‘Move over and make room for Meeka’: the representation of race, otherness and indigeneity on the Australian children's television programme Play school

Abstract

Play school is an icon of Australian children's television and an important part of Australian life – this programme, perhaps more than any other, has taken and continues to take centre stage in our living rooms and social worlds as young children. Play school is invested with an enormous amount of cultural capital and hence plays a significant role in the way that children engage and learn about social interaction, life and values in Australian culture. Aimed at preschoolers under the age of five, everything in the programme is done to relate as closely as possible to the social world and developmental level of the child and thereby assist their social, psychological and cognitive development. Through a combination of songs and dances, stories, dress up games and moments to ‘look through the window’ into the real world outside Play school, children are presented with a variety of sounds and images to engage with social concepts. In this paper we explore discourses of race, otherness and Indigeneity on Play school by deconstructing Aboriginalist images and representations featured on the programme and in doing so ask questions about the types of ‘race making’ that this programme engages in.