A new TV series on the colonial settlement of Australia titled Banished manages to totally exclude any Aborigines, as performers or even as crew members. How on earth can the story of colonisation of Australia exclude the indigenous population?
Creator Jimmy McGovern, who has a pretty decent track record, defended this by saying that working the indigenous people into the plot would have disturbed the narrative flow, and that filming Aborigines would have been too expensive.
Perhaps sensing that both were untenable position, he wheeled out this mind-boggling explanation: "It's a series written by a British man for the British Broadcasting Corporation for British people."
He suggested that the onus on telling the Aborigines' story rests with Australian producers.
McGovern's spectacular weak and not exactly unracist defence is not helped by the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna", and have been subjected to mind-boggling racism even since they were grudgingly classified as humans. I can't see much appetite by Australian producers to make a big-budget series from the Aboriginal perspective of colonisation.
This article discusses the issue well.
Creator Jimmy McGovern, who has a pretty decent track record, defended this by saying that working the indigenous people into the plot would have disturbed the narrative flow, and that filming Aborigines would have been too expensive.
Perhaps sensing that both were untenable position, he wheeled out this mind-boggling explanation: "It's a series written by a British man for the British Broadcasting Corporation for British people."
He suggested that the onus on telling the Aborigines' story rests with Australian producers.
McGovern's spectacular weak and not exactly unracist defence is not helped by the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna", and have been subjected to mind-boggling racism even since they were grudgingly classified as humans. I can't see much appetite by Australian producers to make a big-budget series from the Aboriginal perspective of colonisation.
This article discusses the issue well.
Comment