The Living Flame: Energy,promotion and ‘natural’ gas in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

For most of the 20th century, energy transformations were promoted, and legitimated through diverse media and promotion. Much of this ‘energy media’ was generated and circulated with specific public relations goals in mind. Identifying the wider historical context, including emerging promotional industries and the advent of television, this paper investigates the promotion of natural gas in Australia. It analyses one AGL television advertisement: The Living Flame (1979), noting the renewed competition between electricity and gas amid an energy crisis. We argue that this advertisement represents a significant shift in energy promotion, in that it is very different in tone and style from the recipe services, radio programs and TV cooking shows in earlier decades, or even of the spectacular documentary films sponsored by the energy sector that sought to demonstrate conquering of the land and national progress. Instead, our textual analysis reveals key themes that identify significant concerns around energy security, affordability and the environment. These findings point to a critical period for energy transition, with competing agendas and gendered narratives around energy in Australia, and highlight the importance of understanding the impact of promotional industries on environmental justice.

Introduction

In an era when there is growing public support for a de-carbonised energy supply, gas is frequently promoted a ‘clean’ fossil fuel necessary for transition to renewable energy. This characterisation contributes to a longstanding energy discourse that has advanced the interests of the gas industry (Szabo, 2012). Despite its name, ‘natural gas’ is a non-renewable fossil fuel energy source and methane, a greenhouse gas, is its largest component. Yet, the Australian government recently announced its ‘Future Gas Strategy’, arguing that more, not less, gas is needed as part of its energy transition (Government of Australia, 2024) and noting that ‘natural gas supports our standard of living and Australia’s energy security’. Today, about five million households in Australia rely on natural gas (more than 80% of households in the state of Victoria are connected to gas), although many more rely on gas-generated electricity. This reliance is the result of an earlier energy transition that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when awareness of the impact of greenhouse gasses on the environment was beginning to garner public awareness.

Promotional industries have played a crucial role in energy transitions past and present, including positioning gas as a ‘clean’ fossil fuel or persuading households that gas powered cooking and heating is preferable, As Daggett argues, ‘climate denial obviously serves fossil-fuelled capitalist interests’ (2018: 27) and fossil fuel industries not only pursue profit and promote consumption, but historically have furthered the interests of white patriarchy and Western petrocultures (Wilson et al., 2017). This article draws on a promotional culture perspective to investigate how promotional industries have helped shaped understandings of energy and energy consumption during an earlier period of transition, arguing that the ways these industries are entangled with environmental (in)justice are under-researched. Environmental justice is specifically concerned with human rights and social inequality, given marginalised peoples are disproportionately impacted by pollution and lack environmental protections along – but not limited to – race, class, and gender lines as well as in developing countries (Mohai et al., 2009). Revealing how Australian energy sectors of the past gained dominance and legitimacy has much to offer as we now confront the problem of thinking in radically new ways about our relationship with energy and its environmental and global impacts in the Anthropocene.

This paper analyses one AGL television campaign promoting natural gas, The Living Flame (1979) – although it is also referred to as Flame Girls, the name given to the dancers who feature in the television commercial – in order to understand the context of its production in a critical period with competing agendas and narratives around energy in Australia. ¹ To address this aim, this paper is structured in four sections. First, we briefly review the central role of energy in the development of both a gendered national identity and the post-war promotional industries. This allows us to consider the significance of ‘energy media’, that is media produced to promote diverse forms of energy. Second, we discuss the roll out of natural gas for domestic consumption in Australia amid fierce competition between gas and electricity that played out in promotional campaigns. We focus on Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, where AGL – responsible for bringing natural gas to Sydney homes – was based. Third, we analyse one campaign produced by AGL in 1979. Using textual analysis, we identify themes that inform understandings of how this particular campaign circulated in the Australian energy imaginary. Finally, we discuss our findings in conjunction with two subsequent AGL advertisements and consider their significance for the work of energy promotion in associating gas as not only natural and feminised, but as natural, safe and comforting – domesticated – to influence the Australian energy economy, especially in moments of technological, social and media change and transition.

