Living memories
Australian Geographic’s latest book evokes fond recollections of Aussie daily life in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Our latest book evokes fond recollections of Aussie life in the mid-20th century.
THE MID-20TH CENTURY saw the world map redrawn in the aftermath of two devastating wars that ushered in an era of unprecedented geopolitical, social and technological changes that transformed society into the one we recognise today. Australia’s geographical isolation had made a virtue of necessity and forged a rugged kind of self-reliance, but as the 20th century wore on, Australia was inf luenced by the same global forces as everywhere else and ultimately assumed its place in a new and more interconnected world. Against the backdrop of seismic international events, ordinary Aussies went about their daily lives doing the same things that people always have – living, working, making homes, caring for loved ones and f inding opportunities to laugh and enjoy life, no matter how tough the times.
Our new coffee table book, In Living Memory, is a visual celebration of those wonderful Australian lives. It’s also a tribute to those who were there to capture those lives – the photographers who occasionally turned their cameras away from the big events of the day and trained them on arguably the most fascinating of all subjects: us. The remarkable images featured in the book of the way we lived are fascinating, and ref lect the fact that it’s often through the prism of the small rituals of daily life that we can detect the bigger picture.
Some of the photographers are known to us by name; many aren’t, but we chose their images because they captured moments that are both delightful and insightful. These photographs wouldn’t have survived if not for the many excellent cultural institutions from whose collections we drew the majority of this material. It takes time, resources and dedication to collect, conserve and make available such culturally valuable material and we acknowledge the efforts of Australia’s museums, archives, state libraries and newspapers that do this work to such a high standard. Nor could we have produced the book without the dedication of those who are dr iven by passion to collect and organise outstanding pictorial records of their particular area of interest like cinema history, trains and aeroplanes. We are thrilled that AG regular contributor and award-winning author Alasdair McGregor was able to provide the well-informed, witty and entertaining commentary on the era-def ining decades of 20thcentury Australia.
We hope this book will serve to evoke happy memories and lively conversation among those who remember the good old days, and those eager to hear f irsthand accounts from their family and friends who lived them. On the following pages we feature an extract from Alasdair’s text and a selection of the photographs.
THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA in the middle decades of the 20th century, from 1930 to 1980, is one of dramatic contrast – of dark days and light: of economic struggle, anxiety, war and sacrif ice, giving way from the 1950s onwards to prosperity, plenty, and, at times, a precious conf idence and certainty.
In a century of earth-shattering change, nowhere was spared the ravages of war and economic decline during these decades. We suffered like other nations through the desperate years of the Great Depression, when poverty, hunger and despair blighted a generation. Australia, too, then made a costly blood sacrifice in World War II, defending its familial ties with the mother country and its own economic self-interest, though far distant from its wellspring of Britishness.
But the passage of time always seems to smooth out the wrinkles in the collective memory. The bad days of the 1930s and ’40s – of being out of work for long periods and struggling to make do in the Depression, going overseas to f ight, or enduring wartime austerity and the constant fear of a rapacious enemy at our doorstep – were undeniably harrowing. Unresolved and half buried, such traumas weighed heavily on the collective psyche, but through the very miracle of being alive, the events of the past also transformed into something useful for our sense of wellbeing. Survival was more than a victory over an economic or militar y enemy; it became an aff irmation of the Australian character and way of life. Having struggled through the bad times, the material fruits and opportunities of the good times were surely there for all to enjoy.
Not that threats to the Australian way of life – perceived or real – ever actually went away. There were, after all, the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the skirmish of the Malayan emergency, to keep us alert to the perils of the outside world. The Cold War brought forth the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon, and the deliberate political invocation of the domino effect in South-East Asia rekindled the invasion anxiety of recent times.
But with the trials of the Depression and World War II in the past, the ways in which people had coped became a matter for ref lection and comparative gratitude. The worst memories were relived and suffered in endless silence. But with the passage of time, other more tolerable or pleasant memories could be indulged with a serving of that most comforting of human emotions – nostalgia.
Along with a house, a job and a settled family life, people craved the car, the backyard, the beach, national sporting prowess, and prosperity founded on an endless bounty of natural resources. Every child’s geographical knowledge of their country in the immediate postwar years was built on a region-by-region cornucopia of products. Usually embellishing the margins of the school atlas were timber from East Gippsland; silver, lead and zinc from Broken Hill; cattle from outback Queensland; wheat from the plains of Western Australia; and so on. It all sat easily beside views of natural splendour in an era oblivious to the notion of an environment in need of protection.
The defeat of Ben Chif ley’s Labor government in 1949 heralded an unprecedented era of political continuity in Australia. A succession of Menzies-led coalition governments stretching into the 1960s kept socialism and the bogeyman of communism at bay, and arguably shaped a more egalitarian society than at any time since Federation.
RAPIDLY RISING living standards energised a gathering wave of readily affordable consumer goods that broke over Australia and the rest of the developed world. That wave became a f lood. Like some firstworld cargo cult, a consumer culture of
But the passage of time always seems to smooth out the wrinkles in the collective memory.
hyped convenience, fashion and forced obsolescence rode roughshod over the inconvenient need for environmental sustainability. Although it would be a later decade before scientists began to warn us of human-induced climate change, the first step on that nightmarish road had already been taken with the identif ication of ‘disposable’ with ‘modern’ and the economic pursuit of ever-growing consumption.
