Australia in the 1980s

While on the subject of TV mini-series, there is an Australian classic that epitomises the 1980s. Does anybody remember Return to Eden (Ten, 1983)? It sort of broke the mould of the mini-series by having a contemporary setting.

A revenge tragedy saga with far-fetched storylines, Return to Eden was influenced by the lavish, melodramatic American soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty, using plot devices like nightmares, amnesia, plastic surgery, bitchiness, hysteria and rich people. The production design helped to give Return to Eden its high gloss glamour. Throw in some outback Australian imagery, some Indigenous characters (with few lines) and, with Australia regarded as flavour of the month in the US, you have an overseas hit.

It was told from a woman’s point of view through Stephanie’s voiceover. There was lots of gratuitous male flesh. Rebecca Gilling (as Stephanie) is savaged by a crocodile, then has plastic surgery and returns to avenge her evil lover (James Reyne as a kind of yuppie tennis pro) with nobody recognising her even though she looks the same.

Produced by Hanna Barbera-McElroy and McElroy, Return to Eden was a critical flop but one of the most successful mini-series of the 1980s. It became a 22-part series in 1986.

We are going to look at television culture in our 1980s exhibition and it strikes me that there is something unique about Australian TV drama in the 1980s. Towards the end of the 1970s a new narrative genre emerged — the Australian historical mini-series. The convict drama Against the Wind (Seven, 1978) was one of the first of these produced for commercial television.

Australians love to watch locally made drama but it is expensive to make. It has always been cheaper to import American programs. However the introduction of a tax concession (known as 10BA) for film and television productions encouraged investment in telemovies and mini-series. It allowed independent producers like Kennedy Miller and Crawfords to make high-budget mini-series, giving commercial networks access to prestige product for a fraction of its actual cost.

The historical mini-series became the boom TV genre of the 1980s. It brought national myths to the small screen, with quality, nation-defining drama, often about colonial settlement, the outback or war — essential aspects of Australian identity. Most of the obvious Australian historical legends, stories and themes were dramatised.

The genre is ideally suited for the screen adaptation from literary sources (think of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange), although many were written specifically for television. Some were fictionalised versions of true stories.

A preferred, but not necessary, ingredient was Sigrid Thornton. In Crawford’s 1983 adaptation of Nancy Cato’s novel All the Rivers Run, Sigrid became the captain of her own riverboat, the Philadelphia. All the Rivers Run had all the typical qualities of a mini-series – an historical, rural setting, action, romance and a heroine overcoming adversity to fulfil her destiny.

I liked John Jarratt as Ned Kelly in The Last Outlaw (1980). Nothing like his scary character in Wolf Creek!

Now let’s see, there was Sara Dane (remember the wonderful Juliet Jordan?), Waterfront (with Jack Thompson), My Brother Tom, The Cowra Breakout, Vietnam (with a young Nicole Kidman), ANZACS (starring Paul Hogan), Nancy Wake, A Fortunate Life, Water Under the Bridge, The Dismissal …and on it goes.

Can you remember any other 1980s Australian historical mini-series? What were their good and bad points?

As the 10BA tax concessions were progressively reduced, the historical mini-series was displaced in the late 1980s, exacerbated by a collapse that saw the Seven and Ten networks in receivership and Nine in great debt. Networks found that ongoing drama series were cheaper to make than lavish mini-series. Historical drama almost vanished from Australian television as program makers sought new inspiration for telling contemporary stories. Mini-series have returned only occasionally to our screens.

Hi, I’m an assistant curator working on the 1980s exhibition, and I’ve been asked to guest-blog about heavy metal in the 1980s.

British hard rock groups of the 1970s such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were popular in Australia well into the 1980s. However, it was really, in the early 1980s, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) bands, as the movement was known in the music press, which started the culture of headbangers or metalheads in the suburbs of Australian towns and cities. Bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard and Motorhead spoke to teenagers, primarily male, and primarily European, in a language that was distinct from, and in opposition to the benign pop music of the time. The local band scene was slower to react to what was happening in the UK though. Sydney bands like Surrender and Cobra were still playing Deep Purple, Rainbow and Jimi Hendrix covers and sticking to the 70s hard rock formula.