Energy and promotion

Energy can only be fully understood by examining the impacts of promotional work and the ways in which it shapes not only energy production and consumption, but it also implicated in associated environmental impacts, and policy concerning energy futures. We know, for example, that fossil fuel companies use advertising and promotion to ‘manipulate environmental discourse and influence political outcomes around climate change’ (Brulle et al., 2020: 88). But there are more nuanced outcomes. As Milanesio (2013) argued, media and promotional discourses in Peronist Argentina transformed gas – and in correlation, the gas stove – into a culturally meaningful object strongly linked to national prowess, economic liberation and a better standard of living. In the USA the public relations industry promoted a corporate agenda in the shaping of environmental awareness, particularly around the climate crisis and other environmental problems throughout the 20th century (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2022). Scholars in the energy humanities have theorised how energy organises populations – it has become so entangled in our everyday lives that it is foundational to operations of contemporary power, politics, and governance (Diamanti and Szeman 2020; Pirani 2018; Szeman, 2021).

For most of the 20th century, energy transformations were promoted, legitimated and tied to the Australian nation-building agenda. Much of what we are calling energy media was generated and circulated with specific promotional or public relations (PR) goals in mind. It includes corporate and government sponsored documentary film, television and radio advertising and programs, commercial photography, and newspaper supplements and advertising. While the fortunes of the post-war public relations industry were closely associated with the energy sector and the production of documentary films (Fitch, 2016a; 2016b; Smaill, 2021), from the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Australian advertising industry grew significantly, with ground-breaking and creative campaigns (Crawford, 2006, 2008; Light, 2015). Identifying this wider context and rationale, this paper investigates shifts in the promotion of energy in Australia amid the renewed competition between electricity and gas in targetting the domestic consumer in the 1970s and 1980s.

These particular decades are significant for understanding energy transitions: there was a global oil crisis (peaking in 1973/4 and again in 1979); growing awareness of climate change (the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, in response to rising global mean temperatures and concern about the greenhouse effect); and increasing environmental protests, particularly in response to corporate environmental impacts and disasters (such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989) (Pirani, 2018). In the Australian state of New South Wales, there were significant concerns about the supply and affordability of energy, with rapidly rising electricity prices due to the global oil crisis and frequent blackouts due to a combination of strikes and ageing infrastructure (Darroch, 2015). It is in this context that the framing of ‘natural gas’ as a clean, reliable and affordable energy source was achieved through significant promotional work. Whereas gas was perceived as a ‘dirty, smelly fuel’ in earlier decades, natural gas was considered to be the modern fuel of the future’ (Donovan and Kirkman, 1986: 255). Research has shown that the term ‘natural gas’ evokes a favourable public response and effectively elides its status as a fossil fuel (Lacroix et al., 2021).

Energy media consistently adjusted to, and sought to reflect, changing values concerning the natural environment, labour, gender, citizenship and Indigenous sovereignty, all of which have fed into varied ways of imagining the extraction of energy sources and their use (Smaill, 2021). Although focusing on a period after 1986, Brulle et al. (2020) found a direct link between the oil and gas industry’s expenditure on promotional activity and media coverage and government focus on climate change. In their book Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry, Dahlquist and Vonderau argue that ‘petro-cinema’ frequently harmonised with broader socio-cultural concerns and sought to “shape the tenor of collective life. . . with bodily affect, social tempers, political moods, or cultural sensibilities as key targets” (2021: 2). While this media contributed to the public face of governments and corporations, it resulted from both creative practice and promotional industries.

The Shell Film Unit’s landmark film, The Back of Beyond (1954), exemplifies the nuanced ways in which the petroleum industry contributed to the “tenor of collective life” by using the prestige offered by high cost documentary film production in the mid 20^th century. John Heyer, the director and the head of the Shell Film Unit in Australia, chose to focus the 62-min scripted documentary on the fortnightly mail run that took place along the more than 500km-long rough track, that crosses two states—South Australia and Queensland—and runs north to south through the centre of the continent. At no point does the film reference, or even visualise, oil or petroleum. The Back of Beyond is arguably Australia’s most celebrated film of the 1950s; it was more than just another sponsored corporate documentary. Through the vehicle of petrocinema, it took Australian narratives of nationhood into novel storytelling terrain with a nuanced public relations strategy (Smaill, 2021). An example such as The Back of Beyond is part of a deep archive of sponsored film that also includes education films more explicitly focused on energy and its production, such as Frank Hurley’s series of four short educational films, Pageant of Power (1949), commissioned by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria to highlight the significance of coal for the Australian economy. The body of promotional media we refer to as energy media is wide and diverse. One of its key achievements has been to associate energy with national concerns, personal convenience and economic prosperity while simultaneously decoupling energy production and use from problems including pollution, climate warming and habitat loss. Revealing how this decoupling has occurred over the previous century is a first step in addressing corporate and government responsibility for environmental justice.

