A multinational’s chips, flavoured with a yeast-based spread that we’re all convinced is right up there with koala and thong as a hallmark Australian tourist attraction? Tom Tanuki is having none of it!
McDONALD’S IS selling new Vegemite McShaker fries for a bit.
Cross-branded promotional marketing is all for nothing if you don’t fully realise its benefits by informing the stenographers of the nation’s local establishment media via an immediate press release. Then, they do their hack work on your behalf.
As the McShaker Fries media release says:
Just when you thought a Macca’s summer couldn’t get any bigger, we’re shaking things up – literally – with a collaboration written in the Aussie stars featuring one of our most treasured icons, VEGEMITE… Whether you like a little or a lot, nothing tastes like Australia more than VEGEMITE and it’s now coating our World-Famous Fries for the ultimate snack collab.
I know about this innovation in cross-branding promotional marketing because The Project, Seven News, Nine News, Daily Mail, news.dot.com au and MSN, at a glance, all shared their findings from the McDonald’s press release at once.
Australian sweets cross-branding occurs as a way to harness nostalgia for consumerist ends. But I have long argued that it is only through the consumerist memories of normative White or settler Australian childhoods that we have any nostalgia at all — because we didn’t really have any other culture aside from going to the shops.
I do mean that I have long, long argued this point. I’d say that my views on cross-branded sweeties form one of the core tenets of my anti-nationalist punisher worldview and I am willing to lecture you about it for hours at a time… over a beer if you’re paying.
I once successfully argued this point in a riveting Australia Day poem I made some years back.
I also raged against Bundaberg eggnog and such in a now-paywalled True News Weekly column from 2020, entitled ‘Modern Australian nostalgia is cross-branded sweets and nothing more’:
Hysterical Australian boomer Facebook memes often compel the scroller to REMEMBER THE WAY THINGS WERE BACK THEN! They tell me that ‘UR ONLY AN AUSSIE CHILD OF THE ’80s IF YOU REMEMBER…’, compiling a list of lo-res, watermarked images to tell me what I enjoyed about my childhood.
All of the images are products manufactured by multinationals.There’s a packet of chips. A lamington. An icy pole. A lolly. Another icy pole. A yeast-based spread. This, then, is our childhood in consumerist Australia: trips to milk bars or to supermarkets to buy products manufactured by multinationals. White Australians have always been allowed to forget, or ignore, the rest.
People scoff at this immutable truth from one who is but the humble messenger. But they are cowards, clinging to their faux-nostalgia-by-way-of-Curly-Wurlys. And they may all be dismissed out of hand as the fools they are.
Since raging about this in 2020, I had hoped to already have established the ideal society with me at the head of it – my caliphate, if you will – in which all cross-branded sweets would be burned in a massive bonfire on Parliament Hill — hopefully, their producers in there burning with them. But I have encountered setbacks and my coup has yet to occur. Stay tuned.
For now, you must admit that many of your memories of your past – should you have grown up in normative White Australian suburbia as I did – are actually derived from treats, products and things found at the shops and in ads.
Perhaps you were fortunate enough to have a genuine migrant community or local Indigenous community to hail from and call your own, but that is not the normative transplanted colonial outpost White Australiana of which I’m speaking.
Perhaps you were lucky enough to live near a beach or a nice park, but for your “culture”, you had only sweets. If you’re like me, you have foggy memories of buying stuff in the shops as a kid. And that is more-or-less all you have to reminisce about.
Certainly, all we did in outer-suburban 1980s White Australia (Melton for me) was roll around in the dirt in a dry paddock, tearing out chunks of serrated tussock as a form of innocent childhood fun. And go to the milk bar for sweets… with 10 cents. Sometimes, we’d watch ads on the telly. (Another hallmark of Australian national fervour: sharing ’80s ads.)
This fuzzy-headed amnesiac consumer nationalism paves the way to make us most malleable for the purposes of buying stuff. Either being more racist for a while so someone in a suit can make money or win an election or buying shit: those are the two primary utilities of you, the pleb, through successful waves of nationalism.
Co-branded sweets make you go all sappy with remembrance. Bundaberg is a serial offender, putting its awful brand of pipe-cleaner in everything and selling it in Coles/Woolies. Flavoured milks give it a red hot go, too. Oak Milk, once branded with Redskins and the worst sweet of all time, musk sticks.
Now we get a multinational’s chips, flavoured with a yeast-based spread that we are all convinced is right up there with koala and thong as a hallmark Australian tourist attraction. Right in time for 26 January.
The Project, having duly read McDonald’s media release, issued an urgent provocation on its behalf:
‘Yes, as of today, you can add Vegemite to your fries at McDonald’s… Would you try them?’
Olivia Lambert at Seven News declared that what she’d just read in the press release was a ‘huge twist’ set to ‘shake things up’.
Shania Obrien for Daily Mail Australia announced that her copy of the media release spoketh of ‘a move that will either delight or divide’.
And Nine News thought of the contents of the press release as ‘snack-related patriotism’.
Here’s my media release:
Any mention of McDonald’s Vegemite McShaker Fries will be punishable by death or exile in my caliphate. Also, when I seize control, any journalist who shares the cross-branding promotional marketing media releases of multinationals under the guise of being a “news item” will feature on the town square’s lamp-posts.
Also, if you insist on celebrating your stupid Australia Day, then you will only be allowed to do so in the only true home of Australian nationalism: the sweets aisle of Coles. You will be forced to consume four kilograms of Redskins-flavoured chips, drink two litres of Bundaberg-flavoured Greek yoghurt and inject 500mls of Vegemite-flavoured Coca-Cola into your arm. Failing that, it’s the lamp-post for you. Or exile. Once I have my caliphate. I’ll keep you updated.
In the meantime, enjoy your cross-branded sweets marketing month.
Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
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