The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia eBook: Frank Bongiorno: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store
It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary.
It was perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting, torrid debates over land rights and immigration, the advent of AIDS, a harsh recession and the rise of the New Right.
It was a time when Australians fought for social change – on union picket lines, at rallies for women’s rights and against nuclear weapons, and as part of a new environmental movement.
And then there were the events that left many scratching their heads: Joh for Canberra . . . the Australia Card . . . Cliff Young.
In The Eighties, Frank Bongiorno brings all this and more to life. He uncovers forgotten stories – of factory workers proud of their skills who found themselves surplus to requirements; of Vietnamese families battling to make new lives for themselves in the suburbs. He sheds new light on ‘both the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened to Australia and Australians during this liveliest of decades’.
The Eighties is contemporary history at its best.
‘Frank Bongiorno has successfully negotiated the minefield of Australia’s political egos to write the definitive account of an inspired, infuriating decade.’ —George Megalogenis
‘Meaty and entertaining … The Eighties reconjures the full flavour of the time – the tackiness of its fraudsters and jailbird entrepreneurs, the cruelty of its economic fallout. ’ —the Australian
‘A rattling account, quick-cut and filmic, of contrasting, often overlapping, events: high and low culture, the big moments nestling in the finer longforgotten detail. And the detail here is the thing, a running authorial sleight of hand that salts a nimble, skipping narrative with enough fine-grained close-up to give the impression of a dense and exhaustive study without being tempted into the many digressions that detail might, in less disciplined hands, provoke.’ —the Age
‘A very impressive achievement of historical synthesis, written in lucid, fast-moving prose with an eye for the telling detail. This is fine writing for the decade that brought Australia fine dining.’ —the Monthly
‘My guide down the foggy ruins of time is a 1980s teenager who’s now an ANU historian. His comprehensive tour is a canny mix of economic history and news headlines.’ —Canberra Times
Frank Bongiorno is associate professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian andInside Story.
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It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary.
It was perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting, torrid debates over land rights and immigration, the advent of AIDS, a harsh recession and the rise of the New Right.
It was a time when Australians fought for social change – on union picket lines, at rallies for women’s rights and against nuclear weapons, and as part of a new environmental movement.
And then there were the events that left many scratching their heads: Joh for Canberra . . . the Australia Card . . . Cliff Young.
In The Eighties, Frank Bongiorno brings all this and more to life. He uncovers forgotten stories – of factory workers proud of their skills who found themselves surplus to requirements; of Vietnamese families battling to make new lives for themselves in the suburbs. He sheds new light on ‘both the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened to Australia and Australians during this liveliest of decades’.
The Eighties is contemporary history at its best.
‘Frank Bongiorno has successfully negotiated the minefield of Australia’s political egos to write the definitive account of an inspired, infuriating decade.’ —George Megalogenis
‘Meaty and entertaining … The Eighties reconjures the full flavour of the time – the tackiness of its fraudsters and jailbird entrepreneurs, the cruelty of its economic fallout. ’ —the Australian
‘A rattling account, quick-cut and filmic, of contrasting, often overlapping, events: high and low culture, the big moments nestling in the finer longforgotten detail. And the detail here is the thing, a running authorial sleight of hand that salts a nimble, skipping narrative with enough fine-grained close-up to give the impression of a dense and exhaustive study without being tempted into the many digressions that detail might, in less disciplined hands, provoke.’ —the Age
‘A very impressive achievement of historical synthesis, written in lucid, fast-moving prose with an eye for the telling detail. This is fine writing for the decade that brought Australia fine dining.’ —the Monthly
‘My guide down the foggy ruins of time is a 1980s teenager who’s now an ANU historian. His comprehensive tour is a canny mix of economic history and news headlines.’ —Canberra Times
Frank Bongiorno is associate professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian andInside Story.
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1980s Australia: Frank Bongornio revisits Hawke, Keating, Medicare
If you can remember the 1960s, they say, you probably weren’t there. The 80s are a different matter. If you were there, you probably don’t want to remember them. Who wants to think in any great detail about the heyday of David Hasselhoff, Dan Quayle, the Police Academy movies, an era when Rick Astley wasn’t just a joke meme but an actual cultural force?
