Faye Ginsburg
Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’
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On Thursday evening 1 November 2012 at 8.30 p.m., Australians who switched on their televisions to the nation’s flagship public service broadcaster, the ABC, were part of a ground-breaking moment in the nation’s media history. They witnessed the inauguration of a new, outstanding, six-part Indigenous drama series, Redfern Now, testimony to twenty-five years of struggle by Indigenous media makers to gain control over almost every aspect of a mainstream Aboriginal television production. Both on and off screen, Redfern Now speaks forcefully to the unfinished business of decolonization. On screen, the series tells riveting, complex stories about urban Indigenous lives that have not been told before, reaching out to Indigenous audiences as well as to a broad Australian public as part of a televisual national imaginary.2 Off screen, the show was the result of an astonishing coming together of both new and seasoned Indigenous talent in the writing, acting, directing, shooting and editing of this first Aboriginal dramatic series to be broadcast on Australian national television. Because of the control and participation of Indigenous media makers, from producers and scriptwriters to actors, set designers and extras, I make the case in this chapter that Redfern Now constitutes a project of ‘televisual sovereignty’.
Redfern Now consists of two seasons (2012, 2013) of six loosely connected one-hour episodes that explore the lives – and unexpected moral dilemmas – of Sydney-dwelling Indigenous families living on the same street in Redfern, a working-class neighbourhood (now gentrifying) long known for being home to the city’s Aboriginal community. The series has raised the bar for what Indigenous media makers can achieve through influential contemporary media platforms, such as the ABC, that have considerable resources and wide reach across the nation. In particular, it brings recognition to Indigenous urban experiences that have been more or less invisible in Australia’s public culture, which, until now, has tended to cast Aboriginal people as remote-living people engaging in either traditional performance practices or dysfunctional activities (Hartley and McKee 2000). The excellence of the writing, acting and production in Redfern Now are such that the issue of indigeneity is almost taken for granted in some of the reviews of the show in the discursive field that emerged around the series. Ironically, to have indigeneity ignored is considered by some to be one of the most valued signs of success. While Karl Quinn, the national film editor for one of Australia’s newspapers of record, the Sydney Morning Herald, headlined his positive lead review on the eve of the launch of Redfern Now with ‘Getting Aboriginal Stories out of the Ghetto’ (2012), another respected critic described the series simply in terms of its quality:
Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’
The characters are caught at moments that in time define them: a decision to pick up the phone, to ignore a cry for help, the refusal to sing the national anthem, a moment of sexual jealousy, a seemingly insignificant car accident, a thought that suddenly consumes. Their response to these moments threatens their work, their love lives, their equilibrium, and their identity. And … we can only gape in amazement at how elegantly those involved in this production have taken these moments and filled them with resonance and meaning. Each episode is like a beautifully constructed short story that sees straight to the fragile hearts of Redfern Now’s characters, without the stories becoming sentimental or stubbornly political. (Blundell 2012)
Such critical reception, based on the show’s excellence in terms of plot, acting, scriptwriting and pacing, rather than its exceptionalism – that Indigenous artists are capable of creating a fantastic and innovative television series – is yet another long overdue marker of arrival.
As is the case with Indigenous media everywhere, space and location are foundational; in this case, the series itself underscores the under-represented significance of Redfern to Aboriginal Australians. Every episode takes place in inner-city Sydney, each set around The Block, a precinct in Redfern known historically as the centre of Aboriginal political action beginning in the 1970s. At that time, Redfern gave birth to Australia’s first Aboriginal-run housing company as well as health, legal and children’s services and also served as a focal point for civil right demonstrations, leading some to call it a ‘modern sacred site’ for Aboriginal families. Despite poverty, low employment and discrimination, Redfern was also the place where then Prime Minister Paul Keating made his now historic 1992 reconciliation speech, publicly acknowledging that European settlers were responsible for many of the difficulties Aboriginal communities continued to face. Controversially, Redfern’s iconic status as an Indigenous place/community is now threatened by gentrification and the demolition of buildings that have long characterized the neighbour-hood’s rough street sensibility, as we see in Redfern Now. In the series, the careful choice of place makes a serious if understated claim to the area’s significance in Aboriginal Australian history on the streets, in homes and public space, and now on screen.
