Cultural Cringe and Ja'mie, Private School Girl

Lilley described as “a skinny, long-faced guy in his late 30s
flouncing around with what looks like a horse’s tail on his head”
in the role of Ja'mie. 

Originally published at The Conversation.

Australians love to know that we’ve been noticed overseas. When floods and fires strike, news broadcasts frequently ensure that excerpts from CNN or Fox are shown. It doesn’t matter if the event is a naturally occurring catastrophe rather than any form of achievement, we need to see that other countries registered our existence, especially the United States.

This need for external approval is related to Australian cultural cringe. When A.A. Phillips first used the term in 1950, he referred to the tendency to perceive Australian literature, music, theatre and art as inferior to British and European high culture.

Since then the need for overseas recognition in order to prove the worth of Australian creativity has extended to include all kinds of popular culture, including film and television.

In the past week, it has become national news that several American critics panned Chris Lilley’s current mockumentary series Ja’mie: Private School Girl after its debut on US television.

The AV Club gave praise to the work of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, but described Lilley as producing “sloppy, transphobic drag” in his performance as teenager Ja’mie King. Tim Goodman at The Hollywood Reporter complimented Lilley’s oeuvre in general, but found the new series “almost unbearable to watch”.

While the involvement of US network HBO in Ja’mie’s production gives a partial explanation for local interest in these negative American responses, cultural cringe is also a significant factor.

We can readily criticise one of the plethora of American television programs included in Australian TV schedules without it being seen as a reflection on American culture overall. Yet when one of our own productions achieves the rare feat of an international release, it is seen to bear the weight of representing us on the world stage.

Comedy induces far greater anxiety than any other genre. It reveals a great deal about a culture’s preoccupations, prejudices, and character—it tells viewers who we’re laughing with and who we ought to be laughing at.

We generally accept that there are national differences in comedy. For example, American humour, as reflected in its film and television, is seen to differ substantially from British humour.

Australians continually express cultural cringe about how our own comedic inflections, especially in programs such as Lilley’s, as well as Kath & Kim, give an impression that we are unsophisticated, racist, sexist and homophobic.

When news of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday’s “blackface” skit drew international attention in 2009 due to the outrage of guest Red Faces judge Harry Connick, Jr., the rightful embarrassment that this kind of humour would have otherwise gone largely unremarked about in Australia was palpable.

Lilley’s previous series Angry Boys also prompted debate in the US, especially given his use of blackface to portray rapper S.mouse. Australian site The Vine interviewed US hip hop artists to collect their largely condemnatory comments about the appropriateness of a white actor playing an African American character and the show’s use of racist terms.

Lilley’s adoption of blackface and “yellowface”, with character Ricky Wong in We Can Be Heroes, can be understood as more complicated than expressions of outright racism than these American responses identified.

As Lisa Bode shows, We Can Be Heroes made “ visible tensions and contradictions within contemporary Australian national identity, as well as the truth of white economic and cultural privilege within a dominant discourse of celebratory multiculturalism that seeks to mask it”. Though there is nothing to prevent racist or non-PC celebrations of some of Lilley’s characters, several of his series also work to expose the racism that lies at the core of supposedly upstanding and accepting Australians.

Ja’mie is a prime example of this tendency in Lilley’s creations. She brings a Ugandan boy, Kwami, into her palatial family home for the sole purpose of appearing charitable in order to receive a prestigious school medal. Yet her performance of tolerance and racial equality is just that. She is mortified when he expresses affection for her, telling Kwami “no offence, but you are really povvo, you live in the western suburbs, and you’re black, and I am… this”.

While the politics of drag, blackface and yellowface are highly fraught, we should not base our anxieties about Lilley’s programs on international perceptions of what is and what is not funny.

Our television comedies often mirror unique aspects of Australia’s cultural make-up and shared history that are largely incomprehensible to those outside of it, in a way that US and British comedies are not unintelligible to us, with our large quota of foreign programming.