We seem to agree, though, that the 80s were good for one thing, at least in Australia: politics. The Hawke-Keating years have assumed the stature of a golden age of grown-up government, especially when measured against our shambolic recent past. Between 1983 and 1996, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating worked the difficult trick of gutsily renovating the economy without being voted out of office. They knocked down trade barriers, floated the dollar, opened the banking sector, introduced Medicare and compulsory superannuation.
Controversial as some of these measures were at the time, few would now contend they were unnecessary. These days, conventional wisdom has it that the Hawke and Keating administrations were about as good as government in this country gets. You can even obtain bipartisan agreement on this, as long as you are ready to concede or pretend the Howard government was solid, too.
Frank Bongiorno, an associate professor of history at the Australian National University, and previously the author of The Sex Lives of Australians, believes the truth about the 80s is more complicated. He thinks our rosy view of the era is premised on an amnesia that has seen us filter out “the anger, shock and disappointment that so many people felt about the lived 1980s”.
His meaty and entertaining new book, The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, sets out to correct this amnesia by reconjuring the full flavour of the time — the tackiness of its fraudsters and jailbird entrepreneurs, the cruelty of its economic fallout. He wants to put flesh back on the decade’s bones.
He is surely right to think our memories need refreshing. The book is full of people and things that, even if you lived through the 80s, you may not have thought about since. Cliff Young. Warwick Capper. Whinging Wendy Wood, the ALP pitchwoman who asked Howard’s opposition where the money was coming from. BUGA UP, scrawlers of ethical graffiti on cigarette billboards. Cigarette billboards themselves. The Australia Card, the Multifunction Polis — concepts that noisily flamed out on the launch pad, like Australian versions of New Coke.
Even when retelling the familiar story of the 1983 America’s Cup win, Bongiorno spices the brew with details you may never have heard. Did you know that Ronald Reagan sent the American crew a telegram reading: “Nancy and I will be rooting our hardest for you”? Or that Ben Lexcen’s winged keel is now generally believed to have been designed by a team of Dutch scientists?
In the US, the reigning master of this sort of history is Rick Perlstein, who has written a whopping and addictive trilogy about three giants of conservatism: Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Reagan. Perlstein’s books are encrusted with vignettes pulled from the newspapers of yore: he piles on the detail with a lavishness that would have been unthinkable before the advent of the searchable digital archive. Say what you like about the internet: as a research tool, it beats the hell out of a microfilm machine.
Bongiorno’s juicy reanimation of the 80s gives him fair claim to be considered the Australian Perlstein. There are differences between them: for one thing Perlstein writes books twice as thick about periods half as long. But like Perlstein, Bongiorno has a rare combination of virtues. He researches like an academic but he writes like a writer. He can be quick and fluent without being superficial; he can lay on the hard facts without compromising the narrative go-forward.
His deft retelling of the Lionel Murphy affair is typical of his approach. Murphy served as Gough Whitlam’s attorney-general before being controversially appointed to the High Court in 1975. In 1984 he became entangled in a scandal that was deeply inconvenient for the new Labor government. The details were complex: the one nugget likeliest to have lodged in your head is the allegation that Murphy called somebody or other “my little mate”. Bongiorno doesn’t just lucidly explain the whole business. He enriches it with a novelist’s gift for human details.
In case you have forgotten what Murphy looked like, or are too young to know, Bongiorno makes unkind but not inaccurate reference to his “lack of conventional handsomeness” and “nose of gargantuan proportions”. He also quotes a crucial observation from Gillian Appleton, who was married to Murphy’s friend Jim McClelland: “He had the gift of making you feel that you were the most interesting person in the room.” This is the money quote. If the passage of time has made Murphy seem more a name than a man, suddenly his humanity is restored. You have a sense of why people would have wanted to be his mate in the first place.
Bongiorno’s book is several sorts of history at once. On one level there is the stuff of traditional history: “the big changes and the great men”. But he thickens the conventional story by going to sources that an old-school historian might never have consulted, such as Appleton’s memoir of McClelland. He also retrieves the forgotten voices of the not-so-great, an approach that is known in the trade as “history from below”. Whether these voices are always worth reviving is debatable. “People like me are sick and tired of being told what Utopia we have coming,” said a woman attending a meeting about the Multifunction Polis in 1991. “What do you have to do to get rid of them?” If we’ve forgotten contributions such as this, perhaps it is for a reason. Such stuff is the white noise of Australian politics, the dust that had to settle before we could start seeing things in perspective. What do we gain by kicking it up again? Should it fundamentally change our minds about the past?
