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?

Eurovision is a completely baffling entity to me - how are so many countries that ARE NOT IN EUROPE allowed to be part of it?? Can't the other continents have their own version (extremely lighthearted) 😂

I turned 20 in 1987 and 30 is 1997, so probably a touch older than what you want. I spent 2 months in Australia in 82 and it was the first country I’d been to which felt so familiar and I’d been to lots of Europe and the USA by then. I also spent 3 years in the late 80’s living with an Australian friend, both of us in the USA. We were much more alike and sharing cultural similarities than the Americans around us. For instance, we knew the sane tv shows and music that the Americans hadn’t heard of. One of our Australian friends got a Bassett hound, I straight away asked if he’d called it Fred. He said yes and American friends who were there were dumbfounded I’d been able to guess right first time, lol. As we moved through the 90’s we were both back home but still in touch, we still shared info on our lives with each other, some similarities, some differences. I didn’t really give any thought to our British identity having much effect in Australia, other than we still watched a lot of each other tv and listened to each others music. I certainly didn’t think it was all one way. We are still really close, I saw her earlier this year in the uk and we chat over SM several times a week.

Neighbours... and Crocodile Dundee. Why would I know anything else about Ozz?

Have you got enough to finish your assignment OP? I can't imagine why anyone in Australia gave a shit about what the UK thought of them or vice versa in 1995...and I say that as a Kiwi who is in the demographic you are interested in, who was living in Europe that year.

This all seems a bit off.

I can't see any scenario in which Australians of Irish heritage would see the UK as a mother country.

Australia from the 1990s on was developing into a multi ethnic society, with immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Poland, India, Philippines, China, Korea, Lebanon, and a host of other countries, none of whom would have understood the UK as a 'mother country'.

Britain imagined itself as a rival to France and Germany as a leader of the EEC when it first joined, and many Britons continued to chafe at the idea of the UK as an equal of all other states within the EU, even states like Ireland, Latvia, Czechia, or Slovakia. Meanwhile, the myth of the 'special relationship' with the US continued to exercise a hold over the British national imagination. It was a case of one foot in and one foot out, bets continually hedged on where the UK really belonged.

I'm slightly older than your Cool Britannia crowd, but I remember there was quite a lot of talk in the 80s news about Australia no longer wanting to be aligned with the monarchy. It was seen as a tricky time, but Prince Charles and Diana did a tour with a very young William and everyone was so enamoured of Diana, she was seen to have 'saved the day'.
Other than that, all people here were really bothered about was Scott and Charlene's relationship in neighbours. Nobody really gave a second thought to Australia. It was too far away.

This

Did Australians mourn Diana like Brits did or see her as a foreigner?

The quote was from a sociological journal discussing evolving Australian attitudes to UK and how by the 1970s, Australian nationalism resurfaced, repudiating British identity and Britain became less relevant to Australians as US became more important.

I spent a year in Australia at the end of the nineties and they bloody loved the Spice Girls!

The 1990s is quite some time ago. Did Australians view Britain exactly the same as they do now then or somewhat differently? In terms of level of connection and emotional affinity?

Are you Australian, OP?

Like others, it genuinely didn’t cross my mind what Australia thought about the UK. Australia barely crossed my mind at all. Just not on my radar and not sure why you think it would have been.

Not quite sure on the basis for your thoughts on this.

Also don’t understand your Seinfeld and Simpsons point? Don’t understand it as they are completely different to the spice girls so don’t understand the comparison. But also they are American so again, not sure what point you are trying to make?

In fact, I could better understand the reasoning for your question if it was what did we think of how AMERICA viewed us. The US was more pertinent to us during to pop culture, music, tv shows, Hollywood. British musicians / actors were always trying to “break America”.

But Australia? Other than Home and Away and Neighbours, it just wasn’t relevant / didn’t register.

You’d have to ask Australians that.

The question is in terms of the emotional identification of Australians and Brits as fellow British people as they used to and whether that still existed by the 1990s. And whether Australians and Brits viewed each other differently than to now or not.

