media (settler colonialism) work 2000words

https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X19863849

Media International Australia 2020, Vol. 174(1) 29 –38

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Corresponding author: Sukhmani Khorana, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, Building 19, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. Email: [email protected]

863849 MIA0010.1177/1329878X19863849Media International AustraliaKhorana research-article2019

Special Issue Article

Diverse Australians on television: from nostalgic whiteness to aspirational multiculturalism

Sukhmani Khorana University of Wollongong, Australia

Abstract This article delivers preliminary findings from a series of interviews with Australian migrant producers, directors and writers. With the increasing calls for diversity in the media generally, and on television screens specifically from a wide range of stakeholders (institutions like Screen Australia, advocacy groups and high-profile media personnel of colour), there is ample empirical evidence that our public and commercial broadcasters have a long way to go in terms of ‘reflecting’ contemporary Australia. There is also more emphasis on institutionalised strategies, and looking towards overseas models to make this happen. Using the discourses of official and everyday multiculturalism, this article unpacks what it means to ‘reflect reality’, versus the meaning of various kinds of aspirational content, especially in drama and comedy. Such an analysis is crucial to understand the value of diversity beyond the simplistic rationale of ‘reflection’, and particularly in a changing mediascape.

Keywords aspiration, Australian television, diversity, migrant, multiculturalism

In this article, I am interested in providing a rationale for increasing ̀ cultural diversity’ on Australian television beyond the notion of reflecting a multicultural society. Although this argument is fre- quently used in industry advocacy groups, it has limitations in a media environment that is domi- nated by market-driven forces. To begin with, I provide an overview of screen diversity globally, situate Australia in these debates, and then move on to examine local representations and condi- tions through the lens of `aspiration’. I argue that aspiration can be re-defined to re-conceptualise cultural diversity on Australian television screens such that it encapsulates what the multicultural nation is capable of, and not just reflect what it currently is. In order to make this argument, I use the case study of ̀ ethnic comedy’. This includes empirical interview material with a range of stake- holders in comedy who have seen the media landscape evolve, and have adapted where necessary to new media and new ways of getting a wider audience interested in non-Anglo stories.

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30 Media International Australia 174(1)

Diversity on-screen and off-screen: an overview

In most immigrant nations, cultural diversity in the media has been in question. On the one hand, this is because media content is presumed to be required to live up to the ideal of ‘reflecting real- ity’, especially the changing demographics of migrant settler nations like the United States and Australia. At the same time, there is also noticeable lack of cultural diversity in the workforce of dominant media industries such as Hollywood. These issues reached a tipping point with the #OscarsSoWhite movement in 2016, when it was noted that ‘for the second year in a row, all 20 actors nominated in the lead and supporting acting categories [were] white’ (Ryan, 2016). In response, the trending Twitter hashtag was created, and several high-profile film personalities like Spike Lee, Will Smith and Michael Moore boycotted the awards.

In her book on cultural diversity and global media, Siapera (2010) argues that ‘cultural diversity is (re)produced and distributed through the media, which construct and represent it in certain ways, and which are in turn received and put to use by audiences’ (p. 7). This, in turn, raises the question of what happens when there is an absence of such representation? Or, relatedly, what are the con- sequences when a lack of sufficient on-screen and off-screen portrayal places a burden of represen- tation on the token few who are visible/audible? Siapera (2010) adds that ‘mediation involves a constant tension between control and/or containment of cultural diversity and defiance, opposition to, but also negotiated acceptance of, such efforts’ (p. 8). This implies that there is a faltering pro- gress on the issue of having more culturally representative media (Khorana, 2018).

In the Australian context, #OscarsSoWhite led to questions around the lack of diversity in our own screen industries. By April of the same year, the local media industry awards (known as the ‘Logies’) attempted to address the diversity gap by nominating two non-white on-screen personalities (news- reader Lee Lin Chin and The Project co-host Waleed Aly) for the coveted Gold Logie. In an interview at the time, Asian Australian writer Benjamin Law pointed out that while these nominations were heartening, there was a particular problem with the lack of ethnic diversity in Australian-made scripted content in the genres of comedy and drama (cited in Bizzaca, 2016). Industry bodies such as Screen Australia responded to these critiques by commissioning research on the previous 5 years of Australian drama on commercial and public broadcasters. The findings, released in late 2016 in a report titled ‘Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in Australian TV Drama’, indicated that in the screen industries, there is a lower proportion of people of non-European background both on and behind the screen compared to the total Australian workforce (Screen Australia, 2016).

