Negotiating change: Celebrity pie cart narratives

This article presents the pie cart as a life marker within three celebrity narratives. While Americanized fast food chains currently dominate the Australasian take-away market, pie carts (and especially those operating in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s) provide an entrance into the collective memory, evoking a nostalgia redolent of Bruce Mason's Golden Weather (1962), a time past that, in retrospect, seemed simpler and less complex than contemporary life. The narratives of Ray Columbus, Georgina Beyer and Johnny Cooper are important because, and as Graeme Turner suggests, celebrities mediate the momentary and the permanent by constructing communities of thought from which others find reassurance and identity. Like pie carts themselves, our celebrity narratives offer a performative recapitulation of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experience by engaging the symbolic realms of nostalgia and memory.