Where are the Aboriginals? Why are the men, as they look for their selection, walking across cleared land? What about giving us a real version of Australian history? This whitewashed reality TV version is just another copout. (“Richhosk”)
In the last few years, Australia's colonial history has become bitterly contested terrain, picked over in public in a series of debates known as the “history wars.”1 These debates have centered on conflicting interpretations of indigenous-European history and the violence of colonization and have been fought not just between academics, but also among politicians and neoconservative newspaper commentators. Such furious debate framed the production and reception of Australia's first forays into reality history TV in 2005: The Colony, which screened on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in January,2 and Outback House, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in midyear. All reality history TV series reflect and shape popular ideas about the meaning of the past, and they gain added resonance when that past is a deeply contested one. Reality history TV dramatizes (even exaggerates) an essential historical problem—namely, the impossibility of ever re-creating the past in the present, to know what “really” happened. Reality history can only show us what twenty-first-century citizens choose to make of the past. For this reason, reality history offers a limited means of learning about the past: it focuses on the material conditions of the past at the expense of politics; it gazes at the past through the prism of personal relationships and conflict, and it reproduces, rather than challenges, popular social memory of the past. Yet reality history can offer interesting possibilities for understanding the significance of the past. It confronts the ways ordinary people in the present make sense of the past—indeed, how they understand their past—in more explicit ways than other kinds of television history and even some written histories. Both The Colony and Outback House promised that participants and viewers would “step back in time” to different periods of Australia's colonial history. Did these programs offer a “real version of Australian history”? Or did they merely present a “whitewashed version,” as the angry viewer quoted above alleged? This essay will explore the possibilities and limitations of reality TV as a form of history, with particular attention to issues of national and personal identity, empathy, and ethics.
Australian history has recently been one of the most contentious areas of cultural, political, and media debate. Successive Australian prime ministers have used history as a tool to define their particular vision of national identity. While Australia was secure in its identity as a nation united by British race patriotism up until the 1960s, this was a relatively simple proposition. Yet by the 1970s Australia's cultural and ethnic unity came under challenge from new social movements, and diversity was nurtured by a new nondiscriminatory immigration policy and the anti-assimilation ethos of multiculturalism. This meant that telling a story of national unity through the country's history became more difficult to sustain (Curran). The bicentenary of white settlement (or invasion) in 1988, marked by extensive official celebrations, became the focal point of Aboriginal protest and its slogan, “White Australia has a black history.” The bicentenary emphasized the division between those who wanted to celebrate Australia's white pioneers and those who insisted that such a celebration ignored the dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal people that had accompanied the achievements of those pioneers (Macintyre and Clark 93-118).
In the early 1990s Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating attempted to retell the story of Australia centered on republicanism, radical nationalism, and reconciliation with Australia's indigenous peoples, a story most famously summed up in a speech that acknowledged the role of white Australians in the dispossession and attempted destruction of Aboriginal Australia: “We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice” (quoted in Curran 232). The speech sparked a barrage of claims that Keating was perpetuating a “black armband” view of history designed to induce guilt and shame (Blainey). The black-armband view also prompted vehement denials from Keating's successor, the conservative Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard, who stated upon his election in 1996 that to teach children “that we're part of a sort of racist and bigoted history is something that Australians reject” (quoted in Macintyre and Clark 137). Prime Minister Howard was keen to promote a new pride in Australian history.
