Australian multicultural policy and drama in comparative contexts

Harvey May BA (Comm), BA, B Bus (Hons)(Comm), Post Grad Dip Ed

A thesis submitted in 2003 for the award of Doctor of Philosophy

Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology

Key Words

Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity, Television, Drama, Casting, Minorities, , , New Zealand, .

Abstract

This thesis examines changes which have occurred since the late 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the representation of cultural diversity on Australian popular drama programming. The thesis finds that a significant number of actors of diverse cultural and linguistic background have negotiated the television industry employment process to obtain acting roles in a lead capacity. The majority of these actors are from the second generation of immigrants, who increasingly make up a significant component of Australia’s multicultural population. The way in which these actors are portrayed on- screen has also shifted from one of a ‘performed’ ethnicity, to an ‘everyday’ portrayal. The thesis develops an analysis which connects the development and broad political support for multicultural policy as expressed in the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia to the changes in both employment and representation practices in popular television programming in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The thesis addresses multicultural debates by arguing for a mainstreaming position. The thesis makes detailed comparison of cultural diversity and television in the jurisdictions of the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand to support the broad argument that cultural diversity policy measures produce observable outcomes in television programming.

ii Contents

Glossary of Abbreviations ……………………………………………………… vii Statement of Original Authorship ……………………………………………… ix Acknowledgements …………………………………………….……………….. x

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter One Theory, terms and methodology

Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 6 Multiculturalism ………………………………………………………….. 10 White ……………………………………………………………………… 14 The second generation …………………………………………. ……... 16 Representational anxieties ……………………………………………... 19 Television and policy studies …………………………………………... 22 Classifying populations …………………………………………………. 24

PART ONE AUSTRALIAN POLICY ENVIRONMENTS

Chapter Two The multicultural project

Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 27 Pre-war and post-war immigration …………………………………….. 30 Fathering multiculturalism and Fraser ………………………………… 34 Multiculturalism under Labor …………………………………… ……... 37 The Agenda ……………………………………………………………… 41 1996: back to the future? ……………………………………………….. 45 Multicultural and strategic hybridity ……………………………………. 52 Conclusion: assimilation revisited …………………………….……….. 56

Chapter Three Cultural diversity, television and policy

Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 61 Liberal multiculturalism and ethnic TV ………………………………… 62 An Australian look ……………………………………………………….. 63 The ABA, the BSA and cultural diversity ……………………………… 66 Casting, policy and the cultural diversity debate 1992-1996 ……….. 68 Creative Nation case studies: SBS Independent and the Commercial Television Production Fund ………………………………74 SBS Independent (SBSI) ……………………………………………….. 75 The Commercial Television Production Fund (CTPF) ………………. 77 Conclusion: cultural diversity policy discourse and television ……… 80

iii PART TWO INTERNATIONAL POLICY AND PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 84

Chapter Four The United States: affirmative action, 'quotas' and diversity rights

Policy and industry contexts ……………………………………………. 87 Television broadcasting overview: USA ………………………………. 89 Power to the people: multiculturalism in the USA ……………………. 90 Policy contexts …………………………………………………………… 93 Network programming and production: historical contexts …………. 99 Racial narrowcasting ……………………………………………………. 102 Changing times ………………………………………………………….. 105 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….. 110

Chapter Five The United Kingdom: policy remits for diversity and an 'everyday' multiculturalism

Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 113 Television broadcasting overview: the UK ……………………………. 114 Race relations in the United Kingdom ………………………………… 115 Policy contexts …………………………………………………………… 118 Programming contexts ………………………………………………….. 125 Production contexts ……………………………………………………... 131 Conclusion: a remit for everyday multiculturalism …………………… 133

Chapter Six New Zealand: biculturalism and targeted subsidies

Television broadcasting overview ……………………………………... 137 Bicultural New Zealand …………………………………………………. 138 Policy contexts …………………………………………………………… 142 New Zealand on Air ……………………………………………………... 146 Audiences, programming and production……………………………... 149 Conclusion………………………………………………………………… 156

PART THREE AUSTRALIAN POPULAR DRAMA: MAINSTREAMING THE MULTICULTURAL

Chapter Seven Australian drama casting and production perspectives

Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 159 Casting survey: method ………………………………………………… 162 Casting survey: results…………………………………………………... 163 Self-Identification of ethnicity…………………………………………… 165

iv Industry perspectives: Indigenous casting ……………………………. 167 Industry perspectives: the acting profession and casting …………… 168 Industry perspectives: writing ………………………………………….. 181 Industry perspectives: producing ………………………………………. 187 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….. 191

Chapter Eight Australian television programs: texts and contexts Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 194

Breakers: cosmopolitan serial television The financing …………………………………………………………….. 197 The set-up………………………………………………………………… 201 ‘Have you visited the world lately?’: cultural diversity and Breakers……………………………………………………………… 202 Breakers’ limits…………………………………………………………… 205 Findings from the six week recording period………………………….. 208 Breaking into the mainstream…………………………………………... 211

Pizza ‘chocko comedy’………………………………………………………….. 210 A slice of Pizza…………………………………………………………… 220 Cultural diversity and Pizza: series one……………………………….. 221

Six weeks, popular programming and cultural diversity……………… 225 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….. 238

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 240

Appendix One …………………………………………………………………... 247 Appendix Two ……………………………………………………………………251

References ………………………………………………………………………. 253

v List of Figures Figure 7.1 Ethnicity of Actors ……………………………………….. 161 Figure 7.2 Comparison of Studies ………………………………….. 162 Figure 7.3 Family Background by Region …………………………. 163 Figure 7.4 Self Identification ………………………………………… 163 Figure 8.1 Program Recording Chart ………………………………. 193

List of Appendices Appendix One: Casting Survey Questionnaire …………………………. 245 Appendix Two: List of interviewees who consented to be identified …………………………………………… 249

vi Glossary of Abbreviations

ABA ………. Australian Broadcasting Authority ABC ………. Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABCB …….. Australian Broadcasting Control Board ABS ………. Australian Bureau of Statistics ABT ………. Australian Broadcasting Tribunal AFC ………. Australian Film Commission AFTRS …… Australian Film Television & Radio School ASDA …….. Australian Screen Directors Association AWG ……… Australian Writers Guild BBC ………. British Broadcasting Service BSC ……….. Broadcasting Standards Commission BSA ………. Broadcasting Services Act 1992 CLC ………. Communications Law Centre CTPF ……... Commercial Television Production Fund DCALB …… Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Background DCITA ……. Department of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts DIMA …….. Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs DOCA ……. Department of Communication and the Arts FACTS …… Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations FCC ………. Federal Communications Commission ITC ………… Independent Television Commission ITV ………… Independent Television Network MEAA ……. Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance NAACP …… National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAB ……….. National Association of Broadcasters NES ………. Non-English Speaking NMAC ……. National Multicultural Advisory Council NZOA ……. New Zealand on Air OMA ……… Office of Multicultural Affairs SAG ……… Screen Actors Guild SBS ………. Special Broadcasting Service

vii SBSI ……… SBS Independent SPAA …….. Screen Producers Association of Australia TPS ………. Television Programme Standard UPN ………. United Paramount Network VCA ……….. Victorian College of the Arts WB ………… Warner Brothers

viii

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signed ______

Date ______

ix Acknowledgements

I thank both supervisors, Professor Stuart Cunningham and Dr Terry Flew, for their guidance, insight and support.

I also acknowledge the support of family and friends during the candidature.

This thesis would not have been possible without the appreciative contribution of actors and others in the television industry, who were interviewed in 1999 and 2000.

x Introduction

During the early 1990s, a number of studies exploring multiculturalism and the media found representation of cultural diversity on Australian commercial television drama programs was both minimal in quantity and limited in its portrayal (Goodall, Jakubowicz, Martin, Mitchell, Randall, and Senerirante, 1990; Cope, Jakubowicz and Randall, 1992; CLC, 1992a; Bell, 1993; Nugent, Loncar, and Aisbett, 1993; Bostock, 1993; Jakubowicz, Goodall, Martin, Mitchell, Randall, and Senevirante, 1994). In combination with these studies, the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA), the Communications Law Centre (CLC) and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA – formerly Actors Equity) conducted seminars1 on the topic of multiculturalism and the media in order to raise awareness of the issue with broadcasting regulators and within the television industry. By 1998, the MEAA’s federal secretary, Anne Britton (1998), agreed with comments made in a discussion paper by Appleton (1995) that since the early 1990s there had been an improvement in both the number of diverse cultural and linguistic background (DCALB)2 actors appearing in drama programs and the way in which cultural diversity was being represented in popular programming. Australian drama programming in the late 1990s strongly suggested that the criticism made by Bell (1993) and Jakubowicz et al (1994) that Australian drama was overwhelmingly anglocentric was no longer sustainable.

This research seeks to quantify the changes in Australian drama and casting with regard to cultural diversity and looks for clarification as to why change took place. The thesis examines the development of broad multicultural policy, focusing on 1980s onwards. It finds that a convergence of discourses began to emerge between the mainstreaming policy approach of Labor’s 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, with language and policy

1 The main seminars were - 1991: Seeing is Believing: Scriptwriting for a Multicultural Society held at The Australian Film, Television and Radio School; 1993: The Media and Conference held in Brisbane; 1993: Self-Regulation and Cultural Diversity held in ; 1995: Television and the Multicultural Audience held in Sydney. 2 The term DCALB designates people born overseas in non-English speaking countries, their children, as well as Indigenous Australians.

1 debates circulating within the broadcasting policy community. By the late 1990s, the discourse of multiculturalism as an embedded sense of social reality and the Agenda ‘s equity discourse began to be reflected in the professional practice of creative stakeholders, which is then expressed in drama programming output. In an analysis of the representation of AIDS on Australian drama in the 1990s, Wilding (1998, pp 363 - 364) found that ‘key creative personnel’ working in television drama had been influenced by the ‘social field’ of AIDS policy and education, and that Commonwealth policy on AIDS provided a ‘way in’ to think about the topic. Wilding’s notion that Commonwealth AIDS policy directed a number of policy communities in dealing with AIDS, which then influenced the creative force of television representation can also be applied to the representation of multiculturalism. This is supported by comparative research in Part Two of the thesis which examines cultural diversity and drama in the USA, the UK and New Zealand. A review of policy and academic literature in the three countries bears out the idea that a nation’s development and approach to multicultural policy impinges on discourses of cultural diversity and broadcasting policy, which then influences program making.

Chapter One introduces theoretical and methodological concerns. In particular, I argue that second generation migrants have become a significant and sizable factor in discussing multiculturalism and representation in Australia, which affects the terms of multicultural debate. This discussion is informed by an examination of Whiteness, as South East Asian3 migrants and other more recent immigrants take on a particular importance for the research in Part Three, where their inclusion in a multicultural mainstream is shown to be unrealised. An examination of multiculturalism and the second generation is also important because they make up a sizeable number of DCALB actors appearing on drama programs in recent years. Chapter One also examines representational analysis as a research approach, finding past research into

3 Throughout the thesis, I use the term South East Asian when referring to populations predominantly from the South East Asia region in a wider sense. This has been done to avoid confusion with terminology used in the chapter on the United Kingdom, where Asian refers to populations from and Pakistan for example. When referring to a particular person or group, an effort is made to identify and refer to their cultural origin more specifically.

2 ethnicity and the media over-determined in its search for either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ portrayals of cultural diversity on Australian drama. The chapter sets out how this research will employ a cultural studies policy approach as well as making textual analyses of programming, in order to explore the connections between broad multicultural policy, broadcasting policy, professional practice and how programming engaged with cultural diversity up to the year 2001.

The thesis is then divided into three parts. Part One, Australian Policy Environments, contains Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two re-evaluates Australian multicultural policy to argue that the Agenda in particular, as official multicultural policy, has a greater relationship to the creation of a multicultural mainstream than critical multicultural analyses permit. The chapter also examines in greater detail, the significance of the second generation in the analysis and conception of a multicultural mainstream. Chapter Three provides an historical analysis of the debates and issues surrounding cultural diversity and television as a site of policy discourse and intervention. Included are two case studies in ‘governmental television’: SBS Independent and The Commercial Television Production Fund, both Creative Nation initiatives from the second half of the 1990s. The chapter establishes a convergence of multicultural policy discourse.

Part Two of the thesis is divided into three chapters and examines cultural diversity and television in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. These three countries were chosen because of access to a sizable body of existing research and familiarity with their programming. When viewing television from the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, there is the tendency to see their programs as presenting a more comprehensive portrayal of cultural diversity as compared with Australia. This can be attributed for example to the historical prominence of Black actors in US police shows, the wide diversity of medical staff in ER, the clear presence of non-Anglo actors in The Bill, and a range of Maori performers in the New Zealand serial Shortland Street. In non-fiction programming one also observes a level of culturally diverse news anchors

3 and TV presenters in the USA and the UK not seen on Australian television outside of SBS.

The choice of the USA, the UK and New Zealand for comparison is also based on the particular achievements of each country with regard to cultural diversity and television. The three countries demonstrate a variety of explicit policy measures aimed at developing a mainstream approach in casting, writing and producing programs in culturally diverse territories. When examined with the purpose to underscore Australian practices, policy and programming, the changes and current status for cultural diversity and popular television in the three countries offer worthwhile insights for the Australian context.

The complexities and intersections of broadcasting, cultural diversity and program production in the three countries is also considered in the historical context of multicultural policy in each country. An examination of each nation’s particular approach to multiculturalism (or biculturalism in the case of New Zealand), provides opportunities for examining the ways in which broad multicultural policy discourse influences both broadcasting policy and program production with respect to cultural diversity and drama in particular.

Chapter Four examines the USA, where a history of civil rights action has had a profound influence on the establishment of equal opportunity policies in the broadcasting sector. Chapter Five focuses on how in the United Kingdom, a policy remit for an everyday representation of multiculturalism has permeated through to management and commissioning program editors in broadcasting organisations. In Chapter Six, an established social and cultural policy of biculturalism in New Zealand is combined with state support for culturally diverse programming in a heavily de-regulated television broadcasting environment.

Part Three presents original primary research into cultural diversity and drama programming in the Australian context. Chapter Seven presents a comprehensive survey of acting, casting practices and production

4 perspectives, while Chapter Eight analyses drama programming over a two- year period. Part Three provides primary research material which supports the argument that the portrayal of cultural diversity has changed considerably since the early 1990s. The representation has changed from a minimal and limited representation to one more aligned with an everyday multiculturalism, and that this can be attributed in part to a convergence of discourses, emanating from the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia.

5 Chapter One Theory, terms and methodology1

Introduction This research finds that changes have occurred since the late 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the representation of cultural diversity on popular drama programming. Firstly, since the early 1990s, a greater number of DCALB actors have negotiated the complex and often capricious employment process for obtaining acting roles in a lead capacity compared to the early 1990s. The majority of these actors are from the second generation2 of migrants and have a post-secondary school acting education. Second, the way in which these actors are portrayed on-screen has shifted from one of a ‘performed’ ethnicity, where ethnicity is the primary purpose of the role, to an everyday portrayal. By this, I mean that DCALB actors are now likely to play roles which make no or very little reference to the cultural background of the actor. DCALB lead actors, including Indigenous actors, now appear in a variety of roles not available to them in drama programs during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I maintain that the formulation and broad political support for multicultural policy, brought to its fullest policy expression in the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia (OMA, 1989), played a key role in the changes to both employment and representation practices in popular television programming. The release of the Agenda and the possibility to carry out comparisons in multicultural representation on TV with a collection of previous research from the early 1990s provides the motivation for limiting the years under study from 1989 to 2001. In effect, the Agenda assisted to embed a sense of cultural diversity as an everyday experience in the Australian

1 Parts of this thesis have been published in the following publications: May, H., Flew, T. and Spurgeon, C. (2000) Report on Casting in Australian Television Drama, Centre for Media Policy and Practice, QUT, Brisbane., May, H. (2000) ‘Cultural Diversity, Casting and Australian Commercial Television Drama’, Published Conference Papers, Ethics, Events, Entertainment, Ballina July 2000, Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, pp 227 – 236., May, H. (2001) Cultural Diversity and Australian Commercial Television Drama: Policy, Industry and Recent Research Contexts’, Prometheus, vol 19, no 2, pp 161 – 170., May, H. (2002) Broadcast in Colour: Cultural Diversity and Television Programming in Four Countries, Screen Industry, Culture and Culture Policy Series, Australian Key Centre for Culture and Media Policy and Australian Film Commission, Sydney. 2 Second generation in this research refers to Australian-born people who have at least one parent born overseas in a non-English speaking country.

6 community, as well as to promote equity measures and influence other areas of policy such as broadcasting, to take account of a culturally diverse Australia.

One of the contested objectives of multicultural policy in the Agenda has been the educative role of the state in promoting tolerance in the wider community. Critical analyses by Jaukubowicz et al (1994), Stratton (1998) and Hage (1997a, 1998) tend to reduce multiculturalism’s central rationale to that of government programs for promoting community tolerance. These analyses position multiculturalism as cultural enrichment which enhances the Anglo communities’ cultural and culinary lifestyle. According to such analysis, multicultural policy acts to obscure multiculturalism’s implicit function of maintaining the superior economic and cultural position of Anglo or ‘white’ Australia. Hage (1998, p 121) offers a succinct statement on this position:

While the dominant white culture merely and unquestionably exists, migrant cultures exist for the latter [white cultures]. Their value [migrant cultures], or the viability of their preservation as far as White Australians are concerned, lies in their function as enriching cultures. It is in this sense that the discourse of enrichment contributes to the positioning of non-White Australians within the White Nation fantasy.

While the promotion of tolerance and cultural enrichment has been an important feature of multicultural policy, I do not accept that these are its only actual outcomes along with the maintenance of the dominant class. Cowlishaw (2000, p 244) notes that Hage is ‘interested only in the discourse of tolerance’ and while it is true that multiculturalism continues to be understood and at times promoted as cultural enrichment and tolerance, it can also be understood as a policy which has contributed in making multiculturalism part of everyday life in mainstream locations in work, media and culture.

Hage (1997a) on the other hand considers an everyday multicultural mainstream to be located mostly in the home life of ‘third world’ migrants in Sydney’s Southwest. An SBS commissioned study into multiculturalism by Ang, Brand, Noble and Wilding (2002, p 6) provides robust survey research

7 which demonstrates that ‘most Australians live and breathe cultural diversity’ and that ‘Australians from all backgrounds experience everyday cosmopolitanism’. Ang et al’s research also advocates that cultural diversity experienced by most Australians is not confined to a superficial cosmopolitanism but is a lived mainstream experience. While their survey shows this is especially so with young people and the second generation, I demonstrate in the thesis that Australia’s demographic is increasingly composed of second generation DCALB migrants, who demonstrate very high cultural mixing in relationships and marriage.

While transformations to cultural diversity and drama programming became evident after the early 1990s, the portrayal of and employment prospects for actors of South East Asian backgrounds in the late 1990s did not reflect changes made by other DCALB actors in the same period. However by 2000, there were noticeable changes in the area of South East Asian casting which became more aligned with improvements in other DCALB groups. This trend continued into the early 2000s (Jacka, 2002, pp 13 - 14). The thesis provides an examination of and explanation for the delayed involvement of actors from South East Asian backgrounds in drama programming, as well as exploring the near total absence of actors with an accent or actors from first generation migrant groups. In examining these issues, the thesis develops the premise that the second generation has become a sizable and important location for exploring contemporary understandings of multiculturalism and the representation of that multiculturalism in Australia.

There is little research focusing on second generation migrants, multiculturalism and television drama programming, the exception being Aquilia’s (2000) doctoral dissertation, ‘‘ Babes’: the representation of the second generation Italian-Australian female protagonist in film and television drama’. Bertone, Keating, and Mullaly (2000) provide theatre-focused research on the representation of people from culturally diverse backgrounds which incorporates a section on television, however the section mostly reviews previous research from the early 1990s. O’Regan’s (1993, pp 111 - 114) analysis of multiculturalism and television drama representation in his

8 book, Australian Television Culture, suggested the importance of the second generation and cultural intermixing and proposed that drama programming would necessarily begin to reflect such demographic change. This study then extends analyses into cultural diversity and television carried out in the 1990s in Australia in the following respects.

The first of these involves the analysis of cultural diversity and television in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Previous research, such as Nugent et al’s (1993) study included a comparative survey of British audiences with Australian audiences’ attitudes to the portrayal of cultural diversity on television. Communication Law Centre research (1992a) also examined the regulatory policies of the US with regard to casting and cultural diversity. Aside from these two smaller comparative studies, no Australian television research has examined cultural diversity, multicultural policy and television programming in a comparative frame. My examination of the USA, the UK and New Zealand does not attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of multiculturalism or television broadcasting in each country, as this is outside the scope of the thesis. Rather, the purpose of the studies is to highlight particular similarities and divergences compared with the Australian context.

The second aspect is a comprehensive survey of lead actors appearing on Australian commercial television drama programs in 1999 and their portrayal in the programs in which they appear. This primary research is presented in Part Three. This actor survey provides a quantification of the cultural background of actors working in commercial television drama. The research also involved an interview program with 21 actors, seven writers, Australia’s four leading casting directors and eight producer-creators and two directors. These stakeholders were chosen as they represent a major component of the creative and producer gatekeeping for Australian drama. Lastly, drama programs over a two-year period in three blocks of programming were analysed for the textual representation of cultural diversity. Such an in-depth and inclusive analysis of drama programming and cultural diversity has not been undertaken to date, the only other study being Bell’s (1993) smaller survey of three two-week blocks of drama in the early 1990s.

9

Multiculturalism Multicultural policies in Australia began with the emergence in the late 1970s of government programs to aid in the settlement of recently arrived migrants and an acknowledgment of the contribution that migrant cultures made to Australian life. In contemporary research and policy contexts (including broadcasting policy), the term multiculturalism is replaced or combined with the term cultural diversity to take account of groups such as Indigenous Australians, the gay community and the disabled. In this study, I use the term multiculturalism when discussing the outcomes of multicultural policy and the ideology of multiculturalism. The term migrant multiculturalism is used when explicitly referring to immigrant Australia, and cultural diversity is used when referring to a wider diversity within the community. Although Australian multicultural policy itself has incorporated the term cultural diversity since the late 1980s the inclusion of Indigenous Australians within multicultural policy is not unproblematic. This study recognises that the requirements of Indigenous Australians cannot simply be incorporated into multicultural policies and programs alone, which have historically related to migrant Australia. However, I preserve the use of the term cultural diversity in signifying both migrant and Indigenous Australians.

While the next chapter examines Australian multiculturalism in detail, I wish to explore multiculturalism as a concept in broader terms in this introductory chapter. At a fundamental level, Hall (2000, p 209) defines multiculturalism as referencing ‘the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity which multi-cultural societies throw up’. Taking the policy articulation further, Lopez (2000, p 446) defines multiculturalism as ‘an ideology promoted by a policy community’, with the state supporting and implementing that ideology through legislation and programs. However as Hall (2000, p 210) goes on to add, multiculturalism ‘is not a single doctrine, does not characterize one political strategy, and does not represent an already achieved state of affairs’. As Hesse (1997, p 377) states, ‘it [multiculturalism] has become a floating signifier’. Both Lopez (2000) and Hall (2000) construct a number of multiculturalisms which are based to a

10 large degree on the historical development of multiculturalism from the mid 20th century.

Prior to the late 1970s, a conservative assimilationist model was common to Australia, the UK and the US. However, Stratton and Ang (1994, p 145) make an important distinction between US assimilation and Australia’s version, in that the US ‘melting pot’ signifies the creation of a new society from many cultures, with a shared set of core values. In Australia, the aim of assimilation was to ensure the ‘preservation’ of Anglo culture at the expense of others, particularly the Indigenous culture. Replacing assimilation, both Hall (2000) and Lopez (2000) identify cultural pluralism, or pluralist multiculturalism, as incorporating notions of cultural maintenance, the promotion of tolerance and what Hall (2000, p 210) calls a ‘communitarian political order’. Borowski (2000) maintains that Australian multiculturalism of the cultural pluralist approach engendered and reinforced virtues, which sustain peaceful and liberal democracies, providing a local application of Hall’s communitarianism. While Lopez (2000) posits liberal pluralism as the dominant form of multiculturalism in Australian politics since the late 1970s, running alongside it in the late 1970s to early 1990s is a critical multiculturalism, or what Hall labels ‘revolutionary multiculturalism’. This focuses on a structural and class based interrogation of power, which seeks to transform the power base for the betterment of migrants and other ‘minority’ groups. More recently though, Hall (2000, p 210) defines the terms commercial and corporate multiculturalism, to describe how culturally diverse communities contribute both as consumers and producers of global capital and social goods. In the era of global media proliferation, the contested concept of hybrid identities becomes bound up in issues of media representation and media use, by intercultural youth in particular.

In this study, I wish to connect hybridity with multiculturalism in a number of ways. I concur with Anthias (2001) that hybridity theory has usefully assisted in overcoming essentialist notions of culture and ethnicity. Anthias supports hybridity theory’s desire to ‘overcome the victimology’ of the migrant experience, as well as noting hybridity’s valuable objective to invoke non-

11 unitary identities which go beyond the binary of the hyphenated intercultural migrant (such as the ‘Italian-Australian’). However, Anthias (2001, p 630) also poses dilemmas for hybridity’s intercultural power, making the point that:

The acid test of hybridity lies in the response of culturally dominant groups, not only in terms of incorporating (or coopting) cultural products … but in being open to transforming and abandoning some of their own central cultural symbols.

While it is doubtful that ‘central’ cultural symbols would rapidly be replaced in any society through the conception of hybrid identities, a transformation of dominant or mainstream culture nevertheless takes place as hybrid identities becomes more prevalent3. Shohat and Stam (1994, p 237) propose that ‘cultural syncretism’, as a result of ever-increasing hybridity, generates a ‘conflictual yet creative intermingling of culture [which] takes place both at the margins and between the margins and [within] a changing mainstream’. In American society, this syncretism has led to the creation of a cultural ‘non- finalized polyphony’. The changes in Australian mainstream popular programming explored in Part Three of the thesis supports such a proposition in a local context.

Anthias (2001, p 637) then calls into question hybridity’s ability to construct difference not contained within an homogenous, globalised media. She explores the way in which global images of women in magazines for example include an ample cultural diversity, but on the other hand, still promote a singular conception of beauty utilised for commercial purposes. Hage (2003, pp 108-119)) describes global multiculturalism as a shift in multiculturalism’s focus from a critical interrogation of working class minority equity issues to issues of identity which concentrate on the middle class. He refers to the way in which a ‘neat, middle class, aestheticised multiculturalism’ is concerned with a global corporatised cultural diversity which moves little beyond the spheres of ‘leisure, entertainment and consumption’ (Hage, 2003, p 111). Hall (2000, p 217) notes an homogenizing tendency in globalisation, but at the

3 In the Australian context, Stratton (1999) argues that the preservation of Christmas and Easter holidays represents the privileging of dominant Anglo culture over that of Muslim or Buddhist culture and that this reflects a form of White Australia policy for holidays.

12 same time, he locates a paradox in globalisation. While things may appear the same, a ‘proliferation of difference’ at local levels means sameness and difference cannot be viewed as simple binaries. People are ‘obliged to adopt shifting, multiple or hyphenated positions’. In the British context, Hall (2000, p 227) gives the example of the ‘besuited Asian accountant … who lives in suburbia, sends his children to private school and reads Readers Digest and the Bhagavad-Gita’. While this example illustrates Hage’s concerns for placing questions of multiculturalism within the professional classes, Hall’s account is useful in highlighting the shifting associations migrants make in their day to day lives, particularly amongst those of the second generation.

In the Australian context, I employ the term strategic hybridity, to identify how second generation migrant young people in particular call upon a range of cultural identity alliances for a range of purposes. Australian research examined in Chapter Two from Noble and Tabar (2002) and Luke and Luke (1998, 1999, 2000), suggest that second generation and hybrid Australians operate in ways which destabilize traditional conceptions of binary migrant identity, while also displaying an assimilatory predisposition when useful or necessary to do so. Luke and Luke (2000, p 47) explain the blending of influences in the creation of such strategic hybrid identities as:

a work in progress, rather than a ‘role’ or a ‘sense of self’ given by cultures, constructed by individuals, or secured unproblematically from the passing down of residual cultural resources. Identity, then, is a dynamic process by and through which increasingly diverse and commodified texts, cultural and discourse resources are brought to bear.

Strategic hybrid identities challenge overly celebratory accounts of hybridity and stress agency over identity. Strategies utilised by hybrid subjects in reaction to ongoing discrimination point to unresolved issues regarding their contested place within society. However, such strategies may also involve discriminatory tendencies and socially undesirable behaviours within a subject’s own cultural community and in the wider community. I assert that multiculturalism at the end of the 1990s includes the notion of strategic hybridity and that second generation and intercultural families are its key

13 location. The thesis also provides support for O’Regan’s (1993, p 106) statement that Australian multiculturalism, considered as a ‘family of projects’, has provided the following:

a state-sponsored cultural hybridisation program promising a new culture in which the Anglo-Celtic … would become decentred and attenuated so that Australian culture could be more readily and easily defined through a mix of other cultural elements (first Southern and Central European and then Middle Eastern and Asian).

The staggered timeframe by which non-European migrants (and for that matter Indigenous Australians) have contributed in transforming the mainstream later than their European cohort is explored in the next chapter and in Part Three. This delay for some groups relates to the incrementalism of multicultural policy (Lopez, 2000), and significant though gradual demographic changes in Australian society. While such change has been measured over time, I agree with Hesse (2000, p 10) when he cites Bhattacharyya, stating that ‘multicultural thinking has seeped in as common sense’. In spite of this ‘seeping in’ of a mainstream multicultural reality in the late 1990s, the question posed by Hage (1997a, 1998) of ‘third world looking migrants’ and the limits of multiculturalism requires an examination of ‘whiteness’, and any de-centring of the mainstream and popular television programming.

White Like Hage (1997a, 1998) and Stratton (1998) in Australia, theorists such as Nagel (2002) in the UK, and Johnson (1999a) in the US, point out that ‘whiteness’ is an unstable category. In the US, fair skinned Hispanics and Blacks display closer economic and social parity with European migrants compared to the darker skinned (Johnson, 1999a, p 24). According to such analyses, second generation Northern and Southern European migrants in most immigrant nations have ‘re-fashioned themselves as part of the mainstream’ (Nagel, 2002, p 265). At a policy level in Australia, ‘whiteness’ as an official immigration category changed from initially being only migrants of Anglo origin, to later include Northern, and then Southern Europeans with the

14 application of the White Australia Policy4. While the White Australia Policy was phased out in the 1960s, theorists such as Hage (1997a, 1998), Stratton (1998, 1999), Larbalestier (1999) and Schech and Haggis (2001) maintain that ‘white’ Australians, including those from previous ‘non-white’ categories such as Continental Europeans, continue to signal ‘superiority, cultural compatibility and privilege’ (Larbalestier, 1999, p 150).

Schech and Haggis (2002, p 146) provide a familiar argument among critical multicultural theorists, stating Australian multiculturalism is ‘concerned with maintaining a cultural hegemony as monocultural visions of the Australian nation’. Like Hage and Stratton, Schech and Haggis (2001, p 151) maintain that Asian Australians in particular have been unable to ‘read themselves’ into a ‘surrogate whiteness’ of dominant Anglo Australia (‘surrogate whites’ predominantly meaning Southern European migrants now included in the Australian mainstream). I accept that the opportunities for South East Asian groups to contribute to mainstream Australian culture (and drama programming) have been more complex and uneven compared to other groups. However, I demonstrate that the reasons for a less significant South East Asian presence in mainstream programming are not exclusively due to multicultural policy, as stipulated by Stratton for example. I maintain that such critical multiculturalist analyses are over-determined in their uncoupling of official multiculturalism from any relation to the lived experience of ‘everyday multiculturalism’, which Stratton and Hage resolutely argue, is the faithful location and foundation of a transformative and hybrid ‘everyday multiculturalism’ among ‘non-white’ migrants. These theorists reject the prospect that the spaces available to migrants (including ‘non-white’), which they suggest lead to transgression and transformation, could be related to

4 The end of the White Australia Policy was not a clean break in any one year with the restriction of migrants based on racial criteria. Linden (1996) situates 1956 as the beginning of a relaxation for mixed descent applicants. 1958 saw the abolition of the dictation test – a test able to be given in any language to a migrant in order to exclude certain applicants. The official end to the White Australia Policy is cited as 1966 by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA, 1997), when ‘well qualified’ rather than ‘distinguished’ non- European migrants were considered. However, Linden (1996) places the official end at 1963, with migration then based on an individual applicant’s merit, rather than racial origin. One can also argue that in 1973, Whitlam further removed implicit barriers to non-European immigration with citizenship reform. The growth in Asian immigration under Fraser showed that the White Australia Policy had ended.

15 O’Regan’s idea of official multiculturalism’s ‘family of projects’ – including the project of transforming the mainstream. Ultimately, in the discussion of ‘whiteness’ and multiculturalism, Nagel (2001, p 266) provides a more open- ended supposition:

It cannot be presupposed that contemporary ‘non-white’ immigrants do not or cannot engage in a politics of sameness when the very notions ‘white’ or ‘non-white’, and the institutions, discourses and social practices used to sustain all kinds of racial categories, have changed so radically over time. Racialized hierarchies … are fluid, reflecting the constant negotiation of the terms of membership and exclusion.

What Nagel is stressing, is that care should be taken when assuming that ‘non-whites’ are at the mercy of a powerful, traditional assimilatory project which dictates the occurrence of inclusion or exclusion. I contend in Chapter Two and Part Three of the thesis that strategic hybridity also includes the possibility for instances of a ‘strategic assimilation’. This builds on recent studies based predominantly in America (Gans, 1992a, 1992b; Portes and Zhou, 1993; Alba and Nee, 1997; Zhou, 1997; Boyd, 2002; Farley and Alba, 2002), which utilise a new assimilation theory to suggest that contemporary second generation multicultural identities are involved in the transformation of the mainstream, with assimilation becoming a two-way street.

The second generation For the purpose of this study, the second generation are predominantly people born in Australia with one or both parents born in a non-English speaking country as well as young ‘third world looking migrants’ and young South East Asian Australians from the third generation. Aquilia’s (2000, p 36) study makes a valid point, that research into multiculturalism and drama carried out in the early 1990s failed to ‘make clear distinctions between first and second generation non-Anglo representation’. And more generally, research and analysis on multiculturalism tends to address a broad conception of migrant multiculturalism (however Chapter Two explores some exceptions to this). Aquilia thus makes a constructive addition to analysis on

16 the theme of cultural diversity and drama programming at the end of the 1990s.

Aquilia continues the argument advocated by Stratton (1998) that official multiculturalism is at odds with a hybrid everyday multicultural reality. However, she rejects Hage’s (1997a, 1998) deterministic position regarding the centrality of an Anglo white national imagery fostered by ‘white multiculturalists’. Aquilia (2000) cites recent films such as Head On and multidimensional second generation female characters found in texts such as Looking for Alibrandi and , as an indication of a trend away from marginalised, exotic or binary representations of ethnicity, towards an ‘exuberant mainstream’, which displays ‘social fluidity’ and female ethnic characters with ‘cultural savvy’ (hence the term ‘Wog Babes’ in her thesis title). A weakness in her argument regarding television drama, which she criticises for lagging behind cinematic representations, is that her sample of television programming is limited to analyses of single or particular episodes of drama programs which contain very specific stories with multicultural themes. She also remains bound to anxieties over stereotype, claiming Heartbreak High falls prey to an inferior representation, when in one episode for example an Asian father is portrayed wearing a suit and reading the Financial Review (Aquilia, 2000, p 136). This seems a tenuous criticism as business people from all over the world mostly wear suits and read the financial press, not to mention the established demographic trend for South East Asian immigrants to be composed mostly of business and higher educated migrants (Inglis, 1999). In spite of these limitations, Aquilia points to a form of multicultural representation where cultural interaction between the second generation migrant and Anglo Australian is no longer centred in an Anglo ‘white’ ascendancy. While Aquilia’s focus on the second generation is somewhat exceptional in Australia, American multicultural researchers over the previous decade have come to focus on the second generation as a distinctive area of study.

Due to the increasing size of the second generation in the US, Brubaker (2001, p 531) notes how a public policy discourse and research program in

17 the US has begun to distinguish a ‘modest return’ of assimilation theory. He, along with other social science scholars in the area (Gans, 1992a, 1992b; Portes and Zhou, 1993; Alba and Nee, 1997; Zhou, 1997; Boyd, 2002; Farley and Alba, 2002), make it very clear this is not to be associated with the previous ‘analytically discredited and politically disreputable’ assimilation of the past. The return of assimilation as a concept in US research relates to a transformed analytical approach combined with empirical research, which explores the status and achievements of second generation communities with a referenced mainstream. The empirical element of such studies is most often survey research concerned with cultural, social and economic criteria which attempts to explain the segmented (or uneven) rates of cultural and social proximity with other ‘minority’ groups, along with such comparisons to the mainstream population. Intergenerational achievements in language, schooling, occupation, and rates of intercultural marriage are frequent criteria for comparison.

For this study however, it is the conceptual scheme of second generation research which has application, rather than the survey methodologies . I apply two major arguments taken mainly from the US research. First of all: ‘that individual and structural factors are intertwined’ in the lives of migrant offspring, which impacts upon their social life chances and cultural identity formation (Zhou, 1997, p 993). In Australian research (Luke and Luke,1998, 1999, 2000; Noble and Tabar, 2002), the place of family and intergenerational cultural mixing (as individual factors) are significant cultural resources in the creation of hybrid identities. In exploring families containing first and second generation members, Luke and Luke (2000) find a complex, contradictory and non-essentialist identity amongst second generation migrants and culturally intermixed families in particular. Structural factors such as schooling and the mass media combine with individual factors of family and cultural history to ‘redefine culture and identity from fixed entities to [an] ad hoc blending of practices and identities through interlocking systems of representation’ (Luke and Luke, 2000, p 65). As this demographic is of such significant size and impact in Australia, the second premise I apply from US second generation assimilation research is that the mainstream has begun to ‘assimilate’ with a

18 culturally diverse Australia, leading towards a changed mainstream. As Brubaker (2001, p 542) notes, such an analytical shift does not signify a return to ‘the bad old days of assimilation’, nor conceptions of absorption. Rather, it refers to active subjects, ambiguity, ad hoc blending, and more abstract notions of differences and similarities within an increasingly culturally diverse society.

Representational anxieties Like multiculturalism and media research from the 1990s, this study is concerned with the portrayal or representation of cultural diversity in Australian programming. Most of the early 1990s research, as well as Aquilia’s (2000) more recent study mentioned above, spends considerable energy in discovering ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘stereotypical’ representations. The partiality of such analyses in assessing noticeable episodes of cultural diversity in casting as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, acts to restrict possible interpretations of these texts and may only contribute to the difficulties that performers and creative stakeholders face in establishing transformative practice. Such analyses may often be unaware of the pragmatic rationale behind such casting or be limited by the amount, or time-frame of programming studied. This is not to say that tangible damage is not done to communities by portrayals which reaffirm hurtful representations which may reinforce and contribute to ‘prejudicial social policy’ (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p 183). However, the issue ‘bad’ or ‘token’ representations needs to be explored further with regard to South East Asian or Indigenous portrayals in particular. In Australia, the casting of Indigenous actors in mainstream TV drama brought with it an avoidable and arguably unnecessary responsibility for the actors and program producers alike. This is partly due to the lack of Indigenous faces on commercial TV in the past and that when they did appear, it was most often in roles which were directly related to the actor’s cultural background.

In the daily serial Breakers (broadcast in 1998-1999), Indigenous actor Heath Bergersen played a predominantly non-specific role, which was not initially written or conceived of as an Indigenous character. In addition to Bergersen’s

19 role, there was a young gay character, as well as other actors of culturally diverse backgrounds, including a young female South East Asian journalist. Such culturally diverse casting in an Australian program was viewed as a conspicuous multiculturalism by some audiences (see Chapter Eight). The ‘burden’ on Heath’s character manifests itself among audiences and within his own people, who may interpret his role very differently to a European audience. Bergersen (1999) comments on his role on the show:

With feedback, most Aboriginal people are happy that there’s an Aboriginal actor in this series. Some do say, well look you’re the only blackfella there. When I was doing Sweat, I thought and felt a little bit that I was a token blackfella – but even then it really was all right. Even Ocean Girl was OK. But with Breakers, my background is definitely not an issue. The good thing about Breakers is the different people are just there in the neighbourhood – like when you walk down the street. I remember when I’d see another Aboriginal on the screen – it makes you happy, you know ‘there’s a blackfella!’ I remember when Aaron (Pederson) was doing Gladiators in the mid-1990s and the first time I saw him I said, ‘Hey man! Shit it’s an Aboriginal’.

Bergersen’s remarks demonstrate the powerful argument of many in the casting industry that the unambiguous presence of Indigenous actors in non- specific roles has served as a role model for potential aspirants. In addition, his comments give insight to the sense of community felt by Indigenous people, made all the more intimate due to their shared sense of exclusion from elements of the mainstream. As an individual and experienced actor, Bergersen also expressed personal offence at the suggestion that his role was tokenistic.

Questions of what might be an appropriate portrayal for an Aboriginal character are also unhelpful. For example, writing roles for DCALB actors as only positive ones, denies them opportunity for an everyday or banal portrayal. There is also a hazard in continually seeking out assessments of portrayals based on categories of stereotyping of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ representations. Shohat and Stam (1994, p 199) label such criticism ‘procrustean’, and illustrate their point in the context of the historical

20 representations of Blacks which led to repetitive critical analyses of Blacks in the USA:

The critic forces diverse fictive characters into pre-established categories. Behind every Black child performer the critic discerns the ‘’; behind every sexually attractive Black actor a ‘buck’; behind every corpulent or nurturing Black female a ‘mammy’. Such reductionist simplifications run the risk of reproducing the very racial essentialism they were designed to combat.

In addition, one could question the appropriateness of criticism aimed at a minority performer’s role when that role is valued as significant, for the progression of the performer’s career and as a signal of professional possibilities in the mainstream media for others in the community.

Bergersen’s role as Rueben on a series such as Breakers allows for multiple readings of his character. For example, Rueben goes to the gym to achieve a better looking body with a gay friend one week (they both give up), but a few weeks later, in a different plot, Rueben tries to help out a friend having problems with drugs. Contemporary Australian drama may at different times ignore or explore the cultural meanings and histories of the characters in it. The interplay between an actor’s cultural background and the attendance of that personal cultural identity in a role is more complex than the interrogation and labelling of portrayals as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. As McKee (2001, p 11) notes, ‘by always seeking out the worst interpretation of texts we may be hampering our attempts to understand how they are working in culture’. Cottle (1997, p 5) explains how such ‘unproblematic and self-evident’ stereotype analysis ‘fails to consider the active work of historically/politically situated audiences in making sterotypes “mean” or mean something different … or not mean at all’.

In the US, the Black network comedy The Cosby Show (examined in Chapter Four) has been evaluated as both a bad and good representation of Black America. On the one hand, the show is criticised for sustaining ‘the harmful myth of social mobility’ held among white middle class American audiences, who see the program as affirming a successful American meritocracy. On the other hand, it is applauded for offering a much needed alternative for Black

21 audiences, to the image of poor and crime ridden ghettos (Lewis, 1997, p 95). Havens (2000, p 377) provides another example of how the portrayal of Blacks on The Cosby Show can be interpreted by different audiences resulting in contrasting assessments. In South Africa, Black audiences see the show as exposing ‘the fallacy of Black South African inferiority’ to white South Africans. On the other hand, white South Africans see the show as demonstrating that the Huxtable family possess ‘values that Black South Africans lack’.

In addition to an examination of overseas television programs in the three comparative studies included in Part Two, Chapter Eight provides textual analysis of all Australian television dramas broadcast over three two-week blocks in a two-year period (1999-2000). In this research, I include comment from creative stakeholders and industry perspectives to avoid making purely textual based analyses of ‘bad’ or ‘good’ portrayals of cultural diversity. This allows for an exploration of the ambiguities, contradictions and complexities of representations of an everyday multiculturalism. Referring to Indigenous representations in the media, Hartley and McKee (2000, p 6) cite Ray (1995) to affirm: ‘there is a serious need to move beyond notions of ‘ideological atrocity’ committed by all-powerful media against vulnerable populations’.

Television and policy studies While multiculturalism is a core theoretical field in this research, the study also makes use of television and policy media studies, as well as social science methodologies in exploring cultural diversity and television. Hartley (1999, p 21) labels as ‘useful’, the combination of ‘cultural theory, media studies and textual research [to] answer questions posed by producers, regulators … and audiences’. Hartley (1999, p 183) goes on to pose three important issues for studying popular television: ‘what it does, where it fits and who it is for’. In order to address these issues, I make use of a mixed methodology combining theory from media studies and cultural policy studies.

The integration of policy studies with cultural studies in researching culture is well established. Bennett (1998, pp 60 - 61) notes how cultural studies’

22 concern with power relations in the ‘production, circulation, [and] deployment’ of cultural forms was eventually complemented by a consideration of culture as ‘increasingly governmentally organised and constructed’. Bennett (1998, p 106) formulates an argument which positions social and cultural policy as a reforming project, where the ‘junction of the fields of culture, policy and administration’ constitute the transformation of the ‘cultural sphere’. Related to Hartley’s analysis of television programming, which both exceeds the textual and esteems the popular, Bennett appeals for research which moves beyond the repetition of audience ‘resistance’ analyses. He proposes a ‘fuller and richer cartography of the spaces between total compliance and resistance’ and a ‘thicker description of the complex flows of culture’ (Bennett, 1998, pp 168 – 169).

The location for this cartography or thicker description lies in part with policy studies grounded in Foucault’s theory of governmentality, which offers a number of arguments for application to this study. McNay (1994, p 119) notes how strategies of government (such as multiculturalism) do not necessarily denote strategies for a centralised state power. For example, multiculturalism was not born of a state ideology, but is a complex and contradictory process involving ethnic community stakeholders, public service policy advisors, academics and a relatively small number of political (or governmental) agents. The combination of these factors is less about a unitary or ‘immanent’ state apparatus, than about a set of ‘heterogeneous and indirect’ factors, which constitute, rather than determine, the social and cultural sphere (McNay, 1994, p 118; Gordon, 1991). A governmentalist approach to multiculturalism stresses that top-down policy is also and at once a response to bottom-up pressure and activity. It is both a recognition (bottom-up) and shaping (top-- down) of social and cultural change.

In Chapter Three, I examine in detail events and processes in the early 1990s regarding policy activity around cultural diversity and television, as the issue became a contested focus for divergent groups. These groups and individuals were involved in a ‘reforming’ practice, in order to transform how cultural diversity was represented on television programming. Like multiculturalism

23 policy analysis and research, advocacy multiculturalism research of the era made use of quantitative population data, to establish arguments about Australia’s cultural diversity and its portrayal in popular programming.

Classifying populations The use of statistical data in the thesis leads to methodological issues when categorising sections of the community. This commonly involves referring to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data to classify populations along lines of family and cultural background, into non-English speaking (NES) and mainly English speaking (MES) populations. The use of statistics is also used to classify first and second generation migrants. It is interesting to note that since the early 1990s there has been a shift in the way the ABS defines and collects data on migrant Australia. In the 2001 census, the ABS considered second generation (NES) migrants to be Australian born with both parents born overseas. Previously, a second generation migrant was defined as having at least one parent born in a NES country.

The ABS’ (ABS, 2003a) motivation for this stems from the government’s interest to focus on data which relates more closely to the needs of immigrants who require access to migrant services. Accordingly, the government’s position is that a DCALB person who has one parent born in Australia will not need access to migrant services as they will possess familiarity with English language and have an Australian education. In addition, the 2001 census did not allow second generation migrants to identify their overseas born parents’ country of birth. The only variable was: ‘born overseas’. This now makes it impossible to maintain the size of the non- English speaking second generation in Australia by parental birthplace, or discern the regional backgrounds except by the ancestry question. As an alternative to birthplace data in determining the NES component of the country, the ABS has moved to the ancestry question and relies on ‘language use at home’ questions to inform government policy on migrant services. The ABS (2003b) decided not to adopt a ‘self perceived identification’ approach to determine ethnicity in spite of continuing confusion and data error with the ancestry approach.

24

The ancestry method gives people the choice of a number of ethnic groups ‘from which they and their ancestors’ descended, including Australian. The interpretation of the question by Australians in the 2001 census resulted in a number of contradictions. For example, the majority of subjects who identified themselves as Indigenous in one question of the census also claimed Australian ancestry instead of ‘Aboriginal or Torres Strait Ancestry’ at the ancestry question. The question design also excludes the possibility of prioritising ancestry, even though this may play an important role in policy and help in determining other cultural information of importance for researchers. Because the ABS only code the first two ancestries encountered on the form, in spite of providing the ability to list several, an estimated 8.1% of the total ancestry responses were lost, which is a noteworthy loss of data.

Luke and Luke have also raised a number of issues with a reliance on census data in locating identity. According to Luke and Luke (1999, p 235), the use of birthplace and language competency in census data removes questions of race from analytic and policy scholarship. The census data restricts interpretation of ancestries which go beyond two generations, yet such people’s racial origins can have significant impact on their social and cultural interactions and, as explored above, questions of racial visibility are central to studies of cultural diversity and representation. The census data also overlooks people in mixed-race relations, as well as their subsequent ‘multiple heritage offspring’. Essentially, Luke and Luke (1999, p 237) consider the census ‘tick a box’ approach to racial or ethnic identification as no longer able to contend with the cultural complexity of second and third generation migrants, or ‘increasingly large interracial populations’.

To address these weaknesses in future, the ABS intends to expand the number of ancestries actually coded from two to four, and explain this on the census form. The ABS will also provide the possibility to record ‘dual ancestry’ (ABS, 2003b). In spite of these limitations in establishing accurate figures for DCALB groups, a combination of ABS data (2003c) provides a figure of 14.4% of the total population being born overseas in NES countries (the first

25 generation). Figures for calculating the NES second generation depend on definition used. If applying the pre-2001 census definition of the second generation meaning a person with at least one parent born in a NES country, a figure of 10.4% is achieved (ABS, 2003c; ABS, 1997). With the addition of an Indigenous population of 2%, 26% of the Australian population can be said to be from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. An alternative figure to this is calculated by Jupp (2001) who, by using ancestry data from 1996, finds 28% of the population being of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

While quantitative data and reference to census statistics are a feature of this study, I recognise Luke and Luke’s concerns over the limitations of ABS data in being able to distinguish the ambiguities and complexity of cultural diversity in contemporary Australia. While one of the research features of this study is the quantification of ethnicity for lead actors appearing in Australian drama in the late 1990s, the thesis also provides a qualitative examination of the relationship between cultural diversity, acting and casting practices through an interview program with actors, casting directors and actor training professionals. This interpretive research facilitates a ‘thicker’ analysis of the results of the quantitative data, as well as addressing Hartley’s (1999, p 183) three issues of ‘what it does, where it fits and who it is for’, when researching popular television.

26 PART ONE AUSTRALIAN POLICY ENVIRONMENTS

Chapter Two The multicultural project

Introduction There are numerous texts on the subject of immigration, and its descendant - multiculturalism1. The purpose of this chapter is not to replicate or extensively review the various histories of immigration and multiculturalism. However, it does reappraise particular developments in Australian multiculturalism, and draw out a number of its subsequent effects which have been neglected in Australian criticism and analysis. The chapter provides an examination of the changing discourses and analyses of multiculturalism. A core assertion is that multicultural policy has been of greater significance than previously credited by critics in the creation of an everyday multiculturalism.

This position does not signify uncritical support for multicultural policy, as continuing instances of racism, diminished government support for multicultural policy development, and reduced life opportunities for some DCALB groups underline the significant obstacles which remain. As Bennett (1998, p 104) notes, ‘there is still a good way to go’ in social, cultural and political negotiations surrounding cultural diversity, before it is ‘firmly secured in “mainstream” Australia’. However I assert that official multicultural policy, in particular the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia (OMA, 1989), has been a key constituent in the ‘reforming endeavour’ (Bennett, 1998, p 104) of Australian multiculturalism, which has delivered a social space for a predominantly nonviolent cultural mixing. This chapter draws on research which demonstrates how second generation immigrants in particular engage a

1 Examples are major reports for government such as the Galbally Report (1978) the FitzGerald Report (1988), occasional papers on multicultural issues such as Castles (1992) published by the Centre for Multicultural Studies in Wollongong, and books such as Mistaken Identity by Castles et al (1992), FitzGerald’s (1997) Is Australia an Asian Country? and Stratton’s (1998) Race Daze.

27 range of complex and often strategic approaches in everyday multicultural lives.

The rationale behind a focus on the second generation lies in the results of research carried out in Part Three of the thesis. In Chapter Seven, primary research indicates anomalies between the employment status of actors from the second generation, and those from more recent migration. The results of the casting survey, as well as interview material presented in Part Three, indicate a trend away from the conspicuous, problematic or celebratory multiculturalism, to a redefined multicultural mainstream. This expanded mainstream, while not entirely free of discrimination along lines of gender, sex, class, status, religion, race or even appearance, does however embrace an eclectic cultural mixing. Displaying a strategic hybridity, its members may at times deliberately transgress mainstream boundaries in one location, while in another situation slip back to mainstream membership when advantageous or necessary.

