The real achievement of The Hidden Culture is that it has expropriated the discussion of Australian folklore away from the nebulous spheres of myth back to the ‘folks’ themselves, through an examination of the dynamic of everyday life culture, in the family, the workplace, amongst children and adolescents, ethnic and sexual groups. Seal’s discussion of one of the country’s major popular events, the Melbourne Cup, is a case in point. Rather than highlight the sporting legends the race has thrown up (the Archers, Phar Laps, and Tommy Woodcocks), Seal looks at how the event has impacted the lives of the common people, and the occupational folklore it has created and perpetuated – the factory and office ‘sweeps’, the tipping hunches and outlandish methods of horse selection, the ritualistic annual trip to the TAB, the communal gathering around the radio or television. That the nation ‘stands still’ for a few minutes on the first Tuesday in November signifies to Seal more than a mere obsession for a horse race. It is a ‘direct infringement of the hidden culture on the official culture of work and authority.’

The ‘hidden culture’ is the network of largely informal, non­institutionalised activity and expression that can seem so obscure, precisely because it is such a part of the grain of our daily lives. The range of its manifestations, systematically collected, arranged and examined by Seal, is remarkable: verbal forms such as slang, jokes, folk narratives (family gossip, tall stories, ‘urban legends’, etc.), folk poetry and song; non-verbal forms like gestures, body language, chain letters, graffiti and ‘reprographic’ lore; behavioural forms such as ‘shouting drinks’, April Fool’s day revels, weddings and so on; and material forms like folk art and craft and the preparation and consumption of food. Folklore, as Seal defines it, differs from ‘popular culture’ in that the latter refers specifically to the product and effects of the mass communications industries. This, as Seal implies, is a somewhat tenuous distinction, as formal channels of communication like television continually propagate, through word-of-mouth transmission, new folkloric forms. A tedious recent example of this cultural process is the ‘Claytons - the drink you’re having when you’re not having a drink’ TV advertisement, which was adapted and recreated into a cynical or subversive comment with seemingly infinite application.

The accessibility of The Hidden Culture in tracing the arcane development of Australia’s folkloric heritage is some achievement for an academic work with the professed aim of giving the study and teaching of folklore credibility within Australia’s notoriously snooty cultural institutions. But The Hidden Culture also illustrates the central problem facing those engaged in the academic appropriation of popular culture. On the one hand, Seal wants, naturally, to lend his field intellectual status by dealing with it rigorously and with analytical respect, which necessitates the use of some potentially alienating jargon (as in the assertion that knowledge of the hidden culture is important in order to facilitate tolerance of the ‘otherness’ in our society); at the same time he would like his study to be digested by all – he does not want to detract from his field’s popular appeal. I am not sure he successfully resolves this inherent tension. For example, the provocative proposition that folklore, though it frequently ridicules social institutions, acts ultimately to preserve those institutions because it is a culturally accepted means of expressing discontent, frustration and aggression, is never really put to the test. More sustained analysis may have exploded some of the comfortable notions of folklore that Seal is determined to put to rest.

Likewise, the discussion of graffiti (‘the heart-cry of modem urban life’) seems something of a lost chance. The pointedly unofficial ethos of graffiti makes it one of the most potent folk discourses. So diverse (sexual ‘latrinalia’, political, philosophical) and so prolific, it is (according to Seal) ‘yet another instance of the apparently trivial yet fundamentally significant nature of folklore’. This attestation has a ‘believe it or not’ quality about it: what the reader would like to know is ‘why is graffiti so significant?’, and ‘does Australian graffiti have special characteristics?’ Seal rightly stresses the social context of folklore, but doesn’t refer to it enough in his discussion of the various folkloric forms; at times the text starts taking on the appearance of a descriptive catalogue of folksy items. Sexist and racist jokes are rather glibly dismissed with brief condemnatory asides rather than interrogated for their cultural particulars. And more could have been made, perhaps, of such recent ‘joke cycles’ as the series on Azaria and the dingo, and that on AIDS. Then again, maybe it would take a psychologist rather than a cultural analyst to explain what makes people laugh at this joke, one of the many listed in the book: ‘Q: What type of Wood doesn’t float? A. Natalie.’

Another joke collected by Seal inadvertently reveals the regionalism of folkloric expression – regional difference noted in The Hidden Culture but often neglected in books about Australian life. The joke: ‘Q: Why do Australians drink XXXX beer? A. Because they can’t spell “beer”.’ The Victorian version that I am familiar with replaces Australians with Queenslanders - southern sophistication mocking the northern barbarians (well, it is Queensland beer anyway). Parochialism is ingenuously (I think) revealed by the West Australian Seal himself in his piece on the Melbourne Cup, when he recycles tired clichés about Melbourne’s weather by remarking that the race is run on ‘the usual muddy turf of ‘Melbourne’s Ascot racetrack’!

Quibbling aside, the virtues of The Hidden Culture are signal. In redressing the deficiencies of Australian folklore collection and scholarship (which has been stifled for too long by an obsession with pinpointing a rural-derived, Anglo-Celtic national ‘identity’) and in retrieving the field from a mire of trivia, Seal has performed important work. He has brought to light the intersecting uniqueness, variety and universality of folk expression in modern Australia, and so has made it easier for more specific studies of this ignored area to appear in the future.