In 1930 the Australian population was just 6.5 million, and in the 15 years to 1945 the total had only risen by 900,000 to 7.4 million. But in the following decade and a half to 1960, the population grew by 3 million, to stand at 10.4 million. Mass postwar migration from Europe and the ‘baby boomer’ spike in the birth rate then saw the trend line in population growth inexorably steepen.
As the population grew, Australian society changed with the times. In 1933 out of a total of nearly 2.7 million people in employment, only about 20 per cent were female. By 1980 the proportion had nearly doubled, and women made up nearly 38 per cent of the Australian workforce. Women had stepped into men’s roles during the war, just as some of their mothers had done a generation before. They often moved aside when the men returned to their peacetime occupations, but the trend to greater female participation in the workforce was on. For younger women in the postwar years, the term ‘housewife’ became quaint and anachronistic, a label more appropriate to their mothers and grandmothers. And in the 1960s and ’70s, state and federal bureaucracies removed the bar on hiring married women, or requiring them to resign or forfeit their job upon marriage.
WHILE THE POPULATION cur ve arced ever upwards, the other great strand of change in Australian society between 1930 and 1980 centred on its racial and ethnic make-up. With the gradual relaxation, and then effective abandonment of the White Australia Policy by 1966, the population was set to become more racially diverse.
The Australia of the 1970s was gradually coming to see itself as a multi-cultural society. Al Grassby, the immigration minister in the Whitlam government, was multiculturalism’s passionate poster boy. Grassby approached his advocacy for a diverse Australia with a colourful f lair and turn of phrase that matched his loud ties. Credited, in Australia at least, with f irst using the term ‘multicultural’, this son of an Irish mother and Spanish father asked,
“Where is the Maltese process worker, the Finnish carpenter, the Italian concrete layer, the Yugoslav miner – or dare I say it – the Indian scientist? Where do these people belong, in al l honest y, if not in today’s composite Australian image?”
Continental drift has been shunting Australia towards Asia at the rate of 6–7cm a year for millennia. But a cultural ‘Asian-ness’ of the Australian mind has only been a tenuous construction of the multicultural era. For many, attitudes towards multiculturalism have centred on the simple pleasures of life. Ask anyone today to name the benef its of multiculturalism, and rather than a complex answer concerning cultural practices, they might proffer a single word – food.
Often held up to exaggerated ridicule, the stodgy blandness of an Anglo-derived cuisine, in which cheese was simply processed cheddar, bread was always white and overcooked meat and three veg was the staple fare, causes many to recoil rather than recall with affection. If there was an ethnic cuisine on offer, it might have been a Chinese takeaway or an Indian curry masquerading as the real thing. But the comparison with today’s cornucopia of cuisines is perhaps a little unfair. Never mind the culinary delights of our present-day aff luent society; as the
It would be a later decade before scientists began to warn of human-induced climate change.
old saying goes, “we are what we eat”. Outside of the Depression years and wartime austerity, generally speaking, Australians did enjoy a good standard of nutrition and access to fresh food – undoubtedly healthier than today’s junk food temptations with their empty calories.
We have the talents of the immigrants who formed our newly multicultural society to thank for the second of the century’s three major nation-building initiatives. During an era in which politicians wished to be seen as carving out an Australian identity and future, these projects required daring and nerve, and our era might evoke the word “vision”.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression and at a time of swirling political turmoil. A mix of f inancial brinkmanship and engineering prowess had seen the project through, and the bridge came to be described as the “Iron Lung” for the way it kept workers employed in desperate times.
Also affectionately dubbed the coathanger, it is now impossible to imagine Sydney without it. More than an engineering solution to Sydney’s divided geography, the unmistakable form of the bridge not only became a symbol of the city itself, but of the wider nation. For Australians returning by ship, or in later years by air, the reassuring sight of its arch was a reminder that, yes, we were finally home.
SEVENTEEN YEARS after the f irst car crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, work began on Australia’s most ambitious nation-building project of any era, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. Commencing in 1949, over the following 20 years the scheme saw a veritable immigrant league of nations help construct 16 dams, seven power stations and hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, pipelines and aqueducts. The scheme’s environmental consequences were little considered at the time; nature was there to be bent to the human will. But the achievements of immigrant workers forging positive bonds with their new country are remembered with pride, symbolic of a nation recovering from the darkness of war and embracing a future lit by optimism.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme opened in 1972 and the following year, the Queen opened the Sydney Opera House, an architectural marvel 13 fraught years in the making. As 60,000 balloons streamed skywards and ships’ horns boomed across the harbour, the parochialism, impatience and mean-spiritedness that had dogged the building’s diff icult birth were forgotten. This “ship of sail”, as the ABC’s commentator described it on the day, was launched into the affections of Sydneysiders and the nation. Instantly, the Opera House became the cultural symbol of an outward-looking Australia, and one of the most recognised buildings in the world.
So as populations grew in postwar Australia, our cities grew up and out – forever out. We blithely knocked down the old to make way for the new, all in the name of what was passively accepted as ‘progress’. We forsook the tram for the bus, and the train for cars – ever more cars. Our houses grew larger and we filled them with shiny appliances to make life easier.
We clung to the myth of our collective bush heritage, while we morphed into the most urbanised society on earth. The future was perennially bright and f illed with optimistic certainties, even if the outside world left plenty of room for doubt, and those changes continue to churn away today.
More than an engineering solution to Sydney’s divided geography, it became a symbol of the wider nation.