While institutional responses to the problem of cultural diversity in Australia are only just emerging, people of colour working in the industry, or those trying to get in, have been advocating for change for much longer (see, for instance, Hamad, 2014). This advocacy has largely been tak- ing place on the grounds that it is essential for the integration of new migrant communities into the Australian mainstream, that is, the ‘reflection’ argument). Research commissioned on migrant audiences at the turn of the century indicated this to be the case:

Apart from the Greek sample, all groups made a connection between their favourite TV network and the one that most reflects reality. For the Greek sample, the station most reflecting reality was SBS (8 percentage points ahead of the Nine Network), with the three most popular stations recording identical scores (pay TV 20%, SBS 20%, Nine 20%). Given the high results on the issue of the media not representing respondents’ ways of life and the connection between favourite television station and that which best presents reality, we could infer that the participants like those stations which they believe most reflect their own reality. (Ang et al., 2002: 63)

In the contemporary media environment in Australia, the growing recognition of the cultural diversity issue is compounded by other policy and technological shifts – namely, the marrying of neoliberal mar- ket values with new media innovations, and multicultural advocacy. With regard to its impact on screen

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Khorana 31

media, I argue that this has entailed changes in the role of comedy in appealing to audiences, and the fracturing of audiences with the introduction of new media platforms. If this is the case, why does the symbolism of descriptive representation on mainstream Australian television still matter? This article will address the question of the value of cultural diversity in Australian scripted content by referring to data gathered from qualitative interviews with prominent people of colour working in the industry, with a particular emphasis on comedy, and mapping it against contemporary socio-political shifts.

Aspiration and Neoliberalism

In their edited volume on lifestyle media in Asia, Martin and Lewis foreground aspiration as linked to both consumption-oriented lifestyles in globalizing economies (2016: 18). Looking at a variety of lifestyle media and their audiences, they also conclude that there is a significant gap between material and aspirational lifestyles, and this has led to revised aspirations in the wake of the global financial crisis (2016: 19). How can we use this understanding of ‘aspiration’ and ordinary people in changing economies to understand what is happening in the media landscape in Australia? This article is based on the premise that aspiration has a) a consumption orientation which will be expli- cated in the subsequent discussion of neoliberalism; and b) the potential to be revised to incorpo- rate a justice dimension in the face of rising global precarity. The double-sided expression of aspiration is most evident in the role and evolution of ‘ethnic’ comedy in the Australian context, as will be examined later in this article.

The rise in global economic uncertainty is often attributed to many governments and multina- tional corporations adopting the ideology of neoliberalism. While liberalism is widely understood as a broader political doctrine whose goals include ‘the diffusion, deepening and preservation of constitutional democracy, limited government, individual liberty, and those basic human and civil rights which are instrumental to any decent human existence’ (Thorsen and Lie, 2006: 7), neolib- eralism has a more overtly economic dimension. Thorsen and Lie examine the conceptual history of neoliberalism to conclude that it is ‘loosely demarcated set of political beliefs which most prom- inently and prototypically include the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual, especially commercial, liberty, as well as strong private property rights (2006: 15). In terms of how this applies to the mediascape, it can be understood as the minimization of state intervention in addressing issues of inequality, such as the representation of racialised groups. With regards to its approach to migration in general, individuals are viewed primarily through the lens of their economic contribution. The ensuing section will lay this out more lucidly through a genealogy of multiculturalism in Australia, and the recent role of market-oriented mechanisms.

Australian policy and practice: from official to everyday multiculturalism

At the time of writing, Australian multiculturalism appears to be falling prey to more divisive forces than has been the case since the official end of the White Australia Policy in the early 1970s by the Whitlam Labor government. For instance, in a recent reflective piece for The Sydney Morning Herald, former Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane (2019) observed that Prime Minister Scott Morrison prefers characterising Australia as a ‘migrant’ rather than a ‘multicultural society’. He added that this distancing from multiculturalism represents a departure from his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, and that the latter term signifies a confident celebration of cultural diversity instead of being threatened by it (Soutphommasane, 2019). In line with this approach, I argue that the prioritising of a migrant over a multicultural attribution also

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signals the current regime’s embrace of migration only in the context of its value to a neoliberal enterprise. Another noteworthy recent event was a neo-Nazi rally at Melbourne’s St Kilda beach, which was met by an equally strong swathe of anti-racism protesters (see Seo, 2019). As a conse- quence of this occurrence, Seo (2019) concluded that the title of being a successful multicultural society is ‘an unfinished project that requires endless aspiration and defence’. This article takes such a progressive dimension of endless multicultural aspiration further by attempting to envisage what it could mean for Australian television content, particularly in the realm of comedy.

