antipopper

In the mid-’80s, I thought the world could have ended at any moment. Like many other children, I was waiting for the Blinding Flash of Light. All the time. There’s been plenty written about nuclear war tropes in pop culture of the ’50s and ’60s, but by the 1980s, I think the imagery of Mutually Assured Destruction had reached a new refinement, a new “pregnancy” — the arsenal was so huge that it overflowed the constraints of traditional Cold War affiliations, and leaked into the realm of Generalised Death. It had a planetary dimension, probably only made possible by the notion that human beings had stood on the moon and seen our world from another. (As Donna Haraway says, it sounds cheesy, and invites a whole bunch of dodgy “mother earth” metaphors, but it’s still true.) It’s probably this planetary generalisation of the idea of nuclear armageddon, rather than whatever maneouverings of state were actually going down, that made things seem so urgent in the ’80s.

It seems so distant sitting here now, huddled in the cold with the fucking flu, but for me it was one continuous Summer of the Apocalypse. It was very pop. And strangely enough for me, very “Australian”. In many ways my experience was held together by dodgy pieces of a mythological national imaginary. The shimmering image of an orange sunset above the Cahill Expressway, cars snaking onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge, like a mirage. A quintessentially ’80s “Australian” image that seems almost impossible now. And one which I can’t conjure without the backdrop of, say, GANGajang’s “Sounds of Then”, and the simultaneous Knowledge of the Bomb. A public culture in denial of its multi-ethnic population, with populist progressive politics of the time celebrating an imaginary, black/white “dual custodianship” of a land without non-Anglo migrants. The desert. Images of which in the ’80s could somehow not help but be haunted by the murderous nuclear testing at Maralinga in the ’50s and ’60s. The Sunset on Civilisation that was Mad Max II, and (for better or worse) the more consciously mythological (and more explicitly post-nuclear) Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. INXS’s video for “Listen Like Thieves”, and tangentially even “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain)”. The national landscape, full of light and heat. (And weirdly irrelevant to the highly urbanised experience of the majority of Australians, but iconic nonetheless, probably because of this. The hot, strangely irradiated mythological landscape as a molten slate to project onto, or carve into. Now I get the sense that the landscape is not so much a touchstone in contemporary Australian life. It’s not “needed” as much.) Tsunehisa Kimura’s cover art for Midnight Oil’s Red Sails in the Sunset, reproduced here, also included a bunch of images inside the gatefold that were more oblique but just as apocalytic. (Couldn’t find them, sorry.) Doomladen kangaroos and whales, hapless humans. Perhaps pointing to a future without “us”.

It’s all dubious. But it’s how I lived the ’80s.

On the talk back show
On the radio
At the local bar
In the hot traffic by the red tail lights

Everybody’s down on their knees
Listen like thieves
But who needs that
When it’s all in your hands

And we take it down
To the end of town
Where they have control
But they’re losing touch when the lights go out
Everybody’s down on their knees
Listen like thieves for the end signs
But who needs that when you’ve got it all in your hands
It’s all in your hands
It’s all in your hands
You are all you need
You are all you need
And that is everything
So don’t hesitate
There’s no time to waste
You just do it for yourself