CULTURE WARS: THE STRUGGLE FOR ON-SCREEN AUSTRALIANNESS

The difference between local production with foreign elements and overseas production with Australian elements is getting harder to discern. Yet film and TV drama needs to be instantly recognisable as Australian for it to connect deeply with local audiences, writes Sandy George.

The production of Australian film and television drama has been shadowed by persistent concerns for decades. Is enough being made for it not to be swamped by foreign production? How can it compete with US dramas shot on vast budgets? How can the health of the producing community be assured? Today, these concerns are being exacerbated by accelerated globalisation, changing online viewing habits, growing costs, inattentive and patchy governance, and inaction over the obstacles that are blocking Australian films from getting into our cinemas.

But another factor needs to be put on the table: only when drama is recognisably Australian, that is, when it has on-screen ‘Australianness’, is there any chance of it deeply connecting with local audiences. Why is this so vital to grasp? Because a delicious outpouring of cultural value happens when an outstanding film or television drama does connect, and cultural value is the primary reason government supports drama. You see, Australian production, as defined by government and industry, doesn’t necessarily have much Australianness. It might be an overseas story made by Australians, or it might be a co-production, or the Australianness might be watered down with the aim of pleasing offshore commissioners.

A tangle of reasons accounts for what has been happening. Australians have turned away from free-to-air (FTA) television and towards Subscription Video On Demand (SVODs), which are unregulated, offer a vast array of choices and, in the main, are part of global conglomerates. They are affecting all players in the field, and will fundamentally change the nature of Australian drama, although exactly how is the big unknown. Given this enormous shift, and for other reasons, too, there is no longer clarity around the objectives behind each of the financial incentives currently in place, courtesy of Australian taxpayers.

Year after year, the difference between Australian production with foreign elements and foreign production with Australian elements is getting harder to discern, and there is evidence everywhere of economic value taking priority over cultural value − a folly, given cultural significance is the predominant reason the industry gets public funding.

The new Federal Government and the industry itself will hopefully encourage drama imbued with the spirit of Australian life more enthusiastically. The current system of support doesn’t need throwing out, but it does need expounding, fine-tuning and utilising with a different attitude.

Cinema owners often say that when an Australian film manages to tap into the zeitgeist, it goes off at the box office. Similarly, word of mouth can explode around a homegrown TV series. The response might be of any kind − amusement, joy, horror. The intensity comes from a sense of recognition and belonging.

Those Australian characters might be leading ordinary lives, as in Home and Away, or having fun hunting vampires, as in the eight-part series Firebite. This unmistakably Australian show for US streaming service AMC+ has Australia baked into every frame via its characters and the gorgeousness of the desert at sunrise and sunset.

But Australian drama, as defined by industry and government, doesn’t have to have an Australian look and feel. Three of the top 10 Australian films in cinemas in 2021 − the animations, Peter Rabbit 2 (in the number one spot) and Maya the Bee: The Golden Orb, and action fantasy Mortal Kombat − had no on-screen Australianness. The other seven did: TThe Dry, Penguin Bloom, High Ground, June Again, Buckley’s Chance, Long Story Short and the documentary, Girls Can’t Surf.

Australian drama production is underpinned by taxpayer money. To access funding, all projects, except co-productions, must pass a Significant Australian Content (SAC) test. Subject matter, the place where a film is to be made, nationalities and places of residence of the people undertaking production, where production expenditure flows and other criteria deemed relevant are taken into consideration. Precedents indicate that if the creators and production company are Australian, they are probably making something that will be judged to be Australian, regardless of what is happening on screen.

The eight-part series Clickbait, a dark, fast-moving tale of kidnap, revenge and internet trickery, was shot in Australia, set in Oakland, California, and had hardly a skerrick of Australia on screen. On release, it hit the number one spot on Netflix in more than 20 countries. This level of success from Australian creatives is exciting to see, as is their success at accessing an eye-popping $52 million from Netflix.

The rule that 55 per cent of all the programming broadcast on commercial FTA primary channels between 6am and midnight must be Australian has been retained, as were the transmission rules on the multi-channels, such as 7plus and 9Now. Because of an Australia-New Zealand trade agreement, NZ drama continues to be counted as Australian for the purpose of the content quotas.

When it comes to Australian-ness on our screens, there’s a few other important and interesting things to know:

· A growing amount of Australian drama and comedy, much but not all of it limited in length compared to FTA and SVOD series, is being shown on social-media sites, such as YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, and Broadcaster Video On Demand (BVODs), like ABC iview and SBS On Demand.

· Australians were paying for 19.1 million SVOD subscriptions at the end of June 2021 and 57 per cent of these viewers regarded them as an essential service. There are now more than 30 SVODs available and the average number of subscriptions in a subscribing household was 3.1

· For me, the most exciting thing about attending the Screen Producers Australia (SPA) conference in March was hearing youngish SVOD executives discuss their interest in new Australian drama. Mainly paid by big global entities, the executives repeatedly pondered aloud what ‘authentic’ Australian content might look like in future.

· Former director of ABC TV, Kim Dalton, says there are four pillars to the scaffolding that supports Australian film and television: regulation; direct funding, which comes particularly via Screen Australia; indirect funding, which currently comes via tax rebates; and the national broadcasters. The ABC and, to a lesser extent SBS because it has much fewer resources, are vital to Australian drama’s quantity and quality.

· Aussie content of all kinds is much loved. Enthusiasts could be given resources to run book-club-style events that would elevate attention at the time of a production’s release. If done right, the impact could be phenomenal.

· Fostering a community of supporters would help keep some local cinemas open on the back of Australian films and could even lead to the establishment of a lottery that funds production initiatives designed to involve the public.

· While senior Screen Australia executives say that local cultural value is a plank in their decision-making, it is no longer enough for them to quietly consider the cultural value of individual projects or a group of projects in the same application round. The world has changed. It is time they seriously reviewed all programs and initiatives through the lens of cultural value, bearing in mind that Australianness is the key to it.

This is an edited extract from the New Platform Paper Nobody Talks About Australianness on Our Screens by Sandy George, published by Currency House 2022.

As a journalist, Sandy George has tracked the Australian film and television industry for more than 20 years, and is a long-time correspondent for the London-based magazine Screen International and the website www.screendaily.com. Sandy has been editor of Australian trade magazine Encore, film writer for The Australian and presenter of films on SBS on Saturday nights.