ACIS – Australasian Centre for Italian Studies

3rd Biennial Conference

“Italia Globale: le altre Italie e l'Italia altrove”

Treviso (Italy)

30th June – 2nd July 2005

Mambo Italiano

Italian surfing subcultures and representations of Australian cultural identity

Federico Boni, Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract

The paper aims to explore the ways an all-Australian surf lifestyle brand, Mambo, conveys the images and the representations of Australian-ness among two Italian surfing communities, based in Northern and Central Italy.

Essentially, Mambo is a Sydney based surf-wear label that specializes in bright t-shirts. Created in 1984, in less than a decade the label was generating an annual turnover of more than $10 million. While a Mambo montage might feature the conventional signifiers of Australian culture – like the beach, thongs, sprinklers, and Holdens – it is almost invariably underlined with a sharp satirical bite. The Mambo designers are generally obsessed with something that derives from, or connects with, the Australian experience. Also, Mambo has taken Australia’s blunt approach to life and glorified it, in pure surfing subculture style.

The paper tries to understand how and how much the different signifiers of Australian cultural identity conveyed by Mambo products are received by Italian surfers/consumers, also trying to explore how the Italian surfing subcultures make sense of these ironical markers of Australian-ness.

Introduction: Surfing the Nation

It is a widespread assumption that national identity is a cultural construction, whether it is an “imagined community” (Anderson) or the output of the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm). In both cases, what we have is essentially a modern construct, where the national identities are produced and re-produced by such means as mass rituals and ceremonies, as in Hobsbawm, or the invention of the printing press and the subsequent diffusion of the print (mass) media, which proved to be so useful in disseminating the idea of the nation as a bounded, “natural” community.

What these theories of the nation tend to neglect is the important role played by other dimensions, maybe less grounded in the realm of “high culture” and more connected with the “low” aspects of popular culture and everyday life. After all, if we have an idea of the national “community” is also thanks to the several representations, performances and materializations of national identity through popular culture and everyday life. As Tim Edensor (2002) argues, the identity of a nation is revealed by things and acts that we often take for granted, from familiar landscapes and places to eating habits, from cinema to music. Not only do these and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices become the signifiers of a sense of national belonging, but they end to represent the main characters of other countries, as we picture them in a series of fixed stereotypes and clichés. The red deserts and the exotic beaches of Australia are a shorthand for Australian nation, synedoches through which the Australian country is recognized globally. Important iconic sites as Sydney Opera House or Uluru/Ayers Rock are powerful signifiers for the whole nation, reproduced across popular culture and endlessly recycled through images in films, television shows, postcards and towels. From the great spaces to the familiar and quotidian landscapes: a Swiss cottage reminds us of the Swiss Alps, cows and chocolate, while a typical Queenslander is the signifier of the tropical climate of North-Eastern Australia. Another dimension that narrates us the identity of a nation is that of popular rituals and performances, where certain performing habits are seen as embodying particular national characteristics. An Australian pub in Italy stages particular aspects of the “imagined Australian community”, with many signifiers and symbols of Australianness. When, during the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, Italian audiences watched Ian Thorpe on TV, it was the most “natural” thing to see an Australian youngster swimming “like a shark” (as many Italian newspapers reported). This is also the realm of abstract qualities, such as politeness, openness, a.s.o. (see the Australian mateship, the Italian friendship or the British humour). The third dimension of the popular representations of national identity is that of material culture, where national narratives are often organized around things and objects. Several commodities are strongly symbolic of national identity: the Italian Vespa, the British red phone boxes or black cabs, the Australian thongs and sprinklers convey particular meanings, connoting shared stories for the inhabitants of a nation as well as invented narratives for the foreigners and the visitors.

The study we are presenting tries to explore how all these dimensions, so strongly rooted in the popular culture and representations of a country, function as a set of several signifiers for the national and cultural identity of a foreign country, for a particular kind of people. What we are going to explore is the way (the set of ways) an Australian surf lifestyle brand, Mambo, conveys the images and the representations of Australianness among an Italian group of consumers, according to all the dimension we have already seen – namely, the iconic sites and the places, the acted performances, such as sport, everyday life, abstract qualities and “national character”, and the material culture (objects, things, commodities that signify Australia at home and abroad).

Essentially, Mambo is a Sydney based surf-wear label that specialises in bright t-shirts. Created in 1984, in less than a decade the label was generating an annual turnover of more than $10 million. While a Mambo montage might feature the conventional signifiers of Australian culture – like the beach, thongs, sprinklers, and Holdens – it is almost invariably underlined with a sharp satirical bite. The Mambo designers are generally obsessed with something that derives from, or connects with, the Australian experience. Also, Mambo has taken Australia’s blunt approach to life and glorified it, in pure surfing subculture style.

Since Mambo is a very specialized brand, less known than other surf labels such as Quiksilver or Billabong, our research is based on a very restricted part of the population, namely two Italian surfing communities, based in Northern and Central Italy (Liguria and Emilia Romagna). The paper tries to understand how and how much the different signifiers of Australian cultural identity conveyed by Mambo products (shirts, t-shirts, trousers, a.s.o.) are received by Italian surfers/consumers, also trying to explore how the Italian surfing subcultures make sense of these (ironic) markers of Australianness.

The research is based on a sort of frame analysis of Australian national identity signifiers both as they appear in the Mambo products and the way the Italian surfer groups make sense of them. Visual analysis is used to identify the different frames producing the discourses on Australianness, while a series of focus groups identify the consumers’ frames, i.e. the different ways the young Italian surfers “make sense” of the Mambo prints. The visual analysis has been conducted on several Mambo products, comprising items worn or owned by the interviewees and items shown on Mambo catalogues and promotional books. Focus groups are adopted as a qualitative method to understand how Italian consumers interpret, interact with and create meaning out of the content of Mambo prints. There were four sessions, each with a different group; two groups are from the Eastern Riviera in Liguria, and two groups are from the Riviera of Emilia Romagna. The data of both the visual and the consumers analysis are presented together to underline the strong connections between the Mambo “texts” and the uses and interpretations of their consumers.

The choice to focus the analysis on a single surf lifestyle brand is due to the fact that Mambo is the only surf company which is strongly focused on recognizable Australian signifiers; it is a sort of celebration of Australian popular culture, to which the Italian surfers of our research seem to be particularly sensitive and sympathetic.

Surfers Paradise, Italy

The first Australian cultural aspect framed by Mambo products is the surfing lifestyle in its complex, with all its different signifiers: places – the beach –, (social) roles – the surfer –, attitudes – sexism, typical in every male subculture – and performances – drinking, consuming drugs, a.s.o.

The beach is a powerful icon of Australianness, and is the signifier of different meanings: it is “uncompromisingly seen within the general framework of the natural, the free, the outdoors, the informal, the physical, and so on” (Fiske at al. 1987, 53). The most famous Australian beaches (Bondi, Manly, Surfers Paradise a.s.o.) have a particular aspect: quite paradoxically, while they express the typical love of Australians for “nature” and outdoor living, they are for the most part urban beaches: “the central image of the Australian beach is not that of the tropical hideaway. That does exist, but is reserved for holidays, preferably outside Australia. The beach that contributes to everyday existence must be metropolitan, therefore urban. It is Bondi Beach, with its row of hotels and fast food outlets; Manly, with its aquarium and dodgem cars; or the most recent additions, cities that are planned solely in order to be close to the beach thus clearly highlighting the relation between beach and the city, [like] Surfers Paradise” (ibidem, 54-55). The framework of Australian beaches is thus a double one: on one side we have the urban environment, that is, culture; on the other side we have something primitive, spiritual and physical, that is, nature (of course, the socially constructed idea of “nature”). The beach is an anomalous category as its (symbolic) place is between nature and culture; it is the site where nature and culture meet and blend. Mambo prints refer both to the “urban beach” and to the “surf beach”, that is, both to the “McBeach” and to the “new age” flavored beach, with all the mystical meanings that it carries.

Nevertheless, the kind of beach evoked by Mambo prints to the Italian surfing subcultures of our research is especially that of the second kind, connected to a sense of primal freedom. According to Mauro, a surfer in his twenties from Recco, Genova,

the beach portrayed in my Mambo t-shirt is a completely natural one, with no buildings or hotels around. Just a palm tree, a surf board and a van, that’s it. And that’s exactly what you need when you go surfing, whether alone or with your friends: nothing less, nothing more. I think that’s exactly what I could expect from a proper Australian beach, at least from a surf beach, not one with suntan oil and towels!

The “proper” beach the young Italian surfer is talking about is the typical Australian surf beach, which “develops a ‘fundamentalist’ youth subculture of its own with its codes and practices that oppose the conventions of more normal society” (Fiske et al. 1987, 55). The beaches the “true” surfers look for are places where the surfer can challenge the natural elements, and the surf itself challenges its user, in a more dangerous (and mythical) way than do the harbour beaches of Sydney or the bay beaches of Brisbane.

The panel van Mauro is referring to is a main feature of the surfing subcultures, and it is present in many Mambo prints, like the one worn by the young Italian interviewee during the focus group session. When asked about the significance of the panel van in his idea of Australianness and Australian (surf) lifestyle, Mauro adds:

Well, yes, I love the idea of buying a van and going around in search of remote beaches where to surf free from anything. Some friends told me that when they went to Australia they bought one for a few dollars, I think they were in Merimbula, but I can’t remember exactly. I think it must be very cool to go around Australian coasts and just get the “right” beach, doing whatever you want!

Just like the beach, and youth itself, the panel van is an Australian myth that, according to Fiske et al. (1987), represents an anomalous category, “in that it has got the form of a truck for work, but it is used more like a car for leisure and for other social/sexual purposes” (ibidem, 67). The panel van is a “uniquely Australian vehicle” (ibidem) which contributes to the social and (sub)cultural construction of a whole cosmology of the Australian surf lifestyle: “it is appropriate that this accumulation of meaning of beach, youth, surfboard, and panel van should have elements of the sacred for its initiates and of taboo for the rest” (ibidem).

The joyful images suggested by the prints of the Mambo t-shirts worn (or owned) by the participants to the research are connected to another important feature of Australian cultural identity, that is, a strong sexism. It is worth stressing the sexist nature of many Mambo prints, as it reflects the sexist nature of most youth subcultures, where males and females are well separated and their behaviour is distinguished, with the male playing the dominant role and the female the subordinate role. In the surf subcultures this feature is particularly evident, even if the participants to the focus groups share the “Mambo ironical view” to sexism:

It is almost a joke, the babes are not allowed to use our boards, but actually they use them maybe more than we – well, than I – do! So it is not really a true exclusion, we joke on it, but it remains true that normally when I surf I share the company of my mates, and the girls are… Well, they are spectators! And sometimes they get bored.

This idea of the ironical use of cultural tropes, as we will see, is strongly recurrent both in Mambo prints and in the opinion of the interviewees. After all, as Susie Khamis (2004) argues, “it does matter that of all the surf wear brands marketed and sold as ‘distinctly’ Australian, like Rip Curl, Billabong and Quiksilver, it is only Mambo that confronted and critiqued the latent conformity and conservatism of both surf culture specifically, and Australian culture generally. Moreover, as Mark Dapin argues, given that it is surf wear that is easiest to promote both here and overseas as ‘particularly’ Australian, it has fallen on Mambo to project an image that actively considers and questions this Australianness. Every cultural intervention Mambo instigates effectively speaks to, about, and against the status quo. From the initial encounter with its Farting Dog mascot, to the quasi-sacrilege of its Spiritual Adventurewear line (with its Jesus-Mouse hybrid hero), to the sexual politics of Maria Kozic’s Mambo Goddess, Mambo designs move well beyond an adolescent pranksterism to a fundamentally humanist idealism. Where other brands strive for clarity and consistency, to the point of a conveyor-belt blandness that nullifies whatever hard-won niche they once enjoyed, Mambo’s ever-changing stable of artists forestalls such predictability”.

Big Aussie Beer Monster Creates the Southern Ocean

During one focus group session of the research, one of the interviewees showed the print on the back of his Mambo t-shirt, depicting a demonic monster drinking beer from a can and pissing in the middle of a sea of beer. The scene is surrounded by the following phrase:

Big Aussie Beer Monster Creates the Southern Ocean

The image carries one of the typical features of the constructed cultural identity of Australia: the love for drinking. The same boy, Ivan, 23 years old, from Ferrara, continues:

At the end, Australians are from Britain… And you know that the British like drinking beer! Well, we like too, but I think that here we drink more wine, while I imagine them drinking beer all the time. I think that what this image suggests is the connection between Australian culture and the strong use of beer.

What Ivan is illustrating here, tracing a parallel with Italian drinking habits, is an important feature of Australianness. It is interesting to note that in their analysis of “Myths of Oz”, Fiske et al. (1987, 16) stress the importance of beer and alcohol for the construction of the Australian mythology: “the archetypal Aussie male drinks gallons of beer to get drunk […]. For him beer is a bearer of culture insofar as it is cheap, egalitarian, masculine, social and, when drunk in pubs, significantly differentiated from both home (family/wife) and work (boss)”. The radical egalitarianism of drinking is linked by the authors to the figure of Nietzschean Dionysus: “Dionysiac revelers are depicted (by a later, anti-Dionysiac age) as semi-naked, with pot-bellies – like the archetypal Australian beer-drinker, flushed, demonic and absurd. Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysiac orgy incorporates the radical egalitarian ethos that is also claimed for Australian drinkers in Australian pubs” (ibidem, 12). Semi-naked, with pot-bellies, flushed, demonic and absurd: this is exactly the description of the “Aussie Beer Monster”, whose belly is a beer can, his eyes of fire, and whose figure is an absurd and grotesque extravaganza.