Joanna McIntyre

This report presents findings from research designed to better understand the ways adult audiences in the streaming era experience, express, and channel nostalgia for children’s television from their childhoods, particularly Australian children’s television. Quantitative and qualitative data and findings from a nationwide survey and semi-structured interviews form the basis of this report. The Australian Children’s Television Cultures research group gathered unique, robust data through an online survey that targeted adults who grew up watching children’s television. The survey was titled “Children’s TV Shows from Your Childhood” and ran for six weeks from August 23–October 3, 2021. Semi-structured interviews were also undertaken with 21 participants from a range of age groups and different regions of Australia. These interviews were analysed to gain more nuanced qualitative detail to complement the quantitative and qualitative survey findings. This report locates and investigates intersections between nostalgia, creative industries, and screen technology. It offers unprecedented insight into how and why Australian adults have accessed Australian children’s television from the past, and the deep and lasting impacts of Australian children’s television on multiple generations of adults. The findings and outcomes of this project will help to shape the future of children’s TV in Australia.

This report presents findings from research designed to better understand how Australian audiences discover, consume, and value local children’s content in the streaming era. The Australian Children’s Television Cultures research group gathered unique, robust data through an online nationwide survey that targeted parents and carers of children aged 14 years and under. The survey was titled, “What are Your Children Watching in 2021” and ran nationally for six weeks (23 August – 3 October, 2021). A dozen extended semi-structured interviews were also carried out with select survey participants. These interviews were analysed to gain more nuanced qualitative detail to complement the quantitative survey findings. This report covers a range of key considerations, from perceptions of what makes “good” Australian children’s television, to the use of media platforms, and the importance parents and carers place on diverse representation. The report’s findings are original and provide unique insights into parents’ perspectives on Australian children’s television in the streaming era.

Bluey, the Emmy award-winning animated series about a family of anthropomorphized cattle dogs, has become a ratings phenomenon since it was first broadcast on the ABC in 2018. Bluey follows the eponymous six-year-old Blue Heeler, her younger sister, Bingo, and their playful parents, Bandit and Chilli. As part of our new research project, Australian Children’s Television Cultures, we are surveying audiences about how they interact with Australian children’s programming. From over 700 adult responses, Bluey was the TV program parents were most keen to watch with their children. Full article available here: https://theconversation.com/an-idealised-australian-ethos-why-bluey-is-an-audience-favourite-even-for-adults-without-kids-168571

Australian kids’ TV show Round the Twist gained an international following when it was first broadcast in 1989-1990. Broadcast over four seasons up until 2001, young audiences were thrilled by the supernatural adventures of the lighthouse-dwelling Twist family. As its original fans have grown up, a veritable cottage industry has emerged around Round the Twist nostalgia. Full article available here: https://theconversation.com/round-the-twists-fans-grew-up-and-their-love-for-the-show-grew-with-them-167695

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multifaceted socio-cultural functions of Australian children's television. As social distancing measures forced school students to study from home, local children's TV producers and distributors contributed to home-based learning. Yet, in response to the pandemic, the Federal Government has indefinitely suspended Australian children's television quotas, the regulatory framework that sets minimum hours of local children's content for commercial television broadcasters. In response to government imposed budgetary restraints, public broadcaster, the ABC, has also made redundances in its children's content department. Such changes have occurred at a critical juncture in which the sector's long-standing contributions to the education of Australian children and pedagogy of local teachers, caregivers and parents have been brought to the fore. We argue that this pedagogical function is a core but often overlooked element of the socio-cultural value of the sector that has been highlighted during the pandemic.

Charlie Brooker’s science fiction television series Black Mirror has engendered intense audience responses, from discomfort to abjection, since the popular series first aired in 2011. While the majority of this anthology series’ episodes grapple with disaster arising from the oppressive technology-driven social regimes, a notable exception is Season 3’s Emmy Award-winning episode ‘San Junipero’. This episode follows two distinct female protagonists who fall in love with each other while experiencing the redemptive possibilities of future technologies – they meet and fall in love within a simulated reality destination for human consciousnesses called San Junipero, accessible only to the elderly and deceased. ‘San Junipero’ is transgressive in its depiction of a liberating technologised future unconstrained by patriarchal power structures. We argue ‘San Junipero’ re-manifests the hopeful, egalitarian vision Donna Haraway explicated in her influential 1984 work ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, and that it does so by hybridising codes and conventions of the science fiction genre with those of melodrama, traditionally a ‘women’s genre’. The cutting edge ideas Haraway explicated in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ have been developed within the discourse of cyberfeminism, which analyses illustrations of technologised feminist potentialities in the face of oppressive technologies as well as critiquing the misogynistic frameworks that could/do underpin technologised social structures. Reading through a cyberfeminist lens, we find Black Mirror explores the subjugating possibilities of future technologies – in its representations of what we term the ‘tech-symbolic’ – as well as, in ‘San Junipero’, the liberating power and potential of technology Haraway predicted. We contend ‘San Junipero’ offers a textual rupturing, evoking tropes of science fiction as well as melodrama to reconceptualise the often masculinist nature of Black Mirror and the science fiction genre more broadly, giving light to a vision of a unified, queer technological future.

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields-actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities-and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia's colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.