Pride of Australia

With his new book, What a Ripper!, Tim Ross has gone on a jaunt down memory lane to revisit some of the classic everyday objects that shaped our cultural history. He shares his insights into the larrikin nature of some of these designs - and why Aussies reigned as world leaders in innovation.

-  TIM ROSS

There was a time when a lot of things were designed and manufactured in this country. In 2019, I did a small exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney called “Design Nations”. It had a Ken Done placemat, a Dolphin torch, a Sebel Integra chair - a few things like that. I did a talk, and it struck me how much people liked the stories of these things. But also how, back in the day, we had less choice. For example, there were four different torches you could buy. But the Dolphin torch reigned supreme - it was the highest selling torch not just here in Australia, but for a period of time, the world.

There’s an important story to tell about nostalgia and how ‘things’ can connect us to place and time. It’s also a story about a time when we could manufacture here, when we designed a lot of our everyday items, and how that meant something to us. The idea of Australian-made was a source of pride.

We were manufacturing here because we had tariffs which made things produced elsewhere incredibly expensive. We also had a population boom and we were inventive because we needed to be.

Plus, the idea in the post-WWII period was, “What sort of nation can’t design and manufacture its own things?”. During the war, we got stuck because our supply chains had disappeared and we had to suddenly make our own things. We felt like we needed to be self-sufficient.

From the 1970s, our national identity had been on the rise. And we found our feet in a lot of ways in the 1980s. We took what I call “the warm shadow of the Opera House” – our culture – to the world. There was also a huge amount of confidence in people like Ken Done, Paul Hogan and Olivia Newton-John to take that sense of Australiana to the world and not be ashamed of it. It was a pre-globalisation time where things happened here in isolation that were really different and interesting.

The Blinky-Di jumper is a great example of that.