Australia, a continent and the world’s largest island, supports a population of 19 million living in an area just under 3 million square miles. Two thirds of the entire country’s population live in a few urban areas of the southeast, making Australia one of the most urbanized countries on the planet. Why Australia has so few people and how those people got there are questions that have fueled longstanding debates about the Australian national character, which in turn have given rise to pervasive national myths, all of which are of interest to the student of propaganda. More recently there is an increasing recognition that there is more to Australian national identity than gauging the degree of English or American cultural domination. Australia had an Aboriginal population long before the first English settlers arrived. In sum, questions of national identity have affected official and unofficial propaganda in the twentieth century.
Australia’s eastern coast was first charted by Captain James Cook (1728—1779) in 1770. Britain made Australia a penal colony, permanently exiling convicted criminals in this “empty” land. Although the policy of permanent exile ended in 1809, the remainder of the nineteenth century saw a steady influx of colonists, mostly but not entirely from Britain. In January 1901 the six Australian colonies were renamed states as part of the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia, an entity still connected by more than sentiment to the British crown. Australia’s Commonwealth identity was shaped by three concerns: immigration; the growth of a labor movement; and the need to develop a sense of loyalty to a federal (as opposed to a local) Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 required that immigrants possess fluency in a European language, a rule designed to keep the Chinese from entering the country. This whites-only exclusionist (racist) policy remained in force until the 1960s, helping to keep Australian identity tied to London, as well as preventing the population from growing too rapidly.
Film came early to Australia. In 1896 a Lu-miere representative filmed the Melbourne Cup race. A year later one newsreel contained footage of Aboriginals. In 1901 Sir William Baldwin Spencer began to film Aboriginals in central Australia. On Boxing Day (26 December) 1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang, a sixty-six-minute tale of Australia’s famous bandit Ned Kelly (1855-1880)—con-sidered the world’s first feature film—premiered in Melbourne Town Hall. The original advertising cannot be accused of understatement: “The greatest, most thrilling and sensational moving picture ever taken!” Australian film flourished until the coming of sound in the late 1920s. That, plus the Great Depression, meant that for the next forty years going to the movies meant going to watch American and British movies.
In World War I more than three hundred thousand Australians fought in the Middle East and on the Western Front, of which nearly sixty thousand died. This extraordinary sacrifice is captured in the name “Gal-lipoli,” the scene of enormous Australian losses (as well as New Zealand and British) in an ill-fated effort to conquer Constantinople from the sea in an attempt to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The effective Turkish resistance was organized by Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), though both sides suffered three hundred thousand casualties apiece. The experience became foundational for Australian national identity, and its cultural meaning is well captured by the Australian feature film Gallipoli (1981), directed by Peter Weir (1944- ). Some consider Gal-lipoli one of the greatest antiwar films of all time, but one can also view Weir as using the past to justify an Australian foreign policy of isolationism and pandering to Republican, antimonarchist sentiments.
World War II presents its own set of problems for the student of propaganda in Australia in the form of collaboration with the enemy. In 1943 the Imperial Japanese Army Secret Service and Australian servicemen made a film revealing the pleasant conditions in which prisoners of war were living while under Japanese supervision. The film, Calling Australia! (1943), was meant to soften up Australian public opinion and to make a forthcoming invasion of Australia as painless as possible. No invasion took place and the film was forgotten, only to be rediscovered in 1969. The film reveals Australian POWs and Dutch internees on Java frolicking at a country club, a scene remote from reality, though the Australians are easily identifiable. Geoffrey Barnes made a fine documentary about the ethics of collaboration entitled Calling Australia! Prisoners of Propaganda (1987). Another instance of collaboration, this time involving radio, is the story of Maj. Charles Hughes Cousens (1903-1966), a popular broadcaster for Radio 20B (Sydney). Cousens was captured during the fall of Singapore. When his Japanese captors learned of his credentials, they forced him to broadcast from Tokyo. Radio Tokyo (short-wave) carried Cousens’s first broadcast in August 1942; he worked closely with the infamous “Tokyo Rose” and went to San Francisco in 1949 to testify on her behalf. In 1945 Cousens was charged with treason, but his case never came to trial because the attorney general of New South Wales did not feel the evidence warranted an indictment, though the army felt otherwise. Cousens was not court-martialed, but he was stripped of his commission, effectively branding him a traitor. That Australians of a certain age continue to debate Cousens’s guilt indicates how sensitive some veterans are to the behavior of one who, instead of making some futile heroic gesture, did what he was told.