In the early to mid 1980s, American metal bands were becoming hugely popular: Van Halen, Motley Crue, Ratt, Dokken, and WASP offered a more polished, though still heavily guitar driven sound. These bands also put emphasis on stage show and image – drawing on the earlier 1970s glam image, but cutting it with the leather and studs of bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. These American bands showcased innovative and skilful guitar playing, and this inspired local headbangers to practice what chops they had non-stop. Although these bands had limited exposure here in Australia, the Sydney metal scene responded with bands like Shy Thunder, Lightning Rock, Roxx, Assassin, Lotus, and White Widow – all aspiring to be the Australian Van Halen or Ratt. These bands played in Sydney pubs regularly and gathered a following. The metal scene was born.

In America, the flashiness of Motley Crue and Ratt (who had gotten progressively glammier) wore thin on fans. Enter San Francisco band Metallica. The band’s 1984 debut album Kill ‘em All was raw, honest and addictive to metalheads. Other bands quickly followed: Anthrax from New York, Megadeth from LA, and Slayer (much heavier and rawer than the others) all started to garner massive followings.

In Sydney, the only place to obtain heavy music not on major labels was Utopia Imports in Martin Place. The tiny shop was always full of headbangers, some of whom would travel hours to get there. The shop was a micro-scene itself. The latest metal from OS would be playing through the stereo, and the guys who worked there were aficionados of all things metal. Metallica, et al, were discovered there by countless ’bangers.

The Sydney scene too was bored of would-be guitar heroes and men in tights. In the Western suburbs – Blacktown, Parramatta, guys started jamming much heavier, less pretentious stuff. Slaughter Lord, Death Mission, Massive Appendage all started gigging at the same places Roxx, Lightning Rock, and Lotus, et al had been playing, and bringing crowds that got drunker, looked heavier, and had a far more conspicuous good time than previous hard rock crowds had. Other bands joined the scene: Addictive, Detriment, and Mortal Sin – who went on to lead the scene, getting a major record deal with Polygram and scoring big supports (Metallica, Anthrax), and touring Europe with burgeoning thrash group Testament.

The scene revolved around several pubs and clubs: The St James Tavern in the city had metal every Thursday night, The Hills Inn at Seven Hills every Saturday night, The Coogee Bay had metal bands regularly, The Sutherland Inn was a regular, as was The Den at Penshurst and The Bexley Hotel; The Cobra Club at Parramatta had metal on Fridays, and other smaller pubs regularly had metal bands: The Lewisham Inn, The Vulcan Hotel, The Teacher’s Club in the city, The Lansdowne, The Hopetoun, The Mortdale Hotel, The Wagon Wheel at St Marys. Crowds and bands alike inevitably moved afterwards to someone’s house for a party. All headbanger group-houses were decorated with the trophies of such parties: tens, even hundreds of consumed bourbon and vodka bottles!

The metal scene was mortared together by a deep passion for heavy music and like-mindedness, but it ran on alcohol – the drug of choice. A close second was marijuana, and then speed. There were very rarely fights though. If there were they were over girlfriends – who were in limited supply in the scene. Self mutilation was something some headbangers practiced as a ritual at gigs: Some headbangers had to be carted off in ambulances several times when the glass-inflicted cuts on their arms and torso bled uncontrollably. Every weekend there were parties or a gig somewhere. No one cared how wasted you got. It was a badge of honour. No one cared how poor you were. Heavily worn and ripped clothes were preferred. There was camaraderie in ‘chucking in’ with your mates to buy a case of beer and a ‘stick’ of pot, and consuming the above while listening to Slayer. Band T-shirts, tight black jeans or faded blue jeans, white hi-tops, denim or leather jacket, and long hair was the uniform. Though the hair was an option, most ’bangers grew it as long as they could. Mundane society was to be laughed at. As were pop music, pop culture in general, politics, and the police. Sydney headbangers in the 1980s aligned themselves with the punk movement. There were a few bands that crossed the punk/metal divide: Death Mission, Mass Appeal, The Hard Ons. Headbangers saw themselves as anti-establishment, and as a definite sub-culture. The hair band trend that saw a resurgence in the US and subsequently in the Australian mainstream charts – bands like Bon Jovi, Europe, Poison and Whitesnake (post 1987) – brought metal out of the underground, but by and large these bands were ignored by the Sydney metal scene, or were at least laughed at. Headbangers still wanted harder and heavier bands. Mortal Sin, Addictive, Detriment, and Frozen Doberman – all ‘thrash’, street clothe image metal bands – were the biggest crowd drawers in Sydney during the hair band era. Death Metal took the metal scene into the 1990s, where it remains the predominant metal genre for the current scene. Glammier bands have seen a resurgence, though really purely for a nostalgic aesthetic. Mortal Sin have continued, in one form or another, through the 1990s to now.

