"Culture up to our Arseholes": Projecting Post-Imperial Australia

In December 1967, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt announced his Government's intention to establish an ambitious new Council for funding the visual and performing Arts in Australia. Holt had formed the view that Australian culture was fundamentally deficient— that urgent measures (and money) were needed to project a more distinctive, mature, and culturally sophisticated Australian image at home and abroad. His ambition was taken up by his successor, John Gorton, who set up the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968 and its stablemate, the Australian Film Development Corporation. This essay considers the rationale behind the new government schemes to promote national culture, and argues that these processes need to be understood in terms of the demise of British emblems of civic identity and belonging in the 1960s. It examines the dilemmas faced by those charged with the task of projecting a distinctive new face of Australian culture for a post-imperial age. While there was a broad consensus about the need for a "new nationalism" in cultural policy, there was little agreement as to what that policy should entail. The idea of "Australian content" proved notoriously difficult to pin down, and aroused scepticism as to whether Australia could ever live up to the aesthetic standards of "real nationhood"—a scepticism that was most vividly conveyed by Barry McKenzie's typically crass observation that "back in Oz now we've got culture up to our arseholes".