These political responses were in reaction to the rise of a new kind of Aboriginal history, which told the story of Australia's past through a different lens. Violence on Australia's colonial frontier was central to this historical narrative, and a large body of scholarship was produced that detailed the extent and nature of this violence, based both on European accounts and on Aboriginal oral testimonies. This scholarship was widely accepted among academic historians, yet it came under challenge in public conflicts in the media and in schools, in debates that became known as the history wars. The wars kicked off when an independent historian, Keith Windschuttle, released his deeply contentious book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, in 2002. In it he claimed that Australian history had fallen prey to an academic orthodoxy that had deliberately falsified and distorted Australia's frontier history to tell an exaggerated story of white violence that was designed to provoke guilt and that would in turn bolster indigenous claims to land and self-determination. Most notoriously, Windschuttle alleged that, by his calculations (which included only indigenous deaths recorded by white witnesses) “only” 118 Aboriginal people had died on the Tasmanian frontier. “To his mind,” John Hirst noted, “with this low figure, he has rescued the reputation of the British empire and its successor settler nation from their detractors” (“How Sorry” 80). Windschuttle managed to find evidentiary and citation mistakes in the works of some historians, and one could argue that the debate as a whole aired important historiographical issues (the trustworthiness of evidence, for example) in a public context. Yet for the most part the debate was conducted in a dichotomous way through the mass media, which reduced complex issues to sound bites and created a charged backdrop for the reception of Outback House and The Colony. Beyond these debates, however, we need to consider further questions about the ways Australians conceive of their past: is Australia, as Graeme Davison argued, a society with “a strong sense of the past, but with only a weak sense of history”? (28).
Many Australian historians and critics have drawn attention to the trope of victimology in Australians’ sense of their past. Australia's origins as a penal settlement were, until recently, the subject of an ashamed silence, although by the bicentenary in 1988 genealogists were eagerly seeking out their convict ancestors (Griffiths 115-118). In popular presentations of history, convicts remain victims of a brutal system. Yet Australia's pioneering past—the explorers, pastoralists, and farmers who pushed the frontier of settlement inward throughout the nineteenth century—has long been the source of both nationalist and victim mythologies. John Hirst dubbed this nationalist celebration of those white pastoralists and farmers the “pioneer legend,” a discourse that “celebrates courage, enterprise, hard work, and perseverance.” He adds that this legend “can scarcely help being conservative in its political implications. It encourages reverence for the past” (“Pioneer Legend” 174-175). Long-standing popular notions of pioneering are about sacrifice and struggle, but this struggle is with the land, not the land's indigenous inhabitants. In these imaginings the Australian landscape is a malevolent unknown, unpredictable and predatory, and this, according to Peter Otto, “offers a colonial society a way of displacing the conflict between settlers and indigenous peoples onto a more acceptable narrative of a direct conflict between the settler and the land itself. The land and the indigenous people become merged, the former foregrounded, the latter denied a place in history at all” (quoted in Curthoys 13).
Andrew Lattas writes that conservative political discourse celebrates these pioneers, and their suffering in particular, because their suffering “becomes white settler society's right of ownership to the land” (235). This discourse emphasizes not white pioneers’ achievements but victimhood, robbing them of agency in a struggle with Aboriginal people. Ann Curthoys argues that the prevalence and emphasis on suffering is central to Australia's history wars: “How good non-Aboriginal Australians are at memorialising their own sufferings. Looked at more closely, the contest over the past is perhaps not between positive and negative versions, but between those which place white Australians as victims, struggling heroically against adversity, and those which place them as aggressors, bringing adversity upon others” (Curthoys 3). Curthoys identifies these two conflicting impulses at work in the history wars, and those who oppose the latter view see those who perpetuate it as defaming the national past.
John Hirst has detected an additional impulse at work in popular responses to the history wars. He recounts attending a public debate about the history wars where the two panelists were debating the number of Aboriginal dead. A woman in the audience stood up and declared that she was sick of the debate about numbers. Hirst continues the story: “Even one death, she said, was too many. This remark was met with spontaneous applause, which though not universal was nevertheless revealing. The woman and those who applauded believed it was possible to dispossess the Aborigines without bloodshed. The woman did not speak of dispossession but she … was located in [a] theatre which stands on land that formerly belonged to Wurundjeri. Let us label this the liberal fantasy of our origins. It avers that conquest could have been done nicely” (“How Sorry” 82).
