A “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”: The Melbourne Cup and the Popular Culture of Satirical Dress in 1970s Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, a shift took place in the dress practices of attendees at the Melbourne Cup, marking out the period from the conservative formality of the decade before. Evident in the public areas of Flemington Racecourse, this new trend saw boisterous young racegoers dress in satiric, comedic or raunchy attire. Commenting on this trend in the late seventies, the journalist Keith Dunstan decided that unruly young people engaging in these madcap dress practices had turned the Cup into a “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”. In this article, we use Dunstan’s commentary and an extensive archive of images taken at Flemington by the photographer Rennie Ellis to argue that the culture of mocking and ludicrous dress emerging at the Cup in the 1970s was a form of carnivalesque disorder that appealed not only to boorish, beer-swilling ocker men, but also young female revellers determined to contest convention and members of countercultures who creatively pushed sartorial boundaries. We also argue that the best way to understand the rise of carnivalesque dress at the Cup is to see it as part of a wider suite of practices that had the cumulative effect of changing approaches to sexual, gender and social decorum across the seventies.