damian‘The Vegemite Effect‘- or Why would you bother with Australian culture?
July 10th 2006 03:41
It’s rare to find an Australian who doesn’t care on some level about Aussie culture but it’s also rare to find an Australian who actually goes out of their way to see it. And that’s the problem- we’d like to have TV worth watching, movies worth going to the cinema for and the best music to be Australian but the fact is it’s usually not. If it is then it’s a once off and normal coverage will soon resume. It’s inevitable, it’s consistent and fighting it is an uphill battle not usually worth the effort. If it were a football team it would be the Rabbitohs. Aussie culture is just too much effort.
I’ve enjoyed Aussie culture for a long time. I don’t know why but I’ve never had to try to like Australian stuff. Like a little kid who decides to support a football team (the wrong football team) based on the first game he’s ever seen I watch the success of stuff made in Australia with the heartache only diehard supporters know and wonder when my team will get its act together. And the worst part is I don’t know why I love it.
I was looking for a metaphor that best described Aus culture and it’s ironic that the best one I could come up with was Vegemite. This black goo (as legend would have it, invented as a way of reusing beer hops) is so archetypically Australian to foreigners that I hesitate to use it but the love hate relationship we have with the stuff highlights the same love hate relationship we have with our culture.
Vegemite is unbelievably Australian. Although it works like any other bread spread, competing with the likes of jam and peanut butter for your lunch-time sanger, it’s taste is unique enough to divide people into those who eat it and those who don’t, people passionately declaring their allegiance to either camp in a display of patriotic and amused pride or disgusted revulsion. Once upon a time, so they say, we all ate the stuff and if you didn’t there was something very unpatriotic about you. These days we don’t eat that much of it, sandwiches being joined by junk food and everything else that we end up eating for lunch these days- eating out instead of packing a lunch- and with the demise of the sandwich goes one of the true icons of Australia’s culture.
Not only is it under pressure at the lunch table, it’s technically not even Australian anymore. Kraft owns Vegemite and Kraft is American. Americans own Vegemite and they don’t even eat the stuff! Even when we’re doing something uniquely Australian it’s not to the benefit of Australians but to the benefit of American shareholders.
But what has this got to do with the appreciation of Australian culture? Well everything really.
Australian culture is an acquired taste if ever there was one. Were you to be interested you’d probably have to go out of your way to experience it and even then you’d probably find it hard to digest. It’s similar to what you’re used to, packaged in the form of music, TV, movies and every other form of postmodern expression we have today but it’s also very different, unique and truly bizarre in a way that makes you wonder who uses the stuff and, above all, why? On first experience it can be quite strong while at the same time very uninspiring. Again you question ‘why on earth…’?
It’s not until you don’t have it that you think about it. If you were to think about it, surrounded by all the other stuff that comes out of America and is in your face all the time, you realise that it’s a taste you don’t get often. It’s different, unique, like nothing else you’re seeing.
And it’s at this point that people either fall in love with it or file it away under ‘experiences I don’t want to think about’. Just like Vegemite.
That’s often what Australian culture does- it polarises people between those who love it and those who see it as a freakshow of sorts; a cultural abnormality that is amusing simply because it exists, a story to tell your mates when you go back home from your year at an Australian university.
Want an example? Sure, I can give you an example- Kath and Kim.
Kath and Kim is one of the few popular sitcoms to be made in Australia recently and perfectly sums up ‘The Vegemite Effect’. It’s weird, it’s fairly slow and doesn’t have a laugh track. The show revolves around a group of dags obsessed with their lifestyle, completely oblivious to the fools they’re making of themselves. The characters are bizarre, they speak funny and they look ridiculous. And people love them.
Why is unclear to those who just don’t get it. Some people listen to their mates go on and on about it, watch the show and completely miss the humour in it. They cant fathom the humour, they hate the characters and feel really uncomfortable watching anything on the ABC.
Attending a uni I’ve had the privilege of watching ‘The Vegemite Effect’ in action on many occasion, especially with Kath and Kim and foreign students. A lkot of foreign students are told to watch it and decide never to repeat the experience but every now and then there’ll be someone hunkered down in the library with every Kath and Kim televisual product the ABC can muster or asking their lecturer where they can get the fourth series (which doesn‘t exist). They ‘got it’, they loved it and they’ve gotten the bug and from the number of countries Kath and Kim is now screening in they don’t appear to be the only foreigners getting a taste for the weirdness that is Aussie culture.
For those who have gone out of their way, experienced a wide range of modern Aussie culture (not just the old school, ‘we all live in the outback’ stuff) and enjoyed the experience on some level there usually isn’t any going back. Sure, it’s not the only thing you watch and do but when you’ve got the time or there’s something on TV you cant help but have a look and see what it’s like. For some it even becomes a full blown hobby, going out of their way to see stuff because they love it, want to support Aussie stuff so that more good things will be made or need to hunt down that rare copy of the Barry MacKenzie sequel they haven’t got yet. For others it may just be checking in from time to time like a casual sport supporter, just to see how well the team is going. For the rest it’s a total mystery.
It’s one of the aims of this blog to change people’s opinions about Aussie culture. Through articles and whatever else I’d like to promote the fun side of Aussie culture, the bits worth seeing and all the incredible stories that surround them. Most people don’t get to see the good stuff because it’s drowned out in a sea of Hollywood marketing and they definitely don’t get to hear the history and how we came to have the stories and myths we have. If I can provide a place for the die hard fans, turn casual supporters into long term fans and transmit the Vegemite Effect to some of the non believers then I’ve done my job.