Promotional industries

Energy media is entangled with public relations and other promotional industries, and to ignore this means we do not fully understand the influence of media and promotion in the 20th century; the ways in which certain energy sources became dominant; or even how the changing institutions of public relations and promotional industries shaped the history of energy communication. Furthermore, we do not understand the significant impact of the energy sector on the historical development – and in particular, the expansion and professionalisation – of the public relations industry post-World War II and the growth of, and shifts in, the advertising industry, particularly with the advent of television, in later decades. In this section, therefore, we establish the substantial links between the energy and promotional industries in communicating about and promoting energy from the 1950s onwards.

The first professional public relations institutes were established in Sydney in 1949/50 and in Melbourne in the early 1950s. Membership lists and state council positions in their first two decades indicate the energy sectors – across oil, hydro, electricity and gas – were well represented (Fitch, 2016a). John Flower (2007) of the Petroleum Information Bureau, which ran from 1951 until 1975, ² was twice national president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia [PRIA]. PRIA members from energy sectors often spoke at industry events or even hosted these events (for example, at film screenings in the Shell theatrette), and provided content for the newsletters, such as a 1965 article and photographs reproduced from the Caltex Star, the internal newsletter of Caltex, showcasing its various public-facing activities (Meeting the Public, 1965).

The professional institutes’ early newsletters also demonstrated their significant investment in audiovisual media; across the 1950s and 1960s, film production was considered a core public relations activity. Ideally, ‘public relations films’ omitted ‘advertising propaganda’ and were ‘devoid of product advertising’ (P.R. Films, 1955). Screenings were frequently offered to PRIA members, with PRIA members involved in the commissioning or production of the films speaking at these events and documentary film producers, such as J. Kingsford Smith, were also PRIA members (PR Films Shown, 1965). One such film, ‘Flames in Harness’, was produced for the Commonwealth Industrial Gases (PR Films Shown, 1965). The PRIA (Victoria) state president and owner of Pegasus Public Relations, George Stapleton, ‘supervised, scripted, or directed over 30 documentary films’ when he worked for the oil industry (Dwyer, 1961: 132).

It was not only American advertising and marketing techniques that influenced public relations practice in Australia; British documentary filmmaker John Grierson travelled to Australia in 1940 to espouse the importance of documentary film in creating consensus among citizens. While Williams (1999) argues the significance of this visit is overstated in histories of Australian film production, the post-war government adopted the nationalist components of the Grierson model when they established the National Film Board in 1945. An article reproduced in the Australian Public Relations Journal, from its British equivalent, which L’Etang [1999] argues, represented Griersonian values about public relations’ role – through film – in democratic education and social responsibility. In it, Trusler described ‘film [as] a medium of sophisticated public relations practice’ in that it ‘offers… a dramatic and articulate bridge between an organisation and its public’ and functions as ‘education by communication’ (1966, pp. 8, 9).

Whereas film was pivotal to the early professional institutes and the developing public relations industry in the post-war years, with significant overlaps between advertising and public relations (Fitch, 2016a; 2016b), the advent of television in 1956 ushered in a new era. There was increasing demarcation between promotional industries, and advertising and public relations competed for both clients and budgets. The power of television to sell products and promote brand recognition meant that advertising came to dominate promotional industries and marketing spend (Crawford, 2024). Certainly, advertising attracted a significant share of promotional spend globally (Tungate, 2010). By the 1970s, public relations trade media saw advertising and, more broadly, marketing communications as a distinct threat, citing technological change alongside the changing media system and the ‘audio-visual future’ (Winner, 1972). The public relations industry responded by increasing its efforts at professionalisation and establishing its distinct expertise in serving the corporate agenda (Fitch, 2016a).

