One of the significant issues in Writing Religion and Spirituality is to consider what, who and why certain groups are being written about and depicted in certain ways in various mediums. This week we foraged within media representation and Indigeneity.
The picture has vastly improved in Australia with NTIV, shows like Message Stick and Living Black, and dramas such as Mabo, Redfern, and The Gods of Wheat Street. 'The Gods', a new ABC drama, is promoted as: 'Taking Australians into the home, and hearts, of an Aboriginal family, 'The Gods of Wheat Street' aims to fill a huge gap in Australian television. Series creator Jon Bell says the production, which explores modern Aboriginal stories, has been described as 'Black to the Rafters' (Burin 2014).
What this series aims to do is to introduce the wider Australian community to a regular Aboriginal family in rural New South Wales. The characters and storylines are designed to be positive, to lift the mediated stereotyped images and stories from Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander so-called 'problems' to a show which promotes 'identity and...connections to family, country and culture [and] present-day lives of Indigenous Australians'.
Television reviewer for The Australian newspaper, Graeme Blundell (2014) reports the show as:
'heartbreaking at times and often inspiring, a story of dogged courage, resilience and tragedy that illuminates the indigenous experience. It’s also mischievous, sly and beguiling, and especially fascinating for those of us who know little of Aboriginal life. And it’s characterised by occasional moments of that typical Aboriginal deadpan use of wry, ironic humour that takes the piss out of do-gooding authority and adds even more poignancy to the family shenanigans.'
Another media reviewer, Paul Kalina (2014) writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, interviewed the series director Jon Bell about the series and his intentions. Aimed at both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences, the show seems framed in a similar mould to Home and Away and Neighbours.
Bell, a Wiradjuri, Bundjalung and Yaegl man from rural northern NSW, makes a strong shift away from what he calls the 'flotsam and jetsam' of mainline media, as if Aboriginal people 'don't have a choice or are victims of bigger circumstances'.
As well as being a show for and about the everyperson (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal), Bell introduces elements of Aboriginal culture perhaps missing from other TV soaps - themes around spirituality and the supernatural. This helps to situate the otherwise super-natural perspective as a cultural norm and adds to the real-life realism of family and country.
Specificity of location and country connection also helps overcome the homogeneity of much reporting of Indigenous people in Australia. The series shows how Aboriginal identities are not static. They emerge from 'particular historical moments, experiences, relations, position with the social order, and from both the opportunities and constraints that govern our realities' (Harris 2013:13).
But one question remains for me. Currently there seem to be two versions of Australian film and television - one which represents the ideology of secular whiteness although Australia is a multicultural and multifaith nation, and one which aims to redress this dominance and present a story for all Australians. Is there a way of bringing these two mediated worlds together?
US law, crime and hospital series are populated by ethnic and racial representation but largely overlook Native Americans. The feel good Canadian breakthrough show, Little Mosque on the Prairie, showed Muslim and non-Muslim characters working and socialising together. But in Australia the two worlds - Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal - are still set apart in most media. Certainly there are instances of both ways and intercultural storylines but they are not frequent. Why? I can't answer that but perhaps one important reason for the growth and spread of Aboriginal media is the invisibility of Aboriginal people (Asians and other ethnic cultures too) on screen, an issue raised by many writers and researchers over many years - and still.
For example, Paul O'Hanlon (2014) writes that over the 6,790 episodes of Neighbours (up until Dec 2013), 'only 3(!!) ...featured an Aboriginal character (Sally Pritchard) played by Brenda Webb way back in 1994'. O'Hanlon has documented the limited Aboriginal and Islander representation in mainline TV and ABC dramas and other programs over the years. But my observation is that one of the few places that regularly feature Aboriginal people on the media are in sports programs, from Marngrook to other footy shows featuring former players like Wayne Carey, and many other current players, notably Adam Goodes, the 2014 Australian of the Year - although on the footy field itself, racism and racist slurs still occur as Goodes experienced last year.
According to Rekhari (2008:131, in Rodriquez 2011/2012: 13), representations of the other also refers to representations of self. 'The signified of the ‘Other’ is always indicated as being secondary to the primary ‘self’, reducing Aboriginal characters and their representations to the expectations of this binarism', sometimes still reflected in a homage to the primitive in opposition to the civilized (Rekhari 2008).
Viewing the contemporary onscreen world, I wonder if the invisibility of Aboriginal people, Asians and others' ethnicities is an unconscious rendering of the stereotyped Australian identity as whiteness? Is it a lack of awareness by media producers and writers about the diverse composition of the Australian community? Is it a ploy to try to sell the Aussie beach cultural stereotype overseas to encourage tourism and migration? Or perhaps it could be the feeling of producers that overseas audiences may not warm to images of the real (not reel) Australian society? I don't usually like so many rhetorical questions but in this case I find it hard to find answers that do not include racism (unconscious, institutional, personal) and prejudice.
Rodriquez underlines this criticism by citing a shift in the popularity of Aboriginal art and culture and thus in the construction of Aboriginal identity:
'In contemporary multicultural world, Australia constructs its first inhabitants as a cultural brand that can be commercialized, and cinema has not missed the chance to use them as a narrative asset. Representations of Aborigines in the last decade have moved from ethnically marked to a genuine exploration of the possibilities of the alien culture. This process, of course, implies the use of a positive make up upon Aboriginal culture.' His comment seems to create another problematic binary to unravel.
Going back, let's celebrate the role of Aboriginal media for prying open Australian film and television to allow a glimmer of diverse Aboriginal and Islander representation and a glow in the plethora of local and international awards these shows garner.
References cited
- Blundell G. 2014. The Gods of Wheat Street tackles eternal dreams of family. The Australian, April 12, 2014, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-gods-of-wheat-street-tackles-eternal-dreams-of-family/story-fn9n8gph-1226879115226#
- Burin M. 2014. The Gods of Wheat Street: a TV drama about a family who just so happens to be black. ABC North Coast NSW, April 5, 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2014/04/04/3978556.htm
- Harris M. 2013. In M. Harris, M. Nakata, B. Carlson, Eds., The politics of identity: emerging indigeneity. UTSePress, University Library, University of Technology Sydney.
- Kalina P. 2014. The Gods of Wheat Street: An Aboriginal Home and Away, Sydney Morning Herald, April 10, 2014.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/the-gods-of-wheat-street-an-aboriginal-home-and-away-20140409-36bri.html
- O'Hanlon P. 2014. The under-representation of Aboriginal people in the media, Feb 27, 2014, http://indymedia.org.au/2014/02/27/the-under-representation-of-aboriginal-people-in-the-media.
- Rekhari S. 2008. The "other" in film: exclusions of Aboriginal identity from Australian cinema''. Visual Anthropological. 21.2 (2008) 125-135, http://www.tasa.org.au/conferences/conferencepapers07/papers/31.pdf
- Rodriquez PV. 2011/2012. Shooting the Other: representations of Aboriginal and Torres Islander masculinities in 21st century Australian cinema. MA in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities, University of Barcelona.
Image source:
Pixabay: the dunes desert sand
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