For more on Vegemite go to the wiki here.
For more on Kath and Kim go here or the wiki here.
I was looking for a metaphor that best described Aus culture and it’s ironic that the best one I could come up with was Vegemite. This black goo (as legend would have it, invented as a way of reusing beer hops) is so archetypically Australian to foreigners that I hesitate to use it but the love hate relationship we have with the stuff highlights the same love hate relationship we have with our culture.
Vegemite is unbelievably Australian. Although it works like any other bread spread, competing with the likes of jam and peanut butter for your lunch-time sanger, it’s taste is unique enough to divide people into those who eat it and those who don’t, people passionately declaring their allegiance to either camp in a display of patriotic and amused pride or disgusted revulsion. Once upon a time, so they say, we all ate the stuff and if you didn’t there was something very unpatriotic about you. These days we don’t eat that much of it, sandwiches being joined by junk food and everything else that we end up eating for lunch these days- eating out instead of packing a lunch- and with the demise of the sandwich goes one of the true icons of Australia’s culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite
Not only is it under pressure at the lunch table, it’s technically not even Australian anymore. Kraft owns Vegemite and Kraft is American. Americans own Vegemite and they don’t even eat the stuff! Even when we’re doing something uniquely Australian it’s not to the benefit of Australians but to the benefit of American shareholders.
But what has this got to do with the appreciation of Australian culture? Well everything really.
Australian culture is an acquired taste if ever there was one. Were you to be interested you’d probably have to go out of your way to experience it and even then you’d probably find it hard to digest. It’s similar to what you’re used to, packaged in the form of music, TV, movies and every other form of postmodern expression we have today but it’s also very different, unique and truly bizarre in a way that makes you wonder who uses the stuff and, above all, why? On first experience it can be quite strong while at the same time very uninspiring. Again you question ‘why on earth…’?
It’s not until you don’t have it that you think about it. If you were to think about it, surrounded by all the other stuff that comes out of America and is in your face all the time, you realise that it’s a taste you don’t get often. It’s different, unique, like nothing else you’re seeing.
And it’s at this point that people either fall in love with it or file it away under ‘experiences I don’t want to think about’. Just like Vegemite.
That’s often what Australian culture does- it polarises people between those who love it and those who see it as a freakshow of sorts; a cultural abnormality that is amusing simply because it exists, a story to tell your mates when you go back home from your year at an Australian university.
Want an example? Sure, I can give you an example- Kath and Kim.
Kath and Kim is one of the few popular sitcoms to be made in Australia recently and perfectly sums up ‘The Vegemite Effect’. It’s weird, it’s fairly slow and doesn’t have a laugh track. The show revolves around a group of dags obsessed with their lifestyle, completely oblivious to the fools they’re making of themselves. The characters are bizarre, they speak funny and they look ridiculous. And people love them.
Why is unclear to those who just don’t get it. Some people listen to their mates go on and on about it, watch the show and completely miss the humour in it. They cant fathom the humour, they hate the characters and feel really uncomfortable watching anything on the ABC.
Attending a uni I’ve had the privilege of watching ‘The Vegemite Effect’ in action on many occasion, especially with Kath and Kim and foreign students. A lkot of foreign students are told to watch it and decide never to repeat the experience but every now and then there’ll be someone hunkered down in the library with every Kath and Kim televisual product the ABC can muster or asking their lecturer where they can get the fourth series (which doesn‘t exist). They ‘got it’, they loved it and they’ve gotten the bug and from the number of countries Kath and Kim is now screening in they don’t appear to be the only foreigners getting a taste for the weirdness that is Aussie culture.
For those who have gone out of their way, experienced a wide range of modern Aussie culture (not just the old school, ‘we all live in the outback’ stuff) and enjoyed the experience on some level there usually isn’t any going back. Sure, it’s not the only thing you watch and do but when you’ve got the time or there’s something on TV you cant help but have a look and see what it’s like. For some it even becomes a full blown hobby, going out of their way to see stuff because they love it, want to support Aussie stuff so that more good things will be made or need to hunt down that rare copy of the Barry MacKenzie sequel they haven’t got yet. For others it may just be checking in from time to time like a casual sport supporter, just to see how well the team is going. For the rest it’s a total mystery.
It’s one of the aims of this blog to change people’s opinions about Aussie culture. Through articles and whatever else I’d like to promote the fun side of Aussie culture, the bits worth seeing and all the incredible stories that surround them. Most people don’t get to see the good stuff because it’s drowned out in a sea of Hollywood marketing and they definitely don’t get to hear the history and how we came to have the stories and myths we have. If I can provide a place for the die hard fans, turn casual supporters into long term fans and transmit the Vegemite Effect to some of the non believers then I’ve done my job.
For more on Vegemite go to the wiki here.
For more on Kath and Kim go here or the wiki here.
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Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
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Techbreak
maybe you won't think this is funny, but I wrote this about Australian culture. It's a half-serious joke...
and this is how much Americans know about Australia - amazing considering, as you said, they own Vegemite!
Comment by Grant
As for what you wrote it's so very true. Maybe it's because we take the piss so often that 'look' has become the shorthand for 'okay, now I'm being serious' the same way we say 'how are you' when we're not actually asking how you are, we're just saying hello. It's shorthand for 'hello, I care about you and I'm being friendly' or something...