Rebranding Australia--in a different light?

Hinkson, Melinda

 You feel free in Australia and so you do.
 There is a great relief in the atmosphere--
 A relief from the tension, from pressure,
 An absence of control or will or form.
 The skies open above you
 And the areas open around you.

These words were penned by D. H. Lawrence, (1) yet in the Australian Tourism Commission's recently launched advertising campaign they are spoken in Arrernte, by Central Australian Aboriginal artist Barbara Weir. Weir appears in this thirty second television commercial alongside two unidentified female companions. The three look for all intents and purposes as if they are on a foraging expedition--carrying billy cans, digging sticks and handbags, wandering across the red rocky outcrops that epitomize the Central Australian landscape; then seated on the red earth as Weir applies vivid brush strokes to a large canvas. The advertisement closes with Weir breaking her narrative and directly addressing the camera, in English: 'This old fella, D. H. Lawrence, he wrote those words, he understood our country'.

This is one of six commercials recently produced to be screened internationally as part of what the Australian Tourism Commission (ATC) describes as the 'refreshed Brand Australia', a new corporate package aimed to 'strengthen the emotional appeal of Australia and differentiate it from other countries'. The rationale behind the new campaign, simply implied, is that the symbolism of Paul Hogan's Crocodile Dundee, a persona used widely and to great effect throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, has become somewhat tired in recent years. And in light of 'global events' (read September 11, the Bali bombings, and the new pervasive and abiding fear of terrorist attack and subsequent disastrous fallout for the international tourism industry) 'new strategies are needed to ensure Australia remains top of mind among potential travellers'. (2) Packaged with the signature 'In a Different Light', the campaign promises to provide 'an updated image of Australia's diversity and cosmopolitan culture'.

Each advertisement claims to offer a 'personal perspective', a brief impression of contemporary Australianness, through the eyes and voice of a recognizable personality. Disparate themes are touched upon; the common thread binding them is 'Australia's light'. Delta Goodrem--ex-Neighbours star, pop singer, cancer survivor, new face of Pepsi Cola and girlfriend of Australian tennis player Mark Philippoussis--appears in one, performing 'I Can Sing A Rainbow'. Renowned Australian poet Les Murray reads his poem 'Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', conjuring up the oft-referred informality of Australian culture. Local food and wine is presented by Jonathan Coleman, who, according to the ATC website, is 'one of Australia's most successful media exports to the United Kingdom'. Australia's passion for sport is celebrated by internationally recognizable cricket commentator Richie Benaud. And in a curious partnering of perspective, Brett Whiteley's Jacaranda Tree (on Sydney Harbour) provides the visual backdrop for British talk-show guru Michael Parkinson sharing some glib remarks in the guise of art appreciation--'It's the light that you notice first of all ... and it's the amazing energy that it's got ... It's hard to capture in words ... I think it's brilliant!'. (3)

In looking to what, if anything, differentiates the symbolism of this advertising campaign from those previously undertaken by the ATC, and to the points of connection and disjuncture between the Australia packaged for a cashed-up international audience and that being constituted at the level of national politics, by far the most interesting and curious of the commercials is that featuring Barbara Weir.

In pitching Australia as a tourist destination, Aboriginality has always played a prominent role. The 'most ancient living culture' has been a treasured symbolic resource for the country's image makers, providing the young nation with both historical depth and a culturally exotic edge. Symbols associated with 'traditional Aboriginal culture', and especially Central Australian Aboriginal art, have over the past two decades been the favoured visual carriers of this message. In this sense Barbara Weir's performance is continuous with earlier campaigns, as it is with the images of Aboriginal tradition performed at the opening ceremony of Sydney's 2000 Olympic Games. But there are important ways in which this new commercial also marks a discordant departure.

On the ATC's website the familiar 'oldest culture in the world' line is put to work, but with a relatively new twist. Visitors to the website are told:

 Aboriginal culture is alive and well in Australia today. You
 don't have to go to a museum and view it from behind glass
 cases ... And all over Australia you will hear Aboriginal
 history from the Aborigines themselves.