I turned 21 in 1996 and went backpacking in Australia in 1997, had my 22nd birthday in Sydney. Absolute halcyon days and a wonderfully optimistic time AFAIC. Aussies and Brits rubbed along very well together both in Aus and UK, I lived in London after graduation, there were a ton of Aussies travelling and working there. But then younger people of different nationalities usually get on pretty well together and I wasn't really thinking of how the nations saw one another. Though I was in Sydney when Princess Diana died and was quite glad to be out of my own country and to miss a lot of the hoo haa around it.

Exactly what Australians are you thinking of?

I don't think Australians were the homogenous group you believe they were, in terms of feelings toward the UK.

Certainly my Irish-Australian relatives, three generations of them, with the first generation arriving before WW1, had no feeling toward the alleged 'mother country' apart from huge bitterness and resentment. My great uncle who first emigrated was hit on the hand with a belt for speaking Irish, and forced to learn and recite a rhyme expressing thanks to God for making him a happy English child, in school in Ireland back at the turn of the 20th century. He was not a happy English child.

When the relatives attained a degree of financial security they plonked down their money and made visits to Ireland, to see the old farm and meet the Irish relatives. They didn't make any sort of pilgrimage to the UK, which you keep on calling the place known to Australians as the mother country.

As a 60-something Australian, I would say it has been a very very long time (way before the 1990s) since Australia regarded the UK as anything ‘special’ or somewhere to prove ourselves to. And I am not sure ‘mysterious’ has ever been a consideration.

When I was very young, the British cultural influence was still strong but it hasn’t been for a long time. My kids were born in the 1990s and their cultural references - aside from Australian, of course - are definitely American, not British.

Ok, well from my experience and the responses on here - Young Brits attitude to how Australians viewed them in the 90s was complete ambivalence.

Holy shit, what a stupid post this is.

Most Brits didn’t mourn Diana the way the press suggested. It was only a small with public minority who did. As always the tabloids love royalty as it’s a home grown soap opera which sells.

Interesting - I came of age at this time and for me it was a moment of heightened cultural exchange between the two countries. London was jam packed with Australians, Australian pubs, communities. Australians were behind every bar (or it certainly felt like it! I even saw a well known soap star bar tending in my zone 2 local pub).

Similarly, almost everyone went to Australia on their ‘gap yah’ and many planned to move there after university so it really was two way traffic in those heady late 90s/Y2K days.

The reduction of Australians in London and the UK generally was pretty swift and seems to track with the wider decline of the UK’s soft power status. The rise of others centres such as Singapore and Dubai where Australians could make money closer to home contributed.

The cities of Sydney and Melbourne of course are culturally impactful now. Elsewhere UK friends who live there complain how monotonous life is outside of these hubs and how much they miss the UK for cultural activities. The Australians now seem to more interesting things to think about.

First post nails it.

What are you studying? Why are you writing this very specific questions?
Sounds like something for uni

I didn’t think about it is the answer, I don’t think anyone did so I’m not sure you’ll get the answers to your questions

I also went back packing in Australia, loved it great people great country, yes a couple of people mentioned it when I was there
lots of Australians working in the UK at the time, nice we all got on well.

But I never thought about what anybody else thought of Cool Britannia. If you were Australian and living here then you’d have an opinion, but why would you even care about it if you were living in Australia?

”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”

honestly, I’ll find this really weird. Are you very young and thinking that the world was connected in the same way as now because it totally wasn’t? No social media.

It never crossed my mind to think what Australians (or any other nation for that matter) thought of us. And I wasn't aware of 'Cool Britannia' either. I was about 30. Even now, I don't wonder what other people think of us.

Stop using AI to write your posts…unless you are do schoolwork which explains the phrasing and double questions

First of all, Australians are not a bloc. We are a massively multicultural country so I imagine individual feelings about the UK would vary a lot across the population. Many people have family connections, many do not. I was ‘youth’ in the 1990s. I liked the Britannia stuff at the time - but did not identify with it any more than I would culture from any other foreign country. I was supportive of the Republican movement in a sort of ‘yeah why not’ way but it wasn’t something I or my cohort thought too much about. Australias connection to the UK has been purely legal and historical in my lifetime. As part of the commonwealth there is I would say a cultural preference for the UK over the US. But that’s about as high as you could put it in my opinion. Suggesting we were in any way British would have created much amusement then and now.