What is Australia really like? How is this country and its people perceived around the world? There's little doubt that perceptions of Australia are influenced by how the country is portrayed on television and in the movies - but of course that's only part of the picture. In an attempt to paint a true picture of 'Australia Now', Radio Australia's new 13 part education series, producer Sue Slamen has been recording stories and canvassing the views of students, both local and overseas students, farmers, writers, academics and Aboriginal Australians.

Broadcast 08 June 2003

Transcript

SLAMEN: We decided we needed to do a series about Australia, about issues in contemporary Australia, in part because, Roger I think, people overseas have certain images of the country which are largely shaped by tourism, advertising, - who could forget 'throw a prawn on the barbeque' - or images of the great outback, Ayers Rock, the bush, stockmen. Which of course is a bit curious because you and I know that most of us actually live in cities and more often in the suburbs, the garden suburbs around those cities.

BROADBENT: Surely though those images must have changed, must have been dispelled, because recent events, Australia's involvement, more direct involvement in our immediate region, our membership of the coalition of the willing. I mean that must have changed a great deal, certainly in the eyes, or the perception of Australia overseas?

SLAMEN: Well I think you have to look at how people see Australia politically and they know from the news what images they get of Australia, there on the news, sure focus on the political issues. But in broad terms how Australians live, what are our attitudes, to a whole range of things. What are our attitudes to living with the first Australians, Aborigines. These are questions I think we've certainly found overseas students, who are in Australia in increasing numbers, they want to know about these things. And interestingly we did our own straw poll. We interviewed a lot of overseas students, who you'll hear in our series. And whether they were from the northern hemisphere, we're increasingly seeing Europeans, Americans, Brits, coming down to study in Australia, as well as of course large numbers of students from the Asia Pacific region at our universities. 18% of total enrolments in Unis these days are overseas students. And when we said, well what were your images of Australia, what made you decide to come down here to study? Curiously they were the same images. Ah, we saw Mad Max and a kangaroo bouncing through the outback or the Indonesian students, well we didn't really know very much about Australia, you were so, so far away. Distant in our minds but of course geographically very close, Australia's nearest neighbour. So it was surprising to us so we have tried to deal with those issues as well as the broader political issues of Australia, as it's always had to do, balance its foreign policy with its interests with Britain, the old mother country, and certainly after the second world war, when Japan entered the Pacific war, there's little doubt that without America's intervention, we were facing imminent invasion. So of course Australia's balanced those interests with, if you like, rich and powerful allies with the realities of living in the Asia Pacific region where of course we're developing much closer ties.

BROADBENT: What does this tell us then about the way we promote ourselves? I mean it must tell us that we're not doing a particularly good job?

SLAMEN: I think of course, you're influenced by a whole range of things aren't you? And it depends on the person coming to Australia, what their interests are. I was really taken by a Chinese girl's remarks. She made the point, she came her from Hong Kong to study, and she said, 'You know I don't come here to go to the beach. You know we Chinese we are not so much beach goers. I was interested in the history of Chinese in Australia. The fact that you had large numbers of Chinese on the Australian goldfields in the 19th century many of whom are the predecessors of Chinese Australians today. The fact that the Lord Mayor of Melbourne is an ethnic Chinese, for example, surprised a lot of the Asian students we interviewed. So you can't perhaps just say well the tourist images have perhaps tended to still promote, what are fantastic places to visit, the great outback, the huge skies. You can of course see stockmen riding with the sheep, the images that a lot of the early Australia films project too. But I think more recently even our TV and our films have addressed that. They reflect the broader society and they take on themes like 'The Bank', a film about the banks in Australia and people working in corporations like that in our cities. Our films are beginning to reflect it. And I think those changes will filter through. But it is surprising that people still have those stereotype notions of being down-under.

BROADBENT: While Australia has undoubtedly become a multicultural society it's still wrestling though with its past - reconciliation is still something that's very much on the agenda and yet it seems to have lost some of its impact that reconciliation debate. It seems to have gone off the boil.

SLAMEN: Well again I think you can make some distinction between official government positions and there does seem to have been some back peddling on the issue of reconciliation. Just as there has been in terms of the republican movement that we saw very strongly at least up until the referendum on whether Australia would become a republic which got bogged down in the detail of how we would elect a Head of State. I don't know that that reflects a lot of the opinions out in the community, so we've tried to have a broad sweep of people, both people from outside who happen to be here and people who are living here, as to their feelings about the land, their attitudes to Australian Aborigines. And there's one really nice story that we came across that we put in our programme that we called 'Unfinished Business' which relates to Anglo-Australians' perceptions and reconciliation with Australian Aborigines. And this was an Anglo-Australian woman whose family ran a big, a very large, pastoral property in Queensland in the north. And she only discovered the origins of the property, the fact that the Aboriginal communities who'd once been on that land prior to European settlement. And of course Australia has such a short history it's still possible to trace back Aboriginal ancestors to the land. And when she discovered the Aboriginal predecessors who had come to visit this land and she was the one who offered her hand and she wanted actually to find out more about this. She met Aunty Ruby, this wonderful Aboriginal elder, who showed her over her property, a property that had been in the family for some 20 to 30 years. But they began to see it through different eyes. The gum trees took on a new significance. The billabong or the lake, if you like the natural waterhole on the property, when it was explained what significance that had to Aunty Ruby and her family, the Anglo-Australian family saw it in a whole new light and went on a very special journey and it's a great story. And I don't think it's just a one-off I think there's a lot of Australians and a lot of young people too who are wanting to find out more about Aboriginal, the Aboriginal dreaming. If white dreaming is about owning your own home in the suburbs, having your little plot. And we're very much into outdoor living. It also flows on to environmental awareness I think, an interest in how the land once was and the first Australians who occupied that land.

BROADBENT: If a listener remains with us for the entire 13 programmes of the series, do you draw any conclusions in terms of the topics you've been talking about or do you leave it up to the listener?