The new frontier
The New Frontier
Hi Fibre, I have finally written something serious for once. If you have
any comments, then they would be more than appreciated. It is about
Australia and globalisation and Fitzroy and technology. It is a little
rough, but then again so are you lot.
(sorry no footnotes in email)
The New Frontier
It is perhaps surprising for rest of the world to learn, and for some
Australians, that in the industrialised world, Australia is one of the most
urbanised societies. Most Australians live in large cities with 64% of the
population in the capitols cities, 17% live in rural areas, and the rest in
large towns. At the time of Federation, it was almost exactly the opposite
with most of the population living in rural areas. During the 20th Century,
rural employment dramatically declined and industry and people flocked to
the cities. The cities became vibrant booming industrial hubs that
attracted immigrant workers from all around the world. In the post-war
period, Australia doubled its population in a generation, bringing migrants
from England and Ireland, Greece and Italy, and later Asia, creating
perhaps the most multi-cultural society of all the advanced industrial
economies.
The demographic realities of Australia are often in stark contrast to our
resilient popular identity. This identity, which circulates in our popular
media and press, is one that insists that we are a still a masculine,
Anglo-Saxon, and laconic people who live an idealic and relaxed lifestyle
in wide-open spaces. From Patrick White to Frederick McCubbin, from Banjo
Patterson to the movies that spectacularly broke into the US and European
markets in the 70’s and 80’s, the mythology of an Australia connected to
the bush is as resilient as a frill necked lizard baking itself in the sun.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s under Federal Labor with Paul Keating and
Bob Hawke, the ‘idea of Australia’ became a vigorous national debate that
centred on multiculturalism, deregulation, republicanism, and the dalliance
with ‘the world stage’. We opened our industries to international
competition, deregulated our currency and financial system, sold off nearly
all our public industries and through our arts bodies and galleries,
attempted to foster a new more inclusive national culture that recognised
the many faces that make up our national neighbourhoods.
What resulted is an Australia of the late 20the and early 21st that is
radically different to the country that characterised us for most of the
last century. It resulted in a much more ‘global nation’, one that no
longer seemed to suffer from a ‘tyranny of distance’ much more open to the
rest of the world and one with a number of new domestic frontiers.
The frontier, as articulated in the Bernard Salt Report, The Big Shift, is
no longer the great post-war middle suburbs based on material and social
egalitarianism. The middle suburbs are where masses of people settled
during the long post-war boom, from the second world war to the early 70’s.
The long boom, so well articulated by one of the great historians of the
20th Century, Eric Hobsbawn, was a period of growth that the world had
never known. The output of manufactures quadrupled between the early 1950’s
and the early 1970’s and world trade in manufactured items grew tenfold.
Australia became during this time perhaps the world’s most middle-class
society with over half our population situated in the middle strata.
Working people for the first time had a disposable income and skills that
could afford them a place in the middle class. An income that could buy
cars and a brick-veneer house in the suburbs, clothes and even luxury food
items imported from half way across the globe. In another generation, this
would have only been a dream.
“What had once been luxury, became the expected standard of comfort, at all
events in rich countries: the refrigerator, the private washing machine,
the telephone”.
The image of Australia in the long boom of 1950’s and 60’s is one of
prosperity and comfort, of conservatism and ‘wake in fright’ conformity, of
high-tariffs, restrictive censorship, and extraordinarily bad public
architecture. It is a time when people moved out of the inner suburbs in
their droves, from the damp and cramped houses of the inner-city ’struggle
towns’ so well documented in Janet McCalman’s oral history of Richmond, to
the spacious comfort of the suburbs.
However, in the Australia of this century, the frontier is no longer the
middle suburbs of Barry McKenzie or the bush of Paul Hogan. The new
frontiers are at the fringes (or the ‘edge city’, as described by Joel
Garreau)) and the inner-cities. Bernard Salt goes as far as to assert that
we are entering a ‘third Australian culture’ or a country defined by the
new demographic of the beach, the inner-cities, and the fringes.