Hirst's argument is provocative but useful because it emphasizes, as he notes, that “we are all a long way from 1788,” that it is impossible to think oneself back to the mindsets of the period. While I do not believe that this fantasy applies to historians, I do think traces of it can be found in popular responses to the history wars. Many white Australians are horrified at the violence perpetrated in the process of invasion and dispossession and, as Hirst notes, want to wish it away in an ethical reenvisioning of the past. Of course, this desire by some to atone for the wrongs of the past has been positive—it has been the wellspring of the reconciliation movement between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians, for example. But such an impulse can also lay the foundations for a rose-colored reworking of our past, one that disavows present-day Australians’ investment in—indeed, reliance on—colonial dispossession and the violence in our past. I would suggest that Australians’ desires for their history as identified by Curthoys and Hirst—to see themselves as victims, not agents of suffering and mistreatment, to see themselves in struggle with the land, rather than with indigenous people, and finally, to wish that the white settlement of Australia could have been enacted without violence—can be found in the presentation and enactment of Australian history in The Colony and Outback House. I will explore these ideas through considering how “the past” is constructed in these programs in three ways: through emphasizing technology and material culture, a focus on personal relationships and conflict, and a reliance on nostalgic understandings of the past.
At first glance, reality history programs seem to offer some kind of access to the past in that they reproduce, reasonably faithfully, the material conditions of the past. In reality history, technology is the dominant signifier of “pastness,” rendering the past accessible, allowing audiences to understand the past in these programs through technological change. This becomes particularly clear when we see the work involved in cooking and cleaning. On the one hand, this emphasis on technology allows audiences and participants to comprehend something of the strangeness of the past. Yet on the other hand, as John Hughes argued, it reproduces a myth of modernity as progress. Technology, Hughes argued, stands in for the radical cultural difference that is the actuality of the past, and all historical elements are submerged as plot, if they are dealt with at all. Robert Rosenstone dubbed this obsession with objects in historical films “false historicity”: in short, history is no more than a period “look,” and “things themselves are history, rather than become history because of what they mean to people at a particular time and place” (60). This goes for clothing as well as technology: both programs focus on the strangeness of the women's clothing (multiple layers, hoop petticoats, hats, and numerous impracticalities) without providing any insights into the cultural conditions that created it. As Gardiner comments: “To fetishise the ‘authentic’ object does not necessarily foster empathy with or understanding of those who lived with it, nor does it automatically raise questions about how the object was made [and] under what conditions” (19). We retain the objects of the past in these programs, but we lose their context and their ideological moorings. The absence of politics leaves the way open for a conservative, personalized view of the past (a point to which I will return).
The “past” of reality history programs is viewed through the tightly focused lens of interpersonal relationships, and especially through conflict, rather than through politics. The past is personalized, as conflicts are caused by personalities, not, for example, by class or racial differences. Beth Seaton argues that this emphasis on the subjective or personal is characteristic of reality TV: “Reality programming expresses social or moral dilemmas in emotional terms; and it is the emotional affectivity of the programme which acts as the key support for its ‘truthfulness’ or credibility.” Reality history works as television when it keeps the facts of history submerged and emotional immediacy uppermost in the drama. This produces a personalized past, where, Tristram Hunt argues, issues of “class, social structure and inequality” are generally “pursued through the prism of identity—’how would our forefathers and mothers have lived,’ not why, or how did it change over time” (856). Hunt sees this as symptomatic of a general shift in television history away from explanation and toward experience, identity, and empathy, a “‘living history’ which invites few questions about the nature of the past” (845, 857). Indeed, this may reflect the ways that audiences use history: American and Australian surveys of people's uses of the past revealed that most tend to make “‘intimate’ uses of the past; they turn to the past to live their lives in the present” (Rosenzweig 861, Ashton and Hamilton). The personal focus of reality history, then, is a major source of its appeal to audiences, yet this can expand historical understanding as well as truncate it.