Australian multiculturalism has its foundations in settler colonialism. This means that while the nationalisms in settler nations such as Australia and Canada draw upon the past for symbols, they are primarily oriented to the future promise of the nation (Moran, 2011: 2156). One the one hand, this newness can be a source of uncertainty. On the other, the future orientation has ‘allowed Australia and Canada to embrace multiculturalism as a project of national identity renewal’ (Moran, 2011: 2156). Such an embrace has enabled multiculturalism to have deeper roots in settler societies as it is more intertwined with the very notion of national identity there. For this reason, the ‘death of multicultural- ism’ pronounced by the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the post 9/11 era (Connolly, 2010) has received less political and populist support in Australia and Canada (Moran, 2011: 2162).

Multicultural policy and demands for greater cultural diversity in the Australian media have also been impacted by the changing demographics of the nation. According to the 2016 census figures on migration, there is a notable tilt in the numbers from Europe to Asia:

Fifty years ago, the overseas-born population was only 18% of the total. At that time, a third (32%) were born in England, with only 1.6% from India and China combined. In the 2016 census, for the first time, most people born overseas were from Asia, not Europe. (Hunt, 2017)

While there is substantial academic literature on the cultural openness, or lack thereof of the dominant Anglo population, more work needs to be done to understand how multiculturalism plays out among migrants of various backgrounds. This is necessary to get a better picture of how official policy and demographic shifts impact the everyday lives of citizens and communities. According to preliminary work done by Ang et al. in 2002, ‘the NESB population routinely enters into inter-cultural relation- ships at home and at work, while the mainstream population tends to be involved more in cross-cul- tural consumption, which, in some cases, means a “multiculturalism without migrants”’ (p. 37).

These dynamics of the multiculturalism of ethnic minorities versus that of more privileged Anglo Australian consumers also play out in a number of scripted shows that have featured on Australian television since the 1990s. According to Stratton (2017b), these shows embody a shift from official to ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in that while the former was concerned with groups, the latter is focused on interactions between individuals from diverse backgrounds (p. 245). He adds that realism functions as the mode of representation of everyday multiculturalism, as opposed to the hyper-real- ism of ethnic stereotypes in official multiculturalism (Stratton, 2017b: 246). In the 2016 comedy titled Here Come the Habibs! that was broadcast on commercial network Channel Nine, the two ver- sions of multiculturalism were arguably at loggerheads. Stratton (2017b) argues that the series, prem- ised on a Lebanese family that moves from Sydney’s west to the more upmarket eastern suburbs after the father wins the lotto, is expressive of nostalgia for official multiculturalism (2017: 254).

In terms of the neoliberal dimension, it is relatively new migrants to Australia that are represented as solely interested in accumulating wealth, and apathetic to more rooted forms of group belonging. These include a Sri Lankan realtor and a transnational Chinese couple that buys the Anglo family’s ancestral house. This, then, raises questions about whether neoliberal, everyday forms of multicultur- alism and their mediations are a response to the limitations of official multiculturalism? At the same time, what are the pitfalls of marrying state-sanctioned multiculturalism with neoliberal policies? In

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their influential book on the crises of multiculturalism, Lentin and Titley argue, `In the individualiz- ing logic of neoliberalism, history, politics and the state are increasingly written out of any analysis of disadvantage generally, and racialized disadvantage particularly’ (2011: 168). This means that capital is seen solely as a social corrector, and not as one of the factors perpetuating discrimination (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 168). In the sphere of diverse media, such an approach has very particular outcomes for the representation of cultural diversity.

