Solemnly Enjoying an Ice-cream: The inertia of the Ordinary and Australian Cultural Studies.

Mark Gibson, School of Media Communication and Culture, Murdoch University

mgibson@central.murdoch.edu.au

The paper reflects on the condition of cultural studies in John Howard's Australia by returning to a problem posed by Meaghan Morris in her 1992 essay 'On the Beach'. Morris's own reflections circle around an image of Australia proposed by Donald Horne in The Lucky Country - that of a man on a beach in an open-necked shirt, 'solemnly enjoying an ice-cream'. For both Morris and Horne, the image captures an enduring theme in the relation between intellectuals and everyday life in Australia: the stubborn inertia of Australian materialism, its resistance to romantic or revolutionary impulses.

I argue that it is even more important now than in 1992 to address a 'gap' diagnosed by Morris between the figure of the Ordinary Australian and available models of everyday life in cultural studies. I suggest, however, that it may be necessary to look to other intellectual resources than she considers- those associated with a 'British' experience of modernity. The remarkable sophistication of Australian cultural studies in its importation and translation of continental European theory has not been matched, I argue, by a similar sophistication in relation to British intellectual traditions. If, in the past, attention to Australian experience has required an insistence on differences from Britain, the situation may be now be reversed. A continued Anglophobia may paradoxically inhibit a sensitivity to the cultures associated with Australian sun, sand and surf.