Bongiorno seems to think the answer is yes. He seems to feel that contemporary grievances about the Hawke government, when you add them all up, put a fatal dent in the views of the “80s cheer squad” whose chief pompom wavers, according to him, are journalist-authors Paul Kelly (The Australian’s editor-at-large) and George Megalogenis. Querying Kelly’s belief that the recession of the early 90s was the result of a necessary economic transition, Bongiorno says it is unlikely the nation’s million unemployed “took comfort from their contribution as sacrificial lambs”. Assessing the government’s 1991 tariff cut, Bongiorno observes that “Kelly has celebrated the 1991 decision as having ‘demolished the edifice of Protection’ after its century-long reign, but it did not at the time meet with popular acclaim”.
No doubt the final part of that sentence is true, but one fails to see how it damages Kelly’s position or even conflicts with it. The same goes for Bongiorno’s slightly cheap point about the recession. Kelly isn’t claiming that economic transformation didn’t hurt. He’s just saying it was necessary. He’s describing the same reality that Bongiorno is, but from a different perspective. Bongiorno favours the sympathetic close-up; Kelly takes the chillier long view. And surely the long view, in history and politics, is what matters.
Consider the question of industrial action. Bongiorno revisits some of the decade’s most traumatic strikes, which look suitably gory from up close: the pilots, the Dollar Sweets dispute, the Victorian nurses. But he also points out, in another context, that the number of working days lost to industrial disputes fell from 4.2 million to 1.3 million between 1981 and 1986. On this question at least, then, the Hawke-Keating boosters would appear to have a point. Individual pain matters, but the bigger picture, the retrospective wide shot, matters more.
Or does it? At times, Bongiorno seems to hint that revisiting the past from below is not merely a useful supplement to hindsight but a revolutionary new way of seeing that trumps the naive journalistic practice of looking at history backwards. In an afterword, he says the cheer squad’s “now ingrained habit of reading the 1980s predominantly in light of what happened next” cannot “capture the meaning of the period as it was experienced by those living through it”.
This has the distinctive whiff of a piece of academic theory being pushed too far. To what degree, exactly, are our retrospective judgments obliged to capture what people felt back then, in the heat of the moment? How diligently must we pretend not to know what’s happened since? There must be a limit, unless we want their perspective to replace ours entirely, so that we become an unheard voice ourselves. This would be pushing deference into the territory of masochism. Insensitive as it sounds, maybe we have to do a bit of weeding out — a bit of forgetting — before the past can start to yield up general meaning.
Fortunately, Bongiorno tends to reserve the polemical stuff for the fringes of this book. Mainly he has written a shapely and stylish popular history about which you are free to draw your own conclusions. If you admired Hawke and Keating to start with, there’s every chance the book will make you admire them even more, by vividly reminding you of the fire they copped from all sides, including the left wing of their own party, for pushing through reforms that nobody now denies the country needed.
It’s worth adding, at a time when a lot of books are slapped together with obvious perfunctoriness, that Bongiorno’s first-rate work has been matched by the efforts of his publishers. Care has been lavished on the text, which is spotlessly clean and augmented with a photo section and an exhaustive index. It’s an old-fashioned pleasure, in the age of e-texts and clickbait, to weigh a high-quality book in your hands and read about a time when the technological tide had barely started to turn.
At the start of the 80s, Bongiorno startlingly records, 35 per cent of Australian TV viewers received only two channels. In 1982, one in 20 households had a VCR; five years later, more than half did. Computers started creeping into homes too, although they were still vastly expensive and didn’t do much. And get this: in a survey taken in 1978, one in five Australian adults reported having bought a book in the past week. Here is one of the many respects in which the recent past has begun to seem pre-historic, even prelapsarian. If our politicians have become less substantial since then, it may be because we all have.
The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia
By Frank Bongiorno
Black Inc, 370pp, $45 (HB)
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