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Article Excerpt
Since even before European settlement, the development of Australia has taken place in the shadow of the United States. Already in the colonial era, before either country had formed much notion of a national culture, the US (or usually, the more mythical 'America') had become an established reference point ('international benchmark', as we would now say) for all kinds of human endeavour. For example, even before a sod was turned in the founding of Adelaide, in 1837, one of Colonel William Light's critics bewailed, 'Oh, had we but a Yankee surveyor to help us, all would be well'. (1) The goldrush years brought immigrants and technologies from the US, also increasing the diffusion of democratic ideas in the lead-up to Federation (2), and 'America remained the standard of modernity' into the twentieth century. (3) However, there has also been a longstanding critical discourse of resistance against 'Americanisation', coming at some stages from Anglophile conservatives, such as Sir Robert Menzies, and other times from cultural nationalists on the Left. (4)
The most influential and durable manifestation of the latter has been the 'cultural imperialism' thesis of the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by Humphrey McQueen's Australia's Media Monopolies, which he says are actually 'not Australian. They serve the interests of US Imperialism'. (5) The central proposition of the cultural imperialism thesis is that the culture in general, and media in particular, of the US is imposed upon subject nations such as Australia, as a deliberate ideological strategy to overcome resistance to the economic and military purposes of the US. Thus, the international news, film and television programs, and advertising campaigns emanating from the US are seen as instrumental in bringing about a society amenable to the marketing of US goods and services, and the stabilising of its strategic interests. In this view, it is impersonal forces--all-powerful cultural products and practices, with economic and military organisations, the corporations and the Pentagon, standing behind them--that enable the US to exert its influence. The social mediation through which the influence is articulated from one country to another--that is, its human agents--is not theorised as part of the picture. Similarly, the influence, being ideological, is theoretically inferred in this perspective, rather than being empirically demonstrated, particularly via denunciatory concepts such as 'consumerism'.
By 1991 it became possible to put this basically cold-war worldview into some perspective, as John Tomlinson did with his argument that, inter alia, the cultural imperialism thesis was too nebulous to be a theory at all, and that it was really a kind of critical discourse, not even about capitalism as such, but about modernity. (6) He suggests that we think instead in terms of 'cultural globalisation', which supersedes the idea that one national culture is deliberately imposing itself upon the rest, and rather envisages 'complex connectivity' between nations which are all experiencing global modernity together, however unequally. (7)
Furthermore, it is not even as if the nation-state is still the unit of analysis in an era of 'deterritorialisation', in which both capital and labour have been cut loose from their nations of origin. Corporate investment comes from multiple sources and crosses borders with ease; so do business expatriates, foreign students and academics, retirees, and tourists, and with rather more difficulty, immigrants, refugees, exiles, and 'guestworkers'. (8) While we think of this movement of peoples as characteristic of the global era, it is not at all a new phenomenon, and it has been relatively neglected in accounts of how cultural influence has been mediated from one place to another, at least within neomarxist perspectives like cultural imperialism.
Yet, nor is there much guidance to be had from the nonmarxist literature. Robert Park, an American sociologist of the 1930s, noted the 'wider horizons' of the immigrant; and modernisation theorists of the post-World War II era such as Everett Rogers valorised the outsider's cosmopolitan perspective as a motive factor in generating social change. (9) Research literature in the management field on entrepreneurship seeks to understand individual behaviour relative to resources and opportunities, but this is 'stratified, eclectic and divergent' and suffers from 'an ill-defined paradigm'. (10) It includes some work on immigrant entrepreneurs, but this is limited to 'ethnic' entrepreneurs in the US. (11)
This paper explores some cases of how international cultural influence can be mediated by individuals, particularly those whose birth and upbringing, education or other experience overseas has enabled them to see opportunities for innovation not evident to others. This is examined in the particular context of the 'Americanisation' of culture in Australia, where 'America' represents the archetype of modernity, and 'culture' means the whole complex of practices and institutions identified with the emergence of 'consumer society', such as branding, marketing, and franchising. The paper focuses on three historical conjunctures when particular persons have introduced innovations which have provided the basis for the subsequent development of different kinds of consumer industries. Firstly, there is the case of the Foster brothers, Americans who first produced the eponymous iced lager in the 1880s. The second moment is between the world wars, when Victorian Railways Commissioner Harold Clapp brought modern innovations to food marketing and tourism. Finally, there is the era of the late 1960s when fast-food franchising first came to Australia.
In the beginning was the wort: Foster's
Two brothers from New York who made a brief intervention in Melbourne's brewing industry in the 1880s not only established Foster's Lager as a brand, but ultimately, with the international success of that brand, gave their name to one of Australia's largest globally active corporations, Foster's Group. William M and Ralph R Foster arrived in Melbourne in 1886, together with Mr Sieber, a German American brewer, and Frank A Rider, a refrigeration engineer, also from New York. They brought with them all the equipment they needed to establish a 'very modern', state-of-the art brewery in Collingwood, then 'the brewing capital of the nation (12)', which was specifically set up to brew lager beer: a relatively light, bottom-fermented beer made to be drunk cold, as distinct from the traditional top-fermented, more dense ales that are drunk at room temperature, as in Britain. (13) German in origin, lager-bier had become popular in the US during the 1860s. (14)
The Germans at the Gambinus Brewery, also in Collingwood, and the Cohn Brothers in Bendigo were already making lager in 1885 using German equipment, and there were importers in Melbourne bringing in bottled lagers from Germany and the US. (15) So, the Foster brothers were not the first to be brewing this 'beer of the future', or as the Australian Brewers' Journal predicted it to become, 'the drink of Australia'. However, they knew they were at the brink of a shift in taste, and were able to press the advantages they had in having a product well-adapted to local conditions, and the marketing needed to fulfil the prophecy. The beer was launched ('rolled out') in the summer, on 1 February 1889, and as a lure to increase distribution, every hotel which took it was given a free supply of ice. However, the sensation made by Foster's Lager prompted the lager importers to retaliate by drastically dropping the price of their product. The Foster brothers in turn successfully lobbied to have import duties on lager raised by State Parliament. Yet, with this achieved, there was the most surprising turn of events--after little more than nine months of having their new beer on the market, the Fosters sold out entirely to a local syndicate, a public company formed as the Foster Lager Brewing Company Limited. After settlement, the brothers quit their house in Fitzroy and returned to the US, and 'were never heard of again'. (16)
This narrative is more the stuff of legend, a myth of origin, rather than historical scholarship. The definitive source is Keith Dunstan's The Amber Nectar, published in 1987, an official history of what was then Carlton and United Breweries, and the main points of the story have become integral to the current Foster Group's public relations material. (17) Dunstan's main primary source for the early period is the Australian Brewers' Journal, and since secondary sources published subsequent to Dunstan's work largely just plagiarise him, the trail has grown cold and nothing more has been turned up on the mysterious Foster brothers. So, their motivation in coming to Australia and the reason for their bailing out are both just matters of speculation, although they appear to have sold the brewery at a loss and in continuing financial and management difficulties. (18) It seems plausible to conclude that they had come intent on opening up a market in Melbourne for the new style of beer, exploiting technology already developed in their own country and in Germany, but that they simply cut their losses when this proved...
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