Stratton (1998) and Hage (1997a) critique the official policy of multiculturalism as unconnected to the concept of everyday multiculturalism. While I am in agreement with Hage’s disdain of multiculturalism appreciated only as a cosmopolitan tourist experience and I share Stratton’s view that passing multicultural-day celebrations should not constitute the product of multicultural policy, I assert that there is a correlation between official multicultural policy and the representation of everyday multiculturalism - an analysis Stratton in particular rejects. I maintain that multicultural policy objectives in the Agenda and the language of cultural diversity began to filter through to objectives in broadcasting policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was complemented by a period of research, debate and lobbying as well as a number of forums in the broadcasting and television community, which attempted to transform professional practice to take account of a culturally diverse Australia. The outcome of this activity and the influence of the Agenda in making multiculturalism a sustained social and cultural policy discourse led to a ‘convergence of discourses’. The Agenda’s language of cultural diversity being ‘the reality of Australia’ (OMA, p v) and its objectives for equality of

28 opportunity and the development of skills and talent (OMA, p vii) influenced the language of broadacsting policy and later professional practice, to produce programming where cultural diversity became more an embedded or everyday social and cultural attribute. This counters Stratton’s and Hage’s view of official multicultural policy as only producing such outcomes as school day celebrations and a conception of multiculturalism as the superficial consumption of multicultural cuisine and culture by the middle class.

Finally, this chapter examines recent Australian research on multiculturalism, hybridity and immigration along with recent research and theory from the United States, focusing on the second generation. Since the 1990s, a number of US researchers and theorists (Gans, 1992a, 1992b; Portes and Zhou, 1993; Alba and Nee, 1997; Zhou, 1997; Boyd, 2002; Farley and Alba, 2002) have invigorated a research program particular to the United States around the second generation and the ‘reinvention’ of assimilation theory. It is important to clarify that ‘the return of assimilation’ in analytical terms, does not signify as Brubaker (2001, p 533) notes, ‘a return to the normative expectations, analytical models, public policies or informal practices associated with the ideal of Anglo-conformity’ or what he justly describes as: ‘the bad old days of arrogant assimilation’ (Brubaker, 2001, p 542). This new research has made useful contributions in examining how the second generation experiences diverse social and economic outcomes compared to their parents. While there are fewer comparable studies in Australia on the second generation, a number of recent Australian multicultural survey studies (Baldassar, 1997; Luke and Luke, 1998, 1999, 2000; Ang et al, 2000; Noble and Tabar, 2002) suggest that everyday multiculturalism is widely experienced in the Australian community, particularly amongst the second generation. This concurs with the findings of Part Three of the thesis, which establishes a recognisable everyday expression of multiculturalism in popular television programming in the late 1990s to 2001, which was noticeably lacking in earlier programming.

29 Pre and post-war immigration Our very future hinges on the success of such schemes as this (the Snowy River Project). Without water there can be no life. Without immigrant manpower there will be no water. It is as simple as that (Arthur Calwell speaking in 1949, cited in Cope & Kalantzis, 1994, p 166).

Prior to this call for migrants, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, non- British migration to Australia had consisted mostly of Chinese gold seekers. Except for several abandoned attempts at restricting non-European immigration in the period of the 1850s to the 1880s, migration to Australia was basically unrestricted. Reasons for the eventual appearance of restrictions in the late 1880s on immigration were rising unemployment, concerns about ethnic conflict and fears of immigrant labour threatening wage levels and thus reducing living standards in the new colonies (Cope & Kalantzis, 1994, p 11). By the time of federation in 1901, the new Commonwealth Government had introduced the Immigration Restriction Act, which was to mature into the White Australia Policy (Linden, 1996, p 27). However, early conflicts related to immigration in Australia were more about an ethnic division within Her Majesty’s subjects. While the term ‘anglo-celtic’2 came to signify Australians of white British origin, there was in the 1880s a division between the Irish and English populations in Australia. Castles (1992, p 19) considers the anti-Irish racism in England, later transported to Australia, to be based upon fears of the Irish forcing down wages and conditions. Castles claims this contributed to a ‘split in the working class’, which subsequently lasted into the 20th century, later transferring to a split between immigrant and Anglo populations. Hirst (1995) on the other hand, believes a lack of hostility between the Irish Catholic and British Protestant populations in Australia, compared with the violence in Great Britain was a reflection of an Australian capacity for the accommodation of differences, and an early indicator of egalitarianism.

2 Inglis (1991, pp 21-22) provides a background to the term anglo-celtic, noting it was initially used by ‘the first ethnics’ – the Catholics in the late 18th century. According to Inglis, the word anglo-celtic starts to appear again in the 1980s, where it came to embrace both English and Irish descendants.

30 In the two positions on Anglo-Irish hostility above, two broad approaches are evident. The former stresses issues of class, conflict and disadvantage in Australia’s history of migrant settlement, while the latter concedes the benefits and mostly non-violent nature of Australia’s immigrant history. In the late 20th century, tensions around immigration over class have become redundant as this growing section of the population transcend their parents’ financial and cultural capital through education and amalgamation with the mainstream. The focus for community agitation over immigration since the late 1990s has conspicuously shifted to humanitarian immigration, while the larger family and points3 immigration intakes receive much less attention. Concerns by the dominant host culture of economic and cultural loss with the acceptance of non-Anglo immigrants have been expressed in official and unofficial discourse up to the recent past. Anti-Chinese sentiments of the mid to late 1800s based upon concerns of cheap labour and social conflict have been repeated in political comment many times since in debates about immigration:

I maintain that no class of persons should be admitted here … who cannot come amongst us, take up our rights, perform on a ground of equality all our duties, and share in our august and lofty work of founding a free nation (Sir Henry Parkes in a N.S.W parliamentary debate, 1888, cited in Cope, B., Kalantzis, M. and Castles, S. 1995, p 11)

Parkes’ comments demonstrate as early as 1888 a familiar rhetoric of invoking the ‘good of the nation’ and fears of social cohesion coming undone as justification for direct and indirect attacks upon certain groups of immigrants (the Chinese in this case). Updating the political era to the late 1990s and multiculturalism, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation multicultural policy statement could be seen as a continuation of Parkes’ speech:

… a lack of integration amongst the population [and] issues of immigration and population must be urgently addressed in the interests of our future as one people. What we are experiencing now in Australia is a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values (Hanson, 1998).

3 Potential immigrants are awarded points based on such criteria as skills, qualifications and language competency.

31

Pauline Hanson’s implied racism in her comments on immigration, and debates surrounding immigration in the later half of the 19th century, demonstrate that hostility towards and racial prejudice against migrants, has not been limited to isolated periods in the post World War II mass immigration era. Indeed, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which was mostly in reaction to Chinese migration to Australia, began a continuity of race based immigration selection across a period of 60 years through the selective criteria of the White Australia Policy.

After World War II, Australia’s overseas-born population grew from 9.8 per cent in 1947 to remain around 24 percent from the 1990s onwards (ABS, 2003c). That the transition from a profoundly homogeneous Anglo population to a multi-racial one was without significant turmoil is in some ways related to what Davidson (1997) notes as a weak national identity in the first half of the 20th century. However, this does not mean that government was not concerned about public response to immigration. Acceptance of mass immigration was promoted to the mainstream through the policy of assimilation.

The first aspect of assimilation led to the selection of, initially, those migrants whose ‘absorption’ into Australian society would be easiest. Castles, Kalantzis, Cope and Morrissey (1992, p 45) make the wry observation that it seems improbable that Calwell’s hopes for migrant ‘invisibility’ could be taken seriously, in light of the sheer numbers of immigrants from diverse backgrounds. As a consequence, Calwell saw the need to create a consensus among Australians for the acceptance of immigrants and so assimilationist programs for migrants were put in place. This consensus was in itself appropriated in two ways. First, non-English speaking immigrants were afforded a number of programs to aid in their integration. Castles (1995, p 14) lists a number of educative processes for the ‘new Australian’: a pre- embarkation program in the refugee camp; upon arrival instruction in utilitarian English and social conditions; the showing of films dealing with Australia, and then continuing evening classes to facilitate the transformation of ‘aliens‘ into

32 ‘good Australians’. The second element in achieving a consensus was the appeasement of the host culture in regards to the new arrivals. In some ways, this was accomplished by making it well known that the above filtering and subsequent induction of migrants was taking place.

In the assimilationist period, the Anglo majority’s support was also accomplished by the use of media and education to assist in the compliance of mainstream Australia to the introduction of migrants from diverse European backgrounds4. As assimilation became untenable in the 1960s and 1970s, the Galbally report (1978, p 103) developed the first official expression of multiculturalism as a program of education and services, aimed at promoting a ‘multicultural society (which) will benefit all Australians’. One of the aims of Galbally’s multiculturalism was to counter previous racist elements inherent in the ideology of assimilation. But the use of promotion, education and media with respect to ‘conditioning’ the Australian public about cultural diversity has been part of a socialising process with a long history.

In the years leading up to Galbally’s report, the Whitlam government implemented a broad social justice agenda which included particular assistance for disadvantaged immigrants. This reflected a philosophy which recognised that disadvantage was evident across society, rather than existing in small self contained pockets. In addition, Davidson (1997, p 254) notes the conferral of citizenship rights in the 1970s became ‘ever more inclusive, partly because it had to and partly because it did not matter’. This correlates to Davidson’s premise that pre-Whitlam, national identity was weak in Australia. However, with the emergence of culturally based nation-building projects under Whitlam (such as the film industry), a sense of Australian identity began to develop5. This began a critical engagement with what constituted

4 Such media strategies consisted of the creation of the magazines The New Australian and The Good Neighbour. The film No Strangers Here, which screened as a cinema short, and the use of an Advisory Council to influence the reporting of immigration issues was also employed to influence acceptance (Castles, 1995, p 16). 5 Such films as Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), and Alvin Purple (1973), belong to the arrival of the ‘Ocker’ as a grotesque though recognisable Australian identity, while the early output supported by the Australian Film Commission emphasised colonial dramas with settler and rural themes.

33 Australian identity, though mostly male and Anglo, which would later progress to examining multicultural Australia. What early multicultural policy achieved, was a significant break with the previous era of making the immigrant either invisible through imposed assimilatory programs, or simply undesirable as a threat to the Anglo-Australian identity.

Fathering multiculturalism and Fraser The 1978 the Galbally Report (Migrant Services and Programs: Report of the Review of Post-Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants) focused on the provision of services and programs for post-arrival migrants in order to compensate for generic disadvantages migrants were enduring. Key recommendations focused on migrant education, translation services, implementation of ethnic and community help agencies, creating an ethnic media and an explicit articulation of what multiculturalism meant in 1978 and how it should advance in the coming years. Under Fraser, the migrant services of Whitlam’s welfare state model were transferred to an ethnic self- help strategy. The handing over of responsibilities for immigrant welfare from centralised government to ethnic communities and agencies, could be seen at the time as a government keen to give immigrants a voice in defining their needs and identity which was in sharp contrast to the overt influence government enacted in assimilationist times. The Galbally Report also began to define multiculturalism for the first time as an inherent component of Australian society, though the initial expression of multiculturalism was based on a concept of primordialist ethnicity.

A primordialist account of ethnicity is concerned with the preservation of traditions and predicates ethnic difference as a principal element in social identity. Galbally (1978, p 104) embodies the conservative approach to multiculturalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

We are convinced that migrants have the right to maintain their cultural and racial identity and that it is clearly in the best interests of our nation that they should be encouraged and assisted to do so if they wish. Provided that ethnic identity is not stressed at the expense of society at large, but is interwoven into the fabric of our

34 nationhood by the process of multicultural interaction, then the community as a whole will benefit substantially and its democratic nature will be reinforced.

Critics of early multiculturalism, such as Kalantzis and Cope (1984, p 86), saw the Fraser years as the co-option of a burgeoning ethnic politics. They maintain Fraser’s multiculturalism provided a response to conservative ethnic political interests with a ‘do-nothing-except-be-nice solution’. Using a critical Marxist analysis, Rizvi (1986) describes early multiculturalism as a state vehicle for diffusing migrant unrest in the late 1970s. Rizvi argues that migrant labour was closely connected to industrial manufacturing and so the containment of possibly disruptive ethnic politics allowed the necessary structures for the reproduction of the capitalist industry to proceed unheeded. Castles et al (1992), saw Fraser’s approach to multiculturalism as part of a general dismantling of Labour-led initiatives in big government and social justice. Analysis by Jakubowicz, Morrisey and Palsar (1984) of early multicultural policy as an instrument of class maintenance designed by the dominant class was later to develop into a critical analysis of multiculturalism and the media (Jakubowicz et al, 1994). The core assertion in these early analyses of multicultural policy as a conservative state apparatus is reflected in later critical multicultural analysis by Hage and Stratton and require further examination.

In an historical study into the origins of multiculturalism, Lopez (2000) undertook an extensive primary research program involving interviews with politicians (including Fraser), senior public servants, ethnic group leaders, activists and academics on both sides of Australian politics. This was complemented by a review of documentation (research, policy, correspondence, parliamentary records, and personal papers) on a scale not previously attempted. Lopez (2000, p 380) explains how he could find no evidence ‘to corroborate a Marxist account and analysis’, asserting that such an interpretation of multiculturalism under Fraser’s to be ‘seriously flawed’. Lopez asserts that it was ALP left wing ethnic leaders (George Papadopoulos and Spiro Moraitis) who had the ‘most profound influence’ on Liberal party policy in these early days. Lopez also finds that Fraser relied most upon the

35 advice of the ‘multiculturalist left’ for a number of years in formulating multicultural policy. In addition, Lopez (2000, p 39) claims as few in number the key actors (academics, activists and social policy advisors) in the development of early multiculturalism. As a consequence, he argues that their influence was greater than previously recognized.

However critics of Fraser’s multiculturalism sought a deeper sense of social pluralism, one which would see structural and organisational changes to core institutions of power, allowing for a more equitable distribution of social resources. Aside from Lopez’s claims of ‘flawed’ critical analyses, entirely unfavorable assessments of the Fraser period appear harsh, when one reflects upon the lasting gains made in the years after the Galbally report’s release. Essential and highly worthwhile ESL teaching is a case in point, as well as the establishment of ethnic media, which has evolved into SBS radio and television. The entry of significant numbers of Indochinese refugees in the Fraser era is also an enduring symbol of change in Australian society, regardless of claims of political expediency or external pressures on government to accept such change6. The combination of explicit multicultural policy and the influx of non-European migrants and refugees was, however, to awaken debate surrounding notions of culture and national identity. These concerns were to come to the fore in the latter half of the 1980s, which coincides with the arrival of the enduring policy approach contained in the Agenda for a Multicultural Australia.

6 Castles et al (1992, p 71) cite research by Viviani (1984) to fortify their argument that Asian refugee immigration was forced upon the Fraser government by diplomatic pressure from the United States. In addition they claim that Fraser thought it better to implement an increased, though controlled intake of Asian immigrants, to ‘stem the tide’ and ‘offset the political effects of a divided public opinion’. While there may be some credibility to this claim, Mackie (1997) on the other hand also relies on Vivani’s research but comes to a more generous conclusion of the Fraser government’s handling of the refugee crisis and the direction in which it took immigration policy.

36 Multiculturalism under Labor In 1983, the Federal Labor Government came to power and remained in office until 1996. In the initial years of government, the Hawke ministry left the Galbally program ‘virtually intact’ (Cope et al, 1995, p 30). In the post-election period, Castles et al (1992, p 73) point to the role of the States, particularly , in the development of a socially democratic multiculturalism, also known as ‘mainstreaming multiculturalism’. New South Wales in establishing the first Ethnic Affairs Commission in 1977 began mainstreaming multicultural policy, embedding cultural diversity into Australian social and working life. For example, the idea of integrating ethnic-specific assistance across government departments and services, contributes to the idea of moderating the ‘specificness’ of ethnic populations, as well as the disabled, Indigenous and other minority groups. This shift in multicultural policy from a specific set of ethnically discrete measures to multiculturalism as an inclusive element in all services and policy reflects the changes in later years of multicultural representations as specific and problematic, to those of the everyday. This phasing out of ‘ethno-specific services’ (Castles et al, 1992, p 74) from the Galbally era, also marks the beginning of thinking about Australia in terms of cultural diversity. Here we see multiculturalism no longer conceived of as an ethnic domain, but as an attempt to incorporate difference into a reconstructed mainstream. This approach was to gain momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s and became a key component in such areas as EEO strategies and the broadening of SBS’s television charter to address cultural diversity for all Australians, rather than an exclusively ethnic audience.

The latter half of the 1980s is marked by two major developments which were to impact upon the status of multiculturalism and attitudes towards immigration for at least a decade: the so called Asian debate7 and the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. It is difficult to ascertain whether the National Agenda, released in 1989, was in some way a direct response to

7 The initial comments of Professor Geoffrey Blainey, who is credited with starting the debate, were made in 1984 in the town of Warrnambool at a Rotary meeting. Like Pauline Hanson’s folk-like popularity in the late 1990s, he is also believed to have been encouraged by receiving much ‘fan mail’ (Mackie, 1997, p 30).

37 the irritated climate of immigration and multiculturalism in the mid and later part of the decade. However, it is insightful to consider both developments, as both have residues in the recent past. The discord over immigration policy begun by Geoffrey Blainey witnessed a significant mass media articulation of racial intolerance towards Asian refugees. Blainey’s position was that the community would become resentful of cultural differences on display in the 1950s dreamscape of his conception of an average Australian street. His now infamous remarks about malevolence arising from ‘the smell of goat’s meat…noodles drying on the line and phlegm on the footpath’ (Cope et al,1995, p 31), suggested a wider intolerance to cultural diversity beyond his comments at the time which were directed at Asian immigrants.

Not wishing to contain his comments to superficial markers of cultural difference for causing conflict, he also invoked the well worn path of immigration threatening ‘jobs for Australians’ and intimating social cohesion would be in jeopardy. It is interesting to note that in 1986, only two years after the Blainey debate, the ALP began to reduce commitments to multiculturalism with the closure of the Australian Institute for Multicultural Affairs8, cuts to ESL teaching and an attempt to amalgamate the ABC with SBS. Castles (1992, p 14) chronicles how ‘an ethnic mobilisation which threatened the ALP hold on marginal seats [resulted] in an amazingly rapid about-turn’. In fact, after this period, a form of policy and activity compensation occurred with the establishment of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the FitzGerald Review (FitzGerald, 1988) on immigration, scrapping plans to merge SBS with the ABC and the release of the National Agenda. The FitzGerald Review, released in 1988, marks an attempt in policy to move away from issues of culture only towards an economic imperative for multiculturalism.

The Labor Government was embarrassed by FitzGerald’s questioning of multiculturalism, criticisms of unskilled intakes and suggestions that entrepreneurial Asian candidates would be preferred applicants. Such notions also upset the more established European ethnic lobbies (Mackie, 1997, p 32;

8 Known as AIMA, this institute was established in the Fraser years to realize Galbally Report proposals.

38 Grattan, 1993, p 133). What is enduring about FitzGerald’s report is the move away from the cultural and identity aspects surrounding immigration and ethnic diversity found in early policy to the economic benefits of immigration. Lack and Templeton (1995) provide a key understanding of the report in identifying that the term multiculturalism was becoming a liability and misunderstood. At the time of the report’s release in 1988, critical events and public discourse surrounding notions of national identity and cultural resurgence were also taking place: the Bicentennial ‘celebrations’ and Expo 88 in Brisbane. Both of these events contained theatre and spectacle in order to evoke public sentiments, feelings and understandings of Australian nationhood and the place of Australia in relation to others (Lawe Davies, 1998, p 35). Public and national media discourse around the multicultural debate coincided with these national cultural events, just one year before the release of the Agenda, making conditions for a re-evaluation of multiculturalism judicious for the Agenda’s release in 1989.

Lawe Davies (1998, p 35) draws attention to the ‘competing versions of national identity’ that were apparent by the end of 1988. Citing Morris (1993), and Turner (1994), Lawe Davies (1998) constructs a continuum of readings for the Bicentennial from Morris’ ‘bleakness’ to Turner’s ‘optimism’. Morris (1993) provides the counter-celebratory history of a British invasion and considers the Bicentennial year as an Australian ‘Tourism Fantasia’, where tourism is cast as the national pursuit, deflecting attention from voices calling for a more inclusive history of Australian settlement. Turner (1994) on the other hand identifies the contested meanings around the Bicentenary as signalling the beginning of Australia coming to terms with an ‘ambiguous, contested, mutable but honourable, formation of national identity’ (cited in Lawe Davis, 1998, p 40). Castles (1992) presents many of the ultimately contradictory episodes of the Bicentennial9 as a clear sign that nationalism in the sense of a cohesive reflection of an Anglo mainstream was untenable in

9 Castles (1992, pp 155 - 157) lists such episodes as an exchange of beer cans between Aborigines on the Harbour shore with yuppies in yachts, the bankruptcy of the First Fleet re- enactment, the staging of a mock Aboriginal counter-attack against the ‘first fleeters’, and a collection of ‘parochial’ community events.

39 the late 20th century. Indeed, the cultural and social uncertainty of the Bicentenary’s ‘contested celebrations’ (Turner, 1994, p 92), can be seen as the beginnings of a changing mainstream.

Turner’s (1994) notion of a reconceptualised Australian culture is associated with the conception of cultural hybridity. He sees the end of the 1980s and early 1990s as a hopeful site of cultural transformation in Australia, based on a ‘hybrid (which) retains its links to and identification with its origins (and) is also shaped and transformed by … its location in the present’ (Turner, 1994, p 125). Through such a construction of national identity, Turner offers an alternative to the claims of Castles et al (1992) for the ‘demise of nationalism in Australia’. Accounts of the Bicentenary such as Turner’s in the period concerned are welcome, but such an account is in contrast with some of the major political debates from the period.

In August 1988, John Howard, the then opposition leader, made remarks on radio which clearly implied an aversion towards Asian immigration. Howard pronounced, that if ‘Asian immigration were slowed down a little’, this would be of benefit to social cohesion (cited in Betts, 1993, p 231). These remarks follow his rejection of clear bipartisan support for immigration and multicultural policy. This is in addition to his objection to the word ‘multiculturalism’ in the name Australian Bicentennial Multiculturalism Foundation. Betts (1993) analyses press before and after Howard’s removal as party leader over this issue and notes that before the fateful radio interview on August 1st, the press had generally supported Howard for his ‘brave’ criticisms against multiculturalism and acquiesced with his endorsements of FitzGerald’s pro- economic immigration policy recommendations. However, by the second week of August, Howard had become the man who appealed to the ‘darker aspects of human nature’ (editorial Financial Review, in Betts, 1993, p 233). Within this replay of the Blainey debate (and later with Pauline Hanson and the Tampa affair), one can find an alarming pattern in the Australian media’s approach to new waves of immigration. As the press and electronic media waver in their commitment to whichever group is arriving and how it is being addressed in policy, the inevitable effect is for the debate to return to issues

40 driven by anxiety, familiar to those in the 19th century. As the media and political mêlée inevitably subsided over Howard’s comments and his removal, the arrival of the Agenda began a sustained period of political support for broad multicultural policy.

The Agenda In 1989 the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia was released and received bipartisan support throughout Labor’s term until 1996. The policy was reaffirmed as a commitment to multiculturalism by the Liberal party on October 30, 1996 (DIMA, 1998a). In spite of the change in government in 1996, the original Labor policy continues to have its impacts on policy regarding cultural diversity in Australia, as the Agenda’s core objectives remained mostly intact with the release in 1999 of the Liberal party’s multicultural policy: A New Agenda for Multicultural Australia (New Agenda) The original Agenda’s three core dimensions reflect a mix of economic and social equity aspirations for the support of multiculturalism:

1) cultural identity: the right of all Australians, within carefully defined limits, to express and share their individual cultural heritage, including their language and religion.

2) social justice: the right of all Australians to equality of treatment and opportunity, and the removal of barriers.

3) economic efficiency: the need to maintain, develop and utilize effectively the skills and talents of all Australians, regardless of background (OMA, 1989, p vii).

These three objectives are not dissimilar from the New Agenda’s four principles:

1) civic duty: which obliges all Australians to support those basic structures and principles of Australian society which guarantee us our freedom and equality and enable diversity to flourish.

2) cultural respect: which, subject to the law, gives all Australians the right to express their own culture and beliefs and obliges them to accept the right of others to do the same.

41 3) social equity: which entitles all Australians to equality of treatment and opportunity so that they are able to contribute to the social, political and economic life of Australia, free from discrimination, including on the grounds of race, culture, religion, language, location, gender or place of birth.

4) productive diversity: which maximises for all Australians the significant cultural, social and economic dividends from the diversity of our population (New Agenda, p 8).

Both Agenda policies condense these domains into the promotion of social harmony, a ‘fair go’ for all and the harnessing of human resources. The policies cautious emphasis on private and community expressions of cultural practice ‘within carefully defined limits’ is a progression of earlier policy, which is mindful of Australian law, the Constitution and citizenship rights. The change of government in 1996 brought with it a dismantling of multicultural policy bodies and highly contentious changes to immigration policy with respect to humanitarian immigration. In spite of these significant events, a policy continuity with respect to multiculturalism is evident.

Stratton (1998) considers the cultural aspects of multicultural policy as a disempowering influence. His criticism being that the ‘political and legal spheres’ continue to be ‘dominated by British…premises and institutional forms’ (Stratton, 1998, p 11). Davidson (1997, p 167), concurs with Stratton, maintaining the view of the National Agenda as embellishing cultural diversity at the cost of negating criticism of ‘existing political and legal structures’. Davidson argues that multicultural policy’s emphasis on the cultural sphere disavows considerable issues related to citizenship and active participation therein. Closely related to Davidson’s argument, Castles (1997) attempts to explore a ‘multicultural citizenship’ as a response to globalisation and questions of national identity. Invoking Habermas, Castles connects democracy with the collectivity of citizens able to exercise their rights. Habermas states: ‘A correctly understood theory of rights requires a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed’ (cited in Castles, 1997, p 13 - my emphasis). The Agenda attempts to both recognise and defend the ‘life contexts’ of different groups in an accord which confers on immigrants the

42 accessibility of citizenship while at the same time asking them to respect the authority of an Australian system of law and democracy. Castles (1997) regards social well-being, education and economic rights to be necessary for the realisation of active or multicultural citizenship. The Agenda is concerned with these domains (ie: social well being, education and economic security) and its focus on equity as a pivotal element has been a consistent discourse. In reflecting upon ten years of ‘the ALP model of multicultural citizenship’, Castles (1999, p 35) states that the Agenda’s efforts in access and equity brought ‘important benefits for many people’.

Equity policy in the Agenda expressed and translated into action centers on placing responsibility for equity issues within the management processes of organisations. In the New Agenda, a strategy continuity exists to form partnerships between the Commonwealth and the private sector in order to:

achieve widespread appreciation of the fact that productive diversity and performance improvements are achievable through diversity management strategies, and that diversity planning should be viewed as an integral part of an organisation’s business (New Agenda, p 8).

The long term aim of the original Agenda’s strategy was the removal of ‘the need for on-going external or additional support’ for minority populations (OMA,1989, p 51). Castles (1992, p 19) observes the paradox in mainstreaming. If not promoted, the continuation of distinct ethnic services may ‘segregate and marginalise migrants’. On the other hand, the mainstreaming of services ‘can mean neglecting special needs and perpetuating structural discrimination’. The challenge for the Agenda was to register a balance between specific assistance where needed to address structural obstacles for some groups, while encouraging an embeddedness of cultural diversity in mainstream work practices and everyday culture along the way. The Agenda promotes the mainstream as the site for diversity and the removal of barriers, due to ‘ethnicity, culture, religion, language, gender or place of birth’ (OMA, 1989, p vii). Bottomley (1994, p 140) states with regard to multiculturalism: ‘practices of heterogeneity are strongly influenced by policies’. The Agenda’s focus is on social justice and equality. It is deliberate

43 in not converging on ethnicity as the central policy rationale. The Agenda’s discourse is to alter the economic and cultural sphere, to gradually replace an Anglo-centred mainstream with an everyday heterogeneity and cultural mixing.

This evaluation is in contrast to Stratton, who marks out a clear division between official multicultural policy and everyday multiculturalism. According to Stratton (1998), policy such as the Agenda is firmly based in a conventional cultural pluralist paradigm, representing the interests of the ‘core mainstream’, whilst compartmentalising non-Anglo groups. Official policy is seen as ‘population management’ and a tool of the state for securing an Anglo- Australian identity and ‘managing the national culture’ (Stratton, 1998, p 112). In contrast to official multiculturalism, he describes everyday multiculturalism as ‘how cultures, produced by individuals in their everyday lives, merge, creolise and transform as people live their lives’ (Stratton, 1998, p 15).

On occasion, Stratton, like Bottomley above, acknowledges an association between the development of social and cultural heterogeneity and the policies of multiculturalism. Stratton states: ‘Of course, everyday multicultural practice is heavily influenced by the institutional apparatus, and the concerns of official multiculturalism’ (Stratton, 1998, p 34). However, this statement is tempered by Stratton when he later asserts, ‘to think that Australian social life is lived in the image of the official policy of multiculturalism is a crucial ideological misrecognition’ (Stratton, 1998, p 138). It would be naïve to assert that Australian social life strictly reproduces either the rhetoric of policy or that policy captures the contradictions and complexities of ‘everyday’ life. As Webber (2001, p 882) states, ‘countries are always richer and more varied than the bare terms inscribed in legal texts’. However, Borrowski (2000, p 461) makes the point that social policy and social transformations are ‘often impossible to disentangle … from other social, economic and political policies and processes which act in tandem with it during a given epoch’. And as O’Regan (1993, p 134) asserts, ‘multiculturalism is a policy that sets up a range of possibilities which cannot be known in advance, and which will provide many different styles and passages for realising policy’.

44

A range of possibilities began to materialize at the end of the 1980s with questions of national identity epitomised by the Bicentenary year and policy recognition for cultural diversity contained in The Agenda. The articulation of cultural pluralism in this period is far removed from the primordialist celebratory rhetoric of earlier multicultural policy. Turner (1994), writing before the change of federal government in 1996, observed new found complexity in the contradictions of the late 1980s, taking up the possibilities offered by diasporic, hybrid and post-colonial accounts of identity. In addition, increasing significance and attention of the dispossession of Indigenous Australians and the germination of reconciliation at the time add weight to Turner’s (1994, p 87) claim that ‘something important did begin to happen during the Bicentenary’. The Agenda’s framework for encouraging cultural diversity across a broad social program and the possibilities awakened by the Mabo decision delivered overdue changes to the social landscape. However, the election of a Liberal government in 1996 placed in doubt, the work undertaken since the Agenda’s inception.

1996: Back to the future? Just don’t mention the ‘M’ word - Sydney Morning Herald byline in a 1997 article (Sheridan, 1997, p 13) which comments on the Prime Minister’s artful avoidance of the word ‘Multicultural’, in spite of releasing an issues paper titled ‘Multicultural Australia – the Way Forward’.

The election of the Liberal government was interpreted as a response to administrative and cultural ‘elites’ being out of touch with the social and economic distress of ‘mainstream Australia’ (Jupp, 1997; Morris, 1998). This contention was also used to explain the election success of Pauline Hanson to the House of Representatives in 1996 along with the election of 13 members of her One Nation Party to the Queensland State Parliament in 1998. Stratton (1998, p 23) describes this conservative fracture as ‘the revenge of the lower-middle class against the governmental consensus of the rest of the middle class’. Developing a race based analysis of Hansonism, Perera and Pugliese (1997, p 10) take the view that Hanson’s policy for

45 compulsory military service for example, was about mobilising the Anglo mainstream ‘against a threat from the Asian north’ and to ‘protect against aliens within’. Probyn (1999) on the other hand, claims Pauline Hanson’s place in politics at the time represented the danger of the ‘white woman settler’ who disturbs national male identity. While One Nation’s presence in parliament became virtually extinct and Hanson herself was briefly jailed in 2003, a change in policy direction in the late 1990s for aboriginal affairs, immigration and multiculturalism within the Liberal Party was in evidence. In a blunt assessment of the period, Kalantzis (2000, p 99) stated: ‘the coalition government has dumped multiculturalism’.

John Howard had previously opposed aspects of immigration policy and multiculturalism throughout the Hawke/Keating era. It is therefore not surprising Howard abolished the Office of Multicultural Affairs and The Bureau of Immigration Multicultural and Population Research, cut ESL funding, and introduced changes, with adverse implications for migrant populations who are susceptible to economic hardship10. And during this period of administrative contraction and revision of immigration policy, the advent of Pauline Hanson contributed to the renaissance of debate over multiculturalism and immigration in particular.

As with the preceding Blainey and Howard episodes in the 1980s, a lack of ‘conscious articulation of our values and what is non-negotiable’ (FitzGerald, 1997, p 161) with regard to Asian immigration and cultural diversity allowed Hanson’s mixture of talkback radio anxieties, ignorance and factual errors to proliferate in the media. Such racist and bigoted assessments, which were in the past mostly confined to the private sphere, went ‘unchallenged by Australia’s political leadership….for nearly 2 months’ (FitzGerald, 1997, p 161). This silence led to an increasing revisionism as opposed to any critical reflection over where immigration policies should go in the late 1990s, with multicultural policy development stalled for two years. There is no doubt that

10 Such changes include an extension of the waiting period for migrants to receive welfare payments from 6 months to 2 years, recouping costs of ESL teaching and increased scrutiny of family migration.

46 Hanson’s misinterpretations of multicultural policy at the time, as well as her erroneous facts on a number of issues gave a voice to those wishing to attack immigration – though Pauline Hanson was not the first to invoke such methods.11

At the end of the 1990s, conservative politics began to target immigration policy. A Public Affairs document distributed by DIMA (1998b) expresses an implicit motive to implement immigration strategies which in effect demonstrate that the Liberal Party was reacting to conservative influences by ‘doing something about immigration’. Within the four-page document (titled, ‘Immigration Reform: The Unfinished Agenda’) strategies include tightening measures for family and refugee status, narrowing immigration appeal for judicial review and ‘restoring the integrity of our borders’ by implementing ministerial fast-track visa cancellations for ‘undesirables’. These measures eventually came to fruition with the Tampa crisis and the resulting ‘Pacific Solution’ for so called border protection purposes. These highly visible changes to immigration policy came about at the same time as the New Agenda was released in late 1999.

While the Liberal party undertook divisive changes to humanitarian immigration policy, the major report by the National Multicultural Advisory Council, Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century (NMAC, 1999) continued policy support for multiculturalism. The resulting policy statement, A New Agenda for Multicultural Australia embraces much of the previous 1989 Agenda with all but two of the NMAC report recommendations supported. Of the two not supported but noted, Recommendations 16 and 17 ‘urge’ political leaders to maintain a consensus of support for multiculturalism and to ‘not lend support to or confer any political respectability or credibility on individuals or parties’ who ‘violate the spirit’ of multicultural policy (NMAC, 1999, p 16).

11 Rimmer’s (1991a) publication The Cost of Multiculturalism, which contains lurid and unsubstantiated claims regarding the ‘true costs’ of multiculturalism is a major contribution to this genre. Claims made by Rimmer include supposed substantial ethnic insurance fraud, unfettered organised crime and the expense to Australia of immigrants with ‘contagious diseases’ (p 58). The book appears to be self published, but was seriously reviewed by The Age (Masanauskas, 1991, p 13) and found its way as an article in Bulletin (Rimmer, 1991b).

47 These two recommendations were a clear reference to One Nation and Pauline Hanson’s performance when she spoke about immigration and multiculturalism in the House of Representatives in 1996. Noteworthy recommendations supported in the New Agenda are Recommendation 24 and 30. Recommendation 24 asks that Government agencies lead by example in implementing policies, which will increase cultural diversity in the workplace. This recommendation was then incorporated into the Australian Public Service charter, making the collection of data on DCALB employees and diversity workplace plans mandatory in government agencies. Recommendation 30 requests that a central multicultural Agency, similar to the defunct OMA be formed. The New Agenda supports this in principal, the Government later establishing the Council for Multicultural Australia in 2000 to provide policy advice and to co-ordinate activities for the promotion of cultural diversity in society, including ‘grassroots programs’ to support equity strategies.

This policy continuity with multiculturalism brings about the question of whether the government’s immigration policies have impacted deleteriously on former multicultural policy outcomes and the progression of multiculturalism since. Lopez (2000, p 28) notes that in spite of Pauline Hanson’s remarks on multiculturalism from 1996 to 1998, multiculturalism in public policy was eventually reconfirmed. In contrast to Kalantzis statement above that multiculturalism has been ‘dumped’, Lopez (2000, p 27) asserts: ‘multiculturalism remains secure’. More recently in The Australian, one time immigration advisor Professor Zubrzycki (2003, p 9) wrote that the entire portfolio of immigration and multiculturalism had been ‘tainted by the disgrace of the Tampa affair’ and policies for humanitarian immigration. This was in response to a letter from Dr Colin Rubenstein (2003, p 10), a member of the Council for Multicultural Australia, who asserted like Lopez above, that multicultural policy has been safeguarded since the release and support of the New Agenda.

The above dilemma rests largely on whether it is possible or desirable to separate immigration from multicultural policy. Can multiculturalism in the

48 policy sphere and its outcomes in the everyday as conceptualized in this research transcend recent ruptures in immigration policy, such as the Tampa incident? Community opinion on immigration and its relationship to multiculturalism is less than straightforward. Birrell and Betts (2001, pp 3 - 6) examine community attitude research to immigration collected since 1954 in order to discern whether the Coalition’s border protection policies have made an impact upon community opinion. Figures show that since 1992, a steadily decreasing number of people considered the intake to be too high. In late September 2001 a majority (54%) thought the number of immigrants was ‘just right’ or even ‘too low’. Using an interview survey methodology, SBS research by Ang et al (2002, p 5), found high levels of support for multiculturalism and cultural diversity, at 52% and 59% respectively (entirely negative views were at 10%). Birrell and Betts speculate whether the Coalition’s border protection policies have made people more comfortable with immigration or whether lower levels of unemployment and low interest rates have had their impact on opinion as well. But one could just as likely speculate that since the 1990s the community is simply less concerned with immigration numbers and multiculturalism but rather than with the category of immigrant.

Since the Tampa incident, it is the refugee (humanitarian) intake which has become the focus of attention in community and media debate on immigration. Based on this premise, it is problematic to conflate emotive and unique issues surrounding humanitarian immigration and the legitimacy of arrivals with the policy of multiculturalism, which increasingly, relates to immigrants whose life in Australian society has less to do with the critical needs of refugees. This does not mean that the Tampa incident has nothing to do with important social trends in opinion regarding anxiety over humanitarian immigration. However, DCALB immigrants as a group are more likely to be either from first generation family category migration, related to the 1970s and 1980s waves of South East Asian migration, or second and third generation migrants whose parents were part of post war period immigration intakes (ABS, 2003c). In this regard, I agree with Birrell and Betts (2001, p 4) who point out that ‘hard multiculturalists’ are mistakenly inclined to consider immigration and multiculturalism as one and the same, as they ‘recast

49 Australia as a community of communities’. The authors are correct in their assertion that there is a high degree of ‘intermixing and intermarriage’ within Australia’s culturally diverse population, which makes any concentration on refugee immigration as a focal point for considering multiculturalism somewhat misguided. The issue of cultural mixing is a significant aspect of this thesis. The comprehensive study by Ang et al (2002, p 4) on contemporary trends and attitudes to multiculturalism came to the conclusion that ‘cultural mixing and matching is almost universal’ – in all locations in Australia. This is in contrast to the assumptions made by Birrell and Betts however (2001), that there is an ‘ethnic divide’ in Australia, once one moves away from South West Sydney.

Critical theorists such as Hage (1998) and Stratton (1998) also make assumptions about the facility of those living in areas not belonging to the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ in Sydney or to engage with cultural diversity. Their position is that while the white, city living ‘tourist’ can search out their measure of cultural diversity for self-edification at the expense of the migrant, such an experience is assumed to be not available to the regional and presumably less educated Anglo. For Hage (1997a, 1997b) in particular, it is predominantly in the private homes and everyday lives of conspicuously non- white immigrants in South West Sydney that a ‘vibrant interactive’ everyday multiculturalism is located (Hage, 1997b, p 159). While I agree with Hage’s desire for an approach to multiculturalism located in the everyday lives of migrants, as opposed to celebratory or problematic notions of multiculturalism, both he and Stratton ignore the inevitable process of community diffusion and multicultural incrementalism. This diffusion occurs both geographically and culturally, due to Australia’s high level of inter-ethnic relationships and the increasing significance of the second generation and their relationship to cultural diversity. This outlook is supported by Ang et al (2002, p 6), who found no evidence of ‘ethnic ghettos’ with regard to cultural experience and practice, but did find a marked and affirmative engagement with cultural diversity among growing numbers of the second generation.

50 In quantitative terms, the statistics for cultural diversity within marriages12 and what it might mean for cultural diversity in Australia is noteworthy. While Australia and the United States have a similar percentage of people from culturally diverse backgrounds, only two percent of marriages in the US are registered as interracial (Luke and Luke, 1999, p 225). However in Australia, marriages between brides and grooms from NES countries increased from 20% in 1974 to 30% of all marriages in 1998. Of this 30% of marriages, almost one third were between a long term Australian and a NES partner, a further 30% were between partners of the same NES overseas birthplace and 40% were between partners with different NES overseas birthplaces. In the late 1990s, there was an even greater number of culturally diverse marriages in the second generation than in the first generation. In this group, 40% of marriages involved a long term Australian, 40% involved partners from differing cultural backgrounds while only 20% were between partners of the same cultural background (ABS, 2001)13. This equates to 80% of second generation immigrants marrying outside their cultural group. Ang et al (2002, p 26) also reported a high incidence of intercultural relationships among their sample, with people aged between 16 and 24 almost 30 times more likely to be in an intercultural relationship than those over 55.

Price (1989, 1993) came to similar figures for projections on ‘intermixture’ and he puts forward the challenge to multicultural policy to take account of these inevitable changes in conceptualising multiculturalism. However, Price’s (1989) use of ancestry and cultural diversity within marriage census data to support an adaptation and dilution model of immigration and multiculturalism is strongly attacked by Castles et al (1992). They state that the use of such data is inherently racist and see it as an instrument of bloodline classification, being worse than such data use in Nazi (p 170 - 171). Luke and Luke (1998, 1999, 2000), who undertake inter-ethnic family research, also cite demographic data. However they tackle the classificatory vocabulary and conceptual issues of collecting ethnic and race based data, and then go on to

12 The term ‘cultural diversity in marriage’ is preferred here over the term ‘mixed marriage’. 13 With regard to Indigenous couples, the ABS (2001) note that by 1996, 57% of all couples involved a partner who had not identified as Indigenous.

51 combine this with survey research among interethnic families. An assessment of their research provides a helpful foundation for examining issues of multiculturalism, cultural mixing, and the second generation.

Multicultural and strategic hybridity Ang (2000, p xix) states that the term multiculturalism has become ‘stale’. A conception of multiculturalism as an attempt to simply manage and contain cultural diversity in the context of migrant communities ‘within the Australian nation’ is indeed an ‘older notion of multiculturalism’. As a way to invigorate multicultural policy and ways of thinking and teaching multiculturalism, Luke and Luke (1998, 1999, 2000) undertook significant research in the late 1990s into interracial families. One of their aims (1999, p 237) was to correct what they saw as a lack of policy awareness in multiculturalism for more complex renderings of the concept, as well as the need to enhance understanding of racializing practices and the politics of identity in interracial families and their offspring – which now constitute a considerable number of Australians. They were also interested in pursuing deficiencies in cultural theory, particularly in analyses of race and ethnicity, by highlighting the location of the interracial family as a significant identity figure and key site ‘for the development and articulation of hybrid identity’ (1999, p 223).

Luke and Luke (1999, p 232) make use of recent theoretical discussions of diaspora and hybridity to construct the interracial family as an account of ‘the affirmation of blended and malleable cultural identities’. Their field research involving families in different parts of Australia reveals degrees of ambivalence and ambiguity amongst their subjects towards their cultural background, and ‘a slipperiness across a range of signifiers that bear no direct ‘essential’ link to any identifiable a priori identity discourse’. They see these families as enhanced exemplars of Bhabba’s ‘third space’ for the formation of hybrid identities, which are not ‘exclusively the representation of the dominant culture, but intertwine with community, family, or nation narratives’ (Luke and Luke, 1999, p 234). Their service of diaspora and in particular hybridity theory within intercultural families, presents a productive

52 approach in considering how significant cultural mixing and second generation migrants have begun to transform the mainstream in Australia.

Luke and Luke’s analysis is not unlike that of Hage (1997a) and Stratton (1998), who see multicultural policy as deficient in capturing or constructing the everyday reality of cultural diversity within certain migrant communities – particularly those from non-European backgrounds. But unlike Hage and Stratton, Luke and Luke are more generous in recognising the locations and depth of everyday multiculturalism throughout the Australian community. Their research provides additional support for Ang et al’s (2002) conclusions, on the extent and engagement of cultural diversity in the nation. Importantly, Luke and Luke’s research demonstrates that while discrimination is obviously still an important issue for subjects (and thus policy as well), it is not necessarily a pivotal focus for such culturally diverse family members14. Among those under 40 in particular, a range of sentiments and experiences of being from a noticeably culturally diverse background are registered – from ambiguity and total ‘lack of yearning’ for home or origin – to humour and a ‘playing through’ of difference and similarity (Luke and Luke, 1999, p 230). Hage’s (1997a) determination to split the experience of multiculturalism between the Anglo elite cosmo-multiculturalitst and the working class migrant seems misplaced when one considers the greater complexity presented by significant interracial relationships and the mobility of the second generation to move between identities for varying purposes. Marotta (2000, p 185) notes while cultural boundaries are still important for some groups in the ‘construction of self identity’, the multicultural experience may make cultures ‘porous’ as well. Essentially, such members are, as Luke and Luke (1999, p 249) state, ‘innovatively crafting themselves’ through a combination of local agency and various institutions such as the family, school, media, community and nation. This version of a multicultural hybridity extends and complicates the notion of a celebratory hybridity or a self acting fluidity in much the same way as Noble

14 The fact that Luke and Luke’s subjects, were what Hage classifies as ‘Third World Looking migrants’, is particularly important in consideration of Hage and Stratton’s work, whose analyses are focused on the noticeably non-European migrant.

53 and Tabar (2002) find a strategic hybridity among second generation Lebanese youth.

The importance of the second generation in broad multicultural research has been noted by a number of Australian researchers. Ommundson (2000, p 105), writing about the place of migrant Chinese authors in Australian culture, asserts that it is writers of the second generation who make contact with the ‘national mainstream’ with cross-cultural writing. Castles and Davidson (2000, pp 138 - 139) also locate the second generation as the foremost instance of transcultural consciousness and experience. In comparison with previous notions of ethnic exclusion, classic assimilation theory, or even homeland identification within diasporic communities, they perceive the second generation’s interaction with increasingly diverse peer groups, as resulting in new forms of cultural work and lifestyle. Baldassar (1997, p 89) demonstrates in her interviews amongst second generation migrants who make the visit to the homeland, that such groups in contemporary Australian culture reinvent their ethnicity in response to the ‘host society’, as well as in response to the homeland culture. And finally, Noble and Tabar (2002) bring what they believe is overdue empirical application of hybridity theory to show how second generation Lebanese youth may display a flexible or strategic hydridity.

In practice, such youth may assimilate for the purposes of employment, sport, ‘hanging out’, and pursuing relationships with partners from different cultural groups. While at other times, they may construct a ‘Lebabese-ness’ for reasons of group solidarity, in order to counteract racism or even marginalisation within their own wider cultural group. The authors note that while young males may ‘complain ardently’ about their parents’ traditional values, the young subjects are not averse to asserting moral convictions to what they perceive as a ‘moral laxity’ in the Anglo community (Noble and Tabar, 2002, p 141). The authors make the conclusion that while exhibiting ‘a degree of assimilation, they also have the capacity to adopt positions which attempt to subvert the logic of context’ (Noble and Tabar, 2002, p 144). These recent studies, based predominantly on field research, contribute much needed perspectives on how the second generation (including ‘Third-world

54 looking migrants’) are able to complicate an overly celebratory account of hybridity and expand the conception of multiculturalism.

This perspective is further enhanced as the proliferation of global popular culture makes its contribution to young people’s identity formation. The arguments of researchers such as Luke and Luke and Noble and Tabar connect with During’s (2000, p 388) premise, that global culture presents individuals and collectives with the ‘difficult business of timing when to discard or transform, and when to welcome or improvise’, cultural and material products from the global economy. During (2000, p 388) maintains that cultural agents are making choices of when to ‘exploit, bolster, shrink or transform’ their cultural repertoire. This second generation research helps to temper Hage’s (1997a) over-emphasis on intercultural interaction as located primarily around the everyday of home-building amongst Lebanese in South West Sydney. It also offers an alternative to his synopsis of the cosmo- multiculturalist, or ethnic culture consumer, as a conception of multiculturalism.

Second generation perspectives and research do however bolster Hage’s (2003, p 59) notion of multiculturalism as a way of conceiving national identity, rather than multiculturalism as a ‘mode of governing ethnic cultures’. In this conception of multiculturalism, ‘migrant cultures are seen to be actually hybridising with the European Australian culture, creating a new multicultural mainstream’ (Hage, 2003, p 59). The second generation and members of interracial families in particular experience multiculturalism in no singular expression or essential conception of the term. In the last 10 years, researchers concerned with cultural diversity such as those mentioned above in Australia, and to a greater degree in the United States, have come to accept that a ‘bumpy’ (Gans, 1992b) or ‘segmented’ (Portes and Zhou, 1993) ‘assimilation’, particularly amongst the second generation, need not be comprehended as purely an homogenizing device of the state. Rather, as a conceptual tool, it offers ways of assessing the consequences of transcultural interaction and proposes that assimilation can be fluctuating, and bring about the transformation of mainstream culture as well.

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Conclusion: ‘assimilation’ revisited Alejandro Portes is recognized as the key sociologist in the US for proposing a ‘more complex notion of assimilative outcomes’ with the introduction of the term ‘segmented assimilation’ and for a shift in research agendas to the second generation (Kivisto, 2001, p 557). This is in addition to the work of Gans (1992a, 1992b) whose notion of a ‘bumpy-line’ assimilation model has aspects in common with Portes’ segmented account of new assimilation theory. Segmented assimilation refers to recognizable trends in some US populations for uneven ‘inter-generational socioeconomic improvement’ (Boyd, 2002). In the US, communities with well established economic networks and cultural practices which value ‘success’ such as some South East Asian cultures, display superior life outcomes for the second generation compared to other groups. For less successful groups, if parental resources are minimal in the community, and considerable segments of the population suffer poor education, the second generation can in fact exhibit downward life outcomes. However, while the role of education is important, it is not absolute.

This is particularly so when a ‘minority population [is] characterized by an oppositional culture and identity’ (Boyd, 2002, p 1043). Such factors will then come into play in education contexts, when certain cultural groups will encourage high achievement in both family and peer settings, while others will be vulnerable to a culture of ‘high risk behaviors and school failure’ (Zhou, 1997, p 980). Gans ‘bumpy-line’ assimilation model mirrors the above elements, however he places a much greater stress on self agency, rather than broader structural implications in segmented assimilation theory. According to Gans, the ‘bumps’ along the way to better life chances for ‘dark- skinned’ young immigrant off-spring (such as Jamaicans) are heavily influenced by dissimilar peer group practices in the US Black minority culture. In addition, anti-authoritarian popular culture is seen as contributing to offspring rejecting parents’ desires for a better life (Zhou, 1997). Under such conditions, Gans (1992a, 1992b) maintains that it may be preferable for such groups to delay interaction with other minority groups. Farley and Alba (2002) on the other hand refute the pessimism of segmented assimilation

56 perspectives, arguing that the contemporary second generation’s diversity does not allow for whole group assessments. They believe that while most second generation Americans will not suffer in poverty, they do agree that intergenerational advancement is diminished for Latino groups.

Brubaker (2001, p 543) points out that these researchers are not ‘opposed to difference, but to segregation, ghettoization and marginalization’ and that some forms of assimilation in regards to educational attainment, occupational mobility and linguistic confidence are in fact desirable, while others are less so. Aspirations for better life chances are commonly expressed amongst migrant families, and as Kivisto (2001, p 555) observes, immigrants have mostly ‘bought into the system [of capitalism] rather than attempted to resist or subvert it’. This is especially so of more recent migrants. British researcher Caroline Nagel (2002) offers a corrective to the overly quantitative and administrative American studies by undertaking interviews with a variety of Arab groups from the first and second generation in the UK.

Her study argues that strategies for ‘blending in’ are concerned with an uneven (segmented) accommodation by individuals of dominant norms. She identifies three clusters within the Arab community who share social and cultural attitudes in their ‘balancing’ of Arab and English culture. The first cluster is the Middle Class Negotiators. These mostly first generation Arabs compartmentalise and at the same time balance their cultural practice into a private traditional Arab identity, with a public identity of middle class Englishness. Arab Multiculturalists are first generation, often working class immigrants, who assert their Arab identity. This may stem from early community involvement and a desire to maintain membership of their cultural group, both within Arab culture and in relationship to the mainstream. And finally, young Cosmopolitans are the second generation professionals, who display a ‘semi-detachedness’ to Arab and traditional English culture. They are more likely to declare themselves ‘as members of a new multicultural mainstream’ and may identify ‘difference’ as an indicator of their belonging to a culturally diverse London (p 277 – 279). Nagel’s research demonstrates that the American literature offers points of departure for researching the second

57 generation, rather than incorporating them into multicultural research as an undifferentiated group.

In other English speaking countries with significant immigration, the demographics of American cultural diversity differ in important ways. Boyd (2002) makes the observations that American research in the field may not apply to other countries with significant culturally diverse populations. The core reason for this is that the sheer size of the Black community in the US, their marginal social status, as well as a clearly defined Black culture, is not repeated in countries such as or Australia. However, the US research highlights the need for such studies regardless, amongst second generation migrants in other countries. The American research also offers, as Boyd (2002, p 1039) comments, conceptual tools for infusing ‘new empirically and theoretically relevant insights’ into the second generation. While the classic linear assimilation approach suggested a smooth and homogenous integration leading to the ‘melting pot’ in the US, and Anglocentric conformity in Australia, the ‘return of assimilation theory’ adds weight to the influence of ‘family strategies’ in constructing and influencing the identity and aspirations of culturally diverse people (Nee and Sanders, 2001). Intercultural family research also helps to enlarge the research agenda for multiculturalism and offers an exploration of social and cultural intermixing (Hwang, Saenz and Aguirre, 1997).