In contrast, the advertising sector celebrated the creativity it could bring to promotion and the 1970s is characterised as the ‘creative revolution’ (Crawford and Dickenson, 2016; Light, 2015; Tungate, 2010). Crawford and Dickenson (2016) argue this emphasis on, and reification of, creativity emerged in the late 1960s and can be attributed in part to growing critiques of capitalism and consumption. Concerns about not just the environment, but also the promotion of harmful products, threatened the reputation of the global advertising industry. However, the use of ‘creativity and wit…disarm[ed] consumer criticism’ (Crawford and Dickenson, 2016). Light (2015) argues that this creativity was borne from a broader cultural shift as the arts became more celebrated in Australia in part thanks to the progressive Whitlam government, which saw unprecedented government support. ³ Advertisers reflected and shaped a confident and cultural Australia, with television advertising offering what Cunningham framed as a highly audiovisual ‘new nationalism’ (1992: 83). In Australia, many creatives left multinational advertising agencies to establish boutique agencies, promoting their ‘creativity’ credentials beyond what more corporate, global agencies could offer. They were able to avoid simply ‘reshooting’ commercials made elsewhere for an Australian audience and instead pitch their own ideas, often celebrating a unique Australian identity that appealed to audiences (Crawford and Dickenson, 2016). These new creative boutique agencies worked closely with media buyers and planners in newly formed media agencies, who were accredited by the Media Council of Australia, to ensure they could buy television advertising, (Crawford and Dickenson, 2016). These changes in the media landscape were supported by energy companies, who saw considerable value in increasing expenditure on promotion.

Cooking with gas

In this section, we establish the long tradition of promoting gas to domestic consumers, with a particular focus on the housewife. In the 1950s and 1960s, energy companies engaged in extensive public relations campaigns to increase domestic consumption, attract new customers, and ‘educate’ them about energy. These campaigns, relying heavily on radio, cookbooks, women’s magazines, and later television, also contributed to public consensus regarding the use of fossil fuels. Energy companies produced and distributed recipes and even radio programs, and ran demonstrations in their test kitchens and department stores. They published cookbooks, often in collaboration with media organisations, such as the Daily Telegraph Gas Cookbook (1964), a 32-page supplement to the newspaper, and South Australian Gas Company’s (1945–1959) Recipes: Gas The Wonder Fuel For Cooking, which featured its Home Service radio competition’s winning recipes. The Australian Women’s Weekly was a popular platform for energy promotion in the 1950s and 1960s, with stunning colour advertisements; circulation exceeded 750,000 copies in 1957, with more than a third of its pages taken up with full page advertisements (National Library of Australia, n.d).

The distribution of recipes was an effective public relations strategy, and home economists were in demand, creating new career opportunities for women to work in media and promotional roles targeting female consumers in the affluent post-war era. Popular Australian cook and writer Margaret Fulton wrote in her memoir that she was advised to get into advertising after the war as ‘food, energy and cosmetics will grow, and these will be the areas for the new progressive woman’ (1999: 29; see also Dickenson, 2016). Fulton’s first job in the food industry was at the Australian Gas Light Company, and in its Home Service Department she ‘gave cookery classes, conducted demonstrations, showed women how to use and save gas, and taught them about appliances’ (1999: 29; AGL, 2021). Like Fulton, some women built on this experience promoting to ‘housewives’ to develop media careers as a result of their public profile through writing food columns and giving radio interviews, and later cooking demonstrations on television. However, there was a shift when in the 1980s, more men rose to prominence as television chefs invading a previously feminised domain (Dickenson, 2016).

Cooking, entertainment and energy were all influential in the advent of television in 1956 in Australia and it is worth noting the links with prominent American television chefs and the gas industry. Popular TV chef Julia Child’s 1978 television kitchen was provided by the American Gas Association (Leber, 2023). This high-profile product placement was part of a larger public relations campaign designed to promote gas over electricity at a time of growing concern over its environmental and health impacts. Even earlier, celebrity TV chef, Dione Lucas, toured Australia in 1956, 1958 and 1960 at the invitation of the Australian Women’s Weekly in part to cross-promote Packer’s media empire; she was the first woman on Australian television, prior to regular programming (Adams, 2013; Samuelsson, 2022). Lucas hosted primetime cooking shows on American television and her profile meant she was highly successful in promoting products to her female audience; the Caloric gas appliance sponsorship of one program led to her reputation as ‘the nation’s leading saleswoman of gas appliances’ (Adams, 2013: 161). In Australia, her profile as a celebrity chef and her cooking demonstrations were a significant drawcard in promoting television – and televisions sets – to housewives (Adams, 2013; Samuelsson, 2022).

