Rethinking Australia's 1980s

School of History Seminar Series The journalist and historian Paul Kelly characterised Australia’s 1980s as "the end of certainty" but in some recent Australian political discourse, the decade has taken on many of the features of a golden age. Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno has written a paper, which emerges from a book he is completing on the history of Australia between 1983 and 1991 – the period of the Hawke Government, and it will explore some key themes from the period in the context of recent cultural and historical representations of the decade. Bongiorno says the paper "will not treat the 1980s as an era in which far-sighted politicians saved the country from mediocrity and Australians from themselves – a broad characterisation that has become almost an authorised version of decade’s meaning among Australian elites across the political spectrum". "Instead, I present an era of considerable anxiety about rapid and far-reaching change, as well as sharply contested visions concerning Australia’s identity, economy and place in the world."