Such perspectives concur with Luke and Luke’s interracial family research and reflect similar circumstances in Australia, where discrepancies in life chances and education vary among different cultural groups. Like the Australian research, US studies support the notion of a combination of local agency and additional factors (school, community, media and nation) to explain how the second and third generation experience and conceive multiculturalism. Ang et al’s study (2002, pp 37 - 38) confirms this in the Australian context, where the second generation live everyday ‘hybrid lives’ with multiple identities, which are not articulated or necessarily desired by the first generation. However, what is most significant for this research is how such theoretical work around the second generation in the US and Australia

58 generates an ‘awareness that immigrants do not assimilate into a society that is fixed and given, but rather one that is fluid and subject to changes brought about by the presence of immigrants’ (Kivisto, 2001, p 571).

The research on multiculturalism reviewed in this chapter helps lay a foundation for exploring later in the thesis the inroads made by the second generation (including more recently ‘Third-world looking’ migrants) into popular programming, while first generation migrants are still noticeably absent. Part Three of the thesis confirms how the late 1990s witnessed a marked improvement in the type of representation of a multicultural Australia from the problematic to the everyday, as well as improved employment outcomes for culturally diverse lead actors – though predominantly from the second generation. I contend that from the late 1980s, multicultural policy played its role in delivering the social and cultural conditions, for a ‘mainstreaming tendency’ in multiculturalism due in part to an awareness of cultural mixing and support for social justice issues. In the 1990s, multiculturalism was conceived less as purely celebratory to be replaced by a more complex and contradictory set of meanings.

While this chapter has examined broad multicultural theory along with multicultural policy in the Australian context, Chapter Three focuses on explicit policy discourses associated with cultural diversity and television. A core assertion of this thesis is that expansive multicultural policies as typified by the Agenda and explored in detail in this chapter have been an important driver for articulating cultural diversity, with subsequent effects for popular programming. The history, debate and analysis of specific policy aimed at enhancing the portrayal of cultural diversity on Australian screens occupies a no less significant location. Chapter Three describes how multicultural policy from the 1970s informed by a liberal pluralist approach initiated a migrant multicultural presence in the media, commonly referred to as ‘ethnic television’. This was principally articulated through the early functions of SBS. Such a compartmental approach became inadequate in capturing the consequences of multiculturalism within an expanding mainstream, with claims for the incorporation of explicit policy measures for cultural diversity to

59 be included within broadcasting policy and applied to the commercial sector. Chapter Three charts the progression and results of debates surrounding policy intervention into cultural diversity and popular programming.

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Chapter Three Cultural diversity, television and policy

Introduction Beginning with the Galbally (1978) report and its recommendation for ethnic television services, broadcasting policy could not contain multiculturalism forever to a special interest channel alone - being the SBS. The chapter chronicles how in the 1980s and 1990s, the discourse of multicultural policy and cultural diversity began to converge with broadcasting policy. I demonstrate that such policy discourse was simultaneously invoked by community, commercial and governmental interests to sustain a variety of arguments around issues of cultural diversity and programming such as employment and equity, industry protection, industry liberalisation, cultural maintenance, opposing racism and advancing human rights. The change in philosophy from a more regulated broadcasting environment to self-regulation with the advent of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 also brought its tensions. The chapter concludes with an examination of ‘governmental television’ with two Creative Nation case studies of SBS Independent and its commercial relation, the Commercial Television Production Fund. These two case studies represent the achievements possible for a policy approach to increasing diversity in programming – including cultural diversity. The chapter substantiates the notion that cultural and broadcasting policy is influenced by a broader field of social policy.

The politics of mobilisation by individual activists, advocacy groups, cultural critics and key stakeholders are as O’Regan (1993, p 115) states, able to ‘project … a unity in diversity and stage their policy involvement’. Accounts of policy in cultural spheres (Hawkins, 1993; Cunningham, 1992) have employed a Foucauldian analysis to illustrate how the development of policy discourses are linked to practices revolving around ‘political rationalities, actor networks and technologies of government’ (Flew, 1997, p 91). The range of ‘actor networks’ in debates surrounding cultural diversity in broadcasting policy

61 (particularly with respect to commercial drama production) substantiates Hawkins (1994, pp 36 - 37) claim of fluidity and diversity within the ‘sphere of the governmental’ and that cultural policy is ‘complex, shifting and contradictory’.

Liberal multiculturalism and ethnic TV Three years before the Galbally Report (1978) was released, ethnic broadcasting existed in the form of access radio 3ZZ in Melbourne and the state-like broadcasters 2EA and 3EA in Sydney and Melbourne respectively. While 3ZZ did not continue beyond 1980, 2EA and 3EA went on to become the SBS radio service. Lawe Davies (1997) considers the continuance of the ‘colonial controlled’ EA stations and their subsequent transition to SBS as the beginning of a pattern in ethnic broadcasting, whereby higher paid Anglo managers were in conflict with lower paid DCALB staff. According to Lawe Davies, this conflict represented the ethnic community’s struggle against a paternal mainstream. These early issues of the purpose of ethnic media and how it should be managed evolved into debates around SBS television and its charter responsibilities, which were to resonate for nearly twenty years.1 What is important for this thesis is the impetus and effects that community and state arguments for an ethnic representation in broadcasting had in more general terms on the commercial sector. The combination of Galbally’s recommendation for ethnic television and Fraser’s support for such broadcasting led to the creation of SBS television. This subsequently and importantly put commercial broadcasting on notice to give consideration to Australia’s cultural diversity in its programming.

It is no surprise that the 1970s and early 1980s approach to multiculturalism fits together with a preserved space for migrant cultures to find expression in a discrete ethnic media. Castles et al (1992, p122) make the point that a multiculturalism which is based only on the preservation of traditions and celebration of descriptive cultural differences leaves minority groups ‘to play the core cultural game’. In media representations of the period, this translates

1 See Lawe Davies (1997) and O’Regan (1993), particularly chapters 7 and 8, for a comprehensive history and analysis of SBS broadcasting.

62 to programming of sanctioned difference for DCALB audiences and DCALB creative stakeholders which highlights ethnicity as exotic or problematic. Their participation in multicultural representations in mainstream programming are either absent or employ a performed ethnicity, conceived by a dominant Anglo mainstream. The evolution of SBS television in the 1980s from ‘ethnic TV’ to a broadcaster of culturally diverse programming in the 1990s for a culturally diverse community, reflects changes to multicultural policy which took a mainstreaming turn with the Agenda. In addition to SBS’ role in expanding the definition of multiculturalism, Cunningham and Flew (2002) note that the continued support by both sides of government for SBS is also an indicator of a policy commitment to multiculturalism. With regard to a policy commitment to multiculturalism in the commercial sector, a great deal of debate on the issue of Australian identity and representation was an important issue for commercial broadcasting in the 1980s. Debates about what constitutes an Australian program have a long history. Of particular significance are those that took place during the period of regulation under the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT) and then within its replacement, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA).

An Australian look The desire for domestic television to contain Australian content was expressed in 1956, before television services even began. The Broadcasting and Television Act 1942 requested licensees to use the services of Australians in the production and presentation of programs. In 1954, the Royal Commission on Television resolved that ‘there was an obligation on television stations to make the best use of Australian talent’ (ABT, 1991a, p 123). The period from the 1950s onwards witnessed the development of policy intervention into Australian content on commercial television as a means of securing a space for national culture, by way of advancing local television production, with drama being the most contested ground. Central to past decades of policy debate on content regulation is that such regulation is based on cultural and social objectives, rather than economic imperatives.

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The Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) began content regulation proper in 1961 with percentage requirements for local content and quotas for peak viewing periods. This was in response to what was seen as a distressing trend in increasing American content on Australian screens. At the end of the 1960s content regulation required 50 percent of all content to be local with 12 hours of local content per month dedicated to peak viewing times (ABT, 1991b, p 61). The 1970s saw a major review of the content requirements by which time the now familiar pattern of consultation began with advocacy groups such as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the commercial television networks, and the production industry guilds. The ABT replaced the ABCB in 1977 and made further refinements to the regulation of local content as well as bringing ‘specific public interest criteria to be considered by the Tribunal in the granting, renewal, revocation, suspension or transfer of a licence’ (ABT, 1991a, p 127). With the demise of the ABT in 1992, the public hearing process into licence renewals was replaced by a range of self-regulation procedures and codes of practice administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA). However it is in the area of local drama specifically, where debates around cultural identity have mostly taken place.

From 1967, when the first ABCB quota set local drama at two hours per 28 days to the contemporary points system of the Australian Content Standard, the implication has been that locally produced drama will contribute in fostering, promoting and reflecting an Australian national identity. From the 1980s onwards, this aim began to include cultural diversity. The ABT first introduced the term ‘an Australian look’ in 1977 in the initial report Self Regulation for Broadcasters? (ABT, 1977). Over a period of 10 years, attempts were made at crafting the regulations behind the phrase into a feasible and accepted method in order to implement the document. By the late 1980s, an ‘Australian look’ was described in the ‘Draft Proposal for the Television Program Standard’ (TPS 14) through ‘on screen’ markers (ABT, 1991a). The indicators were to be tested against a program’s intensity of ‘theme’ (illustrating an Australian lifestyle), ‘perspective’ (the content to be

64 conveyed from an Australian point of view), ‘language’ (use of local accents and idiom) and ‘character’ (portrayal of Australian characters). The impossibility of scrutinising such factors was not lost on both the commercial networks and sectors of the independent production industry2. Cunningham (1992, p 57) makes the point that the Standard ‘sought to define the Australianness of a given program as it is viewed on screen and commit the Tribunal to a hermeneutic rather than an administrative process’. The irreconcilable vagaries of monitoring such elements subsequently led to the ‘Australian look’ being replaced by the test of an ‘Australian factor’. This test for Australian content hinges on a quota and points system. For a program to be deemed Australian, a combination of local key creative personnel indicate the program’s Australianness. The quota aspect is a measure to ensure a diversity of local content makes up a percentage of screen time. An amount of 50% was increased in 1999 to 55% of programming to be broadcast between 6.00 am and midnight. The drama score gives different types of drama programming a point value for which an annual total must be reached.3

Looking beyond the failure of an ‘Australian look’ as the ABT’s means for promoting cultural objectives, analysts such as Cunningham (1989, p 10) note that the ‘on screen’ test was the first instance of a ‘modern western system of broadcasting regulation to move from pinpointing structural and employment criteria to textual markers of nationality’. What Cunningham is referring to for example is the replacement of quantitative data on employment requirements in the media, ownership rules and quotas of local programming, with the ABT’s aspiration of qualitative interpretation of a program’s text. However as Cunningham (1992, p 57) observes, such limiting or definitive means of marking out national identity in a text ‘flew in the face of prevailing cultural criticism’, which advocated a deconstructionist view of identity – that is, there is no essential Australian identity, only cultural constructions rendered by questions of gender, ethnicity and class. This view does not seem to have been shared by the Standing Committee on Transport, Communication and

2 For more detail on the history of the Draft Standard see ABA 1991a and 1991b. For analysis, see Cunningham, 1992. 3 For a detailed description of the current and previous Australian Content Standards, see http//www.aba.gov.au.

65 Infrastructure, who state that the Tribunal’s role is a ‘significant cultural and social one’ and that ‘considerable research … supports the concept of national identity’. They state that the ‘propagation of a sense of national identity requires television to have a predominantly Australian look’ (Standing Committee on Transport, Communication and Infrastructure, 1988, p 79).

Beyond the debates over how to regulate for Australian content, Flew (1997, p 97) notes the communal nature of the ABT policy process during the local Content Inquiry of 1983-1989. He goes on to say that such feedback mechanisms promoted ‘the circulation of information’, thus reducing conflict and assisting negotiations to ‘move beyond ritualised oppositions’. A consequence of years of dialogue on national identity was that both the broadcasters and the production industry had to consider ‘the relationship of commercial television to changing notions of Australian cultural identity’ (Flew, 1997, p 97). The convergence of broadcasting policy discourse on issues of Australian identity in the late 1980s begins to connect with the Labor party’s activity in formulating and then releasing the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia in 1989. Such issues were to sustain momentum into the transition period during and after the introduction of the new Broadcasting Act and a new government authority to administer its regulation.

The ABA, the BSA and cultural diversity With the advent of the Australian Broadcasting Authority in 1992, the occurrence of cultural diversity discourse in broadcasting policy becomes more conspicuous with the Object of the Content Standard closely aligned with the Object of clause 3 (e) of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (BSA). The object of the Content Standard is to:

promote the role of commercial television in developing and reflecting a sense of Australian identity, character and cultural diversity by supporting the community’s continued access to television programs produced under Australian creative control.

Replacing the previous 1942 Act, the BSA heralded the change to a light touch regulation of the media, which included co-regulatory frameworks for

66 television broadcasting. On a macro level, the BSA was seen as a means to ‘facilitate the entry of new competitors and technological developments’ in an era of spectrum abundance instead of the former rationale of spectrum scarcity (Cunningham and Flew, 2002, p 471). I will concentrate on that part of the Act and subsequent Content Standard which is concerned with cultural diversity.

By the early 1990s, the appearance of terms such as ‘cultural diversity’ and references to a ‘multicultural Australia’ begin to surface in discussion papers, submissions and reports on television broadcasting policy. In the lead up to the 1994 review of the Program Standard, the ABA’s initial discussion paper places cultural diversity in a discrete discourse relating it to the Object of the Standard, whereas before discussion centred more on an indistinct Australian identity (ABA, 1994). The paper spends considerable space asserting that the self-regulatory Commercial Television Code of Practice provides ‘substantially greater safeguards [for promoting cultural diversity] than those contained in the previous ABT television program standards’ (ABA, 1994, p 9). The paper outlines the framework for determining a Standard, quoting the Explanatory Memorandum to the Broadcasting Services Bill for 1992, which stipulates that programs should ‘reflect the multicultural nature of Australia’s population’. This is reinforced with the Memorandum’s notice on Clause 3 (e) of the Act which explains the origin of how the wording ‘cultural diversity’ came to be in the Act and it states: ‘the reference to “cultural diversity” is consistent with the (Labor) Commonwealth’s multicultural agenda’ (ABA, 1994, p 44). Here we see an explicit convergence of policy discourse between the Agenda and broadcasting policy. The ABA’s contention that cultural diversity was being well served by the new Standard is however in conflict with several submissions it consequently received. The MEAA, the SBS, the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and the Communications Law Centre (CLC) all expressed serious concerns at the past performance of commercial broadcasters in complying with the Object of the Standard in relation to cultural diversity (ABA, 1994). When the Australian Content Standard for 1996 was finally released, the ABA provided lengthy ‘Explanatory Notes’ to the Standard, which stated the following in the introduction:

67

The issue of cultural diversity is a central part of the Objective of the Standard. The absence of any specific requirement which addresses the representation of cultural diversity is not a reflection on the importance of this aspect of the objective (ABA, 1996, p 1).

The note goes on to clarify that the former ABT TPS 14 (Television Programme Standard) test could not be assessed and that under the new Content Standard, cultural diversity ‘is assumed to be there if the program satisfied the objective for Australian creative control over production’ (ABA, 1996, p 2). This final statement is significant. The participation of culturally diverse creative personnel such as writers and actors, who ultimately make a substantial contribution to whether a program reflects cultural diversity or not, are assumed to be fairly represented within the workforce of the commercial television industry. The ABA’s position regarding the wording of the Object is that is an ‘aspirational’ goal, rather than an objective with measurable outcomes (Osbourne, 1999). A central policy debate surrounding cultural diversity and commercial broadcasting is whether the ABA should have directed the Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations (FACTS - now called Commercial Television Australia) to devise a new code of practice relating to cultural diversity, which it decided was unnecessary.

Casting, policy and the cultural diversity debate 1992-19964 As pointed out above and subsequently stated in the Productivity Commission’s (1999, p 199) draft report into broadacsting: ‘the objectives of content regulation are largely cultural and social’. Any evaluation of how broadcasters have or have not met the cultural and social objectives of content regulation is extremely difficult to empirically gauge without reference to industrial indicators such as employment or television program content analysis. This is particularly so when it comes to assessing whether local content quota programming has contributed to developing and reflecting cultural diversity. In the early 1990s, the Communication Law Centre and the MEAA, with assistance from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, began a

4 The year 1996 is used as a cut off date, as little policy advocacy and no major public seminars on the issue took place in Australia after this date.

68 campaign to address what they felt was a poor record of achievement when it came to the portrayal of cultural diversity in commercial television drama. While the portrayal of a multicultural Australia had been an issue of note some years before the early 1990s, it was the beginning of co-regulation under the new 1992 Broadcasting Services Act, which acted as the catalyst for the following events.

In the early 1990s, conferences and campaigns for an improved portrayal of cultural diversity were often a collaborative effort on the part of the guilds, government policy agents, academics and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Beginning in 1991, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) hosted a forum for scriptwriting in a multicultural society. This forum was a rare event as it addressed writers in particular, whereas subsequent conferences were more focused on the contribution of program producers and the networks to the issue of cultural diversity. However at the AFTRS forum, producers from the commercial television industry were present and expressed the attitude that portraying cultural diversity tended to be addressed as a problem of the week issue. Because of this narrow portrayal, the scope and opportunity for writers and actors was restricted. The AFTRS forum indicated that the industry continually problematised migrants and focused on negative aspects of characters from culturally diverse backgrounds (AFTRS, 1991).

In 1992, FACTS released a draft code of practice and invited public comment. A joint submission (CLC, 1992b) was endorsed by several organisations including the MEAA, Australian Writers Guild (AWG), Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA), Australian Screen Directors Association (ASDA) and the CLC among others. The submission made note of the short timeframe allowed for comment and expressed concern at how an assessment of community attitudes and concerns would be taken into account in the new code. The submission also reflected concerns made in a CLC discussion paper (1992c) on self-regulation, where processes of accountability and broad representation of any administrative panel were seen as lacking in the proposed code. When the code was released in 1993, it

69 coincided with media research (CLC, 1992a and Cope et al, 1992; Bell, 1993) which indicated an unsatisfactory state of participation and representation for ethnic and Indigenous Australians. As the ABA prepared to replace TPS14 with the new content standard, the conclusions made in the research at the time helped support arguments for policy intervention in order to satisfy the cultural and social objectives of the Act.

The lack of opportunities for ethnically diverse groups was again brought to the attention of a public forum at ‘The Media and Indigenous Australians Conference’ held in Brisbane in 1993. At this venue the MEAA revealed that no Aboriginal actor had been cast in a lead role in a series or serial to date. MEAA Federal Secretary Anne Britton (Conference Proceedings, 1993, p 74) noted that the draft Code of Practice and Content Standard, while addressing aspects of the public interest (such as decency) contained no facility to scrutinise portrayals of cultural diversity. As a result, the MEAA once again proposed a ‘head count’ of actors to gauge the level of participation of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds as a means of improving the situation.

The MEAA’s dissatisfaction with the new code of practice, combined with the energies of the CLC, resulted in a two year period of action to address what were seen as regulatory deficiencies. Gillian Appleton (1993) authored a paper for the Department of Arts and Administrative Services indicating the need for the creation of a new program standard should cultural policy of the time be found to be inadequate. She also suggested training initiatives for culturally diverse populations to facilitate their involvement in broadcasting. In the same period, a CLC/MEAA working group was organised and possible scenarios for the inclusion of cultural diversity in future policy were put forward in a background paper (CLC, 1993a). Such possibilities included a cultural diversity standard or a code of practice relating to cultural diversity. However, achieving such a policy intervention faces considerable hurdles.

Under section 123 subsection (1) the BSA asks industry to develop codes of practice in consultation with the ABA and to take ‘account of any relevant research conducted by the ABA’. The ABA may also create a new standard if

70 an existing code has failed or does not exist in order to provide ‘community safeguards for a matter referred to in subsection 123 (2)’ ((s125(1)). The problem here is that no item referred to in 123 (2) deals with the portrayal of cultural diversity. However, 123 (2) (l) states that [a code of practice may be developed if] ‘such other matters relating to program content as are of concern to the community’. As noted above, the ABA rejected this need for a code or standard on cultural diversity based on the research and information presented to it at the time.

The CLC (1993a) background paper and related lobbying for a new standard or code drew varied responses from industry and policy organisations. In a response from the AFC (1993, p 2), they noted that the existing wording of the Act (and Content Standard) gave broadcasters the chance to ‘see themselves as having positive obligations rather than only negative ones’. Problems in regulating representation were raised by the AFC and it was suggested that a code of practice would be more suitable than a program standard. In a letter signed by 22 organisations (CLC, 1993b) including ethnic, Indigenous and media advocacy groups, the CLC/MEAA presented Brian Johns (then Chair of the ABA) with research and evidence of community desire for an improved portrayal of cultural diversity. In response, Johns (ABA, 1993) would not commit the ABA to any action citing the constraints of the regulatory process but added in relation to the new code that the ABA is ‘closely monitoring the progress of each sector’. He also cited Section 123(3)(e) of the BSA relating to racial vilification as meeting concerns about the portrayal of cultural diversity. In reviewing documents of the period, the issue of the portrayal of cultural diversity with regard to television drama is displaced by the separate issue of anti-vilification legislation. Both the ABA and FACTS cite the inclusion of anti-vilification discourse as adequately addressing a lack of policy explicitly related to culturally diverse actors in television drama. Irene Moss, Commissioner for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, stated that ‘racial vilification looks at racism in the media – it’s not about portrayal of cultural diversity. That’s another debate, which in my opinion is actually more important’ (OMA, 1993, p 20). Such comment from the Commissioner is helpful in separating the issue of policy for the portrayal of

71 cultural diversity with issues of human rights related to discriminatory employment practices and representations of racism.

The MEAA/CLC letter sent to the ABA and then to FACTS was subsequently released to the media and a story in the Sydney Morning Herald (Lecky, 1993, p 9) appeared titled ‘TV chief says ethnic quotas not practical’. Tony Branigan (then General Manager of FACTS) declares in the article that quotas would be impractical to administer – in spite of the fact the MEAA had never suggested quotas. The tactic of invoking an alarmist statement about the use of ‘ethnic quotas’ has been an effective one for FACTS in derailing the cultural diversity issue. Concern over the possibility of quotas eventuating was sometimes raised in interviews with production stakeholders during this research, with the MEAA desire for cast monitoring confused with fears of prescriptive casting quotas. In spite of the less than positive response from FACTS to the letter in February 1994, the CLC, MEAA and FACTS did meet in order to discuss some form of resolution to the issue. In the same period, the Advisory Notes on the portrayal of cultural diversity were formulated.

The applicable point in the Advisory Notes on cultural diversity reads:

in scripting and casting drama and selecting on-air talent, management and producers should be concerned to reflect Australia’s complex and culturally diverse society (FACTS, 1994a).

It was initially hoped that the Advisory Notes would be included in the scope for complaints relating to television services in the same manner that audiences can complain about matters relating to the appropriate classification and content of programs such as issues of violence, language and sex. However, the Advisory Notes as they stand have no regulatory significance as they are outside the scope of the actual Code of Practice. Finally in 1994, the CLC and MEAA (CLC, 1994) once again put forward a model for the unofficial monitoring of roles and actor employment data for performers from culturally diverse backgrounds. The MEAA suggested a six- monthly information collection on the cultural background of performers. To be kept confidential, the data would be used as a method of identifying where

72 remedial action may need to be taken to improve casting practices for DCALB actors. It was also discussed whether networks could report to the ABA regarding their activities with respect to the Advisory Notes. However there is no regulatory compulsion for networks to do so. FACTS (1994b) responded to the letter by declaring the Advisory Notes as a satisfactory approach to the issue and rejected the need for cast monitoring.

In August 1994, FACTS officially released the Advisory Notes along with a commitment from their council to fund an annual scholarship for a NES or Indigenous student to take up studies at NIDA (this scholarship was still in place at the time of writing). In the same year Heartbreak High began on the TEN network offering signs the commercial networks were responding to a multicultural Australia. While the acceptance of the Advisory Notes were the least preferred choice for the MEAA and CLC for a policy driven approach in the issue of portrayal and cultural diversity, the contribution that the MEAA, CLC and OMA made in raising awareness of the issue should not be overlooked. In 1994, a National Multicultural Advisory Council paper (NMAC, 1994) on multiculturalism committed the Labor government to seek ‘substantial progress in addressing the portrayal of cultural diversity on commercial television’ when the FACTS code of practice was to come up for review in 1996. This was broad multicultural policy recognition of the preceding debate over cultural diversity and programming in the previous four years within the broadcasting community. However, the Labor government did not survive the 1996 Federal election and a 1996 revised FACTS code of practice was eventually delayed for almost three years, with no change to the status or policy of cultural diversity in the new Code in 1999.

Two additional significant events were the Television and the Multicultural Audience conference in Sydney held at Taronga Zoo in 1995 and the release of the Australian Content Standard in 1996. Turning to the notion of the economic advantages of programming for a culturally diverse audience, the 1995 conference reflected Agenda objectives for promoting economic development by utilising the skills and economic potential of multicultural Australia. While the 1995 conference covered some of the same ground as

73 1994, it included possibilities for pay TV’s contribution to the issue and the advertising market potential of a multicultural audience. It was noted in the conference discussion paper (Appleton, 1995) that since 1993 there had been positive change. Cited as encouraging developments was Network Ten’s Heartbreak High (discussed in Chapter Eight), the presence of more actors from culturally diverse backgrounds in serial drama, an increasing input from Indigenous film-makers to tell their own stories, and the employment of Stan Grant and Aaron Pederson (both from Indigenous background) as TV show hosts. However the conference heard of continued stereotyping and a lack of Indigenous actors in commercial drama. The need for follow up was again the conclusion of this important forum on the issue of cultural diversity and television. A further policy development in the mid-1990s was a commitment from Labor to address the portrayal of cultural diversity in drama and other local programming through support of the Commercial Television Production Fund (CTPF) and SBS Independent (SBSI). Both initiatives were the result of Creative Nation, which survived beyond Labor’s 1996 election defeat, with SBSI still in existence and the CTPF finishing its run of productions in 1999.

Creative Nation case studies: SBS Independent and the Commercial Television Production Fund In the domain of television broadcasting, the Creative Nation cultural development policy made two specific pledges for enhancing domestic programming. SBS television was provided with $13m over four years ‘in recognition of the importance of developing programming to reflect Australia’s multicultural society’ (DOCA, 1994, p 47). In addition, the Commercial Television Production Fund was established to ‘give Australians access to a wide range of high quality Australian programmes’ (DOCA, 1994, p 48) and through Objective 4 of the Fund, ‘to encourage a more representative portrayal of Australia’s cultural diversity by encouraging applicants from people of diverse cultural background’ (AFC, 1997). Once again, the influence of the Agenda is to be found converging with policy discourse related to the production of television programming – and specifically in the commercial sector. While the cultural diversity objective was only one of several, the success of the CTPF overall offers an example of the possibilities which are

74 afforded by more express policy and financial support in the production of domestic commercial programming. SBS had previously been criticised for a lack of locally produced programming, and in the fifteen years prior to Creative Nation funding, SBS had averaged between three to four hours per year of locally-produced ‘multicultural drama’ (Long, 1995, p 19). Since 1991, SBS has had a clear legislative requirement to cultivate cultural diversity at the level of community awareness and an expectation that local programming be one avenue of expression (SBS Act, 1991).

The augmentation of SBS Independent (SBSI) with Creative Nation funds was intended to help SBS realise its multicultural Charter responsibilities more comprehensively. The only other commitment of Creative Nation funds to broadcasting was the Commercial Television Production Fund. By way of investment funding, $60 million over three years was pledged to program production for screening on commercial television. However, by the CTPF’s final year, the newly elected conservative government had effectively reduced government support to $53.6 million. Additional aims for CTPF productions were to increase local programming beyond the Australian Content Standard and to produce programs ‘primarily aimed at an Australian audience’ (AFC, 1997, p 7). In 1998, funding for SBSI was extended at $19m over four more years, while the CTPF did not receive further funding.

SBS Independent (SBSI) Established at the same time of the release of Creative Nation, SBSI was a collection of SBS staff headed by Andy Lloyd James, who worked to facilitate support for local production. This arm of SBSI was funded from the appropriated budget thus allowing the entire amount of Creative Nation funds to be ‘quarantined for production’ (Urban, 1998, p 22). SBSI also attached its trademark name to programming which was not funded from Creative Nation capital. This distinction is made in literature supplied with a production status report (SBS, 1998a) under separate listings for productions from the ‘SBSI General Production Fund’ and the ‘SBSI Special Production Fund’. Significantly, the bulk of SBSI programs funded from appropriations (General Fund) are documentaries while Creative Nation funds make up for a diverse

75 slate of fiction and non-fiction programming. In the 1995/96 SBS Annual Report, there is a transparent articulation of programming being sourced from both the appropriated budget (40 hours) and from ‘Federal government independent production funding’ ie: Creative Nation (27 hours). However, the 1997/98 Annual Report no longer makes this delineation of funding sources. It cites SBSI as contributing ‘about 300 hours of innovative film and television projects’ commissioned ‘to reflect and embody the spirit of contemporary multicultural Australia’ (SBS, 1998a, p 18). In actuality, 127 hours of programming were from the appropriated budget while only 152 hours were from Creative Nation funds. My reason for making clear the divisions in funding is related to how in the coming year (1997) SBS capitalised heavily on the achievements of SBSI as a whole, as a Creative Nation initiative, in securing extended funding from the conservative Liberal government. The CTPF on the other hand failed to achieve the same extension as it was not able to refer to such a high programming output.

In quantitative terms though, SBSI’s Special Production Fund achieved a good deal. From 1994 to 1998, SBSI could attach its name to 73.4 hours of fiction and 78.5 hours of non-fiction in the form of documentaries, short films, and series. Drama commitments accounted for 80% of funds and 60% of programs were sold overseas. Productions such as Shifting Sands, Bran Nue Dae, Tales From a Suitcase and Radiance made a measurable contribution to the portrayal of cultural diversity in the Australian film and television landscape. At the level of employment, more than a quarter of the 2,500 personnel associated with SBSI productions were from a culturally diverse background (SBS, 1998b). In order to measure the fund’s diversity of outcomes, programs were accorded an ‘SBS Element’ in a 1998 status report. Examples of these descriptors are ‘Access and Equity’, ‘NESB Crew and/or Director/Producer’, ‘Multicultural Issues’, ‘Indigenous’, and ‘Cultural Diversity’. Themes related to rural Australia, gender and sexuality, social class and alternative lifestyles were also part of SBSI’s production diversity. More ambiguous program genres such as Chooks (a comic-documentary about chickens) and House Gang (a comedy-drama series set amongst intellectually disabled housemates) were simply classified under ‘diversity’, as were a

76 further 25 programs. What such diversity demonstrates is the further development of SBS as a minority broadcaster in the sense that its focus was no longer ‘ethnic’ Australia. Minoritarian in this instance does not indicate minority audiences however, but rather what Hawkins (1996, p 47) has described as a ‘bizarre and pleasurable heterogeneity’ which is considered a positive aspect of the service’s evolution. SBSI’s success in overseas sales also reflected the export desires contained in Creative Nation at a macro policy level.

In lobbying for the continuation of SBSI, the SBS utilised the impressive data mentioned above to demonstrate results and to appeal to the government’s affection for ‘value for money’ when it came to funding a national broadcaster. It is also insightful to consider the new directions SBSI intended to go with the extended $19m, with one statement indicating that SBSI would give a greater focus to programs which reflect regional Australia (DCITA, 1998), a direction also reflected in the 1997/98 SBS Annual Report.5 In contrast to the fortunes of the ‘lean and hungry’ SBS, the Commercial Television Production Fund did not secure a further three years funding.

The Commercial Television Production Fund (CTPF) It could be argued that SBSI programs rather than CTPF product more accurately reflected Creative Nation’s description of Australian culture as an ‘exotic hybrid’ (DOCA, 1994, p 1). Commercial television makes a less than usual bedfellow with cultural initiatives commonly referred to as ‘the arts’, such as museums, theatre or even emerging digital art of the era. However both broadcasting and ‘the arts’ are within the one portfolio. Nevertheless, the CTPF provided a key strategy in Creative Nation for contributing to an area of cultural production not associated with the traditional and subsidised arts – popular broadcast television. Thirty-eight projects were the direct result of CTPF funding, accounting for 81.5 hours of new Australian programming above the local content requirements. Objective four of the CTPF was to

5 It is difficult to gauge whether SBSI did eventually achieve its objective to provide a greater focus on regional Australia, without conducting detailed content analysis into its post-1997 output.

77 ‘encourage a more representational portrayal of Australia’s cultural diversity by encouraging applications from people of diverse cultural backgrounds’ (AFC, 1997, p 2). The CTPF’s Chief Executive Officer Chris Fitchett (1999) affirmed that this objective was considered important by himself and the selection panel when making decisions about project approvals. This translates to the CTPF operating as a career development and informal equity function for DCALB creative personnel in a policy initiative, aimed at improving cultural diversity in television programming.

Total CTPF investment was $54.9m, but total project budgets amount to $74.5m, thus creating a funding leverage of $20m. Programs consistently won their ratings with The Day of the Roses (about the 1976 train disaster at Granville in Sydney) attracting 2.5million viewers. As far as comparisons can be made, the CTPF represents 53 hours of fictional programming compared to 73 hours from SBSI’s Creative Nation funds. Obviously SBSI outlays were somewhat less than the CTPF and help explain why SBSI seems to represent incredible value next to the CTPF. However, CTPF projects did not source government financing from other state funding bodies to the degree SBSI projects did and the costs of a drama such as The Day of the Roses are significantly greater than those for a shot-on-video program such as HouseGang.

The CTPF established the possibilities for a working relationship between the production industry, commercial networks, governmental process and overseas trade. Such policy outcomes reflect assessments of Creative Nation’s commercial television achievements as signalling a shift away from quota-based forms of content regulation to ‘industry assistance in the name of cultural development’ (Melville, 1995, p 39). There was also comment from across the industry that CTPF programming took more risk with content and genre. Kris Noble, director of drama for the , referred to CTPF projects as generating an ‘impressive list of progressive programs’ (Harty, 1999). Producer of Good Guys, Bad Guys, Roger Simpson, stated that ‘we take more risks [with this series] than we’ve ever taken before on commercial television’ (Mauric, 1996, p 23). As for aiming programs at Australian

78 audiences, a mini-series such as The Day of the Roses, which focused on a specific episode of Australian history and attracted significant audiences, may have found financing difficult otherwise. One figure also of note, particularly in comparison to SBSI’s reported total hours of Creative Nation product, is that CTPF funds which laid the foundations for many programs (with props, costumes, legal expenses and offices) which continued after the end of the CTPF. These network funded shows were worth an additional $60 million in 1999 and over 200 hours of programming, in addition to the original CTPF achievements.

The CTPF and SBSI clearly contributed to Creative Nation’s commitment to cultural diversity in terms of both cultural production and the portrayal of cultural diversity. Obviously the output of SBSI was more explicitly concerned with diversity in the sense of reflecting a multicultural Australia and its achievements in this respect are more assessable due to reporting requirements of the broadcaster. While the CTPF was more concerned with providing audiences with increased local programming of a diverse nature, it nevertheless progressed cultural diversity policy objectives by containing the objective on cultural diversity, which was operationalised in a less direct and measurable fashion compared to SBSI6. The CTPF selection process and comments from within the industry support such an appraisal.

The CTPF provides an example of national cultural policy not restricted to the elite in terms of its cultural product and audience. While it is true that CTPF funds went to what could be described as flagship organisations (ie: major television production houses), ratings attest to audience levels which would rarely be achieved for attendances at cultural events contained within cultural institutions more commonly associated with the arts. The range of cultural product over both the CTPF and SBSI with regard to cultural diversity in programming and in creative participation would be difficult to achieve in one cultural arena alone such as dance, theatre, music or multimedia arts. Both

6 For example, the ongoing and originally CTPF funded children’s show Hi 5, has a clear mandate for cultural diversity in its content, presenters and the culturally diverse children’s audience who are present in the opening and closing songs.

79 initiatives are an indication of Creative Nation’s capacity to include the domains of television and film within cultural policy and ‘the arts’. Both schemes also reflect in organisation and output what Flew (1999) describes as policy which adopts inter-relationships between globalisation and national culture, multiculturalism and national identity, and the coupling of cultural policy with economic policy. Such an approach is also found to varying degrees in the UK and New Zealand, which is examined in Part Two.

Conclusion: cultural diversity policy discourse and television The Australian Content Standard, Object 3(e) of the BSA and Creative Nation initiatives such as SBSI are articulated to promote a culturally diverse nation in the form of cultural products. In the 1990s, the macro objectives of the Agenda outlined in Chapter Two filtered through to policy strategies at the micro level within the various levels of government (local, state and federal). Such policies cover a broad spectrum of locations for the convergence of multicultural policy discourse: EEO monitoring in the public service, local area multicultural partnerships (LAMPs) involving local councils and state governments, education curriculum design and city councils having a community development section with staff dedicated to issues of multiculturalism or cultural diversity. Critics of multicultural policy such as Jakubowicz et al (1994, p136) question such an assessment, perceiving strong ideological motivations behind both bureaucratic and advocacy group participation in the policy process. They cite the early 1990s cultural diversity debate described above as substantiation of a symbolic policy process, which exposes the ‘real commitments of the power blocs that lie beneath the public rhetoric’ (p 136).

While Jakubowicz et al (1994, p 134) concede that SBS has been ‘the most outstanding expression of multicultural policy’, their general criticism of multicultural policy as an exercise in class domination does not take into account that, like the creation of SBS, the Agenda’s schema has led to strategies and policies across a range of services and in organisations, not as apparent or direct as SBS. The final outcome of the cultural diversity debate (the Advisory Notes) might be seen as a failure from the standpoint of those

80 expecting nothing less than the application of a new Standard or Code of Practice on cultural diversity. In order to reposition the outcome beyond that of a policy failure, interactions amongst the policy community during the cultural diversity debate can instead be evaluated as part of Bennett’s (1998, p 106) thesis of cultural policy as a ‘reforming apparatus’. Bennett’s consideration of cultural transformation and analysis through the task of cultural management and administration does not translate to an exclusionary account of how a ‘top-down’ policy process ensures a static status quo. In the cultural diversity debate, a wide range of stakeholders were engaged with an investment in the portrayal of cultural diversity on commercial television within the context of existing policy, with its currency and outcome for change under negotiation.

The policy projects of the Agenda at a macro level and a concomitant awareness of cultural diversity within the community, eventually funnelled into the cultural diversity debate within the commercial television sector. O’Regan (1993, p 109) helpfully extends this reforming role of the Agenda and his insights can be readily applied to what has occurred with the portrayal of cultural diversity in popular programming since the cultural diversity debate of the early 1990s:

Lobbying for more multiculturalism in television is encouraged by the more general acceptance of equal opportunity, affirmative action and anti-racism policies targeting pluralist outcomes, better life opportunities and social and economic integration, and fair dealing within Australia as a territorial nation.

O’Regan points to a discourse in the early 1990s, which became increasingly apparent in policy and industry discourse at the end of the late 1990s, and that is the mainstreaming of multiculturalism. While minority populations’ interaction with the mainstream can be fettered by lack of familiarity with Australian life and language barriers, more recent audience research (ABA, 2000) makes the case that recently arrived migrant communities are in fact more satisfied than dissatisfied with their portrayal on commercial television.

81 In the late 1990s, the ABA commissioned the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) to include questions about media use by newly arrived immigrants in DIMA’s longitudinal survey of immigrants, in the survey period 1997 to 1999.7 With an initial sample size of over 5,000 recently arrived migrants, the results of the research are of significance. The survey found that commercial television was the most frequently used media by respondents. Asian and Middle Eastern migrants watched television more often than European migrants and in the specific area of entertainment, commercial television was listed by one third of all migrants as the primary source of entertainment. Such results highlight the continuing significance of commercial television as a cultural product for migrant groups. With regard to questions on the representation of ethnic groups, only 12% of the sample agreed with the assertion that a higher representation was needed. As to whether commercial television ‘accurately reflects what ethnic groups in Australia are really like’ (ABA, 2000, p 13), 30% felt commercial television did not, while 37% felt the portrayal was accurate (the remainder being undecided). ABA (2000, p 15) makes the statement that such findings ‘appear quite contradictory’ compared to findings of earlier research (Nugent et al, 1993), which indicated a measured dissatisfaction among ethnic communities. The ABA (2000, p 15) concludes with a possible hypothesis that the ‘depiction of ethnic groups on commercial television has increased’ compared to the early 1990s. In Part Three of the thesis this hypothesis is shown to be correct.

Chapters Two and Three has charted how broad multicultural policy, in particular the Agenda, began to influence the discourses of broadcast policy with resultant effects on the broadcast policy community, as well as drawing in industry stakeholders such as producers and writers. The Agenda’s change in policy philosophy from earlier conceptions of multiculturalism as cultural maintenance, to a set of multicultural policies aimed at equity and skill utilisation, placed multiculturalism increasingly as a mainstream issue rather than an insular or private-life only issue. By the early 1990s, advocacy groups,

7The survey tracks a variety of social indicators and attitudes of migrants at three intervals after they have been in Australia for 6 months, 18 months and 3.5 years.

82 the OMA and academics had called for greater policy attention to cultural diversity and programming. While the commercial network representative body FACTS, participated in the process, an adversarial attitude developed with the actors representative body, the MEAA. The material policy outcome of the early 1990s, the Adivisory Notes on cultural diversity, lack the regulatory authority advocacy groups were seeking. However, the several years of debate and policy attention to cultural diversity and television programming made it clear that former casting practices and representations of multicultural Australia were not in keeping with the changes in broad multicultural policy and the mainstreaming of multiculturalism.

Part Two demonstrates how in the USA, the UK and New Zealand, approaches to broad social policy for dealing with culturally diverse populations have influenced those countries’ approaches in representing their cultural diversity in drama programming. This reflects the contextual relationships explored above between Australian multicultural policy and resulting influences on broadcasting policy. As in Australia, this is then followed by changes to production practices and ultimately – changes to programming. The three chapters in Part Two explore the possibilities for policy intervention and influence in order to change production practices. Each country has its own multicultural policy history, which has resulted in distinct approaches to how cultural diversity is promoted as an integral, or everyday, part of drama programming. This contextual work precedes a return to Australian production and programming, where in Part Three, policy process outcomes of the early 1990s and the continued support of multiculturalism as a mainstream social policy, has seen an increased participation and everyday representation of cultural diversity on Australian drama.

83 PART TWO INTERNATIONAL POLICY AND PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS

Introduction As explored in Chapter Two, Australia developed a governmental approach to managing the social, political and cultural spheres of immigration, defining immigration’s social consequences and management under multiculturalism. However in the United States, the grounding of multiculturalism as a social and cultural consequence of immigration and slavery has its roots in two key locations. The first is minority civil action of the 1960s against social inequalities - predominantly in the Black community. This led, among other things, to affirmative action programs for participation and employment, which have come under attack in recent years. The second site of multiculturalism in the USA can also be identified as the politics of recognition and representation. Here, multiculturalism is interrogated as a collection of theoretical questions advanced by academia from the 1970s onwards, and in particular from critical cultural studies departments within United States universities (Wieviorka, 1998).

New Zealand on the other hand shares with Australia a significant British legacy of colonisation. Both nations charted similar paths in their development in the 19th and 20th centuries with the observance of British governance and a cultural attachment to Britain not shared by the States. The 20th century saw both countries develop increasingly urban centres with immigration from Europe in the post World War II period, providing skilled and unskilled labour. But there are keen differences between Australia and New Zealand. Like Australia and the USA, New Zealand has an Indigenous minority population. However unlike the USA and Australia, in New Zealand it is the Indigenous Maori population who are central to negotiating cultural diversity and not various migrant groups as is the case in Australia and the United States. As a consequence, the relationship between the dominant European society and the Indigenous population in New Zealand has seen the establishment of a

84 not unproblematic biculturalism involving the Maori and Pakeha.1 Mirroring the advance of Black politics in the USA, a reassertion of political rights resonating from the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), has seen a ‘Maori revival’ since the 1980s. In Australia on the other hand, Indigenous populations have endured a long period of less than benign paternalism, which has been replaced only in the last decade with a crucial awareness of the unfinished business of reconciliation.

In contrast to Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the status of cultural diversity in the latter half of the 20th century in the United Kingdom (at least in terms of migrant multiculturalism) has evolved from the movement of people to the UK from former English colonies or dependent states, such as the Commonwealth Caribbean and Africa and the Indian sub-continent. There is also the earlier shared history of migration that links the United Kingdom to the other three countries under study. Britain itself has not experienced the displacement of an Indigenous population. Rather, the ‘relatively unorganised and voluntary’ (Layton-Henry, 1992, p 12) arrival of ‘coloured’2 migrants seeking better life chances from 1948 onwards later fractured any impression of a racial and culturally homogonous Britain (aside from those conflicts of independence surrounding Wales, Scotland and , of course). The early response to an apparent cultural diversity in Britain oscillated between government fears for social stability followed by inaction, as research discounted xenophobic claims and political inertia combined to dilute the issue. By the 1970s, a series of Race Relation Acts and Commissions on the matter began to redefine the politics of citizenship and belonging in the UK. The 1970s also saw Black protest and radicalised groups who were not dissimilar to Black power in the USA. A salient feature of the era were the conflictual relations between predominantly African-Caribbean communities

1 The terms biculturalism and Pakeha have fluctuating and contested meanings through recent New Zealand history. Spoonley (1990) has defined Pakeha as New Zealanders of a European background whose cultural understandings have been shaped by their location in NZ and membership of the dominant group. 2 The term ‘coloured’, while imbued with social prejudice, is significant not only for its use in the UK. For it was the skin colour of what was a relatively small number of Commonwealth Caribbean migrants in the early post-war years which evoked issues of national belonging, citizenship and the expression of a British multi-racial society.

85 and the police, with the Brixton disturbances in 1981 being the most media- memorable illustration of a challenged multicultural Britain.

And finally, the later years of the 20th century also witnessed Britain’s uneasy entry into the European Community. This has brought changes to citizenship rights being more aligned to the European tradition of ancestry - jus sanguinis - as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of jus soli, which confers citizenship through either birth in the nation concerned, or soon after settlement. But of particular interest to this study is the cultural and intellectual recognition of particular well established communities in Britain such as those from the Indian sub-continent. As an example, the Rushdie Affair became a well known site of contemporary post-colonial expression as well as a site of cultural conflict in a multicultural Britain.3 In addition to post-colonial discourses in literature and academia, the late 1990s saw Britain take the lead in European contexts for Equal Employment Opportunity and affirmative action strategies (including television), not dissimilar to the United States. In comparison to the US, Britain’s EEO measures are not particularly exceptional – however when compared to other EC countries such as for example, which refuses to engage in the concept of minority discourse or disadvantage, Britain’s policies are progressive.

3 Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, was critically acclaimed by a cosmopolitan West looking for cultural assurance of its sophistication while at the same time, Muslim calls for withdrawal of the book and Rushdie’s death brought to bear the limits of multiculturalism’s ideals for difference within a frame of social cohesion and the tolerance of Others.

86

Chapter Four The United States: Affirmative Action, 'Quotas' And Diversity Rights

Policy and industry contexts In discussion with key Australian television drama program personnel, it was common to perceive a cynical criticism or mistrust expressed with regard to explicit measures for representing diversity. In the United States where such measures come with a long history of accomplishment, the following extract (O’Sullivan, 1997) demonstrates that also in the USA, unambiguous diversity in casting draws its critics. The National Review ran an ongoing competition to find the best use of multicultural to mean ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ with the winner on this occasion sending in the press release below from Disney, for an upcoming TV movie (bracketed text belongs to the Review ‘s editor):

Disney's newest Cinderella passes multicultural muster with flying colors. The title role belongs to singer-actress Brandy [who is Black]... Her prince is Paolo Montalban, a newcomer of Hispanic descent. Milk- skinned Bernadette Peters has the role of the wicked stepmother whose two haughty daughters are played by white and Black actresses [Ugly Sisters under the skin, presumably]. Whitney Houston is the fairy godmother, Jason Alexander is the Prince's loyal steward - Lionel, and Whoopi Goldberg gets to be Queen Constantina. ‘We hope that this Cinderella, as we approach the millennium,’ says co-producer Debra Martin Chase, ‘is reflective of what our society is today’ (O’Sullivan, 1997, p 8).

The Review ‘s editor goes on to add:

Not quite. The Ugly Sisters--oops, sorry, haughty daughters, should surely be white and Asian. But the new Disney Cinderella is a brilliant reflection of what multiculturalism itself means in our society, i.e: a monocultural fairy tale involving people of different races and ethnic groups (O’Sullivan, 1997, p 8).

The irony in the article reveals fundamental differences in casting for a culturally diverse society in the USA and Australia. It is doubtful whether an Australian telemovie rendition of Cinderella could, or would be able to muster such a diverse cast. A heightened awareness of utilising culturally diverse

87 casts among US networks (sceptically labelled the Disneyfication of multiculturalism in the above case) is not the only rationale to explain why such a colourblind Cinderella is more likely in the States. For one thing, the establishment of culturally diverse performers in the States has a longer history than in Australia, due in part to the size of the Black community and the success of advocacy groups in bringing networks to task over the issue. Additionally, the significant market value of names such as Brandy, Whitney Houston and Whoopi Goldberg also carry the security of likely success for a production. Shohat and Stam (1994, p 190) note that only since the 1980s has a pool of US actors from culturally diverse backgrounds attained the star status necessary to play leads in racially non-designated roles. They make the valid point that for a film to be considered economically viable, the demand for (usually white) universal stars exposes the complex relationship between racism and capitalism. The question could be asked – would Disney have pursued this culturally diverse cast without the ratings confidence of such well established and successful performers of culturally diverse backgrounds? And as the National Review‘s editor quips, does the presence of a culturally diverse cast in this production of a European fairy tale describe multiculturalism?

Perhaps the author is suggesting that the suspension of belief required to take pleasure in a fairy tale is also required for audiences to accept a cast, such as the one above. Such a criticism does not hold up to scrutiny. The weekly hospital drama ER, for example, contains a diverse cast and is a critically acclaimed ratings winner, suggesting its culturally diverse cast is accepted by mainstream audiences. ER is very much set in the ‘real world’ as opposed to Cinderella. Notwithstanding such cynical responses to diverse casting in the media, there is strong agreement among acting guilds, policy makers and sections of the production industry in all the countries studied that non- traditional casting is more desirable than casting only performers from Anglo backgrounds. To this end, the United States has established robust regulatory requirements for monitoring the employment of DCALB employees, including casts. Its performance in this issue provides a superior example when compared to the situation in Australia.

88 Television broadcasting overview: USA In the USA, the place of commercial television is central. Its public service channel (PBS) is funded to a far lesser degree than those in the UK or Australia. However, like Australia, three major networks have dominated the free to air market (CBS, NBC and ABC), though FOX television has evolved to become the fourth network in recent years and has since been joined by two mini-networks, United Paramount (UPN) and Warner Brothers (WB). The television landscape is based on free enterprise and was set in place by the Federal Communications Commission, which promoted a mix of local based TV and nationwide services. In the early 1950s however, the dominance of the established radio broadcasters NBC and CBS forged further alliances with local TV stations (affiliates) across the US through superior programming (with formats often brought over from radio shows). The third network, ABC, was not able to compete on a strong basis with NBC and CBS until into the 1970s, when it achieved affiliate parity with the other two networks (Walker and Ferguson, 1998).

The staple of television programs on US TV was an evolution of program content from other entertainment forms. Radio quiz shows, musicals, soaps and comedies were transferred to television. Televised theatre contributed a period of live drama broadcasts in the 1950s but it was the connection to movie making which cemented the place of drama programming from the late 1950s onwards. However the position held by the three networks was challenged in the 1970s and 1980s by the eventual penetration of cable with Home Box Office, which was followed by the likes of MTV, CNN, and ESPN. The other obvious addition to the televisual landscape was Rupert Murdoch’s FOX Network in the late 1980s. A combination of sport and youth oriented programming has seen FOX foster an established position as the fourth network. And like Australia, the US has witnessed the merging of media industries across product ranges, including television, making it merely a component within a collection of entertainment content and delivery platforms.

89 Power to the people: multiculturalism in the USA The settlement of America by European immigrants differs from Australia. While the percentage of Americans born overseas in the USA in the second half of the 20th century did not surpass 15%, the number of people who identify with a particular ethnic origin is nevertheless significant. The main ethnic groups of migrants residing in the United States are 55 million who claim German descent, the English with 50 million and the Irish at 45 million. Italian and French are 26 million, and Latino 24 million. The main groups discussed in this chapter are African Americans who in 1996 made up circa 12% of the population, Latino at 11% and an Asian population of 4%. Indigenous Americans accounted for 1% of the community (Mastro and Greenberg, 2000). In spite of the image of an American melting pot, a strong Anglophile current runs through American history dating back to the English settlers who in the 18th century deemed themselves to be ‘the true Americans’ (Highham, 1991, p 2). Quantitatively, it is estimated that in 20 to 30 years, the USA may approximate a ‘majority minority’ society, meaning that the category non-white will make up more than half of the population (Williams, 1997). On a more political and ideological basis, the hegemony of a dominant white and middle class America has in fact been open to fissures for some time.

Before the Revolution, North America was a collection of ‘disparate groups, separated from one another by religion, country of origin, local institutions and geographical distance’, who resisted attempts to construct a coherent identity (Highham 1991, p 3). Post-Revolution America though, began to witness the emergence of an ideological republican based identity, founded on shared visions for a strong, diverse, yet individualistic America. Immigration was seen as an integral part of the development of the United States. A continuum of immigration history which lasted into the 20th century conceived immigration as belonging to the myth of the USA as an unbounded society. However, from WW I onwards, the integrity of a boundless culture was undermined by a significant voice of dissent. Into the 1950s and 1960s, Black politics combined with the civil rights movement, drew attention to the status of minorities in the USA.

90 Until the 1960s, a taken for granted assimilationist attitude existed towards immigrants in the States. In later years, a philosophy of cultural pluralism replaced the melting pot and the period has similarities with Australian multiculturalism of the 1970s. However, institutionalised programs for managing immigrant populations such as those in Australia were not apparent. From the Kennedy era onwards, a notion of multiculturalism grew out of the civil rights movement, which accorded affirmative action to the Black community and then to other minority populations. Prior to the 1960s, the explicit discrimination of Blacks had been challenged in the celebrated Brown Vs Board of Education legal action which saw the Supreme Court put an end to segregated schooling, creating the constitutional foundation for equal opportunity. The impetus for the ensuing civil action of the 1960s can be traced to unrest over the urbanisation of Blacks in ghettoes and a forceful awareness among the Black community for equal rights (Naylor, 1997).

Affirmative action was intended initially only for the Black population but as it is based on social equality and not on cultural recognition, it was extended to women, Hispanics and other minority groups. Affirmative action should not be confused with the application of explicit quotas in the workplace, as is commonly assumed. This is particularly relevant in the area of casting, where on the basis of quotas alone, equality is reduced to a purely quantitative measure. The type of portrayal is of vital importance, as is the facility for minority groups to have some control over both recognition and representation. This is the other side to multiculturalism in the United States. The politics of recognition, related to the growth of a critical paradigm in the social sciences, began in educational contexts in the 1970s. The study of minority groups in US university curricula includes Afro-American studies and cultural studies based programs, centered on identity politics analyses. Critical analyses of American multiculturalism also relate to the effectiveness of affirmative action, which in the Black community, is seen to benefit a middle class Afro-American (Wieviorka, 1998; Fair, 1999). The reality for many in the Black community has not meant parity in life chances. The vision of the Huxtables in The Cosby Show for example offers contradictory interpretations of Black America in this context. While being criticised for presenting a fantasy

91 of middle class American meritocracy for Black Americans, The Cosby Show was also considered innovative in the way it de-ethnicised the Huxtable family. Zook (1999, p 68) presents a connection between affirmative action of the 1960s with contemporary contradictions in programming:

In the late 1980s and early 90s, shows such as Cosby … presented the refreshing possibility that racial authenticity could be negotiated rather than assumed, with the success of integration and affirmative action in the 1960s and 70s, unusually large numbers of African Americans had been granted economic mobility. This ‘buffer’ caste, although only a small fraction of the total African American population, experienced a certain, strange inclusion, one that blurred established notions of race.

As a ‘buffer’ caste, the Huxtable family present an alternative to the usual associations of Blacks with crime, poverty and hip hop. However, the life of the Huxtables is far removed from practices such as racial steering for example, where Blacks are shown only housing located next to other Blacks (a practice which complements the ‘White Flight’ of the 1960s and 70s where whites abandoned the metropolis for the suburbs).

While links can be made between the social movements for equality of the 1960s with the representation of Blacks in the 1990s, current debates around multiculturalism are now more likely to focus on identity politics. Downey (1999) defines the period of the late 1970s onwards, as an era of ‘benign neglect’ for the further stimulation of civil rights and in some cases, the reversal of socially transformative policy. A disengagement from analyses of structural factors and issues of minority obstructions to equity, was replaced by a move toward examining issues of identity and culture. Subversive textual readings on their own, achieve little by way of engagement with the political process and day to day struggles for equality, which were a key feature of the civil rights era. As a transformative tool, the turn to identity politics is questionable, and the symbol of multiculturalism perceived as diluted and ambiguous. As a consequence, multiculturalism understood outside of academic fields of study in the USA has drifted away from its civil rights roots. The allegation that cultural diversity has become a corporate multiculturalism is also a perceptible discourse in the USA:

92

While the new economic utilitarian rationale for diversity lent broad legitimacy, it further compromised the significance of diversity as a symbol of – or lever for – progressive social change, and the meaning of the advocacy of cultural diversity shifted dramatically away from social equity issues (Downey, 1999, p 180).

The shift away from an advocacy discourse is further reinforced by the concept proposed by Glazer (1997), with the claim that all Americans are now multiculturalists. The danger with this is that continuing minority needs for structural equality, particularly among more recently arrived groups, may be submerged. Such a discussion is also to be found in Australia, where multicultural analysis centered on questions of identity and representation alone, overlook one of Australian multiculturalism’s original purposes as the betterment of immigrant living and working conditions. However the fashion of the cultural critique of multiculturalism in the USA has enabled groups such as Mexican-Americans and Native Americans to explore a renewal of their culture and identity in institutional forums such as university courses and in wider contexts through the publishing of articles and books. The challenge to place contemporary American multiculturalism into a framework for examining television programming and cultural diversity lies in its synthesis of civil history and resulting affirmative action, with the progression of identity politics and questions of representation.

Policy contexts Broadcasting in the United States is regulated by an independent body, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Its policies are established and modified by legislative amendment. Being similar to the position of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, it offers the prospect of making comparisons in how regulating for cultural diversity has been approached in the two countries. Commissions such as the FCC develop policy as required from guidelines handed down by Congress. While the US promotes free market forces in most industries, in some areas the government considers that ‘normal market forces in a capitalist economy will generally promote their self-interests, and may not protect the interest of the general public’ (Walker

93 and Ferguson, 1998, p 71). Broadcasting is considered one such public interest under the Communications Act of 1934. This key notion of a public interest for broadcasting in the US has meant that minorities may also stake a claim for their interests in both ownership of and representation in television broadcasting. This can be compared to Object 3(e) of the BSA in Australia, concerning the promotion of cultural diversity and the debates centred around the Act, examined in Chapter Three.

Decisions made by the FCC can be appealed in the courts and may be contested on the grounds of poor conduct by the FCC, a lack of due process and importantly in the US, decisions may be challenged if they are in conflict with the constitution. Also contributing to the policy making process, the FCC is at times pressured for favourable treatment by the television industry (by its lobbying and self regulatory body the National Association of Broadcasters - NAB) and by various public lobby groups. Public action against stations over children’s TV in the 1960s for example, resulted in the term ‘petition to deny’, whereby a station licence renewal is challenged by advocacy groups over specific matters. Although this avenue of dispute diminished as deregulation took hold in later decades, it served as a stimulus for change in the representation of minorities in the civil rights era. However issues concerning the representation of Blacks in particular were being raised a decade before the rise of the civil rights movement.

Amos n’ Andy was a signpost in relations between minority communities and broadcasters over issues of portrayal. Billed as the first all Black network show in 1951, its coarse representations received condemnation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but the program remained on air for many years in spite of losing its sponsor. After the public protest surrounding Amos n’ Andy,1 an unanticipated consequence was that Black characters were avoided for the next decade. When in the early 1960s they did return, Lichter, Lichter and Rothman (1994,

1 The NAACP sought an injunction in the federal court to prevent CBS broadcasting the show when it came out. After five years of litigation, CBS withdrew the show from syndication in 1966 (NAACP, 2001).

94 p 354) note how Blacks featured as ‘saintly or heroic figures with little sense of place or heritage’. Such a representation is similar with those of Indigenous Australians in the 1960s and 1970s, where they were portrayed as either noble savages or as a problematised community. In the USA, a pious rendering of Blacks changed by the mid 60s, when social realism replaced the superficial portrayal of previous years. As a consequence, Black characters became ghettoised as criminals though this portrayal was tempered by stories which showed Black America as the repressed, overcoming hardship by any means. Nevertheless, this did not endear the television industry to the civil rights movement who rightly saw the power of television in communicating pessimistic messages about minority communities. After the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Ethical Culture Society began the first national monitoring of Blacks in television. Two years later, a coalition of civil rights groups filed the first ‘petition to deny’ as a regulatory measure against a Mississippi station for discriminatory hiring practices. Monitoring played a vital role in the case and two years later in 1966 the US Court of Appeals ruled the FCC must grant a hearing on the matter (Montgomery, 1989). As a consequence, the monitoring method was repeated by Hispanics, women, gay groups and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). By 1968, enough pressure had mounted for the FCC to issue a new policy and rule that would link licence renewal to a station’s performance over EEO practices.

The FCC’s EEO requirements were in place for 30 years until 1998, when they were deemed unconstitutional in a case involving the Lutheran Church, which protested the FCC’s finding that the church had made inadequate requirements in recruiting minorities at two of its radio stations.2 Over the previous 30 years however, the FCC’s equal opportunity rules were interpreted as enabling content diversity by increasing the chances of minorities to work in the sector. The FCC also stated that its inclusivity requirements in hiring make ‘good business sense and benefited employers because they (the requirements) increase an employer’s chances of obtaining the services of the most talented people’ (FCC, 1998). This also reflects the

2 Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. FCC, 141 F.3rd 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998).

95 idea of productive diversity (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997) in Australian multiculturalism, where a culturally diverse population will provide ‘diversity dividends’ in the workplace, once their cultural resources are fully utilised.

The FCC’s measures in EEO went well beyond the policy Object of the Australian Content Standard with its aspirational goal of promoting and reflecting a multicultural society. The FCC measures for EEO are supported with consistent enforcement of monitoring and reporting efforts. The FCC claim the following results in support of the near 30-year-old rule. In 1971, women constituted 23.3% of full time broadcast employees and minorities 9.1%. In 1997, women constituted 41% and ethnic minorities 20.2% of employees. Congress also expanded the FCC hiring rules to include cable TV in 1984 and to multichannel video programming distributors in 1992, endorsing a mandate for diversity in digital media industries as well. However an inconsistency in the rule with the constitution was established in the Lutheran Church case, in that discriminatory hiring based on gender, race, colour, religion or national origin was deemed unconstitutional – and this applies to positive discrimination as well. Over the years, an interpretation of the ruling had led to the practice of de facto affirmative action in order for broadcasters to safely approach their licence hearings, as well as to deter attention from the NAACP, the SAG and other advocacy groups. This was the foundation of the so-called and much maligned quota system of proportional employment.

An explicit and enforced quota system has never existed in US broadcasting, despite popular belief to the contrary. The FCC would simply consider the employment data (minority-hire filings) and other relevant matters at licence renewal time and compare this with local labour force figures. If results were unsatisfactory, a more detailed analysis would be carried out with a worst case scenario being remedial conditions placed on the broadcaster such as extended reporting and perhaps a shorter licence period. However when such measures were about to be applied to the Lutheran Church due to a lack of diversity in their employment figures at two of its radio stations, their subsequent appeal resulted in the court identifying the FCC rules to be an

96 imposition of racial considerations for the purposes of employment. The FCC (1998) maintained that its sole purpose in EEO rules was to ‘foster diverse programming content’ and that such diversity is a ‘compelling motivation’.3 However the court held that even assuming the compelling nature of program diversity as stipulated under the 1934 Act, the Commission had introduced no evidence linking DCALB employees to what appears in programming content. This decision undermined, in the words of the FCC, ‘the proposition that there is any link between broad employment regulation and the Commission’s avowed interest in broadcast diversity’. The FCC (1998) continue to believe that affirmative action efforts do not constitute discrimination as ‘white males suffer no cognizable harm in being forced to compete against a larger pool of qualified applicants’.

As well as hiring rules, the FCC maintains policies which enhance minority ownership of the media as an instrument for ensuring diversity. These policies were also contested in the 1990s through the courts in separate cases,4 however the court affirmed the Commission’s judgement on one occasion that there is a nexus between rules fostering minority ownership of broadcast stations and the statutory goal of fostering diversity of viewpoints.5 And finally precedent was established in a previous ruling where ‘Circuit recognised the Commission’s authority to enforce both “affirmative action” and anti- discrimination rules in the licence renewal context to advance its public interest mandate to foster diverse programming'.6 These conflicting legal precedents over minority hiring also contributed to uncertainty over the formulation of new FCC equity rules in the late 1990s. As a consequence, the

3 The notion of a ‘compelling interest’ may be deemed as a just reason for racial based affirmative action practices to take precedence over Amendment 14 of the Constitution which prohibits racial discrimination (‘positive’ included). 4 The minority ownership preference rules received much criticism in the 1990s as they were abused by large companies for profit and tax avoidance. After deregulation amendments in the 1990s, companies such as Murdoch’s FOX were able to broker quid pro quo deals with government to gain favourable changes in ownership rules for investment into minority interests. Indeed, the higher ‘homes coverage percentage’ for minority controlled broadcasters (30% rather than 25%) and better tax breaks saw Murdoch expand into the market. The FCC has questioned the wisdom of allowing greater media concentration in order to foster program diversity. 5 This was of course to be then contested in the Lutheran Church case. For a review of these decisions, see Hammond (1999). 6 Bilingual Bicultural Coalition on Mass Media v. FCC, see Hammond (1999).

97 FCC called for empirical evidence in a 1998 proposal for Rule Making which would determine the nexus between women and minority hiring and programming content and how various positions exert influence on programming decisions.

This lack of empirical analysis in the past between employment data and programming content illustrates the FFC’s challenges as a mixed regulatory body. That is, conflicting perspectives and analytical gaps in evaluating social and cultural objectives related to the public interest compare poorly with more tangible and measurable economic outcomes related to researching issues of ownership and control. Napoli (1999, p 571) comments: ‘These gaps [in social objectives] are largely due to an analytical orientation that consistently fails to investigate and account for the social and political consequences of policy decisions with the same empirical rigor as for economic consequences’.7 The failure to link information about minority job positions with program outcomes led the FCC to design new EEO rules which would maintain its policy responsibility for the promotion of content diversity while trying to maintain equity goals, without resorting to the application of discriminatory hiring practices (including positive discrimination). This is something which the ABA in Australia will not consider.

In January 2000 the FCC released new rules for broadcasters and cable systems to court minorities through so called ‘outreach efforts’ in their job vacancies. The rules came into effect in April 2000, with critical comment from some broadcasters that the new measures were too arduous. Advocacy groups on the other hand were critical of the outreach rules for being less influential than the pre-1998 rules. The new requirements were to apply to stations with more than four employees and offered as two options. Option A: a licencee sends their job vacancy announcements to any organisation requesting the vacancy, and for the station to select from and participate in a variety of outreach opportunities such as job fairs, internships or interaction

7 Such comments are similar to those made in the context of the Project Blue court case and in recommendations made by the 2000 Productivity Commission into Broadcasting (discussed in Chapter Three).

98 with educational and community groups. Option B: the licencee designs their own outreach recruitment program, which would also require them to keep data on the sources, race, ethnicity and gender of applicants (McConnell, 2000a).

Broadcasters suggested that publishing their vacancies on the Net would suffice and that the new rules would ‘bury them under paperwork’ and that these rules also constitute de facto quotas as licence challenges could be based on ‘whether stations are doing enough to reach minorities and women’ (McConnell, 2000b, p 19). The FCC rejected such claims estimating that the new filings would take three hours per year and while gender and minority employment figures must be kept, the data would not be considered at licence renewal reviews. The NAB argued this was overly optimistic but interestingly, cable operators were satisfied with the new rules. These FCC rules were still well advanced compared to Australia, as they contained an obligation for employee monitoring. However, the US Court of Appeals vacated (ruled invalid) the new EEO outreach programs in January 2001, citing the same reasons for vacating as they did in 1998, ie: that they encourage discriminatory hiring practices (albeit positive).

The primary rationale was that such rules put pressure on broadcasters to recruit on race-based classification that is not ‘narrowly tailored to support a compelling governmental interest’ and so the rules were again judged unconstitutional (Ward, 2001, p 2). However in late 2002, the FCC was able to register a revised set of EEO rules based on the Option A outreach concept put forward in 2000. The new EEO rules took effect from March 2003. Interestingly, these rules will be tied to the FCC licence renewal process with EEO compliance being central to the FCC’s assessment of a licence renewal application. At the time of writing, no appeal has been lodged to vacate or suspend the new rules.

Network programming and production: historical contexts It was the Black sitcom Amos n’ Andy that brought a mostly Black show to American television in 1951. Though advocacy groups were unable to

99 pressure CBS to remove the family sitcom, the show’s initial sponsor (Blatz Beer) did eventually withdraw. After Amos n’ Andy, ethnic roles were once again minor or consigned to single episodes. An exception to this was actor Desi Arnaz - co-owner of Desilu Productions and the character Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. While a permanent feature on the show, Ricky’s character set the tone for Hispanic representation as being of ‘Latin temperament’ and therefore prone to excitable outbursts in uncontrolled Spanish. Asian characters were rare in early years and it was only ‘subservient roles … that kept them from complete oblivion’ (Lichter et al, 1994, p 337). However with the advent of the civil rights movement, cast monitoring, and FCC interest in minority participation, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw significant change. In a decade, roles for Blacks increased fourteen fold, although roles for other ethnic groups decreased. The range and quality also changed for Blacks with starring roles in shows such as I Spy, Mission Impossible, Julia and Mod Squad. Previous features of Black roles such as the use of slang and servile behaviour were no longer tolerated. Racial issues were addressed in keeping with the era, though as Lichter et al (1994, p 341) note below, the roles tended to over-compensate for past ignorance and stereotype:

There was a tendency to replace the old negative Black stereotypes with new positive ones. Having discovered that Blacks didn’t have to be cast as valets and janitors, white writers turned them into James Bonds and Mary Tyler Moores [reference to the shows Mod Squad and Julia]. The frantic search for positive characters smothered individuality with good intentions.

This resurgence in Black portrayal, regardless of its naivety, demonstrates the power of early advocacy groups to effect change, although the general disruption to social conservatism in the 1960s also played a role. At the networks, a department was put in place to consult and negotiate with audience groups to avoid unwanted attention over contentious content. While not initially connected to issues of representation, the establishment of network broadcast standards and program practices departments8 were to

8 Referred to as Standards and Practices, such departments were established after the controversy resulting from contest rigging on game shows in the late 1950s. Networks put the

100 play a significant role in how broadcasters negotiated the portrayal of minorities.

By the 1970s, Standards and Practices departments were previewing scripts in advance of filming in an effort to anticipate controversy. In some cases, consultation with advocacy groups and the employment of technical consultants and members of advocacy groups were made when researching contentious issues. Over the decades, networks formed relationships with spokespersons or advocacy groups in many areas such as the gay movement, pro-choice, Indigenous Americans and ethnic groups (Montgomery, 1989). The role of Standards and Practices however declined in the late 1980s as networks downsized and in any case, the heady days of the 60s and 70s had been replaced by an absence of political action. After two decades of experimentation, not only did producers know what might be a problem in scripts, but issue-based stories had become somewhat exhausted. However in 1971 the exploration of homosexuality, miscarriage, equality and race in the infamous All in the Family set the pace for years to come.

The producer of the controversial and issue-based show All in the Family, Norman Lear, became known for his support of racial justice and a willingness to explore political issues in his shows (such as Good Times, Sanford and Son, That’s my Mama and Maude). However his All in the Family character, Archie Bunker, was an overt racist presented as a person to be derided. The show received a good deal of criticism for airing Archie’s racist slurs: terms such as spade, spic, coon and coloured were common and would be impossible to utter in a comedy a few years later. An equal opportunity bigot, Archie was borrowed from the British series Till Death us do Part. Lear hoped that the likeable racist would present viewers with a non-preaching style anti- racism message. However studies suggested that the show only served to

departments forward as a way of avoiding tighter regulation as was recommended in a Congressional report of the time (Montgomery, 1989).

101 confirm liberals’ contempt for the Archie Bunkers of the world while conservatives found solace in identifying with him (Lichter et al, 1994, p 345).9

Lear’s seminal comedy paved the way for several such Black comedies in the years to come. Good Times and Different Strokes were both screened with some success in Australia and represented a liberal approach to teasing out issues of race in a non-threatening manner. Later in the 1970s, Blacks were joined by other minorities in lesser numbers in a range of shows such as a Greek Kojak, the Polish Banacek, and the Italian attorney Petrocelli. The expansion of lead and support roles also brought with it an expanded menu of characterisations, both flattering and unflattering. Alongside criminals of obvious non-Anglo descent (particularly Hispanic and later Asian), characters such as Vinnie Barbarino, Freddy ‘Boom Boom’ Washington and Juan Epstein presented a combination of comic stereotype and liberal social consciousness. This period of televised pluralism, reinforces critical multiculturalists allegations against liberal or soft multiculturalism, which they see as unable to grapple with institutionalised racism due to the focus on outbursts of individualised bigotry. However the 1980s heralded an important shift in the production of minority programming with the arrival of shows made by Blacks for Blacks, rather than the previous liberal content of white made shows with Blacks in them.

Racial narrowcasting In 1984 The Cosby Show premiered as a major series with significant creative input by Blacks. Generating the highest ratings for a show since Bonanza, it remains a one-off in Black programming in that the major networks were joined in later years by cable, FOX, WB and UPN, who offered Black audiences a greater variety of programming. In the 1990s, shows such as FOX’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, In Living Color, New York Undercover, Roc, The Sinbad Show, South Central and UPN’s Moesha delivered a Black authorship with the following distinctive elements:

9 Years later, Norman Lear held a preview screening for Washington’s Black Caucus of a comedy series about a Black congressman (Mister Dugan). The reaction was so critical, Leer withdrew the series for good, losing three-quarters of a million US dollars.

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Autobiography, meaning a tendency toward collective and individual authorship of Black experience; improvisation, the practice of inventing and ad-libbing unscripted dialogue or action; aesthetics, a certain pride in visual signifiers of Blackness; and drama, a marked desire for complex characterizations and emotionally challenging subject matter (Zook, 1999, p 5).

Zook’s study of the FOX Network and Black programming illustrates the two edged sword of commercial interests and Black television. According to Zook (1999), FOX fostered a place for Black authorship in television in its youth orientated shows. However after a short affair with such programming, FOX sought out a white legitimacy by abandoning many Black shows and courting the mainstream with NFL football. This FOX strategy had little to do with social justice and it could also be argued that its Black programming had an alternative agenda. Traditional network television was seen as not overly appealing to Blacks. However with the advent of FOX, advertisers interested in targeting the Black demographic in particular were also interested in ‘going after the more affluent young white urbanites who watch Black orientated shows to keep abreast of the latest trends and styles’. Murdoch himself is quoted as wanting to ‘hook the hip white audience’ (Lichter et al, 1994, p 56).

Nevertheless, shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air explored integration in a Black post civil rights America, taking ‘the Black upper class for granted, as had Cosby, it also wrestled, frequently and openly with economic and cultural mobility’ (Zook, 1999, p 15). However as FOX became more established as the fourth network, minority-heavy casts in shows such as New York Undercover with its Latino / Black leads, presented FOX with a dilemma if it wanted to be seen as less of a racial narrowcaster. In spite of such economic rationales FOX programming showed minority characters in dynamic contradictions within issues of race loyalty, class disparity and nationalist desire. Such stories and representations were not often found in prime time mainstream programming.

As FOX withdrew from its Black programming in the mid 90s, two new mini- networks, United Paramount (UPN) and Warner Brothers (WB) launched

103 themselves with the same strategies as FOX had years earlier. Hoping to attract an abandoned audience, UPN and WB took on FOX staff and replicated their programming for a hip audience. The two new networks hurt FOX and as the late 90s came to a close, FOX held onto its Black shows and was still the top-rated network among Black and Latino audiences. However as Entertainment Weekly suggested about the two new networks, ‘the bigger UPN and WB get, the whiter they’ll become’ (cited in Zook, 1999, p 105). This is not to say that the big three networks contain nothing of value for research into the place of cultural diversity on TV.

In a content analysis of minority characters in new season programs from 1966 to 1992, new Black characters accounted for an average 6% of casts in the late 1960s, 8% in the 1970s, 12% in the 1980s and near 15% in the 1990s (Greenberg and Collette, 1997). From the 1980s onwards, Black roles were in sync with US census figures and then exceeded the real world population. Asian and Hispanic roles on the other hand ran counter to census figures, with only sporadic new characters from these groups. While such comprehensive quantitative analysis serves useful purposes for identifying the presence or invisibility of minority actors, it is limited in its capacity to take into account the type of roles played by actors. In other research, analysis of prime time TV in 1992/93 found that on the whole producers and writers ‘challenge white preconceptions through their portrayals of minority individuals victimized by passive bias and active discrimination’ (Lichter et al, 1994, p 61). The study also found that 8% of Black characters in prime time were criminal – half that of white characters. Looking specifically at homicides over a period of 30 years, Blacks on television were 18 times less likely to commit murder than in real life, while Asian murderers were three times more prevalent on TV than in reality. Whites committed murder at twice the rate on TV compared to actual rates for homicide in the real world. What such content and demographic research presents is sometimes at odds with common beliefs that Blacks are portrayed in a manner which reinforces established perceptions of them as anti-social.

104 In a further study of Blacks in the highest rating TV entertainment shows, 70% of characters were in professional or management positions (Entman and Rojecki, 2000). While this may seem a positive step, such a utopian reversal imposes a formal distance between Black and White actors, detaching them from the sort of peer interaction that White characters engage in. In support of this argument, an eight week study (Bramlett-Solomon and Farwell, 1997) in 1994 of intimacy and relationships between characters in the top network soap operas, showed that intimacy was far more prevalent between White characters than Black, and no scenes depicting interracial intimacy occurred at all. However, research (Lichter et al, 1996, p 426) among Hollywood’s executive and creative TV personnel suggest that discriminatory intentions are not evident. Polling 104 influential writers, producers and executives in the 1990s, it was found that the ‘creative leadership (of television) represents an urban and cosmopolitan society’. Being mostly ‘left of centre’, the sample expressed significantly less conservative opinions than the general population, who were also surveyed at the time

This has resulted in television drama that attempts to mediate social and political transformations from the perspective of white liberal America into the homes of what is commonly thought to be a conservative mainstream. At the same time it is worth noting that 1999 figures from the NAACP (NAACP, 1999) showed that of 839 writers at the networks, 55 are Black and they were mostly employed at UPN and WB (NBC having 1, CBS 2, ABC 9 and FOX 3). Accepting the proposition that television can have a ‘substantive effect on the social context in which it operates’ (Harper, 1998), then the portrayal of minorities in such stories over a long period of time is significant and necessitates on-going evaluation. Aside from the mostly academic research presented above, the Screen Actors Guild of America and the NAACP have played significant roles in monitoring the place of minorities in US television as well.

Changing times From its foundation years in the 1930s, SAG has concerned itself with inequalities and detrimental representations of minorities on American

105 screens. In 1947, a special resolution was passed that the SAG commit itself to issues of inequality. An anti-discrimination committee was established and meetings held with producers, the directors guild and the writers guild with the result that an agreement was reached regarding the portrayal of Blacks (SAG, 2000a). Through the 1950s, the NAACP joined with the SAG to address issues of discriminatory casting. In the area of feature film production, SAG negotiated minority hiring reports into contracts in 1977. However it took several years to attain industry compliance, with the SAG writing in the threat of monetary penalties in contracts for failure to provide affirmative action information. SAG have their own EEO department and support another advocacy project: The Non-Traditional Casting Project, which organises conferences and forums on inclusive hiring as well as maintaining an extensive national talent bank. SAG also undertake campaigns to raise the awareness of minority hiring and commission research on the topic of cultural diversity and television. One such SAG research project undertaken by George Gerbner (2000) looked at the roles for minorities on prime time and daytime TV between 1994 and 1997. The position of African Americans was confirmed to be that they were over-represented (at 171% of their real-life proportion) and that Hispanic and Asian characters continued to be represented at less than half their statistical figure in the community. As for the type of portrayal, Gerbner seems most upset by the lack of poverty on fictional TV with only 1.4% of major roles cast as underprivileged, whereas US census data shows that 13% of people live in poverty. He is also critical of ageism in both minority and mainstream casting – an issue which actors and casting agents do indeed grapple with (see Chapter Seven).

More recently, SAG released further research which confirmed the FCC’s fears that with the absence of minority hiring rules in the late 1990s, advances made in the previous decades had come undone. For the first time since records were kept, all minority groups bar Asian/Pacific saw decreases in their proportion of roles after 1997 (though by less than 1%). Still of particular concern in the US are the on-going problems Latino actors face in securing roles. Now representing around 11% of the US population, their representation hovers around 3% (Mastro and Greenberg, 2000). In a further

106 study on Latino portrayal, when Latinos are cast, it is often in servant type roles, such as ‘Jose the busboy and Maria the maid’ (SAG, 2000b). Similar to claims from Australian DCALB actors, Latinos are occasionally asked to speak poor English and perform their ethnic background in order to conform to a rather coarse portrayal. Hollywood executives claimed in the study that a combination of low pulling power of Latino themes at the box office or in the ratings, combined with a lack of Latino ‘name’ actors, are the main reasons for the poor result. The appearance of Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas in recent years questions this assertion. Mastro and Greenberg’s (2000, p 699) study explains the lack of Latino programming as a classic tautology: ‘Latinos tend to watch programs that Whites watch, therefore, there is no need for Latino oriented shows’.

With respect to African Americans, a SAG commissioned report (Hunt, 2000) examined 384 episodes of prime time series in late 1999 on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, UPN and WB, finding an uneven distribution of Black characters in situation comedy. UPN and WB took the lion’s share of on-going roles for Blacks, even though the two networks produced less than a third of all programming. Every show on UPN featured a Black regular, whereas the once Black narrowcaster FOX had none. Such abundance of quantitative research in the States has allowed organisations such as the SAG and the NAACP to manage high profile media campaigns in support of their causes. After the drop in roles for minorities became noticeable and verifiable by the end of 1999, the NAACP began a particularly intensive promotion targeting the networks over their new season of programs, which they claim were demonstrably ‘pale’.

The NAACP itself is the USA’s oldest civil rights organisation. Begun in 1909, it works on numerous projects concurrently across a wide range of social justice issues, with a bias towards Black America. In the second half of 1999, the NAACP made television casting its high profile activity charging the networks with a whitewash and threatening a national boycott which would see minority audiences tune out of prime time. This campaign gained significant media coverage. The following months in early 2000 saw

107 agreements reached between the NAACP and networks. Even before the agreements, networks had attempted to calm the situation by adding minority actors to existing shows and sending out memos to department heads to increase diversity (Consoli, 1999). Later in 1999, there was criticism of the NAACP for not imposing more concrete terms in the agreements with network goals being vague and difficult to enforce (Stodghill, 1999). However from an Australian perspective, such agreements and their possible impacts appear significant. The accords made by the networks involve a commitment to establish minority internship programs, make explicit minority recruitment drives, double their business with minority owned companies and of most interest link executive remuneration to the fulfillment of diversity responsibilities. Within a few months of the agreements, production outcomes became tangible.

In 2000, CBS began producing a predominantly Latino series and NBC slated a similar show with a mainly Black cast. ABC was committed to deliver three shows with minority leads in them. The newer networks also committed to Black and Latino shows, with FOX hiring a diversity executive. CBS was cited as the leader among the networks with the Stephen Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) drama City of Angels. Conceived some time before the NAACP action, the hospital drama had Black executive and creative staff with half the writing team African American and 70% of the crew from minority backgrounds. Like most new shows, producer Bochco was concerned about its initial success, however in Angels case the show was also a test for culturally diverse programming in the market place. In spite of such concerns, the show gained high ratings in Black households, only just behind Who Wants to be a Millionaire and another season of the series was made (Moonves, 2000).

Aside from high production values, the success of Bochco’s diversity dramas possibly lies with their intentional yet unspectacular multiculturalism. CBS president Leslie Moonves (2000, p 18) cites such a change in programming as a shift towards the everyday in the way Black America is portrayed, stating, ‘Black series were always about being Black as opposed to being just a

108 straight melodrama that dealt with situations where the cast just happened to be Black. Which is a big difference’.

A popular and culturally diverse show in all households is of course NBC’s ER, which demonstrates the possibility of inclusive casting. The program has won at annual NAACP Image Awards where actors, films and television shows are nominated for their engagement with a culturally diverse US. The series which screened in Australia in 2000/2001 had a cast of 14 main characters, seven of whom were from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Most significant compared to Australian shows of the same genre, is that two of these seven DCALB actors on ER were born overseas. Ming-Na as Dr Chen was born in China and Goran Visnjic as Dr Kovic was born in Croatia and speaks with his natural accent – a rare occurrence in drama. In addition to these cast members is the non-disabled actress Laura Innes as Dr Weaver, whose disability has never been explained in the entire series. ER also demonstrates a breadth of inclusivity for cultural diversity.

While a show such as ER contains a disabled portrayal, shows in the US nevertheless come under fire for not representing other groups such as ‘hefty eaters, middle-aged women, non-spunky seniors, blue collar workers’ and those in poverty (Johnson, 1999b; Gerbner, 2000). In spite of the intended humour here, this is possibly one reason why technologies such as DBS and cable have taken audience share away from the networks as they are able to offer more specialised programming to particular groups. However such divisions in audiences can also be seen as a reflection of the segregation in American social life and the rejection of the liberal-pluralist ideal of integration and diversity (Gray, 2001). Gross (2001) notes that of the 10 shows most watched by Black audiences on US television, seven of these are the least watched shows by White audiences.10 Network programs which do offer attraction for both minority and White audiences are predominantly action/drama series such as ER, Chicago Hope, NYPD Blue and The Practice.

10 The main programs of overlap are Monday Night Football and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

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A show such as ER also demonstrates that while culturally diverse actors in the cast appear in everyday (though dramatic) roles, a similarly dramatic show which is all-black for example, does not feature on the networks. In a study (Entman and Rojecki, 2000) of narrowcaster programming on the Black Entertainment Network for example, the depiction of African Americans was more ‘egalitarian and inclusive’ when compared to network programs. But of course, 89% of its audience is Black America and so such portrayals are not seen by white audiences. Nevertheless, the same authors found in interviews with 251 white households that as consumers of network television, white Americans now hold ambivalent attitudes toward African Americans and that this represents a significant positive change from previous feelings of animosity and fear. This contrasts with the proposal of critics such as Gross (2001) who consider the TV drama backstage of hospitals, police stations and courthouses as merely offering white audiences the opportunity to go on a ‘weekly safari’ into gritty urban lifestyles. This understates the social efficacy of everyday, non-designated portrayals of culturally diverse professionals. While other electronic media have eroded the dominant position of network TV, and will continue to do so, network primetime TV still remains the most contested and keenly observed location for measuring and discussing the portrayal of cultural diversity and programming in the USA.

Conclusion The USA presents a model of compelling intervention by advocacy groups to transform the representation of culturally diverse groups. Using a combination of public campaigning, direct negotiation with network management and when necessary court action, groups such as the NAACP continue a civil rights tradition in bringing about change in broadcasting and cultural diversity. However the historical preeminence of African American civil rights groups has meant that it is mainly this population who have made noteworthy improvement, while South East Asian, and numbers of other DCALB groups, in particular Indigenous Americans, continue to suffer lower participation rates in employment and diminished portrayals in mainstream programming.

110 Nevertheless, the type of negotiation the NAACP recently undertook with the four networks offers constructive insight for the Australian context.

Two years after the NAACP campaign over the networks’ poor performance in cultural diversity, they have been able to seek evaluative outcomes from the networks in relation to the accords made with them in 1999. All four networks hired Diversity Vice Presidents, directly responsible to the CEO and a diversity board. At FOX and CBS, these newly created positions were seen as a core factor in ‘significantly influencing casting practices and decisions’ (NAACP, 2001, p 31). Three networks have explicitly made the outcomes of diversity performance linked to manager bonuses. FOX in particular have almost doubled the number of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds in primetime schedules. Other measurable outcomes across the four networks include at least $10 million per network spent on minority services and goods, the employment of an African American public relations company, managerial employment outreach programs to boost minority executive staff and participation in training programs.

A consistently poor outcome was the stagnation of opportunity for Indigenous Americans, in spite of a CBS telemovie which featured predominantly American Indian actors. The movie, The Lost Child, performed well critically as well as with mainstream audiences, demonstrating that such programming can translate to ‘good business for a network’ (NAACP, 2001, p 35).11 While such unambiguous commitments from networks to cultural diversity are not foreseeable in the Australian context, the USA demonstrates that both economic and cultural objectives for meeting the needs of audiences and broadcasters are open to outcomes-focused negotiations. These outcomes need not be seen as over zealous regulatory interventions, imposing upon the profit orientated business of commercial television. The negation of any such agreements or accords in Australia was a significant frustration for those involved in the cultural diversity debate of the early 1990s. The acceptance of

11 Outside of the broadcasting sector, retailer K-Mart hired singer/guitarist Jose Feliciano in TV ads to increase Hispanic business – K-Mart also employ a Chief Officer of Diversity (The Australian, 2002). Coca-Cola also announced a $1 billion plan to increase its business activities with minority and female owned companies (Jet, 2000).

111 explicit measures to promote cultural diversity as stated in Object 3(e) of the BSA and the Object of the Australian Content Standard are rejected by both industry and the regulatory body in Australia, the ABA. It is worth considering how less Anglocentric the media of the 1980s and early 1990s would have been had such measures as those in the USA been in place. However one area of concurrence between the two countries has been the increasing acknowledgement by program makers for a mainstream and everyday portrayal of cultural diversity. This means casting in a non-specific manner and avoiding previous representations which narrowed the scope of possible roles. However, some US producers embarked on such an agenda at least a decade before Australian drama producers were either able to, or wanted to. The critical mass of the American Black audience as both advocacy power broker for regulatory intervention, and as a significant marketing target should not be discounted as a major motivation for such changes in the US program production industry. In this respect, the demographics of cultural diversity and the broadcasting system in the United Kingdom bears a closer resemblance to the Australian framework. However, like the USA, stakeholders in the UK are also attempting to embrace the notion of a cultural diversity dividend in order to make multicultural programming part of an expanded mainstream.

112 Chapter Five The United Kingdom: Policy Remits For Diversity And An 'Everyday' Multiculturalism

Introduction This chapter examines recent research in the UK on multicultural representation and how top levels of UK broadcasting management demonstrate a willingness to address cultural diversity on two levels. First, broadcasters and policy agents acknowledge that cultural diversity is an integral component of programming which requires a tangible response. This has evolved to what I term a remit for everyday multiculturalism. It is a multiculturalism based on a contemporary understanding of multiculturalism which acknowledges the cultural mixing of the second and third generation into the social fabric of a changing mainstream. Second, the realization that an expanded mainstream contains market potential translates to program makers having to take responsibility for addressing culturally diverse audiences.

In the production environment in the UK, symbolic or piecemeal approaches to influencing professional practice are deemed insufficient to facilitate program production which consistently speaks to increasingly diverse audiences. Both state and commercial broadcasters in the UK have set tangible targets for transforming employment profiles, including those of creative stakeholders and management. The chapter illustrates that responses to cultural diversity and programming for industry and policy agents will continuously be challenged as the movement of people around the world continues beyond the post war immigration era. In addition to new migration trends, the consequences of an ever-increasing second generation is also addressed.

113 Television broadcasting overview: the UK Britain’s BBC was established in the early 1920s and from the outset it was a service which would provide more than entertainment. Committed to educative, religious, and democratic notions of social responsibility, the BBC model of public service broadcasting was emulated in many other countries. Television began in the late 1930s with the BBC holding on to its monopoly until the mid-1950s. Intense debate over the introduction of commercial services in Britain mirrors exactly what was to eventuate throughout Europe in the 1980s, when technology made it impossible for nations to maintain transmission borders. In addition to BBC 1 and BBC 2 (launched in 1964), commercial television, referred to as ITV or channel 3 stations, became firmly established by the early 1960s and are now controlled by a number of companies (the main ones being Thames, London Weekend, Central, Granada and Yorkshire). These companies share popular programs across the ITV network and schedule, combined with regional specific programming. The BBC experienced a sharp drop in the audience share with the introduction of ITV, which later evened out to reasonably equal audience portions, unlike Australia where the commercial sector has always dominated.

The established dual system outlined above remained intact until the 1980s when Channel 4 was created as a semi-state, semi-commercial broadcaster for servicing special interest audiences and to explore innovative programming. However it is with pay and digital services that there has been a significant transformation of British television in comparison to Australia. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Britain developed additional services such as cable and satellite. Of the three, it was Murdoch’s BskyB service which dominated. Cable has had a measured impact in the UK due to a low rate of cable infrastructure compared with the spread of easily installed satellite dishes. Alongside commercial interests, the BBC also offers its pay service across platforms. The free to air terrestrial market faced further competition in the 1990s with Channel 4 becoming an independent commercial broadcaster along with the commencement of channel 5. In the digital realm, Britain currently enjoys a burgeoning market with satellite, terrestrial and cable digital services provided by established commercial broadcasters (BskyB), and

114 public broadcasters (BBC). Interactive services are already in use and are expected to expand in coming years.

Race relations in the United Kingdom As in Australia, the impact of World War II on the availability of labour in the UK led to shortages in manufacturing and industry. Unlike most DCALB migrants to the USA and Australia, Britain’s immigrants had a relationship to its imperial past. This resulted in the arrival of migrants who were already connected to Britain. Both migrant and host, had pre-established notions or direct experience of each other. In the case of the British, these were mostly derogatory attitudes inherited from past generations interaction with those from Commonwealth states, who viewed the Asian and African migrants deprecatingly. The British TV comedy It ain’t Half Hot Mum (discussed below) provides an example of such colonial representation. However the unplanned arrival of people from the West Indies in 1948 marked the beginning of significant immigration to the United Kingdom. While Britain did not embark on the kind of strategic and mass immigration which Australia undertook, pockets of industry and state services did enter into a form of recruitment. One particularly evident location for this was the explicit recruitment of Barbadian and Jamaican immigrants to staff London’s transport network. In addition to Caribbean migration, Asian immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and East Africa eventually made up the larger proportion of post-war immigrants to Britain, who now number around 8% of the population.

With palpable discrimination against immigrants increasing through the 1950s and 1960s, action was taken by the government to tackle race-based inequity while at the same time establishing barriers to further migration to the United Kingdom. A liberal pluralist approach to cultural diversity generated race relations institutions and policy, which included a Commission for Racial Equality, a Race Relations Board, community councils and research bodies. The 1971 Immigration Act drew attention to the active role of government in shoring up Britain’s island status. The element of patriality in the Act demanded that one must prove direct parentage connection to Britain in order to reside there. British citizenship was also split into several categories with

115 the result that distinctions were made about ‘who belonged in Britain and who did not’ (Goulbourne, 1998, p 53). Thus the British government employed the dual tactic of restricting immigration, while at the same time establishing anti- discrimination legislation to help support an assimilationist policy.

Like Australia, the 1970s also saw the appearance of second generation UK immigrants who had acquired their education in British schools. As is common in other post WW II immigration countries, second generation migrants will typically be involved in cultural interaction to a greater degree than their parents. Such cultural encounters promote cultural fusion between the mainstream and migrant culture and not necessarily in a one-way fashion. With the emergence of the second generation in Britain came the formation of organised interest groups who were willing to agitate for enhanced life chances and to protest acts of explicit racism. Such political activism of the 1970s was on the one hand highly visible but on the other hand, it was also presented as militant. This civil action had connections with the civil rights movement and Black Power of the 1960s in the United States. Indeed, the term Black was also embellished with notions of pride and strength by coalitions of African-Caribbeans and Asians in Britain. The evolution of mainly young and politically active immigrant groups marked, as Brah (1996, p 47) puts it, the ‘coming of age of a new form of Asian political and cultural agnecy’. Around the same period, the Race Relations Acts of the 1960s were replaced by the Race Relations Act of 1976, which is still current today.

The current Race Relations Act 1976 allows complaints to be heard against direct and also indirect acts of discrimination. This means for example that requirements for employment, which would exclude people on ‘cultural or racial grounds’, are no longer a way for employers to limit their applicants to non-immigrant groups. Examples of this are conditions of dress, which are purely on cultural grounds, such as the wearing of a hijaab. While not particularly strenuous in comparison with the United States’ affirmative action legislation, the British Act is considered comprehensive by European standards (Ouaj, 1999). However, conscious of public sensitivity to the

116 concept of positive discrimination, the British Act makes clear that affirmative action is not permitted:

An employer cannot try to change the balance of the workforce by selecting someone mainly because she or he is from a particular racial group. This would be discrimination on racial grounds and is unlawful (Race Relations Act 1976).

There are also exceptions to the Act whereby a genuine occupational qualification may override the above statement, as in the use of performers for particular roles (such as a Black actor to play Martin Luther King). The Act was complemented by a new Commission for Racial Equality, which has broad applications relating to enforcement of the Act - and like multicultural policy in Australia - it seeks to promote awareness of multicultural issues and anti-discriminatory practice in the wider community. While such policy advanced the avenues to equity in comparison with the previous decades, the impact of Tory politics under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s resonated with conservative anti-immigration debates reminiscent of Enoch Powell.1 Brah (1996) reviews the 1980s for immigrant Britain as a time of continuing institutionalised racism and provocative measures aimed at discouraging further migration to Britain by Asian migrants. This period in race relations, which Husband (1994) terms ‘the new racism’, meshed with Thatcher’s Britain of self interest and nationalism

The 1980s also saw minority debate focus on Muslim communities with Ayotollah Khomeni calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, who was judged to have committed blasphemy with the writing and publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. What the Rushdie episode highlighted for race relations in Britain was the disputed position of Muslims and religion in a multicultural British society. As in Australia, the capacity for the state to embrace cultural divergence in multicultural policy, will clearly be tested at times. Husband (1994) notes continuing inequities in the UK are a challenge to multicultural

1 Enoch Powell was a conservative MP who in the 1960s demanded zero immigration and voluntary repatriation of migrants. Giving a speech in 1968 he foresaw ‘rivers of blood’ flowing in Britain as a result of immigration – the speech gained much publicity and a level of popular support at the time.

117 policy, which he believes prioritises cultural aspects over power relations. Husband’s analysis of British multicultural policy is similar to critical multicultural analyses in Australia. British multicultural policy is judged as a benevolent gesture, which obscures mainstream privilege. Such assessments of multicultural policy fail to consider contemporary enabling devices in the UK like explicit EEO measures. And as in Australia, an incremental reconstruction of the mainstream through second generation participation in social and cultural life has been buttressed by multicultural policy of previous years. Britain, like Australia in the 1990s, began to make efforts in the direction of workforce equity reporting.

The mobilisation of ethnic groups at the level of politics has also contributed to transforming the overall public discourse on immigration and race relations (Coopmans and Statham, 1999). Events such as the debate surrounding Rushdie’s book and a cultural renaissance of Asian hybridised popular culture contribute to the multicultural reality of urban Britain, where 27% of London’s Underground staff are from a minority community, 23% of Britain’s doctors are born overseas and two-thirds of independent local shops are owned by ethnic British (Commission for Racial Equality, 2000). The transformation of a domineering British cultural identity in post-imperial and post-colonial times is still contested at many levels. The prevailing class structure for example has seen the formation of a hybrid ethnic bourgeoisie, as comically portrayed in the TV show Goodness Gracious Me. Television sectors both commercial and public have made commitments to furthering the portrayal of cultural diversity, increasing participation in the media and attempting to better serve audiences. As a member of the European Union, Britain not only considers itself advanced in these areas, there is also agreement outside Britain that its achievements and approach to cultural diversity and the media are superior compared to continental Europe’s efforts (Ouaj, 1999).

Policy contexts The Commission for Racial Equality first highlighted the lack of cultural diversity in British media in the late 1970s, however it took the first half of the 1980s to gain acceptance for remedial measures from industry, the second

118 half of the 1980s to see implementation begin, and only in the early 1990s were changes becoming more apparent (Myant, 1995). The BBC, realising profound changes were ahead in the media landscape, also began to formulate policy for addressing a multi-racial Britain in the 1980s. The BBC’s enhanced efforts in the 1990s coincide with the arrival of The Broadcasting Act 1990 for commercial broadcasters, which saw the replacement of the Independent Broadcasting Authority with the Independent Television Commission (ITC). Channel 4 was made a non-profit corporation and provision was made for a fifth terrestrial channel. Unlike the examination of US television above, the place of as well as commercial services needs to be considered as both maintain reasonably equal audience share and the status of the BBC is of course highly significant in British broadcasting.

The BBC operates under a charter with a director general as the CEO. The 1990s at the BBC saw two changes in human resources which impacted upon cultural diversity and programming. Under outsourcing policies of Producer Choice and Extending Choice, the BBC were able to shed several thousand positions. Up until the late 1980s, the BBC was a traditional employer of long- term staff. Less than 1% of these employees were from ethnic minority backgrounds (Myant, 1995). The diminution of the BBC as an employer is likely to reduce the chances for newcomers from ethnic backgrounds, as the BBC as a state employer was more aware of EEO policy than the independent sector. On the other hand, outsourcing was a way to theoretically engage with a diverse range of independents to bring about new programming at a faster pace than in an overly bureaucratic organization.

Changes to the overall running of the broadcaster also came with the realisation that explicit policies were needed to address the lack of diversity in the workplace. An EEO department was established in 1988 and research undertaken into the portrayal of minority communities made the conclusion that much needed to be done. The BBC set itself a target in 2000 that its workforce would include 8% ethnic minorities, which is the statistical proportion of ethnic minorities in the wider population. Along with the

119 establishment of multicultural units, the target for 8% was achieved in 2000, however it is only among the general workforce. Management is far lower at 2% and of the 8% DCALB employees in the general workforce, many positions are in security, cleaning and catering. As a result, the latest Director General, Greg Dyke, made it a specific aim of his term to see general workforce diversity increase to 10%, and more importantly, for management to double to 4%. He also intends to see improvements made in culturally diverse programming by the end of 2003, by linking executive financial bonuses to achievement appraisals in the area of diversity and programming.2

The BBC’s efforts in the last five years parallel the accords which American networks have undertaken to maintain and improve their performance in areas of cultural diversity and television. Among the European Union member states, Britain’s efforts are considered an imperfect best practice model. The European Institute for the Media (Ouaj, 1999) recently conducted a comparative study of several member states’ television and their response to cultural diversity. Its results confirm the BBC as the leading institution for providing EEO in the media professions, however there was criticism that areas of digital media and further redefining of the broadcaster’s mission have taken up an inordinate amount of resources. The BBC’s establishment of specific multicultural units and setting of EEO targets lies in direct contrast to the French sector for example, which refused to participate in the study claiming multicultural research to be unnecessary and offensive. France’s model of integration by symbiosis highlights the administrative nature of British EEO policy, which reflects its foundation in a wide legislative base, necessary in the post-war era.

Having similarities with Australia’s governmental method of multicultural policy as opposed to the USA’s civil rights actions, principles for EEO are based on the Sex Discrimination Act (1975 and 1986), the above mentioned Race Relations Act (1976), the Equal Pay Act (1976), and the Disability Discrimination Act (1995). In spite of such policy, with significant numbers of

2 Speech by Greg Dyke, BBC Director General, made at the Race in the Media Awards, 7/4/2000. Copy provided by BBC in a personal email.

120 people who contribute to BBC programming being technically outside the organisation, monitoring and enforcement of EEO strategies present problems. For a start, it was ascertained in the European Institute’s study that the most common method of obtaining a position in the sector was through informal and personal contacts. With an estimated 54% of the film and TV workforce freelance and/or casualised, strategies for addressing the dynamics of such a workforce and minority employment are not apparent (Ouaj, 1999). This results in an exclusion by default whereby outreach efforts are not widely available to minorities and the requirements of experience act to deflect minority application. This highlights why the NAACP in the USA were so keen to include employment outreach programs in their accords with the major networks. However, this should not entirely devalue the recent commitments made by BBC management in regard to equity.

In order to take some control over issues of cultural diversity among its producers and freelancers, the BBC issue Programme Standards, which are considered to be part of the contractual agreement between the BBC and the production team. The standards refer to the use of language and portrayal regarding a number of areas including the disabled, women, ethnic minorities, sexual orientation and older people (BBC, 2000a). Audiences may complain to the BBC’s Programme Complaints Unit if they believe there has been a breach in a Programme Standard. Beyond this unit, the complaint may be taken to a Governors’ complaints committee for review. In 2000, the BBC also set out a range of goals in a document titled, The BBC Beyond 2000, with an obligation ‘to reflect the nations, regions and communities of the UK to themselves and to the rest of the UK’ (BBC, 2000b). This is a similar policy for accountability that was applied in 1998 when the BBC made a series of promises which would be evaluated in 2000. With regard to a promise in 1998 to represent all groups in society accurately, the BBC introduced a Diversity Database, which gives program makers access to over 2,000 individuals and organisations who represent minority interests and backgrounds (BBC, 1999). In a Statement of Promises for 1999, the BBC again set goals for reflecting a diverse United Kingdom, noting one year later in the 2000 Annual Report, (BBC, 2000c) there was still some stereotyping and under-representation.

121 And finally in April 2000, Greg Dyke appointed a Head of Diversity manager directly responsible to the executive, making cultural diversity a business objective with financial bonuses to be linked to appraisal targets (BBC, 2000d). This measure has much in common with the Accords made between the NAACP and the main networks in the US3.

ITV stations (not including Channel 4) in comparison to the BBC have been somewhat slower in addressing issues of cultural diversity and as a consequence lie behind in minority employment. This is in spite of statutory requirements under the Broadcasting Act 1990, which deal with EEO concerns. There are three conditions placed on broadcasters: 1) that non- discriminatory employment practices are followed, 2) that licensees review their job selection procedures at regular intervals and undertake monitoring and 3) that a licensee provide to the ITC statements regarding the licensee’s actions with regard to EEO policy. The Act does not offer guidance or impose codes upon licensees regarding the explicit representation of minorities on screen, nor does it refer to matters of ‘integrated casting’. These requirements for commercial broadcasters put a degree of accountability onto them for monitoring their efforts in cultural diversity and programming as well as employment – something lacking in the Australian context. While not as intense as the obligations placed on USA networks, the UK sector nevertheless has a framework in place.

Using its powers under the Act, the ITC conducted a review in 1997/1998 of ITV stations with regard to their performance in EEO policy. The commission acknowledged a ‘lot more had to be done’ and that progress was ‘uneven’ with the traditional channel 3 stations. The mean rate of employment for ethnic minorities was under 3% (ITC, 2000a). Channel 3 stations such as Carlton and London Weekend (LWT) had the healthiest figures of 6.5% and 8% respectively, while regional broadcasters had very low numbers of

3 However according to Trevor Phillips (1995, p17), a London Weekend Television manager, British producers still had some learning to do as he relates how a colleague’s negotiations with a US company fell through with a member of the American group later taking him aside and commenting ‘no-one goes into a negotiation with an all-white team’ and that this is interpreted as poor business conduct in the USA.

122 culturally diverse staff. This reflects the fact that minorities make up over 22% of the population of Greater London while regional Britain has far fewer people from culturally diverse backgrounds. However, the European Institute for the Media make the point, that even the London-based stations are well behind their community levels of diversity (Ouaj, 1999). By the next review in 1999, the overall rate lifted to 3.5% with Carlton and LWT making increases of two percent. 1999 also saw the release of data for management from culturally diverse backgrounds at 1.6%, only half a percent less than the BBC’s figure of 2%. Looking back on 1999, the ITC note that while women had moved to near parity levels in most areas, ‘ethnic minorities were heavily concentrated in non-managerial and non-programme positions’ (ITC, 2000b). Several ITV-3 companies also committed themselves to developing program portrayal policies using screen analysis and monitoring of achievements compared to policy statements.

In comparison with the channel 3 ITV stations, Channel 4 has displayed a superior commitment to cultural diversity in both the workplace and in its programming. Having a general multicultural workforce of over 9% and 5.8% for those in program and management, it is the best performer in the UK. This is however hardly surprising, as at its establishment in 1982 the remit was ‘to innovate and experiment, and to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for by ITV’ (Ouaj, 1999, p 50). Channel 4 initiated a training scheme specifically for minority groups and has actively pursued culturally diverse programming. Since being transformed into a corporation in 1993, the channel has become responsible for securing its own advertising revenue rather than receiving a levy. There has been criticism since (ITC, 2000c), that Channel 4 has subsequently taken on an overly commercial outlook in raising income with the broadcasting of too many repeats and imported material with US Black actors as a substitute for local, culturally diverse programming. In answer to these criticisms, the ITC imposed a number of licence conditions on the broadcaster in the 1998 licence reviews: Channel 4 was to increase production outside London, increase commissions of original product, limit repeat material and broadcast three hours per week of multiracial programs (ITC, 2000c). Like the multicultural SBS in Australia, the Channel 4 remit

123 easily finds the broadcaster in conflict with various minority groups (including independent producers), who become frustrated that their particular community is not being served.

The other ITV station, Channel 5, experienced a significant reduction in general staff from culturally diverse backgrounds from 10.4% in 1998 to 7.4% in 1999, however its management component is a comparatively healthy 4.5% (ITC, 2000b). The other noteworthy feature of recent ITV monitoring is the inclusion of figures for women and the disabled. In the late 1990s, both the BBC and ITV made noticeable efforts to recruit disabled and engage with representatives in the formulation of policy. One final piece of policy related to cultural diversity and programming is an Equity Model Clause prepared by the British Actors’ Equity Association. In 1999, British Equity developed EEO agreements with the BBC, ITV and Independent TV Producers with wording based on a model clause. The agreements with the three bodies essentially commit all sectors to developing and promoting policies for EEO employment, including non-traditional casting and bind the organisations to monitoring the agreement clause and its operation on an annual basis.4 It is not difficult to see the similarities between what British Equity proposed with what the Australian actors’ equity organization (the MEAA) also put forward in the early 1990s. But in the UK the proposal was accepted.

The above assessment of policy in the UK illustrates two defining features for cultural diversity and television programming. One is the relative newness of policy discourse for EEO strategies compared to the USA. The second feature is a heavy reliance on statutory bodies and organisational input for the creation of so-called top-down policy which has evolved from more established race relations policy. This doesn’t however discount the contribution made by minority activists in the 1980s for better conditions. In comparison with Australia, the collection and publication of minority monitoring and EEO data in both commercial and PSB sectors in the UK

4 British Actors’ Equity Association, Independent Producer Agreement Clause CC4 , BBC TV Agreement section 13 paragraph 1303 and ITV TV Agreement, paragraph 7. Approved 11th May 1999 by Council. Personal correspondence from British Equity to the author.

124 presents yet another example of a broadcasting environment willing to open itself up to some degree of scrutiny on the issue. The ABC and SBS in Australia do collect voluntary EEO data on the cultural background of staff and set goals for the employment of Indigenous staff. However, self initiated research on a level comparable with UK broadcasters is not so apparent.5 While the Australian Broadcasting Authority like the ITC has undertaken research in the past on cultural diversity and programming (Nugent et al, 1993; ABA, 2000), it remains a descriptive tool with no consequential follow up for policy change. This reinforces the importance of considering programming as well as the professional practice and attitude of media stakeholders in making a thicker analysis.

Programming contexts The inspiration behind Norman Leer’s Archie Bunker in his seminal family comedy All in the Family (discussed in Chapter Four) was no doubt Alf Garnett, described as a legendary bigot in the LWT show Till Death Us Do Part. Alf, played by actor Warren Mitchell, was meant to be laughed at, rather than along with, as was the case with Archie Bunker. However, as conservatives in the USA looked to Archie for confirmation of their racist attitudes, it is likely that British audiences also watched Alf with some degree of consolation (Mullan, 1996, p 9). Also in common with the early US shows was the use of humour in shows such as Mind Your Language. Such shows commonly employed humor as a device for making fun of the community. As Amos n’ Andy had used exaggerated language and mannerisms to mock Black Americans, the immigrant students at the English language school in Mind Your Language were the source of humour due to linguistic and cultural differences (Barker, 1999, p 78).

The appearance of a sustaining Black character on British TV came in 1972 with Love Thy Neighbour. In an effort to defuse the depth of racism in the UK, racist attitudes were shown as being more a matter of personal folly and possible in both the mainstream and minority culture. In the show, two

5 However, the SBS (Ang et al, 2001) recently commissioned a significant community research into attitudes towards multiculturalism, including media portrayal.

125 couples are neighbours – one couple Black the other White. The men in each case are involved in an on-going war of verbal abuse with each other while the two women on the other hand are friends. Love Thy Neighbour is memorable for its frequency of slang, somewhat similar to early US Black comedy shows – particularly common were the terms ‘sambo’, ‘nig-nog’ and ‘honky’. While both White and Black received verbal insults, it is the pejorative terms against the Black minority population which carry the most resonance with what was after all a predominantly White audience (Medhurst quoted in Mullan, 1996, p 9). Invoking coarse humour once again, the Sergeant Major in the comedy It Ain’t Half Hot Mum also expressed scandalous attitudes to the local and ‘servile’ Asians, and to his regiment of performing ‘lovely boys’. Other early drama such as Crossroads and Coronation Street failed to incorporate characters of culturally diverse backgrounds in what would have been urban and diverse communities (Manchester in the case of Coronation Street). Though in 1984, Black factory worker Shirley Armitage joined the cast of Coronation Street. Also in 1984, the Commission for Racial Equality conducted a casting survey in light of the advances Black actors had made in the USA. Their findings were that 5% of British drama roles went to Black actors (meaning both Asian and Caribbean) and that on-going roles accounted for three of the 62 actors working on programs at that time (Barker, 1999). As the 1980s witnessed the Commission’s efforts in promoting the necessity for explicit EEO measures, the BBC serial East Enders arrived in 1985 with its realistic inner London setting. The original cast and later additions to the show have included actors from culturally diverse backgrounds.

East Enders, like shows in the US with diverse casts, have at the outset characters and actors of culturally diverse backgrounds. This goes contrary to some industry opinion whereby actors from culturally diverse backgrounds will find work if by chance they are explicitly written in by a writer, or more commonly – if they happen to be right for the part at audition (see Chapter Seven). The show’s creators believed that long term serial Coronation Street suffered from being a static community and felt the East End would offer a mobile society. After conducting research in the East End, they arrived at a

126 set of core characters which included Bengali shop owners, a Jewish doctor, Caribbean father and son, and a Turkish-Cypriot café owner (Buckingham, 2000). Programs such as East Enders combine policy for cast diversity with writing that attempts to take representation beyond one-dimensional characters. But even East Enders is open to criticism with claims that its diverse roles rely on safe representations of Asian doctors and shopkeepers (Barker, 1999, p 82). Of course television writers and producers can state facts like two thirds of small shops in England are owned by Asians and one quarter of doctors are from culturally diverse backgrounds. But the reaction from audiences can nevertheless be problematic, as this comment from an African-Caribbean viewer demonstrates: ‘The thing is though, where I live, all the corner shops are owned by Asians. It is quite representative, you know, quite a true representation, but it is very stereotypical’ (Sreberny, 1999, p 23).

One significant difference between British shows such as East Enders and Australian drama from the last five years compared with US series is that inter-race relationships are not uncommon on British and Australian programs while they are very rare on US shows. In focus group audience research in the UK, the presentation of mixed marriages was noteworthy by participants: ‘I think it’s sad that you don’t get Black couples together, in America it’s acceptable but over here you tend to have a Black man with a white woman or vice versa … it happens too often for it not to be deliberate’ (Mullan, 1996, p 40). Of course what this viewer perhaps fails to realise is that it is still unacceptable for mixed marriages to be presented on most US programming. These conflicting remarks by audiences highlight the cultural specificity of how individual nations represent on-screen cultural diversity – particularly in the domain of personal relationships. The low incidence of portrayals of interracial relationships in the US corresponds to the relatively low levels of interracial marriage in the US between Black and white – while in Australia, it was noted in Chapter Two, that the incidence is quite high.

At ITV, The Bill has been an enduring police series which, like East Enders, has been given both credit and derided for its portrayal of cultural diversity. While two of Sun Hill’s officers have usually been Black or Asian, a number of

127 ‘villains’ are at times from minority groups. Once again, there is a comparison to be made with the US. A content analysis in 1996 of four weeks programming on all British terrestrial channels confirmed the portrayal of minority characters involved in crime as actually being less than their White counterparts at 6% (minority) and 8% (White) respectively (ITC, 1996a). A later study by Gunter (1998) mostly confirms the ITC results, however in a comparison with programs in the USA regarding violence and Black roles, it was found UK Blacks engaged in violent actions in the context of upholding the law (most likely as police officers). Whereas in the US, Blacks were more likely to be involved in violence associated with law-breaking.

As in the USA, media discrimination in race-based news reporting around crime and colour can lead to a sensitivity among audiences over the issue. The quantitative analysis of drama above does not bear out perceptions of minorities being overly represented in criminal contexts in drama programming. A heightened sensitivity to seeing your community portrayed in crime may also be linked to not seeing your people in more mundane, everyday, middle class or professional roles. This is then combined with an attentiveness to all roles and incidences which are related to your cultural background due to the lack of everyday portrayals. One problem however with interpretive and textual analysis such as that used by the ITC (1996a and 1996b) in the UK context, compared with the US’s wealth of quantitative research, is the method used for classifying characters and actors in such research.

A 1996 study undertaken by the ITC (1996a) examined the frequency and portrayal of ethnic minorities across all programming, regardless of origin in both fictional and factual genres. The research does not define what counts as an ethnic performer, character, guest, or presenter and relies on coding ethnicity by appearance only. As a consequence, those on television who may be from a culturally diverse background but who do not display clear signs of their ethnicity are not included. The point is raised here, because the ITC (1996b) research locates Australian television to be the least culturally diverse programming based on the appearance of actors. This correlates with the

128 early 1990s research and method carried out in Australia, which came to similar conclusions for culturally diverse casts and Australian drama.

In other audience research (Barker, 1997) involving Asian British girls and their attitudes to soap operas, the representation of ethnicity in Heartbreak High is described as ‘inherently racist’ due to a lack of Black and Asian leads (as in Indian or Pakistani). This is then conflated with the predominance of White (though possibly non-Anglo) actors as further testimony as to the shows perceived lack of cultural diversity. This said, the ITC research does contain broad insights of value, with a figure of 6% of people in UK programs from ethnic minority groups, compared with 13% in USA programs. The type of portrayal confirms the attitudes of audiences in that there is a lack of roles for minority professionals.

The British sitcom Desmonds (1989-1994) for example revolved around the comings and goings in a Black hairdressing salon and met with success, though its social setting was somewhat limiting in terms of showing a Black professional class. In contrast to this, British audience research of the 1990s showed the US comedy Cosby as offering the sort of role models for Black children not apparent on British television. Yet is was also interpreted as an unrealistic fairy tale by other viewers (Mullan, 1996, p 44). In more recent times, British shows such as The Cops and This Life have included more complex and multi-dimensional representations of ethnic characters where gender, social class and sexuality are at the forefront of the drama, with the character’s ethnicity an incidental and unspectacular detail. More recent audience research (Sreberny, 1999) also suggests that a show such as Goodness Gracious Me operates along similar lines to the US show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air in giving minority communities a space for authorship on TV as discussed in Chapter Four. At the same time, such programming speaks to a younger demographic which traverses the cultural backgrounds in which the shows are set. This correlates to youth programming in Australia which is discussed in Chapter Eight.

129 Sreberny’s (1999) research for the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC) offers insights into audience perceptions for the portrayal of ethnicity on British television – particularly fiction programming. The study deliberately set out to avoid ‘dealing with predominantly male community activists as ‘representative’ of minority ethnic opinion’ and instead accessed a range of audience members with a focus on generational and gender variables (Sreberny, 1999, p 9). As a consequence, the views of young people and women make up the majority of participants who not only took part in discussions, but filled out media diaries as well. While all programming was open for discussion, viewers required no prompting by moderators in their discussions about drama and it was these dialogues, which were the focus of the most spirited comments.

Overseas programming was also included and once again, Neighbours and Home and Away were criticised by young viewers for their apparent lack of ethnic minorities in the casts, while the presence of Blacks in US programming was regarded as encouraging. English series such as The Bill were noted as making attempts at including diverse characters, however the portrayal was seen as mostly negative and inaccurate as far as the presentation of young people from culturally diverse backgrounds. However the BBC show Goodness Gracious Me elicited some of the most valuable comments. On the one hand this comedy received much positive commentary from young people for its deliberate employment of Asian stereotypes – of both young and old. On the other hand, some Asian audience members felt discomfort at seeing themselves portrayed in rather savage caricature, which was particularly heightened when viewed with parents or elders. White audiences interpreted the program as a sign of Asian self-assertion and as an important cultural boundary-marker. Overall, the show is considered innovative and a ‘watershed in minority representation on British television’ (Sreberny, 1999. p 33). The program reflects the way in which programming made by second generation migrants displays an ease with themes of cultural specificity as well as confidence with the mainstream in creating a cultural intermixing and contributing to an expanded mainstream.

130 Production contexts The manner in which British programming is produced has moved in a similar direction to Australian programming, in that shows are now substantially commissioned from an independent production sector. In particular, the BBC and Channel 4 contract producers for a variety of programs and station commissioners act as gatekeepers. A survey of independent producers (Cottle, 1997) who are involved with minority programming found the institutional doors to program makers very tightly shut to all program producers, let alone minority producers. The capital risk of programs is such that commissioning staff tend to go with well established independents, who may have originated within the commissioning institution in the first place. Such arrangements are labeled ‘sweetheart deals’. Such deals bring with them difficulties in ascertaining who is being employed and under what criteria at the executive level. The issue of participation by minority television workers is then made problematic in an independent sector which relies on networking to get a job at lower levels in the production process. This confirms the European Institute for the Media’s conclusionz (Ouaj, 1999) that work in the industry is difficult to formally monitor for equity purposes. Aside from informal processes, which obviously impact upon what does and doesn’t get produced in an outsource production model, the channels have explicit policy and management arrangements for multicultural program production.

The BBC created a Multicultural Programmes Department in 1991 after merging its separate Asian and African-Caribbean units. This new department of broad multicultural programming lasted only four years before it was decided to remain only with an Asian unit and place Caribbean programming in the hands of independent producers and mainstream departments within the BBC. While there has been criticism of this change among Caribbean producers, in-house producers of the Asian unit still walk a balance between the advantages of professional credentials the BBC give to them, along with the dread of being branded ghetto-programming (Cottle, 1997). Cottle’s research supports the notion that a significant number of producers desire to be considered mainstream rather than minority program makers. Yet at the same time, the producers interviewed were also quick to point out the virtues

131 of a specialised program unit for delivering what the mainstream cannot. This was especially so with regard to discrete units providing a development environment, which when considering the tightly shut doors of commissioning producers, seems to be a compelling argument for their continuance.

Channel Four has since conception been considered a site for multicultural programming. However with its evolution to a commercial entity, there was the sentiment that it had failed in this area of its programming production (Cottle, 1997, p 147). Senior editors pointed out in the late 90s that the exact remit for Channel Four is to cater for interests not otherwise served – the mention of minority concerns is not explicitly mentioned. However as the ITC licence review for Channel Four resolved, it would now have to explicitly address multicultural programming as a licence condition (ITC, 2000c). For the BBC, as a fully-fledged public service broadcaster, such an overt guideline probably sits more comfortably with its overall mission. However with Channel Four, the demands of being a commercial enterprise with a public service remit have created a specific approach to the issue, as expressed by Channel Four’s CEO:

Here [at C4] it’s different. We’re a commercial channel, but still with a public service remit. And here, and in ITV, what’s driving people is the recognition that, first of all, the general mission [is] that we should cover properly. But also, we’re a largely urban, pretty young channel. And large parts of the urban audiences in all the big cities are African- Caribbean or Asian. And so, if we’re not reflecting and tapping into their agenda, we are going to see our audience sort of fall off the end. So it’s marketing reasons. So the BBC has a social function plus a licence fee function; we’ve got a social function plus we’ve got an audience driven function … if people stop watching, we can’t get advertising (Sreberny, 1999, p 91).

As a consequence, Channel Four’s idea of the place of multicultural programming and production falls into step with notions of mainstreaming. This philosophy was reflected in a 1999 speech by the new Head of Channel Four, Michael Jackson, who suggested that the minority sector was outdated and a multicultural Britain needed no special slots for minority audiences. C4’s commissioning Multicultural Editor, Patrick Young (2000) claims there has

132 been a degree of improvement in culturally diverse representations across most British broadcasters. However he feels the superior portrayals have come from non-fiction programming (such as news, documentary and entertainment) where portrayals are most likely to be everyday. He cites the UK Big Brother series (from 2000) as a case in point when in the final week, the housemates were composed of a White working class ‘scouser’, an Irish lesbian ex-nun and a Black father of three. He states ‘the effortless multiculturalism and their ease of presence in each other’s company is what program makers need to aspire to’ (Young, 2000). Some years earlier, interviews with BBC and independent minority producers (Cottle, 1997) had hinted at such an approach as a way of including representations of minorities which are at the same time both complex and ordinary. This sits well with the notion of a mundane or everyday concept of multiculturalism discussed throughout the thesis. What is surprising in the case of British television production though, is that such an approach has become policy in the last few years among a wide variety of stakeholders including the BBC, Channel 4 and independent producers. In the case of Australian television policy discourse, such explicit references and clear articulations of an everyday multiculturalism are mostly absent. However amongst creative stakeholders in the independent production industry, everyday portrayals of cultural diversity are recognized as desirable (see Part Three).

Conclusion: a remit for everyday multiculturalism The BBC and Channel Four wish to de-problematise multiculturalism in their programming, in much the same way that Australian programs have evolved towards an everyday multiculturalism. The BBC’s Director General expressed such sentiment in a speech made in April 2000:

I want a BBC where diversity is seen as an asset not an issue or a problem. For young people today British culture is already diverse and heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multi-everything. For them multiculturalism is not about political correctness but is simply part of the furniture of their everyday lives (Dyke, 2000).

133 At Channel Four, Director of Programmes Tim Garden stated that multicultural programming policy was no longer about specific programs for minority groups, but about ‘innovative programmes for the mainstream reflecting society as it is, modern and cosmopolitan’. The channel’s commissioning editor of multicultural programs went on to say ‘There’s sort of an old view of Britain and there’s a new view of Britain, and I think the new view sees very much Britain as a hybrid society’ (Sreberny, 1997, p 91). Both Channel Four’s and the BBC’s invitations to producers in applying for program commissions are framed with attracting a broad audience (ie: market share) in mind. At the same time, a producer should be ‘daring and original’ but also give more general themes a ‘multicultural texture’ (Channel Four, 2000). At the BBC, an executive producer expressed it this way:

I’d like to see these communities in all their aspects on the tele … not just when they’re victims and villains but all the incidental stuff … just let them find script-writers who know how Black and Asian people operate, but don’t turn them into issues every time they’re on television. They go to Tescos, they make dinner, they do their homework, they draw pensions, they do all those really banal things everyone else does, so that’s where they need to be shown (quoted in Cottle, 1997, p 53).

At ITV the message is a little different, but it still reflects faith in an encompassing, though diverse, audience as the market to serve, as David Liddiment (2000), Director of Programmes at ITV, has stated:

programmes we make like Coronation Street will still be the lingua franca that brings disparate groups of people together to enjoy a common experience in an increasingly fragmented society … There’s no longer any need for single channels to try to meet mass and minority needs at the same time. We are now more responsive to our audience. Important minority programmes are part of the mix, but they are more on merit than by regulatory dictate.

The shift to cultural diversity as good business sense is of course not new in multicultural policy, however it has its critics. Allowing popular and market driven formulae to dominate entertainment programming may close off spaces to important, though not necessarily low audience appeal, minority programming. Independent producers express hope for incorporating their

134 stories into the mainstream and at the same time express concerns over the opportunities to present realistic and truthful issues to that mainstream audience (Cottle, 1997, p 113). This unremitting dilemma over balancing the exceptional with the routine in the representation of minority groups on audience driven television is well articulated in the following comment by Sreberny (1999, p 117).

There is a rather depressing synergy between the positive sense of becoming more hybrid that comes from the audience, followed by demands for more African-Caribbean and Asian faces across the range of media output, and rhetoric that seems to consign social responsibility simply to the marketplace.

It may be attractive for program management to evoke the discourses of hybrid identities and post-colonial states in support of mainstream multicultural programming, rather than relying on former progressive liberal ideologies and minority politics. However this also requires support for minority actors, writers and producers to create precedents for multicultural work. Also, monitoring of minorities in the British production sector is inadequate due to the diffuse organisation of employment in television production.

Sreberny’s (1999) suggestions for coordinated longitudinal research involving broadcasters, independent production companies and regulatory authorities would provide a more eloquent interpretation of the output made by both mainstream and minority production organizations. Such measures are also highly relevant for the Australian context.. A more elaborate monitoring research goes beyond the use of EEO data. Being able to analyse program volume and range may point to remedial action required to promote complexity and depth of portrayal, as well as increased participation for people from culturally diverse backgrounds – rather than just meeting EEO targets. A multifarious range of diverse stories which are able to capture the experience of diverse peoples without falling prey to burdened representations is the challenge for programmers, particularly in drama on mainstream channels. Such strategies need not be a call for quotas.

135

What program strategies in the UK demonstrate is that the current juncture in post World War II multicultural evolution in countries such as England and Australia may be in a transitory stage, where ethnicity experienced as migrant is keenly divided by generational shift and class background. The needs and demands model of early multicultural policy has little application to second and third generation migrants whose everyday experience of social interaction may be far removed from their parents’ struggles in the decades before. Changes in media diversity and availability coupled with second or third generation migrants’ access to the mainstream media (or alternatives) may also be different to the recently arrived immigrant’s requirements for pragmatic information or homeland media.

Such sliding understandings of what constitutes an immigrant identity make for the very challenges mentioned above and in Chapter Two, in capturing the mundane and the exceptional (which we all experience) in the life of people from culturally diverse backgrounds. The arrival of South East Asian refugees in the 1970s in Australia and more recently, arrivals from former eastern European nations continue the process of settlement, possible hardship and a negotiated adjustment. This of course is in addition to considerable numbers of non-refugee migrants, who settle for professional and family migration reasons. But what of cultural diversity and television programming in a nation where two main cultural groups influence the conception and policies of cultural diversity? New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori and the European Pakeha mainstream have, in recent years, developed a palpable official and cultural biculturalism in comparison to multiculturalism in the US, the UK and Australia. How this has impacted on television programming in a deregulated broadcasting environment is the focus of the next chapter.

136 Chapter Six New Zealand: Biculturalism And Targeted Subsidies

Television Broadcasting Overview1 Television broadcasting started later in New Zealand than in most Western countries. It began in 1960 essentially as a public service broadcaster funded by a mix of advertising and licence fees, much like the European model. The two state channels (TV1 and later TV2) held a monopoly and displayed similar values for comprehensive and socially responsible broadcasting as the BBC. Television remained fairly stable until the late 1980s, when New Zealand embarked upon a wide ranging program of deregulation of state services, including broadcasting. In place of the two state public-service channels, the state broadcaster was recast as an entirely commercial enterprise with an obligation to return a dividend to its ‘owners’ – the New Zealand government. A new agency, New Zealand On Air (NZOA) was formed to harvest the broadcasting licence fee with the remit to fund culturally diverse local programming, as well as programming vulnerable to market failure, such as drama, comedy, minority programming and documentaries. The $NZ110 licence fee paid by viewers to fund NZOA was abandoned in 2000 in favour of government funding from consolidated revenue. The late 1980s also saw the arrival of a privately owned broadcaster (TV3). Originally in New Zealand hands, it was bought-out by Canadian company Canwest after collapsing in its early stages – the government having to remove foreign ownership rules in order to attract investment for the ailing channel. Added to these three free to air channels was TV4 (also Canwest) in 1997. And in 1998, Australian owned Prime television began with a collection of five networked regional channels. In 2000, a Labour government indicated a commitment to reinvigorate public service broadcasting principles into the original state owned channels.

The profile of the five channels do differ, but as expected in a country with the population of New Zealand, broadcasters rely heavily on imports from the USA, Australia and the UK. Of the two state channels, TV1 is considered the

1 I thank Geoff Lealand and Roger Horrocks for their assistance in developing this outline of the broadcasting system in New Zealand.

137 most like Britain’s BBC or Australia’s ABC, screening local content, educational shows and quality drama. TV2 is more entertainment orientated and more dependent on foreign product. The local long running serial Shortland Street stands out as a notable exception in a mostly imported drama schedule. Of the three private channels, the nationally broadcast TV3 relies somewhat on USA product and has managed to maintain local non- fiction programming, though very little local drama. Of the two non-national free to air channels, TV4’s youth oriented profile was based upon a large amount of foreign product - its capturing of the cricket from TV3 in 1997 as a start up measure being the only point of significant local programming. More recently it has been refigured as a music video channel. Prime offers a combination of imported shows from the UK, USA and Australia while broadcasting a percentage of regional specific programming. As for pay services, Sky Network (not related to BskyB) and Saturn delivered a packet of channels in 2000, showing mostly imported product. However in spite of New Zealand’s deregulated and privatised structure, the state funded NZOA has managed to establish a presence for local drama which reflects the country’s biculturalism and a Pacific cultural hybridity.

Bicultural New Zealand Unlike Australia, Britain and the United States, New Zealand’s demand for immigrant labour in the post-WW II period was more easily accommodated by skilled migrants from Northern European countries such as the (Winkelmann, 2000). Semi-skilled labour was to be found amongst Maori workers moving to urban centres, complemented by migrants from neighbouring Pacific Islands. As a consequence, the significant transformation in demographics caused by immigrants from non-Anglo backgrounds was not apparent in New Zealand as compared to the other three countries. The lower numbers of mainly White immigrants to New Zealand compared with the numbers and diversity of Australia’s migrant program for example meant that New Zealand’s non-Pacific immigration programs initially received less political and policy controversy.

138 What has been significant about New Zealand’s history of cultural diversity is the relationship between the European population and the Maori, where they are the central culturally diverse community while smaller immigrant groups are peripheral (Mulgan, 1993). Of course minority immigrant history in New Zealand is by no means unimportant, however the focus on cultural diversity in New Zealand policy and in the realm of creative arts has in the last two decades been more about developing a sense of biculturalism rather than multiculturalism. And like Australia and debates around multiculturalism, New Zealand also has undergone an extended period of contestation over the issue of biculturalism.

New Zealand’s early settlement by Pakeha was a combination of exploration, trade and missionary efforts. While the colonial settlement of New Zealand shares facets of Australia’s settlement by the British, Pearson (1990) notes that a vital difference in the case of New Zealand was that the ‘raw edge’ of imperial power was blunted. Maintaining a degree of autonomy, Pearson maintains that Maori were well organised in dealing with the settlers compared to episodes of colonial settlement in other countries. In the decades before mass settlement, an ‘uneasy co-existence’ existed and this has its effects today. Through the early 1800s, it was assumed that Maori people would be assimilated into the mainstream in much the same way as Indigenous people were expected to assimilate with Australian Anglo culture. In spite of this, in 1840 the Crown made a treaty with Maori people – the Treaty of Waitangi. The compact instituted British sovereignty and authority over the administration of land sales while preserving the traditional authority of the chiefs, guaranteeing them continued possession of land and treasures. However a Eurocentric interpretation of the treaty in the century to come saw the Maori people lose much of their land and powers (Williams, 1996). In spite of this, Maori people maintained a sense of independence through a combination of resistance and collaboration. In the latter half of the 20th century, interpretation of the 1840 Treaty combined with a history of Maori autonomy became reflected in the resurgence of Maori political activity and accompanying legislative rights.

139 An emphasis on the relationship between Pakeha and Maori should not however negate the presence of significant Chinese, Indian and South Pacific Island immigration to New Zealand. Of importance is the intransigent political response to non-Pacific immigrant groups in the early 1900s, who made up a small proportion of the population. The antagonism directed towards early Asian immigration by restrictive immigration policy also mirrors the response of the other countries under study. While access for Pacific Islanders to New Zealand was more liberal due to legal and economic ties, their status in New Zealand was, and continues to be, a matter of contention and conflict among Maori and Pakeha alike. However, the defining component of cultural diversity continues to be focused on Maori/Pakeha relations. In the 1970s, the Treaty of Waitangi was examined with regard to its impact on the Crown and its institutions. Initially, debate over land and fishing rights then expanded to include a wide-ranging reappraisal of the place of Maori culture in New Zealand mainstream life. Alongside political agendas for creating a partnership based on the Treaty, Maori people also asserted a greater influence on the cultural life of New Zealand. Maori writers, artists and film makers exercised a presence in the 1980s which contributed to the decline of colonial significance in both economic and cultural foundations (Williams, 1996).

The recognition of Maori as an official language, explicit equity measures combined with self-determination interests are the sort of outcomes more palpable than what critics (Hage 1998; Stratton 1998) refer to as a cosmetic multiculturalism in Australia. In addition, the constitutional approach to Maori progress in terms of equity and self-determination has more in common with the United States civil rights movement than the Australian policy approach. At the same time, it should be noted that in Australia, no one or two particular minority groups, including Indigenous Australia, constitute the size or impact the Maori have in New Zealand. An adverse consequence of New Zealand’s biculturalism though is the increased level of marginalisation for immigrant groups, such as more recently arrived immigrants from South East Asia. In the late 1990s, Asian immigration became a target for immigration debate instigated by racist statements from the nationalist New Zealand First Party,

140 not unlike the One Nation party in Australia. Munshi (1998, p 109) describes such episodes in New Zealand as illustrative of ‘the keen tussle between multiculturalism and biculturalism’ as competing frameworks of discourse for cultural diversity in New Zealand.

Biculturalism in New Zealand functions in two major ways. The first is the adaptation of mainstream institutions for Maori needs. Sectors such as health and education for example may instigate provisions for addressing the particular needs of Maori people. The second implication of biculturalism is the development of specifically Maori institutions to ‘share the authority defined in the treaty’ (Durie, 1995, p 35). This translates to the development of a redefined mainstream, where both Maori and Pakeha share in defining the cultural, social and economic interests of the nation. Putting these two implications into practice in the television industry, New Zealand’s core funding body expects that productions it funds will take into account the reality of New Zealand’s cultural diversity. NZOA also supports an independent Maori agency (Te Mangai Paho) focused on promoting Maori language and culture for broadcasting to Maori and mainstream audiences alike. Te Mangai Paho is administered by the Maori ministry Te Puni Kokiri.

However, Pakeha identity as part of that partnership is still not accepted throughout New Zealand, where its meaning is not always agreed upon. It can be employed by those involved in policy and intellectual debate who believe in reparative justice, to those who see it as an offensive label aimed at the White intruder (Spoonley, 1995). Marotta (2000, p 182) takes a more healing view of New Zealand’s cultural mixing and employing Gadamer’s notion of the ‘fusions of horizons’ he states:

Cultural horizons are always able to incorporate different horizons to achieve a wider, more unifying ‘fusion of horizons’. Thus, a bicultural self fuses the cultures of Maori and Pakeha to contruct an in-between hybrid perspective.

This does not necessarily translate to Maori culture relinquishing constructions of self identity, or that it is so porous that important cultural

141 boundaries are lost to new hybrid perspectives. In addition to such ideas of cultural mixing, is the false notion that the Maori are a homogeneous people representing a unified Maori culture which can amalgamate with Pakeha culture. What New Zealand biculturalism demonstrates along with the other three countries’ tussles with multiculturalism is the ‘salience of political pluralism, material equality and cultural hybridity for contemporary democratic struggle’ (Bell and McLennan, 1995, p 6). Such struggles give rise to strategies for equity and cultural expression such as an independent Maori media and school curriculum.

Policy contexts In contrast to the UK’s and Australia’s varying degrees of broadcasting regulation, New Zealand is placed at the extreme end of a deregulated marketplace. Having limited local production, New Zealand must rely on program imports of high cost productions. The situation for local programming in a deregulated New Zealand is not comparable with the deregulated United States however, which by the nature of its enormous domestic markets easily sustains high production volume and local content levels. In a 10 country comparative study of local content and broadcasting diversity, New Zealand was found to have an extensively deregulated market, second only to the United States (NZOA, 1999a). As such, there are no legislative requirements placed upon broadcasters in New Zealand for local content or types of programming and no restrictions on foreign ownership. This has not however seen the disappearance of local programs in New Zealand. Indeed, local content increased by 265% six years after deregulation and programming has been expanded with the addition of new services and longer transmission hours (NZOA, 1999b). Compared to other countries in this research though, local content in New Zealand still accounts for less than one quarter of transmission time. While the total hours of content increased after deregulation, the proportion of local content in the schedule has barely changed since 1989 and is continually under threat of diminishing. Likewise, it is arguable whether increased consumer choice has translated to enhanced content diversity.

142 Such market competition has also resulted in scheduling practices which see a flourishing of populist programming made up of magazine, reality and repeat programs while innovative programming goes to late night slots (Lealand, 2000). In such an environment, it is perhaps surprising that high cost programming is produced at all over more cost efficient local shows such as sport, news and current affairs. More risky, minority or cost intensive programming is subsequently supported by the funding body NZOA, created at the same time as deregulation came into being, as a counter measure for ensuring program production which may otherwise be under threat in such a market driven environment.

As the former public service type broadcasters TV1 and TV2 became profit seeking channels, a separate discussion of public and private broadcasters is somewhat redundant in discussing New Zealand up to the early 2000s.2 While all five terrestrial stations have decidedly marked program mixes, drama and minority programming is really dependent on the relationship between NZOA, the program producer, and the broadcaster. This differs from Australia and the USA where there is a close relationship between producer and commercial network only. In these two markets, most commercial drama is outsourced to independent production companies. State funding is mostly involved in public broadcasting programs and while the state has in the past funded commercial programming as well, it has not been an ongoing policy.3 In New Zealand however, NZOA represents the foremost influence in explicitly promoting cultural diversity in television programming. NZOA has the responsibility to carry out cultural policy tasks set out in section 36 of the Broadcasting Act to ‘reflect and develop New Zealand identity and culture’. This is to be achieved by promoting programs about New Zealand, promoting Maori language and culture and ensuring that programs are of interest to women, children, the disabled, other minorities and ethnic minorities. The ‘special needs’ nature of the Act, and the relegation of such programming to a singular body at first

2 I accept that the re-orientation of Television New Zealand towards a ‘public service’ remit has taken place under the Labor government in the years since 2000. 3 The Commercial Television Production Fund being the notable example, discussed in Chapter Three.

143 appears in contrast to Britain’s mainstreaming approach. However this is not entirely the case.

As well as setting out the cultural mandates for NZOA, the Act also lays down certain matters to be considered in order to guarantee (as far as possible) that a program will be broadcast. Section 39 addresses prospective program makers in conjunction with section 36 (on cultural diversity) to clarify that funding will be connected to a program’s potential audience and the likelihood of it being broadcast. The purpose of Section 39 is that minority programming, while sought after, will need to satisfy a mainstream audience by designing market potential into any submission for funding. In effect, minorities become ‘part of the mainstream primetime programming, their faces and concerns become part of the public sphere of popular culture’ (Bell, 1995a, p 114). Critics of such a concept for cultural diversity and television programming like Roscoe (2000) suggest that the result of ‘mainstreaming the margins’ is that minority programming suffers as it becomes more acceptable to mass audience sensibilities. Roscoe claims that bringing marginal faces, stories and drama to the centre, under the pressures of a state funded agency with market considerations attached, leads to programs which focus on minority culture as exotic. However, such attitudes to mainstreaming should also take into consideration the desires of minority program makers and actors, who may actually yearn for such mainstream opportunities.

This is not to say that complex stories and thought provoking programs should be absent from TV schedules, or that ‘marginal’ portrayals in the mainstream need be exotic to court audiences. But the quarantining of state funded minority programming to non-popular and risky programs alone contains the risk in itself of delegating minority programming to the exceptional, problematic or special interest alone. The dilemma facing cultural diversity and local programming in New Zealand stems from the fact that there is no public service broadcaster to guarantee a space for so called risky and challenging programming. The very limiting size of the domestic market also makes it uncertain that commercial interests would commit to particularly innovative programming. This doesn’t mean such programming is entirely

144 lacking on New Zealand screens, but media commentators and innovative program makers have grounds for anxiety.

145 New Zealand on Air Treating NZOA as the principal site of study for culturally diverse programming aligns with this thesis’ focus on drama. While programming such as children’s, Maori, ethnic, arts and documentary are independently produced and near 100% subsidised by NZOA, all drama programming is nevertheless subsidised by 60% through NZOA (NZOA, 1998). This makes NZOA an important element in the consideration of cultural diversity and drama programming, particularly with its requirements for the inclusion of cultural diversity within programs. While entertainment and information programs in New Zealand such as Gone Fishing, Changing Rooms, Behind the Wheel or the talent show Get Your Act Together, accounted for a large portion of local popular content in 1999/2000, no studies examining the level and type of portrayal in popular entertainment shows similar to research in the USA have been undertaken. Nor are EEO figures for the composition of broadcasting and production workplaces readily at hand in New Zealand as they are in the UK. However, NZOA does have EEO requirements stipulated as part of its funding support and NZOA itself has a robust research agenda which covers extensive content analysis and audience research. Minority (Maori) producer and industry perspectives have also been reviewed and will be monitored over the coming years (NZOA, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c).

NZOA cite as critical the task of encouraging broadcasters ‘to maintain a sustained commitment to programs reflecting New Zealand identity, cultural diversity and regional mix’ (NZOA, 2000a). With a yearly budget of around NZ$87 million, it is not surprising that in its 1999 annual report, the overall tone is gloomy, with the agency predicting it may not be able to sustain previous levels of production support. During 1998, only seven hours of first run NZOA supported drama was screened (though 182 hours of combined first run drama/comedy was screened in total). In 1999, total drama/comedy hours were slightly less at 179, with the stripped serial Shortland Street on TV2 (originally a NZOA funded program) accounting for a significant block of these hours. On TV1, the period drama Greenstone, a detective series, and the first two 30 minute Pacific Island dramas made to date, The Overstayer and Matou Uma made their premieres, thus signifying a multicultural rather

146 than strictly bicultural New Zealand in funding for NZOA. TV3 on the other hand virtually withdrew from commissioning drama or comedy. In spite of such sparse production activity, New Zealand’s biculturalism is to be observed in NZOA’s policies relating to Maori programming. While its legislative commitment is 6% of funding, it has supported the domain to levels around 12-14%.

NZOA has a dual strategy for supporting Maori culture by a) assisting the independent Maori agency, Te Mangai Paho, and b) the funding of mainstream projects which feature Maori talent within them. Te Mangai Paho ‘concentrates on the promotion of Maori language broadcasting initiatives for a Maori audience’ while projects accessible to a wider audience ‘help to increase Maori presence in the mainstream media and present Maori language, culture, and issues in regular programming’ (NZOA, 2000b, my italics). NZOA also expects that program makers include Maori language, culture and viewpoints where relevant across all programming. In 1999, TV1,2,3 and 4 all screened distinctive Maori shows including two youth series (Mai Time and Pukana) and documentary projects, making a total of 196 hours of first run Maori programming. In a 1999 audience research (NZOA, 1999c) of 750 viewers, over 80% of people were aware of NZOA’s function in promoting Maori culture and identity, the same level of awareness for its function to promote New Zealand identity and culture in its totality. In 2000, NZOA decided to re-evaluate its policies with regard to the mainstream component of its Maori television programming. The key objectives of the new strategy are to ‘enhance the on-screen outcomes of mainstream Maori programming … improve the broadcast experience for Maori practitioners [and] to develop and maintain understanding of relevant Maori issues, as well as relationships with Maori’ (NZOA, 2000c). The review identifies some of the problems faced by minority producers similar to those identified in UK research (Cottle, 1997). The review sets a series of goals and action points, and importantly timeframes for their implementation. This policy strategy reflects that taken by the BBC and resonates with the network accords in the USA, in that evaluation of policy is included with regard to cultural diversity in their programming and employment structures.

147

In 2000/2001, the most important action points in the NZOA review were: appointment of a Maori executive producer to act as mentor, guidelines for non-Maori producers to undertake mentor relationships, bringing Maori programming into prime time by holding discussions with broadcasters, introduce a Maori Quota for prime time and instigating a regular and diverse schedule of meetings and consultations with Maori stakeholders. There are also formal criteria laid down for what constitutes a Maori Project with the criteria closely resembling the creative elements test in the Australian Content Standard. The test requires a Maori project to have a core Maori creative team. Where a non-Maori company is involved, a Maori executive producer/mentor should be attached. The subject matter should be relevant to Maori culture and there should be a balance of positive and non-stereotypical subjects across the quota range. While such policy is promising and includes evaluations against undertakings, it represents a small proportion of total programming, and may not overcome the issue of Maori programs absence in prime time. After all, it is finally up to broadcasters to decide and consequently control what gets broadcast and when.

Maori programming combined with activities in documentary and drama place NZOA as either a compensatory funding body for addressing the mainstream’s inability to produce such programming, or, a complimentary constituent to the mainstream. Bell (1995b, p 192) believes what deregulation has done is to entrust a singular body to be the televisual ‘guardian of the “national imaginary”’, in a country which clearly claims its bicultural status as preferable. In a nation of about 4 million people, where an import such as ER cost NZ$6,000 per hour in the late 1990s to broadcast over local drama which costs up to 50 times that amount, the efforts of NZOA are crucial in promoting New Zealand’s distinctive cultural diversity on TV. NZOA could be helpfully viewed as development assistance for culturally diverse programming in the high-risk marketplace of commercial television, as it tries to leverage prime time opportunities for expensive or ‘marginal’ product. Such programs and the creative teams behind them will at least have a chance to extend their skill base, while negotiating a cultural space. And from audience research carried

148 out by NZOA (2000d, 2002), it would seem that audiences are beginning to value local drama as long as it is high quality.

Audiences, programming and production New Zealand audiences seem to have suffered a quality crisis in past years with their drama, if NZOA’s audience survey (NZOA, 2000d) is any indication. While the vast majority of New Zealanders wish to see more local content, there are certain barriers stopping audiences from watching New Zealand drama. Poor acting, low production budgets, an unpolished look and a lack of emotional impact were cited by respondents. However this changed in 1999/2000 with the screening of dramas displaying higher production values (Duggan, Greenstone, Jackson’s Wharf), which would be more familiar to audiences used to imported product. This is a noteworthy point as later in the study it is revealed that audiences value ‘high quality’ in local drama over and above seeing New Zealand culture, if local content is being discussed. British drama is rated as best followed by American, with Australian drama receiving mixed comments.

Production values such as flat sound and poor acting in New Zealand shows are mixed with a feeling of cultural cringe for New Zealanders seeing and hearing themselves (one participant stating overseas actors are also ‘better looking’). Previously, the predominance of polished overseas product created such an overwhelming norm that a shock of the familiar would be experienced at hearing a New Zealand accent on a drama program (Horrocks, 1995). However with the advent of international co-productions and the improvements in local drama, the case of a distinctive New Zealand look and sound has diminished, as the following comments illustrate:

Jackon’s Wharf looks and sounds Australian. The cop with the big round hat looks Australian not New Zealand (Male European).

I thought Jackson’s Wharf was Australian the first time I saw it (Female European).

And it works the other way as well:

149

Some Australian ones (dramas) almost have a New Zealand feel to them. Like having Jay (Laga’aia) in Water Rats (Male Maori) (NZOA, 2000d, p 12).

The above comments hint at a broader trend in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where there is now a blurring between the local and the international in audio visual product, as overseas production units, actors and their respective genres locate elsewhere for financial or creative reasons (programs and films such as Xena: Warrior Princess or The Piano in New Zealand and Farscape or The Matrix in Australia being examples). An issue for cultural diversity and programming in New Zealand is whether local diversity becomes subsumed into off-shore productions, as well as being muted in local drama due to the internationalising of audience taste. However according to NZOA audience research, New Zealanders display a fairly typical attitude for viewers everywhere in preferring well made local content over imports and attaching meaning to the portrayal of a local cultural diversity. In a later survey (NZOA, 2002), attitudes to drama had improved since the previous research in 2000, with programs such as Street Legal and The Strip providing more contemporary and diverse representations of New Zealand culture.

The representation of New Zealand’s ethnic diversity and having well known actors are high on the list of priorities for audiences. Related to questions of cultural identity, participants have high regard for fictional characters to be role models, whether it be children’s, mainstream or culturally diverse programming. This reflects the comments of Indigenous performers in Australian drama who act as both role models for aspiring performers and examples of successful casting to the production industry. In new Zealand, there seems to be a fine line for audiences between what represents a fair and acceptable portrayal, and the representation of minority groups in negatively reinforcing roles – even though such portrayals are recognisable to such audiences. While not initially a television program, the film Once Were Warriors was found to be hurtful and upsetting for some Maori (NZOA, 2000d). Likewise, Pacific Islander participants were not pleased to see an

150 Islander in a cleaning role, despite them accepting that this is a common experience in real life. Such a comment echoes that of Asian shop owners in the UK who accept the social reality of their prominence as shop owners, but are nevertheless uncomfortable when seeing themselves portrayed as such.

More promising, there was comment from culturally diverse groups that instances of minority representation gave pleasure for the simple, though powerful reason of being included: ‘Shortland Street had a Fijian girl getting an operation. Back in Fiji they loved it, it’s something you can relate to’ (Male, Pacific Islander) (NZOA, 2000d, p 23). Overall, participants believed that a model of proportional representation of New Zealand’s ethnic minorities in television programs would be acceptable, an attitude not widely held or accepted in the other countries under study. In 2002, around two thirds of audiences had positive attitudes towards NZOA making explicit commitments to Maori programming in mainstream productions, in addition to existing support for distinctive Maori programming (NZOA, 2002, p 68).

When it came to specific Maori programming, Europeans had contrasting sentiments ranging from resentment to enjoyment and interest (with older participants less enthusiastic about such programming). In comparison, most Maori have an understandably keen interest in culturally specific programming, while other Maori would prefer such programming to be a part of the mainstream for all New Zealanders to have access to (Maori specific programming as well as some mainstream programs do not sub-title Maori dialogue, making it difficult for non-Maori speaking European and Maori alike, to engage with such programs, NZOA, 2000d).4

A mainstream program in 2000 was the drama series Street Legal, funded with NZOA support and screened on TV2. Not only does it star Water Rats veteran Jay Laga’aia (from Pacific Island background), but it casts him in the role of a confident and successful lawyer (a criticism of minority audiences

4 Bearing in mind Maori is an official language in New Zealand.

151 was the scarcity of successful characters in local drama). Adopting the philosophy of character first, ethnicity second, Laga’aia says of his part:

He’s a lawyer first and Polynesian second. That’s why you won’t find tapa clothes hanging up in his office. You’ll just find diplomas and a hard attitude … we make no excuses for the fact we sometimes speak like Islanders, because we are (quoted in Cleave, 2000, p 5).

Street Legal is set in what was originally a working-class area of Auckland, later populated by Pacific Islanders, which has since transformed into the ubiquitous café precinct common to culturally diverse inner-city locations. The show is reminiscent of inner-city dramas made in most countries, in that as the location moves closer to a city’s centre, the more cosmopolitan and hence culturally diverse it may be (one recalls the Australian ABC program Wildside). Set in a very different New Zealand landscape but of cultural significance, the mainstream drama series Jackons Wharf was in its second run of production in 2000.

The 20 part series recalls comments made by audiences for their desire to see ‘recognisably’ New Zealand locations – meaning the sort of places New Zealand has become well known for as a tourist destination. NZOA (2000e, p 3) develop drama in line with government cultural policy which aims to contribute to ‘cultural tourism by taking New Zealand to the world’. The global marketing of New Zealand landscapes has long been a valued commodity across a range of markets. Turner (2000, p 226) wryly points out that a ‘way of saying what it is like living in the export zone of settler colonization - is that the New Zealander is a tourist at home’. The local significance of a ‘recognisable’ New Zealand heartland is expressed by Jo Tyndall, former NZOA CEO:

(Jackson’s Wharf) is set in a small town, and there is a strong sentiment that in New Zealand, in one way or another, we all come from a small town – where there are simpler times, stronger values and a sense of community … it embraces and showcases the things we hold near and dear about ourselves as New Zealanders (Tyndall, 2000).

152 This sentimental longing for the untainted small town is not exclusive to urban bound New Zealanders though, as the producers/creators of , Seachange and attest to in Australia. And like Australia, it is a yearning for a past and way of life experienced mostly by Europeans. However the veneration of both the rural location or small town and the past it signifies have profoundly different meanings and conceptions for the Indigenous groups. The histories of settlement and the mainstream’s relationship to the Indigene in America, Australia and New Zealand will always sit uncomfortably with mainstream drama set in the present, particularly in country/rural settings. Nevertheless, Jacksons Wharf attempts to be inclusive, as John Barnett, managing director for the show’s production company, South Pacific, states:

The cast is reflective of New Zealand society. About a quarter of the cast are Maori or Polynesian and a large number of stories are based around the fact that Jacksons Wharf was settled by the Jacksons in the 1800s but Maori have been living there for much longer … NZOA look to see that drama meets requirements for programs to be reflective of New Zealand society (Barnett, 2000).

Like all dramas put forward by producers for NZOA funding, as a significant stakeholder NZOA anticipates the inclusion of Maori and other minority elements in story and cast. This requirement does not operate as a quota at de facto level or otherwise. The inclusion of Maori talent has become very much part of the everyday life for producers and audiences in New Zealand television. This can be traced back to the history of Maori claims for social and political rights based on the Treaty of Waitangi and government recognition for those rights. The depth of inclusiveness resultant from the Treaty is still very much contested at many levels, however resultant policy efforts have had their consequences. Such outcomes of policy funded drama for an inclusive New Zealand are to be found in another program, Shortland Street, produced by South Pacific and originally funded by NZOA. Shortland Street has left an enduring mark on New Zealand television and presents an interesting study in government subsidised local content within a commercial marketplace.

153 Running for over 10 years, the medical serial Shortland Street was initially funded by the then recently formed NZOA as a risky foray into long form drama. In 1991, New Zealand youth had little choice but to watch overseas productions for the lack of local ones. They also preferred US programming with research showing they had reservations about warming to local actors combined with a reluctance to hear local accents (Horrocks, 1995). In order to combat negative expectations, Shortland Street adopted a mixed genre or hybrid approach to the , taking American influences and imbuing the program with distinctive New Zealand attributes, including a cast which reflected the country’s cultural diversity. Early criticisms of poor acting and unreal storylines on the show are typical of the reception for most new serials, which can often take two years to become established. By the mid-1990s, young audiences showed a dramatic change in attitude toward the show and its longevity attests to this support. More interesting is the fact that NZOA progressively reduced funding for the show after four years, as it became more successful, thus making it a stand alone independent production and obviously a profitable one.

Such success was not expected when it was conceived. Considered a controversial initiative for NZOA at the time, its good intentions in the direction of launching local youth drama were met with a cynical response from some who saw it as a ‘sellout’ to commercial type programming. Horrocks (1995) notes how debate occurred over whether an Americanised soap was the type of project a public service type funding body should be investing in. The show’s anticipation of commercial success was also unpopular with advocates of public service broadcasting ideals, who conflate state funding with exclusively anti-commercial and quality programming. Nearly 10 years later though, the initial support from NZOA is described as pivotal by South Pacific Pictures managing director:

The creation of NZOA gave South Pacific the opportunity to make Shortland Street, which created the talent necessary to make Hercules on a day to day basis, which created the confidence for US studios to back Peter Jackson’s considerable talent into Lord of the Rings, which

154 convinced Sony to listen to the New Zealand producer and director of Vertical Limits, and locate here (Barnett, 2000).

In the case of Shortland Street, NZOA not only allowed the show to build an established audience, it gave the production company the initial support required to go on with the show. The show provided ongoing technical and creative training for a small New Zealand industry and has been the starting place for a very large majority of New Zealand actors, who have progressed to both national and international projects at home and overseas (Onfilm, 2000). Barnett estimates that 50% of crews on the productions are Maori or Polynesian. He concedes that there is a shortfall in minority writers, producers and directors but that NZOA and the New Zealand Film Commission have instigated measures to address this, such as funding for a Maori TV drama series. As for actors on Shortland Street, no hard data exists for New Zealand programs but an extended viewing of the show demonstrates a diversity of faces not seen on many other serial programs produced in the region (of particular significance in 2000 was the presence of two continuing roles played by Australian actors of South East Asian background). Barnett also believes that finding suitable actors from Maori and Polynesian background has become easier than locating actors of European background. This is in direct contrast to the sentiments of Australian producers who claim that there is still difficulty in getting access to a range of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds (see next chapter). Barnett (2000) believes the reason for the ease of access to actors of Pacific cultural background in New Zealand may be due to their ‘tradition of oral performance, an emphasis from funding bodies to achieve better representation and the commercial recognition of the size and diversity of various demographics’.

