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?

I was a student in the early 90s. I didn't think about Australia other than Kylie Minogue and the working holiday folks I met during my summer vacations working in Edinburgh.

I don't think that British youth had much opinion on what Australians thought of them. I think that people who emigrated to places like Australia, America etc from the UK and Ireland seemed to often still feel connected to their heritage but I don't think it was really a two way street.
I watched some Australian shows growing up, but I wasn't aware of Australian news and it seemed very distant, not just physically

Actually I’ve just remembered in the early 90s how many Australians there were in London. It certainly made me think subconsciously I guess that young Australians wanted to be in London. I remember the big Aussie bar in Shepherd’s Bush (what was that chain?) and the church on Sundays 😂

I lived in NW London at the time, there were more from Auz, NZ and SA than Brits and we all shared flats and got pissed together. And we collectively hated the Spice Girls 😂

Don't know about Australia. Full of snakes and spiders 😉but Union Jack dresses and Cool Britannia, we would all be accused of being racist today.

Omg! I'd forgotten about the Church on a Sunday 🙈 there was the Bushranger on Goldhawk road, or the walkabout. I used to love the Raj in Holland Park!

It's a really interesting topic, though. Nice to have a thread asking something completely different from the usual MN themes. Thank you @Femusia .

Also in the UK in the 90s, the Spice Girls and Oasis appealed to completely different audiences. Odd to lump them together. Spice Girls was mainly pre-teen girls, whereas I quite liked Oasis (although not enough to buy a ticket to one of their concerts). And 'Cool Britannia' was just an invention of, I think, the Sunday Times colour supplement (as it was then ...).

I was a teenager through the 90s. I had no opinion on either of those things. Why would I??

Good luck with your article!

This is really funny, seeing our recent lives portrayed as history, only possible to understand through archive material!

Cool Britannia was part organic (Oasis, Blur, Pulp - all bands with very distinct English place-based identities), part manufactured bandwagon-cashing-in-upon tosh (Spice Girls, the better quality All Saints). It was a combination of luck, that a number of good bands came through at the same time and a reaction against the American dominance of early 90s Indie, Grunge and other cool genres. So a moment of Britain reasserting itself culturally and economically - with the Blair Govt sweeping in 1997 - after a tough few years and against the American cultural and economic behemoth.

Nothing to do with the Commonwealth. Everything to do with plucky little Britain displaying cultural capital that far outweighed our declining political and economic influence in the world, in the context of America, China, the emerging BRICS (had they been identified as such then?) and incidentally showing off how much cooler we were than the rest of Europe- but in pop music terms that’s never needed saying.

It all contributed to making London a very cool place to visit and live. It wasn’t just music either, there was heightened emphasis on culture, including the YBAs (Young British Artists) for example - look up the Sensation exhibition and hype around that.

What did we think about Australia at the time? Big, hot, full of beaches, sport, BBQs and kangaroos, bit of a cultural desert, good place for a gap year if you could tolerate the sexism and racism.

Culturally, more cheerily, Australia had given us Neighbours, Kylie and Jason in the 80s (not cool but very cheerful, Kylie didn’t become cool until later) and thousands of short-visa bar staff in the 90s. So the Australians we saw were young and fun. They contributed to the London buzz.

Did we think much about post-colonial government and nationhood across the Commonwealth? No.

That was and is an internal discussion for Australia, Canada, Jamaica, NZ etc. I think the only change is that now, when I explain to a child that the head of state of Canada or New Zealand is King Charles, it does seem surprising, to me as well as them. In the 90s it seemed anachronistic, likely to change in the next decade or two (none of our business) but there will have been a closer living legacy of connection and interdependence, from WWII and after. Less so now.

This is really funny, seeing our recent lives portrayed as history, only possible to understand through archive material!

It feels recent, the 90s feel like only a few years ago, but 1990 was 36 years ago! If you were born in the 70s like me, @lottiegarbanzo it's actually less 'recent' then WW2 was when we were born, which is a sobering thought.

Social media was in infancy and did not exist like it does today so it would be difficult to keep an eye on Australia like we can today especially as a teen. How would we have known what Australia thought about us unless we actively read our parents The Sun or Daily Mail?