One of the representatives of the neoliberal era is the ‘Wogsploitation’ genre of the 1990s, including both films and comedic television series. These will be explored in greater detail in the subsequent section on comedy, but for now, suffice to say that they marked a shift in the representation of ethnic minorities in the Australian mainstream. According to Speed (2005), films like ‘The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza reflect a move away from the sensitive and serious portrayals of ethnic minorities in earlier Australian films, such as Kostas (Paul Cox, 1979) and Head On (Ana Kokkinos, 1998), towards market-driven entertain- ment’ (p. 138). In other celebrated series of this era, such as the drama The Secret Life of Us that aired from 2001 to 2005, the mode of realism was found to be aspirational, and not representative of the reali- ties of continuing racism. In other words, it sought to depict the best aspects of Australian multicultural- ism, sometimes projecting the kind of utopia that glossed over existing problems and thereby hid underlying discomfort regarding conversations about race (Nolan, 2009: 146–147).

While the discourses of representation of Indigeneity and the cultural diversity of migrants do not always overlap, it is noteworthy that eliding over visible differences in both cases can be read as an ongo- ing sign of anxiety over race in neoliberal times. What is consistent in the two eras is the persistence of the trope of ‘neighbourliness’, possibly seen as distinctly Australian, and drawn from the long-running Channel Ten series – ironically known for its nostalgic whiteness and lack of diversity – Neighbours (1985). At this juncture, it is important to understand whether and how the mediated inter-cultural encoun- ters in Australian comedy and drama capture the ‘realism’ of banal multicultural life, while also helping the audience aspire towards higher levels of cultural openness. In the Australian context, several scholars of sociology have described ‘banal multiculturalism’ as the inter-cultural encounters that take place in everyday sites such as the food courts of suburban shopping malls (Wise and Velayutham, 2009), or the habits of civic virtues in a school that can contribute to a cosmopolitan disposition (Noble, 2013). This is akin to everyday multiculturalism, but with an emphasis on the transformation of cohorts of various kinds in particular habitual sites, and not just on individuals involved in inter-cultural encounters. Based on this conceptualisation of multiculturalism, can a model of representing banal multicultural reality with a future orientation avoid the pitfalls of solely market-driven content?

Changing role of comedy: from drama to particularities

The genre of comedy is seen to play a particularly effective role in terms of allowing ethnic minori- ties to represent themselves, and talking back to dominant representations or misrepresentations. In my interviews with Tony Ayres and Benjamin Law, the producer and writer/director, respectively, of the SBS comedy series The Family Law (2016), the particularity of comedy and its interpellation of wide audiences were also highlighted. Ayres was of the view that the The Family Law (2016) works because it is the story of a particular world; it is Ben’s personal story and also largely dysfunctional, which is ideal for comedy (interview with author, 2017). At the same time, Law explained that, in adapting his memoir for the small screen, the motto was that ‘we will make you laugh, but only after we make you cry and tear your guts out’ (interview with author, 2016). He added that they wanted to make a show with dramatic heft, and that the comedic mode was a means to invite people in (Law’s interview with author, 2016). This rationale for using comedy to draw in a larger audience, and then to explore cultural and personal particularities, has also been used in the Australian comedy scene before, particularly in the type of series classified as ‘wog humour’.

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In my interview with Maltese Australian actor/director Paul Fenech, who is known as one of the stalwarts of ‘wog comedy’, he highlighted both the working class and broad multicultural appeal of his show Housos (2011):

It’s the most diverse show I’ve done, and has the greatest range of ethnicities every week . . . It’s a very hard country for a lot of people to survive, and that’s why people come to my shows, doesn’t matter whether they are Greek or bogan. If you’re struggling in Australia, [the show is] a bit rough, broad, rude, politically incorrect’. (Interview with author, 2017)

This championing of the mythic ‘underdog’ is also a means of inviting in a wide section of the audience, which harks back to the days of much less ethnically diverse ‘ocker comedy’ in Australia. According to Speed (2005), the wogsploitation genre of films alluded to earlier ‘simultaneously assert their ethnic identities and reconfigure the Australian stereotype of the “ocker”’ (p. 138). The wog comedy genre on television is arguably similar, though the assertion of the ethnic self is often also subjected to self-stereotyping. At the same time, their satirising of mainstream Australian popular culture, and playing with a low style of comedy that was previously less available to non- Anglo Australians (Speed, 2005: 140), suggests a kind of talking back to the conventions of the national canon. According to Stratton, Housos also represents the impact of Anglo-dominated power structures from the perspective of the underclass (2017b: 533).

