Diversity on our screens

If — like me —you grew up as a non-white kid in Australia, you wouldn’t have seen many people on Australian TV who resembled you. In the 1990s and 2000s, Asian-Australians had Cindy Pan, Elizabeth Chong, Lee Lin Chin and Annette Shun Wah, but scripted roles were pretty rare. Off the top of my head, I can remember one Asian dude on ‘Home and Away’ — let’s call him, oh, I don’t know, Victim of Racism — who disappeared as soon as Alf Stewart learned his lesson that racism was bad. ‘Neighbours’ had the Lim family, a Hong Kong Chinese family who moved onto Ramsay Street and were promptly accused of eating a neighbourhood dog. It was pretty grim.
Benjamin Law, ‘The problem of limited diversity on Aussie TV’

Historically, Australian television was dominated by Anglo-centric stories, faces and voices.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), launched in 1980, plays a significant role in showcasing culturally-diverse programs and actors, but there is still some way to go.

Racialised caricatures and performances were common until (alarmingly) recently. In 2009 the Nine Network's Hey Hey, It's Saturday sparked a worldwide outcry for showing five men in ‘Blackface’ (the practice of white performers using shoe polish or theatrical makeup to imitate the appearance of a black person) performing a Jackson Five song. During his 2011 series ‘Angry Boys’ Australian comedian Chris Lilley donned blackface to play the character of S.mouse, an African-American rapper with songs like “Slap My Elbow” and “Squashed N*gga”. Three years later Lilley played a troubled Tongan boy whilst wearing dark make-up and a curly wig, a performance that the Guardian newspaper described as a ‘modern minstrel show’.

The latest report from Screen Australia (2023) shows increases in the levels of diversity on screen since 2016. Representation of First Nations people has risen from 4.8 per cent to 7.2 per cent (compared to a population benchmark of 3.8 per cent). However, First Nations characters were concentrated in a small number of programs, such as Cleverman, Black Comedy, Mystery Road and Wentworth.

Characters from non-European backgrounds more than doubled, increasing from 6.9 per cent to 16 per cent, but this is well below population benchmarks. Television news and current affairs programs are still overwhelmingly presented by people from an Anglo-Celtic background.

Disabled representation rose from 3.6 per cent to 6.6 per cent, but this is also below levels in the general population. LGBTIQ+ representation rose from 4.5 per cent to 7.4 per cent — again, lower than the estimated 11 per cent of the population who identify as LGBTIQ+.

Memories of television

I don’t remember the first time I watched television, but I do remember key TV ‘moments’.
I remember watching ‘Jaws’ with my (much) older brother. It changed the way I felt about the ocean and open water. I remember watching Stephen King’s ‘It’ and ‘Pet Cemetery’ (again with my brother, can you spot a theme?) I refused to go outside after dark and, for some years, was pretty convinced an old family pet haunted our home. And I still have mixed feelings about clowns, drains and plugholes (IYKYK).
I remember when RAGE began in the late-1980s. As a country kid in rural Victoria this was my window to the outside world (at least of rock and pop music). On Sunday mornings I would sneak into our living room to catch the ‘Top 50’. Oh, how glorious it all was – Madonna, Salt-n-Pepa, Iggy Pop. I’m embarrassed (and a little bit proud) to say that I still know all the words to ‘Like a Prayer’ and could (probably) dance along to ‘Rhythm Nation’.

But it is not so much ‘what’ I watched, but ‘how’, that interests me now. Growing up, we had one television. Most families did. We had no choice what to watch, or when, and I was last in the pecking order — my parents and brother had ‘first dibs’. Even if I was allowed to watch (my parents were quite strict), and got in first, there wasn’t much on. With only four channels (yes, Millennials, four!) it was slim pickings. There wasn’t much else to do but play outside!

My children know of no such deprivation. As I type, my eldest is in the rumpus room watching a movie. My youngest is on the Ipad watching her latest series (age appropriate, I promise), and my husband and I are watching a Scandi crime drama from the couch in our living room. Long gone are the days when you had to choose between ‘Young Talent Time’ or football on Saturday nights!
Internet TV and subscription streaming services have taken over as the leading way people watch. And today, with satellite technology, there are hundreds of channels available from around the globe. There is always something to watch.

We asked staff and volunteers at the Old Treasury Building to contribute memories of their first television. Here are some of them.

