Jackson Jive Response Part 1: But we never even had Blackface in Australia!
All over most forms of media recently was the Hey Hey it’s Saturday Revival show with its infamous Red Faces segment, and by now even more infamous 2009 Jackson Jive skit.
In one respect it has opened up international dialogue, specifically for me; in the sense that my American friends started asking, "What the hell were you thinking?!"
I tried to explain it in a way that did not make Australians look like bigots, but letter writers to the feedback columns were not making it easy on me. I had to start admitting how much we did look like racists, even when I went back to thinking about Hey Hey it’s Saturday in my childhood.
I grew up in Gippsland in the 70s and 80s, and I lived in Churchill, where a giant sculpture of a cigar lit up at night in a surreal fashion. The biggest local place to me as a child was Morwell which seemed exotic to me at the time, what with having a McDonalds and all. In the less than rose coloured glasses of my youth, it was a place of open cut mines, high cancer rates, and excrutiatingly common domestic violence.
My parents were art historians, and like many such places worldwide, there was a thriving local arts community where quirky folk hung out. It was in my youth essentially a very white community, even here. I was caucasian and Catholic, my parents were caucasian and Catholic, everyone I knew by name was white.
My history classes in primary school were concerned with explorers, not Indigenous Australians. I did not know the true name of the land I was born in. I learned a good deal more about American Indians in school than I ever did about Australian Indigenous people.
The first time I ever saw or heard of blackface was on the BBC in an episode of The Goodies which was taking off the Black and White Minstrel Show. I have only the vaguest of recollections of the episode myself, but I can remember being a bit confused, specifically because covering your face in greasepaint looked pretty damn uncomfortable (I’d been roped into many an eisteddfod as the bad guy and covered in makeup).
That was about it, really, until years later when I saw some sort of footage of an old vaudeville act with white people in blackface. I didn’t have any cultural context then either, but what I saw was, as far as I could tell, a bunch of white people being caricatures of black people and I suspected it of being vaguely nasty and snide. All in all, I thought it was weird.
I guess a lot of white Australians probably had about as much context as that or less. Blackface meant almost nothing to us.
And this is a highly convenient forgetting of history. Because there has been a documented history of blackface in our country.
Ceredwyn Ealanta is a web designer and developer working in Melbourne, which is Wurundjeri land in the Birrarung valley. She has an interest in social media, responsible design and usability, gaming and sustainability. In her spare time she writes, does art and stained glass work, and goes rock climbing. Her regular blog is rookinthegarret.
