Red Ned 3

Story and Paintings by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

This week by chance I found myself thinking that SBS was kind of unpleasant. I’ve always avoided feeling any unpleasantness about SBS; it was a given with me that SBS was tainted with no ambiguity.

It was an advertisment about a cooking show; some guy from an asian background going back to the land of his ancestors to experience their food and to show them his own. I speak the language of food, he said. I was disturbed. That’s what idiot cooks say when they go to a country and pretend to be really communicating with the natives. Not only communicating, but teaching them something.

I don’t like to say this, but sometimes I feel that the way multi-culturalism is represented on SBS is a bit like cultural imperialism, cultural pornography, cultural shopping. We own that, we say. We may be Australian but look here! We have one of those too. And so this – all this – is ours too!

Red Ned 4

I sometimes feel uncomfortably like a thief. Looking at the travel guides, the food travel guides, the interior and exterior travel guides for tips to do up my home. As if other countries existed to fill in some little stylish detail that would give me the edge. We often call it “appropriation”. But another word for it, just as ambiguous, is stealing.

It is still making me feel uncomfortable that I found myself not liking SBS. Has it changed so much? There’s a strange sense of ownership of culture these days, I don’t remember it being there before. Perhaps it was simply there in a different way. In the past we seemed to look at these foreign countries as being “them”. Now, sometimes it feels like we’re sitting on the couch with a glass of cold something in our hands saying “Oh yes, we got some of that just the other day!” And what they’re talking about is “foreignness”. But then you see them introduce “one of us” into the mix. And then it doesn’t feel like stealing, so much as it feels like completely nullifying the situation. It’s not even foreign any more. Weird.

But I’d be curious to know what you all thought about this. Does SBS ever make you feel uncomfortable ?