Closely related to this focus on the personal is the genre's reliance on popular or social memory, rather than on knowledgeable participants, for its sense of the past. Participants in the programs generally rely on their own (often limited, often nostalgic) knowledge of the past, a knowledge that tends to be drawn from popular sources such as the media—and popular history, as Chris Healy argues, forms part of social memory (5). We can share a memory of a past that we have never experienced directly by drawing from sources like film, television, radio, and the press (Burns 68); in Australia social memory is a product of colonialism, and its most powerful narratives date from that period, beyond the range of lived experience (Healy 5). Graeme Davison argues that these histories specialize in presenting the veneer of the past, “leaving its human meaning to be filled in by inference or juxtaposition. Often its underlying social message is one of uncritical nostalgia” (Davison 28-29). Reality history programs speak to Australia's social memory of its colonial past—”histories of discovering, exploring, pioneering … struggling in a new land” (Healy 6) and, I would argue, at least partly reproduce it—in a new forum. Reality history participants are generally given minimal historical training about the period they are “entering” beforehand (Bignell 81), which means that they tend to revert to popular conceptions—or misconceptions—about what the past was like. The participants on Outback House were given historical training, yet they were not compelled to adhere to it (Hardy and Corones). Thus, they tended to rely on a social memory of the past. Claire, the cheerful maid on Outback House, remarked on the online forum for the program, “We were real people trying to make the best of a new way of life that was completely foreign to us. If there were any historical inaccuracies it was because we were not experts and so tried our best with the knowledge we had” (“toothpowder”).
In the opening episode of Outback House, viewers are told that the participants on the program are going to “test themselves against the mythology of the outback”: instead of struggling against the indigenous inhabitants, or even against the land, the people on the program are going to be testing themselves against the myths of history. This was clearly a popular desire—Outback House had around five thousand eager applicants, and The Colony attracted two thousand (Lynam 38, Gibbon 348). Those chosen made clear their yearning to experience historical conditions and to prove themselves against history. Paul and Juli Allcorn, the squatter and his wife from Outback House, said they applied “to see if we could do it. We'd just had that trip around Australia and … we'd also taken the kids to various museums … so we had an increased awareness of the history of settlement, of how people survived then. How did they do it? … As a family we'd always had an interest in history, but that trip brought it all to a head” (Lynam 45). The Allcorns saw the program as a chance to exercise their interest in history, but the Hohnkes, a family from Tasmania who were cast as ex-convicts in The Colony, offered a more directly nostalgic reason for their participation. Tracy Hohnke said, “Kerry and I are always saying we wish we lived in the olden days. Life now … well, everything seems so false” (Gibbon 28-29). Glen Sheluchin, the original overseer on Outback House, offered a similar motivation: “I have an affinity with olden times—I often feel more at home back then than now.” His wife added, “We always said that we were born in the wrong era” (Lynam 188-189). Though these participants expressed nostalgia for a time they had never directly experienced, others felt less rosy about the past they were preparing to enter. Trish Hurley, a feisty Irish settler on The Colony, declared that she would be “your traditional women's libber here in that everyone has to do their share regardless. But I grew up in a situation where the girls did the work in the house and I wasn't too happy about it. … My daughters might find it difficult. They grew up with equality in everything.” She added that she was keen to take the show on because “women don't figure too much in history. You mostly get it from a male point of view” (Gibbon 24). Others saw participating as a personal challenge. Declan Hurley, another Irish settler on The Colony, said he was expecting the show would be “a psychological challenge more than [a] physical one” (Gibbon 23), whereas Dan Hatch, a young man from Perth who was initially employed to work as a shepherd on Outback House, said that “the idea of going back to basics has some appeal. … I am a complete city boy, so this is a challenge to see if I could manage to go back” (Lynam 193). The obvious question, however, is: go back to what? How do these programs represent the relationship between the present and the past, especially as the participants negotiate it?
I have argued that reality history programs tend to present a picture of the past that necessarily relies on social memory, generally nostalgic and personalized, and that substitutes technology for a deeper understanding of the complexities of life in the past. I would now like to examine the ways the programs represented the contentious histories I outlined earlier: Do the representations of pioneers and convicts perpetuate both pioneering and victim mythologies of white Australians? Do representations of the indigenous participants and their interactions with others on the programs offer visions of reconciliation—an ethical reenvisioning of the past—or do they enact a (mythical) peaceful settlement of Australia? Or might the genre offer new ways of raising questions about historical understanding on our television screens?
