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Mining mateship: Beaconsfield provided a channel for our collective anxieties about workplace changes and the loss of face-to-face community.

Article Excerpt
Following the so-called 'Great Escape' of Beaconsfield miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell from their kilometre-deep entombment, Prime Minister John Howard was quick to hail their rescue as a 'wonderful demonstration of Australian mateship'. How could this be? How could a Prime Minister who has just introduced deeply unpopular workplace laws, which ostensibly commodify Australian workers and further individuate Australian society, claim any affinity with such a compassionate collective bond?

Howard's decade-long electoral 'success' owes as much to his rhetorical hegemony over so-called 'Australian values' (and wider engagement with popular culture) as to political luck and economic management. This historical inversion has, however, produced some more unfortunate and concrete material effects. Australia's (imagined) egalitarian disposition has degenerated further; the once subjectively constitutive Leftist rhetoric has been emptied out. Given Labor and the broader Left's disengagement from aspects of popular culture, and unease with utilising Australia's past radical nationalist achievements, conservatives have successfully appropriated--if not twisted --Australia's cultural heritage...

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