Deconstructing the Elephant

Report on the WIFT NSW Diversity Debate held at AFTRS on 16 September 2009

By Roanna Gonsalves

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, including the space within which this article is written and read.

Who is home? Who is away?

An Englishman recently told me that much of the UK’s ageing population are hooked on to the long-running Australian TV series Home and Away because it is full of white people, just like them. It makes them nostalgically imagine Australia as a pre-lapsarian monocultural UK. It is besides the point that this nostalgic imagining could be read by some as sweet post-colonial revenge. TV in the UK is multicultural.

At the recent debate entitled ‘Is diversity good for television’ hosted by WIFT NSW on the 16th of September 2009, Caterina De Nave, who is currently Executive Producer of Commissioned Content (Drama & Comedy) at SBS, seemed to confirm the reputation of this particular TV series.  She said that when Home and Away had a Thai character in one episode, the producers received thousands of complaints from people, she didn’t say from which part of the world, presumably protesting against this dilution of Anglo-Australian domination. “What are you afraid of?” she asked tongue-in-cheek as a New Zealander of Italian heritage herself, pointing out that most Australian television projected an image of a cautious, scared country.

That night, as I entered the darkened auditorium at AFTRS, I thought to myself that finally the wooden elephant in the room, that object that we have allowed diversity to become, would be examined, enjoyed, and played with. It’s tendency to repel would deconstructed, and then put back together in exciting ways, perhaps as poolside recliners we could have some fun on, or as frames on our walls holding our cherished images.  By hosting this debate, I thought WIFT put its money where its mouth is, and demonstrated its commitment to excellence in Australian media culture. It also seemed to tap into the current collective mood of media workers, judging by the interest and healthy attendance the debate generated. There were many positives to come out of this event. The very presence of the panel, all esteemed media professionals quite high up in the food chain, illustrated the power of this issue to generate meaningful discussion. Some of the ideas generated were interesting and workable, and I have taken them up in this article. The evening turned out to be quite entertaining, led by the affable Jane Roscoe. Admittedly it was always going to be hard to have a wide-ranging discussion in a couple of hours, and so there was almost nothing said about diversity in children’s television, no comments to a question about diversity in sport in the media, and total silence regarding diversity at the news desk, and diversity of media ownership, cross platform ownership and what that means for multicultural, globalised consumers of media product in Australia. These silences were lost opportunities to imagine and thereby to create a more diverse Australian media. For example, it would have been an interesting exercise at the debate, to visualize compelling television in the form of an Indigenous Australian grilling John Howard about the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, or an Indian-Australian host of the ABC’s Lateline, or Channel Nine’s A Current Affair grilling the Victorian and NSW Premiers about the recent attacks on Indian students.

Making up is hard to do

But the first thing I noticed was the composition of the panel at this debate. It was quite an accurate representation, in terms of race and culture, not gender I have to stress  of the composition of power in Australian media. The flyer for this event couched the discussion in terms of race, culture, gender and age. Yes, there was Peter Abbott of Freehand Productions, who mid-way through the proceedings decided to stop apologising for his male point of view. The rest were Barbara Uecker who is Head of Programming and Acquisitions, Children’s TV, ABC, Caterina De Nave who is Executive Producer, Drama & Comedy at SBS, Kylie du Fresne who is partner & producer At Goalpost Pictures, all female executives from mainstream television, of Western European ancestry. There was no representation of alternative media, nor of the under 30 and over 65 demographic, nor of any Asian, South-Asian, African, Eastern European, Pacific Islander nor any other ancestry, nor of the gay/lesbian/transgender demographic, nor of people with special needs. Most notably, Indigenous representation was conspicuous by its absence. Penny Chapman who is head of Chapman Pictures, and also was Executive Producer of the film Blackfellas, and Darren Dale who is Co-Director of Blackfella Films had to pull out at the last minute. Their points of view, particularly that of Darren who is an Indigenous person, situated within and embodying the cultural spaces they occupy would have been very important to the ensuing discussion. It is a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion about diversity if diversity itself is unrepresented.