However, this subtle reference to the politics of representation that continue to be passionately waged in Australia is not followed through in the 'Brand Australia' campaign--Barbara Weir, an Arrernte woman who spent much of her childhood in and out of foster homes prior to reuniting with her Aboriginal kin and finding expression for her complex bicultural heritage in art, speaks not from her own experience of what it is to be Australian, but that of D. H. Lawrence. They are curious words to hear her speak on a number of levels. The concepts themselves are very much at odds with Aboriginal ways of reckoning the significance of place. It is more characteristic for Aboriginal people to speak for their own attachments to particular tracts of country, not to presume to speak for others--this would not only be considered shameful, but could be possibly interpreted as a hostile challenge to another's claims to ownership and authority. Nor is it common in such contexts to hear Aboriginal people speak of feelings of 'open' spaces or 'freedom'. Rather, they are more likely to identify the markers that delineate their territory from that of others, and to speak in terms of responsibility--responsibility to look after customary lands and waters, and to work in conjunction with those kin who share this inheritance with them. Authority (meaning a presence rather than an absence of control) and respect for the social forms through which that authority is enacted are key ordering principles at work in this system of relationships.

In having Barbara Weir speak the foreign words of D. H. Lawrence rather than expressing her own perspective on what it is to be Australian, the campaign cleverly avoids any reference to the conflict-ridden issues of Aboriginal claims to land and waters, native title, self-determination, reconciliation and the stolen generations--issues which have dominated Indigenous affairs in Australia in the past decade. The exotic symbols of Aboriginal culture are cut loose from any moorings in the complex and troubled reality of contemporary race relations.

Since 1988 the majority of overseas visitors to Australia surveyed on their arrival in the country have expressed a keenness to have some kind of 'experience' of 'Indigenous culture' during their stay. It is interesting to note, however, that on leaving the country the majority of these same people report dissatisfaction with whatever experience they have had. (4) The deployment of repressively authentic (5) symbols--symbols with no reference to the circumstances of Aboriginal people's lives, nor indeed to the scenes of drunkenness and poverty tourists are likely to encounter on the streets of Alice Springs and Darwin as they go in search of such imagined traditionality--is integral to this dissatisfaction. It conjures up for tourists impossible dreams of communion with a people that simply cannot occur.

Yet Weir's recital of Lawrence appeals to potential tourists at a different level. While performing her cultural authenticity--speaking in Arrernte, appearing against a backdrop of rocky red desert, painting her heritage--she articulates not her own cultural difference, but a sentiment collectively applied to a viewing 'you'. Cultural difference, it seems is located only at surface level, for Weir's appeal to 'you' simultaneously implies a collective 'we', a 'we' who transcend the bounds of cultural difference. It is a 'we' who can all appreciate Australia, not from diverse and irreducibly different perspectives, but rather from the same perspective. Weir's endorsement of Lawrence's Australia suggests that beneath the surface of our different languages (Arrernte, English, Japanese ...) lies a universal language, one in which the conflicts occurring at national and indeed international levels are dissolved. There are echoes here of the mantra with which John Howard and his Coalition government came to power in 1996--his promise to govern 'for all Australians', and not to allow the interests and symbolic forms of 'marginal groups' dilute those of the 'mainstream'. This is also the late-capitalist dream of a borderless and homogenous globalized market. (6)

Such a subtle but decisive repackaging of Aboriginality may seem unsurprising in the context of the approach the Howard government has taken to Indigenous affairs in the eight years it has been in power: its radical dilution of entitlements under the Native Title Act; its desiccation of reconciliation, stripping it of such 'symbolic' and substantive dimensions as the need to collectively own history and atone for past wrongs, in favour of a 'practical' focus on policy (housing, health, employment and education); its refusal to apologize to the 'stolen generations'; and more recently, its unilateral attempt to abolish the peak Indigenous national representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and Howard's declaration that Aboriginal self-representation has failed and will not be repeated.