Despite these particularities, other ‘wog comedy’ veterans, like Lebanese Australian Rob Shehadie, insist on being inducted into the said canon rather than being defined by their difference:

It’s not like I don’t like doing ethnic comedy. I’m an ethnic and I do comedy. I try to water it down because people go, ‘oh you’re doing an ethnic comedy, a multicultural comedy’, but really I’m telling my life or my experiences and I’m born in Australia so really I’m an Australian doing Australian comedy. That’s how I look at it. This show we don’t talk about nationalities . . . Street Smart is really broad, we don't mention the word Lebanese. (Interview with author, 2018)

In other words, Shehadie’s pitch, not unlike Law’s, is to broaden appeal by representing the ‘ethnic’ as Australian rather than as a wog or an Asian. Their objective here is not to disavow ethnic differ- ence and particularity, but to explore it only once the (presumably mainstream) audience is already hooked in, and disarmed. According to Speed (2005), the wogsploitation films of the 1990s and early 2000s suggested ‘a resurgence of identities that Australia sought previously to render “safe” through assimilation, a common strategy for surplus repression’ (p. 143). Therefore, the assertion of the wog stereotype in the films signals ‘a refusal among ethnic minorities to discard their origi- nal cultural identities’ (Speed, 2005: 143). Given this history, what do we make of more recent comedic series like The Family Law (2016) and Street Smart (2018) in which ethnic identity is also embraced, but only as an aside. It is my contention that this is by virtue of the evolving role of comedy in a neoliberal mediascape where both public and commercial television face new compe- tition from similar content on online platforms.

New media and new audiences

The changing role of comedy, amid the broader context of a greater demand for diversity on our television screens, is also accompanied by a parallel and significant shift in the technologies that bring these genres to our living rooms. This means not just the advent of digital TV, and online streaming of television shows, but also the rise of web series and YouTube stars that often attract

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more diverse storytellers, and younger audiences. In my interview with Ayres, he interpreted this as a positive development for the cause of cultural diversity on the television screen:

The idea of audience is changing. The whole idea of mainstream audience versus fringe audience isn’t meaningful any more. What is happening is that audiences are now fragmenting into much more particular interest groups. With The Family Law, you were able to catch a youth audience, those interested in comedy, as well as Chinese-Australians and Ben Law fans. (Interview with author, 2017)

Ben Law stated that the show was ‘marketed heavily towards specific Chinese Australian com- munities’, and added that it was also expanded to Arabic and Korean subtitles for online audiences beginning from Season 2 (interview with author, 2016). It is noteworthy that the debut of this SBS series was on Facebook, and that it attracted 1.1 million views (Hickman, 2016). This appears to be a strategic move by television producers to leverage social media popularity among audiences, and perhaps also an understanding that this is usually where they look to find diverse content.

At the same time, there is caution in the local television industry about the loss of revenue and jobs to bigger online streaming services such as Netflix, and what implications this has for all genres of Australian content. For instance, Fenech was less optimistic about what new media populism means for a small market like Australia:

Social media means you can make popular things without anyone’s supervision. But [this is] always a barrier in Australia because of our population numbers; five per cent of the population won’t register a lot of hits on YouTube, whereas in the US it would be massive. My only advice to anyone who wants to . . . the more you make the better you get, make your own opportunities, have a lateral mind to succeed. It's a narrow path; a very closed shop these days. (Interview with author, 2017)

In other words, Fenech views reaching broader audiences in the new media, market-oriented land- scape as a ‘closed shop’ for most Australian content-makers. Also, he added that by virtue of their substantial exposure to transnational online media, the 15- to 25-year-old demographic is US-centric in its tastes, and more likely to watch Keeping up with the Kardashians over Acropolis Now (Fenech’s interview with author, 2017). This view of neoliberal globalisation as harmful for local cultural diversity needs further empirical work. It would be useful to conceptualise its policy framework and political implications for Australian advocates of on-screen cultural diversity. This is essential to understand how such advocacy can persist within a mediascape with a market orien- tation, and also attempt to resist it.