The opening credits of Outback House, set to swelling violins, depict wide open bush spaces, the participants at work on the land and in the house, and a lone man on horseback, while the voiceover tells us that the participants on the program are about to “take on the challenge of life in 1861.” By 1861, according to the narration, the property of Oxley Downs would have been a prime candidate for carving up into small farms. The squatter and his team must successfully harvest a good wool clip to ensure the survival of Oxley Downs. Of course, though this is the driving force for all the participants on Oxley Downs, in effect it means different things to the men and the women, as the women are largely reduced to supporting roles. Women are praised for their “pioneer spirit”: for example, Juli Allcorn takes over the kitchen “in true pioneer spirit” when the cook is sacked (episode 2). Women are represented as guardians of culture in the program, just as white women were seen as essential to frontier civilization in Australia's history. The arrival of the women on the farm in episode 2 is described as bringing “a new order on Oxley Downs,” and the arrival of the prim-looking governess in episode 3 is described as a “civilizing influence.” This representation of women recycles historical views of white women on the frontier to bolster myths of pioneering.
Yet though the female participants are still confined by the gender ideologies of the pioneering era, male participants are judged by the way they measure up to the “pioneer spirit.” Dan Hatch, a young gay man from the city, fears toward the end of the first episode that he cannot meet the imagined standards of 1861. Left alone for a few hours with a large group of lambing ewes, he delivers a tearful piece to the camera as the sun sets: “I've had enough. … I can't do this. I'm filthy, I reek, the flies won't leave me alone, my feet are killing me … and I can't see things getting any better. This is reality, this is what it would have been like. I'm not tough enough to handle three months out here.” Dan is reassigned to tend the farm's vegetable garden, described as a “houseboy” in episode 3, and by episode 4 is planning the wedding of Peter, the overseer, which takes place on the program. Dan might have what he describes as a “different skill set” from the other men on the farm, but the voiceover text leaves the audience in some doubt about his pioneering mettle (and, by implication, his masculinity): “While Dan makes his decorating decisions, Russell takes on Baldy, the biggest, strongest, and most cunning horse on the station” (episode 4). The men on Oxley Downs manage to measure up to their pioneering forebears by washing, shearing, and delivering their wool. In the final episode, when the wool must be loaded onto a bullock dray (a cart drawn by young bulls), a laborious task they complete over many hours, Dan comments, “It all comes down to teamwork—we all have to work together … in order that we can function as a group, as a squattocracy, as a community.” The program affirms the pioneer spirit of the men, who have been able to complete this difficult task together. The voiceover builds the tension as the moment of judgment approaches: “So would our twenty-first-century pioneers have survived in 1861? How will they stack up beside their original forebears of the mid-nineteenth century?” When they discover that, in nineteenth-century financial terms, they have succeeded in their task to sell the wool for a high price, we are told that “the volunteers have not only survived the nineteenth century, they've done a lot better than many of the original pioneers” (episode 8). So in Outback House, the modern “pioneers” test themselves against the pioneer legend and emerge triumphant.
Pioneering on The Colony was somewhat different and arguably more difficult. Reenacting the first years of European settlement in tents and basic wooden huts in demanding weather must have been challenging for the participants, especially those from Ireland and the United Kingdom. The stakes were high, and they were established by the expository voiceover that opens the program: “Two centuries ago the British Empire pulled off a deed of mythic stature: it planted the seed of a new civilization on the edge of a fantastic land. Home to an ancient Aboriginal culture for some 50,000 years, to Europeans Australia remained a vast, untouched unknown until the British seized the entire continent. It was to be a massive prison for the criminal underclasses of Great Britain, and only the bravest and most desperate would join them there.”
This opening text establishes that the early history of Australia was potentially riven with conflict: between black and white, between convicts and their masters. Yet in the program itself, the tensions are not between convicts and their masters, but among the three settler families; again, a focus on interpersonal conflict comes at the expense of a richer social history. This is possibly because the convicts controlled by each family cannot be punished in the ways they would have been punished in the early colony. (That is, there is no threat of violence for those who misbehave.) Thus, social tensions along class lines are muted, while the participants are at pains to minimize tensions between indigenous people and invaders (a point I will return to shortly). If the three male heads of household are not fighting with each other, they are struggling against history itself: as the voiceover warns in episode 1, in three months “we will know whether each of our modern-day families are tough enough to cut it on the frontier.” Again, white families must test themselves against a mythic set of pioneering values and thereby affirm conservative understandings of the nation's past.