I want to consider Redfern Now as exemplary, not only for its consid-erable accomplishments in the present as a form of Indigenous media, but also for its capacity to illuminate the history of how what we might think of as televisual sovereignty came into being in Australia. My goal here is to open discussion about what Indigenous control over screen media representation has meant at the local and national levels, in both remote
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communities and urban settings. In other words, this work has a history and a context, one in which I have been involved for over two decades. I first encountered Indigenous television in Australia in 1988, when I made my initial research trip to Central Australia to understand what had enabled the lively emergence of Aboriginal TV in remote communities, in particular at the Warlpiri settlement of Yuendumu, where the American activist scholar Eric Michaels had gone to learn about – and advocate for – the ‘Aboriginal invention of television’ emerging there and elsewhere (1986). Despite the small scale of such work, the experiment in radical alterity that it represented – to create television on distinctly Indigenous terms – brought it to the attention of many people, including myself, living at some distance from Australia (see Ginsburg 1991). Like others, I was curious about how different cultural protocols might reshape our ethnocentric assumptions about televisual media practices.
That same year, after considerable struggle and demands for greater representation on the national stage following Aboriginal protests during the 1988 Bicentenary, Indigenous units were created at Australia’s ABC and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), the nation’s two key public service broadcasters, both located in Sydney (see Ginsburg 2010). What Indigenous control over television meant in these different contexts –
Fig. 1 Deborah Mailman (centre left) pictured against the background streetscape in the final, feature-length episode of Redfern Now, 2015.
Photo: Mark Rogers.
Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’
the remote central Australian Indigenous settlements with a relatively traditional community and the more mainstream context of national television with bicultural urban Aboriginal participants – was a source of considerable contention at the time, as there were few opportunities for Indigenous Australians to gain the experience needed to make Aboriginal television a self-determined enterprise (Ginsburg 1994). A few years later, in 1994, after further agitation by Aboriginal cultural activists who demanded more opportunities for Indigenous actors, directors, screen-writers and cinematographers, training programmes for Indigenous media makers were established via the Indigenous Unit at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (Ginsburg 2010). Eventually, these initiatives were headed by Sally Riley, a Wiradjuri woman with film and theatre credits to her name and, as it turned out, an incredible creative ability to nurture talent and build capacity in the emerging Indigenous media sector (see Riley 2007). Through her initial position at the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission, and then as head of the Indigenous Department of Screen Australia from 2000 to 2010, Riley guided a phenomenally successful Indigenous media training programme.
These initiatives have been central to developing the capacity and vision that anchors not only Redfern Now, but also much of the Indigenous media work that speaks compellingly to, and about, the circumstances of contemporary Aboriginal Australians. Included in this field are films that have won major awards at some of the world’s most prestigious showcases, such as the Cannes, Sundance and Telluride film festivals, to name a few. As scholars and supporters of Indigenous performance and media arts, one of our tasks is to understand what makes such achievements possible, especially at a time when funding for the arts sector is often at risk. If we confine our interest in Indigenous media practices to textual analysis alone, however important such work might be, we fail to fully understand the historical, cultural and social dynamics, and the value of infrastructure, funding and other forms of support, that are the crucial off-screen realities in making these art forms both lively and possible. To rephrase a popular idiom, televisual sovereignty is in the details and (like God) may not always be evident through what we are actually able to see on screen.