When some programs mysteriously find a niche despite their idiosyncrasies, as did a dubbed version of Hey Dad! in Germany, it’s a positive thing for our television industry. Yet we shouldn’t seek to iron out elements of Australian humour because of perceptions that our culture is inherently not good enough.

Our Australian Girl: Imagining Colonial Girls

At the moment I'm preoccupied with colonial girls, or at least I should be. I'm currently reading some novels published by Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce for an upcoming conference, 'A Game That Calls Up Love and Hatred Both', about childhood and World War I. On a related note, I've been trying to think about why Australia does not have an equivalent of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables or The Secret Garden. There are not really any Australian girls' books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have achieved "classic" status, or which even remain in print. My Brilliant Career, perhaps, but it is not really read by today's girls in way that these canonical American, Canadian and English novels might be.

What today's Australian girls might read is a new series from Penguin, 'Our Australian Girl', which assembles a range of authors to imagine the lives of historical girls. Five years ago, an equivalent series, 'Our Canadian Girl', began publication in Canada, following the 'Dear Canada' series by Scholastic in 2001 for older readers. (Let us not even ponder the significance of the girls' series title evoking the idea of girls writing a letter to their nation, while the 2010 series for boys is titled 'I Am Canada'.). All of these books perhaps owe something to the success of American Girl merchandise. In 1986, the blandly named Pleasant Company began manufacturing dolls inspired by historical events, and in the ensuing decades, the cross-media franchise, which includes multiple books depicting the life of each historical doll, has become a phenomenon (albeit one in which the historical aspect has been somewhat subsumed by 'My American Girl' dolls that are contemporary in their dress and stories).

Both the Australian and Canadian series are aimed at girls from 8-11 and seek to bring "history to life". To support its take-up in schools, both series are supported by teachers' guides. For the Australian series, these classroom guides were prepared by Dr Pam Macintyre in the Education Faculty at my own university. The academic seal of approval and connection with "real" aspects of history were obviously important to Penguin.

Marnina Gonick has already researched the Canadian series and its representation of Canadian national identity, especially how the historical girl is used to consider contemporary questions of gender and nationality. (Her paper on this topic will hopefully be part of the Girls, Texts, Cultures anthology being edited by Mavis Reimer and Clare Bradford for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.) I am keen to find out how the Australian equivalent represents colonial girls in comparison with their representation in colonial books- though I'll need a cool $250 to buy all the books to date.

While Scholastic has published My Australian Story since 2000 (with a similar connection to the classroom and some high-profile children's authors), Our Australian Girl seems to be the first gender-based historical series of this type to appear in Australia. I first saw it in a bookstore in a large purpose-built display with all four volumes of each characters' story available. The cover artwork is very appealing, and avoids the obvious "this is a book intended to teach me something" look of the Scholastic titles, especially its use of a different charm bracelet motif on each of the characters' titles. The Grace books are about a London orphan who is transported to Australia in 1808 for stealing apples; the Letty books about a free settler who travels to Australia with her sister in 1841; the Poppy books about a girl with Indigenous and Chinese heritage living in a mission during the goldrush in the 1860s; and the Rose books are situated in the early 20th century and focus on the restrictions on girls and women (brought to a head by Rose's suffragette Aunt moving in with the family in Melbourne).

The series website encourages girls to document their own stories of becoming an Australian girl, to fashion their own book cover and learn to do activities enjoyed by the characters (including drawing horses and baking damper). The site recently held a competition where girl readers were invited to describe the kinds of charm they'd like to put on their own charm bracelet. The winning entry is not too far from the kinds of aspirations to be found in girls' magazines of a century ago, including to travel, care for animals, take care of babies and to knit and make things (with an aspiration toward lace making).

Like The Daring Book for Girls there could be an element of parental and grandparental nostalgia here hoping to inculcate old-fashioned values about femininity. Though there's still an element of heroism in the extracts published on the site, with Grace unperturbed when attacked by rats and lice while shackled to the convict ship, the initial signs are that these contemporary versions of colonial Australian girls might just be a little less adventurous than those in the stories real colonial girls read.