The representation of indigenous peoples, and the fraught history between indigenous Australians and Europeans, is critical to representing history in Australian reality history programs. As I outlined earlier, the question of how Australia writes, understands, and reconciles its often violent and disturbing history of colonization and dispossession is central to Australian national identity in the twenty-first century. It is also a history that seems furthest from our grasp in terms of representation. It would be ethically impossible to accurately re-create such a history—to reenact colonial violence, dispossession, and indigenous resistance—in a reality TV program. So how do these programs deal with this issue: Do they implicate contemporary Australians in this history and present an ethically and morally complex past? Do they present a colonization without victims? Or do they offer viewers new ways of thinking about the relationships between the present and the past and exploring the ways people today construct notions of their national past?
Both programs situate violence between Aboriginal and European Australians as “in the past”—it is literally in the past for the twenty-first-century participants, but it is also in the past in the periods being reenacted—dispossession has already happened. In Outback House there were two indigenous participants: the teenager Danielle, playing a maid, and Mal, a farmhand. In the scenario of Outback House, armed resistance to colonization is in the past; the story that predominates is one of Aboriginal assistance to Europeans in the process of colonization. For example, Mal and Tom, a visiting elder, comment that the first settlers would have perished without help from indigenous people (episode 3). This highlights the interconnected nature of indigenous and white history, but it has the effect of presenting the story of colonization as peaceful and cooperative, rather than offering an equally plausible narrative of violence and resistance. Yet could such a history be presented onscreen? It would be ethically impossible to represent the violence and dispossession of colonization in reality history, but the absence of this violence distorts history.
Other aspects of indigenous depiction in Outback House hint at a different, more subversive representation. Danielle, the maid, is just seventeen, and early in the series she complains of her role: “I hate it that I have to wait on people and wash their dishes but I'm gonna try and do what people would have done in this day—just ignore it” (episode 2). The producers arranged a visit for Danielle, who was ready to quit the program, from her mother, who tells her, “This place is so significant to us and our heritage because our family and our ancestors worked on this same property” (episode 3). Danielle excitedly tells her mother, “I've had so much dŽjž vu it's not funny, and I swear it's because I know that … people who are related to me have been here already.” A sense of earlier occupation, of an Aboriginal history connected to this place, is quietly established. Crucially, Danielle is working as a servant, the occupation for which most mixed-race indigenous girls were trained when they were removed from their families in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a large-scale policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people in Australia. (Boys were similarly removed and largely trained to be rural workers.) Her resentment at her heavy workload and desire to quit the program take on a new historical resonance in this context, as does the powerful moment between her and her departing mother. Saying good-bye, Danielle's mother tells her, “You just stay strong, stay strong, and whatever they want you to do, you do it, do it with happiness, because you'll be through this so much better and happier, it's only for a short while.” Danielle in parting from her mother stands in for the thousands of indigenous children who were never able to say good-bye to their parents when they were removed to institutions. The scene resonates strongly in an environment where the issue of the “stolen generations” (as these children who were removed from their families are now known) has only recently come to public attention and has been the subject of bitter political debate (Haebich, Manne).
When the producers of The Colony first called for indigenous participants, they drew a blank: no Aboriginal families wanted to be involved, partly because there was concern among the Aboriginal community about “appearing on a show that focused on a tragic time for Indigenous people” (Tedmanson). The producers eventually found families willing to participate, who were told that they would be “living back in time” but not naked, having exchanged clothes with the British settlers. The families (the Costelloes and the Donovans) lived outside the white settlement and were given no preexisting shelter, unlike the white families. An early voiceover summed up the potential for violence in the early colony: “The frontier saw many skirmishes between black and white, a conflict which some historians have called an undeclared war. Settlers feared attacks from the spears of Aboriginal people, and they feared the muskets issued to each settler. But there were also places where indigenous and settler relations were good. How will modern race relations unfold in our colony?” (episode 2).
