Era 4 — Division, COVID and Reunion

In the early 2020s, with COVID-19 as context, the campaign literalised division as the enemy and communal eating as the remedy. The emotional register intensified: these ads are more moving and less playful than earlier campaigns, and unity is advocated with greater urgency.

Defining context

Australia in 2020–2021 experienced unprecedented internal fragmentation caused by COVID-19 state border closures — a “Fortress Australia” isolated both internally (state versus state) and externally (international borders closed for nearly two years). Melbourne endured cumulative lockdowns described as among the world’s longest.

The dominant idea of Australianness

Australianness is defined against division. 2020’s Lambalytica satirises digital isolation, with a mass-surveillance organisation using data not for harm but to lure the disconnected back to a real-world barbecue. 2021’s Make Lamb Not Walls literalises state borders as physical walls in a dystopian 2031; the central figure is simply an old man who smells lamb from the other side and wants some — the most reduced version of the campaign’s proposition. 2022’s The Lost Country of the Pacific extends this to international isolation: Australia has been so cut off that the world has forgotten it exists.

The role of lamb

Lamb becomes the most literally transformative it has ever been — its smell inspires a nationwide uprising to demolish concrete walls (2021); a national barbecue creates a smoke signal visible from space that restores Australia to the map (2022). These are the campaign’s most hyperbolic deployments of the product, deliberately so in a period when grand national gestures were unavailable in real life.

What changed

The crisis shifts from political to existential: the enemy is no longer bad opinions but literal barriers between Australians, and the resolution in each case is a mass gathering — the physical antithesis of the isolation being satirised. The final era turns the critique inward, onto division Australians generate themselves.