Once were Westies
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Gabrielle Gwyther
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As a guest on a western Sydney community radio program recently, I noted the ease with which the young radio jocks – each born and raised in the city's west – referred to themselves as ‘Westies'. They transformed the pejorative term into one of identity. The Westie was a creation of the 1960s and '70s as young, working families were encouraged westward into the newly built, rather austere public and private housing subdivisions on Sydney's urban fringe. It was a term of division and derision, and became shorthand for a population considered lowbrow, coarse and lacking education and cultural refinement.
The phrase became iconic after Michael Thornhill's 1977 social realist film The FJ Holden. The classic Westie was a male of Anglo-Celtic origin who lived in the vast, homogenous flatlands west of the city. The checked flannelette shirt symbolised his attire and vandalism, cheap drink and hotted-up cars his behaviour. ‘Westie chicks' had a secondary status – much like the ‘surfie chicks' of this misogynistic era – they were considered tougher, albeit more dimwitted than their beachside sisters and more prone to teen pregnancies. Westie became a rhetorical device to designate the ‘other' Sydney: spatially, culturally and economically different from the more prosperous and privileged Sydneysiders of the north and east.
The expression, at least in the pejorative sense, is less frequently heard these days. Although not entirely obsolete, today's Westie must compete linguistically with an expanding dictionary of derisive terms for the increasingly diverse ‘other' that now characterises Sydney's west: ‘Westie-Bogan', FOB (fresh-off-the-boat), Leb, ‘Westie Arse Kicking Hoff' (following the Cronulla riots), ‘Hoon', ‘Westie Skank' (when ‘Westie chick' just doesn't cut it) and Boon. To this lexicon of derision, the interchangeable terms ‘Aspirationals', ‘CUBS' (cashed-up Bogans) and (until recently) ‘Howard's Battlers' can probably be added.
Aspirationals came to prominence in the late 1990s to describe a seemingly new constituency of voters living on the urban fringes who appeared to have clawed their way out of the real battler class and into big cars, big houses and even bigger mortgages. In reality, as the one-time leader of federal Labor, Mark Latham, both promulgated and epitomised, Sydney's Aspirationals are mostly grown-up Westies who have taken advantage of dual incomes, easy finance and housing-based wealth. The term has come to incorporate others, including a mix of blue-collar contractors/service providers who live on the fringes of other Australian cities.
In keeping with its pejorative nuance, University of Wollongong academic John Robinson notes that the term resonates more with outsiders. Viewed as self-interested and materialistic, Aspirationals are reckoned to hold a more selfish set of values and morés than other Australians. As one of Robinson's interviewees from Sydney's privileged eastern suburbs puts it: ‘They are people who want to be middle-class but are not. They are into credit and consumption, living in suburbs they can't afford to be in and in houses they can't afford, with lots of goods they can't afford to have.'
It is this moral undertone that gives the term its pejorative nuance. The concentration of Aspirationals within new master-planned estates located in marginal electorates on the metropolitan fringes gives them political punch. As a constituency, Aspirationals have been wooed by the two major political parties since the 2001 federal election. As Sean Scalmer notes, ‘representing the Aspirationals can be a powerful ideological claim'. Media commentators suggest that, like their Westie predecessors, Aspirationals are not particularly smart, easily ‘gulled' and ‘duped' into misunderstanding their real class interests. The swing to Labor in outer urban electorates in the 2007 federal election undermines this suggestion, however.
This essay takes a fresh look at the Aspirationals by examining the rise of their preferred residential haunt: the master-planned estate (MPE). These estates have a holistic approach to planning, designing and developing a given project site and are the dominant form of contemporary green-field development in Australia's major cities. Developed essentially for middle-income households in conventionally lower-income regions like Sydney's urban fringe, the estates are a cultural artefact which encapsulates the fears, ambitions and way of life of the Aspirational constituency. The MPE promotes a particular ideological form of community, one which is used to buttress residents' social, physical and economic security in a regions which must increasingly contend with cultural diversity, the challenges of multiculturalism, decaying public housing estates, the fear of crime and a variable housing market.