OPINION
In 2006, a small white Australian teenager stood in her bikini upon a vast white Australian beach. “?” the girl asked the world from a virgin shore. The world did not answer. In many accounts, the world stayed . It was widely agreed that Tourism Australia’s $180M global TV advertisement had failed to advertise Australia on global TV.
Tourism Australia has learned from its past experiments in narrow cliché and now takes our tax endowment to make braver, bolder and more profitable cultural statements about our nation to the world. Its new spirit of inclusivity is…what happens in our daydreams. This is the exclusive truth: the , scheduled to air in the US during the Super Bowl, is every bit as diverse and surprising as a box of party pies. Party pies that have been frozen, like the imaginations of those ad producers, in ignorance and time
The 2006 ad begins with the vision of a young white hottie pulling a beer for an outback bloke, ends with the vision of a young white hottie inviting the viewer to make his mark on her untainted beach and briefly offers the vision of a super-hot young Aboriginal woman who tells the viewer she has been waiting for him for forty-thousand years.
The 2018 ad is not quite so explicitly sexist—women are required to do a little more than invite men to drink beer and invade them. And it’s not quite so amateur—nor should it be on any budget big enough to afford a Hemsworth, a Robbie and a Mauboy. Still, its cultural inspiration remains derived from the same old frozen pie. A pie that never nourished from the start.
What the world is fed in this ad is a stale delusion: true Australian culture is produced in the outback. True Australians are sun-kissed white scallywags who have one Aboriginal pal. True Australians admire chaps with big knives and extensive didgeridoo collections. True Australians defy authority, often in the outback, where they drive like Mad Max, drink in Authentic Outback Pubs and frequently tend to the needs of baby marsupials.
As I am not entirely without humour, I do get that this is a reboot. As I am not entirely without reason, I do get that older white citizens of the USA—the niche most likely to have tourist dollars to spend—are familiar with that film. What no viewer can possibly get, however, is an idea of Australia that tallies with its reality. Or even an idea of a nation prepared to see its own reality. Three decades have passed since Paul Hogan offered his fantasy, and we can’t be “bloody” bothered updating that.
The answers to this criticism are of course (a) it’s just a joke and (b) don’t you understand what makes money, you foolish cultural fascist with your fuss about a lack of brown Australian faces or Australian city culture on TV. My answers to these answers would be (a) we need some new jokes and (b) yes, I am rotten at making money, but you guys sure know how to spend mine.
Three decades have passed since Paul Hogan offered his fantasy, and we can’t be “bloody” bothered updating that.
I am not saying that diversity in media makes much of a real-life difference, by the way. We could legislate for a month of cultural difference on TV, and still, those social inequalities which attach themselves to cultural differences would persist. Media diversity is not going to restore land, accelerate literacy or make housing suddenly affordable. This is both my firmly held view and the reason I don’t get as upset as others may when The Bachelorette on Ice fails to reflect the broader population.
But, you and I do not directly fund The Bachelorette on Ice. We can claim a clear stake, though, in the work done by Tourism Australia. This non-rebooted reboot is ours. And so, for that matter, is the construction of a common Australian identity. I’m a bit flipped off by the vision of us as white Larrikins, who look as though they went to very expensive schools and are always about three seconds away from .
This is our money. This is our view of Australia. I claim this ad as mass property and I demand on mass behalf that we do not permit you crocodiles of marketing to take it. Make monocultural ads for your private clients, if you must. But when you’re playing with our common purse, and our common hope that we do not see or portray ourselves as a very old joke, you have me to answer. And I can be very boring. Even more fatally boring than an ancient and frozen meat pie.