Behind the screen in the neoliberal mediascape

‘Productive diversity’ is the take on cultural diversity that advocates for it on primarily economic grounds. According to Trevisanut (2013) in her work on how SBSi (the commissioning house of SBS from 1994 to 2007) championed this brand of diversity, productive diversity is ‘consistent with the “techniques and regimens” of neo-liberal governance’ (p. 35). She adds, this is because it is a policy that ‘intervenes in industry to optimise opportunities for economic participation in favour of financing State based services that compensate for social, cultural and economic exclu- sion’ (Trevisanut, 2013: 35). Furthermore, such an instrumental take on cultural diversity came out of the Office of Multicultural Affairs realising that throughout the 1980s, multiculturalism was seen as antithetical to sound economic policy. Trevisnaut (2013) suggests that the intention was, therefore, to not merely promote the welfare of immigrants, but to also render cultural diversity relevant to the broader population in a climate of increasing deregulation.

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In the case of SBSi, the overarching commitment to productive diversity did improve career opportunities for some creatives from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. However, the broadcaster’s management of their labour ‘ostensibly preserved the whiteness of Australia’s core institutions and political culture’ (Trevisanut, 2013: 39). This implies not just an instrumental but also a tokenistic approach to cultural diversity that does not necessarily aim to change the settler paradigm of powerful cultural institutions. In addition, Bertone and Leahy (2001) are of the view that productive diversity is devoid of a ‘moral and philosophical commitment to ethnic diversity’ (p. 115), with the sole emphasis being the facilitation of competitiveness in global markets. Casting and commissioning agents for the screen industries are inevitably embedded within this policy context, and hence become complicit with neoliberal governance regardless of their own personal advocacy agenda. How can this be resisted while also creating work for con- tent-makers, actors and technicians of colour in Australia?

On the basis of the interviews with ‘makers’ in this study, I am suggesting the notion of ‘aspi- rational multiculturalism’ which can exist alongside, and also counter the most deleterious impacts of productive diversity. The latter is a foot in the door for creatives of colour and can facilitate access to mainstream media audiences which could sometimes lead to bridge-building. However, the former takes away this individualised focus and is instead focused on ensuring that these creatives have adequate exposure to the particular community issues faced by ethnic minorities, and are thereby able to provide a progressive dimension to everyday multicultural- ism. Several creatives, such as Fenech, are already engaging in these dual approaches by con- tinuing to do live comedy in regional and non-metropolitan areas in addition to pitching for mainstream television shows.

Conclusion

In this article, I began with an overview of the recent local and global pressures for increasing cultural diversity on Australian television. This, in turn, has been based on the rationale of ‘real- ism’, which means that a changing nation should be reflected back with some accuracy on its screens. While institutional responses are emerging, this is happening within a neoliberal climate wherein diversity is framed in instrumental terms, and often reaches niche rather than broad audi- ences via new media. I argue that in this mediascape, advocacy for cultural diversity on main- stream television, and job creation for creatives of culturally diverse backgrounds still has symbolic and material value. This is not just because we need to ‘see ourselves’ as we are, but also because locally made drama and comedy can be an aspirational version of our banal multicultural reality.

Aspiration to do with upward class mobility has often been the butt of jokes in popular Australian comedy series such as Kath and Kim, where ‘much of the show’s humour came from the lead char- acters’ attempts to better themselves, or portray themselves as being higher up the class system than they actually were’ (Stratton, 2017a: 533). At the same time, many reality television genres such as cooking and singing competitions have navigated cultural diversity and aspirations of a more inclusive nation with more success. In my interviews with Ayres, he noted that this is grounds for a broader application across other television formats:

It is also about the commercial broadcasters seeing that audiences are not scared of faces that aren’t white now. Reality TV has really helped with that – all of them show a truer representation of Australia than we see in drama where producers are trying to present an aspirational version of what Australia is. (Interview with author, 2017)

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Khorana 37

The aspirationalism of Australian drama referred to by Ayres in the quote above has a nostalgic orientation towards a whit(er) rather than a more diverse Australia. This means that the aspiration- alism of future-facing Australian content ought to symbolise what we can become, albeit based on the current realities of banal multiculturalism, and without glossing over differences and discrimi- nation. As Law put it in my interview with him, ‘I’ve been identifying with non-Chinese Australian families all my life, so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t either’ (2016). That is to say that white audiences ought to be able to see a Chinese Australian on-screen family as one of the realities of the nation, and not too disparate form their own experience, even as they (and others) aspire to ask for and watch more content of this kind.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica- tion of this article: The research published in this article has been funded by ARC Linkage Project Grant LP150100202 (2015-2019).

ORCID iD

Sukhmani Khorana https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7273-1393

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