1943-1945 CULTURAL ICONS

R.M.S. QUEEN MARY

As I grew up, my mental wallpaper in matters civic was without question British. The great icons , cause of our pride were British -  R.M.S.QUEEN MARY. the steam locomotive "FLYING SCOTSMAN", the world's "best"car the ROLLS ROYCE, British crockery, British manufactured goods. Why not! We were British weren't we ?

Of course as Catholics we were just a tad sceptical of the underpinnings of all this. We knew about the English repression of the Irish before Home Rule. And we knew that the establishment in Australia was largely anti- Catholic. We could handle all that. We just knew that everything that was best and good in civic life was British.Of course it was! All the books we had available were published and printed in England ( save for a very few - not popularly distributed- which were published and printed in Australia).Things and people British were "proper"and to be emulated. On the Wireless, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) announcers were selected for their rather prim, well modulated British accents.

All of this worked subtly to establish a cultural "client "mentality in most of the population.Many of us felt our cultural isolation and longed to travel "overseas"- but most of the time, this simply meant London or England more broadly.Travel overseas was 98% by ship , and the ships were British ( of course) and such shipping lines as P&O(Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company), Orient Line, Shaw Savill and Huddart Parker were household names.

Oddly, before the War there had been a great number of American cars on our roads . Names such as Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Ford, Mercury, Willys,Dodge and De Soto were still quite familiar even though restrictions on U.S. currency transactions had long since stopped U.S. car imports. So our cars were Vauxhalls ( who could forget the glittering chromed flutes down the edges of the bonnets), Austins, Morrises,Rovers(Doctors'cars), Wolseleys,Triumphs,Hillmans, and the rarer Lancasters, Alvises, Armstrong-Siddeleys, Humbers , Lagondas, Daimlers( very big with the Royals) and Bentleys etc.

Still other considerations of English origin, re-inforced our above view of the world. Architecture was a leading factor in this way. Most public architecture had its origins at least in the Victorian era. So it was that Government Buildings were designed and constructed to suggest permanence, authority and strength. Other buildings like Banks had developed out of the experience of hard times past. There were usually friendly glass inner doors , but strong, forbidding outer doors - everyone had in mind the runs on the Banks in the Great Depression - only  11-15 years earlier. Windows were high by to-day's standards, further enhancing protection against external assault.

But beneath the surface, there were several subversive streams at work.There had always been American films, movies they called them.As the war effort grew these American films came to be more and more the true mainstream. Their ideas were quite different and...somehow, more ...exciting.The presence of American Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen in Australia greatly expanded the Americanised way of thinking.The failure of the British to come to our aid ( largely due to inability and the failure of what they did try) was commonly known and resented in reality, no matter what the reason. There was a fairly natural affinity between Americans and Australians based upon openness and a lack of British type Class pretensions. We were more like the Americans then, than we are now I think. That may seem paradoxical given to-day's very free communications. But whilst these modern communications have made our cultural links much stronger, they have, it seems to me, facilitated in each society a more rapid development of particular tendencies which are drawing us further apart in essence, if not in superficialities. Hmmm Getting a bit deep. Might try to come back to this later.