commentary on the taste of those seen to lack cultural savoir faire. Yet popular culture continued to celebrate lifestyles and identities that maintained some distance from the new cosmopolitanism. Two of the most spectacularly successful Australian cultural products of the era drew on older identities supposedly being swept away by the advent of urbanity.
When a new television soap opera Neighbours began its career in 1985, TV Week declared it “our own Coronation Street”, in a reference to the long-running British soap. Neighbours, however, was from the outset quite different, being filmed not in a proletarian street but the middle-class Melbourne suburb of Vermont, the fictional Ramsay Street, Erinsborough. The new cosmopolitans who hung around hip precincts such as Brunswick Street in Melbourne and Oxford Street in Sydney might have thought of suburbia as daggy, but Neighbours was a quiet celebration of the Australian suburb at a time when it remained the setting for most people’s lives. Yet Ramsay Street was also a long way from most Australians’ experiences of suburban life, having more in common with a village. Erinsborough was not a dormitory suburb in which the tired commuter sought refuge after a busy day in the office, but an intimate community where people lived, loved and (occasionally) laboured without seeming to need very much that the rest of the world had to offer. Suburbia, as depicted in Neighbours, was a place of community, social drama and, above all, nice-looking young people with tanned skin and perfect teeth.
Neighbours presented an image of Australia somewhat out of time. It was white, even Anglo, in an era when most Australian governments promoted the virtues of a multicultural citizenry. A British-based Aboriginal poet and filmmaker, Rikki Shields, argued that the introduction of an Aboriginal character into the show would do much to advance the cause of his people “because then everyone could see that we are Australian too”. Yet “it is quite unthinkable that the ravaged countenance of an Australian black could suddenly pop up on Neighbours”, judged Germaine Greer, possibly indulging in a bit of stereotyping of her own. “If a gang of Aborigines were to camp on one of those manicured lawns, and pass around the flagon, the good neighbourliness would evaporate long before anyone actually relieved himself in the shrubbery.” Neighbours certainly projected a nostalgic view of Australia, one largely unaffected by the migrations of the 1940s to 1960s, let alone those from Asia since the 1970s. “How many wogs are there in Neighbours?” asked the actor Arky Michael: the answer was very few.
Neighbours had only one rival as “showbiz surprise of the decade”. The global success of the film Crocodile Dundee astonished critics, if not the supremely confident duo of Paul Hogan and John Cornell responsible for unleashing it on the world. In Australia, it surpassed the American film ET as the largest grossing film on record; in the United States, where Hogan had appeared in several cities as the face of Australian tourism promising “to slip an extra shrimp on the barbie”, it became the second-highest grossing film of 1986 behind Top Gun, as well as the most commercially successful foreign film of all time.
With a budget of $8.8m – high for an Australian film, much of it put up by Hogan and Cornell themselves – after just a few weeks in American cinemas it had already earned $114.3m. Audiences loved the simple story of a legendary crocodile hunter from the Australian outback who meets a visiting American journalist, Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski), when she visits Walkabout Creek in pursuit of a story. After a few days in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory, where Mick – among other things – saves Sue from the clutches of a hungry crocodile, the story moves to New York. Much of the humour then turns on Dundee – a noble savage at once wise and innocent – being dropped into the urban jungle, where his adventures include trying to work out the purpose of the bidet in his plush hotel. In the show’s most famous scene, Mick and Sue are threatened with a knife by a hoodlum who wants Mick’s wallet. “That’s not a knife,” proclaims a relaxed and laughing Mick, pulling out a huge concealed blade of his own. “That’s a knife.”
It was easy to see why Americans liked it: their country’s problems, it seemed, might yet be solved by an antipodean Davy Crockett with a big knife. The hero from the Australian outback had a homely solution to every problem raised by an overgrown city and an over-civilised society. Thugs, pimps, petty thieves, cocaine addicts, transvestites, pretentious eastern intellectuals: Mick takes them all on, with knife, punch, grope, avuncular demonstration or tin can aimed unerringly at a bag-snatcher’s head. No one is immune to his charm, while he seems to enjoy the quirks he discovers among the New York natives.
Robert Hughes, the Australian expatriate art critic, concluded that “the reason Americans like such a flagrant example of Australian kitsch is the same reason Australians like it: Americans feel nostalgia for the vanished frontier which they think survives in Australia, but of course it’s disappeared there, too”. Some criticised the film for its outdated stereotypes, as well as for its conservative – or at least complacent – politics. But what these critics missed was the way the figure of Mick Dundee, for all his supposedly primitive ways, embodied a cosmopolitan present.
Crocodile Dundee is often compared with an earlier Australian “fish out of water” comedy, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, where the humour depends so largely on Barry’s antipodean gaucheries in the mother country. But Mick was a very different kind of figure from Barry: rural rather than urban; more assured in dealing with women, the bourgeois and the educated; innocent, like Barry, but combining with it the cleverness of the trickster. Above all, Mick had a touch of class; he was able to hold his own in polite company, and life was for him something more than the quest for the next Foster’s. As Hogan himself explained: “Crocodile Dundee never loses his dignity. Even if he is naive and uneducated, he doesn’t make a melon of himself all the time. He’s got some grace.”
The international success of Australian film and television might have reassured many Australians at a time when Paul Keating was warning of their possible fate as citizens of a banana republic. Yet the essentially familiar, sunny and optimistic tone of Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee was seemingly belied by a strange and unexpected outbreak of national stroppiness.
The Australia Card strikes a raw nerve
The angriest such explosion occurred in September 1987 and few if any members of the political class saw it coming. Some of the usual suspects were there, stirring the pot as before: Peter Garrett, the troublemaker of 1984; former Treasury secretary John Stone, now a National party senator for Queensland; Alan Jones, Rugby Union coach, media personality and Liberal party identity; Ben Lexcen, America’s Cup hero-genius, recently a supporter of Joh for Canberra; even Norm Gallagher, the burly survivor of the class war and Pentridge Prison.
Right and left seemed to have found common cause in opposition to the Australia Card. The idea of a compulsory identity card had emerged from the tax summit of 1985, a new weapon in the fight against tax and welfare fraud. Its passage since had been troubled, sufficiently so to have alerted a less preoccupied government that it needed to be handled with special care. In 1986 a joint select committee came out against the proposal, and the majority included one government member, John Saunderson, who argued that a system of tax file numbers would be sufficient. Still, the government persisted, despite the Senate’s defeating the Australian Card Bill on two occasions. The second of these was used as the trigger for the double dissolution election of 1987, although the Australia Card barely figured in the campaign.
This reticence would cause the government a major problem, for Hawke claimed a mandate to proceed with the bill, which he said would be considered by only the second ever joint sitting of the parliament. Opinion polling up to this point had been solidly in favour of an identity card, with at least two out of three voters supportive. Yet during September 1987, rallies, meetings and sackloads of mail indicated a major revolt. A Perth protest on 23 September attracted between 20,000 and 40,000 people, and brought together state Liberal party politicians and builders’ labourers carrying the Eureka Flag, mothers pushing strollers and goosestepping youths dressed in Nazi-style uniforms, who displayed pictures of Bob Hawke wearing a Hitler moustache. The rally ended with an emotional rendition of “Advance Australia Fair”: “the identity card has clearly struck a raw nerve”, concluded the West Australian. It had.
On 19 September, the Australian reported that since the beginning of the month it had received over 800 letters on the subject, with the proportion of 17-to-one against. Polling by this time showed a clear majority wanted the Australia Card to go away. Some proponents of the card compared the noisy clamour to the hostility the government had faced over its fringe benefits and capital gains taxes, but it is hard to believe that too many really believed this. Such taxes affected the few rather than the many and did not touch on questions of identity, rights and tradition.
In the Australia Card revolt, citizens protested against “this drastic change to our way of life”, about a proposal “totalitarian in concept”, about an instrument for making the state “our master, rather than our servant”. In an age when the microchip was both increasingly ubiquitous yet still little understood, they worried over the dangers to their privacy from prying officials and skilful hackers. People also drew on the past to make sense of what their government was trying to do to them. One letter-writer in the Australian described the Australia Card as “the greatest danger to our freedom ... since the Japanese bombed Darwin” while Geoffrey Blainey reminded his readers that the licences to which the Eureka rebels had objected were the identity cards of their time.
Most of all, people objected to being reduced to a bit of green and gold plastic and a number. The terminology of the formidable 130-page bill itself – which referred to people as “Card-subjects” – invited the ridicule and contempt that rained down on it. But the bill itself was almost impossible to obtain by September 1987; such was the demand for copies that the government printer had run out. If it had been more widely circulated, it is unlikely to have assuaged public concern with its rich panoply of offences carrying large fines and prison sentences. Despite many suggestions to the contrary in national mythology, Australians usually respect lawful authority, but there are hints that civil disobedience would have resulted if the government had persisted. The scheme required the whole population to report for photographing. Birth certificates would need to be acquired from state governments, two of which – Queensland and Tasmania – announced that they would refuse to cooperate. Media outlets previously supportive or indifferent turned against the government in its hour of need. Hawke’s problem was that having used the Australia Card as a pretext for an early election, he could not easily back away; and having for years proclaimed the card as essential in the fight against fraud – the government claimed it would save a billion dollars – he could not now drop it as unnecessary. But a way out emerged from an unlikely quarter.
Ewart Smith was a retired lawyer and senior public servant with a libertarian streak, who had over time come to see the Australia Card as a “menace to our way of life”. Woken in his Canberra home early on 22 September by the warbling of magpies, he re-read the bill and noticed that it contained a line which required a regulation to be passed to bring the card into operation, even after approval by a joint sitting of the parliament. This was an Achilles heel, since a regulation could be disallowed by either house and the government lacked a Senate majority. After Smith announced his discovery, the bill’s opponents in the Senate, the Australian Democrats and the Coalition parties, made it clear that they were prepared to use their numbers to prevent the bill from operating. At this point, the government abandoned the bill to great rejoicing throughout the land, with Smith an unlikely St George to the Australia Card dragon. But the Australia Card affair had exposed a raw nerve of suspicion of the state, an insistence that the virtues of people and nation were cultivated and maintained despite, rather than because of, the qualities and conduct of the political class.
- This is an edited extract from The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia by Frank Bongiorno, published by Black Inc. On sale now.