As a youngster I knew a few Aussies in London and I can only add that we were all quite like-minded, out for fun and booze and we all had a crush on Liam Gallagher apart from one Aussie who loved Damon Albarn.

the Spice Girls were perfectly times for teenage girls to give their attention & adoration too, after the Take That implosion when Robbie ran away to Glastonbury, started hanging out with the “cool kids”, left TT leaving a trail of fan destruction.

we all thought it was all incredibly naff though soon enough the SG (and soon enough to everyone surprise Robbie) became ubiquitous.

I was more interested in Portishead.

I’m a bit embarrassed at the thought of being the mother country. We’re talking about a number of very sophisticated nations determining their own destiny. We don’t have any say in how they behave or what they should believe.

I was a bit older in the Cool Britannia years - late 20s early 30s - and thought it was a load of guff.

I definitely wanted to move towards the EU and still do. I find the whole special relationship with the US idea a load of nonsense. They don’t view us as special they think of us as another nation they can manipulate because of their superior power and resources. Which is fine but I don’t think we should pretend to be pally about it or not see through it.

Unfortunately a lot of people in the UK feel more powerful if they punch down on foreigners, be they other Europeans or people from further flung countries, usually different ethnic backgrounds. The media and certain political parties exploit this, sadly. Brexit resulted from this and has been a disaster. It makes me very sad that we’ve isolated ourselves at a time when we need more back up than ever.

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.

FFS. I stoped reading the thread after this.

Sounds like some bullshit AI would write. And all the follow up responses, not answering questions directly and talking absolute waffle.

Interesting flurry of threads in the past few days OP.

I didn't listen to Cigarettes and Alcohol or Beetlebum and then gasp and say 'but what will the Australians think?'.

I have never met an Australian who felt British. Ever.

There is no way this is for a newspaper article, no one would read it. It must be some navel gazing phd.

But, how would people in the mother country itself feel about a former settler colony? Do British people regard themselves as a mother country in that sense?

A 'mother country'? No. Speaking as a British person, I've never particularly viewed Australia, New Zealand or anywhere else as a 'former settler colony' or even part of what was once the British Empire, but rather as one of many members of the Commonwealth, which of course it still is.

Every now and again, one might hear news that there were talks of independence, but then it would fizzle out again.

I can't speak for others, of course, but I didn't think about a country on the other side of the world very much at all.

Australia was Australia
why would they adopt British culture ?

have you similar posts about why Germany hasn’t adopted Taiwanese culture ?

And not every young person in Britain was into the whole thing either

Jeeze, nearly all my relatives live in Australia, and even I don't give the place a thought with regard to any national connections between the countries.

Also this, especially the underlined bit:

As for 'cool Britannia' in the UK, that was just a cultural meme, not any kind of nationalist or patriotic thing. I think Blair ran with it a bit and actively promoted it, because it expressed a surge of optimism that Labour was riding. But it was really just lighthearted stuff and music. Nothing more. And certainly not anything that had any relationship whatsoever with perceptions of the UK relationship with Australia.

Also yes, why are you asking us to write your article/thesis?

In the 1990s the world was a much bigger place, without the internet and constant access to other cultures through online exposure.

we all watched home and away and neighbours. That’s probably as much thought as we gave to it.

Can’t say I was conscious of world politics and colonisation and the complexities of society on the other side of the world. But then I was a teenager and mostly concerned about clothes and whether I’d save up enough money from my paper round for a spudulike and a Topshop dress by Saturday

I was a teenager. I was too wrapped up in my own life to be thinking about patriotism and pride for my country! And young people in their twenties were too busy anyway. Plus it was pre-social media so we weren't so influenced by hype.

To be honest, as a teen in the 90's, my only real thoughts about Australia were about "Neighbours".

To be honest, "Cool Britannia" isn't really a thing I've heard of either. Britpop yes, but the Spice Girls were kind of background for me, it was more about Blur, Oasis, Pulp etc.

Australia is a lovely country and the UK quite likes Aus stars such as Kylie. I am not so sure though that UK culture has a need to be noted or seen elsewhere and this was true in the 1990s.