• DOI:10.1177/026327648300100309
• Corpus ID: 144339300

A Backwater Awash: The Australian Experience of Americanisation

@article{White1983ABA,
  title={A Backwater Awash: The Australian Experience of Americanisation},
  author={Richard W. White},
  journal={Theory Culture \& Society},
  year={1983},
  volume={1},
  pages={108 - 122}
}

• Richard W. White
• Published 1 January 1983
• Political Science, History
• Theory Culture & Society

In 1962, the Texas Quarterly devoted its summer number to Australia, exploring ’what it is that has made Australia sul generis and keeps It so’. The editor, who had spent some months In Australia in 1960, began reassuringly: Australia, to many British observers In the nineteenth century and some In the twentieth, has faced the perennial peril of sliding Into an abyss labelled ‘Americanisatfon’. Australians themselves, although by no means hostile towards America or Americans, would rather be thought to resemble nobody else In particular. At this they succeed very well. There followed surveys of Australian art, architecture, literature and theatre, samples of short stories and poetry, and a rapturous photographic essay on Joan Sutherland. It Ignored the fact that one of the contributors, the previous year, had coined the term ’Austerica’ to describe an Americanised ’Australian Ugliness’ (Boyd 1961), and that another, at the height of the Cold War, had been arguing that ’our chief threat from outside to decent cultural development comes not from the U.S.S.R. but from the United States, which is flooding this and other countries with debased forms of &dquo;culture&dquo; on almost every level’ (White 1980, p 283). It also Ignored the fact that the early 1960s probably represented a peak in the Americanisation of popular culture In Australia, when measured by the proportion of American material transmitted by the mass media.