Popular culture in Australia during the 1980s

At the beginning of the 1980s, Australia had a stagnating economy but an increasingly confident sense of nationhood in a world being reshaped by an intensifying globalisation. 2 That paradox is best explained by a simple matter of timing: the end of the global long boom in the mid-1970s coincided with the rise of the 'New Nationalism', a product of Australia's emergence from under the British imperial umbrella in the wake of decolonisation and the United Kingdom's turn to Europe. 3 Australian popular culture of the 1980s can be understood in this context. It explored, satirised and celebrated national identity, examined selected aspects of the country's history and tentatively began coming to terms with the legacy, for both Indigenous peoples and the settler population, of dispossession, racism and violence. That the bicentenary of the invasion of Australia occurred in 1988 added both a piquancy and urgency to debates over national history and identity in the 1980s. 4 Popular culture provided a lens through which such tensions played out; it was the site where most Australians grappled with national meaning, and it has become the subject of much nostalgia, especially among Generation X who were children in that era, in the time since.