The advent of natural gas

Although now a dominant fuel in many states, natural gas only became available for the domestic market for the majority of Australians in the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to this time, ‘gas’ was produced as by-products of coal and oil. Natural gas first became available in the states of South Australia, Queensland and Victoria in 1969. Mrs Joy Westmore in Carrum was the first person in Victoria to have natural gas, drilled in the Bass Strait, piped into her home, and the carefully staged moment – with Mrs Westmore stirring a pot on her stove – was captured by news photographers (From the Archives, 2020). Within the year, more than a million Victorian gas appliances were converted to use natural gas. New South Wales had to wait longer to access natural gas; AGL looked for alternatives to the Bass Strait gas after they were offered a more expensive rate than the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria (Darroch, 2015). In a major engineering feat, natural gas was piped from Moomba in South Australia to Sydney in NSW, arriving in December 1976 (Jackson, 2010). From 1977, extensive public relations and advertising campaigns in NSW promoted the benefits of natural gas.

As noted earlier in this paper, the 1970s and early 1980s was a fraught time for energy, with frequent blackouts due to strike action and ageing electric infrastructure in NSW, as well as the global oil crisis. Energy was a major issue in NSW state elections in 1981 and 1984 (Darroch, 2015). Rising electricity prices (they increased by 70% between 1975 and 1982) and concerns over the power supply led the state energy minister to invest in campaigns to save power; these public relations activities included a caped crusader ‘Simon the Energy Saver’ and an attractive ‘Consumer Crusader, Miss Wellings’, who was the public relations spokesperson for the newly established state government’s Energy Conservation Unit and fronted television advertisements to ‘switch off’ and ‘save power’ (she announced that she now took one shower a day instead of two) (Darroch, 2015). Various media celebrities and entertainers – from Margaret Fulton and Molly Meldrum (host of a TV popular music show, Countdown) to Paul Hogan (actor, comedian and TV personality) – urged audiences in television advertisements and programs to save power by choosing recipes that used less stove time and showering for shorter periods. These developments around energy conservation mirrored trends in other wealthy nations (Pirani, 2018). The availability of natural gas – a cheaper energy source for households than electricity with the promise of a more consistent supply – threatened other energy providers and only exacerbated the longstanding rivalry between gas and electricity (Darroch, 2015). It is in this context that AGL produced the television advertisement that is the focus of this paper. We present an analysis of The Living Flame in the following section.

The Living Flame (1979)

The Living Flame/Flame Girls campaign encompassed television and print advertising. The television advertisement ran for 13 years from 1979 in Australia (it was also broadcast in New Zealand) (AGL Energy, 2013). ⁴ We argue that this campaign, highly innovative for its time, built on the feminisation of domestic gas as a consumer product with a highly visual trope that capitalised on a number of substantial 1970s cultural shifts. At first glance, the advertisement is composed of a female figure moving at the will of a greater power controlling the flame, fulfilling a passive/active gendered binarisation. Viewing the advertisement in its historical context, however, enables further, more nuanced readings.

The television advertisement featured dancers from the contemporary dance Sydney Dance Company and was choreographed by principal Graeme Watson (Sydney Dance Company, 2019). It was directed by Patrick Russell, who was a creative wunderkind – he had begun his career as a talented fashion illustrator working in fashion promotion, before becoming creative director of Vogue and later moving to the USA to direct TV commercials (Jobbins, 2007). According to the Sydney Dance Company (2019): ‘The 3-day shoot was punishing, the melt-into-skin costumes making eating, drinking and toilet breaks near-on impossible, but the dancers were paid $1000 (a dizzying sum then) and the ad would run for 13 years’. 1979 was also significant for the dance company, in that it essentially relaunched as the Sydney Dance Company, under the helm of choreographer and artistic director Graeme Murphy and his partner, renown dancer and collaborator, Janet Vernon. They were originally appointed to the Dance Company New South Wales in 1976, but renamed it the Sydney Dance Company; they led it for the next 30 years.

