“Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?” Nobel laureate Bob Dylan warned journalists half a century ago in “Ballad of a Thin Man”.
This past week’s carry-on — from Gone with the Wind to the Cook statues and on to Basil Fawlty — is best understood as that sudden moment when all the Mr Jones in Australia’s media discovered that somehow a major cultural reset has been going on without them.
It’s not unusual for journalism to be slow to keep up with Australia’s changing understanding of itself. Historically that understanding travels on a long, imperfect arc through music, academic research, feature film, books, even advertising and television, long before it lands on the news desks to be integrated into daily journalistic practice.
Australian journalism is slower than most, in part due to its lack of internal diversity and in part to its cultural domination by News Corp. Political leaders from John Howard on have contributed too, by bullying journalists to join them in the culture war galleys to beat against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.
This past week it resulted in an outpouring of moral panic about the slippery slope of anti-racist overreach, with column after column warning that we are, suddenly, one hand-written protest sign or defaced statute away from an inevitable descent into the modern chaos of a global cultural revolution.
Sailing in a mish-mash of hysterical metaphors and historical hyperbole, the tides of op-eds carry Australia’s media opinionistas across the oceans of global debate, mapping what The Australian’s 2000-word editorial described as “a brazen attempt to overthrow what we value in liberal democracy by those who slander it as a system of minority oppression and impoverishment”.
“Gone with the whinge” shrieked The Daily Telegraph on Friday over the decision by HBO Max to temporarily withhold Gone with the Wind to add historical context. “Woke mobs rise up in war on the west”, shouted The Australian’s Inquirer in a “will no one think of the statues?” plea — just the opening of almost seven broadsheet pages for a weekend’s read about the resistance to the current moment of cultural reset. (Makes you wish for the days when ads provided a bit of a breather.)
On Friday you could feel the frisson running through the media at the discovery that an episode of Fawlty Towers had been temporarily taken down by a UK streaming service, not dampened by the fact that the take-down was to bring it into line with the agreed 2013 editing already applied in Australia.
By Sunday the same media that had been so busy with their egg-beater were tut-tutting about the culture war taking focus away from Indigenous disadvantage.
The result of that beating was that the act of a streaming service temporarily withholding an otherwise widely available film from its platform became something like Nazi book-burning.
A broader lens suggests that providing context to otherwise rose-tinted portrayals of slavery like Gone with the Wind — or the public theatre of protesters pulling down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston and dumping it in a river — are the sort of debate that everyone claims to want.
Instead, Australia risks being locked out of the robust interchange around racism and the legacy of colonialism that is seeing a reset in the world’s cultural understanding. On Sunday The Australian’s political correspondent used Insiders to gloss over a distinction between “blackbirding” and slavery, while a News Corp tabloid op-ed argued (in the 21st century!) that Indigenous (and African-American) disadvantage was really their own fault.
Meanwhile, in the Liberal party room, federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg prioritised the need to refute claims of Churchill’s racism. (Maybe he should check with Bengali Australians, although Churchill wasn’t even that keen on white Australians — “bad stock” apparently.)
At the same time, new media are showing better ways of reporting. Junkee exposed Insiders diversity problem, while both The Guardian and the long-diverse SBS rebutted Morrison’s gaffe that there was no slavery in Australia’s history.
Sunday’s Insiders demonstrated how diversity brings better journalism at the same time as it showed the flaws in the ABC’s affirmative action for News Corp.
It shows that if journalists want to know what’s happening, they need to get out in front of Mr Jones.
I’m learning more about history now that the statues are coming down than I ever did while they were up.
Captain Cook was a magnificent navigator. He should be admired for that, but not for the illusion that he “discovered” Australia or New Zealand. Around 1985, I visited Gisborne in New Zealand, the point where Cook first made landfall in what became New Zealand. A guide book told me that there was a statue of Cook at that point, but when I got there, the statue was gone. Apparently, the local Maori had blown it up, incensed by the insult – their ancestors had discovered this land hundreds of years before Cook arrived. In place of the statue, there was a large stone slab with a plaque commemorating Cook’s landing, plus a comment to the effect that this was where the races “first met and started to get to know each other”.
Re: Insider Lilywhite Couch
It’s notable that Waleed Aly – PoC, Muslim, PhD from Global Terrorism Research Centre, Radio National host – has never appears on Insiders, but is good enough for Offsiders panel many times!
You do insist on mischaracterising Scott Morrison’s remarks about slavery. What he said was that Australia was established as a colony without slavery. He was right. He did not say that there had never been slavery in Australia. He replied to the criticism of his statement by referring to exactly what he had said. And yet you continue to assert that he said there was no slavery in Australia’s history. He did not, and you know it. Or ought to.
Morrison said that australia’s Settlement was predicated on there not being slavery, which is not true. Was not mentioned.
However, he did say that there has never been slavery in Australia.
Morrison was indeed referring to Captain Cook and the founding of Australia. However he continued with, “My forefathers and foremothers were on the First and Second Fleets. It was a pretty brutal place, but there was no slavery in Australia.”
When it comes to something as serious as slavery, you can’t be glib or flippant about it. You have to give the broader picture of what actually went on. As Pat Dodson said, “Aboriginal people who were basically incarcerated, enslaved on pastoral properties under acts which indentured them to these employers without any pay.”
An ignorant Robin has piped up here on slavery, knowing nothing. British imperial convict systematic deportation was slavery of the worst kind, clearly, unarguably; liberty and freedom were denied, civil rights were crushed, chains, whips, gallows, manacles, torture were all used and abused. What drives an idiot to pose and expose idiocy? What?
I’m not going to bother.
Stick to polishing your knob; it can do as a mirror.
Paradise, (what a joke, shut up and imagine the gent can argue out his point. Just be polite and not so intemperant. Signed, Paradise.
It would be better to just refute what the commenter said.