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The Real Mirror WORDS BY Vivian Tang ART BY Brooke Stevens @brooke.stev
As the year 2021 bloomed, a prevailing pandemic saw us once again recoil in our homes, clinging to any frothy distraction. Enter Big Brother, The Bachelor, RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under — shows at the epicentre of Australian reality TV, to cure us from our daily burnout. Yet, even they no longer provide a place of security or refuge. A misguided fantasy. BIPoC evicted. Sashayed away. Given a rose, only to be punctured by a thorn. Wait, but why are they the first to leave? A mere coincidence or by design? It begs the question, is Australian reality TV the mirror in which we see racism play out? The spaces we inhabit on screen as Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPoC), are either non-existent or hollow, relaying a damaging message. As Junot Diaz, Dominican American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, simply stated “there’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in [the] mirror…if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” Hence, our process of identity shatters. Caged in a panopticon of mirrored cells where the only enemy is us. It’s a trauma that cannot be choreographed. An estimated three in four Australians from non-European backgrounds suffer discrimination due to their ethnicity. In fact, the majority widely recognise that racism is still largely prevalent in today’s Australia. Though there’s an inkling to overturn these injustices, the country’s inability to address race meaningfully is unavoidably sheltered under the thin veil of the Union Jack and White Commonwealth. Reality programs such as Bondi Rescue prove the sentiment is just as much cause as it is effect in the content we see. Reigning over a decade in a prime-time slot, the show fails to go unnoticed, parading an aspirational image of ‘Australian-ness’ — we are one, and all, we are a White homogenous fantasy. Is it an enduring vanity affair? Are we as a nation too patriotic, progressive, focused on the next step forward that we’re reserving space for White, thin, heterosexual figures on land that is in fact Black, borrowed and splintering?
