Inside Lifestyles Of The Rich & Tasteful

This book is the first in the new series of NOW Australia – contemporary issues written in a reportage style by Australia's leading journalists and writers and issued five times a year.

In this book, journalist and author Andrew West exposes the great Australian myth of egalitarianism by going inside "the class that dare not speak its name" – the upper middle class. With wry humour and cutting irony, West observes the customs, the privileges, the spending and preoccupations of Australia's well-to-do. His grand tour takes us to open days at leading private schools, expensive children's parties, exclusive sea and tree change retreats, elite shopping stores and more of the playgrounds of the rich.

West finds an upper middle class riven down the middle between those driven by money and those obsessed with cultural attainments. He writes of a new elite class conflict that secretly shapes Australian politics : the Materialists versus the Culturalists. West concludes that in the contemporary Australia of boom and conspicuous consumerism, the materialists are ascendant and the culturalists are having to make do with the consolations of good taste. West takes great pleasure in revealing the irony that culturalists are engaged in a constant quest to distinguish themselves, essentially through their consumer choices, from the upwardly mobile lower middle class.