Australia’s News Media: An Anglo-Celtic Panopticon
By: Wilson Da Silva
Tags: World, Society, Australia, Diversity, Medium

But the most extreme Anglo-Celtic bubble I ever encountered was the Australian Broadcasting Corp, which I took to jokingly calling the ‘Anglo Broadcasting Corp’ to friends. Working as a researcher for the Science Unit at the ABC’s old Gore Hill headquarters in Sydney in 1997, the only people I saw like me were either working behind the canteen counter or cleaning the office after hours. Even the crèche was an eye-opener; not only were all the kids white, but almost all of them were blonde. It was like an Aryan dreamscape.

It brought to mind — for me at least — the 1957 science ficiton novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. In it, all the village women of child-bearing age suddenly become pregnant and later give birth on the same day, with the resulting children all being platinum blonde; they are, as it turns out, aliens who plan to colonise Earth. Unfair, I know — but that’s the first image that popped into my head.

ABC TV was also where I first stood up for my ethnicity. The executive producer of the TV Science Unit, the late Joanne Finlay, was planning the line-up of on-air reporters for the 1998 season of the science show, Quantum. There were three existing reporters — two male, one female — and one slot vacant, for which I’d applied.

I’d passed camera tests, proposed stories and fronted an 8-minute trial story for the next season. She called me into her office and said, gingerly, that she was impressed with my work, but that at the end of the day, she had to be conscious of displaying diversity on screen, and really needed to appoint a female reporter.

I got a little hot under the collar. “Look, Joanne, I entirely agree that diversity on screen is important. But you’re only thinking about gender diversity. What about ethnic diversity? There are no ethnics on screen on the network, and the whole of Gore Hill is completely whitebread. The only ethnics here serve you food or clean your office. Yes, two of the reporters are male; and I’m male as well, I can’t help that. But all three of them are also Anglo.”

To her credit, Finlay understood my point, and I joined the Quantum team. Did the fact that she was married to a man of Asian heritage contribute to this? I don’t know. Nevertheless, when my half-hour documentary on antibiotic resistance aired as the 1998 season premiere in March, I briefly became the only non-Anglo face regularly on ABC TV — a status formerly held by newsreader Indira Naidoo until her departure for SBS TV a few months earlier.

In fairness, the ABC has made great strides since that time, and along with SBS, shows much more diversity — at least in front of the camera; people on screen now generally reflect the diversity of the country, as evidenced by the Media Diversity Australia study.

These days, I’m a science journalist. The same day the Media Diversity Australia study came out, NewSouth Books announced the line-up for The Best Australian Science Writing 2020, an annual anthology, of which I was delighted to be included. Nevertheless, I noticed that 17 of the 23 authors had Anglo-Celtic names. When you look back through the 10-year history of the series, Anglo-Celtic names make up an average of 85% of contributors.

Am I suggesting cultural bias? Not at all — editors of the series select the best available science writing, and four of the 11 editors had names with non-Anglo heritage. But it just shows how Anglo-Celtic ancestry is entrenched in the Australian media.