When silence is not golden

The issue of diversity in Australian media and society, or rather the lack of it, whether in terms of race, age, gender, ownership, has been the subject of academic research as well as the occasional column in the broadsheets. To name but a few, Sharon Verghis wrote ‘Beyond the Vanilla Universe’ about advertising courting the ‘rainbow dollar’ in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 26, 2001. More recently Ana Tiwary and Natalie Millar, both working in Australian film and television, wrote a strong article entitled The Diversity Dilemma, calling for more dialogue about diversity, published in Screen Hub on August 12, 2009. Tim Elliott, Erik Jensen and Ellie Harvey wrote a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, on August 25 2009 called ‘Australian cricket ‘needs ethnic stars’. While the article attempted to air an important issue, I couldn’t help but note the speech marks around the words  ethnic stars, again objectifying and positioning ethnic stars as the other, different from the rest of Australian sporting stars, even if the speech marks were meant to indicate a quote. East West 101, that cop show on SBS that is so much more than a cop show, deserves all the AWGIES and Logies that are available. Yet it is still about a Muslim main character written, produced, and directed by non-Muslims. This is not to say that a community must only be represented by people from it. On the contrary I firmly believe in the universal right of any person to dip into the ocean of the sea of stories and speak in any voice they choose, of any people they choose. The makers of East West 101 deserve to be applauded and feted for daring to tell this story so compellingly and with such style. However, while the show deserves utmost praise for technical virtuosity on the part of its creators, and for powerful performances from the cast, it is still a show about Muslims ‘being looked at rather than looking back’ at themselves, to use a little out of context but not out of spirit, the words of Germaine Greer in her foreword to the 21st anniversary edition of The Female Eunuch. Given the history of Muslims in Australia, I wonder how Muslim writers, Muslim producers, and Muslim directors would tell their own cop story.
Not very easily, I have to say, with that wooden elephant currently in the room.
Sure, there are Muslim (and other ethnic) writers and directors in Australia. They would typically be first or second generation Australians, working on self-funded shoe-string budget projects while trying to pay the rent, educate the kids, learn the cultural and economic lingo, and defend their choice of occupation, if  unpaid after-hours filmmaking  can be called an occupation, to their aspirational communities, all usually without any family support. How would these people compete for the funding dollar against wave upon wave of experienced, august, white, film school educated, doyens of Australian media?

Heirlooms and other inheritances

Also present at the debate, to inaugurate Round 3 of the WIFT NSW Media Mentorship for Women, was the NSW Member of the Legislative Assembly, Virginia Judge, who is among other things the minister assisting the Premier on the Arts. She spoke eloquently about the crucial role mentoring can play, and how she would have greatly benefited from a mentor herself, had she had the opportunity. Similarly, it is the mentoring of emerging artists by experienced ones that is crucial if we want to nurture the next generation of truly representative television makers in Australia. WIFT’s Media Mentorship for Women, directed by Ana Tiwary, is a precious step in the right direction that must be defended and supported not only by political decision-makers but also by mainstream media. It would be a start for each network to have a policy on diversity which would include mentoring and affirmative action in the form of quotas for ethnic minorities in content creation, presentation and casting. The public school my children go to will be interviewing candidates for the Principal’s position. The school recently sent a note home to all parents of non English speaking backgrounds (NESB) encouraging them to apply for the NESB spot reserved on the interview panel of 5. Even the NSW Department of Education sees value in the voice of ethnically diverse minorities. Affirmative action in media related industries would encourage minorities to work in the media, create content that reflects contemporary Australian society, and aspire to positions of power in the media, instead of maintaining the status quo and the stereotype, by flocking only to the technical professions like medicine and engineering.

