What did people in the UK think of this during the 1990s?

[Femusia]

If you were a young person during the 1990s when "Cool Britannia" was all the range as Britain's cultural rejuvenation with things like the Union Jack being fashionable again and Spice Girls and Oasis being cool; or even if you weren't young but remember it, how did you and other Brits at the time feel about Australia?

I have been doing some research into Australian attitudes at the time of the 1990s and I learnt how at the time they were at the tail end of their own cultural rejuvenation which began in the 1970s as they started asserting their nationhood and culture against Britain and stopped feeling British. They were rebelling against British symbols like the very Union Jack that Geri Halliwell had so famously made fashionable again with her Union Jack dress and were trying to abolish the monarchy and acting indifferent to British culture.

A quote from a sociological journal investigating Australian attitudes to Britain in the 1990s, "But Cool Britannia was too late to matter Australians. By then, Britain was a foreign country and not the best known one. The Spice Girls did not displace Seinfeld and the Simpsons and that was in place by the 1980. The 1970s was the last decade that British culture could have such an impact."

How did you as British people, especially British youth have such self-confidence, pride and enjoyment at the time if Australians were actively behaving as such, which surely delegitimised Cool Britannia because if they didn't care why did you? Or, were you just not thinking about them to start off with and Cool Britannia was an internal thing not concerned with the world and by the 1990s, Britain didn't care what the likes of Australia thought?

I just watched a 1997 clip of Coronation Street in which an 18-year old Leanne Battersby has a Geri Halliwell poster on her bedroom wall and is listening to Spice Girl songs, symbolic of youth at the time. This would likely not have been something an Australian teenager or young adult would've done because according to that article, "As late as 1990, Kylie Minogue found that Australians were not impressed or bothered about the fact that she had departed for London or adopted a British accent".

So, what do you think of this?

As a teen around then I can remember only good relationships with Oz and UK. Lots of backpacking in both directions. Lots of Australians and new Zealand teens worked in the UK in bars. Australia seemed very cut off from the rest of the world and were behind in fashion etc probably due to the summer fashion being 6 months delayed to ours.

I travelled and worked on Oz at the end of 90s into 00s and was made to feel very welcome over there. So much so 2 of my friends stayed and are now married to Australians.

Good times, not a time a teen on either side disliked the other.

But wasn’t Diana Australia’s Princess too?!

No not really. You've been told repeatedly that no one in either country saw it that way. Can you not just give it a rest now? Why post if you aren't going to take anything on board?

What is the point of this OP? You’ve been told by people with lived experience of the time that we never gave a flying fuck what Australia thought of Britain. Much like I expect Australia wouldn’t have cared what Britain thought of them.

No.

Just to reiterate what many have said before. Asking the same question over and over is not going to get you a different answer on this one.

Not everryone in the UK was weeping and wailing over Dianas death
It was shocking becsuse she wss only 36 and it was a horrible accident
But other than that it didnt affect me
I cant speak for how the people of Australia.felt though
It may also surprise you to know that despite the BBC,s bet efforts to tell the whole world everyone was Devastated at the death of the Queen not everyone was either.

Agree. Was also shocking how insane the country seemed to go over it. Most unlike us as a Nation (then. We are like that now).

I think @Femusia struggles with thinking and writing, but, equally, is desperate to keeping making a point s/he doesn't seem quite able to formulate in the ragebait way they would prefer. There seem to be recurrent obsessions with Princess Diana, invasion and conquest and law, and the terrible injustice that is law conversion courses (which apparently allow people to get Oxbridge degrees in 'soft subjects' and then convert, using the prestige of their first degree to smooth their progress in law).

See also recent threads on restricting the legal profession to those with a first degree in law, and whether, if the UK were invaded, and the conquerors totally changed UK law, would lawyers still know how to practice, and, on Scotsnet, on how an independent Scotland would have to rely on 'England being nice' because otherwise if Scotland gained independence, couldn’t England then wage war on Scotland and forcefully seize all of Scotland’s resources anyway?

I suspect @Femusia is the latest iteration of whoever that poster was who was obsessed with his/her (I always assumed 'he') own particular take on British history, which always came back to the twin obsessions of (1) asking why Britain had 'allowed' its empire to break up, as it should clearly have continued to 'dominate' the world, and (2) why it had allowed other countries to copy its Industrial Revolution technological advances, because if it hadn't, it could have continued to 'dominate'.

It's not clear to me whether them being unleashed on a degree in history or in law is more alarming.

It’s one of the first occasions of “mass public hysteria” that I remember. Even 9/11 didn’t come close, and that could have happened to any of us, if we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not a lot. With no 24/7 (social) media to distract, I was just quietly but busily getting on with leaving home and forging my own path in life.

Not that I was a "cool" youngster anyway...!

Although there wasn't the same hysteria, I think there was soon a much quieter sense that something had changed after 9/11 and the world was never going to be the same again.

People were scared after 9/11. And there were sadly a raft of terrorist incidents afterwards including in the UK. Various places in the UK now have permanent barriers to try and prevent or limit a terrorist attack.

I was a bit younger, but agree with pretty much everything you said-Neighbours and Kylie was about all we thought. But back then, you wouldn't have been accused of privilege, or told to educate yourself. Things that get the keyboard warriors going weren't an issue-and I'd never have dreamed that a school girl would get people calling her racist for wearing a flag dress, or that anyone would have a problem with the flag, if that's relevant, OP. None of my white friends thought it would bother me at all-and it didn't! Not having the internet meant we could just let Noel and Liam be, no doubt they'd be criticised if they were new now.
What I really didn't foresee is that tweens and teens today would be listening to Oasis-and priding themselves on having CDs!

But that was from the IRA, too, well before 9/11.

If not poorly formulated AI glitching over ‘Britannia’, my impression is that OP is trying to write an essay they’re not equipped to tackle.

They’ve been given a quote in the required reading about Australians not being fussed about Cool Britannia and rather than recognise that as a comment on Australia’s internal political journey, they’ve misunderstood it as pertaining to the UK. They’re completely stubbornly stuck on their misunderstanding of that quote, so are trying to shoehorn Australian perceptions of the UK into British perceptions of ourselves.

I don’t think they’re Australian, they read like a young, unworldly American reading about the decline of an historic empire without any human context. Could be from anywhere though.

In the 1990’s I was a teenager and I’ll be very honest - I never gave a second thought to Australia as we as a family had no connections there and it always seemed so far away. Coupled with the fact that there were no social media platforms other!

I realise one of the reasons I perceive OP as possibly American, is the Trumpian undertones to the obsession with Australia (not any other part of the Commonwealth), because well, Australia’s really BIG! Just look at a map. How could little Britain not care what great big Australia thinks???

I mean OP have you SEEN the size of Canada? I know Americans are conditioned to consider Canada insignificant but actually, in the 1990s there was some serious republicanism going on there and real potential for a redefined political relationship with the UK. What did Canadians think of Britpop, eh?