To all you 1980s headbangers – the Powerhouse Museum would like to hear from you. Tell us about your experiences of gigs, parties, life as a ’banger in the 1980s in Australia. We’d also like to see any photographs you may have kept, or if you’ve kept any of those 80s metal T-shirts, old jeans, hi-tops or jackets, we’d like to know about them as well.

It is amazing how when I say to people that we are preparing an exhibition about the 1980s, one of the first things they mention is Commodore 64 computers. Surprisingly, the Powerhouse Museum does not have one it its collection. Does anybody have a Commodore 64 they would like to donate? With games? We’d like one with an interesting history of ownership and use. We are looking for a Commodore 64 on which we can run games in the exhibition as a working exhibit, rather than to be acquired in the collection. Can you help?

Well, it’s Friday afternoon blogging time again and I’m going to ramble. I’m sitting here pondering a conundrum — does nostalgia have anything to do with history? Or is it a product of the imagination?

What is nostalgia? A desire to return in thought or fact to an earlier time? The wistful longing for something in the past that is imagined in an idealised form? The bittersweet yearning for a time that is perceived as more perfect than today? The memory of past times purged of the bad bits?

A dictionary tells me that the word is made up of two Greek roots ( nostos ‘returning home’, and algos ‘pain’), to refer to ‘the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again’.

Nostalgia constructs a narrative of a utopian ideal. Each generation longs for the time of its youth and imagines it as a golden age. The negative aspects of those times are forgotten and the positives are sanctified and magnified. Consider the baby boomers’ nostalgia for the 1960s.

I am convinced that the 80s was a period of remarkable creativity that gave form to many positive aspects of the lives we lead today. But I’m not feeling nostalgic about it. Who is nostalgic for the 1980s? Those for whom it was a more innocent time, who were young and experiencing life’s richness for the first time? But not those of us who are trying to live down our own 80s, to atone for the bad things we did.

Some of the key collective memories of the decade are sensational ones that contrast with the gloom of the 70s, with its inflation, strikes and unemployment. I have discerned from people who were young and ‘in the know’ during the 80s certain mythologies of hedonism, transgression, excess, extravagance, decadence, promiscuity, glamour, narcissism, yuppiedom and underground designers. I have to confess that much of this seems superficial to me, as though people were living on the surface.

I wonder if nostalgia has more to do with the present than with the past. Could it be a critique of the inadequacy of the uncertain present? Is 80s nostalgia a retreat from the crises of the current decade? Are we seeing today a post 9/11 yearning for a period of perceived innocence, stability, peace and certainty? An age when Australia was asserting itself internationally, when a sense of national identity was taking shape, when the nation’s leaders were proud to proclaim a multicultural society? A longing for a return to a time when pub rock ruled, nightclubs flourished and pleasure seemed less fettered. An age before global warming, suicide terrorist attacks, the world wide web, mobile phones, facebook and blogs. Is this fantasy of a less complicated time just a critique of the mundane yet scary present?

I have been reading a fantastic piece by Professor Andrew Higson, writing about English ‘heritage films’ of the 80s, those Edwardian or 1920s period dramas such as A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, Maurice, Another Country see his chapter ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in the book Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed Lester D Friedman). He argues that nostalgia is implicitly a narrative of loss that yearns to return to a comfortable, closed past. ‘The past in all its perfection’, as he describes it.

He discusses how the 80s cinema audience might have found refuge in these films from ‘the radical and often problematic transformations of the 1980s’ (p107). I can see parallels between this and how people today find refuge in the 80s.

In Germany they have a word to describe the yearning for life in pre-1990s communist East Germany. ‘Ostalgie’ is a contraction of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’. It is often used to describe the popularity of kitsch objects from the German Democratic Republic days, but according to Anthony Enns, it also applies to recent German films. Enns sees the phenomenon not so much as a rose-coloured view of life under an oppressive regime but as a critique of the failure of the unified German state to live up to expectations of bringing socio-economic parity between east and west. Again, nostalgia is often more about the present than about the past.

People’s comments on this blog (and at dinner parties) reveal something of what they hold dear from the 80s. It is amazing how when you mention the 80s, people cite products, toys, clothes, songs, albums, movies, books, rather than people or events. I think we are seeing a new type of nostalgic experience that celebrates the popular culture of the recent past through its objects and commodities. A way of enjoying the styles and pleasures of the past by souveniring past commodities, but without a sense of melancholy that nostalgia implies, without the ‘algos’.

Our 1980s exhibition will push the nostalgia buttons in an upbeat and positive way but it needs to be realistic and hard-edged, showing empathy with the decade of the 1980s but without flattering it; questioning it but not disparaging it, not resorting to the wistful fantasy that implies that life was better back then and something has been lost.

Nuclear apocalypse is a theme that seems to recur through 1980s popular culture. The Day After was a 1983 telemovie that terrified people in the USA. Threads was a 1984 British film about nuclear war. There was a 1986 British animated film called When the Wind Blows, about a Soviet nuclear attack on the UK. The 1988 Japanese film Akira is set in a post-World War II future. The Mad Max trilogy implies a kind of post-World War II landscape where survivors struggle to live in a dystopian lawless society. Can you think of other examples in film and fiction?

There seems to have been a high level of anxiety in the 80s about nuclear annihilation. Little wonder, given the threat that the Cold War posed to world peace.

Did anybody see the historical documentary the other night on ABC TV called 1983: the Brink of Apocalypse? It was a scary, gripping story. It seems that on 8 November 1983, World War III nearly broke out by accident.

Operation Able Archer was a ten-day NATO training exercise that simulated a period of conflict escalation leading to nuclear attack by the west. Soviet military intelligence thought it was for real and the USSR prepared for nuclear war.

The Soviet leadership had believed since 1981 that the Americans were planning a first strike against them. They set up Operation RYAN to determine the intent of nuclear attack and then prevent it. President Reagan’s rhetoric about the ‘evil empire’ was perceived as aggressive and fuelled Soviet paranoia. The Soviets saw the Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed ‘Star Wars’ by the press) as an escalation and a threat.

A series of events including the shooting down of Korean passenger jet on 1 September and intense paranoia by the KGB, convinced the elderly Soviet leadership, led by the ailing Yuri Andropov, that the Able Archer exercise was a ruse and that a nuclear first strike was imminent. They prepared their vast arsenal for retaliation.

At the Soviet early warning command centre, alarms went off warning of the launch of five missiles from the US heading for the USSR. According to the TV documentary, this was due to something like a Soviet satellite misreading light reflecting from clouds as missiles! A certain Commander Petrov was on duty and had to decide if the threat was real or not.

This massive misunderstanding was allowed to occur because leaders of the USA and USSR didn’t communicate with each other. It was the spies who worked out what was actually happening.

The threat of nuclear war abruptly ended with the conclusion of the Able Archer 83 exercise on November 11, Armistice Day. It seems that sheer luck averted a nuclear exchange.

Fortunately we don’t yet live in the dystopian future predicted in novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and in the films Blade Runner and Brazil. But have any particular aspects of these fictional post-disaster societies become a reality?

Erika’s comment got me thinking about classic quotes from 1980s movies. Here is what I came up with. There must be heaps more. What can you suggest?

‘These go to eleven’ (Christopher Guest as Nigel Tufnel discussing his new guitar amplifiers, This is Spinal Tap, 1984).

‘I’ll be back’ (Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator, 1984)

‘Luke, I am your father’ (Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker, The Empire Strikes Back, 1980)

‘Lunch is for wimps’ (Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987)

‘The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. (Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987. I’ll have to check the movie, but I’m not sure he actually uttered the words ‘Greed is good’.)

‘Doc, you built a time machine … out of a Delorian?’ (Michael J Fox as Marty McFly, Back to the Future, 1985)

‘Be excellent to each other and party on dudes!’ (Keanu Reeves, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 1989)

‘E.T. phone home’ (E.T., 1982)

‘We’re on a mission from God.’ (Dan Aykroyd as Elwood Blues, The Blues Brothers, 1980)

‘We got them and shot them under Rule 303,’ Edward Woodward as Breaker Morant, 1980)

‘Nazis. I hate these guys’ (Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989)

‘Don’t call me Junior!’ (Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989)

‘Good morning Vietnam’ (Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning Vietnam, 1987)

‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way’ (Kathleen Turner as Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 1988)

‘I’ll have what she’s having’ (Estelle Reiner as woman in deli in When Harry Met Sally, 1989)

‘Pray he’s out there’ (tag from one of the Mad Max films, Mad Max II, I think)

‘From a place we’ll always remember comes a story you’ll never forget’ (tag from Gallipoli, 1981)

‘Who you gonna call?’ (tag from Ghostbusters, 1984)

‘The 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s’ (Dennis Hopper as Huey Walker, Flashback, 1990. OK it’s not the 80s but I love it. I highly recommend this little-known gem of a comedy).

Just a quick Friday afternoon post about something that’s on my mind. You may have noticed that our current decade (the noughties) has seen a revival of interest in the eighties. You can see it in fashion, music, graphics, even in politics. It can’t all be due to the Bangles re-forming for their 2000 tour. Since then we have seen Rick rolling, the return of the Hoff and retro computer games. I mean, you can buy hypercolour t-shirts again. Current local bands like Van She use analogue synthesizers as an ironic homage to the 1980s. It was great to see the Presets at the 2008 ARIA awards, self-professed synth nerds who are so into the 80s.

We want to include in our 80s exhibition references to the 80s revival. What items should we display?

I am starting to gather some classic quotes from the 1980s. Most of the ones I have found are from politicians, but I am looking for quotes from other areas of public life and popular culture. Here are some of the quotes I have found so far from real people (as opposed to film and TV characters):

‘We want to be respected again.’ (Ronald Reagan, 1980)

‘Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.’ (Ronald Reagan, August 1980)

‘The eighties will belong to the computer’. (Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter in Australia, 1981)

‘Yes … whatever that may mean.’ (Prince Charles, when asked if he was in love, after the announcement of his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer, 1981)

‘How does it feel to have blood on your hands?’ (Richard Carleton interviewing the new Opposition Leader Bob Hawke, 3 February 1983)

‘Any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum’. (Prime Minister Bob Hawke, after the America’s Cup, 1983)

‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’ (Leona Helmsley, hotel owner and the ‘queen of mean’, October 1983. She was convicted in 1989 for tax evasion.)

‘I guess in a way they are counterrevolutionary, and God bless them for being that way. And I guess that makes them contras, and so it makes me a contra, too.’ (President Ronald Reagan, March 1986)

‘We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we’. (President Ronald Reagan, November 1986)

‘From this day onwards, Howard will wear his leadership like a crown of thorns, and in the Parliament I’ll do everything to crucify him’. (Treasurer Paul Keating, 1986)

‘By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty’. (Prime Minister Bob Hawke, 23 June 1987)

‘I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.’ (Imelda Marcos, 1987)

‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ (George H W Bush, 18 August 1988)

‘That’s Lazarus with a triple bypass.’ (John Howard, on the day he lost the leadership of the Liberal Party, when asked if he could make a comeback, 9 May 1989)

Can you think of more classic 1980s quotes?

Development of the 1980s exhibition is proceeding fairly well. We hope to have it up and running by December 2009. I am having a little Christmas holiday break but have been working on a kind of ‘vision statement’ (I hate the term. It sounds so institutional but I can’t think of a what else to call it). I guess I’m trying to sum up what this exhibition is going to be all about, to get it clear in my mind. Anyhow, how does this sound for starters?

‘This exhibition takes a light-hearted look at Australian popular culture in the 1980s. It examines the cultural activities, pastimes and entertainments practised and enjoyed in mainstream society. This period shaped the so-called Generation X, and the exhibition will have a strong focus on youth culture.

‘It will interpret the 1980s through subcultures, movements and trends expressed in music, film, television, magazines, celebrity, design and street fashion. It will address the broad sweep of popular culture, placed into historical context through a timeline of newsworthy events. While the emphasis is on the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ young Australians, these experiences are contextualised within a global setting.

‘This is conceived as a fun exhibition, but based on a substantial framework of research and knowledge. Its content will draw heavily on the Powerhouse Museum’s collection. The 1980s exhibition will resonate with visitors whose formative years were in the 1980s.’