The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia

Abstract

The 1980s ended, as they began, in economic recession, as well as in cor­porate collapse and political scandal. This was the rather depressing vantage point from which most Australians reflected on the decade they had just lived through. And many, unsurprisingly, did not much like what they saw, being more likely to repudiate the values of individualism and hedonism already synonymous with the decade than recall it with the warm glow of nostalgia that is so much in evidence today. They knew nothing of the era about to open up before them, with the arrival in the mid-1990s of both the World Wide Web and happier economic times. These surprises would divide the merely globalising world of the 1980s from the hyper-globalisation of our own times.