The Ocker Michelle Arrow sees the ocker as a reactionary movement of men in the first half of the 1970s using parody to rebel against the
women's liberation movement. Many films made during the
Australian film renaissance of the 1970s were marketed as "ocker comedies", representing a "masculine, populist, and cheerfully vulgar view of Australian society". These films were latterly described as "
Ozploitation". While popular with audiences, most ocker films were loathed by critics. Among the best known are
Stork (1971),
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), and
Alvin Purple (1973).
Ocker chic According to Kirkby, the ocker became "less parodic as the nation became a 'projection of the larrikin fantasies of middle-class Australian men'."
C. J. Coventry sees ocker chic as "cultural propaganda". Ocker chic "helped to secure emergent sources of wealth, especially from a heavily unionised working class, and it permitted the open enjoyment of wealth in a time when wage growth was suppressed and unemployment was increasing." It is the Australian machismo equivalent to the one
Gore Vidal argued in
Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia was ascendant in the United States in the 1980s under President
Ronald Reagan. Others see the American machismo as beginning earlier with
Richard Nixon running through every president to
Donald Trump. The machismo strategy to align white men behind right wing populism in the United States began with the Republican political operative
Arthur J. Finkelstein in the early 1970s. Ocker depictions in cinema rapidly faded in the mid-1975s with softer characters emerging, played by actors such as
Jack Thompson,
Paul Hogan and
John Hargreaves. From 1977, politicians began ocker-ising their image with Prime Minister
Malcolm Fraser being seen in public drinking beer. The rise of
Bob Hawke is seen as a key example of how widespread ocker chic had become by the 1980s. Hawke had cultivated an image as a typical union man that was very popular with middle-class voters as early as 1972 that carried him all the way to the prime minister's office. The central part of this image was his "world record" beer skol (scull) which was "at best apocryphal, at worst fabricated" with no evidential basis beyond its appearance in a beer pamphlet called the Guinness Book of Records. Prime Minister
Paul Keating, who had come from a family that owned a large business and chose to live in an affluent part in an
Australian Labor Party area, exhibited ocker chic by projecting a working class persona (drinking cans of beer in public and using tough talk) while also listening to classical music and collecting antique clocks. Coventry cites numerous examples of ocker chic outside professional politics among businessmen, journalists, sportsmen, singer-songwriters and professionals.
R. M. Williams manipulated his backstory to make himself seem to be a rough outdoorsman, even though his fortune was made in gold mining. The
National Farmers Federation repurposed the working-class/union concept of the "fair go". The historian
Manning Clark cultivated his image to appear more like a farmer. ==Present day ocker chic==