Australia now dominates youth culture in Britain
We are wearing their blue jeans and listening to their pop music
Editor’s note: I must revive the “British Coldhealingisms” of summer 2021 to articulate this point. As an important disclaimer I am not writing this to position myself as a ‘Normie Whisperer’. I observe the cultural currents of this milieu from where they congregate publicly, mostly in pubs, which the law entitles me to enter. Even if they detest me they cannot prevent me from paying for a ticket to Infernos; the only personal reward I have reaped from the sprawling multiplication of our bogus ‘Human Rights’ legislation.
Yesterday, I had a revelation. Posh, vaguely ‘right-coded’ young English people are pointed culturally towards the Southern Hemisphere. At exactly the same time that their left-wing analogues, civil servants who live in Kentish Town, become Hibernicised - crying out “Sláinte!” for the first sip of Guinness” - home counties consultants who peaked playing University Hockey are starting to affect vaguely Australian personalities, and even accents.
This became apparent to me during a jaunt to Parsons Green, a veritable Citadel of White UMC, the sort of place that Janan Ganesh has in mind when he writes sneering columns about West London. There is virtually no crime here, meaning it attracts a certain sort of late 20s Graduate.
From boarding school, to University outside of London (likely Edinburgh) to Clapham aged 21/22. Clapham is exactly what they want, it’s safe and clean, but they feel they must move on by their mid 20s (as there is some social penalty for still living in Tutorial Island) so they end up moving to a slightly more metropolitan part of the city which is still safe and full of other wealthy people.
My latest attempt to quit vaping was beginning to falter so I found myself in the smoking area of the Durrell Arms making the rounds for a spare cigarette. One young man replied to my pleading requests with a single phrase that has arrested me with this revelation ever since.
“Yeah, you want a durry?”.
Durry, for those of you who do not know, is Australian slang for a cigarette. As I nodded I had a proper look at him. The mullet….
When did mullets become so pervasive with the UMC White English? I can roughly trace the first signs of it to around 2018, a time at which it was something of a radical fashion statement. But if you look at a group of posh White men around the age of 18-21 you will see that at least 85% of them have their hair cut into some form of mullet; ultimately downstream of Bogan culture in Australia. It is easily more pervasive than the fashion for ‘short back and sides’ in the early 2010s and yet I seem to be the first person to stumble on it’s likely Australian roots. Name a successful male actor born between 1995-2001 and there will be a picture of them somewhere with a mullet.
Once you see it you cannot unsee it. The sudden appearance of moustaches. The singlets and birkenstocks in the summer, the horns ‘rock on’ hand gesture; most University drinking games (Howzat, Not Out) are Australian in origin. It is everywhere.
My best sociological explanation for why Australian culture holds such a cachet with posh English people is that gap years in South East Asia usually include at least a couple of months in places like Byron Bay (cannabis is legal in nearby Nimbin), and so these random affectations signal some form of cultural capital amongst UMC White English. It helps, too, that sports like Rugby and Cricket are popular amongst the ‘posh’ of both countries, inevitably leading to cultural exchanges in the form of ‘The Australia Tour’ circa 2015.
Australia is also still a place where the private school/UMC culture of 1990s and early 2000s Britain is still largely intact. Home Counties culture, the world that Rupert Lowe somewhat represents, the Range Rovers and Rosé in Provence, the posh mother of Catherine Tate has been under structural assault in Britain since the time of Tony Blair. Apart from the general economic mismanagement, the Private School Fee Fixing scandal of 2005 (which condemned prominent private schools for cooperating to keep fees low and accessible for the middle classes) combined with the popularity of British private schools with the international elite conspired to mass demographic and cultural change in these institutions. It is not dissimilar to the destruction of the ‘Sloane Ranger’ culture by the economic colonisation of wealthy Arabs.