After the war, Australians entered a honeymoon-like period of economic growth and development, both on a national and personal level. The optimism that surfaced after peace was announced, combined with a determination to create a better life for themselves and their children through hard work, permeated through the community and brought Australia to a position of near full employment. Australia had one of the most even distributions of wealth of any western nation and the kind of market-driven executive salaries seen today were largely non-existent. Everybody was seen as being in it together.

The 1950s became a time of massive growth of the public sector and major taxpayer-funded investment in vital national infrastructure. The Government of Prime Minister Robert Gordon (Bob) Menzies, which came to power in 1949, saw its role as nation-building; the trade unions, which represented almost two thirds of workers, saw themselves as having a legitimate place in national economic management. The overwhelming national ethos was one of social solidarity. Industry was run by conservative men who played it safe, protected from competition from the outside world by Government approved tariffs. They were happy to deal with unions and allow the union picnic day and Labor Day holiday to become part of the national calendar and character, without a thought about its effect on profitability. Australia in the 1950s was a nation of people who were dependent on the state for their education, their livelihoods and their retirements, and looked upon the Government as their rock, their shelter and guide, rather than a necessary intrusion into their lives, which is the view many present day Australians have of their Governments.

Fads	Popular Music	Fashion	Motoring

This belief that the Government would take care of everything was propagated by the Government itself, and stemmed in part from the fear of Communism, which grew in the 1950s. Government-generated catchphrases like "reds under the beds" fostered the notion that Australia was in danger of being overrun by Communists, which was why it had to "populate of perish". When Communism raised its ugly head in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s, Australians were told - and believed - that it was their duty to side with the people of those countries who opposed Communism, and join in their fight. If the Communists were allowed a foothold there, Australians were told, it would be only a matter of time before they'd be knocking on our door. The White Australia policy, which would ensure that Australia's predominantly British culture would not be threatened by the evil non-European influences in the world, particularly Communism, was all part of the argument.

The arrival of the first migrant ship in 1947 marked the beginning of an era of intense immigration from Europe that would continue until 1977 when the last migrant ship, the passenger liner Australis, disembarked the last of its passengers in Sydney. Assisted Passage migration from Europe would continue into the 1980s, however all new arrivals would now come by air. The composition of the first shipload of post-World War II migrants typified the kinds of people that would be attracted to Australia. It included Polish Allied ex-servicemen, displaced Jewish refugees, child migrants and Britons who had been nominated by relatives or by British industry that had established branches here. The Commonwealth Department of Immigration managed all aspects of migrant selection, financial arrangements associated with bringing them to Australia including their assisted passage, reception on arrival, placement in employment and temporary accommodation in migrant hostels for those requiring it. In 1950, nett overseas migration under Harold Holt, the Minister for Immigration, reached a record high of 153,685, the third highest figure of the century, only surpassed in 1919 (166,303) with troops returning from World War I and in 1988 (172,794). At the beginning of the 1950s, principles were set for the decade: to increase Australia’s population at a rate of one per cent by immigration with the annual migrant intake balanced between assisted and non-assisted migrants, British and non-British migrants, and between northern and southern Europeans within the non-British intake.

In 1952, for the first time since the war, there was significant unemployment in Australia, resulting from a severe fall in prices of some Australian exports. There were major political repercussions and the migration programme was revised to reduce the intake of workers and bring in more family groups. On the basis of each household having only one bread-winner, by bringing in families, less jobs needed to be found for the new arrivals as only one in every four migrants on average needed a job. Each migrant family needed its own home as well as community facilities such as shops and schools; theoretically the migrant family's breadwinner and Australia's unemployed would form the workforce required to build them. Up until 1952, most non-British migrants had been refugees. After 1952, most non-British migrants were families that came under Assisted Passage schemes, the main source countries being Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and the former Yugoslavia. The 1952 migrant intake, originally planned for 150,000, was curtailed and the 1953 programme was reduced to 80,000. This hand-picked influx of manpower provided the skilled tradesmen needed to build the infrastructure the Government planned for the country, and help get the country back to full employment.

To encourage more British migration, the ‘Bring out a Briton’ campaign was re-launched in 1957. The community was encouraged to take responsibility for sponsoring particular British families and assist them to settle. Two years later, the first migrants arrived under the ‘Nest Egg’ scheme. This scheme offered assisted passage to Britons who had more than £500 sterling and were prepared to make their own accommodation arrangements. In that same year, Australian citizens were permitted to sponsor non-European spouses and unmarried minor children for migration. For further information on post-war immigration, view the section on this subject.

