Catherine and Heathcliff. These are surely roles that every attractive British actor should aspire to. Why mope between auditions for years if you don\u2019t think it could be your windswept hair decorating bus posters one day?<\/p>\n
So the British director Emerald Fennell\u2019s casting of two Australians \u2013 Jacob Elordiand Margot Robbie \u2013 to play these parts in \u2018Wuthering Heights\u2019 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\u2019s seducing young Brits most of all.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018jorts\u2019), Birken-stocks and lots of rings. Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect is the return of \u2018speed dealer sunnies\u2019: frameless wrap-around sunglasses. The goal for these men seems to be to look as goofy as possible. The Australian look isn\u2019t just, in the words of The Thick of It, \u2018people in khaki, squinting\u2019. It\u2019s a sort of cartoonish confidence of a type you can probably only acquire from constantly evading all the animals that want to kill you.<\/p>\n
The vocabulary was the next thing I noticed. My own flatmate, who frequently shows symptoms of Australia fever (running clubs in Clapham; \u2018avo on toast\u2019), started saying that he\u2019d been out for \u2018six or seven beers\u2019 last night. Beers. Not \u2018pints\u2019. Beers. Colleagues have also found themselves being asked for a \u2018durry\u2019 in pub smoking areas. Even I have said that I\u2019m \u2018cooked\u2019 upon trying to describe myself as \u2018past it\u2019.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018avo toast\u2019 in 1993. The \u2018flat white\u2019 \u2013 so ubiquitous Rory Sutherland has backed a pop-up called \u2018Flat White or Fuck Off\u2019 \u2013 is also an Australian import.<\/p>\n
Milk Beach, a restaurant in central London, is a good place to take stock. I pass a sign that says: \u2018Australian dining this way.\u2019 I look at the menu and it doesn\u2019t seem very Australian: there\u2019s taramasalata, tuna sashimi and sesame prawn toast. There is a \u2018chicken schnitty\u2019 (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\u2019s Australian. This is what they eat where it\u2019s 30\u00b0C and everyone\u2019s attractive. Everyone around me does have a Bondi\u2013like glow, to be fair. No one with a hangover eats \u2018aubergine karaage\u2019.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s novel Kangaroo he describes the Australian disposition as that of \u2018an indifference with a deep flow of loose energy beneath it, ready to break out like a geyser\u2019. It\u2019s a perfect encapsulation of the current British mood. We\u2019ve got stagnant productivity, 6.5 million on out-of-work benefits, but also\u2026 we\u2019re a nation of binge drinkers, of BuzzBallz, of the highest cocaine consumption in Europe.<\/p>\n
These might seem incompatible with the running clubs, but no. Australians burn the candle at both ends: three hours\u2019 surfing or a half-marathon logged on Strava, followed by \u2018beers\u2019. Australia\u2019s 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 \u2018schooners\u2019, the Australian metric for a beer. You might think he\u2019d 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\u2019s been in Australia for weeks.<\/p>\n
The worst thing about this love affair is that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The attractions of the Australian lifestyle are hardly a mystery. It\u2019s sunny and fun. In most of Britain it has rained every day this year and our economy looks \u2018cooked\u2019. Acting like an Australian is a distraction, but a mullet and a terrible \u2019tache won\u2019t be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catherine and Heathcliff. These are surely roles that every attractive British actor should aspire to. Why mope between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,82490,12358,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-504980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-emerald-fennell","11":"tag-margot-robbie","12":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}