This project in a small way seeks to comprehend one of these new frontiers.
This frontier is in the oldest suburb in one of the countries largest
cities. The suburb is Fitzroy in Melbourne, the cities first suburb.
Fitzroy, like Sydney’s Marackville, or the West End in Brisbane, is
arguable one of the country most diverse in terms of lifestyle, income
distribution, and ethnicity. They are areas with stark contrast between old
economies and new, between small ethnic business’s described in Jock
Collins (et.al.) seminal study of small business in Marackville A Shop Full
of Dreams, to the new middle classes living in the perfumed remains of the
industrial era.
Like the broader city and country in which it is situated, Fitzroy is a
suburb with many beginnings and many identities. For many new migrants,
Fitzroy is the initial encounter with Australia. First, it was the Italians
and Greeks, and then it was the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Africans. During
last century, the idea of Australia became one as a destination for all
comers from all parts of the globe. Stuart McIntyre one of the countries
most pre-eminent historians claims that a multiplicity of beginnings
“further undermined the foundational significance of 1788″.
“The blurring of origins turned Australian history into a story of
journeyings and arrivals, shared by all and endlessly repeated”
Fitzroy is a suburb with many beginnings, now in its third century. It has
changed from its roots as a somewhat rough and insular working class suburb
into one of the countries most diverse, tolerant, unequal, and curious
suburbs. Dennis O’Rourke in his recent documentary Cunnamulla (2001)
portrays an outback town as the very embodiment of Australian contemporary
history. In another generation, perhaps this was true. The bush and rural
economies have taken an inordinate share of domestic economic restructuring
linked to globalisation. This has resulted in rural decline and the rise of
the far right in the Australian political scene. The inner cities are
another country, a country for better or worse that increasingly looks like
the rest of the world.
What is Globalisation
It is perhaps a long bow to draw, to leap between local experiences within
an inner-city Australian community to the global discourses that are the
historical definitive ideas of our time: to leap between local economies
and day-to-day human interaction, to that which effects a good deal of
humanity. However, the argument could also be made that it is impossible to
do one without the other, it is impossible to understand the global without
understanding to some degree your own relative cultural and geographical
viewpoint. It is within local communities in which most of us live and
globalisation needs to be understood in human dimensions.
As the meta-structures of the history of a nation slowly erode, we are left
with small histories and a myriad of voices. As Richard Falk, the author of
Predatory Globalisation asserts, the long period of Westphalia
international relations is nearing an end, and we need to understand the
forces beyond the nation state. Globalisation is not one thing, nor is it
mono-directional; it is a convergence of forces, both local and national,
both policy driven and technological driven, both corporate driven and
community driven.
This is not of course the first time the world has witnessed large global
movements as there was the free-trade movement emanating from Britain in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and colonialism and
socialism were enormous globalising forces. Before the first world war,
Western Europe controlled most of the world’s landmass, and after the
second world war; communism controlled two thirds of the world’s people.
The dominant characteristic of today’s globalisation is free trade, the
liberal democratic, capitalist mode of production, new communication
technologies, and the ascendancy of large multi-nationals. Globalisation is
heavily driven by the developed world’s private sector, and a shift from
the nation-state sovereignty to transnational actors from both
non-government and the private sector. The United States defines the
ideology of globalisation and Corporations are the main catalyst. Many of
these corporations are involved in cultural production thus creating their
own world culture and value system. This value system is based on
consumerism and the triumph of the individual over society. There is
likewise a growing interdependence between nations as they are drawn into a
global economy and culture.
It must be reiterated that globalisation is not an umbrella term, but is a
very specific thing that is the direct result of a number of government
policies and technological innovations. The policies by national
governments from the early 70’s helped the spread of globalisation and many
argue that this has resulted in a number of the sovereign powers of the
state being supplanted by transnational forces. Capitalism has always been
international and relied on internationalism to expand, but this has
entered a new stage. As Morley argues “maintenance of national sovereignty
and identity is becoming increasingly difficult, as the unities of economic
and cultural production and consumption become increasingly transnational”.
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