Last weekend I had a great idea. I can’t believe it took me almost four months to think of it. I played the Hilltop Hoods’ song ‘1955’ in our new (to us) house that was built in 1959. The lyrics took on a new slant as I looked around our home, almost untouched since the day the first owners moved in. Descriptions of a simpler time blended seamlessly into our small house, with just enough and not too much space. There’s a lot of exposed timber, there’s custom built cabinetry in the kitchen with the original laminex on the bench tops, there’s a huge double trough in the laundry and tiny little square blue tiles on the floor, it has three bedrooms, one bathroom, and it has the most outstandingly capacious broom cupboard and linen press. I completely love it.
Then I started thinking about the origin of that song. It comes from a stand-up show by Irish comic Dylan Moran in Adelaide several years ago, where he opened by saying he had been longing to visit Adelaide, because he’d always wanted to know what it was like to live in 1955. And I have to say, as a seventh generation Adelaidian, I was only slightly miffed. I get it, the pace of that city is almost glacial and it feels like a big country town. But it’s not unliveable, it’s actually very pleasant.
Adelaide has what are arguably the best Arts and Fringe festivals in Australia, as well as WOMAD, which is a world-class world music festival. It was also the first place in Australia (second only to New Zealand in the world) to give women the vote. Before federation in 1901, Aboriginal South Australians were permitted to vote, and in 1976 the first Aboriginal Governor, Sir Douglas Nicholls, was appointed in South Australia. Not bad for a place that regularly gets described as an overly large retirement village. But back to the ‘50s.
To compound my sense of transportation back in time approximately seventy-five years on Saturday afternoon, I was also re-reading ‘Franny and Zooey’ by J.D. Salinger, the first excerpt of which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1955. I felt like a method actor, but for the mobile phone and bluetooth speaker through which I was hearing the music. So I began to muse on why it might be that, really, I’ve always loved the ‘50s.
Was it the simple songs with a few verses, a chorus, and maybe four chords? Yes. Or the fashion, with full skirts and stunning necklines and clean, fresh, make up? Again, near the top of the list of reasons. Was it the architecture and design? Absolutely. The beginning of the civil rights movement? Definitely. Or maybe the smaller cities, the slower pace, the lack of the internet in our pockets (or even a television in our lounge rooms), the pastel colours, the Sunday roast, the milk bars, the insane millinery, the daily newspaper delivered alongside the milk… what was it, specifically, that I loved?
I know it wasn’t the gendered emotional abuse we see portrayed in television shows like Mad Men, where a man will belittle and manipulate his wife until she’s a nervous wreck (all the while having multiple affairs), then send his wife to a psychiatrist, who then telephones the man to tell him he thinks his wife has serious psychiatric issues and needs sedating. Not that part. Nor the part where Aboriginal Australians were denied being counted in the census, voting, or an equal wage. Not that part. Nor the part where beatings were seen as a regulation aspect of childhood. Not that part. And as I consider what it is that draws me to this particular decade, I wonder that I can love it at all. Because there is always a shadow, and even sleepy Adelaide has an underbelly. In an analysis of crime in Australia’s capital cities (some years ago now, it must be said), the most dangerous street in Australia was not Kings Cross in Sydney, as one might think could safely be assumed; but it was Hindley Street in Adelaide’s CBD.
The thing is, time and again it has been shown that the mildest of appearances can belie the seamiest of realities. And the reality of those stark contrasts of the 1950s shakes us out of our tendency to pretend that that is ever not the case. Of any decade of the twentieth century, I think the ‘50s exemplifies that the most; with the roaring twenties coming in at a close second.
And I think that it is precisely that juxtaposition that really enraptures me about this decade. The cleanness of the lines in architecture, fashion and design contrasts so sharply with the gritty emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. The preciseness of the mowing of the front lawn stands out so sharply against the arrival of all manner of televised news that developed towards the end of that decade. It’s the application of so many to attempting to control the aesthetics of that decade, standing out against the swell of reality beneath it that said “No more.” Rosa Parks sat on a bus one day and literally said simply, “No”, and it kicked off a movement. It’s almost ludicrous to think of those things alongside one another, and I love it. Because, really, I think the 1950s communicate the breadth and depth of humanity like no other decade. Booming birth rates, economies, and technological developments were all incapable of negating harsh inequality between races, genders, and creeds, and it all happened at once. The Cold War grew, and Martin Luther King Jr began his career, to the soundtrack of Chuck berry, Fats Domino, and The Platters. I mean, there are simply few things more incongruous, and I find it utterly compelling.
So I will delight in my little house while I work a full week and my husband does all the cooking, grateful for both the appearance and the reality of the ‘50s.