The great decayed
By Kaz Cooke

A Queensland Member of Parliament recently came out with a cracker: "People say I want to go back to the 1950s. Well, what was wrong with the 1950s?" No, no, over to you, all you reactionary bloody dingbats. DO tell: what was so fab- about the 1950s? Some of us weren't even born then, but we've heard the stories. Was it the fact that most women who got married had to resign their jobs? That those with jobs got officially paid much less than a bloke for exactly the same work? Was it especially fantastic that unmarried women were refused contraception, but if they got pregnant and the bloke shot through, they couldn't get a pension? Or do you prefer the other two possible scenarios of the time: the babies stolen within hours of birth and given to more favoured citizens, or thousands of women rendered infertile or dead, butchered in illegal, "backyard" septic abortions? Or was the 1950s a triumphant explosion of splendidness because of the cuisine of the time, quivering undulations of desiccated corned beef, three legally available vegies boiled since the Jurassic period to the consistency of phlegm and served up with an incinerated chop and a flap of white iceberg lettuce smothered in something like blue Worcestershire sauce, with a Golden Circle slice on top and a maraschino cherry nestling on a chop, if Mum had heen reading the Womans's Weekly Imaginative Cooking With Colour series? Nobody knew where you could go for a pizza. Except maybe to Italy. Rubber corsets were all the go. All men were expected to wear exactly the same outfit with exactly the same haircut. Are we supposed to love it so much because most of the music had the diversity and intellect of a Spice Girls' song delivered by Perry Como who looked like he had an echidna up his bottle, and any music that seemed sexy and free or non-white was hard to find? Was it really the pants of the ants that radio announcers said things such as: "Hellair. This is the Air Bair Sea. Heah is a maiirssarge from Her Grrracious Majesty~ the Queen of Orstrahliah"? Exactly how way excellent was it that Aboriginal peopIe were literally not counted as citizens and many had to carry papers to cross imaginary borders that the Government invented? ( Don't mention the children.) Sexual harassment was legal: bewdy. Men legally owned their children no matter what they had done to them or their mothers.There were no women's refuges. There was no help for blokes with drink problems, or who had just come back from a mad-making war. They were expected to just pull themselves together, shut up about it, and stop playing with their kids and enjoying them because that was women's work. Oh yeah: top decade. Listen you past-life fetishists, does the phrase "over our dead bodies" mean anything to you? Try and take away the huge gains we've made since the 1950s and you won't know what hits you. It'll be the women of the 1990's with a couple of souvenirs from the 1950s: big hair and seething fury. Written for The AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE,, October 25-26 1997.

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