Australian celebrity dossier: introduction

The Cultural Report section of Celebrity Studies is home to dossiers of original short articles that interrogate cultures of celebrity which have yet to receive adequate critical attention. Each dossier is framed geographically with the aim of highlighting heterogeneous forms and functions of celebrity in different national contexts and thus expanding the international horizon of celebrity studies as a field. Following previous reports on Nordic celebrity in volume 7 (3), Korean celebrity in volume 8 (1), and non-western celebrity politics and diplomacy in volume 8 (2), this Cultural Report comprises four original articles on contemporary celebrity in Australia which suggest together that interrogating the production of fame is a productive way into thinking about, and critiquing, simplistic notions of (Australian) national identity. The articles highlight structural inequalities in the country’s mediascape and enduring and problematic identity discourses in its public sphere. Within a global context in which ethno-chauvinism is (again) rearing its ugly head in Europe, white nationalism has (again) seeped its way into the White House, and tensions have (again) been heightened in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, serious academic work that seeks to understand the ways media systems construct notions of national belonging and demonise those they deem non-national others takes on added importance. Interrogating notions of ‘race’, ableism, and Australianness, through the lens of celebrity, these small articles smartly and concisely focus on big issues. They also lay foundations for further study.

In the first article, ‘“Grant”ing a Voice: The Representation, Activity and Agency of Stan Grant’, Celia Lam and Louise St Guillaume examine the career of the Indigenous Australian broadcaster Stan Grant, whose recent charismatic advocacy for Indigenous rights has evoked comparisons to ‘great orators and human rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela’ and heightened speculation about Grant’s own political ambitions. Through close inspection of Grant’s memoir and other personal commentary, Lam and St Guillaume position Grant’s early career as a journalist, and his struggle to resist being pigeonholed as an ‘Indigenous reporter’, against the background of Australia’s complex identity politics. They then highlight the freedom Grant felt in identifying as ‘Australian’ when he moved to Hong Kong as an anchor for CNN in 2001, finding himself ‘unconstrained by the history of Australia, racial prejudices and pre-judgements, and Australia’s race relations with Indigenous Australians’. This biographical detail provides context for understanding ‘the emergence of the advocate’ when Grant returned to Australia in 2012, which the authors argue was underpinned by a ‘merger of the public persona of the professional broadcaster and the private persona of an Indigenous man struggling with his identity in the face of problematic race relations from earlier years’.

As Lam and St Guillaume suggest, an important signal of Grant’s move towards advocacy was an essay he published in the Guardian responding to the booing of the Australian Football League player Adam Goodes at a match in 2015, after Goodes had called out a heckler in the stands who had called him ‘Ape’. This incident is the subject of the second article in this dossier, ‘Breaking Bad: The Booing of Adam Goodes and the Politics of the Black Sports Celebrity in Australia’, by Glenn D’Cruz, who suggests that it ‘expose[d] a deep fissure within Australian society’. D’Cruz deftly explores the political significance of Goodes as a black sporting celebrity in Australia and identifies the discourses that framed the subsequent debate in which Goodes was both celebrated and denigrated. Arguing that ‘[t]o engage with the Goodes debate ... is to wrestle with the discourses of race, class, human rights, politics, masculinity, and political correctness, and venture into a fractured and agonistic public sphere that exposes the ugly underbelly of contemporary Australia’, D’Cruz suggests that these discourses should be situated within the notion of ‘Anglo-Decline’ and the perceived notion that ‘political correctness is a threat to Anglo-Australian identity’.

In the dossier’s third article, ‘The Complexity of Adam Hills: Celebrity and Disability’, Louise St Guillaume and Ellen Finlay examine Adam Hills, a comedian and presenter who rose to fame as the host of music quiz television shows in Australia in the early 2000s and whose profile has since grown internationally by appearing in the UK media, on shows such as Channel Four’s The Last Leg (2012–). Noting Hills’ desire to achieve success without being defined by his physical impairment, the authors explore Hills’ construction of a ‘typical Aussie larrikin’ persona as a way of ‘proving’ his worth before identifying as disabled once he had achieved a degree of celebrity. St Guillaume and Finlay then critique the meritocratic discourse, elaborated by Hills himself, arguing that Hills’ perspective of his disability as ‘just is’, ‘could obscure the broader politics of disability, impairment and potential experiences of pain, individual and systematic discrimination, disadvantage, eugenics and institutionalisation encountered by many people identifying as having a disability. It could also marginalise alternative voices and narratives of disability from being heard in the media landscape’.

In the dossier’s final article, ‘Representing (Real) Australia: Australia’s Eurovision Entrants, Diversity and Australian Identity’, Celia Lam is concerned to interrogate Australia’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, especially in light of the fact that ‘[t]he first three representatives, Jessica Mauboy, Guy Sebastian and Dami Im, all emerged from singing competitions and hail from non-Anglo Australian backgrounds’.

Noting that a recent study by Screen Australia ‘found that screen representation of contemporary Australia is predominately white, failing to reflect the diversity of the population’, and drawing on the sociological work of Laura Moran, Lam suggests that ‘[o]n the surface the three contestants’ roles as Australian representatives would seem to correct this imbalance. However, their association with SBS (viewed as the “ethnic” channel) casts them within an “ethnic” and minority narrative rather than the “mainstream” one’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Ewen

Neil Ewen is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Winchester, UK. He is the co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21^st Century (Palgrave, forthcoming 2019). He is editor of the Cultural Report section of Celebrity Studies.