It was a revolting show. Didn't even get all the way through it. This sum it up perfecty:
First Contact: Poverty Porn And Trauma TV, With Bonus Celebrities
The latest iteration of SBS’s exploration of ‘racism’ boldly goes where every other mainstream media outlet has already been, and none of it helps, writes Amy McQuire.
Last night the first episode of SBS’ ‘First Contact’ aired – the second incarnation of the series, this time featuring non-Indigenous ‘celebrities’, rather than a random selection of racists from around the country.
The synopsis though is the same – apparently one in six Australians claim they have little or no contact with Indigenous Australia, and so host Ray Martin is tasked with the ‘challenge’ of taking them on their own ‘journey’, allegedly to change hearts and minds.
The series is produced by Indigenous production house ‘Blackfella Films’ and supported heavily by National Indigenous Television. That has not shielded it from criticism, which has largely come from Aboriginal people, many of whom have cottoned on to the fact this wasn’t made with our best interests in mind.
When the first season of ‘First Contact’ aired a couple of years ago, mob quickly pointed out how emotionally taxing the format was. The onus was still on Aboriginal people to relive trauma for the entertainment of white people. The assumption was we had to ‘perform’ in order to change the ignorant views of racists who thought blackfellas get a ‘free ride’, who claimed we were ‘petrol sniffers’ and who thought others were hard done by because Aboriginal people somehow were ‘advantaged’.
The types of roles we could play in these performances, though, were limited, confined to ‘strong’, ‘resilient’ or ‘welcoming’. There was no room for dissent or truth. Even frustration was a stretch.
This sort of ignorance is not news to Aboriginal people – we confront it every single day. And so the idea that we must sit through the casual racism many of us encounter on a daily basis, under the guise we must ‘educate’ the ignorant, felt soul-destroying in itself.
You would think Blackfella Films, SBS and its supporter NITV would have learnt from the first season.
It hasn’t.
Last night assembled a cast of six – singer Natalie Imbruglia, personality Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson, One Nation co-founder David Oldfield, former Ms Australia Renae Ayris, comedian Tom Ballard and actor Nicki Wendt.
All shades of Australian racism are represented, from the in-your-face undeniable racism of Oldfield, to the paternalistic, ‘knows-what’s-good-for-them’ Dicko, to the well-meaning ‘noble savage’ romanticism of Imbruglia. Ballard is a lone voice – the only one that understands his privilege, albeit in an academic sense.
Like the first series, the celebrity version does little to tackle the complexity of Australian racism, which is completely divorced from the history of this country.
In some scenes, the show completely fails to take on the most outrageous, disgraceful views of the show, instead choosing to reinforce stereotypes.
One example comes at the very start – when Oldfield claims Aboriginal culture “should have died out”.
“There’s just been too much BS about Aboriginality, culture: 60,000, 80,000, 50,000 years, there’s just too much BS attached to that,” he tells the camera.
“Is there something celebratory that you lived in the stone age longer than anyone else?
“It’s not actually good for Aborigines to remain Aborigines, they should be Australians and you just naturally let it die out. I mean frankly, it should have died out, like the stone age died out.”
Former One Nation extremist, David Oldfield.
Oldfield’s views are obviously extreme, but they are also views that are rooted in reality, and have currency in this country. This is a man, after all, who was elected to NSW parliament once, and to Manly Council twice.
International tribal advocacy group Survival International runs a campaign against the use of terms like ‘stone age’ in the media, labelling it as ‘incorrect and very dangerous’.
“It is dangerous because it is often used to justify the persecution or forced ‘development’ of tribal peoples. The results are almost always catastrophic: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease and death,” the group says.
And Oldfield’s claims are dangerous precisely because it echoes history. The idea that Aboriginal culture should just ‘die out’ because it is ‘stone age’ and ‘primitive’ plays into every racist assumption that has laid the foundation for genocidal policies – from rounding blackfellas into missions and reserves to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’, to the policies of forced removal, to the current day – where assumptions of Aboriginal culture as ‘violent’ justified a full scale military intervention into the Northern Territory.
But rather than confront this racist and damaging ‘stone age’ characterisation by Oldfield, Ray Martin instead jumps ahead, using the defeatist, deficit language to paint Aboriginal people as devoid of agency, stripped of humanness.
He does this by first outlining horrific statistics of family violence and suicide – statistics Aboriginal people know intimately from personal experience. And then he frames it like this:
“The core of the problem is poverty, booze and depression. I told you it was going to be confronting,” he says.
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