Catherine and Heathcliff. These are surely roles that every attractive British actor should aspire to. Why mope between auditions for years if you don’t think it could be your windswept hair decorating bus posters one day?
So the British director Emerald Fennell’s casting of two Australians – Jacob Elordiand Margot Robbie – to play these parts in ‘Wuthering Heights’ feels unfair. But her decision is canny. Elordi and Robbie are both gorgeous, of course, but they also come bearing a new type of cultural clout. Their perfect hair and facial symmetry are nothing compared with the quirkiness of their being Australian, the aesthetic that’s seducing young Brits most of all.
The first clue was about five years ago, when many British men started looking ridiculous. They still do. You can see them in London and our university towns. They grow outrageous mullets, with the sides shaved off. They grow attention-seeking moustaches. They wear caps inside. They wear vests, denim shorts (or ‘jorts’), Birken-stocks and lots of rings. Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect is the return of ‘speed dealer sunnies’: frameless wrap-around sunglasses. The goal for these men seems to be to look as goofy as possible. The Australian look isn’t just, in the words of The Thick of It, ‘people in khaki, squinting’. It’s a sort of cartoonish confidence of a type you can probably only acquire from constantly evading all the animals that want to kill you.
The vocabulary was the next thing I noticed. My own flatmate, who frequently shows symptoms of Australia fever (running clubs in Clapham; ‘avo on toast’), started saying that he’d been out for ‘six or seven beers’ last night. Beers. Not ‘pints’. Beers. Colleagues have also found themselves being asked for a ‘durry’ in pub smoking areas. Even I have said that I’m ‘cooked’ upon trying to describe myself as ‘past it’.
Then there are the millennial brunch foods, which have been around for a while but are still hugely popular, of flax seeds, overnight oats and that avocado on toast. They were the import of an Australian chef, Bill Granger, who died three years ago. His Sydney restaurant, Bills, is credited with being the first to serve ‘avo toast’ in 1993. The ‘flat white’ – so ubiquitous Rory Sutherland has backed a pop-up called ‘Flat White or Fuck Off’ – is also an Australian import.
Milk Beach, a restaurant in central London, is a good place to take stock. I pass a sign that says: ‘Australian dining this way.’ I look at the menu and it doesn’t seem very Australian: there’s taramasalata, tuna sashimi and sesame prawn toast. There is a ‘chicken schnitty’ (annoying), but that seems to be the only nod to Down Under. The formula seems to be to take a cuisine of nowhere and just tell people it’s Australian. This is what they eat where it’s 30°C and everyone’s attractive. Everyone around me does have a Bondi–like glow, to be fair. No one with a hangover eats ‘aubergine karaage’.
Why is this happening? You can tell a lot about a culture by what it tries to copy. Americanisation was bad enough but at least there was an element of economic aspiration behind the mimicry. The infatuation with Australia seems like a resignation: a wish for life to feel like one long gap year. In D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo he describes the Australian disposition as that of ‘an indifference with a deep flow of loose energy beneath it, ready to break out like a geyser’. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the current British mood. We’ve got stagnant productivity, 6.5 million on out-of-work benefits, but also… we’re a nation of binge drinkers, of BuzzBallz, of the highest cocaine consumption in Europe.
These might seem incompatible with the running clubs, but no. Australians burn the candle at both ends: three hours’ surfing or a half-marathon logged on Strava, followed by ‘beers’. Australia’s per-capita coke consumption is the highest in the world, yet they all look amazing. An example of this marriage is the Instagram celebrity Schooner Scorer: a posh British man who films himself going to pubs and rating ‘schooners’, the Australian metric for a beer. You might think he’d look fat and blotchy, yet his Instagram shows him boasting a marathon time of less than three hours. From his posts, I can see he’s been in Australia for weeks.
The worst thing about this love affair is that it’s unrequited. Australians are less fond of Britain than they were: the number coming to Britain was just 14,953 last year, down from 37,375 in 2005. Meanwhile, their GDP per capita is 30 per cent higher than ours.
The attractions of the Australian lifestyle are hardly a mystery. It’s sunny and fun. In most of Britain it has rained every day this year and our economy looks ‘cooked’. Acting like an Australian is a distraction, but a mullet and a terrible ’tache won’t be enough.
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