Sometimes doing what one is told has other consequences. Australia’s willingness to confront its Aboriginal past is a troubling issue for a country that for so long ignored this part of its national cultural identity. For example, thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their own families as part of a government policy, a process legitimized by federal and church-run institutions set up to house these so-called orphans. A 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report provided detailed evidence of a policy seemingly intended to force white values on Aboriginal children. Phillip Noyce (1950- ) has directed Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), a film that asks Australians to confront a subject traditionally considered taboo by the Australian film industry. Noyce addressed the propaganda content of his subject in an interview: “I could feel in the wind that white Australia wanted a vehicle— whether it was a movie, whether it was a book, or whatever—that got beyond the slogans and allowed them to come to terms with the history of race relations in this country” (Christian Science Monitor, 20 February 2002, 7). As Australia becomes a multiracial society, it is important for all of its citizens to recognize the social costs of imposing white societal values on the original Aboriginal inhabitants. This will inevitably downgrade traditional national stereotypes of the shearer, the digger, and the farmer—all pioneers who occupy uncharted wilderness in the traditional national narrative.
Australia’s media history is synonymous with two Murdochs, father and son: Sir Keith Murdoch (1885-1952) and his son, Keith Rupert Murdoch (1931- ), the latter being one of the world’s most powerful media operatives. The father was an overseas correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and compiled detailed information about the incompetence of British commander Sir Ian Hamilton (1853-1947), which he brought with him to Marseilles, where he transmitted his accusations in the form of a report to his own prime minister in Australia, concluding with the observation that Hamilton was committing “murder through incapacity.” When Sir Keith’s report was reprinted as a Cabinet paper in London, the result was the recall in disgrace of Hamilton. For the rest of his life Sir Keith was an authentic Australian hero, the war correspondent who got the Aussies out of Gallipoli. Sir Keith became the chief executive of the Melbourne Herald newspaper group and the founder of the first powerful newspaper empire in Australia, one given to promoting conservative political values. Sir Keith’s son, Rupert, inherited a reduced media empire in 1952; indeed, Rupert can truthfully claim to be a self-made man, starting with the Adelaide News, a small paper left to him by his father. In 1960 Murdoch purchased the dying Sydney Paper, turning it into the largest-selling newspaper in Australia thanks to a racy tabloid style and aggressive promotion. In 1964 he started The Australian, a national newspaper for a more serious audience. After that Murdoch moved the center of his media operations to London. In time Murdoch owned two television stations in Australia and became deeply involved in global media with satellite television. Since 1960 it would be wrong to say that Murdoch’s primary focus has been Australian media, but nobody thinking of Australian media today could possibly ignore Murdoch’s powerful presence. Broadcasting is regulated by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. National broadcasting is in the hands of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). A special broadcasting service offers radio and television programming in sixty languages, mostly to small numbers of viewers. In 1997, 99 percent of all homes in Australia had television. There are fifty daily newspapers. Regarding the content of the Australian media, Americanization and Australia (1998), a book edited by two Australian academics, states the matter bluntly. Philip Bell’s essay on television makes an important point: “What is strange about Crocodile Dundee and The Castle and recent television schedules generally, is the seamless, invisible (or seldom noticed) transitions between the vernacular populism of local programs and the very different accents, narratives, acting styles and mise-en-scene of the American-produced ‘shows’ which are regularly broadcast following local productions. Melrose Place, L.A. Law or The X-Files do not merely offer glamourized and hyper-dramatized ‘worlds apart’; they seem not to address audiences as national or local subjects at all. Theirs is, by contrast, the televisual itself, making no specific demands on the viewer to identity as ‘Australian,’ but not as ‘American’ either.” One might deem this an insidious sort of cultural propaganda; one wonders if such nuances might escape the attention of the inattentive viewer. It seems likely, however, that future discussions about the Americanization of Australian culture—a result of propaganda—is to be found in such careful discussions of the televisual self.
