Australian of The Year - Awards History - 1970s and 1980s

1970s and 1980s

During its first two decades, the Australian of the Year award grew steadily in national prominence, but it increasingly suffered from its close association with the Victorian Australia Day Council. This fact became abundantly clear in 1975 when the newly formed Canberra Australia Day Council named a rival Australian of the Year. The Canberra council was run by a vibrant group of Canberrans, who pursued a more progressive agenda than their Victorian counterparts. In particular, the Canberra council was sympathetic to the emerging republican movement, while the Victorian council was staunchly committed to constitutional ties with Britain. The Victorian council also battled a common perception that it was an exclusive organisation that represented the Melbourne Establishment. Australia’s turbulent political climate nourished this division and the Australian of the Year award was embroiled in a wider debate about Australian nationalism.

Between 1975 and 1979, the Canberra Australia Day Council named four Australians of the Year. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam lent his support to the new award when he presented the inaugural honour to Major General Alan Stretton, the commander of the emergency response to Cyclone Tracy. The Canberra council also made good use of the federal parliamentary press boxes to promote its award to the national media. The Victorian council was singularly unimpressed that a rival Australia Day organisation had copied its idea – in 1978 it described its own winner, Dame Rae Roe, as ‘the real Australian of the Year.’ The impasse was only resolved when the Fraser Government created the National Australia Day Council (NADC) in 1979. The Victorian council willingly transferred responsibility for its award to the new national body, while the Canberra council agreed to discontinue its rival program. In 1982 the Victorian council was further sidelined when John Cain’s Australian Labor Party created a new Victorian Australia Day Committee within the Premier’s Department, which joined the NADC’s official national network.

The NADC made immediate changes to the selection process, appointing an independent panel of ten leading Australians from diverse fields. Despite this rigorous approach, the panel’s first choice of historian Manning Clark did not please conservative politicians, as Clark had been critical of the Fraser Government’s social policy. If nothing else, the controversy was a clear sign that the award had become a prominent and valued feature of the Australia Day celebrations. In time the selection of the annual winner fell to the board of the NADC itself, whose members are appointed by the Prime Minister of the day. Former NADC chairman Phillip Adams recalls that heated debates were common. Typically the Australian of the Year was chosen at a special two-day board meeting, which Adams likened to the election of a Pope: ‘We would go into conclave, there would be lots of hot air, then a puff of smoke.’

During the 1980s, there was an expectation that corporate sponsorship would replace Government funding and that the NADC would become self-sufficient. The list of former Australians of the Year provides circumstantial evidence of this shift towards a more popular imperative. Economist Sir John Crawford and judge Sir Edward Williams thoroughly deserved their awards, but were perhaps not well placed to promote the importance of Australia Day to mainstream Australia, or to secure corporate sponsorship for the NADC. Subsequent winners included marathon runner Robert de Castella, comedian Paul Hogan, singer John Farnham and cricketer Allan Border, who were far more likely to attract public attention. In 1988 the Sydney Morning Herald editors expressed concern at this development: ‘One worrying trend with the award is its attachment to ratings. This year’s candidates appear to have been people who held high public profiles.’ Yet the steadily rising numbers of nominations indicated that the award was capturing the public imagination.