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?

When I asked the many young australians who lived in the UK at the time why they came to the UK, they always said for the culture as Australia read didn't have much.

I was born in 1974 and lived in Australia from 1998 to 2002. Among the Australians I knew, Britain was generally regarded as another country, rather than a “mother country” they felt they had to define themselves against. That didn’t mean they disliked Britain or British music; I just didn’t get the sense that Cool Britannia meant much to how they saw themselves.

There was a lot of travel in both directions then. I worked with Australians my age in London, and we were all having an amazing time living abroad. They loved their time in Britain, just as we loved our time in Australia. The older British expats I knew in Sydney also recognised their roots while being very happy with the lives they’d made in Australia. To me, those things seemed to sit comfortably alongside each other. I don’t remember anyone treating it as a statement about either country.

I think it’s because the UK is Australia’s mother country so the UK is like a special, mysterious country in the eyes of Australians which they have to define themselves against to prove they are independent.

That might have been true in the 50s and 60s. I've been to Australia around ten times since the early 90s and that's not the impression I get at all. London was and is full of Aussies, I hardly think that means they regard it as a special mysterious country at all.

And I'm baffled by this 'how do you regard a former settler country' business. What a bizarre take.

I was into Rock music & I had seen AC/DC at live in UK in the late 80s (Australian band)
I was not into the Spice Girls music

I had travelled to some places in Europe & I spoke about going to Australia on holiday.
However, it was far too expensive for me to go.
I did not know anyone that had been on a gap year of travel.

I have a cousin who emigrated to Australia, but we were not close in 90s. They still live there.
We communicate via email now & they are researching the family tree.

There were lots of Australians in UK in 90s working in hospitality

Yes watched Neighbours, because it was on ITV (few TV channels at that time)

Yes watched Crocodile Dundee films

Yes watched Clive James on TV

Yes aware that Royal Family visited Australia as part of the former British Empire

I went on holiday to New Zealand in my 40s

I still hope to visit Australia one day in the future.

In the last couple of years, I have done much more research on the historical, cultural & natural aspects of Australia. This was not so freely available in 90s.

I certainly remember watching Neighbours and Home And Away quite religiously as a student in the late 80s and early 90s. I think that might pre-date Cool Britannia though

As a Brit currently living in Australia i would say that Brits (to the extent you can lump everyone as a homgenous block) really don't care what Australia is doing/what Australians think - its peripheral. Aussies care more about Britain because they are trying to prove themselves better than the mother country (lots of chips) and also there are a lot of people with British heritage who have some connection - this was a lot more prevalent in the 90s. Now Australia is much more multicultural with more immigrants from different countries and the British ancestry is further removed so i think Australians care less about Britain

Oh and @Goldenbear miserable music was born in the UK much earlier than grunge- just listen to Joy Division and the Smiths...

wtf?! lol. Who was thinking about what the Aussies thought? Surely no one gave a single fuck

I've never given any thought to what Australia thought about the UK, back then or now. I've always been vaguely aware than there's an anti monarchy element who would prefer to be distanced from UK influence (or it just might be the whole Commonwealth thing?).

As for Cool Britannia, it was really quite naff with some dodgy accents. Then again, I wasn't a "young person" by then had other influences.

So the 1990s took me from my late teens to my late 20s.

In the late 80s, Australia was largely perceived as a 'cool' place by young teenagers due to the popularity of Neighbours/Home and Away. I remember at one point in 1989 the music Top Ten was something like Kylie & Jason at number 1, Kylie at number 2, the theme from Scott and Charlene's wedding at number 3 ... That was starting to cool down in the 1990s, though, as the generation that had started watching 'Neighbours' after school went off to university!

I do remember the spirit of optimism in the 1990s that accompanied Cool Britannia. Staying up all night in 1997 watching Tory after Tory fall in the General Election, although when I had been a student earlier in the decade, 'New Labour' was largely distrusted by left wing student. I don't think I gave much thought to how this might be perceived overseas.

It was also the 1990s when the scandal of child migration was starting to come out, the Australian segment of this being something for which historic Australian and UK governments were jointly responsible, and I remember watching some TV documentaries about that. I didn't link it to any current perception of Australia but I was interested in the history of it.

I think in that era young people largely saw Australia as attractive - it had the same cultural threads common to the UK as most Commonwealth countries, driving on the left, playing cricket - all those Imperial hangovers - but better weather, a more laid back vibe, tanned people wandering round with surfboards. Surfer-dude culture in the UK had been up and coming all through the 80s and Australia was very in tune with that.

How odd, to imagine that british teens in the 90s thought Australia was the supreme judge of all culture 🤔

Nobody thought of Australia in the 90s except when The Ashes series was being played and "Cool Britannia" was seen as some ludicrous publicity idea dreamt up by some back-room wonk in No 10 with sod all to do with real life.

