Sedimentary layers : Bob Hawke’s beer world record and ocker chic
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2023
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 47, no. 3 (2023), p. 478-496
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- Description: Australia’s 23rd prime minister, Bob Hawke, is celebrated for a world record set at the University of Oxford in the 1950s for the fastest consumption of a yard of ale. The beer record is apocryphal, having five evidential flaws. However, the embellishment—or fabrication—of the record was crucial to the “larrikin-leader” dual image Hawke constructed over the course of the 1970s as he manoeuvred to enter parliament. Hawke’s dual image appealed widely from the 1970s onwards because of the rise of the “ocker”: a middle-class caricature of Australians. By the 1980s, a refined “ocker chic” identity had emerged in which the middle class could erect a national culture that feigned meritocracy. In the 2020s, politicians, professionals, performative fathers and others identify with an ahistorical nation in which irreverence, elasticated leather boots, cowboy hats, Bavarian-style cold beer, and stories of endurance in foreign lands help to conceal their privilege. While many commentators have tried to explain this phenomenon, Diane Kirkby’s formulation of ocker chic reveals the interchange between class, gender and race that has preserved neoliberal capitalism in Australia. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Book review : Clive Ponting, Churchill
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article , Book review
- Relation: Before/Now : Journal of the collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 1
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Book review : Clive Ponting, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994, 960pp. ISBN: 978-1856195737
Book review. The Menzies Era: The years that shaped modern Australia
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Before/Now : journal of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 1
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Book review of The Menzies Era: The years that shaped modern Australia John Howard, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2014, 720pp. RRP:$59.99, ISBN: 9781743097977
Book Review. The Spy Catchers. Vol. 1 of The Official History of ASIO. David Horner, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2014
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Before/Now : Journal of the collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 1
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Book Review of The Spy Catchers. Vol. 1 of The Official History of ASIO. David Horner, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2014 ISBN: 9781743319666.
Links in the chain: British slavery, Victoria and South Australia
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Before/Now : Journal of the collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 27-56
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- Description: Beneficiaries of British slavery were present in colonial Victoria and provincial South Australia, a link overlooked by successive generations of historians. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, hosted by University College, London, reveals many people in these colonies as having been connected to slave money awarded as compensation by the Imperial Parliament in the 1830s. This article sets out the beneficiaries to demonstrate the scope of exposure of the colonies to slavery. The list includes governors, jurists, politicians, clergy, writers, graziers and financiers, as well as various instrumental founders of South Australia. While Victoria is likely to have received more of this capital than South Australia, the historical significance of compensation is greater for the latter because capital from beneficiaries of slavery, particularly George Fife Angas and Raikes Currie, ensured its creation. Evidence of beneficiaries of slavery surrounds us in the present in various public honours and notable buildings.