Yet even if we, the audience, believe violence is possible or even justified, we know it won't eventuate—to allow violence would be unethical on the part of the producers. So colonial violence is displaced in favor of disputes over history. For example, though the voiceover emphasizes the potential for both violence and harmony, the indigenous historian John Maynard, who visits the indigenous clan in episode 3, tells them that it is important to note that all race relations weren't pleasant—that there was constant conflict and outright warfare in the region in which the program was set. Hearing Maynard's account of colonial violence, Anto Donovan reflects: “I know that history part really gets to me. Even today some of us, where we grew up, we can't even walk back onto that land, and I don't think that's right. But that history should not have even been how it was” (episode 3). Here Donovan expresses both a sense of anger at the past and a desire to rewrite it in an ethical way. His anger at dispossession and loss of place is emphasized by the earlier arrival of Richard Greene, one of only a tiny handful of fluent speakers of the local indigenous language, Dharug. Greene tells the Aboriginal families that it has been one hundred years since the language has been heard in the area—and, of course, no one can understand the language. The fact that the indigenous families need guidance in finding local bush food, or in the local indigenous language, shows the importance of place and locality in indigenous culture, what the loss of place could mean for cultural traditions and food supplies, and the effect of land loss for all aspects of indigenous life. So though we see some of the consequences of colonial dispossession for Aboriginal people, the reenactment of the beginnings of settlement by the white participants evades this, settling instead for a focus on whites’ hardships as the settlers struggle to make their land fertile and build a community.
Outback House limited some of the female participants to being little more than “civilizing influences,” but this was not the case for all the women on the program. Indeed, one of the most interesting possibilities of reality history is that it has the potential to present aspects of the lives of women in the past, especially working-class women, and invite an empa-thetic identification with them. Anecdotal evidence (and my own experience working in history television) suggests that Australian history television is largely produced and consumed by older men, which often means that programs are commissioned with men's interests in mind. Stories about women's historical experiences are more difficult to shepherd through the development process (Arrow 46-3). In its focus on “ordinary people” and everyday life in the past, reality history differs from much conventional history television, which still tends to examine the great, the good, or the notorious (Hunt 848). Catharine Lumby has noted that some critics argue that reality television is degrading because it invades the privacy of its participants. She claims, however, that opening up the private realm (traditionally associated with women) to public surveillance is not necessarily degrading, and that relegating certain issues and behaviors to the private sphere has not served all social groups equally well. By exposing so-called private behaviors—such as the expression of emotions—to the public gaze through television, Lumby argues, “reality television might be understood as a forum in which so-called ‘ordinary’ people are able to participate, if only partially, in the process of quite literally representing themselves” (Lumby 23). Liesbet van Zoonen concurs, noting that through reality television, “we rediscover on television what has become ever more invisible in the world around us, the private life of ordinary people” (van Zoonen 672). Jerome de Groot argues that reality history programs “emphasise a dynamic, interrogative history of lived experience and of everyday normality—the otherness of history is enacted through the lack of shampoo, rather than the temporal distance of events,” which produces a vision of “history from below” rather than the neat narratives of television historians (402-403).
Although this can lead to an overwhelming focus on experience rather than explanation, as Tristram Hunt bemoans, one of the things reality history does best is help us imagine how difficult women's lives in the past were. The press for the programs expressed astonishment at the lives of Edwardian-era scullery maids, for example: “Required to work between 16 and 18 hours a day, and not permitted to talk during meal breaks, a scullery maid in 1905 earned less than a dollar a week” (Oliver 3), and the voiceover on Outback House emphasized that women's “daily work was laborious, repetitive, and unrelenting” (episode 2). Throughout the series the men are shown working together on different tasks—building a sheep run to wash the wool, or baling the wool to prepare it for market—whereas the women's work—washing, cooking, and cleaning—remains monotonous and demanding. The women are looking for respite from their endless labors; the cook Brigid says she'll do anything to get out of the kitchen (episode 8). Danielle, the maid, complains, “Everyone said it's going to be great fun … it's not fun at all. You have half an hour of fun each week. It sucks!” (episode 3). In representing the difficulties of a nineteenth-century working woman's life (as experienced by a twenty-first-century woman, of course), reality history can portray in empathetic ways historical experiences and ways of being that would otherwise remain elusive to history television.
