“Neither Here nor There”: Landscape, National Identity and the Rise of Australian Slow TV

Abstract

ABSTRACT Slow television has emerged as an intriguing cultural phenomenon over the last decade, but it has not yet been considered in an Australian context. Many slow TV productions around the world draw on elements of national identity and history to engage viewers. In this article, we examine the advent of slow TV in Australia, focusing on two recent slow TV programs that garnered a large Australian viewership—The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey (2018) and The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train Journey (2018)—to examine the ways in which slow TV’s conventions have been adopted and reworked to address distinctively Australian anxieties about landscape, isolation and ownership. We interrogate the ways in which Australian slow TV invokes key iconographies and mythologies of Australia’s pre- and postcolonial history and landscape to present a revisionist Australian history in which the Australian landscape and its enduring anxieties are rendered tame and resolvable. Finally, we argue that while Australian slow TV highlights frequently overlooked elements of Australia’s multicultural history, it also coopts and reinforces enduring narratives about Australia’s sublime but “potentially devouring and overwhelming” landscape that have been inscribed in the cultural imagination since colonisation.