Milk, Magic and the Disappearing Cow: Advertising Cow’s Milk in Australia during the Interwar Period

The movement during Australia’s interwar period to make milk a drink for everyone was a multimedia affair that cut across institutions of public health, entertainment and parenthood, reaching deep into public and private spaces. Using New South Wales as a case study, we examine how state government and dairy farmers constructed powerful new narratives of milk’s magic that excluded the cow who supplied that milk. Well before cows were physically distanced from most city and country residents, advertising removed them from the visual culture of milk, replacing the cow with the fetishized milk bottle and re-gendering milk to support new connotations of masculinity and national health. The many and varied interests that coalesced in this effort help to explain how cow’s milk became so deeply entrenched in Australian culture and the challenges faced by animal activists working to uproot these practices and end the cruelty of the dairy industry.