Shifting senses of in/justice: The gothic detective in contemporary Australian film, television and true crime

Indefinitely beyond Our Reach: The Case for Elevating Audio Description to the Importance of Captions on Australian Television

This article examines the series of publicly funded and ABC-screened history documentaries produced by the Making History initiative since 2005, and the social, economic and cultural conditions of their creation. I argue that the final products of Making History represent an impoverished vision of history and an ideological bias reflective of the wider politics of government funding and commissioning. This article contends that a lack of accountability by Australian film and television industry players, the culture of funding, commissioning and production in Australia, and slowness on the part of the academy to vitalise the Humanities and broaden the agenda for history and historians, are key contributing factors to the limited way that the past is represented on Australian television screens. I argue that change and innovation in Australian television history are both possible and desirable, but that there needs to be greater collaboration between the history profession and the film industry.This article has been peer-reviewed

All fandoms engage in gatekeeping. Whether or not we agree that contemporary media fandoms comprise something like ‘communities’, the ‘-dom’ suffix to the term ‘fan’ necessitates some conception of a group, and groups have boundaries. These boundaries are always in tension, and self-defined true crime fans are a tricky case. True crime is mainstream, an endlessly profitable and staple of the media landscape. However, true crime fans must negotiate and police a boundary that separates them from the posited figure of the Bad Fan. This article examines the Reddit subforums r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers, analysing posts that discuss and police the boundaries separating the right kind of interest in true crime from this posited Bad Fan. I argue that while true crime enthusiasts tend to present their gatekeeping work as an ethical practice, it is often more to do with maintaining gendered norms than it is about morality or propriety.

True crime podcasts are a burgeoning genre. As journalists and storytellers, how do we balance the pursuit of justice and our responsibility to the victims with the demand to tell a gripping tale? As listeners, are we using the pain of others for our own entertainment? In the Dark podcast (Seasons 1 and 2) takes us beyond a vicarious fascination with true crime stories into a forensic and essential look at deep-rooted biases, corruption and systemic failures that prevent justice from being served. The first season (2016) investigates the 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling In Minnesota. Season 2 (2018-19) investigates the case brought against Curtis Flowers, a black man from Mississippi who has been tried six times for shooting to death four people in a furniture store, and who has, for the last 20 years, been in solitary confinement on death row. Thorough investigative journalism is an expensive and time-consuming process. For Season I, host Madeleine Baran and her team spent nine months investigating the story. For Season 2, Baran and four team members spent a full year on the ground, actually moving to the small town in Mississippi where the murders occurred. Whilst there is never any guarantee that an in-depth investigation can bring about real change, it is that key element, unfettered time to pursue a story, that may bring results. One producer sifted through thousands of documents going back 26 years, to show that black jurors were six times more likely to be struck from a trial than white jurors. Stylistically, the spoken word is paramount in the series. The auditory power lies in the voices that we hear – the narrator, the families of the victims, and friends, the witnesses, static recordings of 911 calls – as well as those we don’t hear, the victim who’s been forever silenced. The use of additional sound is discreet – atmospheric recordings and beautifully composed and constructed music around clear, concise and descriptive prose. In the Dark pushes out the boundaries of true crime podcasting, raising universal questions about accountability in the criminal justice system and the need for systemic reform.

This paper examines the ways in which the discourse of ‘deracialization’ is consistently used in Australian media to posit the surgically modified Asian–Australian body as a site of national concern and anxiety. Through close readings of two major Australian factual television programmes on the topic of race and cosmetic surgery, we show how this discourse is deployed to uphold a form of somatic multiculturalism that continues to centre whiteness as the norm. It does so by failing to take into context social, cultural and historical differences when reading race onto the modified non-western and/or non-white body. Consequently, Asian–Australian subjects are allowed only two positions, namely, the ‘authentic’ (unmodified) body and the body that seeks to conform through undergoing surgery. Ultimately, we argue that this media approach demonstrates a lack of space in the national imaginary for popular representations of hybrid non-white subjects whose bodies and behaviours do not conform to monoracial notions of multiculturalism.

Crime stories have been increasingly prevalent on Australian screens over the last two decades. While there have been no breakout box-office hits, crime has nevertheless been one of the most sustained genres of Australian cinema in the twenty-first century. The crime genre in Australia is unique in its broad domestic audience appeal, strong sense of national identity, and inimitable visual style. Most Australian crime films are consumed by domestic audiences and tread a fine line between commercial entertainment and quality cinema. However, not all examples of the genre are clearly billed as ‘crime’: many are hybrids of comedy, thriller, drama, Western, or biography. Nevertheless, of the more than 150 films produced since 2000 that could be regarded as Australian crime films, three of the most popular or critically significant stylistic variations on cinema screens are: ‘true crime’; ‘outback noir’, as an Indigenous Australian variation of neo-noir; and ‘crime comedies’.

