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This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: McKee, Alan (1997) Marking the liminal for true blue Aussies : the generic placement of Abo- riginality in Australian soap operas. Australian Journal of Communication, 24(1), pp. 42-57. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/42047/ c Copyright Australian Journal of Communication 1997 This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. http:// www.emsah.uq.edu.au/ index.html?page=20187&pid=0 Marking the liminal for true blue Aussies: the generic placement of Aboriginality in Australian soap operas. Dr Alan McKee Department of Media Studies Edith Cowan University Mount Lawley Western Australia 6050 tel: 09 370 6859 fax: 09 370 6668 email: [email protected] Marking the liminal... Page 2 Abstract Marking the liminal for true blue Aussies: the generic placement of Aboriginality in Australian soap operas. This paper addresses a previously unconsidered history — that of Aboriginal characters in Australian soap operas. Rejecting critical approaches which have obtained even into the 1990s, it refuses to judge these characters as 'good' or 'bad' manifestations of indigeneity. Rather, using the idea that genre is a way of closing down interpretive possibilities, the paper looks at the manner in which generic expectations around soap operas produce particular valences for these representations of Aboriginality. It points to the many ways in which these indigenous characters are insistently constructed as liminal in soap operas' structural communities - simultaneously inside and outside of the group. This is seen to accord with the suggestions of Jakubowicz et al about the ways in which Aboriginal people are positioned by wider social discourses. Marking the liminal... Page 3 Marking the liminal for true blue Aussies: the generic placement of Aboriginality in Australian soap operas. Introduction The soap opera A Country Practice features an Aboriginal character named Trevor Jackson (Michael Watson). He is a park ranger. Appearing regularly on the program, he is established as part of the community; but due to his job, the character is often associated with nature. How is this fact to be interpreted? Should it be understood as perpetuating a stereotype? Is putting Aboriginality into the wildlife park tantamount to denying indigenous Australians the possibility of entering and engaging with urban lifestyles? Or should this representation rather be celebrated? Is it in fact insisting that Aboriginal people can keep a certain connection with their past, and with the place of nature in cultural traditions, even while they deal with settler culture? The fact that this question is unanswerable has not stopped film and television academics from answering it — or at least, answering similar versions of it. This paper starts from precisely this impasse — that which is produced by the application of good/bad terminology to the discussion of Aboriginal representations in Australian film and television. Despite assertions that the practice of media criticism in Australia has matured beyond the desire for Marking the liminal... Page 4 'positive' and 'negative' images (Moore and Muecke, 1984: 37; Langton, 1993: 41; Jennings, 1993: 10), the dominant tone of much writing in this area has remained resolutely judgmental (see, for example, Brown, 1988: 483; Turner, 1988: 140; Hickling-Hudson, 1990: 266, 267; Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 64; Langton, 1993: 47; and so on). This Aboriginal representation is bad, says academic writing, because it shows stereotyped Aboriginal characteristics; this one is bad, because it denies the specificity of Aboriginal cultural traditions. This one is bad because it is assimilationist; this one bad because it is essentialist. In the face of a critical situation where it is all too easy to insist on the most unfortunate interpretations of any conceivable representation, this paper attempts to shift the argument to a different register: away from the prescriptive judgement of what should be to what David Bordwell has called a 'historical poetics' (1989); a writing of texts back into the discursive situations from which they emerge. This paper works with a previously unwritten history — that of Aboriginal characters in Australian soap operas. It interprets these representations not in terms of unreachable levels of the ideal image of Aboriginality, but rather through the interpretive schema which are offered to viewers by the genre in which they appear. Rather than using Bordwell's historical poetics to attempt to present actual readings of the films by historically precise individuals, this work suggests one way in which contemporary generic frameworks will contribute towards audiences making sense of Aboriginal characters in these programs — in the case of Trevor, how his placement in a soap opera contributes towards the interpretations of his character which are promoted. The genre of Australian soap: interpretation by 'community'. It is unsurprising to suggest that genres function to help stabilise interpretations of media texts (Kent, 1985: 134; White, 1985: 41; Cohen, 1986: 210; Feuer, 1987: 119; Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 81; Neale, 1990: 46; Moon, 1992: 58-59). Genres are not, after all, static collections of texts, but: institutions or social contracts ... whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact ... [texts] must be continually re-placed by conventions if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses ... [genre] is the exclusion of undesirable responses (Jameson, 1981: 106-107). How do the expectations mobilised by audiences approaching Australian soap operas facilitate interpretations of Aboriginal characters in these programs? Marking the liminal... Page 5 Despite the consistent popularity of soap operas and other drama serials on broadcast television, the place of Aboriginality in these forms has been little addressed by critical literature. Any discussion of Aboriginal presence tends to take the form of a fleeting sentence suggesting that Aboriginality in the soaps is characterised largely by absence (Dowmunt, 1991: 40; Jakubowicz [ed], 1994: 57; Molnar, 1994: 19). And it is certainly true that in comparison to the vast number of characters appearing on television drama serials, a disproportionately small number are of anything other than Anglo-Celtic descent. It is easy to provide a list of Australian soap operas, from The Box (Crawfords for Channel Ten, 1974- 1977) to Echo Point (Southern Star for Channel Ten, 1995) which never featured an Aboriginal character in a speaking role. However, a history does exist: and Aboriginal characters are to be found in Number 96 (Cash Harmon, for Channel Ten, 1972-1978) Prisoner (Grundy for Channel Ten, 1979-1986); A Country Practice (JNP for Channel Seven, 1981-1993, for Channel Ten, 1994); Neighbours (Grundy for Channel Seven, 1985, for Channel Ten 1985- ); The Flying Doctors (Crawfords for Channel Nine, 1986-1992); Home and Away (Channel Seven, 1988- ); GP (ABC, 1989- ); and Sweat (Southern Star for Channel Ten, 1996- ). It should be noted in passing that to name these programs 'soap operas' is to partake in a process of generic alignment by textual features that does not entirely line up with the program-makers' own understanding of their work (Best, 1993; Samuelenok, 1993). However, for the purposes of this work, the pertinent fact is that these programs are discursively circulated as soaps (see, for example, Lawrence, 1994). The work of Christine Geraghty (1991) on the textual organisation of soap operas suggests that the fact of large central casts promotes certain readings of characters in these programs. These groups of characters are soap opera's 'communities', with all of the implications of exclusion and inclusion implied by that word. Australian soaps often make explicit the importance of community; in assertions that 'Everybody needs good neighbours'; in a celebration at the Coopers Crossing pub (Flying Doctors); or in the socially-responsible attitude of Pippa as she offers a home to foster children (Home and Away). Geraghty suggests that the community formed by the regular characters in soap operas is continually in negotiation, viewers continually asking who is to be admitted and who excluded from the social framework. The boundaries of the community group are marked and re-marked in the repeated placing of some characters outside the central community: The community in soaps...is a structure in which the setting and the past provide the framework and the family provides the model for relationships. It depends on notions of mutual support and acceptance and defines itself in terms of its differences from the rest of Marking the liminal... Page 6 the world. But the boundaries between 'us' and 'them' are not always clear, and many soap stories are concerned with the difficulties of marking them out. One further strategy in creating a sense of community is to exclude those who do not belong, and to clarify the difference between those inside the community and those outside it (Geraghty: 1991: 100).

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