Jon Stratton

Jon Stratton’s article “Nation-Building and Australian Popular Music in the 1970s and 1980s”, seeks to outline an understanding of the development of uniquely ‘Australian’ popular music throughout the named decades and the relationship this has with various national projects at the time. Published in a 2006 edition of the Australasian peer-reviewed academic journal ‘Continuum’, the article outlines the development of two of three identified ‘strands’ of popular music, which he defines as ‘Oz Rock’ and ‘pop-rock’, argues their intrinsic link with national projects seeking to create a cultural identity for Australians from 1975 to 1985 and their relationship to popular music concerned with this idea of a unique Australian culture.

In using the
For example, the viewing figures for Countdown and testimonials from academics and Molly Meldrum, (the host) all effectively argue his point of the program’s significance in that era. In a similar vein, he cites the improvements in national infrastructure one of the factors allowing Oz Rock to gain popularity, by allowing such groups to perform and broadcast their music across the nation. Stratton further outlines the development of Australian music through the merging of his named strands in terms of their lyrical, aesthetic and sonic qualities. He uses the case study of Men at Work’s “Land Down Under”, to support his point, identifying features of both Oz Rock in the song’s veiled political message, and pop-rock in the sound and mood of the piece. By using this piece as a case study to confirm his argument that popular music concerned with the cultural identity of Australia Thus, Stratton argues that the attempts to forge a national culture led to the development of several genres of Australian popular music, leading to popular music that exemplified an Australian culture. While Stratton asserts that pop-rock was most affiliated with the growing sense of Australian cultural identity, the evidence he presents most strongly points to Oz Rock as being affiliated with this movement. Stratton’s chain of reasoning is that due to pop-rock’s intrinsic relationship with Countdown, and its role as a ‘nationaliser’ of popular music, (also as a beneficiary of nation-building projects) Stratton states that, based off the old ballad tradition, Oz Rock concerned itself with uniquely Australian issues both lyrically and in terms of sound; the touring coupled with its populist subject matter, enabled an intimate, yet broad