ABSTRACT
The familiar radical slogan is: Think Globally; Act Locally’. This advice was not so much subverted as inverted during the America’s Cup in Western Australia (1986-7); the trick was to act globally but think locally. An event induced by media, the Cup attracted 3,000 or so visiting journalists and created a new meaning for WA in the eyes of the world’s TV. But it generated more than euphoric images of Australia, sport and leisure for the tourists; it provoked, within the host community, an unwonted but sustained bout of self-reflexivity and utopianism. It became the mechanism, or rather the practice, through which questions of national or state identity and signification could be thought through; it was a race against time, space and structure. What follows can be read as a review of some aspects of an exotic local event; equally, however, it can be seen as an account of an increasingly international cultural-political phenomenon-the euphoricization of democracy and the mobilization of national unity as a commodity to sell on the open market of the consciousness industries within a global economy of commodified meaning. Within this economy, the distinctions between texts and contexts disappear-the bodies and actions of the people involved (which is everybody) are textualized into a cultural practice of competitive performance; to put the local on show for the global-to act globally.
