The Multicultural Logies

Another year of Logies is done and dusted. For readers outside Australia, this is the Australian TV award held by a local TV magazine. The Logies is long being known as a popularity award instead of a professional award. However, among all the awards, there were a few peers nominated and voted professional awards. I personally did not pay much attention to the Logies in a way that because it is about popularity and as we all know, sometimes popularity does not equate to professional standards.

Having said that, I still pay attention to the professional awards (named as Outstanding Silver Logies) every year.  A few years ago an SBS production called “East West 101” was recognised in this category. For me this was a huge step forward as it was a show that reflects multiculturalism in Australia with the lead being a Muslim cop and other members of the team being Asian and Italian. The show displayed a huge array of cultural lives in modern Sydney although there were still parts that were quite culturally stereotypical, e.g. what Asian migrants do for work in one of the episode. The episode I was in I was again a Chinese restaurant owner. However, at least non-Anglo characters are no longer in the background and get to show what they could do, which is a good progress.

Moving forward a few years, this year the Logies was a great night for Indigenous Australia, as the outstanding ABC drama “Redfern Now” was voted the Most Outstanding Drama Series, Debra Mail won the Most Outstanding Actress Award for her portrayal of the Aboriginal activist Bonita Mabo, and Shari Sebbens won the Most Outstanding New Talent (the Graham Kennedy Award) for her work in Redfern Now. These were all great news as this shows that the hard work of these people were being properly recognised. A phenomenal night for Indigenous Australia, as Shari Sebbens rightly put it.

Now the whole Logies fanfare is over, what’s next?  This is the question I have in my head. Both “East West 101” and “Redfern Now” showcased the talents of ethnic actors to not just the Australian audience but also to the Australian entertainment industry stakeholders. But how much of this were being taken in by them, that is something yet to be seen. I don’t want to adopt an accusational approach when it comes to diversity casting, but I do think that it is really time to move forward in terms of casting for productions in commercial network. It is all great to recognise “East West 101” and “Redfern Now” at the Logies, but multicultural productions, as we saw in the past few years, were still confined within the parameters of SBS and ABC. This includes productions such as “The Slap” and “The Straits”. For commercial channels, a similar approach is yet to be seen. And when it happens, ethnic characters are quite separated from the rest of the cast in terms of story line as if it is hard to mix them with the rest of the world. Debra Mailman once made a similar comment in her interview with the Monthly magazine about her role in Offspring. The interesting part is that for reality TV, multiculturalism is displayed and although sometimes quite unjustly (see my article on My (Ethnic) Kitchen Rules), it reflects that non-Anglo competitors are just your normal daily Australians. So I sometimes do wonder, how come when it comes to scripted drama, the same cannot be applied? Some people claimed that it is because there is a lack of ethnic writers who can write ethnic stories but then if ethnic characters are just your normal daily Australians as shown on reality TV, how different is it to write them as just normal characters? That is another question I have. I remember, when Debra Mailman was cast in “The Secret Life of Us” she was not cast for her ethnicity but as a character. There was no presumption about what ethnicity that character was. The role was not written as “Indigenous Australian in her twenties” in the character brief. This was similar when Sandra Oh was cast in “Grey’s Anatomy” – the character did not have a last name but was just written as Christina. The last name Yang was added after Sandra was cast for the character. I think this is what I would like to see in the future when it comes to casting for scripted dramas in Australia. We need to get out of the framework of “I am writing this character, and this character’s ethnicity is blah” but instead “I am writing this character”, period.

That said I am still pretty excited about “Redfern Now”, Debra Mailman and Shari Sebben’s wins in this year’s Logies. I look forward to seeing that in the future Logies, we see more of these outstanding non-Anglo actors spreading across productions in the Australian media and that they are no longer being segregated as “ethnic characters” but “characters”.