That's my recollection, anyway.

"The Mother country" is quite an outdated, and uncool (not to mention rather imperialist) way of describing Britain. Whereas the 90s "Cool Britannia" stuff was a much more future facing, "Britain as a young country" way of thinking about the UK (it was also quite superficial but all fashion trends are).
Therefore I don't think there was an expectation countries like Australia would share in it and their rejection of Britain/the monarchy as they modernised wouldn't have affected the Cool Britannia brand since is wasn't dependent on that. In fact quite the opposite. By the nineties imperialism, colonialism and Britain's role in that wasn't regarded positively within Britain. So reinventing/reclaiming the Union Jack etc was if anything trying to avoid being linked to old school paternalistic ideas of empire. Australia was also rejecting old school paternalistic views of empire in their case from the other side.

I was young at the time. Spent the first half of the decade still in the UK, then lived abroad in Asia for the second half but travelling back regularly. There was definitely a sense of optimism around the UK in the late 90s. I doubt that it even occurred to most British people to think about how Australians might feel about the UK, and I doubt that anyone really cared.

I had a lot of Australian friends at the time, and I don't think it was a question that they cared about much either. It just wasn't important for any of us. I don't think they particularly perceived the UK as being "the mother country" - they didn't all have British heritage in any case.

I certainly saw myself as being European at the time, and I still see myself as European now. Brexit doesn't change that.

Why are you asking all of these questions, OP? It feels like you are trying to make an issue out of something that nobody really cared about at the time.

I was a young adult in the 1990s. I never really gave Australia thought in political terms - just thought it sounded interesting and exciting but very dangerous because of all the poisonous animals. I didn’t expect Australians to think of England as the mother country. To me, Australia has always been very much its own country.

This. I was late 20s in the early 90s. I had a baby in 92 and another in 94. The only presence Australia had in my life was Neighbours on the TV ( watched in whilst in labour with son number 2). Didn't give a single milliseconds thought about Australia in any other context. I was aware of cool Britannia and the bands mentioned in other posts but hyperemesis meant I didn't get to enjoy much of it

If you're a journo, you should know it's 'all the rage', not 'range'.

Why would anyone have cared what Australians thought about us and why would they care what we though about them.

I lived through this period, born and brought up in London, you couldnt move for bloody Aussies and Kiwis serving you in bars and pubs and restaurants, back packing here there and everywhere. Also in the 80s friends of mine did gap years and did some travel there.

But thats it

To quote someone else on the first page, 'no one knew what every one else was thinking all the fucking time and were the better for it'

WHO CARES!!!

Isn't Australia famous throughout the world for its total lack of culture.

It was cool. I liked it

I wouldnt agree with this, I think at the time there was much of a view that Australia was about 30 years behind and NZ much worse, probably stuck in the 50s, certainly with regard to multiculturalism and racism. My peers and I were quite shocked at what we learned from Aussies about that.

I hope you credit Mumsnet as co-author of your thesis when it's published.

I used to frequent the redback in Acton in the late 90s. Jam packed with Aussies but we weren't having conversations about how each country was viewed by the other 😂

Yes, I'm sure opinions varied, I'm just giving my perceptions from the circles I moved in.

In my experience as a mid teen to early 20s in the 90s the cultural moment (not specifically union jacks but Brit pop etc) was entirely about self confidence and us liking our stuff rather than American music or Australian soaps. We didn’t think or care a jot about what those countries thought of our stuff but we liked it. I honestly still have no idea which British 90s stuff travelled abroad or who/what was popular in the US or AUS at the time.

As a youth teen in the 90s, I can’t say I or anyone I knew ever even thought about any of this stuff. Spice girls were fashionable but it was mainstream pop and not cool, but teens were into a load of sub cultures and spice girls were just main stream pop, the little kids loved them more as they could learn the dances. There was a load of media hype about them but teens didn’t care and adults were not into them. There was more subcultures that teens were into and they were centred around music genres, drum and base, garage, house, happy hardcore, goth, metal, grunge, indie, hip hop and then there were the kids who just liked pop music and boy bands. We all had our tribes and dressed accordingly.
Australia was somewhere most people wanted to travel to and travel around, for the beaches and fun.
literally no one thought in terms of Cool Britannia or gave Australia more than a thought than it is somewhere we would like to visit one day. We were all too busy in our music scenes, identity for youths was very much tied up in your music scene in the 90s.
there was a it girls and laddette culture that was hyped up by the media, to sell more papers but it wasn’t representative of what was actually going on in youth culture.
there was a heavy drinking culture in the uk, most teens were drinking and doing stuff centred around their specific music scene and the scenes did not mix at all, the dress codes for each scene were quite specific and you hung around with people in your scene. You could tell who was into your music just by what they wore.