In NZOA (1999c) audience research, Shortland Street has become well accepted across a range of demographics beyond the youth audience. A cross section of Maori, other ethnic minority and Pakeha viewers felt the show had made significant improvements in production standards, dealt with contemporary issues, and looked more professional. This is due in part to the show’s long standing policy of diverse casting and its setting in multicultural

155 Auckland. Not only popular with Maori and Pakeha audiences in New Zealand, the program is watched with enthusiasm throughout the Pacific Island region in places such as Fiji and The Cook Islands. For the show’s producers, explicitly including cultural diversity through cast and script in Shortland Street was not motivated by NZOA policy or good intentions alone. As has been raised several times in this study, the idea of building in cultural diversity as a market advantage need not be viewed with mistrust by industry stakeholders, if it is implemented at the outset by an informed understanding of culturally diverse groups. Barnett (2000) sees the cultural diversity in Shortland Street as ‘setting the show apart from overseas programs and helps our veracity in the New Zealand market’.

Conclusion A program such as Shortland Street challenges established ideas about the role state funding plays in programming which must compete in a market orientated environment. The balance of trying to promote a nationally diverse culture in television production with the pragmatics of market demands presents its challenges. Commenting on the struggle, Horrocks (1996, p 57) puts it well:

Local content now exists within an extremely complex field of forces. The possible funding of each program involves a negotiation in terms of its commercial value to the broadcaster and its social or cultural value to NZOA, as it pursues the aims set out in its legislation.

Shortland Street demonstrates the capacity of a dedicated funding body to step in at the crucial development phase in order to make a space for programming which is risky for a small market. Such a model of funding is reminiscent of the Commercial Television Production Fund examined in Chapter Three. The fact that Shortland Street is popular, culturally diverse, pro-social and profitable confirms the possibilities for assisted programming in a de-regulated market. However the exceptionality of Shortland Street as being the one show which Lealand (2000, p 87) describes as ‘occupying a central place in the New Zealand consciousness’ presents the danger of placing all one’s eggs in the one basket. In a discussion paper on drama,

156 NZOA (2000e) express frustration at the lack of network enthusiasm for prolonging a series after its first production run, noting that Shortland Street has been the main exception to this pattern. Without network backing, a reduction in funding at NZOA, jeopardizes both second run series and future shows in attracting the crucial start-up finance. As a consequence, culturally diverse programming in such an environment continues to be overly- dependent on state support. Aside from more popular genres, less commercial product may be prevented from evolving as well. While changes in NZOA funding don’t entirely put at risk the inclusive nature of New Zealand’s bicultural broadcasting environment, a show such as Shortland Street rested on the kind of support that a body such as NZOA can provide.

Unlike the mostly unprotected drama production sector in New Zealand, Australian drama production continues to be encouraged by quotas for local content on commercial channels in addition to the commissioning support of a public broadcasting sector. As audience research in the UK illustrated, the perception in the UK of popular programming from Australia in the early 1990s was that it was the least ‘ethnic looking’ of all. As pointed out in Chapter Three, media critics, past research and ethnic groups in Australia stated exactly this in the early 1990s as well. Part Three of the thesis explores cultural diversity and television programming in Australia with a focus on the commercial television production industry in the late 1990s and up to 2001.

Chapter Seven contextualises policy and industry developments of the 1990s related to cultural diversity and presents key primary research undertaken within the commercial drama television industry. In order to determine the status of cultural diversity and commercial television drama at the end of the 1990s, a casting survey of all Australian commercial drama programs broadcast in 1999 was carried out. The latter half of Chapter Seven explores the issue further through industry interviews in order to explain both improvements made in the previous years and the obstacles faced by some groups in gaining a place on popular drama programs. Chapter Eight complements the interview material of Chapter Seven with a study of three two-week periods of programming. The analyses presented in Chapter Eight

157 examine the textual position and type of portrayal with regard to cultural diversity and mainstream television.

158 PART THREE AUSTRALIAN POPULAR DRAMA: MAINSTREAMING THE MULTICULTURAL

Chapter Seven Australian Drama Casting and Production Perspectives

Introduction The primary research presented here is the first since the early 1990s to offer a survey of actors and industry professionals related to casting, writing and producing for commercial television drama. Bertone et al (2000, p 9) note that there is limited statistical information concerning the number of DCALB professionals working in Australian television and that ‘the [existing] literature is dated’. This chapter provides results of a questionnaire survey undertaken in Australia of leading actors appearing in all drama on commercial programming in 1999, to determine their cultural background1. The volume of casting data, amount of programming analysed and breadth of interview material in this study allows for assessment and analysis of cultural diversity and drama programming. This relates to both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the representation of cultural diversity on television.

Academic and media research of the early 1990s examined in Chapter Three (Jakubowicz et al, 1994; Bell, 1993; Nugent et al, 1993; CLC, 1992a, Goodall et al, 1990), established a disparity between cultural diversity in the Australian community with the representation of that diversity on commercial television screens. With the exception of the Nugent et al research (carried out by the ABA), all of these researchers were critical of the commercial media industry and the regulatory process regarding the representation of cultural diversity. Australian drama in particular received much criticism for its seemingly Anglo portrayal of Australian society. The content analyses of television drama contained in the research of Goodall et al (1990), Bell (1993), and Nugent et al (1993), found very few instances of either actors from culturally diverse

1 See Appendix One for a copy of the questionnaire administered to actors.

159 backgrounds or engagement with multicultural stories. However, these previous studies have their limitations.

In the case of Goodall et al (1990) and Nugent et al (1993), only one week’s programming was analysed, Jakubowicz et al undertook a two-week analysis of programming while Bell recorded and reported on three two-week periods. The CLC research undertook a two-week analysis as well as attempting to cover a longer period of ‘a few years’ by presenting ‘informal’ research on the number of culturally diverse roles in several commercial drama programs. However, all of these research projects were based on program content analyses, which employed an observational methodology of programming to determine the cultural diversity of casts and characters in order to make evaluations of multiculturalism and the media. The ethnicity of the actors and the characters they played in these studies was based upon whether the actor/character was ‘recognisably non-Anglo’. Only the Nugent et al (1993) research provides a clearer explanation of methodology. In this research, two coders watched drama programs to determine ‘frequency of appearance’ and ‘nature of appearance’ to classify the cultural background of the character and so establish an indication of representation of cultural diversity in Australian drama. The two coders’ results were then compared to obtain a reliability factor for their coding (which was close to 100% agreement). The key weakness for this methodology is its dependence on taking data from screen appearance alone. Classifying the ethnicity of an actor on their ‘looks’ is unreliable, as it depends largely on an individual’s subjective opinion on what phenotypic and verbal characteristics constitute an actor or character’s cultural background. While Bell (1993) for example uses terms such as an ‘Anglo-centric’ media and other studies discuss the lack of ‘NESB’ roles in Australian drama, their conclusions are based on information and data which leaves open the possibility that non-Anglo or NESB actors were on screen in the early 1990s, but not included in the assessments. What these early studies do provide, is the ability to make limited conclusions about how culturally diverse the media appeared at the time.

160 Probably the best known of the above studies in the area of multiculturalism and the media is the 1994 book Racism, Ethnicity and the Media (Jakubowicz et al, 1994) which researched cultural diversity across a broad range of issues within print and broadcast media, news, advertising, the SBS and children’s TV. The research was a combination of smaller research programs conducted over a four-year period (1990-1994) with the aim of revealing ‘media practices as well as their social context’ in the construction of ethnicity in the media. This was achieved through interviews with minority and mainstream media workers, contribution to media seminars, audience surveys, content analysis of programming, as well as textual analysis of particular programs. The core argument put forward by the authors is that mainstream Australian media is essentially discriminatory and Anglocentric. While a limited investigation of media industry practice was undertaken, little insight was presented regarding the decision making processes of key creative stakeholders within the television drama industry as they relate to the portrayal of cultural diversity. Nor did the Jakubowicz et al (1994) research or other studies mentioned above present a comprehensive survey of casting practices or a wide range of interview material with DCALB actors who were working in commercial drama at the time.

While previous studies and industry perspectives inform the research to a significant extent, the relationship of the study to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 is also important. One of its ten Objects, Object 3(e) is ‘to promote the role of broadcasting services in developing and reflecting a sense of Australian identity, character and cultural diversity’. This wording is also to be found in the Object of the Australian Content Standard (1999), which prescribes amounts of first release drama for commercial television amongst other things. As noted in Chapter Three, both the Act and the Australian Content Standard express the aspiration that broadcasters facilitate the development and representation of cultural diversity in the community, through their programming. The industrial indicator of employment is taken as an important measure of movement towards this policy goal. In Part Two of this thesis, the employment status of culturally diverse populations in the media in the USA and the UK was shown to be a key factor in framing policy

161 and influencing employment practices to address issues of cultural diversity and television programming.

The chapter establishes that while significant improvements occurred in the late 1990s for both the participation and representation of actors of culturally diverse backgrounds, an engagement with Asian stories and characters, particularly in commercial drama programming, was still lagging behind the social reality in 2000. This chapter explores the possible reasons for this, concluding that creative stakeholders have a lack of awareness as to how to incorporate Asian stories and roles into drama, compared to the more sophisticated and everyday portrayals of cultural diversity which are now predominant for other DCALB populations. This chapter also suggests that cultural factors, post-secondary education, and family life also play an important role in determining the extent to which aspirant actors are able to secure ongoing work in television drama.

Casting survey: method The core component of this study is a casting survey of Australian commercial drama series and serials that were produced in July to October, 1999. The focus is on sustaining or lead cast, meaning those members of the cast who regularly appear in the programs. The programs surveyed were: Water Rats and Stingers broadcast on the Nine Network, Blue Heelers, All Saints and Home and Away broadcast on the , and Neighbours and Breakers broadcast on Network Ten (as of week beginning November 8th 1999, Breakers was no longer screened on Ten).

A questionnaire survey was administered to the cast on-site at the productions concerned. With assistance from the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, four weeks was spent in Sydney and Melbourne overseeing the administration of the survey to as many performers as possible. Actors of culturally diverse backgrounds were divided into three groups for the purpose of the study. DCALB 1 for those actors born overseas in a NES country (Non English Speaking) and DCALB 2 for those actors born in Australia with at least one parent born in an NES country (generally referred to as the second

162 generation). Actors of Aboriginal or Torres Straits Islander background were given the opportunity to identify themselves as Indigenous in a separate question. Actors were also given the opportunity to write their own comments on the issue of casting for a culturally diverse Australia. Survey responses were received and processed up until December 1999. Interviews were also conducted with actors and creative stakeholders in the latter half of 19992.

Casting survey: results From a possible total of 88 ongoing actors appearing in all dramas, the ethnicity of 65 performers was established. Fifty (77%) were of English speaking background, 13 (20%) were of NES background, made up of two DCALB 1 (3%) and 11 DCALB 2 actors (17%). Two performers (3%) were from Aboriginal background (see Chart A below).

Figure 7.1: Ethnicity of Actors Indigenous- DCALB 2-born in Australian Australia 3% 17%

DCALB 1-born overseas 3%

Anglo-Australian 77%

The two most significant results compared with research from the early 1990s (CLC, 1992a; OMA, 1993; Bostock, 1993) is the presence of Aboriginal performers in sustaining roles (up from none to 3%) and a total NES presence of 20%, compared with 2% in the previous decade. The NES outcome requires some discussion. It is significant that only 2 (or 3%) of actors were born in non-English speaking countries, according to this study. ABS data for

2 A list of interviewees is contained in Appendix Two.

163 1998 (ABS, 1998) shows that the comparable percentage for this group in the Australian community is approximately 14%. Clearly, those born overseas in non-English speaking countries are not well represented on Australian commercial drama. A more positive result is that for second generation actors or ‘DCALB 2’ actors. According to the ABS figures, Australians who have one or both parents born in a non-English speaking country made up approximately 10% of the total population in 1998. Thus the 17% figure in this survey represents a better than statistical approximation than occurs in the community.

Table A provides three comparisons for performers of culturally diverse backgrounds: 1) the results of the CLC (1992a) survey; 2) the current survey based on a response rate of 74%; 3) the statistical representation of these groups in the general population.

Figure 7.2: Comparison of Studies Group 1992 1999 Survey General Survey * Population DCALB 1 2 % 3 % 14 % DCALB 2 - 17 % 10 % Indigenous 0 % 3 % 2 % * The figure of 2% in the MEAA research represents both DCALB 1 and 2.

Table A demonstrates the continuing poor representation of NES actors born overseas working in drama as compared the general population. The remaining two groups fare much better. The other significant data collected was the actual countries DCALB performers came from. Table B on page 163 shows the regional origins of actors.

164 Figure 7.3: Family Background by Region Region Mother Father Pacific 1 1 Western Europe 1 3 Eastern Europe 3 3 Mediterranean 2 1 Middle East 0 1 Scandinavia 0 2

The research shows that no sustaining actor was from an Asian background. This compares with an Asian-born population in Australia of 5% and an estimated Asian second generation population of 2%. The research supports the notion that it is children from the longer established migrant groups who are able to negotiate the profession and industry obstacles.

Self-Identification of ethnicity Respondents were given the opportunity to state how they identified themselves with regard to ethnicity. This was included as a means of supporting the classification of birthplace data. The reasoning here is that a person whose mother or father was born in a non-English speaking country may or may not have an affiliation with their parents’ birthplace and culture.

Figure 7.4: Self Identification

no answer Indg/Aust 5% 3%

Multicultural 11%

Anglo- Australian or Australian 81%

165 What is clear from Figure 7.4 is that a number of DCALB actors self identify as simply Australian, rather than for example, German or German-Australian. The underlying reasons for the result are complex. How and why people choose to identify their cultural background is discussed in Chapters Two and Eight. However a connection can be made between the results of the above chart and some of the comments made by actors in interview. A number of DCALB actors commented that they were ‘simply Australian’, and did not wish to take on roles that were concerned with their ethnicity. A female actor of Greek-Cypriot background with significant experience on several programs, felt she would have been in danger of being stereotyped had she ever taken on an ethnic specific role. Likewise, when asked if he was pleased to be playing a non-specific role, a male actor of second generation commented: ‘I love it – I was born here and feel Australian. Even my humour is Australian’. DCALB actors noted in interview and commented in writing that they do not wish to have their ethnic background foregrounded. They desire to play non- specific roles:

Once an actor of non-Anglo background plays a role that is say, the typical Italian guy for some time, the industry will only see him as that character (Female DCALB actor3 Breakers).

I find that the casting of non-Anglo characters fails to understand that the character lives and operates in the same world as the Anglo characters. I am an Australian of Italian background - that is an incidental matter in the course of my life, but in roles I play that background is often everything (Male DCALB actor Stingers).

To not be cast any differently from Anglo background actors is what a multicultural society is (Female DCALB actor Neighbours).

It should be emphasised that the great majority of DCALB actors surveyed are second generation Australians and the overwhelming non-specific nature of roles for DCALB actors accords with their wishes. Such a portrayal also reflects the cultural mixing of second generation migrants across the wider community. The connection between these actor sentiments with the concept of mainstreaming and the lack of lead Asian actors is discussed below, as

3 Where the actor’s name is not used, it signifies they wished to remain anonymous.

166 well as why guest roles are more likely to utilise such cultural elements as accent, attitude and appearance in order to engage with a multicultural story.

Industry perspectives: Indigenous casting This research shows that since the early 1990s, there has been a noticeable increase in the participation of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian commercial television drama. In particular, there has been an increase in the number of Indigenous performers. Not only were there two sustaining roles for this group on commercial drama, but they were of a non- specific nature. In the case of actor Aaron Pederson, from Water Rats, he progressed from TV magazine programs with the ABC to co-presenting Gladiators. After appearing in mini-series screened on commercial television and other shows, Pederson was seen back on the ABC in 1998/99 in his detective role in Wildside which led to his leading role as Detective Michael Reilly in Water Rats. Pederson is keen to present Indigenous people as filling ‘everyday roles in society and at sophisticated levels’ (quoted in Johnston, 1999, p 2). He situates his role on Water Rats as being an ‘important breakthrough for his people’ and recognises that it ‘was a big move for a commercial network to cast an Indigenous actor in a mainstream role (and) a very positive one’ (quoted in New Idea, 1999, p 23).

Actor Heath Bergersen, the other Indigenous actor in a lead role, had a history in theatre and television series before working on Breakers. While Bergersen’s character Reuben occasionally had story lines concerned with his cultural background, the actor was consulted on these stories and was pleased with his role and portrayal in the program:

It was all up to me anyway, what the stories about Reuben’s past should be. The writers didn’t really have any sure idea for his background. The writer rang me up and we spent an hour on the phone and she got some ideas from our yarn. It came out pretty good in the episodes. They also showed the Stolen Generation - you know, real Australian history. They put everything in there. There was one story though. A mate rips off 50 dollars from the flat and I get caught putting it back and I react by taking off. Aaron (Pederson) did phone me up and thought I shouldn’t have let them do that story. He reckoned the stealing idea and Aboriginals took us back to early days. But I know the

167 character and how the audience would be feeling. They’ll feel sympathetic for Rueben, they already know he’s a good guy and done the right thing (Bergersen, 1999).

Both Indigenous actors declared the importance of getting an Indigenous presence on the screen as a way of communicating to their own people and program makers that Aboriginal performers need not play culturally specific roles. Until Bergersen’s previous on-going role in Sweat in 1996, no Aboriginal actor had appeared in the list of beginning credits of a television series or serial (opening credits are reserved for the main on-going cast, while guest cast, regardless of duration on the show, are relegated to the end credits). The fact that in 1999 there were three drama programs on TV with Indigenous actors in the main cast went some way to dispelling the notion of Aboriginal characters being on the peripheral (Aaron Pederson was also appearing in the ABC drama Wildside at the time). Their representation in multiple and familiar drama narratives with professional challenges, relationships, sex, and personal crisis bolsters their arrival as mainstream characters. The fact that two shows (Breakers and Wildside) also grappled with issues related to the actors’ cultural background demonstrates a confidence by both actor and program producer to include issues of specific cultural identity as well as the mainstream and everyday portrayal.

Industry perspectives: the acting profession and casting For Indigenous and DCALB actors, the 1999 survey research suggests that sustainer level work opportunities exist, but actors were unlikely to have an accent4 or be from a South East Asian background. All casting directors interviewed were unanimous in the belief that there had been a significant increase in the number of tertiary trained acting graduates from culturally diverse backgrounds throughout the 1990s, and that this was a major factor in the diversity of casts in the late 1990s:

In the last five years there has been a noticeable increase in actors from non-Anglo backgrounds graduating from the acting schools.

4 Bertone et al’s (2000, p xii) survey of theatre based actors also found that first generation DCALB actors with accents experience more problems gaining employment than second generation actors, who do not have an accent.

168 Theatre has played a part, but the schools have understood the need to encourage young actors with potential from a variety of backgrounds to train (Anne Robinson, Casting Director for Mullinars) (Robinson, 1999).

I think the drama schools like QUT, NIDA, Nepean and so on have opened their eyes to the opportunities of having an ethnic mix (Kim Saville, Casting Director for Faith Martin & Associates) (Seville, 1999).

The drama schools’ reasons for having a diverse cohort are principally motivated by two considerations. Firstly, different plays, stories and program genres obviously require a mix of people in gender, personality, and physical appearance. Secondly, the potential marketability of the students is important when it comes time to securing an agent and eventual work in the industry. Having a diverse range of graduates translates to a greater choice for agents, who also seek to fulfil a range of choices for their clients. However when it comes to recruitment, acting is certainly not like most other businesses. Opportunities for work are obtained through a mixture of conventional requirements, such as qualifications and experience, and non-conventional requirements. Unlike most professions, factors such as physical appearance, voice and personality at auditions (the acting equivalent of the job interview) are very important and explicitly so. While these factors are no doubt influential when interview panels make final choices in the recruitment of any job, it is very unlikely and probably discriminatory if a tertiary trained teacher, engineer, lawyer or nurse would be explicitly discussed in such terms by an interview panel. The nuances of achieving success for obtaining a role begin before an actor has begun professional training. Diane Eden (head of QUT’s Acting Discipline) and her department must like other acting schools choose a mere fraction from the hundreds of aspirants each year:

The only way to achieve an excellent graduate is to pay enormous attention to the intake. If we can’t honestly say we think that with training an applicant has a chance of getting an agent and breaking into the business, we don't take them on, we won't lie. Integrity for an acting school must begin at these intake auditions, not at the end of the course. This is not a comfortable process because we are playing God with their young lives during the auditions - but we rely on our experience and our love of the profession to make these decisions. This concept of marketability is not driven by soapies wanting

169 handsome little be-bop boys and girls. It is driven by the knowledge that if they are skilled enough, they will eventually get a job, probably on film or television. The students can be attractive, they can be big, thin, ugly, short, tall, Italian or Icelandic or Indigenous, or anything. They have to offer something strong, interesting, and reliable. And they need to demonstrate a disciplined professional attitude. It's a tough, tough industry, run by even tougher people (Eden, 1999).

These comments help to illustrate both the competitive nature of securing an acting career and give an insight to the tacit impenetrability of the industry. The difficulty in obtaining well-paid and ongoing work as an actor is widely understood. It is therefore not surprising that aspiring actors from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds must accept, like all other acting students, that choosing acting as a profession indicates a level of struggle not usually associated with most other careers. The drama training institutions have by de facto given the Australian film and television industry much of the cultural diversity now apparent on our screens. The motivation of university departments to actively recruit a diverse cohort is based on the knowledge that the mainstream market seeks diverse talent, and this now includes cultural diversity. In a follow up casting survey to the one undertaken for this study (Jacka, 2002), the main drama schools all reported significant numbers of students from culturally diverse backgrounds, with the Victoria College of the Arts (VCA) having established an Aboriginal Access Program. How much of a contribution any implicit affirmative-action recruiting has made is difficult to gauge, as the institutions do not keep formal records of the cultural background of their intakes.5 However, as argued in Chapter Two, multicultural policy from the Agenda onwards has served to permeate, albeit gradually, an awareness of multiculturalism as part of mainstream life and an expectation that cultural diversity is integral to Australian culture and work. Tony Knight, head of acting at the National Institute for Dramatic Arts (NIDA) describes the changes which have come about by taking an active role in changing what was once a largely Anglo domain:

5 However NIDA provided information on students’ cultural background to Bertone et al (2000, p 31) indicating that 11% of students at that time were first generation DCALB migrants, while a further 21% of students were second generation DCLAB migrants.

170 We’ve always been aware that we needed to make more of an effort particularly with regard to Aboriginal people. And it had to be in consultation with Indigenous people and with the University of New South Wales about what we could do. The biggest difference that came though was when Michael Leslie was running the school in WA associated with WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts). What was wonderful about Michael’s school was that it was a stepping stone – it was a valuable place and it was our main source of getting Indigenous people into our school. It’s not like we do a reverse discrimination. Look to be absolutely honest there has been some of that and I’m not ashamed of doing it, and saying it. These students are disadvantaged. They do not have the same advantages that the mainstream may have. But it’s not just Indigenous students, it’s students from Asian and other backgrounds as well. I’ve been doing this job for a long time, back in the late 70s it was pretty Anglo-Saxon. But slowly you started to see the influence of Greeks and Italians. So the effects of multiculturalism gradually started to have their effects. And that has steadily grown. In any one year there is now a huge mixture of ethnic backgrounds in our intake (Knight, 1999).

Graduating from an acting course or training in theatre is one method of finally getting a ‘gig’ on television. Of course many working actors have used other methods such as crossing over from advertising and modeling, or in rare cases, they have been ‘discovered’. Actors themselves are very aware of the pressures placed on them for conforming to socially constructed concepts of attractiveness and personality. The demands of an industry which can lean towards outward appearance for employment criteria further complicates the issue of casting and cultural diversity. Tony Knight again:

The beauty myth still operates in the industry of course. But regarding our intake, we don’t look at that at all. It’s not relevant. It would be silly to say it doesn’t exist however. But that’s a pressure that comes from outside. Particularly from television but not so much in film and theatre. I guess all the television shows have it, whether somebody is ‘sexy’ or not. And that changes as easily as fashion. You do run along side it but you don’t pay too much attention to it. I find that whole beauty thing a bit of a horror actually. Someone will be passed over for a role and some else will be cast based on their looks alone (Knight, 1999).

Interviews with casting directors indicate that the pressures which operate in choosing drama school students in very competitive courses are reflected in how choices are made in the ‘tough’ casting business for choosing actors in television drama roles. In a study of four of Australia’s premier actor training

171 institutions, Leahy (1994) followed the audition process for hopeful students wishing to enroll at NIDA, VCA, The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and the University of Western Sydney – Nepean, in 1993. While the study is now somewhat dated, it showed that successful applicants were most likely to come from higher socio-economic backgrounds and have had exposure to what she terms ‘elite culture’.6 A weakness in Leahy’s comments for application to this research however is that her study was primarily in context to mainstream theatre. She makes a correlation between the theatre’s roots in societal privilege and elite culture with actor training institutions, whereby they operate in an implicit manner to reproduce dominant cultural values as evidenced by a privileged student intake. In the late 1990s though, the drama schools were aware of the career aspirations of potential students in the direction of film and television, as opposed to a theatrical career (QUT’s head of acting noted a strong shift in student preferences towards film and/or TV jobs in the 1990s). While the compression of content in high and low culture has taken place, occupational differences between acting for mainstream theatre and acting for popular television drama are very evident. The schools’ close ties with agents and a focus on marketability also suggests a change from preparing actors for a ‘life on the stage’ to gaining the all important first professional role in front of the camera. However in spite of Leahy’s theatre focus, her finding that actor training institutions were beginning to attempt an intake balance with regard to gender, ‘type’ and ethnicity of students 10 years ago, corresponds to comments made by the acting school heads for this research who asserted this was taking place in the late 1990s.

During Leahy’s (1994, p 14) observations of auditions and interviews it was found that auditioning students who were ‘in control of themselves and the situation’ were most likely to proceed in the selection process. As a companion to this, all institutions placed ‘great emphasis on all elements of

6 Leahy employs Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to demonstrate how the schools implicitly restrict their intake to those students who have access to ‘the kinds of educational and social privileges … that constitute ‘cultural capital’ (Leahy, 1994, p 43). There is some validity to her position, as well spoken English combined with an appreciation of ‘the arts’ was shown to assist some applicants in making a favourable impression on selection panels.

172 language facility, reading, writing, listening and speaking’ (Leahy, 1994, p 26). Given such criteria, there is little surprise that applicants with poor English skills from either Anglo backgrounds or culturally diverse backgrounds struggle with the intimidating audition process. What these demands for success in being chosen for an acting course demonstrate is the difficulty an overseas born student would encounter whose English and social skills were not in the top percentile. While non-English speaking high school students achieve high scores on pre-university entry tests, academic mastery is not a core criterion in securing an acting career. The combination of language and interpersonal skills based on cultural familiarity, as well as the obvious desire to perform, make acting an unlikely career for some groups based on social and cultural factors. However, when the cultural proximity of the homeland and family life are blended with other cultural and mainstream influences, something which is marked among second generation young people, the complex social negotiations which occur in the audition process are more easily and confidently navigated than by students from NES countries.

Outside the acting schools, the casting profession is well aware of the issue of cultural diversity and, in particular, the hardships faced in getting female actors into a range of roles. There was general agreement among casting directors that in some ways, women and older actors face more discrimination in the industry than those of culturally diverse backgrounds:

There will be an endless search for a man in a role for which there is no concrete reason that it has to be a man, and then someone might finally suggest ‘what about a woman’. If we honestly want to reflect our society and workplaces as they appear on TV, then you have to ask – ‘why can’t this role be a women? (Robinson, 1999).

Strong roles for women - where is that being discussed or debated within the industry? It goes for older actors too. Youth seems to be the priority for the networks. Older actors in Australia feel their experience is not respected. Think how different it is for old footballers! In many shows there is the feeling that our more experienced actors are playing ‘second fiddle’ to the often inexperienced younger ones. Look at the UK and the USA, where a greater range of actors are accorded respect and reverence (Jan Russ, Casting Director for Grundy Television) (Russ, 1999).

173

Noticeably absent from screens are actors from Asian background and actors from culturally diverse backgrounds who speak with an accent. The question needs to be asked: are these actors missing training opportunities and being discriminated against in the industry? The relationship between the drama schools and the lack of actors with accents or Asian actors could be explained because DCALB students of the acting schools from the previous 10 to 15 years will predominantly be young second or third generation migrants from European background, who will most likely speak without an accent. As Asian immigration is more recent than the wave of post-war European immigration, the proportional number of young second generation migrants from Asian background is less than those from NES European background (ABS, 2003c). This is certainly the situation in the wider community where first generation overseas born migrants of Asian background significantly outnumber their Australian born children.

There is tension within the industry though when it comes to explaining the lack of Asian actors on-screen, particularly in non-specific roles. Personnel associated with casting point out that the available pool of experienced actors from Asian backgrounds is smaller than for other DCALB groups. Advocacy groups and actors from Asian backgrounds are vigorous in their rebuttal of this argument. The several experienced second generation actors of Asian background interviewed related a continuing lack of opportunities even at the audition level, compared with their Anglo-Australian colleagues. Upon finally gaining an audition call-up, they are often asked to perform their ethnicity, such as playing the role of a recently arrived migrant who speaks with an accent. The issue is complicated further in that producers and network Executive Producers constantly seek an alchemy for success in casting, hopefully turning the program they are developing into an elusive hit show. And so they may screen-test up to 300 actors for 10 available roles, taking into consideration a range of tacit factors aside from acting skill in order to have a balanced cast. Such factors as body shape, appearance and personality of short listed cast may be endlessly pondered in the hope of achieving the right look for the show. Whether an ‘Asian look’ is acceptable in

174 the balance of a lead cast among key industry stakeholders is a vexing question.

Based on the results of the 1999 casting survey and comments from actors, the answer to the above question seems to be that an Asian look remains problematic. While the pool of available actors from culturally diverse backgrounds may be of a limiting size, the chances for significant employment also rely upon a complex set of subjective circumstances. Casting directors often used language such as an actor being ‘right’ for the role, having the ‘essence’ of the character, and particularly in television in many roles, having ‘good looks’, which a network marketing department can utilise. But the point was also made, that actors of Anglo background also complain of not being cast for reasons of age, gender and appearance. Comments from those within the television industry also reflect to a degree Leahy’s (1994) conclusions that there is a ‘theatrical Darwinism’ operating in the auditioning process for applicants to the drama schools. Across the television industry as well, all creative stakeholders and actors themselves spoke of the adversity in achieving success in their field. Like the hopeful students trying out for the acting courses, all actors at some time will experience the ‘ruthless process of auditioning’, which has little in common with the now mandatory position description used to recruit for most other jobs. Leahy (1994, p 98) sees the audition as a process based upon ‘aesthetically legitimated tastes and behaviours’ which results in only the smallest minority gaining entry to the profession. The impact of such adversity in the employment process and the appropriateness of acting as a career may influence whether acting is valued as a future profession by some parents.

In interviews with several Asian background actors, there was cautious agreement that in some Asian communities acting and creative careers in general are not highly valued, making acting a less likely career for children of Asian parents. Annette Shun Wah has had a range of professional experience in radio, television, writing and feature films. Shun Wah (1999) is quoted at length here as her insightful comments are from the perspective of someone

175 who has experienced professional success, critical acclaim and also frustration, over a period of more than 20 years working in the media:

When I was growing up, many young Chinese and other Asian youth would come to me and talk to me about this stereotype of Asian people studying very hard and getting a job as an accountant. Now this is partly the way it actually is because your parents want you to get a good job. They want you to be financially secure. And that is their major aim so you won’t go through the struggles they went through. That can dissuade you from a creative career, because a creative career may be seen as a waste of time – it’s not a real job. So there is that. There probably also isn’t the respect for a creative career. With migration the position of scholars and artists got changed around with merchants. With Chinese, the ones who were most looked up to were the ones successful in business – the merchants. And of those, some became the community leaders. So that pattern has remained. The encouragement is to enter professions that are well rewarded financially. I can speculate that Cambodian and Vietnamese first generation migrants who have children here – it may be even more difficult for them as they are still going through the financial struggle of finding a future. So for those people struggling, certainly an acting career may be unforgivable. Having said that – there are the already trained actors and directors who come here. For them it must be very difficult as they have the skills, and they can not use them. People do put up cultural networks in order to do work but that’s tough. You know kids have come up to me and said that by seeing me succeed it had inspired them to go on and do what they wanted to do. That is wonderful when they say that.

Shun Wah’s comments suggest that there are cultural pressures against taking up acting as a career, but also important cultural reasons for the presence of actors in roles from her cultural background. Her comments reflect those of Heath Bergersen, where he recalls his pleasure at seeing Aaron Pederson on Gladiators and then the pleasure his people got from seeing him on Breakers. The importance of role modelling for young people presented by instances of seeing themselves on TV is a potent justification for the industry to actively adjust its skew from DCALB European actors of second or third generation and recruit more Asian actors into programs. Agents made the point that there needs to be an expectation that the roles are there for actors of culturally diverse backgrounds, for them to pursue acting as a career. However all this aside, while there may be a smaller pool of Asian actors available, there are most certainly more actors available than the

176 number of Asian sustainers appearing on television. While the number was none in late 1999, in the three years to 2003 the situation improved with six shows having Asian sustainers (Home and Away, Neighbours, Crash Palace, Going Home, Secret Life of Us, Something in the Air) and one show (All Saints) having an ongoing guest role of three years duration. However this result should also be understood in the context of guest roles, where actors from more recent migration communities are more likely to find themselves in culturally specific roles.

After finally securing an agent in 1997, Annette Shun Wah has had very few screen tests and of the few roles offered, they have required her to perform her ethnicity in minor parts or guest roles as a waitress for example with an Asian accent on every occasion. A preferable portrayal that not only corresponds to the reality of Asians living in Australia but also makes for better drama is well expressed by her here:

The issue though, is that it isn’t just a factor of a face on the screen. If you’re talking about multiculturalism and television programming, there needs to be a sensitivity for the culture …. the characters need to be interesting, multidimensional characters living in Australia. And that is almost non-existent. And that possibility is a really rich seam for people to plunder in order to come up with interesting characters and plot lines.

From the casting profession’s point of view, there are pressures from their clients, who in television drama are made up of a program’s producer and network executive producers. The involvement of these stakeholders was described as them having ‘ultimate control’ in the casting process. One may construe this to mean having a final say, or perhaps more significantly a definitive control over the program and casting. In the mix of a lead cast for a series, out of 10 actors, a network seeks at least two star names to attach publicity to, with the marketing department joining in the decision making process. Other cast members are usually at the discretion of the producer with final approval always resting with the network. In casting for roles which are not ethnic specific, it is up to casting directors to put forward and then audition a range of actors. It is here that the casting profession has the

177 opportunity to encourage colour blind casting. However all good efforts must eventually pass through what can be an arduous decision making process, influenced by a number of interested parties. All casting directors had varying perceptions on the availability of DCALB actors and the reasons for the continuing difficulties faced by some groups:

We used to cast GP and it was our commitment for there to be at least one NESB actor per episode, scripted or not. In many shows that has been the case. There has also been an increase in Italian and Greek background actors over the years, but there has been a limited access to actors of other backgrounds. The reason might be a cultural one related to the education process and their family life. I would suggest, and I hate to suggest it, that a highish percentage of all actors come from middle class backgrounds. The immigrant parents of children from the 1950s and 60s were interested in their children getting a better education and particularly a professional education. This is now reflected in our broad Australian middle class life, but you don’t get a lot of representation from the middle class ethnic groups in the acting fraternity. However, if you take into account the small percentage of ‘working actors’ that there are in the late 1990s, then there are a well represented and diverse range. In addition to that, the Indigenous area has had a significant commitment from several avenues. And I think that’s healthy (Maura Fay, Casting Director), (Fay, 1999).

A hypothetical situation was put to all casting directors that a script called for a major guest role for a lawyer named Samantha Lee. The writer obviously intending that she be from an Asian background, though the role and story had nothing to do with her ethnicity. They were asked how they would cast this role and would it be a difficult one to fill. All believed that a suitable actor could be found and that they had cast such roles in the past few years, but if a client called for a sustaining role to be filled by an Asian actor, the point was then made that a production may prefer a seasoned TV actor. This ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario aside, with the smaller pool of Asian actors to choose from, there were also concerns about meeting other criteria (again ill-defined) which may be brought to the decision process by a range of people. If a consensus cannot be reached, it may not be a difficult decision to abandon the original idea for an Asian actor and resort to the less demanding task of casting an actor of European background.

178 On one commercial TV medical series,7 it was related that two lead roles were originally written for an Asian ambulance driver and a South American doctor. However by the time casting was complete, the roles had gone to actors of Ango-Australian background. Confirming the ease with which productions now cast a diverse range of DCALB European performers, actors from these backgrounds expressed less culturally based concerns than their Asian colleagues. However once again, the sheer difficulty in obtaining any work as an actor was most often mentioned by all actors, regardless of cultural background. The following comment is from a young DCALB actor who got an on-going role on a serial shortly after graduating from Nepean:

When I got a call back for another audition for Breakers, I wanted to find out more about the role and I also wanted to do this when I eventually got the part. Nine times out of ten I was told ‘you didn’t get the part because of your acting, you weren’t cast just on your performance, we liked your personality’. They liked the real me.8

Other actor perspectives on the profession indicate a range of biases in the industry and actors displayed various approaches to dealing with the system. Jason Chong displays a pragmatic attitude to the profession and the casting practices which relate to his cultural background:

All you can hope for is to go from job to job. You can’t expect a career as an actor in Australia. I don’t put judgment on those roles that come along and that have an ethnic specific element to them. I ask, is this good material and is the character strong. I have in the past played the ‘Asian bad guy’. I’ve done that twice and occasionally they ring up and ask if I would be interested to do that again. It’s how the system operates. All actors are put into a box regardless though. However, I would like to see more faces on screen that reflect the diversity we have in this country and not just in supporting roles, but in the lead roles (Chong, 1999).

Meme Thorne gained an on-going guest role in the Network Ten series Above the Law. Describing herself as of European/Asian background, she played the role of a Filipino housekeeper. The producer of the show, Hal McElroy, had a

7 This was confirmed by the initial director of the series as well as the two Anglo actors who eventually got the lead roles. All wished that the show not be identified. 8 Identity suppressed at the request of the actor.

179 Filipino actress in mind to play the part, however, as noted above, such decisions often change in the pre-production process. Thorne’s character is also culturally problematic as she played a role that might be considered conventional:

For my part, Hal asked how I might want to change or inject story lines into the role. It is unusual I think, that an actor can offer them ideas and that they are open to it. About Sunny, my role in the show, you see I also know the backstory. She is in fact a psychologist who can’t get work in her profession in Australia and so she is taking up this cleaning work. In reality it can be very hard for professionals from other countries who migrate to Australia to practice their profession. I am going to make sure that her professional background comes out. I need that for myself. I am in fact pleased that the role is going to evolve, the fact that I do play a Filipino cleaning lady who will then develop into this more complex character. But I do have contradictory feelings about this part. On the one hand, there is a part of me that enjoys the challenge, the fabulous challenge of mastering the accent of a Filipino. Also a gig means work. I need the work. Now politically, I in fact talked myself out of a possible role with Bruce Beresford on Paradise Road. I said at my screen test that I felt the roles should be filled by Vietnamese actors. So of course I didn’t get the part. But when it comes to needing and wanting the work, the situation isn’t easy (Thorne, 1999).

The inner-conflict for actors to balance their professional aspirations with the opportunity to simply get paid employment must be recognised. Jeremy Angerson is an actor of Singapore/Swiss/Javanese/Irish background. He takes a sanguine attitude to his experiences in the industry and his comments acknowledge the particular hardships of the acting profession:

I’ve played a Vietnamese street-kid, a ‘retarded’ Italian, a Tibetan prince and everyday roles on soapies and series. I took an optimistic approach when I was young and that was: I can get the parts that others can’t. So it balances itself out. I feel lucky that I can cross boundaries. My experience is that if any prejudice is in this industry, it’s from your work pedigree. So if you’ve done Neighbours or Home and Away – then you are conditioned in the eyes of those who hire you to do certain parts. I can say with some confidence that I’ve lost parts because I’ve been a part of programs that elitists may think of as unsavoury. But I also love playing non-specific roles. I was born here and I feel Australian. Even my humour is Australian. Just getting a job these days, it’s a fucking joke how hard you have to work to get a role. When you do win a part you have literally fucking won it. You can feel proud just to be working and working consistently. I take my hat off to those people who do because it’s rare (Angerson, 1999).

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The varied challenges faced by DCALB actors presented above are centred within their profession. This fails to take account of the consequences which key creative stakeholders have in advancing the possible scope and quantity for roles and actors of diverse cultural backgrounds. A significant number of actors commented on survey forms or during interview, that writers should take significant responsibility when it comes to the lack of superior roles for performers of culturally diverse backgrounds. However in discussion with several experienced television drama writers, it became evident that this was an oversimplification.

Industry perspectives: writing While it is true that writers are key contributors to a television program, like casting directors they are also at the mercy of the production process. The several mainstream writers interviewed for this research made up a politically progressive cohort operating at a distance and in some remoteness from the day to day production of a program. Even in expensive series, once a script is finalised, characters may be changed after writing without the writer’s input and writers all mentioned having good and bad surprises when finally seeing the show on TV. And once scripts reach the final edit with an independent production company they are sent to the network for approval. Before a series script reaches the network, it has undergone two to three months of plotting, story and scene breakdown meetings, followed by final edits. Chris Hawkshaw has written for many of the programs covered in this research and illuminates the difficulties for writers in the process:

Well, writers are pretty much at the bottom of the food chain. If there’s going to be resistance for a role from above, writers have got no hope. We can try, and we could try harder. But in the end it won’t be just up to the writers as too many people have a say in each script – and particularly when it leaves our hands. If a character is deemed to be getting in the way of the story, seen as too unpopular with an audience, or difficult to cast, it will be changed to fit the story (Hawkshaw, 1999).

Jo Horsburgh progressed through the writing profession over a period of fifteen years from serials writer to script producer on Water Rats. As the head

181 of the writing team on a production (not attached to the network), she is well placed to comment on the writing process. She comments about non-specific roles being written in during the writing process:

Yes, that happens all the time and then it depends on the availability of actors. It’s funny but it’s not an issue. The big problem in the past was that it was all very well to say you wanted a character of a certain background, but depending on the level of the role (guest or lead), the bottom line is you want the best actor. If they audition and a) they weren’t good and b) you couldn’t sell them – the director is always going to go for the better actor. Time is so short you can’t workshop people. But I think over the last decade, we have people from more backgrounds having had greater experience. They’ve been noticed and come through (Horsburgh, 1999).

Kevin Roberts wrote on the last three series of Heartbreak High, the inner-city school drama with a noteworthy multicultural cast. The show was originally bought by Ten, who were interested in having a youth series with multicultural credentials. Ten subsequently lost interest in the show, which was eventually picked up by the ABC. The program itself is covered in greater depth in Chapter Eight. However, the show is an example of laying foundations for cultural diversity in the initial phases of production, which then continues on through the production process. It presents an alternative model to casting for cultural diversity by placing an embedded sense of cultural diversity in the cast from the outset:

If you don’t have a multicultural cast at the outset, what tends to happen is that the writers come up with a one-off stereotypical multicultural story. Then you can understand executive producers saying ‘well not another bloody ethnic story’. If the cast is diverse and there from the beginning, then there is less chance that they will be written in a stereotypical way. If your cast is part of the multicultural neighbourhood, then race-based stories won’t have to be the focus. Just bringing in an Asian character for a guest role may mean they won’t be treated the same as ordinary characters on the show (Roberts, 1999).

This notion of an ordinary or everyday multiculturalism, has been raised several times in this thesis. Many Australian creative personnel, including actors, believe this is the way forward in popular drama. This does not mean

182 that characters are emptied of their cultural background. Predominantly issues-based drama of the variety made popular in the 1980s and early 1990s have lost favour, though characters are still of course going through topics related to community and personal crises (some of the dramas studied have dealt with Aboriginal issues in the late 1990s for example). Although Heartbreak High consisted of a cast from various cultural backgrounds, overt ‘ethnic’ stories were mostly avoided:

We went the other way in regards to highlighting the cultural diversity of the characters. We thought that if we were to do a race based story it should occur only once in every series (40 episodes). What we did deliberately is to think these kids are just kids – not focus on their cultural background. If we did do a race based story we really gave it some thought. Mostly we wanted to ignore the fact of their cultural background (Roberts, 1999).

Regardless of inclusiveness in casting by producers and an increasingly everyday portrayal of cultural diversity, marketing concerns are an important influence when it comes to deciding on the look of a show. It was pointed out above that marketing departments have an influence on the final choice of actors for a program. When a cast is in place, a small number of the regulars will usually be the focus of on-going promotion. In the case of Heartbreak High, which was very successful in Europe, overseas and local promotion converged on three particular actors:

I can tell you that the press interest in our Asian or Black actors was considerably less than the publicity our Anglo actors got. I think that also reflects the situation. There is an image that advertisers want. As an example, at the film festival in Monaco, the three actors invited were the Anglo actors from the show and were the ones who attracted the most publicity everywhere (Roberts, 1999)

Advertisers may assume that a predominantly Anglo demographic is their only market and so networks may work towards satisfying these expectations. Cunningham and Miller (1994, p 6) remark how in the commercial arena of competitive Australian television, ‘there is a powerful concentration on audiences and their presumed tastes as a passage to profitability’. Focusing on the relationship between producers and how they are implicated in

183 presenting cultural diversity on their programs, Jakubowicz et al (1994, p 83) consider it is the audience who ‘determines for the producer how issues of race and ethnicity will be handled’. Writing in the early 1990s, Jakubowicz et al locate instances in Australian drama where the ‘social perspectives of (producers) are negotiated over time with the audiences’. Script producer Jo Horsburg raises the issue of audiences and their reaction to cultural diversity on screen:

The only time a negative thing happened was on A Country Practice when the show had an Asian female doctor, I think it was the early nineties. She had a romance with one of the regulars and they kissed. The network as well as the production house was inundated with hate mail. None of us had ever experienced it before. People involved in the show were horrified (Horsburgh, 1999).

Other key players in the industry also related stories about occasionally aggressive reactions from audiences when confronted with stories or scenes portraying inter-racial intimacy, though in all cases, such incidents occurred prior to the mid-1990s. Asked whether such reaction from an audience at the time had an effect on producing subsequent stories, Horsburgh (1999) comments:

I don’t think there was a conscious effort not to do it again. Very soon after that we had a story about an Iranian refugee. That was an issue based story, a different kind of story. But we didn’t deliberately move away from that kind of writing. Script departments are always far more progressive than society at large. Before I worked in television, I thought they must be racist and sexist, then you go in to script departments and you find them very forward-thinking. I went to Neighbours in 1988 or 1989 for work experience as my first job and got the shock of my life. It was so feminist, so green, so political. And, if you watched it carefully, all these issues would be worked out in the show. Writers have good intent, but there are all sorts of reasons that may stymie things.

The issue of interference ‘from above’ is one raised by people within and outside the industry. Anecdotes circulate about past transgressions and one network will be considered worse than the other for its conservative position. Publicly and officially, network heads obviously reject claims of discrimination in casting or in the portrayal of cultural diversity. Networks are obliged to

184 comply with the Code of Practice, which contains clauses on racial vilification and how program content is to be classified. As a consequence, a show will at times be altered to fit a particular classification. Networks also refer to audience demands as well as community standards as aspects they take into consideration when it comes to deciding what will or won’t be broadcast. Nevertheless, a recent anecdote from Denise Morgan, a writer with 30 years experience, gives an insight to the issue:

I won’t touch rape by and large, because I think there is a group of people out there who find it titillating and so unless I can hit it from a different approach, I steer clear of it. So I wanted to try a story where one of the male cops on a police series is raped - just going about his social life, crossing a park, unable to defend himself and he’s raped. Well that script got all the way through producers, story editors and the script producer. The trouble started with a director who found it terribly uncomfortable and rather than him saying ‘I can’t work on this, I’ll do a different episode’ the actor became concerned and then the others got all strange about it too. It went as far as the network Executive Producer, but they didn’t come back to the scripting department. Eventually it was pulled and this is after the script had been released as ready to shoot. So I re-wrote the script into something else again. In fact, I think the original episode could have been an award winner for the actor, it was a gutsy thing, especially because he was a man, and he was also a cop (Morgan, 1999).

Most of the writers interviewed believed there were both resistances and encouragement along the production process for more culturally diverse looking drama. Sean Nash, a writer and creator for Australian drama, noted the following:

On the one hand I think there is a resistance in network television towards multiculturalism. But on the other hand, I created and actually shot a pilot for Channel Seven in 1996/1997 and one of the characters in that was an Anglo-Chinese girl, played by Ling Hsueh Tang, who was on Breakers and now appears on All Saints. Likewise, we deliberately created a character played by Aaron Pedersen as an up and coming guy in the Customs service with an Aboriginal background. The reason I mention that is because as much as I thought there would be ‘discussions’ to keep them in, nobody batted an eyelid. The only concern was, let’s make sure we can cast these roles with the calibre of actors that we want (Nash, 1999).

185 The above comments demonstrate the variety of experiences and complexities in the industry regarding the portrayal of cultural diversity. Writers, program creators and other key creative personnel in the industry will often take an active role in trying to address the lag between how society is portrayed on television and how it really is. Tony Morphett is the original creator of programs such as Water Rats, Blue Heelers and more recently Above the Law and Going Home. He also has an impressive list of film and television writing credits and he talks of his own desires to effect change:

You just keep doing it. I often write in ethnic characters, sometimes they get in and sometimes they don’t. You’ve got to keep trying. At the end of the day I want the screen to look like the street. I don’t want 1950s Australia – I lived in 1950s Australia and I prefer the Australia we have now. Writing is a collaborative process and at the end of the day, you do what you can do (Morphett, 1999).

The collaborative relationship in the making of a program means that there are constraints placed on each party to achieve individual desires, but comments from writers illustrate that making an individual effort to effect change is an important step if they wish to write for contemporary Australia. As writers often write ‘what they know’, it was suggested by writers themselves that more writers from culturally diverse backgrounds need to be supported into the industry. This would also see more ‘interesting and multidimensional’ characters of diverse backgrounds, which Annette Shun Wah believes is so necessary. Jakubowicz (1994, p 94) also posits the importance of having writers from diverse cultural backgrounds as a key means of creating ‘cultural visions’ which are dissimilar from those of the past. Specifically addressing this dilemma, the Australian Writers Guild (AWG) undertook research (AWG, 1997) into the employment and support of film and television writers from non-English speaking backgrounds.

The study found that state film organizations, literary bodies and multicultural organizations provide support such as workshops, information, training and liaison for writers from non-English speaking backgrounds. However, specific funding opportunities for this group are not available. The research notes that this is in contrast to the situation for Indigenous and women writers, who have

186 access to a funding pool of targeted programs (for example the Australian Film Commission). In surveying the Guild’s culturally diverse members, the study reveals the pattern that first generation writers feel they suffer greater hardship in obtaining work as compared to the second generation and the second generation feel a less significant need for targeted support. The conclusion of the study is that support for DCALB writers in the form of mentoring and direct grants would assist in nurturing more such writers into the mainstream industry. In spite of actors’ beliefs in the importance of writers’ contribution to cultural diversity, the role the producer plays is more pivotal. In Australian television production, it is often producers who shape the initial components of a drama or even create the concept and story. Such germinal input can have lasting effects on a show once it is established in the network landscape.

Industry perspectives: producing The majority of television series such as Water Rats and Stingers produced in Australia are not made by the networks, but commissioned from independent production companies. These companies are mostly made up of a group of principals, who are involved in creating the concept and pushing it through to a pre-sale with one of the networks. Since the late 1990s, overseas sales have become critical for producers to recoup their production costs as network pre-sales no longer cover 100% of the cost of a series. The serials are somewhat different as their longevity usually means there will have been a number of producers over a period of time. Yet, even here, an executive producer will usually remain attached for a number of years. Network script and drama executives will work closely with both series and serial production providers, looking out for the network’s investment. Network approval aside, producers were unanimously identified as having the most input to the cast, stories and look of a show.

Hal McElroy was previously a film producer and with his brother Jim produced such films as The Cars That Ate Paris, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. McElroy later moved into popular television drama, creating Blue Heelers, with its nostalgic country values:

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It’s a perfectly human, legitimate desire for things to be easy, simple, uncomplicated and rewarding. For there to be heroes and for villains to be captured in the end. That’s been there through the ages so I make no apology for doing it today. The fact that it’s popular reflects the fact that it’s what audiences desire (McElroy, 1999).

However in spite of audiences’ desires for what may be conservative values in programming, he acknowledges the need for there to be a mix of programming and a mix of cast on television:

We had written in a character in Water Rats who was Italian – this is many years ago now. I was directing the screen tests and thought ‘fuck I’ve seen this character a thousand fucking times before – this is getting boring’. I wanted to think of another way. Anyway, one part of the script was that this Italian character’s family is involved in the fish markets. So I went to the markets and there were a lot of Islanders, as well as Greeks, Asians and so on. So I said to Tony Morphett and John Hugginson (co-creators) ‘guys why don’t we just forget Italian and think Maori’. They loved it and so we ended up with Jay Laga’aia (who is actually Samoan) (McElroy, 1999).

