"Culture up to our Arseholes": Projecting Post-Imperial Australia

Abstract

In December 1967, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt announced his Government's intention to establish an ambitious new Council for funding the visual and performing Arts in Australia. Holt had formed the view that Australian culture was fundamentally deficient— that urgent measures (and money) were needed to project a more distinctive, mature, and culturally sophisticated Australian image at home and abroad. His ambition was taken up by his successor, John Gorton, who set up the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968 and its stablemate, the Australian Film Development Corporation. This essay considers the rationale behind the new government schemes to promote national culture, and argues that these processes need to be understood in terms of the demise of British emblems of civic identity and belonging in the 1960s. It examines the dilemmas faced by those charged with the task of projecting a distinctive new face of Australian culture for a post‐imperial age. While there was a broad consensus about the need for a “new nationalism” in cultural policy, there was little agreement as to what that policy should entail. The idea of “Australian content” proved notoriously difficult to pin down, and aroused scepticism as to whether Australia could ever live up to the aesthetic standards of “real nationhood”—a scepticism that was most vividly conveyed by Barry McKenzie's typically crass observation that “back in Oz now we've got culture up to our arseholes”.

Multi‐level order, friction and contradiction: the evolution of Australian film industry policy

“…The nationalistic objective of film policy also reflected a desire for Australians to develop a sense of national identity through film and to project that image abroad for diplomatic and trade purposes (Ward 2005). As Ward (2005, p. 57) explains, political support for an Australian film and television industry was not based on aesthetic notions of art as culture, but on the importance of film and television to the construction of national identity in a post-colonial context.…”

Beyond empire: Australian cinematic identity in the twenty-first century

“…These films reflected, and reflected upon, the state of the nation, especially regarding sexual mores and the relation with England and the British Empire. The ocker films portray a cheerfully vulgar Australia, often mocking the pretentious desire to mimic 'civilized' Europe (Ward 2005b). In essence, they reflect a confident and sexually liberated nation, ready to break free from the cultural dependence from England, and willing to laugh at itself and to laugh at others, especially at 'the Poms'.…”

Perth punk and the construction of urbanity in a suburban city

“…Having benefited from the Whitlam federal Labor government's investment in Australian cultural production (Carroll 2011, p. 124), the country began to see more of its own cinema, television and popular music represented alongside imported culture (Arrow 2009). Subsequently, the nation viewed itself as capable of independence from the cultural influence of both British colonisation (Ward 2005), and of postwar US cultural imperialism. Nonetheless, Australian popular culture was still steeped in a cultural cringe, and indeed the first wave of Australian punk can be viewed as an extension of such a cringe – as well as an attempt to facilitate what might be thought of as a musical culture that offered an alternative to it.…”