Stroll along the Singapore River or North 6th Street in Brooklyn. If you feel homesick, pop into Toby’s Estate for an Australian latte.
Missing Bill’s sweetcorn fritters or ricotta hotcakes like you used to have in Surry Hills? There’s now a Granger and Co in Notting Hill.
Like they used to watch Neighbours and Home and Away to catch a glimpse of the sun, people overseas actually torrent the Australian versions of My Kitchen Rules and Masterchef.
And now residents of Paris, London, New York and Tokyo can now learn for themselves what a mess it makes when you apply Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Balm before you’ve properly dried off your Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash.
By the time BBC correspondent Nick Bryant had lived in Australia for almost 5 years, he’d seen enough to label our country a “great lifestyle superpower.”
So many people want to come to live here and if they don’t come to live here […] they try and ape it. I mean you’ve just got to walk into a book shop in London, you see the books there by Australian chefs and Australian interior designers. You’re exporting this way of life at the moment which again is part of the rise of Australia.
“A nation more concerned with styles of life than achievement has managed to achieve what may be the most evenly prosperous society in the world,” Donald Horne wrote fifty years ago in The Lucky Country.
And Australians, by and large, are prosperous. Not just eating out, but eating out with our iPads next to us on the table.
Three of Australia’s cities are ranked in the top 15 most expensive in the world.
“And you can feel it,” writes journalist Madeleine Morris, “just by looking at the small stuff.”
No litter on the streets. The “obsession with gourmet food shows, the shiny European appliances in the shiny designer kitchens that seem to be a feature in even the most average family home.” The “seriousness about single-origin coffee.”
She does not mean to sound flippant, she says.
Of course, there is poverty too, and the gap between rich and poor is growing. But the overall feeling I get is that this is a country that can afford to be worried about the small stuff, because the bigger things – food, shelter, water, employment are pretty much taken care of.
Nearly six months ago, Australians were explicitly warned to brace for a fall in living standards.
It’s not a question of policy or government or arcane economic levers so much as logic. Surely the good times can’t last forever – especially when the rest of the world is feeling the pinch.
Yes, we’re in marketing, but this post is not going to finish with a chirpy paragraph like “could your brand better export the Australian lifestyle?”
Instead we’ll just ask what we always use this blog to ask. When the prosperity stops… what’s next?