McElroy prefers to cast a range of actors and claims not to be a devotee of the beauty myth on TV shows. In creating a cast, he prefers to have a balanced cast of men and women who may not conform to network expectations:

A network usually becomes risk averse if it is doing very well. So often, a network’s attitude to casting is, frankly, if it’s a girl she should be blonde and ideally have large breasts. If it’s a man he should have plenty of hair and be muscular. So as a joke, I said to them (network drama executives): ‘you’re fuckin’ hairist, you want everyone to have a big fuckin’ shock of hair’. Anyway, they [a particular network]9 have a white bread middle Australian view, an old fashioned view of what audiences want to see on television (McElroy, 1999).

McElroy went on to produce Above the Law for Network Ten, who were interested in exploring a contemporary series which included a culturally diverse cast. Creators of Above the Law, Tony Morphett and Inga Hunter, were also satisfied to be able to write a show which reflected and explored a

9 McElroy did not wish the network to be identified.

188 diverse urban culture from the outset. Mirroring their preferences, Breakers producer Dave Gould also sought to create a more contemporary representation on the daily serial from the beginning, not unlike the everyday casting of Heartbreak High:

From inception, there was a desire on Breakers to make it more ‘real’ in terms of the world that we now live in – with warts and all. Rather than go for what has in the past been a sort of sanitised or nostalgic take on Australian life. Part of that is clearly the cultural mix of this city (Sydney) that we live in. Having established that from the start it became part of the palette that we painted with. It was not something that we sat down at story conferences and tried to find story lines based on ethnicity. But we did look for stories based on emotion, character and human nature. And part of that palette to paint with was cultural diversity (Gould, 1999).

The two other serials on TV at the time in 1999 were Home and Away and Neighbours. In previous research into television and cultural diversity (Jakubowicz et al, 1994, Bell, 1993) Neighbours has often been criticised as an all white Australian drama. In the casting survey, the proportion of second generation DCALB actors on the show was representative of cultural diversity in the community.10 Grundy Executive Producer for Neighbours, Stanley Walsh, like the show’s long term casting director Jan Russ, was aware of the criticism. In reply to disapproving comments on the show’s cultural make-up, both pointed out that the show does represent a particular location both socially and geographically. They argue that when the show was conceived of over 15 years ago, it was unashamedly set in a suburb which represented a nostalgic Australia. The criticism that nowhere in Australia in the last two decades could look like Ramsay street is also not substantiated by population demographics in capital and regional cities outside particular suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne.11 Nevertheless, Walsh had this to say about the show:

I can understand critics’ reaction. I mean the show was like that and still is to a certain extent. I mean they picked a particular suburb in a

10 These shows are discussed in detail in Chapter Eight. 11 A perusal of 1996 and 2000 census data (ABS, 2003c) confirms that significant urban areas of Australia are made up of largely white Anglo/European groups.

189 particular area that is reflective of the community around that sort of suburb at the time. There has been an ethnic mix on Neighbours from time to time and it will continue to happen from time to time. You won’t find as broad an ethnic mix in Neighbours as you would in Heartbreak High because the shows are set in different territories, suburbs and locations. It’s not a policy decision of ours that we don’t have as broad a mix as Heartbreak High. It’s more a question of ‘do we believe it in this area or location?’ (Walsh, 1999).

The success of Neighbours in England is also a contentious issue if seen as offering British audiences a vision of a pre-Coloured Britain set in the colonies. Such an analysis is difficult to maintain in light of audience and ethnographic research (for example see Gillespie, 1995), which shows the program being popular among young Asian viewers in England. The success of East Enders in the UK with its obvious multicultural cast and audience research also places such an argument into doubt. Stanley Walsh proposes the following analysis for Neighbours’ success with British audiences:

One of the reasons the British like Neighbours is that England is dark most of the year, it’s raining and it’s a miserable place. Now in Neighbours we have ordinary working people who live in homes that have got 3 bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, rumpus rooms and garages and maybe a swimming pool. They look to be ordinary people. Now that’s the sort of fantasy that they can accept about Australia, because a lot of people do live in homes like that here compared to England, where they don’t. And so it’s a bit of escapism with generally positive stories. My basic philosophy is: would I like to have these people in my home five nights a week (Walsh, 1999).

Both Stanley Walsh and Russel Webb, producer of Australia’s other soapie Home and Away, believe a ‘permeating multiculturalism’ is preferable to an obvious placement of cultural diversity. This doesn’t mean Home and Away ignores issues related to race. Episodes about racism, The Stolen Generation and Pauline Hanson have all been produced. A plot line surrounding The Stolen Generation garnered 15 phone calls from the audience, when a single phone call is unusual. Only one call was abusive. Web’s inclination towards the representation of cultural diversity in Summer Bay is expressed thus: ’I think it is most important that there is cultural diversity but that we don’t have to explain it … in fact we try to cast out of character sometimes’ (Webb, 2000).

190

A range of stakeholders articulated the notion that a contrived representation of cultural diversity is ‘doomed’. One writer commented it might be useful to even go against type and write for a Vietnamese school boy who hates doing his homework. This suggests an approach to writing and casting that the Australian industry are yet to fully embrace with Aboriginal and particularly Asian roles. That is, writing and casting explicitly against type or producing unambiguous alternatives to more common portrayals of past media representations, such as the servile Asian character or a problematised Indigenous portrayal. In the USA, The Cosby Show is the obvious example of this tactic. As mentioned in Chapter Four, there have been criticisms of the show for presenting a successful middle class Black family as the achievable norm, against which other Blacks are then judged. However such criticism did not occur with Aaron Pederson’s roles in Water Rats and Wildside. But of course these characters operate within a diverse mix of lead characters and not in an all Black show. Aside from Acropolis Now and Pizza (discussed in Chapter Eight), no Australian shows under study have presented a lead cast made up of entirely Indigenous actors or any other cultural group in the way The Cosby Show does. But of course no single group in Australia has the comparative size as that of Black America.

Conclusion Industry comments and quantitative data demonstrate that programming lags behind the social reality with the representation of Australia’s Asian community. Not only has their lack of presence been an issue of concern, but the type of roles have often been culturally-specific, rather than everyday. This representation lies in contrast to the contemporary social experience of migration to Australia in recent years. Sixty percent of recently arrived migrants to Australia, who had been employed before migrating, had been working in professional, managerial or administrative positions. Seventy percent of these professionals coming to Australia are from non-English speaking countries. Of this professional class of migrant, a significant 37.4% were from Asian regions (Inglis, 1999, pp 47 - 50). Such statistical analysis adds weight to claims for a greater variety of roles be made available for

191 migrants who settled in Australia after the post war period, including those from South East Asia. Relying on problematised representations or portraying all recently arrived immigrants as facing considerable issues upon settling in Australia akin to refugees is mistaken, as the humanitarian intake now accounts for only a fraction of immigration numbers.12

In more recent years, immigrants to Australia are much more likely to be middle class and have formal qualifications. The era of continually problematising the ‘ethnic’ presence in television drama is over. However, this has translated to making more recent immigrant groups simply invisible, or falling back to wearying typecasting. There is another issue at stake though and that is the long history of Asian discrimination in all four countries studied. This should also not be discounted as a contributory factor as to why entrenched notions of Asian casting for culturally specific roles has been slow to change. However, this chapter illustrates that a lack of professional participation by Asian creative stakeholders in the industry, especially in acting, has cultural reasons based both within and outside their community.

The social and familial pressures on children from such populations make choosing a career in the acting profession less straightforward than for their contemporaries. Comments regarding parental expectations and family conflict from actors of South East Asian backgrounds in this research reflect the anxieties of young South East Asians who call the national phone counselling service Kids Help Line (Reid and Litchfield, 2000). The majority of calls from young migrants, particularly from South East Asian backgrounds, are concerned with parental conflict. Indeed, the number of calls this group makes regarding anxiety over study matters is double that of Anglo callers. In a longitudinal study of Australian high school students by Marjoribanks (2002), adolescents from DCALB families in general were more likely to stay in school than Anglo students, with Asian students three to four times more likely to do so. Likewise, analysis of ABS data by Teicher, Shan and Griffin (2002),

12 The 2001-2002 migration intake was composed of 93,000 entrants on family and skill entry visas, with humanitarian and refugee intake visas accounting for 12,000 entrants (DIMA, 2003).

192 indicates that overseas-born youth (aged 15-24) have higher participation rates in education and training than those born in Australia. And in the large survey of community groups and attitudes to cultural diversity by Ang et al (2002), it was found that the Vietnamese sample displayed the greatest investment in cultural maintenance and lowest levels of English language usage. While such research tends to confirm notions of the ‘studious Asian’, it does add substance to the comments made by actors that there are additional cultural pressures, as well as existing social impediments from wider society, which make an Asian mainstream and everyday portrayal less evident. This arises as less young people from South East Asian backgrounds pursue actor training through the drama schools with the resultant effect that casting directors are presented with fewer choices by agents. Chapter Eight attempts to grapple with the issue of mainstreaming, including its limits in the Australian context. It also examines the claim that Australian drama is still at times considered to be ‘sliced white bread’, in spite of the results of the casting survey and industry comment presented in this chapter, which suggest a greater diversity than that of a purely Anglo mainstream.

193 Chapter Eight Australian Television Programs: Texts and Contexts

Introduction This chapter examines Australian programs recorded in three survey periods to enable a more detailed consideration of cultural diversity in popular television programs in the domestic market. The chart below sets out the different periods and programs that were recorded. The recording periods represent six rating weeks and all programs were broadcast as ‘first run’, ie: no repeats. A further motivation for choosing these periods was that these weeks offered the opportunity to examine a large range of recently produced local programs. At different times of the year weekly programs in particular will be replaced by repeats or disappear altogether as productions are shut down or are halted for a duration. A key motivation for choosing three periods of two weeks each was that this replicates the time range undertaken by Bell (1993) in his research into multiculturalism and the media.

While Bell’s study presented a broad content analysis of print and electronic media, he also included a qualitative analysis of television drama over three two-week periods, examining three programs Neighbours, Home and Away and A Country Practice.1 While Bell used a quantitative coding methodology for news media items to determine the media’s engagement with multiculturalism, a qualitative methodology was used for a discussion of television drama. His conclusion is that the shows under study are the exclusive domain of Ango-Australian actors. This finding should be interpreted with care, as no casting survey of actors was undertaken to determine an actor’s cultural background. The methodology relied on whether an actor appeared to be of a diverse cultural or linguistic background or not, and whether the scripting took account of multicultural themes. The Bell research presents Australian television drama as devoid of any reference to a culturally diverse society, whether through casting or explicit themes in the scripting.

1 Bell acknowledges research by Goodall et al (1990) in making his comments regarding drama and cultural diversity.

194 The approach taken to studying the programs for this chapter differs from Bell’s in that as well as analysing program content I draw on a wider range of factors which permit a ‘thicker’ analysis. Such factors include the financial relationship to a program’s content, meanings circulating around the programs in print media as well as material from interviews with program makers and actors. I am also able to draw on the quantitative research presented in Chapter Seven, which conclusively demonstrated the presence of actors from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The respective programs are presented below.

Figure 8.1 : Program recording chart Period 1: Two Weeks, 19/06/1999 - 02/07/1999.

• Commercial Programs : Breakers, Neighbours, Home and Away, Water Rats, All Saints, Blue Heelers and Stingers • ABC Programs : Sea Change, Wildside, Heartbreak High and Queen Kat, Karmel and St Jude.

Period 2: Two Weeks, 11/09/1999 – 24/09/1999.

• Commercial Programs : Breakers, Neighbours, Home and Away, Water Rats, All Saints, Blue Heelers and Stingers.

Period 3: Two Weeks, 19/06/2000 – 02/07/2000.

• Commercial Programs : Neighbours, Home and Away, Water Rats, All Saints, Blue Heelers, Stingers and Above the Law. • ABC Programs : Something in the Air • SBS Programs : Pizza, Bondi Banquet and Going Home

195 It is perhaps worth noting that SBS programs only begin to feature in the third period in 2000, as there was little in the way of local fictional television on SBS in the preceding recording times.

As an addition to the blanket recording and analysis of programming in the above periods, this chapter begins with a more comprehensive examination of the commercial serial Breakers and the SBS weekly comedy series Pizza. Both Pizza and Breakers offer a rich canvas for investigation of how cultural diversity is articulated in shows with a younger audience. These shows are significant in that the youth audiences they attract of Anglo and culturally diverse backgrounds are a demographic this thesis maintains to be the most engaged in the Australian community with cultural diversity and most likely to be from the second generation. This claim is supported by Ang et al (2002) who conducted community research on the subject of multiculturalism and cultural diversity based on the attitudes of 3,500 subjects. They find that the youth demographic is the most accepting of cultural diversity as an everyday and embedded experience.

I am not suggesting that Breakers and Pizza represents all Australian popular programming, as this would equate with examining only Neighbours and Home and Away as standing for the sum of Australian television drama. However both Breakers and Pizza are innovative programs in portraying cultural diversity and engage with cultural diversity more so than other programs of the same period. Both programs have exceptional funding arrangements and display distinctive factors as examples of the program genres a commercial serial (Breakers) and a multicultural comedy (Pizza).

Other drama programs are examined in less detail for practical reasons, however, any perceived lack of cultural diversity in some of these programs belies their culturally diverse casts and a desire by producers to engage with multiculturalism at an everyday level, as opposed to actively pursuing culturally diverse themes. The two SBS shows Bondi Banquet and Going Home are predictably and necessarily high profile in their multicultural

196 content, considering the charter expectations of their broadcaster. These two programs will also be considered.

Breakers: cosmopolitan serial television The financing Former Channel Seven executives, Bob Campbell (CEO) and Des Monaghan (Head of Production), left the Seven Network in 1995 and 1996 respectively to pursue independent program production activities. Setting up Screentime in 1996, they have since produced a number of television programs in genres such as quiz, mini-series, infotainment, children’s TV and telemovies. Their initial big-ticket item was the serial Breakers. Promoting program concepts at European media trade shows in 1997, Campbell and Monaghan were approached by UK record label company Chrysalis to consider producing a third Australian serial for the European market to complement the highly successful Home and Away and Neighbours (Shoebridge, 1998, p.49). Aspiring Sydney-based and UK-born drama writer/creator Jimmy Thompson who had met Monaghan on Gladiators a few years earlier had already pitched Breakers to Monaghan as either a five days a week or two days a week drama, based on the social diversity of life he had witnessed at Bondi with his wife while house hunting (Thompson, 1999).

What makes Breakers interesting compared with the financing of other Australian drama, is that a production run was fully deficit financed by a mix of private and corporate investors (one being Chrysalis) before it achieved an Australian sale. So confident were Screentime of Breakers overseas sales potential, that when Ten had signed on to the show six months after production had begun, Screentime bosses claimed in 1998 they could continue producing Breakers should Ten not extend the one year contract (Shoebridge, 1998, p 51). As it turned out, Ten wished to purchase more Breakers episodes after two years of supply, but it was Screentime’s decision to cease production on account of lower than expected overseas sales and unacceptable returns to key investors.2 Breakers ceased production in 1999,

2 Personal correspondence with Ten and Screentime, August 1999.

197 emulating the short life of inexpensive local sun and surf soaps Echo Point and Paradise Beach before it. The termination of Breakers lends support to the notion that the Australian television industry can only sustain two commercial Australian serial dramas on a long term basis, whether broadcast locally and/or overseas. A network Ten executive commented on Breakers demise in the market as follows:

When Neighbours and Home and Away started, you could say here is an audience and they will commit to it. So the audience got engaged with the characters and stayed. Now Neighbours took two years to get going and Home and Away took a while too. My view is that sort of commitment won’t happen again in these times. The pressures on an audience’s time is one reason, there are many more alternative things to do, particularly with the young audiences. 3

In spite of Breakers’ ultimate failure in the market, it is the financial origins of the program which bear a connection to how Breakers employed cultural diversity as a clear textual marker. Without network attachment, the Breakers concept and first episodes were written without network input. As has been identified in previous chapters, program matters from scripting to how a cast look together are in the ‘ultimate’ control of network executives. Consequently, creator Jimmy Thompson and initial writer/director Sean Nash were unfettered to pursue a ‘gritty realism’ and issues-based stories they considered as underprovided in Neighbours and Home and Away. Indeed, in the first week of Breakers, a depressed young girl drinks herself to a stupor in the bath, with the suggestion of suicide.

The core characters of the show also signified an ethnic and sexual diversity beyond that which Neighbours or Home and Away cared to aspire to in the late 1990s. Though to a degree, this logically reflects the geography and original concept of each of these programs. As Executive Producer of Neighbours, Stanley Walsh points out, a show such as Neighbours was originally conceived as set in an outer middleclass suburb in the early 1980s. While there are exceptions of course, every Australian capital city has its mix

3 Personal interview with the author, 1999. The executive concerned requested that his name be withheld.

198 of both Anglo dominant and more ethnically diverse suburbs. In the case of Bondi Beach and Breakers, the outwardly harmonious community of cosmopolitan chic, disenfranchised street-kids and the surfer lifestyle of a culturally diverse Bondi was something creator Thompson (1999) felt the ‘class conscious English’ in particular would find compelling:

My wife and I were spending every weekend down at Bondi and looking around. I became aware of the diversity of people on Campbell Parade and you would see your Jamie Packers and your Kate Fishers and you would see Mum and Dad and the 3 kids - people from all sorts of backgrounds. I remember specifically there was a Brazilian couple, they just looked so elegant and so cool, but behind them would be mum pushing the pram and dragging two more kids, while dad’s gone to get the ice-cream kind of thing. On the beach these people became equal, that was the feeling that I got. Although they came from totally different backgrounds, totally different aspirations, when we got to Bondi, they became equal. That was the idea behind Breakers.

Network 10 signed on to Breakers for similar reasons in a period when the ratings for Neighbours were a little ‘soft’. Ten’s drama script executive highlights how Breakers was able to define itself in the market:

Neighbours only once became issues-based six years ago and it was not successful at that. The audience was uncomfortable with the changing position. Breakers started out a bit gritty – a lot of that had to do with the product design. Breakers was pitched to an English market, which already had Home and Away and Neighbours. So you’ve got Neighbours which is perceived to be soft and warm – you know they’ll have a barbecue and everyone is invited. Then Home and Away which is a little bit harder. So - the only place for Breakers to go is a little bit harder still.4

More pragmatically, it was suggested that Ten CEO John McAlpine wanted another cost effective serial up and running in the event of Neighbours ‘falling over’. Having an established serial on air, they could quickly replace Neighbours if need be (Shoebridge, 1998, p 52).

4 Personal interview with the author, July 1999. The executive concerned requested that his name be withheld.

199 Another reason to explore the production history of Breakers relates to the understandings and comments which circulate in the media and community around a program which is seen as attempting to be different or innovative (or is considered ‘unworthy’ – as was the case with a number of past and short lived local serials).5 Heartbreak High (HBH) falls into the innovative category and like Breakers, it was a Network Ten program. It was shunted around Ten’s schedule and then finally exported to the ABC, where its disappearance from a commercial network invoked accusations of ethnic intolerance on the part of both audiences and network executives for shows with gritty plots or a ‘multicultural flavour’ (Hawthorne, 1996; Wilding, 1998).6 With HBH, there was some evidence that the shows downbeat inner-city location and concomitant cultural diversity was one factor that programming heads speculated on, as a possible reason for its poor ratings. However as Wilding (1998) suggests, a range of production contexts and constraints weigh more heavily on the outcome of a program than how multicultural the cast is. In the case of Breakers, a number of erroneous reasons for its demise also circulated among fans and the press such as poor ratings (it was winning its slot by July 1999), low quality (a subjective opinion in this genre) and that the show was too controversial (which it was at times). The sole reason for its demise however was lack of profit on overseas sales. A Breakers writer related the sentiment that for a third Australian soap to remain financial, it had to succeed in two of the three following markets: Britain, Australia and/or Continental Europe. As Breakers was relegated to the digital channel BBC Choice and more substantial sales to the rest of world failed to materialise, Breakers was ultimately discontinued for financial reasons rather than notions of network or audience discomfort for culturally diverse programming.7

5 The 1990s serial Paradise Beach is a case in point. As Cunningham and Jacka (1995) identify, a number of industrial, textual and cultural factors led to its demise, not least the ‘wrath’ it attracted from media critics. 6 One might also include ABC’s financial failure Wildside. 7 More recently, one need only consider the ongoing popularity of Ten’s , with its Indigenous and South East Asian cast members as well as gay and lesbian characters to establish the comfort commercial television now has with programming of a culturally diverse nature. The program is not examined in detail here as it falls outside the thesis cut-off date of programming broadcast up to but not including 2001.

200 The set-up ‘The Breakers’ is the name of a 1930s multilevel building on the esplanade at Bondi Beach containing a café, local newspaper office, model agency, family home, a flat and a youth drop in centre. All characters either reside or work in the building, making it a high density ‘neighbourhood drama’ (as opposed to a ‘franchise drama’ which is set in a professional context such as medicine or law).8 The press kit for Breakers focuses on the cosmopolitan, the clash of cultures (though not those necessarily focused on ethnicity), the display of youth and beauty, as well as the trials and tribulations of the main characters. The variety of characters, predominantly under 25, include the Indigenous actor Heath Bergersen as one time street kid Rueben, Greek-Cypriot Ada Nicodemou as waitress Fiona, Anglo actor John Atkinson as drop-in centre manager Steve Giordano (presumably of Southern European heritage), Simon Munro as (gay) dancer Vince and three other cast members of culturally diverse backgrounds. The overall impression of the cast is indeed one of cultural diversity. However, like Heartbreak High, any explicit examination of multicultural issues is resolutely avoided with the problematisation of multiculturalism seen as redundant in this location, amongst this generation. Rather, as has been identified in most soaps, it is the predominant textual attributes of the interpersonal, emotional, conflictual and the sexual which provide the foundation of scripts (Bowles 2000, p 119). Just as the geographic setting of Bondi reflects a more cosmopolitan Australia compared to Neighbours’ Ramsey Street, the social fabric of Breakers represents opportunities to explore fractured relationships and transgressive representations of its diverse characters – at least in comparison with its companion programs. Creator Jimmy Thompson explains:

All successful soaps are based around families, there is always a central family, and although I created a family in Breakers which was mum and dad, two kids, and aunty - I gave it a nice modern twist and had dad having his divorce from the mother of his children but they are still living in the same building - as a matter of convenience. And aunty is a single parent whose kid - the bad boy in every soap - is coming

8 A year later, Network Ten and McElroy Television would produce a similar high density neighbourhood drama series with Above the Law, which suffered low ratings and was cancelled after one season.

201 back to stir things up. So that was my core family and I also decided that instead of setting it in the village of Bondi, I made it a building which I refer to as the ‘vertical village’ (Thompson, 1999).

The location of Bondi with its opportunities for scenes of the beach repeats the conventional marketing device of selling Australian series and serials based somewhat on the sunny landscapes of coastal or inland Australia. However, Breakers set itself apart from Home and Away and Neighbours by affirming from the show’s start that contemporary Australia is not necessarily about having, or hoping for, a nuclear family life with a home and a backyard. This is evident in the lifestyles of core characters who display alternate life choices such as the gay character Vince, or the fragmented Simmons family, who occupy upper floors of the mixed purpose building. Breakers also continues the trend of harnessing the appeal of young attractive actors (Bowles, 2000), albeit ones of diverse cultural and linguistic background.

‘Have you visited the world lately?’: cultural diversity and Breakers The above comment was posted on the Breakers official message-board, which was one feature on the program’s website. The message was part of a string which overwhelmingly came down in favour of the everyday cultural diversity palpable on the show, supporting it as a ‘true representation’ of life in Australia9. A viewer from Tasmania had started the string by criticising what they perceived was an overemphasis on actors from ‘minority’ backgrounds. The last message of the string reads in full:

I ask you this Milton of Tasmania: Have you actually seen the show before? That is, sat and watched it for half an hour each day for a couple of weeks. Have you visited the world lately? Things have changed since 1970.

This comment says something beyond the fan’s support for the show and for multiculturalism. One of the dilemmas in passing comment on long form drama such as Breakers, is making an analysis based on a cursory or superficial viewing. A diverse range of television audience research (for

9 The string was contained in messages in the range 330 to 351 titled ‘Breakers is not life’, posted in May 1999. http://www.ten.com.au/webCh10/admin/Swit…otionID=447, accessed 15/051999.

202 example Ang 1985, 1991; Brown 1994; Morley 1992) has alluded to the varied, complex and subterranean interpretations audiences make of television drama texts, not available to a quantitative research methodology or a program analysis which extends to intermittent viewings.

In making an analysis of long form drama it is important to consider how a character’s actions over a few viewings do not represent the whole of that character. McKee (1997a, p 53) makes the following point on Indigenous portrayal in serial drama: ‘an acknowledgement of generically-precise knowledges, formed over the huge texts that make up the run of a serial, is important when suggesting how Aboriginal characters are open to interpretation in these programs’. A good case in point is an examination of Rueben’s portrayal on Breakers. Played by actor Heath Bergersen, a young man of Indigenous background, Reuben’s character comes to the story as a recent ‘street kid’, who’s making good with a fresh start. As the serial progresses, Reuben discards his street kid history and evolves into an ‘ordinary’ young person hanging out in Bondi with a job, sharing a flat and driving about in his battered car – which bears hand painted Indigenous art work.

Producers of the show commented that Reuben became a popular character in fan feedback, especially in the United Kingdom where it was thought his ‘good looks’ were to account for this. Twice in the series, Reuben is involved in romantic relationships, both with White actors. In culturally specific terms, during a one week storyline, Reuben returns to his homeland in order to seek out his people and family.10 Aside from this storyline, Reuben’s role was predominantly non-specific in a cultural sense. However, part way through the series, Reuben begins to busk with a didgeridoo from time to time and plays the instrument on the cliffs at Bondi with one of his romantic interests. Producer Dave Gould estimated that didgeridoo playing occurred ‘about eight times in two years over more than 400 episodes’ (Gould, 1999). Heath

10 This story was suggested and co-crafted by the actor himself with the scriptwriter. This method of co-operative scripting was also employed on the ABC drama Wildside, where Indigenous actor Aaron Pederson went on to become the show’s Indigenous Adviser.

203 Bergersen is, in real life, considered to be one of West Australia’s foremost didgeridoo players and did in fact spend part of his youth busking in such a manner. This crossing over of real life with the actor’s role, also mirrors the ‘Homeland’ story, as during the two year shooting of Breakers, Bergersen was re-united with his biological mother.11

On many occasions, Bergersen was consulted by the writers and producers to seek out not only his approval for culturally specific representations, but for assistance in the writing itself. As pointed out in Chapter One, both Bergersen and the creator/producing team were keen for an ‘everyday’ portrayal. Such intimate knowledge of the production or the longitudinal aspects of Reuben’s portrayal are not available to those who view Breakers for less than several weeks, possibly even months. One would also need to be aware of inter- textual information to be found in magazines such as TV Week, That’s Life, New Idea or the TV pages of daily press – not to mention the show’s website. If tuning into Breakers for just one afternoon and witnessing Reuben playing the didgeridoo, a critic might make the conclusion that Reuben’s is a touristic representation of Indigenous Australia.

The infrequent representation of Reuben in culturally specific terms denotes his representation in domains of the ‘banal’ as well as the ‘Other’ – though it is the banal which is by far the predominant. As McKee (1997b) notes, up until the early 1990s, depictions of Aboriginal identity fell into two main categories: the spiritual or the violent (as in death or endangered), both rendering Indigenous Australia apart or ‘Othered’. Hartley and McKee (2000, pp 229 – 230) note that ‘banal’ occurrences of Indigenous identity in popular media forms such as magazines or popular television shows or indeed as ‘stars’ denote their arrival as part of the wider Australian community. The mostly everyday presence of Reuben in banal programming such as a TV soap, demonstrates the beginning of a trend in popular television in the late 1990s. Up until that time, actors of culturally diverse backgrounds, particularly Indigenous Australians and actors of South East Asian heritage, were unable

11 Heath was in fact the last child in 1976 in West Australia to be adopted out in the manner of the Stolen Generations.

204 to be accommodated in everyday portrayals, which had begun to occur for those of European background. Breakers, along with Wildside and then Water Rats, gave a space to Indigenous actors to contest the former portrayals of Indigenous Australians as either ‘spiritual ’ (as Bergersen calls such roles) or ‘endangered’ exotica. However, unlike McKee’s suggestion that banal or trivial occurrences on popular programming provoke a ‘vaguely scandalous’ sentiment (at least in the mid 1990s), by the end of the 1990s, such rendering of Indigenous faces became trivial in itself – at least for young audiences.12 As McKee (1997b) notes for Indigenous actors up to the mid 1990s, they were included in narratives ‘textually linked’ to their cultural background and sometimes not. However unlike texts in the early 1990s, more recent portrayals include a broad palette of generic plotting and character interpretation concomitant with their Anglo companions. This emerging confidence to represent Indigenous Australia in such terms gives room for actors and scriptwriters alike, to pursue Indigenous issues from time to time within the ‘everyday’, without fear of falling prey to a virtuous liberal sentiment.

Breakers’ limits The inclusion in Breakers of actors from Indigenous, South East Asian and other NES backgrounds found a mostly everyday portrayal with no adverse publicity or viewer feedback, giving support to the notion of an expanding multicultural mainstream. However, the portrayal of gay sexuality and other edgy themes was more problematic. Breakers encountered hostile media, political and fan attention when it broadcast a storyline involving a core character experimenting with her sexuality. Network classification input was consequently to affect scripts with more edgy themes. In spite of the show having a male gay sustaining role, the eight week ‘lesbian’ plotline achieved the program’s mention in Parliament with subsequent debate in the press and amongst fans. Turbulence over the storyline peaked when the two women kissed tenderly on the lips. This prompted Liberal Senator Karen Synon to raise the issue in the Senate and complain to the ABA, at the same time the

12 2002 research (Ang et al, 2002, p 23) concurs with this study that young people are more at ease with cultural diversity than the general population, with Indigenous youth ‘growing up multiculturarlly [and being] so much more relaxed’ with regard to cultural diversity.

205 Liberal Party was attempting to pass stricter Internet and video classification legislation regarding sexual matter, with Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine leading the charge.13 The incident places into relief continuing tensions surrounding community, industry and political reaction to cultural diversity beyond that of cultural background.

The gay character Vince could often be seen flirting with other young men and in one particular scene he leaves his bedroom one morning to enter the living room of the shared flat – only to be followed out of his room by another older man, who he has recently become friends with. A conventional reading of this scene cues the two have had sex, such a filmic device employed in either conservative texts (McKee, 1996) or those with classification restrictions on what can be shown. However in Breakers’ case, this sudden possibility for the audience that Vince has had sex with an older man (or any male for that matter) is quickly resolved with Rueben’s chaste concern over his best mate’s virginity being still intact (Vince is about 16 years old). Vince openly reassures Rueben the new friend has slept on the floor and ‘nothing happened’. This ‘lack of sex’ is in keeping with content capable of being broadcast in the G classification which Breakers was contractually bound to, with the sale to Network Ten and to the BBC. While sexual relations between heterosexual characters was intimated at in the show, it is hardly surprising that the show’s producers would tread carefully with a young gay male – particularly when the age of consent for homosexual sex was until recently still 18 in some territories. However, what is noteworthy in relation to the lesbian storyline and notorious kiss, is that in the course of two years, audiences were never to enjoy glimpsing a kiss between Vince and one of his romantic interests.14 This reticence on the part of program makers may also be related to what McKee (1996) calls as a lack of ‘the banal’ in homosexual representation, at least in

13 A typical headline reads ‘Lesbians not normal says Alston’. Minister for Communication, Richard Alston, joined the debate in declaring that there was normal behaviour and non- normal behaviour in society, such as those who kick with their left foot are ‘not normal’ (Symons, 1999b). 14 It may also be worth noting that Reuben is seen sharing an intimate kiss with his second (and white) romantic interest – something Network executives were nervous to show a decade earlier when an episode of The Flying Doctors was edited to remove a kiss between the Anglo pilot and Indigenous nurse (Di Chiera, 1988) – however, Channel 9 later commented that it was removed for story development and ‘timing reasons’ (Baxter, 1988).

206 American soap operas – as he notes that Australian adult television programs have achieved the ‘familiar and unsurprising’ to some degree, with the meeting of men’s lips on several occasions.15 In the case of Breakers, it is nevertheless a contradiction that a kiss between lesbians was sanctioned by the Network classification process, while a gay kiss was always beyond acceptance.16

From an audience perspective, it would appear that for some viewers an exploration of sexual diversity by a young woman in her twenties is beyond community acceptance for a program broadcast at 3.30 pm at least. Indeed, the Network received two complaints on the day of the kiss, a very significant matter in this case and one in which industry personnel indicate they take very seriously.17 One of the complaints was regarding the appropriateness of such material broadcast in after-school hours, which aligns with a community concerns agenda raised in the Senate on the issue. An ABA spokesperson commented though, that a lesbian relationship was considered ‘normal’ and that at 3.30pm, such material with a G or PG rating is permissible (Symons, 1999a, p 6).18

The second complaint expressed disagreement with how the lesbian relationship was portrayed. This reflects the essence of debate which occurred on the show’s website – being whether the portrayal of the lesbian lifestyle was accurate. Typically, message board comments fell into two camps, those that felt the two females were too feminine and attractive (‘a male fantasy’) and those that expressed pleasure in seeing the notion of diversity in the lesbian community, where ‘lesbians can be pretty, wear short

15 In recent episodes of the Network Ten series The Secret Life of Us, both gay and lesbian sex scenes share equal standing in intensity with the heterosexual scenes. 16 For a discussion on earlier portrayals of gay/lesbian intimacy on Australian drama television, see Wilding (1998) and in particular, Chapter Seven. 17 Three different network executive staff expressed that each official viewer complaint represents a significant audience base. In one example, a small number of viewers complained that the background music on Neighbours was too loud – this was then investigated and production company staff notified to maintain a suitable balance. Another producer considers a single viewer complaint to represent one thousand audience members. (the comments in this note are restricted in use to this thesis). 18 Classification guidelines for PG (Parental Guidance Recommended) allow ‘careful presentations of adult themes or concepts’ (FACTS Code of Practice, 1999).

207 skirts and get perved on by guys and chicks’ as opposed to a ‘butch’ portrayal.19 I do not wish to make an analysis here of the portrayal as to how ‘correct’ a portrayal it was, as this falls prey to the sort of critical reasoning which recurs around stereotyping and attempts to define a lesbian essence or an Indigenous essence which is somehow the most authentic or acceptable. Rather, it is the fact that Breakers dealt with a lesbian theme on a social education level for its young audience, as well as attempting to market itself as edgy and contemporary that is significant. These two aspects are of course related to the core ambition of the show in presenting Australia as culturally diverse and cosmopolitan, particularly for a youth audience. However, the position of youth drama within the Australian television industry generally poses a range of industry and audience related dilemmas faced by TV producers, who must successfully compete against US programs such as Dawson’s Creek, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Party of Five and Beverly Hills 90210, by producing drama that is relevant to and popular with young Australians, but produced for a fraction of the cost of US material.

The time slot of Australian youth dramas such as Breakers, Neighbours and Home and Away is also a problem. In the late afternoon and early evening times when they are most often screened, both in Australia and in the United Kingdom, the shows are required contractually to have a G classification.20 This means the extent to which they can explicitly confront controversial issues and adult themes, which are of course attractive to adolescents, is limited. US shows on the other hand such as Dawson’s Creek and Party of Five are screened later in the evening with Buffy screened in a late-night cult slot. As a consequence, these US shows are granted less restrictive classifications. These classifications allow for greater scope in ‘hot’ story lines and the frequency and context of coarse language, sexual references and violence.21

19 Breakers Website Forum, Messages 182 to 191, posted in early July 1999. 20 G denotes a program suitable for a general audience – such shows will often be broadcast in the after school slot of 3.00 to 6.00pm. 21 It is noteworthy that Network Ten were also hoping for a late night cult following with a the late 20s audience with Breakers, by running episodes at 11.30pm as well as at 3.30pm (Hill, 1998, p 4).

208 The creative team at Breakers were often challenged by their classification obligations in presenting a young, urban Australia as opposed to the suburban Neighbours or the sunny seaside at Home and Away. Creator Jimmy Thompson recalls:

Being locked into a G rating, with the first week of Breakers having a suicide at the end presented its problems. The character is shown drinking whisky in a bathtub. That scene went to air in Australia but it didn’t go to air in Britain, they chopped it (Thompson, 1999).

While such a sequence passed the network classifier in Australia on that occasion, a later suicide sequence involving a popular lead character had to be re-shot several times to satisfy the G rating, resulting in a most ambiguous and unsatisfactory sequence. Series writer and director Sean Nash comments on the predicament:

Some material was re-written after the fact due to classification pressures and I think as a result the scripts suffered. An example of the downside is we did a teenage suicide episode. Around the time we were going to air with it we started to get some pressure (from the network) and that particular story got to the point where the character couldn’t stand on the edge of the cliff - they had to be seated and be at least 6-8 feet from the edge and so on, so it was re-shot more than once (Nash, 1999).

In Home and Away, producer Russell Web recalled how an episode dealing with the Stolen Generation had to be edited for the G classification as scenes involving the emotional removal of a young Indigenous boy could be deemed ‘terrifying’ to a six-year-old (Web, 2000).

Compared to the possibilities for more explicit and contemporary representations of death, drugs and sex offered in US youth series screened later in the evening, it is not hard to imagine why a local teenage audience might find Australian shows peculiarly modest. However such difficulties do not reduce the scope to which Breakers was able to engage with multicultural Australia in an everyday context.

209 Findings from the six week recording period Throughout the recording period, there were only a handful of instances when Breakers’ multiculturalism becomes more conspicuous than the everyday. In a series of episodes screened during June/July 1999, two of the married characters (Monique and Alex) are seeking a nanny for their baby. In what would likely be the crudest portrayal of ethnic diversity on the show, an older Greek woman named Mama Lia (played by Maria Venuti) takes the job for a short time. Speaking in a heavy accent, her maternal behaviour nears parody, with the baby’s mother feeling threatened by the nanny’s extent of involvement with the child. As a consequence, Mama Lia is exchanged for a younger culturally diverse nanny: the aspiring model India. Initially, India assumes the plot device as a possible affair interest for the married Alex, however, by week’s end, equilibrium has been established and India is accepted into the family (and the actor achieves status as an ongoing guest role). Mama Lia’s appearance on the show was indeed a retrospective portrayal. The representation appeared comical in comparison with the show’s usual handling of characters and actors from culturally diverse backgrounds. As Mama Lia was obviously meant to be from the first generation pool of migrants, the depiction relied heavily on the outmoded dichotomy of first generation migrants being poorly spoken, uneducated and working in unskilled labour. This is contrasted to the second generation, who are portrayed as balancing their cultural identity within a ‘cool’ mainstream. While the intergenerational theme of multicultural family conflict has mostly disappeared from Australian screens, this is nevertheless a disappointing return to a portrayal more common in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

The only other instance noteworthy for its engagement with cultural diversity, is when Rueben has a brief affair with visiting casting agent, Brooke. As mentioned previously, the two engage in a rather long kiss, with Brooke wishing to take the affair to the bedroom. However, Rueben would rather not ‘complicate matters’ as Brooke is leaving for New York the next day. Just as Aaron Pederson’s character Reilly in Wildside has a ‘threesome’ with two girls of Anglo background, Reuben’s cultural background is an unspectacular element when it comes to who he might or might not have intimate relations

210 with. This effortlessness in scripting for intercultural relationships on contemporary Australian television stands out from America’s reluctance to do so and from the past in Australia, where only a decade previously, programs would receive hate mail from viewers if intercultural scenes moved to the intimate.22

Breaking into the mainstream During the recording period, there is a scene which encapsulates Breakers’ brand of cultural diversity and that of a mainstream and everyday multiculturalism. On the 22nd of June 1999, an episode involves Fiona (Greek- Cypriot actor Ada Nicodemou) throwing a dinner party. She invites Rueben (the Indigenous Heath Bergersen), Boris (played by DCALB actor Jean-Marc Russ) and the gay character Vince (Simon Munroe). The night is spent debating whether Fiona should get braces (as the actor decided to get them in real life and so the script had to accommodate) and advice was given to Vince not to fall prey to being overly concerned about his looks. In spite of the culturally diverse group, at no time was this a scripting feature of the scene. The Breakers community relates closely to what Nagel (2002) identifies as ‘young cosmopolitans’. While her research concerns the study of the assimilatory tendencies of Arab immigrants in London, her conceptual framework fits over an inner-city migrant youth culture in Australia. ‘Young cosmopolitans’ are upwardly mobile in comparison with their parents. They do not reject their cultural heritage but also tend not to identify themselves exclusively with social networks based on their ‘ethnicity’. In the British context, they ‘assert themselves as members of a new ‘multicultural’ mainstream … comprising the upwardly mobile children of post-colonial migrants’ (Nagel, 2002, p 277). Relieved of the stigmatisation which ensues from problematic approaches to multiculturalism, the second generation of many culturally diverse groups in Australia experience a security with cultural diversity which was not available to their parents.

If we go back to the remark from the Breakers message-boards, where a fan commented Australia was no longer in the 1970s, what the viewer probably

22 This information confirmed with three experienced scriptwriters and a network executive.

211 meant was that the portrayal of Australia’s migrant diversity was no longer as it was in the 1970s – as Australia was already a culturally diverse nation in the 1970s – but television was not. The complete lack of cultural diversity found by Bell (1993) has been replaced with a strong multifaceted cultural diversity. While Chapter Seven found it is still a tenuous achievement in the production industry with regard to Indigenous and South East Asian representation, the nature of multicultural representation on Breakers signifies both audience and industry equanimity for a mainstream, everyday and intercultural portrayal.

Pizza ‘chocko comedy’23 Ten years before Pizza appeared on television, Australian audiences had the opportunity to view ‘ethnic comedy’, predominantly by means of the commercial programs Acropolis Now and The Comedy Company. An examination of these comedies will assist in establishing how critical discourses surrounding the concept of stereotyping and a ‘correct’ portrayal relate to the authority of comedy programming in performing a transitive function for reducing anxiety for portrayals and stories which are deemed intolerable. The shows also represent the evolution from a migrant centred multiculturalism to that of cultural diversity. Programs such as Acropolis Now and Pizza, also become conduits for subsequent multifaceted representations and stories, as the comedies attempt to combine the intimacy of in-group humour with an exploration of often scandalous representations. Although 10 years apart, both programs elicited comment for their impudent treatment of ‘ethnic’ representations (though Pizza to a lesser degree).

Noteworthy for this research is the emphasis on post war migrants in Acropolis Now as opposed to the Arab and Asian migrant presence on Pizza’s comedy (though NES Europeans feature in Pizza as well). This reflects the transformation in immigration intake from Southern European countries in the

23 The term ‘chocko’ is used by the show’s main character Pauly (played by Paul Fenech who is the show’s creator/director) to describe himself or other migrants, as well as ‘everyone who’s a bit loose’ (Molitorisz, 2003). Australians of Anglo decent are referred to as ‘bumpkins’ and likewise, the term can be more broadly employed - as in conservative Australian music being ‘bumpkin music’.

212 post war period to those from the Middle East and South East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. At the level of representation, it also reflects the trends reported in Chapter Seven where the participation of actors from European background significantly advanced in the 1990s, whereas the opportunities for South East Asian and Arabic background actors were still sparse. Just as Acropolis Now was seen as giving a space to Greek (‘wog’) self-identification - albeit working class - Pizza continues this design. Casting its net over a range of groups from skater to car culture, Pizza offers an alternative to and parody of the news media’s rendering of youth culture, in particular the Lebanese community of Sydney, who at the time were portrayed in the news media as ethnically motivated gangs, involved in street crime. While such a rendering was the focus of one episode of Pizza, the episode is a subversive text and communicates a clear message of image-corruption grounded in conservative politics and police discourse.24 While Con the Fruiterer, Jim, or Effie from Acropolis Now were unlikely to engage with such manifest politics, their images and symbols of cultural diversity at the time of the Agenda, contribute to a continuity of debate around ‘worthy’ or ‘positive’ portrayals of a multicultural Australia. What follows is an assessment of the two earlier comedies to be followed by an analysis of the first series of Pizza.

The Comedy Company was a skit show, which included a variety of weekly characters as well as presenting a number of parodies of recognisable television personalities and shows of the time. However, it was the regular character Con the Fruiterer who provided the ‘ethnic’ humour in the program. Con was played by Anglo comedian Mark Mitchell with a considerable amount of makeup to darken his complexion, supplemented with the obligatory fake moustache, greasy hair and thick accent. Mark Mitchell also played Con’s Greek wife in what can only be described as gross caricature. Acropolis Now was a well known and successful comedy series which ran over several years and was based on the theatre production Out of Work. In one way, Acropolis Now differed markedly from Con the Fruiterer in that Acropolis Now was produced by a culturally diverse team. But in another way, the programs

24 See Poynting (2002) for a discussion of the ‘moral panic’ which surrounded a series of incidents connecting the Arabic community with crime.

213 were similar in their service of the ethnic stereotype for audience appeal. While the utilisation of Anglo actors for roles as DCALB characters has an unflattering history in Australian representations of cultural diversity (though mostly in drama),25 it is the use of the stereotype that I will focus on here, rather than the politics of the Anglo actor Mark Mitchell playing a Greek man – or woman.

Both shows have produced their share of critical comment, positive and negative. Con’s creators mischievously claim his presence on commercial TV at the time contributed a certain ‘proportional representation’ to the perceived dominance of an Anglocentric media of the time (White, 1989, p13). In response to this claim, Victorian ethnic community representatives were not so impressed, sharing Bell’s view that Con’s ‘comic stereotype … infantilises the ethnic group’ (Di Chera, 1988). Academic Tony Mitchell’s (1992, p 123) perception that the Comedy Company’s aim was connected to providing a ‘satirical antidote to “minority activists’’’ also rings true. However at the time, it was also likely that Con bestowed racist substantiation upon those seeking consolation for their bigoted attitudes (as did Archie Bunker in the USA sitcom All in the Family). Regardless, it is the more substantial and enduring Acropolis Now which warrants further examination.

The theatre piece Wogs out of Work is often discussed as the more worthy text in comparison to its spin off television program, Acropolis Now (Carmichael, 1991; Mitchell, 1992; Jakubowicz, 1994; Jakubowicz et al, 1994). Wogs out of Work is celebrated for using mimicry as ‘political strategy that mocks and undermines the colonial apparatus’ (Jakubowicz, 1994, p 123). The TV show Acropolis Now was accused of reducing the political power of the theatre production to caricatures of migrants as ‘buffoons’, with

25 A reasonably contemporary (1991) and noteworthy case of this was when the Anglo actor Cameron Daddo was ‘blacked up’ to play the Indigenous ranger Boney. The episode led to involvement of the MEAA who were able to secure Indigenous involvement on the show and from that time the practice has been abandoned. However, actors of culturally diverse backgrounds do at times play roles for which they are able to because of phenotype factors (such as a Chinese actor playing a Japanese role). This practice holds its own dilemmas for the actors from an employment perspective, as decently paid work as an actor is notoriously difficult to come by.

214 writer and actor Simon Palomares being accused of ‘selling out to the mainstream’ (Carmichael, 1991, p 48). Yet in audience research carried out by the same critics who accuse the TV show of detrimental stereotype, they found that amongst 600 mostly Greek subjects, the vast majority saw no offence in the TV show, with audiences saying there was ‘little difference’ between the TV show and the stage production, which most audience members had also seen (Jacubowicz et al, 1994, p 126). The Acropolis Now production team themselves concede to modification of the theatre production for an early evening television show on commercial TV. Indeed, the generic, classificatory and time constraints of television as a medium clearly limit the uncompromising possibilities available to an adult theatre production. In spite of the critical assessments of Acropolis Now, critics such as Mitchell find that it is amongst younger audiences that the potential offered by such comedy is realised:

Acropolis Now … provides an important focal point for out-group identity, and fuel to fight against discrimination by ‘skips’… [this] form of mimicry which is a defiant enactment of an exaggerated ethnicity challenges both the strictures and constraints imposed by migrant parents and stigmatisation by Anglo-Australians (Mitchell, 1992, p 132).

In the same way that Acropolis Now invokes distortion and exaggeration of its characters, Pizza employs similar methods to garner both an affectionate and compelling representation of a particular group, in order to articulate and challenge what are often offensive and/or distressing attitudes, which circulate in the media (or among ‘bumpkins’). The attraction for culturally diverse youth to shows such as Pizza and Acropolis Now rests in the way in which the second generation take on a ‘transcultural consciousness’. Castles and Davidson (2000) note how this emergent identity forms through experiences which DCALB second generation youth have within their own group, as well as interaction with other DCALB groups. The authors note such interaction is more likely to occur for those growing up in the cities of developed countries, which relates well to Sydney or Melbourne. Mixing with youth of other cultural backgrounds and employing global and local sources of culture, DCALB youth often occupy a tactical or strategic hybridity. Noble and Tabar (2002) found in

215 their research with Arabic-Australian youth, that young males may move between an ‘essentialised’ identity for purposes of ‘in group’ solidarity, to an ‘assimilationist’ mode when the cultural manners of the dominant are more beneficial (such as in relationships with girls for example). Such modes of identity formation have been well established in other research, which indicate the slipperiness of contemporary identities in immigrant and post-colonial states (Gilroy, 1987; Hall, 1988; Gillespie, 1995). However, what is sometimes overlooked is that in a choice of contexts, DCALB youth identity may in fact be conforming and conservative, whether it be a hegemonic attitude to gender and sexuality, or racist attitudes to other groups. Comedy offers a location to needle the often unspoken views, trends and cultural practices of DCALB youth, whose tactical hybridity habitually remains concealed by media representations, often grounded in moral panics, which repeat only one potential component of their cultural practice.

What is interesting with the arrival, and ongoing popularity of Pizza compared with Acropolis Now, is the low level of media attention and cultural criticism over Pizza, which haunted Acropolis Now for a significant period in the early 1990s. Using a media clippings service, only twelve articles relating to Pizza between March 2000 and April 2003 were located. None of the articles interrogate the program for racist or stereotypical issues and in fact, most focus on the comedic nature of the show, the unusual professional life-history of creator Paul Fenech and the impressive list of cameos. Two articles make brief mention of the program exploring ‘racial differences’ (Molitorisz, 2003; Williamson, 2000) and one makes note of its ‘political incorrectness’ (Ellul, 2003). There are probably two core reasons for the lack of multicultural criticism of the show. The first relates to the two shows’ ‘pedigree’. Acropolis Now was burdened with the esteemed approbation of its theatre-based roots. Pizza on the other hand was born of a winning entry at the short film festival.26 However, more significant is on which broadcaster the shows have screened.

26 Tropfrest has become one of the nation’s best known short film festivals for its eccentric and eclectic range of independent films.

216 SBS’ status as a ‘post-modern’ broadcaster is now well established (Hartley, 1992). Moving beyond ‘ethnic television’ in the early 1990s, it now encompasses a range of special interests such as sport, soft pornography, art house, animation and of course programming in other languages in a range of genres, which fashion a ‘creative heterogeneity’ (Hawkins, 1996, p 62). Pizza follows the success SBS already established with the animation comedy South Park, a show which did attract significant media and critical interest due mostly to ‘moral panics’ around violence, coarse language and the effects on a youth audience. Like South Park, Pizza’s characters swear profusely and both shows have a clear “anti-political correctness” curriculum. In spite of South Park exhausting media and community indignation over swearing and un-PC behaviour on an SBS program, (which partly accounts for Pizza’s lack of media attention), the weight of multicultural ‘authenticity’ awarded to Pizza due to its presence in the SBS schedule should not be underestimated. This is in contrast to Acropolis Now’s location on a commercial network. As described in Chapter Three, the commercial networks attracted robust and persistent criticism in the early 1990s over a lack of multicultural themes or DCALB actors. Acropolis Now gave other sectors of the media, cultural critics and policy advocates more ammunition for the assault on commercial broadcasters. While it is difficult to make retrospect assumptions, it would have been interesting to gauge the critical response to Acropolis Now had it appeared on SBS.

Malcom Long (1993, p 80), managing director of SBS in the early 1990s, states that ‘SBS would love to have produced the program [Acropolis Now], but dollars are dollars’. This indicates the financial reality for SBS up until the South Park era, when revenues could not attract the funds necessary to engage in more risky local production, such as comedy. Long goes on to comment that SBS would in any case probably not produce a comedy like Acropolis Now which ‘makes fun of racial characteristics [as] the necessary self-confidence may not have been there in the community’. Long’s argument is that what SBS does best is issues based, provocative programming ‘with an eye to balance …. comedy is not quite controllable in that way’ (Long, 1993, p 81). This contrasts with the comments of Nick Giannopolous (1993, pp 73 -

217 76) (co-writer and actor in Acropolis Now), who believes the show reflected a maturity within the community and accelerated an ‘ethnic self confidence’ – for all culturally diverse groups, including Indigenous Australians. Malcom Long’s response to this is that it is a ‘generational issue’, later inferring that such a program is specific to second generation Greek culture. He adds: ‘I think there would be a lot of failures if our industry attempted to do it in a terribly broader way with different communities because the issues are still too close to the bone’ (Long, 1993, p 83). The fact that only six years passed between when the above comments were made and Pizza getting the ‘green light’, parallels the changes in the commercial sector, where casting and culturally diverse portrayals improved markedly as well.

What Pizza and Acropolis Now demonstrate is the evolution of culturally diverse portrayals (whether ‘ethnic’, ‘gay’ or ‘disabled’) along a continuum of representations in popular programming. Such portrayals can be delineated along with the development of multicultural policy, though at a delayed advancement. This begins with the invisible, where the lack of any representation indicates both a lack of professional opportunity for the creative talent and the mainstream’s incapacity to accommodate the contemporary social reality – this resonates with post-war assimilation policy. This is then followed by the problematic, where issues are explored from a paternal liberal axis – mostly by the mainstream looking at the margins (shows such as A Country Practice, Flying Doctors and earlier episodes of Home and Away and Neighbours assumed these portrayals). This reflects the policy turn of the 1970s to a liberal pluralism and the Grasby and Galbally era of multiculturalism. This is then fractured by the comedic, which defuses the anxiety of the problematic, expressing a maturity and confidence by the group, whether it relates to a community from a diverse cultural or linguistic background, gay representation or the disabled. Pizza stands somewhere here. While there is no obvious policy companion to the comedic, Acropolis Now and the debates around such portrayals coincide with intense debates around the Agenda from a critical multiculturalist perspective. The Agenda’s multicultural policy legacy is to be found in the way in which its ‘political and cultural agenda [provided] a context in which everyday multiculturalism is lived

218 and thought through’ (my italics, Stratton, 1998, p 207). In television programming, this relates to how such a context materialised opportunities for creative stakeholders and decision makers to attempt programming which was grounded in the everyday more so than the problematic or spectacular.