Further, reality history can represent the past in such a way as to raise “complex questions about the nature of historical understanding” (Gardiner 19). Reality history participants are shown engaging with the past in the present to extract modern meaning from it, and the disjunction between the past and present often becomes a structuring device in these programs (Cook 493). For example, in episode 3 of The Colony, the women from all the families spend time together, making flags that represent their various clans. (It seems that the producers supplied the women with materials to make these flags.) While the Irishwomen make a historically accurate green flag with a harp on it (which dates, according to the voiceover, to 1798), the Aboriginal women make an Aboriginal flag (a striking red, black, and yellow design that dates to the modern land rights struggle of 1971 [see Ausflag, “Aboriginal Flag”]), and the Hohnkes make a Eureka flag, which was created during a radical political struggle on the Victorian goldfields in 1854 and is a symbol of radicalism used by both the political left and right in Australia (Ausflag, “Eureka Flag”). Thus, notions of historical accuracy are jettisoned in favor of creating symbols that carry modern resonance for the participants; Tracy Hohnke comments, “What we want to do is to represent what we believe in. Makin’ the flag made us Aussies feel like we were having our say, that we wouldn't be dictated to in any way” (episode 3). This sets the scene for a confrontation with the historian Michael McKernan, who acted as an onscreen mediator between the participants and the producers. McKernan reads a proclamation that declares that the Aboriginal families must not visit white homes; the white families will lose their rations if they disobey. This sparks the Hohnkes’ anger: Tracy vows to defy the order, saying, “I don't give a shit what the history man says.” The men, led by Tracy's husband, Kerry, carry out a protest in which all the participants raise the Aboriginal and Eureka flags. The situation is resolved when the Aboriginal families, not wanting to jeopardize the food supply of the white families, leave the camp—and the series. The flag raising is partly a gesture of solidarity with the Aboriginal families, partly an act of defiance, yet it is also an attempt to find the moral meaning of the past in a present-day context. Australian historians writing the history of Aboriginal dispossession, and the dark history of the history wars, are, in many ways, attempting to do just that, and it is the struggle over the moral meaning of the past that gives the history wars their energy and controversy. This roaming across time in reality history can reveal the ways that people make sense of the past far more concisely than the occasionally laborious debates of academic historians.
As I have outlined here, depicting Australia's controversial, checkered past of colonization and dispossession in reality history TV has produced decidedly mixed results. The programs emphasize the impossibility of ever re-creating or reproducing the past in the present—all we can know is what we twenty-first-century citizens choose to make of the past. For this reason, reality history offers a very limited means of learning about the past, for all the reasons I have discussed: it focuses on the material conditions of the past at the expense of politics; it gazes at the past through the prism of personal relationships and conflict; and it reproduces popular social memory of the past. Yet this is not the only function of reality history, and, as I have shown, reality history TV offers interesting possibilities for understanding the ethical significance of the past. The standard criticism of reality history is that it is neither reality nor history (Stearn 27)—de Groot has speculated that many historians dislike the genre because it displaces them from their traditional televisual role as “gatekeeper to the past” (399). Reality history is important precisely because it confronts the ways present-day people make sense of the past—in more explicit ways than other kinds of television history. Though they are not unproblematic, for all the reasons I have outlined, reality history programs and the discourses they engender demonstrate, perhaps more effectively than written history, the ways in which, as Patrick Wolfe writes, “we remain the legatees and beneficiaries of [our] continuing past” (30), and in an era in which history remains more popular and more contested than ever, this is a worthy and timely project.
1. See Macintyre and Clark. Macintyre adopted the American term history wars to describe Australia's debates over its history.
2. The Colony was produced by Hilton Cordell Productions for SBS Independent, Radio Telefis Eireann, and the History Channel U.K. with the assistance of the New South Wales Film and Television Office.
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