Sounes is on less sure ground when he hits what used to be labelled high culture. Conceived in the late 1950s, the Sydney Opera House surely doesn’t belong here. David Hockney and Gilbert and George probably do, but can they really be said to dominate or lead the visual arts of the decade? Literature is represented by the wonderfully unlikely trio of Solzhenitsyn, Norman Mailer and Iris Murdoch, without so much as a mention of Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. ‘Classical’ music doesn’t feature, nor do Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or the upcoming Australian directors. The broader cultural context which underpinned the artistic innovation — the development of feminist, gay and ecological polemics, the impact of poststructuralism on the universities — is barely even sketched,
Sounes has no pretensions to being an academic and he’d probably retort that he wasn’t aiming to be encylopaedic or systematic, yet such omissions mean that he ultimately fails to make the best case for his donné. Although the book presents a bright and amusing parade which defeats the clichés and sniggers about platform heels and the Bay City Rollers, it wilts for lack of a stronger intellectual backbone.
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