Many Australian kids are hooked on to the ABC Kids show Playschool. It is a wonderful example of the ability of ethnically diverse presenters and programming to magnetise the viewer. So I was very surprised when pretty early on in the debate, Barbara Uecker of ABC Children’s TV said “There is a problem finding writers from diverse backgrounds with experience”. This was a chilling echo of what hundreds of highly qualified migrants hear every day, at job interviews (if they get that far), or most often over the phone. “You have no Australian experience”, routinely interpreted by new migrants as code for “we don’t want you because you are not one of us”. The discussion continued along similar lines. One striking comment from the panel was that if you belong to a particular community then you have to tell their story, and this leads to ghettoisation. I noticed how this statement, and others like it, were received, as if it were stating the accepted truth. I thought about the assumptions implicit in an argument such as this. According to the unstated logic of such statements, the largest ghetto currently present within television would be the ghetto of Anglo-Australian content producers, compelled to tell the story of the community they represent. Yet, somehow this is not perceived as a situation that causes alarm. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2006, more than 270 ancestries were separately identified by Australia’s population. If ghettos are spaces within which communities find safety and comfort, then perhaps we do need more ghettos in television, ghettos replicating themselves, ghettos evolving along the way into stories that speak for each of the 270 ancestries in this ancient country. In their article ‘White diasporas: media representations of September 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia’ , Goldie Osuri and Bobby Bannerjee say:
“Through conquest, in the attempt to proclaim ownership over geographical territory, citizenship, as well as cultural discourses of Australianness, settler nationalism produced a racialised Australian, promoting an Australian way of life; most importantly, settler nationalism attempted to name itself as native.” (Pg 159)
To paraphrase Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee, if Australia is multicultural, acknowledging the priority of indigenous people, then our allegiances are multiple and diverse. Yet white diasporas imply allegiances to a particular culture, namely white British and white American. We don’t think of the dominant Australian culture as diasporic, yet historically it is, and going by the content on mainstream TV networks, we can certainly see that it is.

Voting with the wallet

Then there is the question of economic allegiances. If Australian taxpayers are multicultural, then taxpayer funded Australian television bears a responsibility towards them. It also makes marketing sense to court the rainbow dollar, as Sharon Verghis pointed out in her 2001 article. Advertising has realised this and now it is not uncommon to see representations, if stereotyped, of diversity in Australian life. There was a suggestion at the debate, of following some US practices, where every network has a Vice President of Diversity, and there is 1 minority writer per show, among other affirmative action policies. As Caterina said “It’s another restriction on unbridled power, a notion of society demanding that taxpayers money be spent in a certain way, I don’t have a problem with that.”

What we see is what we don’t get

At the debate, some MasterChef-style Mystery Box Challenge questions about the lack of diversity in casting provided a spark of deconstruction of the wooden elephant. The answer from Peter Abbott was “”You can’t cast people who don’t show up for auditions”. Caterina jumped in here and said “It depends on where you audition”. Peter said “Westfield Parramatta”. Checkmate! Unfortunately at this point Caterina politely conceded the point.  Peter agreed that Asians were underrepresented on TV, but attributed this to the assumption that Asians (as if we were monocultural) don’t want to be in showbiz. The last time I looked, Westfield Parramatta had more people of Indian and Lebanese ancestry than any other ancestry. Being Indian-Australian myself, I can vouch for the presence of numerous drama queens and kings, and I’m not being facetious here, of Indian heritage in Australia. There is a long history of the performing arts and performers in India, including a circa 1st century BCE treatise on dramatic art called the ‘Natyashastra’ by Bharata. I have little doubt that even if the spirit of this erudite treatise hasn’t trickled down into the 21st century Indian diaspora in Australia, then surely the hip-thrusting cult of Bollywood has. Living at the coalface it is hard to imagine a lack of ethnically diverse Big Brother wannabes turning up for auditions at Westfield Parramatta. More a case of white diasporas acting as gatekeepers rather than a lack of interest on the part of minority cultures. How else can the casting of MasterChef purely on merit as some panelists noted, and resulting in such refreshing ethnic diversity be explained?

Can laughter make you cry?

Jane Roscoe pointed out that diversity seemed to be played out differently in comedy. Caterina replied that comedy is political, the best comedy comes from anger, and if you can make somebody laugh about a racial/social/cultural issue it somehow makes that issue more palatable. She added that you can say things in comedy you can’t easily say in drama. What Caterina said is certainly true, and can be seen in the surprising popularity of Isrealei TV’s Arab Work among Jewish audiences. It is a sit-com about an Arab family written by Isreali-Palestinian Sayed KashuaI, and aired in Israel. Yet the power of television can be harnessed to go further than merely desensitising people by giving them a cathartic burp of laughter, before they go back to the status quo. We need comedy in television to be the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. But we also need television that grabs the audience not only by the collar but also by the pre-frontal cortex.
How do we get this if the elephant still stands, wooden and ignored?

