Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke’s Beer World Record and Ocker Chic

ABSTRACT Australia’s 23rd prime minister, Bob Hawke, is celebrated for a world record set at the University of Oxford in the 1950s for the fastest consumption of a yard of ale. The beer record is apocryphal, having five evidential flaws. However, the embellishment—or fabrication—of the record was crucial to the “larrikin-leader” dual image Hawke constructed over the course of the 1970s as he manoeuvred to enter parliament. Hawke’s dual image appealed widely from the 1970s onwards because of the rise of the “ocker”: a middle-class caricature of Australians. By the 1980s, a refined “ocker chic” identity had emerged in which the middle class could erect a national culture that feigned meritocracy. In the 2020s, politicians, professionals, performative fathers and others identify with an ahistorical nation in which irreverence, elasticated leather boots, cowboy hats, Bavarian-style cold beer, and stories of endurance in foreign lands help to conceal their privilege. While many commentators have tried to explain this phenomenon, Diane Kirkby’s formulation of ocker chic reveals the interchange between class, gender and race that has preserved neoliberal capitalism in Australia.