Decoder Ring - Tina Turner and the Dance That Conquered Australia
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
In Australia, no wedding or school dance is complete without the Nutbush, Australia’s unofficial national dance. The Nutbush – a simple line dance to the song “Nutbush City Limits,” by Ike and Tina Turner – has become as stereotypically Australian as kangaroos, boomerangs, and Vegemite.
And yet, hardly anyone outside of Australia even knows the Nutbush exists. Here at Decoder Ring, we certainly didn’t – until we started getting emails from Australians asking us to investigate its origins. How did an American song become the soundtrack for an Australian national tradition? Who invented the iconic steps, and why does every Australian know them?
Our producer Max Freedman put on his dancing shoes to get some answers. The global, century-spanning story of the Nutbush involves Australia, Tennessee, Denmark, primary schools, gay discos, and demonstrates that even the goofiest cultural touchstones can go surprisingly deep.
In this episode you’ll hear from culture journalists David Mack and Angus Kidman; Nutbush researchers Panizza Allmark and Jon Stratton; dance historians Erica Okamura and Richard Powers; Dr. Fiona Chatteur, Jeremy Santolin, and Brian Kerr.
This episode was written and produced by Max Freedman and edited by Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.
Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.
Further Viewing
How to do ‘The Nutbush’ - Australian Line Dance
Dancin’ the Madison on “The Buddy Deane Show” (1960)
Alley Cat Tutorial — Spark Physical Education
The Nutbush on Countdown (December 5, 1976)
Tina Turner — Nutbush City Limits, The Midnight Special (1973)
Tina Turner — Are You Breaking My Heart, Countdown (1980)
Tina Turner: How “The Best” Became Rugby League’s Anthem | ABC News
Tina Turner’s Electrifying 1993 NRL Grand Final Performance
Sources for This Episode
Allmark, Panizza, and Jon Stratton. “Doing the Nutbush: How Australia Got Its Very Own Line Dance.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2025, pp. 79–94.
Allmark, Panizza, and Jon Stratton. “The Nutbush Dance Reframed: Further Analysis Related to ‘Doing the Nutbush.’” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2025, pp. 95–103.
Andrews, Shirley. Take Your Partners: Traditional Dancing in Australia. 3rd ed., Hyland House, 1979.
Bloomfield, Anne. “Health or Art? The Case for Dance in the Curriculum of British State Schools 1909–1919.” History of Education, vol. 36, no. 6, 2007, pp. 681–696.
Bloomfield, Anne. “The Quickening of the National Spirit: Cecil Sharp and the Pioneers of the Folk-Dance Revival in English State Schools (1900–26).” History of Education, vol. 30, no. 1, 2001, pp. 59–75.
Gbogbo, Mawunyo. “Tina Turner and Her Australian Connections: How The Best Became Rugby League’s Anthem and Why Is the Nutbush Mandatory at Gatherings?” ABC News, 24 May 2023.
Jones, Benjamin T. “Australian Politics Explainer: The White Australia Policy.” The Conversation, 9 Apr. 2017.
Kidman, Angus. “Tina Turner: How Australia Saved Her Career.” Angus Kidman, 13 Aug. 2023.
Meiners, Jeff. So We Can Dance? In Pursuit of an Inclusive Dance Curriculum for the Primary School Years in Australia. 2017. University of South Australia, Doctor of Education thesis.
Spencer, Eliza. “Australia and the Nutbush: The Quest for the Origin of a Cultural Phenomenon Goes On.” The Guardian, 5 May 2024.
Ward, Mary. “The Mysterious Allure of the Nutbush and Why the Dance Is Uniquely Australian.” Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 2023.
Zhuang, Yan. “Australia Remembered Tina Turner with a Dance.” New York Times, 25 May 2023.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Willa. And before we get going with this week's episode, I want to talk about a story we did recently that we received a lot of feedback about. As you may recall, in our last mailbag episode, which aired on May 6th, we had a segment about the glorious eye roll, a gesture you can use whenever someone's being embarrassing, annoying, boring, rude, or incorrect. And a lot of you heard what |
| 0:22.6 | we had to say about it and, well, you rolled your eyes at us for that very last reason. And so I'm |
| 0:29.2 | here to make a correction. In the segment, we talked about how odd as it may seem, we didn't |
| 0:36.1 | always use the eye roll the way we do now |
| 0:38.3 | as a response to someone else's behavior. In literature, going back thousands of years, |
| 0:43.6 | eye rolls aren't a response. Instead, they express a strong inner emotion. People's bodies are |
| 0:49.5 | consumed with lust, anger, fear, passion, and their eyes roll back in their head. |
| 0:55.7 | And so far, so good. |
| 0:59.8 | But then we talked about when this changed. |
| 1:06.4 | When the eye roll went from being an expression of inner turmoil to a responsive gesture. |
| 1:09.7 | And we said it really caught on in the 1980s. |
| 1:11.3 | And it is true. |
| 1:14.9 | That's when you start to see it mentioned that way with great frequency. |
| 1:22.2 | But many of you also pointed us toward a ton of examples of people doing the contemporary, |
| 1:30.5 | responsive version of the eye roll well before the 1980s. People like Groucho Marx and Buster Keaton and Charlie Brown and Samantha from Bewitched, all rolling their eyes in disbelief or frustration. |
| 1:37.5 | In other words, the eye roll as a responsive gesture was firmly established in the culture |
| 1:43.6 | well before the Reagan era. |
| 1:46.5 | And we got that wrong. |
| 1:48.1 | What would have been more accurate to say is that the 1980s is when this gesture started to be |
| 1:53.1 | called in IRL and reached another level of cultural saturation. |
| 1:58.5 | It's when the IRL went from expressing a bunch of different things, |
| 2:02.5 | including strong emotion, to pretty much exclusively being used the way we understand it now. |
... |
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