Deconstructing the elephant

Kylie du Fresne said that when they auditioned for the TV series Lockie Leonard, although the main character was originally a white boy in Tim Winton’s work, an indigenous kid did the best audition and was cast in the lead role. No mention was made of his race, she claimed with satisfaction. While this noble effort must be and has been lauded, and recommendations have been made to promote such colour blind casting, it would be important to remember that we live in a world with a history of inequality and curtailment of freedoms. To refuse or be oblivious to the socio-cultural-economic minefield that that indigenous kid needed to cross before he could present himself to audition for the TV series and win the lead role, is to deny the historic, bloody, and continuing struggle of indigenous peoples globally and particularly here in Australia. To do this is to diminish our humanity.
It is not by this that we can represent ourselves and aim for freedom in all its avatars.
It is not by this that we can participate fully and freely as citizens of this golden soil girt by sea.
It is only by affirmative action, as has been done in the US that we can guarantee the representation of diversity by diverse people themselves. As Caterina said “You have to legislate or nothing will change.” Jane Roscoe must be commended for suggesting the reservation of training spots for people of diverse backgrounds, quotas at the production level. She is in a position of power at SBS to put her thoughts into action. It is up to organisations like WIFT, and individuals from ethnic minorties supported by their colleagues from the dominant culture to lobby for such change, to lobby Federal and State MPs for affirmative action, to lobby for quotas for ethnic minorities. This is the moment, with a black President Obama of the USA, with a Mandarin speaking white Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd who has a Chinese-Australian son-in-law, this is the moment for this change to be enshrined in legislation. To misquote Leonard Cohen’s Democracy, this need for change is
…coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin’
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away…

Moving on

For those at the debate and elsewhere who say “If we have quotas, they stay in their ethnic boxes, they never get out”, and “If we go on being tokenistic, put in people who are not good enough, it disgraces the community of that person”, and “There is no dignity in a woman being promoted because she’s a woman”, here’s a gentle reminder that it is passé to assume that diversity and merit can only ever be distinct. That argument has been had and won a long time ago. It is affirmative action that can address the imbalance of power and justice between the colonisers and the colonised, between East and West, between the ‘sophisticated’ and the ‘savage’. It is not reverse discrimination but compensatory justice. It is this affirmative action, especially on the part of the powerful Screen Actors Guild of America and their deals with major film producers to push for non-caricatured and accurate roles for African-Americans since 1946, and increasingly since the 1970s that has given us Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Salma Hayek and Lucy Liu, to name a few Hollywood actors of diverse ethnicities. It took decades, but it could be argued, that by the power of the media to influence the public, affirmative action in the American media has given us Barack Obama. And this is not considering his spectacular, orchestrated, globally televised presidential campaign.
Last week it took an American to point out to us that black face buffoonery is unacceptable on television. It is urgent that the historic imbalance of power be addressed by lobbying the government for affirmative action policies in the media, and the support of mentoring programs, and not left to market forces for the gap to get bigger between the haves and the have-nots. The responsibility lies not only with the legislations of politicians, but also with Australian media in general and the content creators of Australian television in particular. Television is not just a mirror of society but an engine, a processor of it. It is a vector through which the world absorbs the flow of power, of influence, of longed-for freedoms, of empowering change.
The diversity debate ended with the elephant in the room still standing, with diversity as an object still wooden and untouched. However it cannot be like this for long. It is on shaky ground. If the gushing viewer feedback on the internet is anything to go by, giving Jeremy Fernandez the opportunity to read the evening news has been a wonderfully timely move by ABC TV. Now is the moment for affirmative action in content creation, presentation and casting. As the tongue-in-cheek exchange between the two cops at the end of Series 1 Episode 6 of East West 101 goes:
Detective Zane Malik : So where to now bro?
Detective Sonny Koa: Uh, there’s only one way bro. Forward.
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Roanna Gonsalves is an Indian-Australian writer who has worked in film, TV, and journalism in India and Australia. She has received support from Varuna Writers Centre and a New Work Emerging Writers Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to complete her first novel. Her short story based on the recent attacks on Indian students can be found here. She can be contacted at roannag@gmail.com.

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‘ On Aug 30, 2009, at a Sydney Opera House Talk, when asked for how long Australians must continue to publicly acknowledge the traditional owners of Australian land, author Thomas Keneally replied “Until justice is done”

” At the highest levels, the glass ceiling for women in Australian media has not yet cracked open.

”’Osuri, Goldie and Bannerjee, Bobby (2004), ‘White diasporas: media representations of September 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia’ , Social Semiotics, 14:2, 151-171

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