Barbara Weir's recital of Lawrence is all the more curious and evokes a wider set of references when the poem is returned to its original narrative context. The lines Weir speaks are those of Kangaroo's protagonist, Richard Lovat Somers, a writer who travelled with his wife to Australia seeking relief from post-World War I Europe ('moribund and stale and finished'), in pursuit of a new life in 'the world's youngest country'. The lines Weir speaks come from a longer reflective passage in which Lovat Somers attempts to make sense of the country he finds himself in. His thoughts continue as follows:

 The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you.
 Not the closing-in of Europe.

 But what then? The vacancy of this freedom is almost
 terrifying. In the openness and the freedom this new chaos,
 this litter of bungalows and tin cans scattered for miles and
 miles, this Englishness all crumpled out into formlessness
 and chaos. Even in the heart of Sydney itself--an imitation
 of London and New York, without any core or pith of
 meaning. Business going on full speed: but only because it is
 the other end of English and American business.

 The absence of any inner meaning ... (7)

In Lawrence's novel Australia stands for everything that Europe and the civilized world are not. A young, naive, unformed nation; a nation of 'unbreathed air'; a nation yet to make 'a great mistake'; a nation of careless people--careless of 'everything but their democratic friendliness'; a people with 'absolute trust in the niceness of the world'; 'gentle as a kangaroo ... with that wide-eyed, bright-eyed, alert, responsible gentleness ... never known in Europe'. Yet the unformed country is simultaneously a place of terror for Lovat Somers. In the 'freedom' he finds a sense of impending disaster. The 'heartless, soulless land' signifies the loss of meaningful psychological anchorage points. In Australia '[h]e was loose like a single timber of some wrecked ship, drifting over the fall of the earth. Without a people, without a land ... He was broken apart, apart he would remain'. (8) It is only as the couple prepare to leave Australia that Lovat Somers realizes he has developed a sentimental appreciation of Australia; nevertheless their departure from the country is seen as 'going back to the world'.

The mobilization of Lawrence's sentiment for the ATC campaign also invites us to draw a series of parallels between Australia in the 1920s--a place of 'freedom', with an 'absence of control or will', a haven from the 'real world' of war--and the Australia of 2004--a haven from global terrorism. This is the 'relaxed and comfortable' Australia envisaged in the pre-September 11 rhetoric of Prime Minister Howard, rhetoric updated after that event to encourage Australians to 'be alert but not alarmed'. It is a vision that sits starkly at odds with the hardline approach this government has taken to border protection, its demonization of asylum seekers and Howard's haughty declaration in the 2001 election campaign that 'we will decide who comes to our country'. For the cashed-up tourist or corporate investor, open arms and the promise of freedom and light are extended; for those fleeing ravaged homelands in hope of a new start in such a promised land the story is an altogether different one.

Yet there is an alternative and starkly different cache of potential symbols of contemporary Australia available to the country's image makers, if only they chose to look. One source of these is to be found in the quiet yet determined expressions of a compassionate Australia taking shape locally in community-based organizations and in larger networks across the country, through all manner of reconciliation projects and refugee support groups. As the participants in these activities quietly go about their business they provide substance for the kind of Australia we might hope to become, and the qualities for which we might wish to be known in the global arena.

(1.) D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, England, Heinemann, 1923.

(2.) Australian Tourism Commission website: http://www.atc.australia.com/.

(3.) These advertisements can be viewed at http://www.atc.net.au/.

(4.) Australian Tourism Commission, Market Research Intelligence on Aboriginal Tourism, Canberra, Market Insights Unit, 2002. Available at http://www.atc.net.au/research.asp?art=3109.

(5.) P. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of An Ethnographic Event, London and New York, Cassell, 1999.

(6.) E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca and New York, Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 117- 8.

(7.) D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, England, Heinemann, 1923, p. 24. Original emphasis.

(8.) Lawrence, p. 252.

Melinda Hinkson teaches anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra.