Australia in the 1980s

As part of our online work complementing The 80s are back exhibition, we’ll be running a Q&A series.

If you know anyone who was prominent in the 1980s in fields such as music, design, fashion, science or politics, and you think they would be happy to answer some questions about their experiences/memories of the 80s, please nominate them online.

We are looking for Australian people who were in bands, ran clubs and bars, record labels, record shops, fashion designers, notorious partygoers, minor celebrities, subcultural icons, early hackers and phreakers, designers, film makers, artists, actors, scientists, political activists and more – the kind that might generally fall beneath the radar of a museum exhibition. Memorable people with a good story to tell.

(Any contact details gathered via the nomination form will be used only for the purposes of the Q&A and will be kept strictly confidential.)

We plan to start posting the responses before the exhibition opens, and adding more to portray a broad picture of the 1980s during the run of the exhibition. We are hoping for a mix of serious and light responses, aiming to build an engaging and revealing microsite. The more people who agree to participate, the better the site will be – enabling a broader and more meaningful picture of the 80s to emerge.

Some sample questions alongside biographical questions might include –

- Were you ever able to solve a Rubik’s Cube?
- Was there one event/party/pub session/nightclub of the 80s that stands out?
- What historical event of the 1980s has most resonance for you? Why?
- Any memories (fond or foul) of what you were wearing in the 1980s?
- What were you listening to – and was it on a Walkman?
- What did you do for entertainment/leisure then and now?

Nominate someone!

If you have any questions about the nomination process you can either ask in the comments or email Irma Havlicek, who’ll be running the q&a (irma@phm.gov.au) or call her on +61 2 9217 0344.

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.’

Before Game Boy arrived in 1989, there was Game & Watch, a brand of hand-held electronic games from Nintendo. These weren’t multi-function toys — each Game & Watch allowed you to play just one game. Their success funded the research and development of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.

In the Powerhouse Museum’s collection there are a few Game & Watch games dating from the early 80s. The one shown above is called Octopus and came to the Museum from Barbara Palmer, who remembers playing the console in the school playground in the early 80s, when she was in Year 7 or 8.

The other four, Turtle Bridge, PopEye, Donkey Kong Jr and Fire, were donated to the Museum by a generous guy called Michael Henry, who was given Donkey Kong Jr for his 9th birthday in 1982. I wonder if anybody else has kept Game & Watch games from the 80s. Do you remember playing with them?

We also have this game called Shuttle Voyage, which is a bit of a mystery. Michael Henry said it was a cheap Chinese-made imitation of Nintendo games and we think it dates from around 1983.

Does anybody know more about these Chinese hand-held games from the early 80s?

Australia in the 1980s is such a broad subject for an exhibition. I am pondering how to give it a clear focus.

Somebody once said that history doesn’t have to be ancient, just relevant. What would our Gen X audience find relevant? I’m thinking that they would hope to see an interpretation of the 1980s in terms of what they experienced as young people, within the broad sweep of popular culture. An exhibition about their everyday life, making reference to their favourite TV shows, movies, music, products, celebrities, fads and newsworthy events. It is all about how people spent their leisure time, what they ate and drank, the clothes they wore, what shows they went to see, their first encounters with computers etc. The emphasis would be on the experiences of ‘ordinary’ Australian people, not just the great, the powerful, the brilliant and the beautiful.

The idea is for an exhibition about Australian life in the 80s but we cannot ignore what was going on in the world. So there would have to be a global context, a background of national and international events. I wonder what is the best balance. I mean, an exhibition about the 80s needs to at least mention crucial events and people like the trial of Lindy Chamberlain, the death of John Lennon, the wedding of Charles and Di, the Falklands war, the Ash Wednesday bushfires, the AIDS epidemic, the America’s Cup victory, Bob Hawke, Cliff Young, Olympic boycotts, the first Apple Mac, AUSSAT, Allan Border, the Sydney Swans, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, the stock market crash of 1987, the Bicentenary and Brisbane World Expo ’88, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square. Maybe we need an illustrated timeline as a kind of backdrop to a bunch of other yet-to-be-determined themes. I’ll keep thinking.