Though Australian culture was definitely "flavoured" by the migration of continental Europeans, as reflected in the variety of foods introduced to the Australian dinner table during the latter half of the 20th century, the high level of British migration, and the loyalty of Prime Minister Menzies to the British crown ensured that Australia remained very British throughout the 1950s. The country would not begin to untie the tightly bound apron strings of Mother England until Menzies left the political arena, and the British Empire began evolving into a commonwealth of nations as an increasing number of its colonies gained their independence.

It was in the 1950s that the gradual "Amercianisation" of Australian culture first became apparent. It had begun during World War II when American troops on recreational leave introduced their culture to Australians. They had a major impact on the youth of Australia who began elumating their dress, music, language and eating habits in the 1950s. Australian Baby Boomers grew up fed on a steady diet of Amercian culture via the big screen. This "Amercianisation" intensified with the introduction of television here in 1956. The United States pioneered television as an entertainment medium and America's tele-dramas and situation comedies (sitcoms) dominated what Baby Boomers watched, in part because to the dirth of alternate programming. The tradition remains strong to this day - American sitcoms and crime shows still reign supreme; our quiz, reality and variety shows are modelled on their American counterparts. Even some of our advertising is based on American ads.

By the end of the 1950s, Australia's Baby Boomers had adopted rock'n'roll - the music of America's youth - as their own. The idols of American popular culture - Elvis Presley, Jery Lee Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood etc. - became their idols. American fast food became their fast food. In the 1950s, when Australia began manufacturing cars, we even used their automobiles as the blueprints for our so-called homegrown models - the first Holden, which began rolling off the production line at Fisherman's Bend, Melbourne, in 1948, was built to a reject 1949-model Chevrolet design, even though Prime Minister Chifley referred to it as "Australia's Own Car"; Ford's first locally produced car was originally going to be the English Ford Zephyr, but the company opted for a carbon copy of the American Ford Falcon for their first "Australian" model in 1960; the first Australian Valiants were simply Plymouth Valiants locally-assembled from mainly American components.

The post-World War II technological age heralded the era of consumerism in which a person's success and happiness became equated to the purchasing of material possessions and consumption. Up to the 1950s, the slow pace of society and limited purchasing capacity of the majority made durable products the most economically wise choice. Post-war abundance and automation in manufacturing led to the creation of forced-consumption. A leading US economist of the time asserted that "Americans would need to learn to expand their personal consumption by 16 billion dollars a year if they were to keep pace with production ability". Some went even as far as to claim that consumption should be the new spirituality in Western society: "our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions in consumption ... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-growing rate" (a mid-fifties marketing consultant quoted in Seymour and Girardet, 1989). The rapidly changing society combined with forced consumption led to the economics of permanence being replaced by the economics of transience. Automation made it cheaper to produce new than repair old; advancing technology meant 'new-improved' versions appeared at ever increasing rates; and this rate of change demanded short-life products - just to keep pace with change.

For the new consumerist society, symbols of success were having the right motor vehicle, kitchen appliances and even the right brands, and the key word used in advertising to sell the concept of consumerism was convenience. Every new product was designed to make life easier. The concept of convenience was not only used to sell appliances, it was also used to sell food. Convenience foods provided Australian housewives with foodstuffs that helped them prepare easier, quicker and tastier meals, utilising preservatives, artificial colouring and flavouring and adding quick frozen and dehydrating technologies to the canning and bottling methods of food production. Food manufacturers developed new "convenience" brands, and focused their attention on the development of product ranges that offered easy and quick meal solutions that could be mass produced utilising the new manufacturing technologies.

After the family home, the motor car became the most desired - and purchased - consumer item. At the beginning of the 1950s, less than one in every ten homes had a car in the garage. By the end of the decade, families without a car had become the exception rather than the rule. The motor car's arrival into the family environment had far reaching social effects. The car had to be paid for, and many who bought new homes and new cars as well as all the latest household gadgets that began flooding the market, found that a single income was not enough to cover these expenses. Mums across the country began going back to work to pay for these luxuries, and in some cases, the essentials. Kindergartens and child minding services, that the people of the previous generation frowned upon, sprang up in the suburbs.

