damianBeer ads- A Truly Australian Art Form
August 31st 2006 23:51
When I lived on campus I had two South American room mates and, as you do, we often compared notes on our respective countries. As much of this reflecting occured around the communal TV, one day the conversation inevitably turned to television. After the usual comments on how surprised they were about the amount of American TV there was they immediately went to cutting down everything about Australian television. It was boring, it was stupid, we didn’t have this, we had too much of that, even their Homer Simpson was funnier in South America, etc, etc ... They ended by saying that this terrible affliction was no more evident than in our television commercials which summed up everything that was bad about Australian TV. They could not understand how we put up with it, and they wouldn’t miss anything about their television viewing experience here.
Except our beer ads.
Our beer ads were the best they’d ever seen.
There have been two major cultural movements in Australia’s history. The first occured in the 1890's and was fueled by writers, poets and anybody else vaguely artistic as a call to nationalism in the lead up to Federation. You may have heard of a few of these artists. One was called Banjo Patterson. Another was called Henry Lawson. It was from this cultural project that the whole Bushman legend was created (back when we had bushman) and was declared the uniquely Australian character.
The second major cultural movement happened in and around the 1970s Australian film revival. This revival was fueled by artists helped by government funding that finally encouraged the development of our own culture and was helped by the lead up to the Bi-centenary in 1988 which was a source of huge national pride (at least for east coast people who weren’t aboriginal). The most visible and enduring part of this revival were the movie and television mini-series industries which tried to make up for the culturally bland previous half century by reinterpreting all the old sources of cultural pride in an effort to rediscover what being Australian was. For this reason they went back and drew on all the old symbols of the bush and the Bushman and made movies set in rural and outback locations. Although really successful the movie and mini-series revival soon petered out after it ran out of stories to reinterpret and we were left with a many stories about the bush and not too many about the coast or suburbs where we actually lived.
Fast forward a few decades and a lot of people believe that the ‘true’ Australian is one from the outback and that because they don’t exist anymore Australia doesn’t have a proper history or culture of its own that we can be truly proud of. We all live on the coast and in the suburbs now so all that bushman stuff can be resigned to history along with all the Australian characteristics that we used to have.
I don’t believe that this is true. The problem with Australia’s culture is that our development was interrupted by World War 1 and 2 which saw us wake up in the 1950s in a completely different world to the one all our previous myths came from. To make up for this people turned back to the symbols of the previous era and forgot that you’re supposed to be constantly reinterpreting them for the present day. When it comes down to it Australians haven’t completely changed- we’re still Australian the way we once were- it’s just that we cant recognise ourselves because of all the out-of-date Bushman imagery used to examine both Australians as we were and Australians as we are.
In my opinion, one of the few places where Australia has been authentically discussed is in our beer ads. Beer ads are suburban, they have our own unique sense of humour, contain all the bushman/larrikin characters that Australian myth contains and are relevant stories of our day to day lives. They haven’t got lost in sentimentalising the past but have got on with reinterpreting the present (and I think everyone would appreciate the irony of beer being the holder of a relevant Australian character).
Perhaps most importantly our beer ads are a form of expression unique to Australia. You go anywhere else in the world and you’ll find beer ads rarely step beyond the Big Three Bloke Issues- Women (usually in bikinis), Cars and Sport- but then you’ll come home to see 500 odd guys running across a huge field of grass in robes, pretending to take their beer seriously and just taking the piss out of themselves. For the rest of the world an ad like that is unusual but here you change the channel and you find another beer ad where a bloke bomb dives into a spa or throws our national symbol on a bbq or gets a lift home from the pub in a pizza delivery car. Our beer ads are unique, their funny and they’re something that is relevant to our lives and who we are today as Australians.
A few years back I asked one of my uni lecturers where you could find Australian beer ads and he said that he had tried to track them down but, because the advertising agencies owned the ads and not the beer companies, they were often just thrown away and not kept on record. Here was a lecturer in Australian Television Studies that couldn’t get his hands on beer ads!
Well no more. For the above reasons I’m going to put together what I hope will be the internet’s greatest tribute to Aussie beer ads. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and video clip sharing The Urban Telegraph is going to become a historical record of as many Australian beer ads as I can track down, starting tomorrow with an award winning number that was, quite literally, the best ad (over 30 seconds) in the world as voted by Cannes.
