ABSTRACT
From the 1950s through the 1980s, Australia’s advertising agencies enjoyed what Robert Crawford and Jackie Dickenson describe as a ‘golden age’. Over the following months, Australia’s GDP shrank, the Australian dollar fell to record lows, unemployment rapidly increased, interest rates skyrocketed, and a series of lending institutions collapsed. In his survey of the ‘decisive transformation’ of Australia’s economy along with its impact on the nation, Paul Kelly concludes that a fundamental change had occurred—Australians in the early 1990s ‘had reached the end of certainty’. The 1990s recession fundamentally disrupted the convenient arrangement in Australia and, indeed elsewhere—yet its significance has been ignored by studies of the industry’s development. With Australia’s improving economy placing agency billings back on to an upward trajectory, agencies ignored these shifts and blithely assumed that everything was at last headed back to normal.
