Document details

A History of Cultural Futures: ‘televisual Sovereignty’ in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Media

In: Voice & Matter: Communication, Development and the Cultural Return
Oscar Hemer; Thomas Tufte (eds.)
Göteborg: Nordicom (2016), pp. 173-187

ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 (print); 978-91-87957-32-1 (pdf)

"When the Aboriginal Programs Unit of Australia’s ABC television began in 1988, every Indigenous person involved was a trainee under the direction of a Euro-Australian professional. They bore the burden of collective selfrepresentation in a televisual wasteland virtually devoid of Indigenous voices. In 2011, Sally Riley (Wiradjuri) became head of the ABC’s Indigenous Unit, with plans to create innovative work that “comments on our own problems, our own issues”. Riley’s projects demonstrate how far Indigenous tv has come in 25 years; new productions expand beyond the burden of representation carried by the first generation, showing the complexities of daily life for diverse aboriginal subjects and audiences, enlarging the national imaginary through the local stories they tell. If the neighborhood of Redfern was known historically as the urban center of aboriginal political action in Australia, the show Redfern Now, has become an innovative site of cultural activism both on and off screen." (Abstract)