Tom ORegan - Australian Television Culture

Australian Television
Programs, pleasures and politics
Edited by John Tulloch and Graeme Turner

Dark Side of the Dream
Australian literature and the postcolonial mind
Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra

Fashioning the Feminine
Girls, popular culture and schooling
Pam Gilbert and Sandra Taylor

Featuring Australia
The cinema of Charles Chauvel
Stuart Cunningham

Framing Culture
Criticism and policy in Australia
Stuart Cunningham

From Nimbin to Mardi Gras
Constructing community arts
Gay Hawkins

From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism
Popular music and Australian culture from the 1960s to the 1990s
Edited by Philip Hayward

Myths of Oz
Reading Australian popular culture
John Fiske, Bob Hodge, Graeme Turner

Resorting to Tourism
Cultural policies for tourist development in Australia
Jennifer Craik

Stay Tuned
The Australian Broadcasting Reader
Edited by Albert Moran

Temptations
Sex, selling and the department store
Gail Reekie

Tom O'Regan

First published 1993 by Allen & Unwin

Published 2020 by Routledge
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Copyright Tom O'Regan, 1993

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
O'Regan, Tom, 1956- .
Australian television culture.
Includes index.
ISBN 186373 527 5.
1. Television broadcastingSocial aspectsAustralia.
2. Television programsAustralia.
3. Communication and cultureAustralia.
4. AustraliaPopular culture. I. Title.
306.4850994

Set in 10/11.5pt Sabon by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong

ISBN-13: 9781863735278 (pbk)

Nowadays the social and anthropological definition of 'culture' is probably gaining as much public currency as the aesthetic one. Particularly in Australia, politicians are liable to speak of the vital need for a domestic film industry in 'promoting our cultural identity'and they mean by 'cultural identity' some sense of Australianness, of our nationalism as a distinct form of social organisation. Notably, though, the emphasis tends to be on Australian film (not popular television); and not just any film, but those of 'quality'. So the aesthetic definition tends to be smuggled back inon top of the kind of cultural nationalism which assumes that 'Australia' is a unified entity with certain essential features that distinguish it from 'Britain', the 'USA' or any other national entities which threaten us with 'cultural dependency'.

This series is titled 'Australian Cultural Studies', and I should say at the outset that my understanding of 'Australian' is not as an essentially unified category; and further, that my understanding of cultural is anthropological rather than aesthetic. By 'culture' I mean the social production of meaning and understanding, whether in the inter-personal and practical organisation of daily routines or in broader institutional and ideological structures. I am not thinking of 'culture' as some form of universal 'excellence', based on aesthetic 'discrimination' and embodied in a pantheon of 'great works'. Rather, I take this aesthetic definition of culture itself to be part of the social mobilisation of discourse to differentiate a cultural 'elite' from the 'mass' of society.

Unlike the cultural nationalism of our opinion leaders, 'Cultural Studies' focuses not on the essential unity of national cultures, but on the meanings attached to social difference (as in the distinction between 'lite' and 'mass' taste). It analyses the construction and mobilisation of these distinctions to maintain or challenge existing power differentials, such as those of gender, class, age, race and ethnicity. In this analysis, terms designed to socially differentiate people (like 'lite' and 'mass') become categories of discourse, communication and power. Hence our concern in this series is for an analytical understanding of the meanings attached to social difference within the history and politics of discourse.

It follows that the analysis of 'texts' needs to be united from a single-minded association with 'high' culture (marked by 'authorship'), but must include the 'popular' toosince these distinctions of 'high' and 'popular' culture themselves need to be analysed, not assumed.

Tom O'Regan's Australian television culture takes the work of television critics beyond the analysis of particular 'high' or 'popular' cultural texts (or programs) to, in his words, 'the dissemination of television and its political and social disposition in space and time'. His book is innovative in articulating the relationship between the familiar differentiations noted by Cultural Studies (of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, aboriginality, etc.) and the economic and cultural geographies that construct 'Australia'. O'Regan organises his text 'to show how the different cultural and spatial levels of televisionits international, national, regional and local dimensions; and its minoritarian, ethnic, indigenous and "established Australia" manifestationsinterconnect in a synergistic and competitive fashion in Australian television services. Australian television is a heterogeneous site at which these various tendencies cohere.'

O'Regan's emphasis on 'coherence' as well as 'heterogeneity' is another important feature of this book. He emphasises both the conflict and the continuity between these different cultural and spatial levels; arguing, 'These continuities and discontinuities, consensus and antagonism between (and within) the different parts of the service provide Australia's television culture with its characteristic shape. A culture is necessarily made up of contradictory, antagonistic, disconnected and connected elements; Australia's television culture is no different.' Nevertheless, as we can see from the adjectival weighting of O'Regan's sentence ('contradictory, antagonistic, disconnected'), the sense of cultural clash and conflict, the quest by social groups for self-definition and power, remains strong. The book ends, for example, with the view that 'For many Aboriginal broadcasters, self-determination in Aboriginal television is seen as an important component of the broader struggle for the power and right to determine Aboriginal cultural, political and economic futures.'

Culture, as Fiske, Hodge and Turner say in