Finally, the banal and everyday portrayal evolves to a position, where audiences are interested in characters’ motivations, emotions, history and futures, which are not fastened to either the actor’s ethnicity or cultural background. The transformation of multicultural policy from a migrant focus to that of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism in the early to mid-1990s, mirrors the significant improvements in portrayal and participation in the last decade. This is manifest for example when it is no longer spectacular to broadcast the physical expression of alternate sexualities (a passionate kiss between two men or women in The Secret Life of Us), or the non-specific attendance of Indigenous actors in a police show (such as Aaron Pederson in Water Rats) or the presence of significant cast members from culturally diverse backgrounds in a soap. This does not however, translate to the post- war assimilationist paradigm. An unmitigated abandonment of any cultural symbols, conflict, issues or story related to a group’s particular cultural complexity need not be assumed redundant by the mainstream due to the collapsing of the group into the mainstream. Rather, it is the representation of an expanded mainstream that develops through cultural and social intermixing, that denotes a media which has come to grips with the social reality of the present. However, this is not to say that at any time in the present, particular culturally diverse groups will not continue to experience any one of the former stages of representation, from invisibility to problematisation.

Examining a selection of portrayals from Pizza recorded in 1999 will help demonstrate how the comedic in particular works to challenge the previously problematic and act as a bridge to the ‘everyday’.

219 A slice of Pizza Paul Fenech (producer, writer, actor and director of Pizza, of Maltese heritage) had worked for SBS as an executive producer on ICAM, before offering SBS two pilots based on his award wining short film Pizza Man. SBS were interested in capitalising on the newly found and significant sized youth audience it had attracted through South Park. The animated comedy had brought to SBS the sort of advertising revenues more common to its commercial cousins. Indeed, funds gleaned from South Park advertising revenue helped to fund Pizza.27 Head of SBS local production, Craig Collie, tested the pilots and short film on teenage family members and their friends, finding that ‘instinct told me it would work in the 15-35 demographic’ (Williamson, 2000, p 3). Fenech had a reputation in the industry as ‘being a bit of a lad’28 and had made the first pilot two years previous to SBS taking up Pizza for production. However, according to Fenech, previous manager of production, David White, was ‘scared by it’ and the show was only produced after the second pilot was made and David White had died (Molitorisz, 2003, p 3). Produced for the sum of a ‘small new car’, the nine episodes of the first series rotate around themes of sex, violence, drugs and a comedy style which encompasses slapstick, parody, political satire and gags which exploit niche cultural knowledge. As far as the program being labelled ‘ethnic’ comedy, Fenech prefers to think that the material for the program is broader than such description, stating:

Actually I think it is a bit less of an ethnic comedy than, say Wog Boy … I just try to represent all of the characters in Australia. It just happens that our main characters are chockos, but we also touch on the bumpkins, the bogans. I just want to represent everyone I see walking down the street (quoted in Molitorisz, 2003, p 3).29

27 This is based on the fact that earlier advertising revenue significantly helped in the formation of SBSI and local fictional programming. The statement is also based on an informal conversation with an SBS program executive in 2000. 28 Quoted by Craig Collie in Williamson (2000). Supporting this reputation, Fenech had a public altercation with Tropfest director John Polsen, after Fenech won Tropfest two years in a row by submitting the film Intolerance under the female name, Laura Fienstein, winning a prize to meet with Hollywood ‘players’. Fenech claims it was the only way he could have won Tropfest twice (Molitorisz, 2003). 29 The feature film version of the TV show is an extension of all characters and themes in the television series. It is worth noting that the Pizza feature film follows the success of Wog Boy (2000) and Looking for Alibrandi (1999) – both local films with multicultural themes.

220

Fenech was particularly keen to show some of the distinctive features of youth culture as experienced in city locations, conspicuous among those parts of Sydney in the city’s south west. Examples of this include the car stereo culture, the use of mobile phones, rapping, drug culture and Lebanese culture, which he portrays as being heavily interconnected by a network of family members, who can be called upon for a variety of motives ranging from compensation claims legal advice to drugs and stolen property supply.

The program also employs a range of cameos, whose impact for audiences is largely dependent on a sound depth of textual knowledge of Australian television and media in general. Some examples are appearances by Tony Bonner (from Skippy), John Mangos (former TV news reader), Bob Ellis (iconic Australian writer), Barry Crocker (star of early Australian feature film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie), the lead cast of Prisoner (Australian TV series from the 1970s based on life in a women’s prison with a cult following), Lex Marinos (early SBS public figure and ‘ethnic media’ advocate), Shane Porteous (lead actor in A Country Practice) and a range of entertainment industry people such as Kamal, Bernard King, Austen Tayshus, , Ian Turpie, Trevor Hendy and Jon English. Many of these entertainers and actors experienced the height of their careers in the 1970s and 1980s. It is therefore unlikely that most 15 to 20 year olds would have access to the inter- textual nature of the comedy, beyond the role the actor is playing for their appearance on Pizza (which were in fact always related to the cameo’s previous career highlight or media persona). However in balance to these cameos from the media’s past is a late 1990s club soundtrack and cultural references very much grounded in recent youth culture - with a culturally diverse undercurrent.

Cultural diversity and Pizza: series one The show’s premise revolves around the incidents which befall the two main characters, Pauly (Paul Fenech) and Sleek the Elite (played by real life Lebanese rapper and air-conditioning mechanic, Paul Nadak) who work as pizza delivery drivers for their Italian boss, BoBo (Johnny Boxer). In spite of

221 having all leads of culturally diverse background, a portrayal running through the series is that of the Anglo-Australian ‘bumpkin’. Fenech’s inclusion of Anglo Australia30 within the cultural diversity of the nation responds to criticisms of multiculturalism as a ‘core – peripheral’ dichotomy, whereby the dominant mainstream sit privileged in their consumption and enjoyment of ‘minority’ culture (Hage, 1995; Stratton, 1998). Fenech somewhat turns this on its head, when Pauly is lost in ‘the desert’31 he ventures upon crushed beer cans and sights a shed in the distance. But fearing ‘interbred bumpkins’ who ‘hate chockos’, he continues on, rather than seeking assistance. The bumpkin scene is reminiscent of the 1975 film Sunday Too Far Away, however, the outback men’s masculine bush toughness is tempered by the suggestion that they have created a ‘goatman’ (by way of bestiality), who they sadly miss since the goatman’s escape to Sydney where he now works for SBS under an EEO employment strategy. Later in the same episode, Barry Crocker plays the men’s city living brother who turns out to be an axe-murderer. In other episodes, Anglo Australians are variously portrayed as over-indulged ‘white’ homeboys, superfluous appendages to USA off-shore film production, military characters, lowly paid and grimy workers, and members of a corrupt police force and polity. Such representations of the dominant group consign a reverse-stigmatisation of dominant culture at sites of contested meaning. In place of a mainstream discourse of ‘youth out of control’ – and in particular Lebanese youth (Poynting, 2002) - Pizza presents an Anglo culture ‘out of control’, by employing either caricature of iconic Australian symbols or substituting the target minority culture for an Anglo one (such as when menacing ethnic homeboys turn out to be Anglos from affluent homes).

That is not to say Pizza confines itself to representing exclusively Anglo Australians in less than venerable portrayals. Main cast member BoBo is the owner of the Fat Pizza shop. A man of barely contained violence towards the

30 In one episode, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo escapes from the set of an off-shore film-set, only to be captured by BoBo who turns Skippy into Pizza meat – this cultural icon of Australian to later be ‘consumed’ by his customers. 31 At the beginning of each episode, a list of characters appearing ‘on tonight’s menu’ is presented with their image. In this episode, an image of the Australian outback accompanies the text ‘the desert’, followed by a still of two obviously iconic outback men, with the text ‘the bumpkins’.

222 world, he nevertheless plays Dean Martin music and continually has SBS TV on in the shop. He is the eternal son to his Mama, who sits with her mother, also watching SBS in the family home – a renaissance inspired suburban mansion. His representation continues the tradition of a media stereotype - in this case, the Italian pizza-maker. However, as customary on the show, his masculinity is destabilised on several occasions. For example, on one occasion he is shown masturbating to internet porn while being harangued by his mother. And on another, he engages in relations with a transgender clubber. Threats to the masculine are repeated throughout the series with both leads, Pauly and Sleek the Elite, finding themselves in a number of compromising situations. This is significant as the show repeatedly displays women as objects of male desire, most notably by employing Norwegian/Australian actress Annaliese Braakensiek as a bulemic model. In balance to this conservatism, are incidents where Pauly is obviously raped (possibly anally) by the original cast of Prisoner, when he goes to the women’s prison to deliver a Pizza. He is also lured to an elite society party, where he is forced to act as their ‘gimp’ for the night.32 Such scenes destabilise what might otherwise be the fortification of status quo representations concerning gender issues, which transgress the more apparent and anticipated cultural issues of ethnicity.

In spite of considerable media-savvy references, slapstick humour and visual gags, themes related to life as a young second generation migrant predominate. At times the program attempts to incorporate topical issues within this subject matter, the episode titled Crime Pizza is the most obvious. There are clear references to the Lakemba Police Station shooting incident in the episode. After a series of homeboy home invasions, the NSW premier, played by Bob Ellis, decrees it an offence to wear a cap or extravagant joggers (Pauly is fined $300 for wearing Nikes). Police harassment of young people from culturally diverse backgrounds attains a gravity in this episode not manifest in other issues dealt with in a more irreverent manner (such as supposed drug trafficking links amongst culturally diverse communities). In

32 The meaning of the word ‘gimp’ attaining wide exposure after the film Pulp Fiction (1995).

223 another episode which draws attention to traditional mainstream culture and its relevance to a diverse youth culture, Australia Day celebrations come under fire as being extraneous to Pauly and Sleek (Pauly unaware why so much ‘bumpkin’ music is being played by radio stations on his car stereo)33.

In comparison to Acropolis Now and Con the Fruiterer, some of the coarse portrayals in Pizza are of the same genre – only the cultural groups have changed from exclusively European to encompass Asian and those in addition to ethnicity (such as sexuality - though any coarse parody of Indigenous Australia is absent). Nevertheless, Pizza offers a timely restoration for local comedy, which imparts an alternative analysis on a range of issues related to youth and cultural diversity. Jakubowicz’ (1994, p 100) comments about Acropolis Now and the possibilities for comedy also resonate through Pizza’s motives:

The comic has been appropriated to assert a difference as creative and cutting, a space to be both different and a part of the mainstream … comedy offers an important site for the recomposition of the mythic forms of a society. An understanding of the use of comedy as an element in ethnic relations suggests that the emergence of mainstream comic characters will be one of the very crucial tests of the way in which multiculturalism has been incorporated into the parameters of popular culture.

A show such as Pizza, is given licence to explore issues which may otherwise remain buried in the ‘institutionally structured racism’ of the mainstream news media (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p 200). The social positioning of Pizza should also be considered significant as the show was consciously produced for multicultural broadcaster SBS, to be broadcast right before South Park. This translates to the program having the potential to meet the widest possible audience, as SBS secured audiences who had never before viewed SBS when South Park was aired. This delivers Pizza’s incorporation into the popular – with Village Roadshow’s financing of the feature film taking Pizza further into the mainstream. Just as the British comedy Goodness Gracious

33 The songs Pauly flicks through on his car radio are Click go the Shears, Echo Beach, Wild Colonial Boy and Advance Australia Fair – the version played for station close before TV went 24 hours.

224 Me served as a marker for Asian self-assertion (Sreberny, 1999), Pizza offers a comparable symbol for the self-assertion of culturally diverse groups whose inclusion in the popular had been meagre through the 1980s and much of the 90s.

While Pizza and Breakers were screened during the recording period in 1999, an analysis of these two programs alone would bias any appraisal of cultural diversity and Australian popular fictional programming. As has been seen, both shows stand out to some degree with their culturally diverse casts. While most Australian programming also contains actors of culturally diverse backgrounds, Pizza and Breakers are notable for their employment of actors from beyond those of Northern European background. However, as I have argued, the presence of a blatant cultural diversity in these two programs merely refects the geographic reality of the shows’ settings as well as astute marketing in the conception of the programs’ target audiences. Writing on Australian television culture, O’Regan (1993, p 114) invites critical multiculturalists to move beyond ‘marginal’ and/or ‘token’ discourses whenever an ‘ethnic’ portrayal finds its way into popular programming. He advocates to such critics that ‘criticism which recognises distinctions in presentation and dramaturgical necessity’ will do more to encourage ‘poly- ethnic representations’ and participation for culturally diverse groups than perennial harassment of programs and producers regardless of whether a show does or does not contain a culturally diverse cast and/or theme. Taking such comment into consideration, the remaining section of the chapter will examine six weeks of fictional programming, as did Bell’s (1993) study ten years earlier to determine a broader assessment across all popular programming.

Six weeks of popular programming and cultural diversity Sea Change (ABC) The residents of Pearl Bay are on the whole of Anglo appearance. This reflects the geographical integrity of the series’ location, being a small coastal

225 town.34 However, one resident of the local caravan park is Phrani Gupter (played by Georgina Naidu), a woman from the Indian sub-continent. In one of two episodes captured in the recording period (Fish Could Fly), Phrani’s cultural connection with Indian mysticism is used to effect when she gives evidence in court by way of recounting a vision. The locals in the courtroom display a respectable awe and faith in the vision, however the scene is played for humour with the use of mystical sitar music and camera work in the genre of the film Lost Horizon. Nevertheless, the episode is significant as it implies the beginning of a romance between Phrani and caravan park owner Kevin (a stout, uncomplicated man most often seen in a blue singlet). The episode also follows an established pattern in Australian drama by employing a DCALB guest role actor who speaks with an accent – in this case, the actor Alex Menglet plays a ‘cosmic’ Pole migrant with strong beliefs in chaos theory. The representation in the case of Phrani is more complex than what one episode demonstrates. She is often portrayed as a strong, independent women in the community, willing to stand up to the town’s self-serving mayor. As the series develops, so to her relationship with the unlikely Kevin. As the attraction of the series lies in its larger than life characterisations, Phrani is not excluded from such treatment. While the episode discussed utilises Phrani’s cultural specificity, her portrayal throughout the series is a more balanced representation in keeping with the humour of the program.

Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude (ABC) This ABC miniseries examined the lives of three women who have taken various paths along a feminist axis of the post 1970s Cultural Revolution. The episode recorded concentrates on Jude, whose father is Chilean and mother Australian. Jude is a spokesperson for a protest organisation which represents those who disappeared at the hands of the Chilean government. Tempered with her cultural background are scenes of Jude as a medical student and scenes set in her social life, which also present a number of the culturally diverse cast. The cultural theme explored in Jude’s life does not focus on the familial or generational as might be expected, but on the

34 ABS data for 1996 indicates that coastal towns which are devoid of agricultural industry have rates of NES residents almost half the national average.

226 disturbing events which beset political refugees. While scenes of South American dancing and music combine with orbital characters who speak with accents might lead to criticisms of stereotype, this would be an imbalanced judgment considering the number of such clubs in capital cities and the recentness of Chilean refugees to Australia. Rather, the drama of the series is an exploration of women’s choices in the 1990s.

Heartbreak High (ABC) Recorded in the final days of the youth series, the show continued to display an inner-city cultural diversity for which it was both celebrated and admonished in previous research (Hawthorne, 1996 and Wilding, 1998). In the episodes recorded, a generational conflict is played out, however it is within an Anglo family, rather than a second generation DCALB family. A new character joins the series, the Italian Marco, who quickly establishes a conflictual relationship with Anglo student Dennis. In the classroom scene, Marco and Dennis exchange words related to Marco’s cultural background, with Dennis clearly understood as being the ignorant bigot – this implication supported by classmates’ derision of Dennis. Later in the week, a romance is suggested between Lee (Anglo actor Marvel Bracks) and the African student Nikki (Fleur Beaupert). A number of students from culturally diverse background are also included in sustaining and guest roles.

Before the series moved to the ABC, Hawthorn (1996) charted the ‘whitening’ of the program in its first two years of production (while screening on Network Ten). However her research is based entirely on reception analysis with no quantifiable evidence for the claims she makes that the show’s producers explicitly set out to ‘purge’ ethnicity from the screen. Hawthorne (1996, p 66) claims that only ‘non-stigmatised’ actors of European origin could now be included, leading to the ‘obliteration of Asian or Middle eastern faces’. Wilding (1998) usefully extends the analysis of the program’s transformation by contributing necessary comment from the show’s producers and Network Ten executives. His research illustrates how the independent producer (Ben Gannon) fought network desire for a less gritty realism, which was not necessarily focused on purging the series of cultural diversity, but on

227 delivering a product more akin in genre to the soaps Neighbours and Home and Away. Wilding notes that network interference was profound in areas of classification concerns, scheduling and scripting – as well as the desire to reduce the use of accents and moderate the focus on the key Greek family. Interviewed in 2000 over the matter, Ben Gannon claims network Ten were unsure of their demographic at the time and changes were made in an attempt to capture a broader audience, rather than any motivation to moderate the multicultural presence (Gannon, 2000).

While I agree with both Hawthorne and Wilding that network intrusion resulted in a different representation of cultural diversity on HBH, the changes should also be placed in the context of the early 1990s, when culturally diverse casts were less in evidence. HBH was an expensive attempt at innovative youth programming for a commercial broadcaster to make. Such experimentation on a commercial station brings with it financial expectations and associated risks, such as ratings pressures and the related obligations networks have to advertisers. Wilding’s claims (1998, p 359) that the use of an African Black teacher instead of a Black Indigenous teacher reduces ‘interrogation’ and ‘problematisation’ opportunities for the program are in conflict with the show’s desire for an everyday portrayal, as well as conflicting with the overwhelming desire from DCALB actors to not be continually ‘interrogated’ and ‘problematised’. Both Wilding and Hawthorne fall into a misguided tokenism discourse which, as suggested previously in the thesis, retards critical analysis of cultural diversity in repetitive suspicious assessments at the sight of Black or other DCALB actors, whose banal participation in popular programming is then frustrated.

After HBH was exported to the ABC, producers were granted a certain freedom, not by the fact that the show was now on the ABC, but because the show’s overseas sales now funded the production. Writer Kevin Roberts notes that due to this, the team experienced no interference in casting or plotlines with such a dispersed range of financial backers. However, even overseas, he states broadcasters are more interested in promoting the white stars of the show more so than their DCALB colleagues. As the writer of 120 episodes in

228 the late 1990s, he is also adamant that ‘race based stories were not the focus of the show’ and that mostly he ignores the characters’ cultural background (Roberts, 1999). Once again, the desire for a lack of specific cultural markers in spite of a culturally diverse cast designates the promotion of an everyday rendering of migrant multiculturalism.

Wildside (ABC) Wildside follows on from earlier social-realist police dramas Scales of Justice and Phoenix. Shot with multiple cameras, Wildside became noteworthy for its overlapping dialogue and naturalistic performances (Schrembri, 1998, p 3). The series employed a dramaturge to assist actors immerse themselves in their roles, with adlibbing of dialogue taking on a hitherto unseen level of acceptance in Australian television drama.35 The series received both Logie and AFI awards, reinforcing its critical acclaim and healthy ratings (for an ABC program) of between 8s and 10s. The series was supported as a major investment in drama at the ABC by managing director Brian Johns and head of drama Andy Lloyd James (both previous SBS managers). The producing team of Ben Gannon and Michael Jenkins (from HBH) came to the ABC with the show already in development, however it is the ABC who became the majority funder (Oliver, 1997, p 4). Lloyd James was keen to promote a police drama alternative to Blue Healers with a show containing cultural integrity without a didactic or issues based agenda. In spite of the show’s producing credentials and critical acclaim, it failed to attract significant overseas sales and the poor returns on the 21 million dollar investment was seen as putting at risk further commitment from the ABC for series drama (Meade, 1998; Fidgemon, 1998; Dennis, 1998).

Only one episode from the final series was broadcast in the six-week recording period. In it, the Olympics development in Sydney comes under attack for the dispossession of homeless people, who are portrayed as a diverse cultural group. The community legal worker (played by Mary Coustas

35 Writer for the series, Chris Hawkshaw, was often surprised at how his scripts would change after they had been locked off and he saw the broadcast product. Once filming began, actors would improvise atypical amounts of dialogue in the usually very controlled production demands of TV drama (Hawkshaw, 1999).

229 in an ongoing role) enters into the conflict, which spills over into the nearby police station. The pre-requisite murder plot sees a suspect’s girlfriend (played by Chinese actor Nina Liu) brought to the station for questioning. plays a sustaining role as one of three main detectives. The episode is typical in its portrayal of an inner-city geography with eternally wet streets and a grungy aesthetic. Like its youthful cousin Heartbreak High, cultural diversity permeates the vision of the series. What is dissimilar to HBH though, is that explicit plots and themes related to cultural diversity also thread through the show – particularly with regard to Indigenous Australia. This was marked when Aaron Pederson took on the role of Indigenous adviser in the second series, assisting in plotlines and bringing local Indigenous community representation to particular episodes (Hawkshaw, 1999). Wildside offers the most emotive exploration of cultural diversity of any of the programs examined, due to the fact that all its characters are involved in high level crime and social worker territory. It complements and counteracts the mostly cheerful surroundings of Summer Bay, Bondi or Mt Thomas, by providing locations and roles which are compelled towards shouting struggles of class and cultural conflict.

Something in the Air (ABC) This rural serial sees the ABC return to familiar ground after the country town soap Bellbird screened on the ABC in the 1970s. The familiar locations and characters of the pub, small shop, doctor’s surgery and farm are connected by the events and activities at the local radio station. Produced by Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier, the series employed two actors of culturally diverse backgrounds in ongoing roles: Joe Sabatini played by (later replaced by Vince Collisimo) and local doctor Eva Petrovsk, played by Melita Jurisic (later replaced by Nina Liu). The most significant aspect of Melita Jurisic’s character is that she speaks with an Eastern European accent (though one reminiscent of films such as Dr Zhivago). In the episodes recorded, Eva’s romance with publican Stuart (played by Frankie J. Holden) is put under pressure when she refuses his marriage proposal. Less extraordinary than the doctor’s relationship with a small town pub owner is her use of alternative therapies such as yoga and vitamin supplements in her

230 practice. Such medical counsel is accepted by her rural patients and no association or humour regarding her cultural heritage and the use of complementary medicines is made. Nevertheless, an air of eccentricity is doubtlessly present in her manner. The show’s setting is consistent with the point made earlier, in that the era, social and physical geography of a series necessarily bears a correlation to the portrayal of cultural diversity. Something in the Air’s service of non-specific casting and plotting for two leads in a rural context highlights the variety of programming and the respective representations of cultural diversity on the ABC in 1999/2000, and demonstrates that there is no rigid mode for the portrayal of cultural diversity.

Going Home (SBS) Going Home was conceived by Hal McElroy and his wife Di. McElroy had spent many years creating and producing costly commercial Australian drama such as Water Rats and Blue Heelers. In 1999, McElroy wished to produce an innovative and low cost program with a culturally diverse cast. Going Home weaves the lives of eight or so commuters on a train along with recent issues and news of the day. The scripts were a combination of planned plotlines interspersed with topical news stories written, filmed and broadcast within a few days of the actual events happening. Although the show was in the realm of the experimental it nevertheless attracted a following large enough to produce a second series. Viewers were given the chance to suggest storylines and advice on character development through the official website, receiving a mention in the end credits if their ideas were put to use. Issues covered in the two-week recording period are: workplace bullying, homelessness, Japanese whaling, genetically modified food, cystic fibrosis, the Goods and Services Tax, vigilantism, donating blood, refugee smuggling and sexual harassment. These issues are passed through the social and cultural filter of each commuter as each expresses opinions - half of whom are from a culturally diverse background. This allows the series to explore a wide gamut of contemporary topics in quick succession and explore then from a range of perspectives not available to the confines of most drama. However, a significant portion of dialogue is set firmly in the banal – with a discussion on the durability of shoes having no narrative or issues based function. Once an

231 issue such as refugees is explored, the characters respond in keeping with their age, class and education background, rather than in any anticipated manner related to their cultural background alone. In some respects, the show sits comfortably with the other SBS program at the time, Bondi Banquet, which also falls into the innovative genre.

Bondi Banquet (SBS) Sharing not only the locale of Breakers, Bondi Banquet is also set in one building. Each week, the residents of two flats in the building cook a meal for a mock documentary crew. The building contains almost the entire strata of Australian society and culture. Mary Coustas plays herself, living in the penthouse, while Rufus (), the homeless curiosity, occupies the roof. In addition are first and second generation migrants, older and conservative Australians, surfers, a gay couple, single parents and Chinese refugees. Scenes of food preparation are interspersed with the residents giving to-camera expositions of their cultural history or background. Typically, the intent is wry humour combined with more serious moments when representation of cultural diversity slips between the ‘everyday’ and problematic within a few scenes. Like Going Home, the show combines genre innovation with both familiar and unpredictable portrayals of cultural diversity.

Blue Heelers (Seven Network) In the third two-week recording period, both episodes of Blue Heelers contained markers of cultural diversity. In the episode A Little Faith, the Mt Thomas police are investigating a young second generation Italian farmer who is exploiting Italian women in the community, obtaining money from them for his services as a supposed Magus (male witch). The episode presents a number of Italian portrayals, from an elegant well educated mother who runs her own business, to a younger expectant mother who speaks with a mild accent (her age seems unlikely, given most Italian migrants who speak with an accent would have arrived in Australia in the post war-period). The episode could easily have fallen into a formulaic portrayal with its peasant farmers represented as uneducated, suspicious folk. To a certain extent, this evaluation is confirmed. What redeems the episode is an equal amount of

232 screen time given over to examining one officer’s prejudices against alternate religions compared to traditional Christianity and the fact that large proportions of the Anglo community hold faith in spiritual knowledge such as astrology, faith healing, conventional prayer and white witchcraft. Indeed, a main supporting role in the episode is the town’s ‘Irish witch’ who assists the Mt Thomas police in their investigations. In a rare instance in the series, long time lead PJ () refers to his own Lebanese cultural heritage when the station Sergeant accuses a younger officer of being racist for even suggesting that the Italians would believe in such practices. PJ comments that Lebanese culture contains similar religious customs, as do most cultures.

The episode is a curious mixture of everyday and amplified portrayal, which attempts to explain and defend its position by concentrating on Anglo spiritual practices which are meant to defuse any claims that the episode is targeting rural Italians. The following week’s episode, The Gumshoes, presents a more everyday portrayal of cultural diversity, when Indigenous actor/presenter plays a private detective, involved in a backpacker’s self-engineered disappearance. The episode completely avoids any cultural reference, utilising Ernie Dingo’s capacity for humour, more than any other feature. In other episodes in the six-week period, no other themes or storylines were present related to cultural diversity. However, as the casting survey illustrates, at least two sustaining and a number of guest roles are filled by actors of a culturally diverse background in a non-specific manner.

All Saints (Seven Network) All Saints is a hospital drama set in Sydney’s South. In the episode Knowing Me Knowing You, a man of Arabic background (Simon Elrahi) has been hit by a car in the street. Unbeknown to the ambulance officers who transport him to hospital, his diabetic son is in a coma on the back seat in his car at the scene of the accident. With virtually no English language skills, the character is somewhat desperate in trying to communicate the situation with the medical staff. The episode is critical of the official translation service, suggesting it is understaffed and overly bureaucratic. In the end, a compassionate nurse and another Arabic patient manage to save the situation. The episode attempts to

233 demonstrate that there is a lack of compassion amongst the mainstream community for non-English speakers (for example, an arrogant doctor wants the patient sedated, assuming the man to be mentally disturbed). However, once again, the episode displays a pattern in the programs which illustrates the divide between specific guest roles and non-specific ongoing roles in the portrayal of migrant multiculturalism. As in Blue Heelers though, when it comes to an Indigenous portrayal, the everyday reigns. In Shoot the Messenger, Indigenous footballer Sede (Luke Carroll) is admitted with a ruptured appendix. However it is discovered he only has one kidney, thus putting his career in jeopardy. In addition to this everyday representation, male nurse Jarad (Hungarian-born Ben Tari) has by now established a relationship with regular cast member Dr Kylie (South East Asian actor Ling Hsueh Tang). While All Saints has yet to achieve the sort of diversity witnessed on the American series ER, it was the only commercial drama at the end of the 1990s to employ a regular cast member from a South East Asian background.

Home and Away (Seven Network) In the six weeks recording Home and Away, no particular plot line dealt with cultural diversity in an explicit manner. The cast of the series has a number of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds, and in 2000/2001, an ongoing role was filled by Chinese-European actor Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen. Hawthorn’s (1996) criticism that there are no signs of a multicultural Australia, even in the form of a Chinese takeaway are hardly surprising. The established sets for the program do not extend beyond the local café, caravan park and characters’ homes. More telling is Hawthorn’s (1996, p 65) statement that when DCALB characters do come to Summer Bay as runaways (as most do), the fact that they are devoid of family attachment (meaning cultural attachment), means the character is left to ‘identify as 100 percent Australian in terms of language, culture and personal style’. Young second generation migrants educated in Australian high schools are very likely to speak with Australian accents and will very likely identify with a global youth culture. To suggest that they retain and display cultural difference for the sake of a multicultural portrayal inhibits rather than expands the possibilities for an

234 everyday portrayal. The geography of the series, generic conventions, target audience and successful marketing of the program also make it unlikely that Home and Away becomes a Breakers or Heartbreak High.

Stingers (Nine Network) Producer of the undercover police show Stingers Roger LeMesurier has commented that Stingers’ inner city Melbourne location offers a broader scope for cultural diversity than his ABC program Something in the Air (Jacka, 2002, p 20). Two of five lead cast are from a culturally diverse background and are on the whole cast non-specifically. In the episode The Big Picture, the Italian head of the team (Joe Petruzzi) comes out from behind his desk to pose as a Spanish buyer of stolen gold. A guest role sees actor Jaun Martinez playing an overdrawn criminal character with obligatory accent. Of all series programming captured, this episode of Stingers represents the most outmoded exemplar of cultural diversity, relying on a straightforward connection of crime and ethnicity.36 However, the other episodes recorded in the period present an everyday portrayal of migrant multiculturalism in an urban Melbourne landscape.

Water Rats (Nine Network) In yet another police drama, Water Rats presents itself as a more conventional police show in comparison with Wildside. Its utilisation of boat chases on Sydney Harbour, slower paced dialogue and mostly neat conclusions contrasts with Wildside’s pessimistic anger. However the attendance of cultural diversity in Water Rats belies its conventional roots. Containing a cast which includes two strong female leads (one gay), Indigenous male lead Aaron Pererson and in 1999, skipper Jay Laga’aia, the series continued to privilege creator Hal McElroy’s vision for an alternative to the glamour model of earlier USA police shows. In all episodes recorded, except one, the program maintains an everyday portrayal of cultural diversity. However in the episode Low Blows, two Lebanese youth are mistakenly

36 In the acclaimed Wildside, an episode broadcast outside the six-week period dealt with Asian culture connected to drug related crime.

235 implicated in a series of bank robberies. Their portrayal is initially conventional (with one of the two wearing heavy gold jewellery). But by the second half of the episode, audience empathy is turned to the young Lebanese with the final quarter of the show exposing an Anglo boy from an affluent home as the eventual culprit (this outcome is reminiscent of Pizza’s Homeboy episode). The episode functions as a morality tale, reminding audiences not to make negative judgements based on cultural appearance or background. How effective such liberal and progressive strategies are by scriptwriters is difficult to assess without audience research. Nonetheless, as a series, Water Rats avoids stigmatising migrant multiculturalism while employing a range of cast and characters who do not conform to conservative social expectations.

Above the Law (Network Ten) Above the Law (ATL) was another creation from the McElroy production house. Initially to be set in a building in Bondi (this would have made the third Bondi building program), the location was changed to Parramatta. Like Breakers, all action occurs in a vertical village, with a café and police station on the ground floor – residential accommodation above. Like Water Rats, McElroy wanted ATL to represent a culturally diverse community (McElroy, 1999). The ongoing cast include Chilean, Swiss and Malaysian actors with an Anglo actor playing the role of a young police officer of Italian background (though non-specific and accent free). In one of four episodes recorded, guest actor Anthony Wong is trapped under rubble and eventually dies – he does not speak with an accent and is portrayed as an educated and successful man who was part of the initial Vietnamese refugee intake (he relates some of his life story to the Chilean police officer as he is dying). The Malaysian actor Meme Thorn actually plays Filipina housekeeper Sunny Rodriguez. Her role develops through the series to the point where she is on more equal terms with her employer, as her former professional life replaces her migrant identity.37 This part of the story acts as a conduit for telling the stories of migrants whose professional qualifications and experience are under-utilised

37 The feelings of contradiction for the actor in playing a role of a proximal culture were explored in Chapter Seven.

236 in Australia. In spite of the McElroy pedigree, ATL did not survive more than one series.

Neighbours (Network Ten) There is little surprise that in the six weeks of recording Neighbours, no explicit plots or themes of migrant multiculturalism were evident. This is not a criticism however. As noted in Chapter Seven, the program clearly functions in a geography well outside of Footscray in Melbourne, Campsie in Sydney or West End in Brisbane. While 10 years ago, Neighbours seemed to stand for all Australian drama in critical debate on cultural diversity and television, the above analysis of six weeks programming reveals how an expanded market for diverse programming has relieved the improbable responsibility on Neighbours, to represent Australia’s social fabric. Data from the casting survey revealed how in 1999, almost one quarter of the cast were from culturally diverse backgrounds. At various times, actors of non-European NES background, as well as Indigenous actors have featured in ongoing roles (at the time of writing in 2003, South East Asian actor Michelle Ang is a Ramsey Street regular). Like the young cast in Home and Away, these roles are not fashioned to interrogate the status quo in a manner as direct as Heartbreak High, Wildside or Breakers. Audiences turn to such shows for a variety of motivations based on a range of individual factors,38 not able to be contained in a single pessimistic reading of Anglo domination.

The appearance of Network Ten’s Secret Life of Us after the recording period in 2000 supports the view that a number of products are tested each year by producers and networks. Some will engage more explicitly and persistently with cultural diversity whereas others will reflect an everyday cultural diversity by DCALB cast with occasional forays into plots of explicit issues around cultural diversity. The comment that such characters do not reflect ‘real’ people from culturally diverse communities is a trivial criticism, as Anglo

38 Audience research into the motivations for viewing drama include: predicting storylines, working through problems, identifying with characters while not having to take responsibility for them and admiring certain characters/actors (NZOA, 2002).

237 Australians are also hardly representative of the lifestyles of the clear-skinned, toned, attractive and eccentric inhabitants written for fictional programming.39

Conclusion Bell’s 1993 study did not have the quantitative instrument of the casting survey for discovering the cultural background of casts, or the capacity to discern the significance of second generation actors. If so, he may have found a greater diversity than was stated. This assumes one is willing to accept that actors from Indigenous, European or a host of other regions may not conform to essentialised notions of race based on colour and accent in determining cultural diversity40. However, it must be accepted that the appearance of Australian drama was predominantly white in 1993. This chapter’s examination of only six weeks of programming clearly illustrates this is no longer the appearance of popular Australian television programming. While a small number of drama episodes were disappointing in their portrayals of migrant multiculturalism, the overwhelming representation of cultural diversity has moved beyond the problematic, to an everyday representation approaching an expanded mainstream. The diversity in programming now offers persuasive argument that erstwhile analyses of Australian drama as portraying either a worthy, critical and observable multiculturalism (such as in Heartbreak High) versus unworthy, invisible and tokenistic portrayals (such as in Neighbours from 10 years ago) have become difficult to sustain.

A program’s diversity hinges on a number of key factors such as the show’s geography, genre, market position and degree of risk. Contemporary young audiences in particular are also no longer conceived as belonging to, or occupying, a fixed identity in what has long been a culturally diverse nation. Intergenerational mixing across culture and sub-cultural groups makes it an

39 Equally large percentages of both a national sample (49%, N=1,437) and a culturally diverse sample (43%, N=2,008) expressed the view that the media do not reflect their lives (Ang et al, 2002). 40 McKee (1997c, pp 174-177) explores the way in which TV presenter Stan Grant offers a cultural meaning of Aboriginality over a biological determination, as Grant’s skin colour is not ‘immediately, visually obvious as Aboriginal’. McKee goes on to add that popular television in the form of quiz, entertainment and drama, has been the superior media for negotiating the ‘lived experience of Aboriginal identities in contemporary Australia’ (see also Hartley and McKee, 2000, pp 229 – 230; pp 249 – 253 and pp 265 – 266).

238 impossible task to produce programming which represents any imagined core or periphery. What this chapter has attempted to show is that the range of portrayals such as those in Neighbours, now complements programming with portrayals of complexity, predictability and instability, in representations of cultural diversity.

239 Conclusion

Australian programming from the late 1990s and 2000 bears out a change in representations of cultural diversity from those in preceding years. An increasing number of DCALB actors played roles which inserted them into the narrative and social world of the drama without the obligation of reference to their cultural background. Programs located in typically multicultural geographies such as Breakers, Wildside, Pizza and Heartbreak High inevitably delivered more frequent encounters with a multicultural Australia than those set in alternative locations such as Blue Heelers, Something in the Air or even Neighbours. While Pizza frequently explored issues of cultural diversity within a comic context and Aaron Pederson’s contribution to Indigenous issues influenced Wildside, most other drama programs made occasional excursions into explicit multicultural stories. However, from the SBS show Going Home to Network Ten’s Breakers, cultural diversity was, as the producer of Breakers’ mentioned, ‘part of the palette’ (Gould, 1999). By this, he and other producers and writers are identifying an incorporation of multiculturalism into a shows foundation, rather than making it an attachment. This mainstreaming of multicultural representation by employing DCALB casts in non-specific roles avoids the treatment of multicultural themes and actors as ‘special’ one-off incursions into the multicultural.

Improvements in the participation of actors from culturally diverse backgrounds in drama programming have been due in part to what Grundy Executive Producer Stanley Walsh called, a ‘permeating through’ of multiculturalism as a social reality and the increasing number of second generation migrants into the acting profession. Virtually all the DCALB actors interviewed for this study already consider themselves part of an everyday culturally diverse Australia and wish to be cast that way. As research in Chapter Seven demonstrated, some actors have benefited from this more than others. While a focus on the second generation is inevitably limiting, Chapter Two illustrated how this demographic is becoming increasingly sizable and significant through cultural mixing. The demographics of

240 Australia’s second generation and significant cultural mixing combined with a series of policy led initiatives which helped to foster DCALB actor participation in television drama beyond the ‘stereotypical’, or negligible, as was the case with Indigenous representation.

Discourses on issues of multiculturalism and Australian identity, equity, and the utilisation of cultural diversity as a resource came to prominence in the late 1980s, culminating in the Labor government releasing the Agenda for a Multicultural Australia in 1989. The Agenda’s discourse was one of mainstreaming multiculturalism into the social and economic fabric. The multicultural discourse of the Agenda then to ‘permeated’ through, or converged with wider policy discourse, as well as into broadcasting policy and program output. Dating from the early 1990s, when the ABA released the Australian Content Standard, the incidence of cultural diversity discourse in broadcasting policy and debate becomes more prominent, with the Object of the Content Standard closely aligned with the Object of clause 3 (e) of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, which constitutes cultural diversity as a policy aspiration. Discussion papers and seminars begin to place cultural diversity as an imperative discourse for developing the portrayal of cultural diversity in the media and improving the lack of opportunities for DCALB performers. In a 1994 ABA discussion paper, policy convergence is explicit when it states: ‘the reference to ‘cultural diversity’ (in Object 3e of the Act and Object of the Standard) is consistent with the Commonwealth’s multicultural agenda’ (ABA, 1994, p 44). Such policy convergence was also to emerge within the objectives of Commercial Television Production Fund, which encouraged DCALB applicants. This aligns with the Agenda’s desire to make the most of Australia’s cultural diversity as a cultural and economic resource. The development of SBS television in the 1990s from ‘ethnic TV’ to culturally diverse programming for mainstream Australia, also reflects the notion of multicultural mainstreaming in the Agenda. This saw an ethos of services for specialised populations in the pre-Agenda era change to the inclusion of cultural diversity in all services and organisations.

241 The understanding that cultural diversity be a consideration in the recruitment of actor trainees into post secondary courses also had its effects. The motivation of university departments to actively recruit a diverse cohort is based on the knowledge that the mainstream market seeks diverse talent, and this now includes culturally diverse groups. In a follow up casting survey to the one undertaken for this study (Jacka, 2002), the main drama schools continued to report significant numbers of students from culturally diverse backgrounds, with the Victoria College of the Arts (VCA) having established an Aboriginal Access Program. How much of a contribution culturally diverse recruiting has made is difficult to gauge officially, as the institutions do not keep formal records of the cultural background of their intakes.1 However the increased availability of DCALB actors has made its contribution to cultural diversity and programming in addition to multicultural policy discourses established with the Agenda, which continue in the New Agenda in the late 1990s.

By the late 1990s, programming which reflected a multicultural mainstream demonstrated that the professional practice of television production stakeholders had also changed. This was confirmed in interviews with writers, producers, program creators and directors of a broad range of Australian drama. These key personnel expressed the opinion that it was an awareness of multiculturalism as an encompassing social actuality which had spurred change at the level of professional practice. The commitment to the Agenda by both major political parties in the late 1980s, endorsed multiculturalism in the community as a concept and social policy, which encouraged equity, awareness and tolerance. It began the embeddedness of cultural diversity in Australian working and cultural life, moving beyond the notion of multiculturalism as an accessory.

The influence of broad policy approaches to cultural diversity in other nations has also had resultant effects on cultural diversity in broadcasting policy and

1 However NIDA provided information on students’ cultural background to Bertone et al (2000, p 31) indicating that 11% of students were first generation DCALB migrants, while a further 21% of students were second generation DCLAB migrants.

242 programming outcomes. In the USA, the results of the civil rights movement for better living conditions for Blacks, preceded the establishment of well organised minority advocacy groups to ensure policy and program makers maintained an awareness of culturally diverse representations and employment equity for DCALB employees. Both those in favour of and opposed to equity measures in the US employed legislative challenges and constitutional interpretation to secure positions on ‘discriminatory’ practices. The long history of EEO employment hiring data being included into broadcasting licence requirements meant that when this rule was overturned by the Lutheran Church, the status of EEO practices and cultural diversity in programming remained largely intact. In the US and to a lesser degree in the UK and New Zealand, the market potential of mainstreaming the multicultural was well established by the time of the Lutheran court challenge. Palpable outcomes included networks and businesses courting DCALB audiences and consumers and linking effective cultural diversity management strategies to executive remuneration.

In the UK, the practice of locating cultural diversity more in the mainstream, as opposed to specialised programming, gained acceptance by policy makers, broadcast management, producers and audiences in the 1990s. This was in part motivated by social changes in the UK where second and third generation migrants began to penetrate wider fields of social, cultural and economic life. In many respects, this mirrors the situation in Australia. However in the UK, broadcasting management were more prepared to adopt an explicit mainstream multicultural discourse. And as in the US, the market potential of cultural diversity has been included into the language of program production policies. The absence of these more explicit and commercial approaches in Australia has lead to an incremental state of progression in developing mainstream multicultural representations in Australia, as opposed to more dynamic change in the UK. The idea of promoting culturally diverse management, rather than simply managing cultural diversity, remains as Hage (1998, p 131) states: ‘[a] repressed idea’ in Australia.

243 New Zealand presents an unambiguous example of wider cultural diversity policy impacting on broadcasting and program outcomes. The impetus of Maori culture upon official policies in a broad range of New Zealand contexts has conveyed a sense of biculturalism. In New Zealand, Maori culture retains its specific entitlement to specialised services. However, there is the obligation that mainstream institutions incorporate Maori perspectives and participation as well. The application of these two approaches for the inclusion of Maori culture in New Zealand institutions has transferred to broadcasting policy and program production alike. And as in the UK and the US, program makers are made aware of the need for producing culturally diverse programming which can satisfy a mainstream market. The subsidisation of local drama in New Zealand combined with bicultural program policies, helped to build a critical mass in fostering DCALB talent. The relatively small size of the domestic market and the reliance on government support means that the now significant pool of DCALB talent in New Zealand remains in a precarious state for employment prospects. However this is not a unique state of affairs for performers in New Zealand alone.

In Australia, opportunities for actors of South East Asian background to work in the mainstream are diminished.2 A creative-based solution to the dilemma of South East Asian representation, suggested by Annette Shun Wah, is to expand the potential of Asian portrayals through interesting, multidimensional characters. While this occurred in the late 1990s for Indigenous actors, it is only since 2001 that such roles have appeared for South East Asian actors. Two possible reasons for the developments in Indigenous portrayal are explicit funding for Indigenous creative talent and the changing representation of Indigenous people and their culture in mainstream Australia. For example, the Queensland Musical Theatre was able to cast an all-Black chorus for a production of Show Boat with a significant number of Indigenous performers;3 an Indigenous model agency ran a competition in 2001 to attract new

2 Since 2001, the industry base for ongoing drama production is being challenged by the various forms of reality TV, presenting all actors with fewer opportunities for fiction-based work. 3 Interestingly, it was a stipulation from the show’s rights holder (Warner/Chappel Music) that only Black performers are permitted in roles usually occupied by BlackAmericans in the USA (Stacey, 2001).

244 Aboriginal talent to further their profile in Australia and overseas (Beaven, 2001); and in the summer of 2001/2002, the first professional Indigenous lifeguards in Australia trained with Surf Life Saving Queensland (Balogh, 2001). As Democrats senator Aden Ridgeway states: ‘it’s cool to be black’ (quoted in Saunders and Hodge, 2002, p 10). What hasn’t happened with South East Asian communities so much is media reporting and stories beyond the problematic and victimhood to media coverage of breadth and everyday texts, which to some extent, has transpired for Indigenous Australians (Hartley and McKee, 2000).

The arguments of Hage and Stratton that ‘surrogate whiteness’ is not only unattainable for Third-world looking migrants, but also undesirable needs to be addressed in relation to popular television programming. In television drama, and particularly in serial drama, actors are most likely to be young and attractive regardless of cultural background. The state of affairs is well articulated in the following comment by the writer/director of Chinese background Tony Ayres:

Non-Anglo roles become in some way middle class and white through assumptions about who they are. Or on the other hand, their particular ethnicity becomes an issue. What is lacking is a complex and grounded way in which culture is integrated into identity – which is the way people live it. Identity is either the issue of the episode or it is invisible as acceptable middle class (Ayres, 1999).

What Ayres and Shun-Wah are hoping for, is a more composite representation of cultural diversity through expanded creative horizons. This need not translate to the abandonment of middle class portrayals as the assured place of the middle class and ‘good looking’4 is an enduring symbol of most television drama. But the current situation leans too heavily on the side of representations, which willingly embrace cultural diversity, but on the terms of a mainstream somewhat devoid of Asian influence. As networks have ultimate control of programming, regardless of whether it is an

4 A definition of the ‘good looking’ is given by casting agent Damien Rossi as features composed of ‘impressive and straight, white teeth, an enigmatic smile, and well groomed hair, nails and face’ (Courier Mail, 2001).

245 independent production or an in-house one, an explicit commitment to cultural diversity such as those in the UK and the US would achieve more vigorous change in Asian representation for example.

In spite of a lack of explicit policy for regulating the representation of cultural diversity or the presence of equal opportunity employment rules, changes to cultural diversity and programming have taken place since the early 1990s. Critical multicultural research from the 1990s on media representations provided an important partnership to advocacy and policy activity for changing what was an Anglocentric media. However since the early 1990s, critical approaches to researching multiculturalism have been flanked by research perspectives which take account of hybrid identities, the effects of the second generation and an increasing ‘everyday’ multiculturalism. The changes in industry practice and programming output in the previous ten years, have run along side the development of theoretical perspectives in broad multicultural research. This thesis has argued, that broad multicultural policies such as the Agenda have also played a role in effecting cultural diversity as an everyday experience in the Australian community, which was increasingly reflected in drama programming from the late 1990s onwards.

246 Appendix One

Casting Survey Questionnaire

The following research is being carried out by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in collaboration with the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). The aim of the research project is to gain a clear picture of the participation levels for non-Anglo actors in Australian drama and to investigate the portrayal of cultural diversity on recent Australian drama. A content analysis of drama currently screening on commercial television will also be a component of the study. The research should have benefits for the acting community by raising the awareness of casting practices within the television industry, related to the employment of actors from non-Anglo backgrounds.

The purpose of this questionnaire is to collect data about the ethnicity of actors who have worked during July in Australian television drama production. The questionnaire should take approximately five minutes to complete and asks for information regarding family background and for comment on the portrayal of cultural diversity in Australian commercial drama. Participation is voluntary.

The information gathered in this questionnaire will be treated in strictest confidence and kept in a secure manner at all times. Only members of the research team at QUT and the executive of the MEAA will have access to the data. Participants identities will not be disclosed in any reports resulting from this research – published or unpublished – unless permission is sought and given.

Should you have any questions regarding this research, you should contact Harvey May in the first instance, who may refer you to other members of the research team if necessary (see below).

Thank you for your time in filling out this questionnaire.

247

Research Team at QUT Harvey May Ph : ************** (any time) Terry Flew John Hookham Christina Spurgeon

MEAA Contacts Simon Whipp / Eve Propper / Sue Marriot What production are you working on ______

What type of role do you have (tick one) [ ] sustaining role character [ ] guest role character

Q 1. Were you born in Australia?

[ ] Yes (go to question 2).

[ ] No. (a) In what country were you born?______

(b) For how many years have you lived in Australia?______

(c) Are you an Australian permanent resident or Australian Citizen? [ ] Yes [ ] No

Now go to question 2

248

Q 2. Are you of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background?

[ ] Yes – if yes, which group do you identify with : [ ] Aboriginal [ ] Torres Strait Isl [ ] No

Q 3. In what country was your mother born? ______

Q 4. In what country was your father born? ______

Q 5. If possible, please list the country / countries your grandparents were born

Your mothers parents Your fathers parents

Q 6. For the purpose of this research, how would you define your cultural background or identity? (for example: Anglo-Australian, Chinese, Indigenous, Italian-Australian) ______

Q 7. What do you think are the key issues which affect the casting of actors from non-Anglo background in Australian television drama?

______

249 ______

The research team are very interested to speak with actors from a non-Anglo background about their experiences with obtaining work in Australian television drama. The discussions would be approximately 30 minutes in length and would be held at the MEAA offices in Sydney or Melbourne or a location of your choice. We are interested in talking about your experiences of the casting process, the roles offered and not offered to non-Anglo actors and your perceptions of the portrayal of cultural diversity on Australian drama in recent years. If you are willing to participate in such an interview, please indicate this below.

[ ] I am willing to speak with the research team about my experiences

Name: ______

Contact details: ______

Thank you for your participation

250 Appendix Two

List of interviewees who consented to be identified5

Sean Nash, (Writer/Dirctor, Breakers), 23/02/1999, Sydney.

Jimmy Thompson (Writer/Creator, Breakers), 24/02/1999, Sydney.

Kevin Roberts (Writer, Heartbreak High), 04/07/1999, Sydney.

Chris Hawkshaw (Writer, Wildside, Good Guys Bad Guys, All Saints), 24/07/1999, Sydney.

Rick Maier (Network Script Executive for the Ten Network), 22/02/1999, Sydney.

Hal McElroy - (Producer, Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Above the Law, Going Home), 05/07/1999, Sydney.

Dave Gould (Producer, Breakers), 23/02/1999, Sydney.

Stanley Walsh (Executive Producer, Grundy Television), 05/07/1999, Melbourne.

Tony Ayres (Writer/Director), 06/07/1999, Melbourne.

Robert Klennar (Director, All Saints), 20/07/1999, Mewlbourne.

Jo Horsburgh (Script Producer, Water Rats), 05/07/1999, Sydney.

Tony Morphett & Inga Hunter (Writer/Creators, Above the Law, Water Rats, Blue Heelers), 06/07/1999, Sydney.

Maura Fay (Casting Director, Maura Fay Casting), 07/07/1999, Sydney.

Anne Robinson (Casting Director, Mullinars Casting) , 07/07/1999, Sydney.

Kim Seville (Casting Director, Faith Martin and Associates), 14/07/1999, Sydney.

Jan Russ (Casting Director, Grundy Television), 25/07/1999, Melbourne.

Maria Jablonski (Agent), 25/07/1999, Melbourne.

Heath Bergerson (Actor), 23/02/1999, Sydney.

5 Fifteen actors interviewed did not wish to be identified. Written comments were also received from most actors who filled out survey forms for the casting survey.

251 Don Hanay (Actor), 12/07/1999, Sydeny.

Jason Chong (Actor), 11/07/1999, Sydney.

Meme Thorne (Actor), 16/07/1999, Sydney.

Jeremy Angerson (Actor), 26/07/1999, Melbourne.

Annette Shun Wah (Actor/Presenter), 17/07/1999, Sydney.

Tony Knight (Head of Acting, NIDA), 12/07/1999, Sydney.

David Berthold (Artistic Director, Australian Theatre for Young People), 13/07/1999, Sydney.

Jacqueline Martin & Paul Makeham (Academy of the Arts, QUT), 07/08/1999, Brisbane.

Diane Eden (Head of Acting, Queensland University of Technology), 07/08/1999, Brisbane.

Lesley Osbourne, (Australian Broadcasting Authority Officer), 17/02/1999, Sydney.

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