Australian Society in the 1950s and 1960s Essay

Through the 1950s-1960s Australia’s popular culture was seriously influenced simply by American traditions, trends and images. The 50s and sixties was the age of Ordinary ‘n’ Move, Hippies, Edgy teenagers, and medicines.

These topics were part and parcel of America’s tradition and had been portrayed towards the rest of the globe as crucial elements of American culture. These types of important aspects of culture greatly influenced the growing nation of Quotes – particularly during this period. Young adults were the prominent era of this time, with the consumers market focused strait for them. The 60s observed the uprising of a new generation whom strived to get different from their particular elders.

Throughout the 1950s-1960s American artists, American themes and American types of music focused the Australian music landscape. Australian chart were filled with foreign American hits, Aussie acts seldom making it in the Australian top. Radio stations committed much less the perfect time to talking thus they can fit in even more American music, because that is certainly what the Aussie people desired to hear.

American artists such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley (and his band ‘The Comets’) we hugely well-liked in Australia and were idols for the teenagers generation. During this time, Australia’s most well known rock ‘n’ roll singer rose to fame – Johnny O’Keefe, Heavily inspired by American rock ‘n’ roll designers. The 50s and 60s saw the birth of a brand new generation – hippies. Hippies were a generation primarily composed of young adults, either in their teens or early twenties. A generation of ‘free spirits’, in whose main desired goals in life was going to just be one particular with Nature and enhance peace and love.

Hippies were looked down upon by seniors because most hippies would not seem to care much in regards to a stable, settled-down life. Hippies were generally involved in medicines (LSD was popular) and in addition believed in weakness. Influenced by the growing American trends of hippy tradition an Aussie hippy tradition began to come out. The generation of hippies sometimes produced anti-government organizations. This was obvious in Australia when hippy anti-Vietnam war organizations and hippy anti-communist teams started to appear.

Aussie hippies spent lots of time surfing as well as the stereotype of your Australian hippy included a VW Kombi, painted colorfully with serenity signs with surfboards inside the back. Australian hippies had been following many of the movements of yankee hippies, especially supporting the psycadelic and folk music displays. In the mid 1950s television set was presented into the home and became part of typical Australian households. Tv was a entrance for Australians into American culture, as most of the earliest television shows had been American. The Australian general public was constantly watching American ways and American trends and began to adapt to these trends because the TV shows portrayed the American way of life as ‘cool’.

Actors such as Elvis Presley playing rebellious teenagers in motion pictures influenced teenagers to become rebellious, since their own idol was. Australia’s own film industries would not kick off before the mid-80s, although film was obviously a major part of Aussie culture throughout the 50s and 60s. Families would regularly go to the movie theatre to watch American films over a Saturday night or visit the new American inventions – drive-ins.

Drive-ins at that time were a symbol of American culture, and were a well known Saturday nighttime entertainer. The main reason Australia was so greatly influenced by simply America during the 1950s and 1960s is because Australia was obviously a young region, without any actual identity that had to look abroad for influence. When compared with America plus the United Kingdom, Quotes was still an extremely undeveloped nation. John Douglass Pringle, a Scottish journalist living in Sydney in the 50s and 60s said this kind of about Australia’s outside influences; “Some Aussie nationalists find a painful irony in the situation that, having fought against the British effect all their lives, they have gained their struggle only to find that American effect has considered it’s place”.

It seems like as Sydney was trying to be unlike its mom country, The uk, it became a growing number of like America without even noticing. Nowadays, in our multicultural culture, it is difficult to stereotype a particular country as every nation now influences countries around the world. Popular traditions in super countries including Australia, England and America is now much the same, because many companies and developments can easily spread across the globe because of better interaction, although these kinds of countries aren’t without an person and unique popular tradition.