MY STORY ABOUT TELEVISION - Louise

I am 70. I grew up in Chadstone, the cultural vacuum of the world in the 1950’s and 60’s. My earliest memories of TV were going to my neighbour’s house on Friday nights to watch Bonanza, followed by a terrible variety show hosted by Bill Collins the name escapes me... I would have been twelve.
I was so envious that my best friend Robyn had TV; we did not get it for another two years and I was overjoyed.
I remember 1969 the year of the Moon Landing. I was at Chadstone High School and sixteen. We were allowed to go home early to watch it on TV. It was an auspicious occasion and TV was a well-entrenched part of my life by then. I do remember a question on the HSC English Expression exam the same year which asked us to evaluate the moral/financial worth of the Moon Landing and I argued strongly in the negative. My opinion has not changed!
I have enjoyed television throughout the decades particularly when I lived in London, with access to the BBC, and still do. I appreciate the free to air, democratic nature of it and the choice it offers particularly with SBS and NITV, illuminating multi-cultural, diverse Australia — a long way from Bonanza!

PICTURE THE SCENE - Jacqueline

Picture the scene. It was June 2^nd, 1953, a grey day, overcast and showery. It was unseasonably cold, even for London with the temperature hovering around 12 degrees. In the street where I lived trestle tables had been set up for the children’s party that was to be held to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. We were all very excited as there was sure to be sandwiches and cakes and maybe even sweets as rationing had come to an end earlier in the year. The area had suffered badly during the war and the large hole in the middle of the street was testament to the destructive powers of Hitler’s V2 bombs. The coronation heralded a new Elizabethan age and for the first time it was to be televised. I had never seen a television and no one I knew was in possession of one. However, on that day like millions of other Britons, our next-door neighbour had rented one and we were all invited to come and watch the ceremony. The television was housed in a rather elegant wooden cabinet, but the screen was barely 12 inches across, and intermittently jagged lines obscured the picture and someone had to fiddle with the ‘horizontal hold’. At times the picture disappeared completely so someone had to move around the room waving the aerial until normal service was resumed. There were at least a dozen children sitting cross-legged in front of the screen while the adults crammed into the tiny room cheek by jowl. As the seemingly endless ceremony dragged on, we kids began to wriggle and squabble and one or two of us were given a swift ‘clip around the ear’ and told to shut up. Unlike the adults, who were riveted by the spectacle, all we wanted to do was get out into the street and launch ourselves upon the goodies.

BETTER THAN ELVIS - Marguerite

Our first TV was a 17-inch AWA that cost 200 guineas. I have no idea how much that would be today, but well over $5,000.
It was very exciting watching the test pattern waiting for the first show to come on.
What convinced my father to buy it was the news that one of the channels had bought a batch of old British movies, including some of his favourites.
I became an addict of course and we silly girls at school talked about nothing else much else. Nightly TV even eclipsed Elvis!

TV EVENTS – Alison

My first TV event was the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. We didn’t have a TV (in Scotland) then — they weren’t yet common and were expensive — but our next-door neighbours, who liked to be ahead of the times, had one and we were invited to watch the event. Being accustomed to Pathé News at the cinema, the black and white imagery was perfectly normal.
In 1957 (exact date uncertain), the BBC TV program Panorama screened a film of actual childbirth, the first time that had been done. I would have been about 11 or 12 years old. I remember my father saying, very casually, ‘Do you want to watch this?’ I certainly did.
About that time, I would have seen my first opera, on TV. From memory, it was Joan Hammond in Madama Butterfly. The singing was great but the closeups required some suspension of disbelief. Hammond was at least mid-40s, not slender and not remotely Japanese looking!
I remember the BBC children’s program Blue Peter better and it was possibly there I first came across a handsome and enthusiastic young man who was familiar with all sorts of interesting animals — David Attenborough.
In late January 1965 (I emigrated to Australia a month later), a major TV event was the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. Then, as now, state funerals were planned years in advance, documented to the last full stop and carried out strictly according to plan. As with most major UK state events at the time, Richard Dimbleby was narrating. But what wasn’t expected, as the funeral procession made its way down the Thames, was about 36 or more cranes on the river side to slowly lower their jibs down to the waterline, one after another. Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, said afterwards that this was one action that ‘undid us all’. I think it undid most of the viewers, irrespective of one’s views about Churchill.
I did watch the moon landing on TV – I was teaching at Ascham School in Sydney and took my small, portable TV to school (by bus) so that my students could watch it too.
What TV has recorded has been a welcome (and sometimes unwelcome) reflection of our times. Some notable events have been seen so many times on TV (eg 9/11, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales) that the TV images have become our reality. But my personal list of memorable TV moments would include the following: