My father recently proclaimed “hawk tuah” at the dinner table. Like a fabled time-traveller from what feels like eons ago, my dad — a heavy-set teddy-bear bald man with a kind smile — felt a moment of silence linger at his birthday dinner, and promptly announced “spit on that thang”.
It felt like a verbal slap across the face. I thought the infamous Haliey Welch, viral from a short clip of her enthusiastically advising how best to please those with phallic appendages, had served her sentence as a viral sensation before being cast off into the digital abyss.
But no, here she appears, possessing the burly body of my middle-aged father, with his thick beard and thick Aussie accent and thick glasses, quoting a video he “saw this week”. My dad recounted her sage advice about intimate pleasures which, to be frank, I don’t think he fully grasped when he was sharing with us. He was merely tickled by the phrase, much like millions of other users who drove the 21 year old to skyrocketing fame.
Did you know I’m older than Haliey? I didn’t know until I was researching her for this piece. How does time even work on the internet?
My dad has a TikTok account, where he occasionally posts semi-viral BBQ videos, but I still refuse. I’m being drip-fed the latest trends on Instagram Reels, or from links I can’t open on Messenger without being redirected to a page bugging me to just download the damn app.
Clearly the timeline does not run linear regardless. We’ve witnessed the rise and fall of the Hawk Tuah girl and her anachronistic Southern slang since June 2024, yet that “we” clearly isn’t true. I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of the Hawk Tuah girl since June 2024. Even having TikTok, my father did not.
When I was stepping off the Hawk Tuah train late last year, it was pulling up to my dad’s station. She was not on his radar until she fell off mine.
Virality has become much like ocean waves: you walk into the water, you feel it gush over you, the rising peaks of natural tides swelling in your ears, and then it slows, and the water hits the shore and the surge is over.
But then you get hit again when your father, the man who has held and loved you since birth, is a few whiskeys deep and resurrects this unexpectedly explicit soundbite. This time, the water is colder. It’s unexpected in the calm, then it pushes up into your nose and you have to expel the salty rush from the body.
One of my friends said to me recently, “I’m so glad ur [sic] on the same internet as me.”
But what does that even mean? How is it that we are all connected through the unending chasm that is the Internet, yet we are also held in these vast algorithmic pockets, like slightly unaligned venn diagrams, wrapped up in technological chain mail?
What is a monoculture when our “one” culture is made up of millions of overlapping For-You pages? Does it become a polyculture?
Monoculture was not an entirely untenable concept as little as a decade ago. There were fundamental truths to our cultural identities which were universal and unshakeable, likely due to the limited channels from which we consumed culture. There were set movies at the theatre, there were limited stories during the daily news broadcast, bookshops held less stock, politicians spoke on the same issues, and we had universal touchstones of history, science, the arts and celebrity which were perfect for watercooler talk.
Monoculture doesn’t mean everyone knows the same things. Rather, it is simply the pool of lingo and ideas that string us together like very thin glue.
“Mono”, as in one thing, applies to the Internet as much as “poly”, meaning many things. We hold these two truths in both of our hands. In the same way that something exists forever on the internet but can also be wiped away forever, it is a paradox that the internet is a singular home to all information and also forever segmented into each individual device or app or feed.
There are a multitude of conceptions of culture to unravel here. It’s an initially bold assumption that digital culture is the arbiter of our monoculture, yet it’s not entirely untrue. When we track the path of any artifacts created in our modern era, from creation to curation to consumption, it is impossible for information (or art, or content, or whatever buzzword tickles your fancy) to trek through the world without stumbling across some seed of knowledge garnered from the digital world.
There’s popular culture, the web of media and celebrities and memes that underpin our ideas of who and what gets to be famous. There’s a national culture, something which gives us geographical and local identity. Australian culture in of itself sometimes feels like a paradox, though: if we get too patriotic we fall into a radical nationalist trap or suffer from cultural cringe, but all of our “acceptable” points of strength are essentially subversive embarrassments. Knitted into the fabric of our ‘culture’ is a Prime Minister who eats raw onion, a winter Olympian who lucked his way into a gold medal, and our delicacy of choice being piss-flavoured beer drunk out of a shoe.
This doesn’t even begin to cover identity culture, the boiling point of all the multigenerational migration that stands as a so-called point of ‘strength’ for our national identity, yet is so flagrantly dismissed when we have these conversations of who we are as a people. It is undeniable that Australian culture, “our” culture, is composed of this untraceable hybrid of hundreds of countries, families, peoples displaced and peoples found. Who owns culture? When do these cultures fuse, and when do they congeal, like oil and water, delineating the boundaries of who and what is acceptable?
Our Government is so willing to embrace tokenistic monoculturalism, reaping the monetary benefits of our “diverse” and “accepting” national identity. And yet, we continue to flout these cultures when they no longer give us cultural currency, always going back to our brutal immigration policies and actively legislating “anti-identity politics” policies. We still remove the space that these cultures need to breathe and expand, we conform them to a greater Australian “pre-existing” monoculture, and we isolate them as distinct identities. We do not allow the boundaries we build to become permeable. We fragment our identities, and expect them to be pieced together by individuals.
If there are so many fragmented ways we consume culture, then what is the utility of suggesting we have or should have a monoculture? Is it because monoculture actually speaks to something greater about humanity?
I worry what happens when we lose this safety net of conversation, if only because it has dictated the way we interact with the world, implicitly and explicitly, for so long. Like the canary in the coal mine, we can tell something has shifted in the monocultural world by turning towards society’s favourite archetype, white men, to foreshadow our current vibe.
The pinnacle of the identity pyramid, we turn to our pet white boys for comfort, security, and to know that if there’s something right in the world, it’s that hot and goofy lil’ guy who turns up on our screens and makes us smile. Harry Styles, Robert Pattinson, Jacob Elordi; these questionably British boys are the lighthouse in the dark of the world. As long as they’re around, and as long as they’re okay, we know that the world keeps spinning, because nothing bad can happen to a pretty white boy.
But what happened to our white boy of the month?
Since the early 2000s we have held certain white men on a pedestal of collective Internet thirst, rotating and reappearing through different ages and stages like an overworked sushi train. This is not a new phenomena — teenage girls have been unsuspectedly controlling culture for as long as you could hold up a sign saying “have my babies, Chris [last name]!” — but we have so many men to choose from now that we don’t have these thirst vacuums as easily as we used to. Attractiveness has expanded, which is infinitely exciting for the type of man which we position on the pedestal of masculinity, but if we can’t even isolate our pretty boy of the moment, with his pearly whites and pasty skin and unnaturally chiselled jawline, then what else are we meant to yearningly bond over?
At what point does culture begin to collapse in on itself enough to fold up into a new monoculture? Perhaps culture is a nice king single quilt, spread neatly over a queen bed, never quite keeping all of the shape underneath it warm. Or culture is a hand, individual fingers probing at the pulses of our times, intertwining yet spindly and isolated.
When does culture become capital, exchangeable for currency? I’ve become the pop culture fiend at any trivia event I attend, and generally I consider that a ‘white person’ trait. The culture we get quizzed on is about American and Australian popular culture, and I have a legion of miscellaneous facts about music and movies and television which I’ve consumed like hand-me-downs from my chronically cultured family. Much like most topics at a trivia night, it’s simply a fun little niche I have in my arsenal of skills. Yet, my knowledge of the world becomes a viable route towards bar tabs, chocolates, or even the elusive cash prize of a single crisp $50.
How do we reckon with the fact that knowledge is no longer linear? I wonder what it means when our politicians legislate social media when they can’t comprehend what the internet even is. I wonder how our brains will cope over the next few decades as the expected cache of knowledge we are expected to keep expands greater and greater, politically and socially and yes, even culturally. I wonder what gets included, and what gets left behind, when we write the history books of our “now”.
Perhaps we must accept that there will never be a true “monoculture” again. The joy of living is offering a small token of knowledge and sharing it to those around you, enlightening them on what sparks the fires in your brain.
Please, tell me about the sprawling, complex, time-hopping narrative that discreetly upholds your favourite video game series. Indulge me, I want to know all about your morning routine. How do you brush your teeth? Where do you keep your toilet paper? How many generations in your family do you think kept their toilet paper like that? Who else in your family has your eye twitch? Why does that hint of an accent linger when you talk? Was it a movie you watched too much too often, or did you find another cultural home to immerse yourself in for a fleeting moment and never quite leave? What shows did you watch as a child? Which of those uncanny puppet characters haunted your dreams?
I plead: dive into my subconscious and burrow your culture inside of me. Tether me to the things that make you you, and perhaps in this great web of culture and memory we will find the love that beats underneath it all, and we will feel at home. Offer me your culture, and I will hold out my hands like a butterfly with open wings to take it all.
Hawk tuah your spirit inside of my mouth. I bet it tastes delicious.
