Alan Bond, quintessential '80s figure, waits to get his hands on the America's Cup in Fremantle in 1987.
Alan Bond, quintessential '80s figure, waits to get his hands on the America's Cup in Fremantle in 1987. Photo: Tony Feder
Social history
The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia
FRANK BONGIORNO
BLACK INC., $45
Where to begin? This is a question quickly resolved by historians with a preference for the tidy, linear play of events: at the beginning. And that, for Frank Bongiorno as he sets out to tell the tale of The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, is the hot high summer of 1983.
<i>The Eighties</i> by Frank Bongiorno.
The Eighties by Frank Bongiorno.Photo: Supplied
Ash Wednesday, February 16, to be precise, a day that saw new Labor leader Bob Hawke launch his campaign for election at the Sydney Opera House: "The new path for Australia after the fifth of March 1983, will be national reconciliation, national recovery, national reconstruction. For let there be no mistake – there can be no economic recovery, there cannot be a beginning towards recovery, until there is a national effort towards national reconciliation." Remember?
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To the south, Ash Wednesday dawned eponymously, with 104 fires already burning at dawn in Victoria. Temperatures climbed to the forties, the winds eddied and roared. Cataclysm followed and brought 75 deaths in Victoria and South Australia. Cockatoo, Beaconsfield, Macedon: some towns were scorched from the map. In all there were 2300 buildings lost and 350,000 head of livestock killed in the searing confusion of bushfire.
And with that juxtaposition – between silver bodgie and bloody bonfire – Bongiorno sets the pattern for the 300 pages that follow, a rattling account, quick-cut and filmic, of contrasting, often overlapping, events: high and low culture, the big moments nestling in the finer long-forgotten detail.
And the detail here is the thing, a running authorial sleight of hand that salts a nimble, skipping narrative with enough fine-grained close-up to give the impression of a dense and exhaustive study without being tempted into the many digressions that detail might, in other less disciplined hands, provoke.
Bongiorno sticks to his path through a decade that he concludes was formative: "Australia's 1980s continue to cast their shadow over our lives. The decade stalks debate about the poor quality of our present politics and politicians, the adequacy of our national leadership and the perils of dependence on commodity exports for which world demand fluctuates as much as it did 30  years ago. The songs of the 1980s fill our journeys, its fashions live in our nightmares, its popular heroes regularly figure in the media – even if only to signal their passing."
All that lies before us as this tale of a decade begins.
As a history – an unswervingly masculine one – it's a little like a cartoon flick-book, one of those analogue animations that brings a series of printed images to life as the pages riffle under your thumb. The names come thick and fast, multiple characters on most pages, the panorama rushing past: Brian Burke and Laurie Connell introduced on one page, replaced by Joh Bjelke-Petersen and David Combe on the next. Then comes Norm Gallagher, Harvey Barnett, ASIO and the CIA, El Nino, drought and the shuffling footsteps of Cliff Young. 
The Eighties is a book dense with character and movement, if a little spare on the grand themes that might lift and contexualise those things. The story almost seems to propel itself, a masterclass in seamless conjunction, slipping smoothly by as you move through the pages, then gone behind in the bubbling wake.
There are moments of rather too easy generalisation: "Australians now ate dainty and stylish dishes, drank wine and dressed or stripped off for display. They had come to accept their own bodies and were thoroughly at ease in enjoying themselves." That kind of thing.
There's a nagging sense of something missing in all of this too. The reader might well be troubled by an occasional and eventually clear sense that Bongiorno is so intent on assembling the characters, ideas and events of the decade, that he neglects to put an argument for what it all might mean.
Which is not to say that at last, in his concluding phrases, he doesn't seek to find some rhythm in it all, a sum of these parts that might give the '80s their due as a pivotal moment in many fields, he does. But that sense of argument, of a unifying proposition, is by and large absent through the book.
We are presented with a chronicle of events, of things set down in quick sequence for no better reason than that they happened, and then left to our own interpretive devices.
And that is something of a pity for this is indeed a decade that might be as well described in terms of consequence as much as action, or at least that action might be better arranged against a scheme that sought  to present some sort of thesis.
Bongiorno goes on to reflect, in his closing pages, on the reputation that Alan Bond carried with him to the grave, of both "hero and crook", the paradoxical parable of this decade embodied in one of its most emblematic characters; a time of financial liberation, but a time too that suited the clutch of too-plausible brigands who would take the opportunities of this new economic order and run amok.
Bond might perhaps have been a better place to begin rather than end: the national hero feted by the powerful, lauded by the ordinary and through it all a schemer, a man teetering on the brink of criminality and fraud.
And there is this decade in a flawed nutshell. It was a salutary moment, a case study in both the necessity of constructive reform and ambitious economics and the companion inevitability that opportunity left unchecked will lead to exploitation and excess. 
Bongiorno doesn't give us much sense of this, and he certainly resists the temptation to structure his narrative in a way that drives us towards that conclusion. There is no index entry for economic rationalism, but three pages for Geoffrey Edelsten.
All that said, it is good to look back, or, for the younger audience perplexed at the constant contemporary genuflection to this golden era of political will and policy ambition, to discover the '80s in all their giddy complexity, from Midnight Oil and Jenny Kee to a freshly floated currency and the H.R. Nicholls society.
By the sometimes staid standards of the present, it was an energetic and often tumultuous time, but then, there was much to be done, a decade-long resolution of the slow steps to worldliness that Australia had been taking since the mid-'60s. 
It's probably true that there is less to do now, with the big-ticket propositions of economic reform all but done and dusted: an economy once opened and deregulated is forever open and free of regulation. We are left with a constant search for fine-tuning and meaning, all of it set against a set of expectations of politics formed at a time when the job was more urgent and real. 
That's a contrast that might just explain the sometimes directionless muddle of our moment as we potter about in the early 21st century. Back in the '80s they had their work cut out for them and a clear-cut job to do. That was a blessing in its way, and the cast here assembled, from Peter Abeles to Mick Young, were a match for it.
Jonathan Green is the editor of Meanjin and presents Sunday Extra on Radio National.