While my focus in this essay is on Redfern Now as a contemporary instance of televisual sovereignty, it is important to recognize that the series is part of a complex Indigenous Australian mediascape incorpo-rating works that circulate in global venues. These include feature films that have gone on to win major awards, such as Central Australian Aboriginal film-maker Warwick Thornton’s extraordinary work, Samson and Delilah (2009), the second Indigenously directed film to capture the Caméra d’Or
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award for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival (Ginsburg 2012).3 Through a variety of outlets, Aboriginal documentaries, dramas, experi-mental works and comedies have been reaching broader audiences in and beyond Australia in recent years, particularly with the growth and intensifi-cation of specialized platforms and festivals connecting Indigenous media producers across the planet (Ginsburg 2009; Wilson and Stewart 2008).
Igloolik Isuma’s NITV global portal for national Indigenous broadcasters worldwide (launched in 2007), the imagineNATIVE festival of film and media arts held every October in Toronto since 2000, the Sundance Institute’s Native and Indigenous Program (begun in 1998), and the global gatherings over the last decade at the International Sami Film Centre in Norway are all important platforms created by and for Indigenous media makers to meet, exchange ideas and see each other’s work.4 Additionally, there are meetings for Indigenous national broadcasters (now numbering 12) who have been represented collectively since 2008 through the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network. Such initiatives have been essential to the emergence of a transnational Indigenous counter-public in which media practices play a central role. Through this network, Redfern Now has been shown not only on the ABC in Australia via the Indigenous Unit, but also on Maori TV in New Zealand and the Aboriginal People’s TV Network in Canada.
In Australia, Redfern Now has been an unqualified success. When it was launched in October 2013, the show was seen not only on the small screen in the proverbial living room but also on a huge outdoor display in Redfern itself, by an audience of over 3,000 residents. Kim Dalton, then director of ABC TV, a former director of the Australian Film Commission and a crucial supporter of Indigenous media (including Redfern Now) for nearly two decades, gave a heartfelt speech to the crowd, indirectly referencing his own role as a strategically placed advocate of Indigenous media within the Film Commission:
Rarely is it more appropriate to begin proceedings by acknowledging and paying respect to the original owners of the land on which we stand tonight, past and present, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
And beyond this protocol, going further and acknowledging and paying respect to the original owners of all the lands we now call Australia, past and present, including those of you here tonight.
Tonight, we are here to celebrate a moment of great achievement in a long journey. Redfern Now is born of, is resonant of, and speaks of Australia’s Indigenous culture, its deep and profound historic roots and its vibrant and contemporary expression. A far-sighted Australian Film Commission initiated that journey over 15 years ago by recognizing that if the mission of our industry is to tell Australian stories, then
Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’
Fig. 2 Aboriginal cast members introduce Redfern Now at sunset premiere on the Block, Redfern, 2012.
Photo: Isabella Moore.
Fig. 3 Audience gathered for sunset premiere of Redfern Now, 2012.
Photo: Tamara Dean.
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Indigenous people need to have a place and number amongst our storytellers, on and off the screen. (Dalton, qtd in Meade 2012b)
Here, Dalton not only offers a well-deserved tribute, noting the journey that led to Redfern Now’s achievement. He also indexes the significance of allies in helping provide support and open doors to bring the experiences and narratives of a remarkable range of Indigenous media makers to the screen in such compelling ways.
In addition to enthusiastic support from Indigenous audiences, the series received positive reviews in Australia’s often scathing press, strong audience ratings and exceptional professional recognition. Awards included Most Outstanding Drama Series for both the 2013 and 2014 Australian Logies (the television industry awards, named in honour of John Logie Baird, the Scotsman who invented the world’s first television), as well as Outstanding Television Show of the Year at the 2013 Deadly Awards (the annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievement, deadly meaning ‘fantastic’ in Aboriginal English). In 2014, Redfern Now also won Best Television Drama Series at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA). Perhaps its most ringing endorsement was its renewal for a second season, especially considering the particularly brutal cultural economy of television in the current climate. Moreover, the show’s off-screen value is not to be ignored.
As the largest Australian Indigenous television drama production ever undertaken, it has given hundreds of people a start in the film and television industry, embracing the local Aboriginal residents of Redfern as non-professional actors and extras (Meade 2012a). Two key players in the production team commented on its fundamental connections with the local community:
You know, Redfern has had its ups and downs and its major triumphs.
We wanted the rest of the country to share in those joys and ups and downs, you know. As long as the Indigenous community there were happy with us exploring that turf, which they were, we were keen to go there. I mean, we would have been mad if we didn’t go there. (Erica Glynn, in ABC TV 2012b)
The enthusiasm with which people really got behind this project amazed all of us. And people were very supportive, letting us into their homes, up to five days, you know, having 50 people in there. We really did want to stay in the radius of Redfern, and kinda be true to the series and also show contemporary inner city Sydney. (Darren Dale, in ABC TV 2012b) As long-standing Indigenous cultural activists for close to three decades,
Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’
Erica Glynn and Darren Dale make clear that their fundamental commitments in media making continue to be the connection to local communities – whether in central Australia where Glynn grew up or in the Aboriginal neighbourhood of Redfern that is the centrepiece of the series.
Going Global
Redfern Now is not only a product of robust local collaborations – the Indigenous Unit of the ABC, Blackfella Films, and the experienced Indigenous directors, writers and actors involved in each episode, all in consultation with Redfern community organizations and elders. It is also a product of a particular global aspiration to work with the legendary working-class Liverpudlian screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, who, at Sally Riley’s request, came to Australia to work on the first season and who continued for the second season in his role as script advisor. In thinking about how to bring Indigenous stories to the small screen, Riley had been inspired by McGovern’s highly successful UK television dramas, including Cracker, The Lakes and The Street, which played to considerable acclaim in Australia. The last bears a strong resemblance to Redfern Now. It follows the residents of different households on a modest unnamed street in Manchester, charting in each episode how their lives are changed by seemingly insignificant incidents.
When her total budget of $5 million a year was approved for Redfern Now, one of Riley’s first missives was an email to ask McGovern if he would work with her writers on this series. Riley approached him not only because of her admiration for his disciplined and riveting screenwriting.
She felt that, regardless of his cultural background, his sensibilities, as someone brought up in a poor working-class family and able to successfully capture in his dramas a sense of lives lived on the margins, would resonate with the stories her writers wanted to tell about the issues affecting a range of Aboriginal families in Redfern. McGovern, in turn, loved the idea of collaborating on this very original debut series and went to Australia to work intensively with the Aboriginal writers and directors.
As he put it, ‘This invitation came out the blue. Like a shot I said I’d love to do it … to work in Australia with indigenous people on stories about indigenous people, it really gripped me’ (qtd in Fulton 2010). This transna-tional collaboration was clearly successful. In speaking to The Guardian, McGovern called the work ‘some of the most rewarding I’ve ever done.
The end product is very important, but the process is equally so. If people don’t come out of this having learned a great deal, then we’ve failed’ (qtd
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in Rourke 2012). Leah Purcell, Indigenous actor and director on the series, gives a sense of the writing process with McGovern:
He brought expertise and reality. He didn’t care who we were … He fine-tuned our stories. I talk blunt and he talks blunt and we learned the s-word – story. I sat and watched him for a few days until I said to him I’ve got a story and [when he heard it] his eyes lit up. One guy threw out seventeen stories and he slammed them. So story became a sacred word.
He’s a good bloke and he made us comfortable, as green as some of the writers were. He told us things straight. (qtd in Leys 2012)
Clearly, this strategy – of grounding the work in local stories and Indigenous talent, but bringing in a consultant from beyond Australia – was very successful in sharpening the writing and storytelling.
The Question of Sovereignty
The broadcasting of an all-Indigenous television series on prime-time TV in Australia is being rightfully celebrated as a ground-breaking moment.
My choice of the phrase ‘televisual sovereignty’ to capture a sense of this social fact is inspired by the term ‘visual sovereignty’, initially deployed to characterize certain works by Indigenous artists in the North American
My choice of the phrase ‘televisual sovereignty’ to capture a sense of this social fact is inspired by the term ‘visual sovereignty’, initially deployed to characterize certain works by Indigenous artists in the North American