Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > False Images Of Oz (in British advertising and culture)

(This started off as a reply to Olulabelle's post in the switchboard but it grew. It's quite long, so feel free to pick and choose bits to take up the argument. I see this thread as a broad discussion kept at headshop standard. There are some related threads here and here. )

I've often thought that in the UK we have a dangerous false image of Australia as a sort of paradise continent (I'll try and run through the signifiers, and would like you to reply to agree or disagree with the proposition or just generally give your thoughts. Having never been to Australia, I can't claim to know "the truth" about it, and the following is from a UK perspective having spoken to some Australian students and reading various internet pages).

The word Australia, in Britain, conjures up a scene showing jungle, mountains, and desert (powerful nature which is there for our viewing pleasure), kangaroos, crocodiles and spiders (bizarre primeval fauna, a biological monster show which is dangerous yet controlled) topped off with a load of happy, good looking white people in cork hats (the men) and bikinis (the women) sitting around a barbecue and drinking beers (they are descended from us, of course; but these people do not lead mundane lives of toil like us, they have conquered paradise, surviving all it's dangers, they have had their weak stripped away; physically, sexually and existentially they are become a kind of north-european ubermensch).

Hence we have this whole industry built around this shorthand for primacy- holiday flights to Oz, Foster's beer which is sold on the basis of it being Australian, clothing lines (e.g. Airwalk) that draw on the imagery of extreme sports and surfing and aim to make the brand synonymous with the assumed "lifestyle", and of course the TV programs Neighbours, Home and Away and Steve Irwin: Crocodile Hunter.

To get a handle on this, compare it to the received image, of say, Brazil- there are still jungles and snakes and spiders but they are dangerous and unhealthy, untamed; the people who live there are seen as either mad, over-emotional and dangerously sexual whilst being kitsch half-whites (the spanish), or dark-skinned and primitive and into "voodoo" and virgin sacrifices (the indigenous peoples, when they are seen at all).

Hence Brazil, or Brazillian-ness, is harder to use as a selling point than Australia. While to an extent Brazil as a place can be sold to the young and self-identified "adventurous" consumer of holidays as an "extreme experience", Brazil the place is only really good for providing shorthand "dangerous" environments for game shows or adventure serials and it's people will either be devious "false-westerners" who try to trick the hero (the Spanish), exotic and devilish one night stands of either sex (any number of adverts for latin-style alchoholic drinks), or nameless Tribal Warriors who get in the hero's way and who he will kill in the hundreds as he tries to get his hands on the secret artefact.

Moving back to Australia, what we don't appreciate, what is hidden and played down and what might well "break the spell", is firstly the genuine present of Australia, specifically the recent racism but more generally the unemployment, alchoholism, teenage pregnancy and in fact all of the other problems which affect northern Europe today (Home and Away is no more a realistic depiction of a country than The OC); and secondly, the atrocity-ridden history that lies behind Australia.

This includes the destruction of entire species of animals, some of them the last surviving of their lineages, wiped out in the space of a few decades. And which animals were wiped out? The ones which were actually dangerous, in any real sense, to humanity: yes, a crocodile or a spider might kill a human being, but it was the Thylacine's predation of sheep flocks that posed the real threat to (white) humanity's presence, and it was hounded down; to true extinction, at a conservative estimate, or to practical extinction at a liberal one.

This gives the lie to the image of the modern Australian hu(man) living in constant conflict with dangerous nature, and thus constantly proving his manhood, because the animals which are there now do not present a serious threat to him on anything more than the individual level. Even these have been killed away to the point where they are a curiosity, barely more than a hold-over from pre-human history. In a test of dominant animal species, most of Australia comes up flies, not Crocodiles (in much the same way that India comes up flies not Tigers, or England comes up flies not Wild Boar, Russia flies not Bears). A person in Birmingham, UK, is more likely to get ill from an insect-transmitted disease than a person in Australia is to be eaten by a Crocodile.

A similar fringe state is occupied by the easily anthropomorphised animals (the Kangaroo) or the quirky and "cute" (the Koala) that serve so well to sell products with (cuddly toys, Skippy, Roo & Kanga).

This past also, of course, includes the anihilation of Australia's indigenous peoples. Let's get a figure, here: 90% of the indigenous population was lost between 1788 and 1900. That's one in ten.

You may think it odd to mention this human loss of life after mentioning the environmental changes that the westerners brought, because, in the conventions of our writing, it suggests a lower status. I'm not trying to confer this status at all; I'm relying on you to have this reaction because it helps to realise exactly how the Aborigines were thought of by the Westerners: as less important than sheep.

The main point is that this past and the present to which it constantly contributes are nearly always absent from our images of Australia, and in the absence of genuine experience the false images take centre, and then total, stage. Why is this bad? I think we all know but I'd like to see someone else phrase it.