So stay tuned. The pride of Australian TV is about to go on display...
Except our beer ads.
Our beer ads were the best they’d ever seen.
There have been two major cultural movements in Australia’s history. The first occured in the 1890's and was fueled by writers, poets and anybody else vaguely artistic as a call to nationalism in the lead up to Federation. You may have heard of a few of these artists. One was called Banjo Patterson. Another was called Henry Lawson. It was from this cultural project that the whole Bushman legend was created (back when we had bushman) and was declared the uniquely Australian character.
One of the best examples of Aus beer ads
The second major cultural movement happened in and around the 1970s Australian film revival. This revival was fueled by artists helped by government funding that finally encouraged the development of our own culture and was helped by the lead up to the Bi-centenary in 1988 which was a source of huge national pride (at least for east coast people who weren’t aboriginal). The most visible and enduring part of this revival were the movie and television mini-series industries which tried to make up for the culturally bland previous half century by reinterpreting all the old sources of cultural pride in an effort to rediscover what being Australian was. For this reason they went back and drew on all the old symbols of the bush and the Bushman and made movies set in rural and outback locations. Although really successful the movie and mini-series revival soon petered out after it ran out of stories to reinterpret and we were left with a many stories about the bush and not too many about the coast or suburbs where we actually lived.
Fast forward a few decades and a lot of people believe that the ‘true’ Australian is one from the outback and that because they don’t exist anymore Australia doesn’t have a proper history or culture of its own that we can be truly proud of. We all live on the coast and in the suburbs now so all that bushman stuff can be resigned to history along with all the Australian characteristics that we used to have.
I don’t believe that this is true. The problem with Australia’s culture is that our development was interrupted by World War 1 and 2 which saw us wake up in the 1950s in a completely different world to the one all our previous myths came from. To make up for this people turned back to the symbols of the previous era and forgot that you’re supposed to be constantly reinterpreting them for the present day. When it comes down to it Australians haven’t completely changed- we’re still Australian the way we once were- it’s just that we cant recognise ourselves because of all the out-of-date Bushman imagery used to examine both Australians as we were and Australians as we are.
Hoges- perhaps a bad example of a proper Australian beer ad
In my opinion, one of the few places where Australia has been authentically discussed is in our beer ads. Beer ads are suburban, they have our own unique sense of humour, contain all the bushman/larrikin characters that Australian myth contains and are relevant stories of our day to day lives. They haven’t got lost in sentimentalising the past but have got on with reinterpreting the present (and I think everyone would appreciate the irony of beer being the holder of a relevant Australian character).
Perhaps most importantly our beer ads are a form of expression unique to Australia. You go anywhere else in the world and you’ll find beer ads rarely step beyond the Big Three Bloke Issues- Women (usually in bikinis), Cars and Sport- but then you’ll come home to see 500 odd guys running across a huge field of grass in robes, pretending to take their beer seriously and just taking the piss out of themselves. For the rest of the world an ad like that is unusual but here you change the channel and you find another beer ad where a bloke bomb dives into a spa or throws our national symbol on a bbq or gets a lift home from the pub in a pizza delivery car. Our beer ads are unique, their funny and they’re something that is relevant to our lives and who we are today as Australians.
A few years back I asked one of my uni lecturers where you could find Australian beer ads and he said that he had tried to track them down but, because the advertising agencies owned the ads and not the beer companies, they were often just thrown away and not kept on record. Here was a lecturer in Australian Television Studies that couldn’t get his hands on beer ads!
Well no more. For the above reasons I’m going to put together what I hope will be the internet’s greatest tribute to Aussie beer ads. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and video clip sharing The Urban Telegraph is going to become a historical record of as many Australian beer ads as I can track down, starting tomorrow with an award winning number that was, quite literally, the best ad (over 30 seconds) in the world as voted by Cannes.
So stay tuned. The pride of Australian TV is about to go on display...
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Comment by Grant
If you heard my room mates going on you would have thought Australian ads were the worst in the world.
Personally, I struggle to match 'the world's best ads' with the same countries that bring us the favellas from City of God/Men.