Australian cinema has never been solely national, neither in the contexts of its production nor in its themes and influences. It reflects the cultural and historical diversity of a continent that has been shaped by the sovereign presence of Indigenous people and more than two centuries of migration. Australian film and television is diverse and inherently international. The symposium “Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television” explored the transnational ...

This article examines the practice and function of casting in the Australian television industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. It investigates the role of ethnicity and accents and the practice of casting actors of migrant backgrounds in Australian drama, variety and comedy. In an industry so often dominated by Anglo-Australian stories, faces and voices, the increasing presence of actors from non-English-speaking backgrounds and non-European ethnicities has been a key feature of the changing nature of Australian television production. By analysing ‘Showcast’ casting directories, supplemented with oral history interviews, this article suggests that actors have tended to adopt fluid or hybrid identities to navigate the casting process and find steady work in the television industry. The manipulation of identity, I argue, sits at the nexus of overlapping cultural spheres amid the challenging operation of multiculturalism in Australian media.

This article considers the significance of food competitions, not just in helping ex-contestants to achieve careers in various food media sites, but also the consequences of this, together with televised food programs generally, in making Australian television more fully represent a multicultural nation, most specifically its Asian-Australian citizens. In 1964, Charmaine Solomon came second in a Woman's Day recipe competition. This, combined with her earlier training as a journalist in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, led the magazine's food editor, Margaret Fulton, to offer her a job. This began her long career as the leading Australian writer on Asian food. More recently, television and shows like MasterChef Australia have replaced magazine competitions in providing a breakthrough into a mediated career in the food industry. Again it was as second place-getter in the very first series of MasterChef that Poh Ling Yeow achieved her break and found her place. Television requires and bestows celebrity, and Poh provides a valuable counterpoint to Solomon here. Several other Asian-Australian contestants have similarly flourished after exposure on the program, like second series winner Adam Liaw. It has become evident that cooking competitions have become one of the principal sites in prime-time Australian television for Asian faces to be seen as a matter of course. While scholars of, and commentators on, Australian multiculturalism are rightly scathing about popular statements claiming a better Australian food culture as an index of the success of post-war migration policies, it appears that Australian television and other media continue to find this conjunction fruitful.

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

True crime podcasts (TCPs) are increasingly saturating the Australian media landscape. The most downloaded podcast in the country is the TCP, Casefile and overall true crime is a popular podcast genre. Despite this, there is limited Australian research exploring the perspectives of TCP listeners. Using data from a survey of 124 university students, this article identifies popular subject matter, listening patterns and stylistic attributes of TCPs. Additionally, listener motivations and perceptions are identified. This paper highlights the importance of critically examining Australian TCPs as contemporary sites of information and pleasure that the public may regard as authoritative resources on crime.

(1988). From Silence to Reconciliation: The representation of the Vietnam war in Australian film and television. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 75-89.

Australian Screen in the 2000s covers the diversity of Australian film and television production since 2000. In this period, Australian film and television have been transformed by new international engagements, the emergence of major new talents, and a movement away with earlier films’ preoccupation with what it means to be Australian. With original contributions from leading scholars in the field, the collection contains chapters on particular genres (horror, blockbusters, and comedy), Indigenous Australian film and television, women’s filmmaking, queer cinema, representations of history, Australian characters in non-Australian films, and films about Australians in Asia, as well as chapters on sound in Australian cinema, and the distribution of screen content. The book is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. It will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of Anglophone film and television, as well as to anyone with an interest in Australian culture and creativity.

In the Australian film, television and audio-visual industries, as in other Western countries, women have not achieved equality to participate and express themselves as key creatives or in key decision-making positions. This matters not just because equity and social inclusion are essential for ethical civil society but because the implications of a lack of diversity are that the industry potentially misses out on innovation by only including half the population (thus providing a business case for inclusion). It also matters because of the broader range of experiences and perspectives women offer to society and culture. As a response to this problem, in 2015, the federal government agency Screen Australia established the Gender Matters Taskforce, a five-million-dollar strategy to address gender imbalance in the Australian screen industry. This policy intervention had a focus on project development and career progress for women.

The Paradox of True Crime Podcasting: Advocacy, Prejudice, and the Pursuit of Justice