Gang-gang
Song for Canberra 1981
Song for Canberra from 1981. Supplied by the National Archives with permission from Southern Cross Austereo
PT1M6S http://www.canberratimes.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2ybuy 620 349 November 28, 2013 - 11:18PM
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The ACT government's just-unveiled $2.6 million ''Brand Canberra'' promotion is set to bombard the world with a sexy, bedazzling (but occasionally clunking) new Canberra-praising video. You can see it now online by typing ''Brand Canberra YouTube'' into your search engine.
But it's, not quite, the first creature of its kind. In 1981, and in a slightly similar spirit, our local commercial TV station Capital 7 made and broadcast again and again a proud, optimistic and cheerful little pro-Canberra film. You can see that 1981 classic now in all its nostalgic quaintness by going to the online version of The Canberra Times.
The brand-new 2½-minute video and the olde one-minute 1981 one (the latter made available to The Canberra Times by Southern Cross Austereo and the National Film and Sound Archive) offer some sweet contrasts (although, eerily, both open with the glare of almost identically golden sunlight suggesting a New Dawn).
Still images from the Brand Canberra video. Photo: Supplied
In the new video Canberra teems with folk (it is time to teem because after all there are 390,000 of us now) while in the 1981 film there are far fewer of us to be seen. But the ones we do see are having lots of fun. So, for example, we see a laughing boy and girl romping (almost everyone in the film is romping and sometimes even gambolling, as if in a happy hurry to get somewhere for something important) with a laughing Old English Sheepdog. A young couple, transparently in love, romp by. Picnickers romp and frolic in a leafy park. A young man (youthfully twirling his jacket in his hand) and two damsels romp past that romping, cascading fountain in front of the High Court.
The 1981 production takes its tone, its spirit, from the romping Canberra's-really-going-places song that accompanies it. It seems (we've not quite been able to confirm this) to have been sung and perhaps composed, too, by the Australian combo The Mixtures, best-known (for those of us of a certain vintage) for their 1970 hit The Pushbike Song. The 1981 song rejoices:
We've come so far.
Still images from the Brand Canberra video. Photo: Supplied
Seems just yesterday
They chose Canberra
To show Australia the way.
Still images from the Brand Canberra video. Photo: Supplied
And [and here the song really breaks into a romp] everywhere you go you get the feelin',
This town is really on its way.
People in this town have got the feelin'
Nobody can stop us now,
We're on our way!
Yes, we were on our way in 1981 but in the new video we have arrived, triumphantly, even a little smugly.
In the 1981 composition we are romping towards true citydom on young, pre-pubescent legs but in the new video we have grown up. We are post-pubescent now. Our voice has deepened. We have grown into a city now, a young adult one.
The new video's more dignified, more grown-up mood (more dignified than its 1981 predecessor) is set by Canberra (but US-impersonating) three-piece combo SAFIA's soulful Listen to Soul - Listen to Blues. Although its words and mood have nothing to do with Canberra (more with Chicago, really, or Detroit), it is very lovely to listen to and helps make the city of the video look and feel adult.
In and among SAFIA's soulful warblings a cast of supposedly representative Canberrans (led by a typical lycra-clad Adonis atop Mount Ainslie with his matchingly coloured and typically state-of-the-art $15,000 bicycle) make this declaration.
''This is our time to look to the future. To define our city. To embrace who we are. And to sell that to the world.''
Yes, the new video bristles with salesmanship. It is trying to interest the world in buying our wares.
And perhaps that is the biggest difference with the more innocent-seeming 1981 composition. The 1981 creation feels and sounds less like an advertisement of our wares to the world than just an encouragement to Canberrans to wake up their good luck. It says to them: ''Hey, you're living somewhere lovely that's really on its way now. It's romping towards the future, getting lovelier every day.''
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