Bradstow:

a study of status, class and power in a small Australian town.

We would never have known that moving into Bowral we had gone into the lion’s den of a pathologically conservative society. Not that it matters much at this stage. We say ‘good-morning’ or give a nod of acknowledgement to the friendly people walking their dog around the Bradman oval. Most of them have a little plastic bag tied onto the dog-lead in which to scoop up any substance excreted by their massive Labrador or ‘tiger’ terriers. We don’t carry any bag because Milo is discreet and sensitive enough to wait till he sees a spot well hidden from any possible feet treading into it.  Even then he tries gallantly to bury it with a furious and lengthy back scratching of leaves and soil. “Good boy, Milo, well done.”

By accident I found out that back in 1974 there was an ABC 4 corners program done by a Peter Reid on the Bowral society and it’s dearly held conservative values. It was based on a book by R.G Wild called “Bradstow.”  The program was well received according to a friend who keeps a keen eye out on those sort of part social and part academic community studies.

It turns out later that the professor, R.G Wild at La Trobe University who had based his PH.D on anthropology studies done at Sydney University, was found to have plagiarized large tracts of a book. In 1985 a book of his, An Introduction to Sociological Perspectives, was published by Allen and Unwin. It was not long before several academics noticed
that extensive passages from the book were taken, without sufficient
acknowledgement, directly from other sources. Publicity about this led Allen and
Unwin to withdraw the book, and eventually La Trobe set up an inquiry into the
apparent plagiarism. In 1986, Wild resigned and hence the incomplete inquiry was
disbanded. Wild soon obtained a high-paying job at Hedland College of Technical
and Further Education,   It became the ‘scandal of the century’.  He went on to publish a few more books on Social Stratification in Australian society and the perceived class-less society.

Here is an abstract of this study.

Abstract

This study revisits the Southern Highlands community of Bowral (NSW), the subject of Ronald Wild’s political examination in the late 1960s.

The paper commences with an assessment of changes in the local political economy, comparing contemporary socio-economic indicators and electoral data with Wild’s findings. Little change is revealed in the patterns of social stratification or conservative political dominance between the two periods.

In Wild’s study elite theories were employed to explain the endurance of conservative parties in Bowral’s inequitable social environment. The local working classes were accordingly cast as a passive, apathetic and ignorant lot, politically beholden to the local gentry and their class allies. This paper argues that these theories do not adequately explain why a social class seemingly votes against its interests.

The lived experiences of Bowral’s working classes received minimal attention in Wild’s study. For the working classes, particularly the more isolated and resource starved constituents of rural Australia, the politics of survival closely shadows the world of electoral politics. A deeper understanding of the hidden politics of everyday life is crucial to our understanding of Australia’s capitalist democracy.

This paper highlights the bias in Australian political studies which continues to render much of contemporary working class politics invisible. It argues for studies in the political economy of everyday life to inform class analyses of communities, as an important adjunct to studies of institutionalised power