The combination of consumerism and the motor car led to radical changes in shopping habits. The most purchased household appliance, which fuelled these changes, was the refrigerator. With a refrigerator, people no longer needed to shop on a daily basis for perishables like meat, fruit and vegatables. They began to shop once a week, and with a car they could travel further and go to shops that offered lower prices or a bigger range. Retailers, particularly in the grocery trade, responded by introducing supermarkets, where it was possible to to buy the week's requirements from a single store. To help keep wage bills low, shop owners provided trolleys for their customers, who were invited to self-serve. The self-service trend eventually reached all forms of retailing, the last to transfer to self-service being the petrol service stations in the 1970s and the banks (with the introduction of automatic teller machines) in the 1980s. The end result was the demise of the corner shop, with only a few of the mixed businesses surviving on the strength of convenience alone. Another victim of the supermarkets was the daily ice, milk, bread and fresh meat deliveries. More and more people began buying these items from the supermarket with their other shopping, leaving home deliverers with insufficient custom to sustain their businesses.

The growing trend of driving to the place where one shops gave birth to the concept of shopping centres, which were introduced into the Australian landscape in the latter years of the 1950s. The shopping centre was created specifically for shoppers who came by car. Built in newly developing suburbs, often on former farming land, they were free standing structures with a huge car park that catered for customers arriving by car from a wide surrounding area. The concept of the fully-enclosed shopping mall was pioneered by the Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen. The new generation of shopping centres, that in the US were eventually called malls, included Northgate Mall, built in north Seattle, Washington, USA in 1950, Northland Shopping Center built near Detroit, Michigan, USA in 1954, and the Southdale Center, which opened in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota, USA in 1956 as the first fully-enclosed shopping mall. It was on this mall's design concept that Australia's shopping centres were modelled.

Australia's first integrated mall-style shopping centres were built in 1957 - the Innaloo Shopping Centre in the Perth suburb of Innaloo, and the Chermside Drive-in at the Brisbane suburb of Chermside. The first shopping centre in Sydney opened at Top Ryde six months after Chermside Drive-in. Melbourne's first self-contained regional shopping centre, Chadstone, opened in October 1960. Being the largest of its kind ever built in Australia, it became and in many ways remains the benchmark for others around the country to follow. In addition to shopping centres, the motor car was responsible for two other innovations that arrived in the 1950s - drive-in theatres and fast food outlets. For further information, follow the links to articles on this disc which detail the development of drive-in theatres and fast food in Australia.

In the 1950s, the motor car also changed the holidaying habits of Australians. For the average Baby Boomer born into a working class family, the annual summer holiday more often than not consisted of the family car being loaded up and driven to a beachside town. Those who could afford it stayed at a hotel or guest house for a week or so, the rest hired an on-site caravan or pitched a tent in the local camping ground.

The term "teenager" was coined in the 1950s, not that young adults hadn't existed before. The youth of previous generations generally had no money and were therefore not targetted or defined as a specific type of consumer as the youth of the western world of the 1950s were. These teens had money to spend and the business community was eager to relieve them of it. They did this by creating products that were marketed as being trendy - clothing, snack foods, records etc. They poured thousands of dollars into advertisements that sought to convince young people that to not buy these products was uncool - the trend continues today and we all still fall for it!

The contemporary view of the 1950s, which has been perpetuated by TV shows like "Happy Days", is that they were indeed happy days, times of innocence when everything and everybody was and could be trusted. In many ways they were, but there was a down side, and that side is not part of the rose-coloured view that is often painted and recalled. As songwriter Paul Simon wrote in "The Boxer", "All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest". In reality, the 1950s were days of naivity rather than innocence. While the people trusted those in leadership to get the job done, what they didn't know, particularly in America, is that those assigned the task of serving and protecting allowed themselves to be corrupted by big business and organised crime. This corruption flourished to such a degree that it took years for the extent of the corruption to be realised and for something to be done about it. That having been said, cracks in the facade painted by the leaders of the time were already beginning to show towards the end of the decade. People began to realise that things weren't quite as they were made out to be. They starting asking questions as to why social problems like racial hatred, poverty and discrimination were not being addressed. Changes were needed and finally did come in the 1960s through the youth of the day; the likes of Bob Dylan voiced the mood of the times in songs like "The Times They Are A-changin'":

Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters Around you have grown
And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who That it's namin'.
For the loser now Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land
And don't criticize What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command
Your old road is Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn The curse it is cast
The slow one now Will later be fast
As the present now Will later be past
The order is Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

The next decade: 1960s