The one-minute advertisement features dancers, in contoured full body blue leotards, on an over-sized size gas stove, suggesting the embodiment of flames. The soundtrack is dominated by a song featuring a female vocalist that intones ‘natural gas is lively, the flame that will obey. Natural gas, the living flame.’ The advertisement does not mention electricity but towards the end, a male narrator’s voice intones that ‘now, more than ever it also keeps your energy costs under control.’ The narrator also states ‘the only source of energy that has ever given you instant cooking control, is the same source of energy that gives you comfort of instant heating and hot water 24 hours a day.’ Finally, the viewer is told ‘You’re better off with natural gas.’

The advertisement capitalises on the visibility of the gas flame, placing it in opposition to electricity’s relative invisibility. Reading this visuality against previous gas campaigns shows a movement from the home cook of the postwar era to the new woman of the 1970s. This is also a movement from highly literal to more suggestive, figurative meaning. The campaigns we have noted featuring recipes, cookbooks and the visualisation of women in the kitchen were concerned with elevating women in the domestic sphere by recognising the skill of cooking though drawing attention to either cooking practices (recipes) or professional female cooks. This promotional activity addressed female consumers as key decision makers in the home. The Living Flame advertisement, we hypothesise, moves beyond this focus with a more sophisticated address that seeks to encompass all consumers, but especially women, and it does so by building on a broad cultural imaginary that developed in the 1970s.

In cultures of the global north, the 1970s saw the mainstreaming of the women’s movement as ‘women’s liberation.’ In Australia, books such as Germaine Greer’s (1970) The Female Eunuch and Anne Summers’ (1975) Damned Whores and God’s Police drew attention to the limited gendered stereotypes available for women. New avenues for professional careers were opening up for women and advertisers and marketers increasingly targetted the ‘new woman’ (Craig, 2003). In the television landscape there were new idealised images of ‘active’ femininity that also aligned with beauty norms, including Wonder Woman (1975–1979), Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981) and The Bionic Woman (1976–1979). While these series largely preceded the first broadcast of The Living Flame, it would have run alongside repeats of these programmes and their impact was felt in the popular zeitgeist. Other relevant cultural phenomena include the advent of disco, the growing popularity of aerobics, and the sexualised aesthetic of women’s bodies that came with the mainstreaming of pornography, especially Playboy Magazine.

The Living Flame enters this cultural domain with a presentation of the female body with figure-hugging costumes that highlight conventional beauty standards while steering away from overt sexualisation. With professional dancers, it also gestures to female physical skill and ability (as per female television action heroes). The Living Flame offers a composite of active, skilful and normatively beautiful femininity, an image that suggests an appeal to female consumers, but one that resonates with the broader cultural imaginary and thus a general audience. It is also crucial that the dancers bring the associations of Sydney Dance Company with the group’s more contemporary, avant garde style as opposed to classical ballet. In this way, the advertisement speaks to the aura of the new rather than the traditional.

By the end of the 1970s, the gas industry surely saw the appeal of a new innovative campaign that visually distinguished it from its floundering competitor, electricity. The Flame Girls dancers were mobilised to present a visual presentation of gas’ attributes as alive, immediate and responsive, features that are alluded to in the voiceover when it states: ‘Pure. Clean. Instant. Natural gas. Always there whenever you need it.’ The visual representation is potent and memorable, with the dynamic and personified flame. Crucially, however, The Living Flame presents a relatively sophisticated femininity associated with the liberal feminist developments of the 1970s, but still unique and based in allegory rather than real life domesticity, aspects that allow it to have currency throughout the 1980s and up until 1992. The campaign was briefly revived in 2012 to celebrate AGL’s 175^th anniversary and promoted as part of the Sydney Dance Company’s 50^th birthday celebrations in 2019 (Delaney, 2012; Sydney Dance Company, 2019).

Gender and climate change: The feminisation of natural gas

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a shift in the promotion of gas to presenting it as a highly visible energy source and one associated with a new mode of femininity. We argue that this new image of ‘natural’ gas creatively invested in second wave liberal feminism while continuing to decouple gas from negative environmental associations. This shift was newly creative because it was not only enabled by the new era of advertising described above, but it also exploited the relatively late introduction of colour television to Australia in 1975 (Thurlow, 2022). These factors fuelled a shift in energy media that is apparent in The Living Flame; rather than the conquering of the land and the masculinist, nation-building spectacle of the documentary films of previous decades, this television advertisement offered strong and powerful female bodies to reproduce the ‘living flame’ of natural gas, building on a long association of the naturalness and ‘vibrancy’ of gas. Prior to the rollout of natural gas for domestic consumption, promotional campaigns targeted the housewife with recipes, cooking demonstrations, radio programs and education to both use and save gas. While some of these strategies continued (particularly the distribution of recipes and the entrenched gender positions), changing cultural norms also enabled promotional campaigns aligned with updated versions of femininity, which newly feminised gas consumption. Yet gas promotion was balanced on the edge of another cultural shift—growing awareness of fossil fuelled climate change.

