A critique of Australia’s 200 year celebration. A collaboration between Paper Tiger TV, Australia’s Video Metro and Television as Performance Space Collective. This video serves up a critique of Australia’s 200th year celebration TV specials, which completely overlooked the history of imperialism and colonization of its native peoples. In 1988, the year of Australia’s bicentennial, the mainstream media shepherded the nation into celebrating the anniversary of British settlement, a massive insult to the ancestors of the aboriginal people who lived there for thousands of years before colonization. Aborigines and activists examine the media’s role in molding together the geographically isolated urban pockets of modern Australia’s population. This creates a technologically supported collective consciousness or “Technonationalism” in which the country depends on the media to string together a national identity. The epic bicentennial television special “Australia Live”, with the all-mighty voice of imperialism narrating, and sweeping shots of outback terrain, dug up a mythological past that brings the Bush into the city and supports a massive pride in colonialism. The video highlights how Aboriginal media provides an alternative to the mainstream by promoting aboriginal music and artists. It also gives the aboriginal community a political voice to fight against institutionalized racism.

Speakers include Anna Munster, Noel Sanders and Jannette Nolan from Aboriginal Radio, Lorretta Fogarty and Chris Kirk Brigh an indigenous lawyer, linguist, and lecturer.
This PTTV video, in collaboration with the Aboriginal radio station Radio Redfern and the Sydney-based video collective TAPS won a Hometown Video Award.