Pollution has been a growing global concern since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was released in 1962. AGL had already rebranded in the 1970s, in an attempt to showcase the environmentally friendly credentials of natural gas (Brandsearch, n.d.). Yet by 1980 knowledge of the potential for a heating planet and the “greenhouse effect” (as well as threats to the ozone layer) were moving from being conversations between scientists to circulating in the public sphere. AGL’s promotional strategy, featuring quirky, entertaining and creative (albeit highly gendered) television commercials, continued the decoupling of environmental harm from the image of natural gas. We show how this continued into the 1980s with reference to two further advertisements that develop some of the themes we have identified.

We refer to these advertisements as ‘Psycho’ (Natural Gas [AGL] commercial, 1982) for its filmic qualities and intertextual associations and ‘Snowstorm Sydney’ (Natural Gas (AGL) commercial, 1983) for its apocalyptic recognition of climate change. In the 1982 advertisement, which heavily references Psycho and Hitchcock, a murderous male lurks outside while the woman enjoys a hot shower. The scene is set with a rainy, dark night and a suspicious figure outside the home with an umbrella, with a slightly creepy, breathless voiceover and dramatic music to reinforce the dark, Gothic staging: ‘Gooooood evening. Tonight – a little tale about getting into hot water’ intones the narrator, before we cut to a kettle whistling away over the blue flame of a gas stove, and a young blond woman in a pink bathrobe removes the kettle and leaves the kitchen in order to disrobe and hop naked into a steaming hot shower, which the narrator refers to as ‘our heroine’s…one weakness’. The camera cuts between the threatening male outside in the dark and then moving silently through the house and the naked woman joyfully embracing the heat of the shower, with brighter and softer colours. He creeps into the bathroom and the camera closes in on a single eye as he watches the woman. In fact, it is the husband who arrives home to find his wife in the shower—but he no longer needs to worry about energy costs as they have now shifted to natural gas. As the wife says, now wearing a robe and towelling her hair in a cosy domestic scene: ‘That’s a relief. The last bill was murder’; in contrast, the camera cuts away to first the man glaringly menacingly at the camera and then outside, where the dark night and music connote the threat of gendered violence.

The 1983 advertisement opens with the question: ‘Is the world’s weather changing?’ as Sydney witnesses an unprecedented snowstorm – an early and rare mention of climate change in an energy promotional campaign. This advertisement references a moment when meteorologists were undecided on whether carbon in the atmosphere would cause the planet to heat up or cool and result in another ice age. Sydney is renowned for its warm weather, but due to climate change, in this advertisement Sydney is well below freezing and snowbound. The postman braves the snow to deliver – in his words – ‘a love letter from your gas company’ – a cheap energy bill, we hear and ‘ocker’ (slang for characteristically Australian) men using a broad Australian dialect as they enjoy ice skating instead of water skiing. Yet again, inside, the domestic home is a cosy and warm family sanctuary, thanks to natural gas. In contrast to the deadly conditions outside the home, the soothing male voiceover states: ‘Don’t be left out in the cold. Gas heating. Better heat. Cheaper.’ With consistent messaging, the reliability and affordability of natural gas (in relation to the never-mentioned and never-seen competitor, electricity) are celebrated, even as the contributions of natural gas – a fossil fuel – to climate change are elided.

What is compelling in our reading of all three television advertisements is the link between gender and energy. We argue that The Living Flame constitutes a strong and graceful femininity with the harnessing – and even enslavement – of the professional dancers – the Flame Girls – to visualise domestic gas consumption that to some extent reflects the contradictory zeitgeist of women’s liberation and second wave feminism. In Psycho, the liberated woman enjoys a sensual shower, but the contrast between the feminised domestic space and the threatening man/outside world plays with, and ultimately reinforces, a binarised opposition between gender and space – after all, it is the husband who both worries about the household finances and represents a potential threat. In Snowstorm, the bleak world outside is overwhelmingly masculine, and although the camera briefly follows a woman rugged up in fur walking through the snow, we only hear male voices and see men. The home, glowing with an orange warmth from the gas fire, is the place – safe, warm and comforting – for women and children who are forever confined to silent domesticity. In this example, moreover, the reference to climate change suggests that natural gas is the solution.

The three examples we cite are all entertaining and anticipate a degree of playfulness in the ways television audiences will engage with these narratives and meaning making around energy consumption. In her work on gender and energy, Daggett (2018) identifies a strong link between fossil fuels and white patriarchy. She coins the term ‘petro-masculinity’ to describe ‘the relationship – both technically and affectively, ideationally and materially – between fossil fuels and white patriarchal orders’ (Daggett, 2018: p. 28). These television advertisements, despite their creative engagement with ideas of the ‘liberated woman’ – at least white and middleclass women – do little to challenge the greenwashing of natural gas or the environmental impacts of maintaining a comfortable and cosy middle-class home. That is, they are far from subversive in challenging either gender hierarchies or environmental injustice, but rather – and not surprisingly – serve the interests of their sponsors. Situating the AGL advertisements in the wider cultural history of gender, climate science and promotional industries shows the important links between these spheres. Building on Daggett, we conclude there is more work to do to understand the mutual impact of gender on energy, and how energy regimes impact gender, including the ways masculinity supports fossil capitalism, and the specific contributions of promotional industries.

Conclusion

Our textual analysis of The Living Flame television advertisement shows how promotional work helped naturalise the idea that natural gas was the first choice of the homemaker during a critical period for the energy market in NSW in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, promotional industries, media history and energy are deeply entangled, as we have established in this paper. In this critical period of energy transition, natural gas was promoted as both cheap, clean and consistent (tropes that have proved remarkably persistent), and as a superior option to electricity for domestic consumption in the competitive energy environment. AGL’s past strategies were effective in establishing natural gas in the NSW energy sector; today, 43% of NSW are connected to natural gas (Energy Networks Australia, 2021). Indeed, many people still view natural gas as more benign, environmentally speaking, than other fossil fuels.

In recent years, sectors within advertising and promotional industries have sought to boycott AGL, the largest carbon emitter in Australia (‘Don’t Pitch to AGL!’, 2022) and industry professionals have engaged in significant advocacy work towards mitigating the impacts of climate change. For example, groups such as Comms Declare (see https://commsdeclare.org/) campaign to stop the public relations, marketing, advertising and media industries promoting pollution by exposing greenwashing, agitating for advertising and public relations boycotts of fossil fuel clients, and advocating for a Fossil Fuel Ad Ban. In turn, AGL has invested in significant greenwashing campaigns to promote its commitment to de-carbonisation (see Australia’s Biggest Carbon Emitter, 2023; Jaspan, 2023). Gas companies continue to collaborate with significant media outlets, such as Australian Women’s Weekly, sponsoring, for example, co-branded awards to celebrate ‘Australian Women of the Future’ (Are Media, 2019) and collaborations with high-rating television programs such as Masterchef (Fitch, and Smaill, 2024).

As we enter a new era of energy transition to combat climate change and protect the planet, the energy imaginary is once again open to contestation and revision. We need to understand the role of energy media and promotion in informing how ‘our beliefs about energy shape how we use it; our uses of energy simultaneously shape our cultural concepts of and beliefs about energy’ (Strauss et al., 2013: 10). For example, recent research confirms the ways the oil and gas industry promotes its corporate social responsibility credentials investing heavily in energy media, highlighting for example its economic and social impacts, alongside its environmental and sustainability initiatives (Loveland et al., 2019). But we must also recognise the more insidious impacts of promotion, influencing not just government policy and legislation but also the public imagination and manipulating and framing environmental discourse around energy consumption and climate change. Indeed, we need to urgently understand the role promotional industries play in fuelling climate change denial, which Daggett (2018) strongly links with white patriarchy and masculine authoritarianism. Our research contributes to much needed evidence-based knowledge about how values and behaviours pertaining to energy have been shaped and the particular role and impacts of promotional industries on environmental justice. This kind of deeply historicised understanding of gendered energy media and energy promotion is one way to continue equipping ourselves for the challenge ahead.