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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

First Australians cleaning up

ABC's Media Watch took a rare and welcome shot at a sacred cow last night, that being SBS's much hyped documentary on Aboriginal Australia, The First Australians.

This small example shows why we should be worried about the fact that SBS has two versions of the series - a 382 minute version that was aired and may be purchased by the public for $39.95, and an educational DVD that goes for 508 minutes and is a snip at $262.

Although the series did not rate highly, it is a certainty that history students across Australia are going to be subjected to this series by history teachers keen to fill in eight hours of their lesson schedules. What are the odds that the un-aired two hours is packed full of absolute bullshit?

3 comments:

Egg said...

Caught episode 5; the info presented was quite good, but they'd help their (cause?) if they did less whining and dropped the negative voiceover tone, it needn't be as upbeat as Ken Burns' docos (however, they're using his still image motion scanning technique, the now famous 'Ken Burns effect', I note).

Margo's Maid said...

Almost a complete rip-off of the style of Ken Burns, egg, though this is probably not such a bad thing.

Some of the episodes have been good, though the credibility-ometer drops through the floor every time they speak to an historian.

Anonymous said...

The Ken Burns, egg, is, like the curate's, egg, good in parts. Sorry, too many commas.
The 308 minute version is subtitled "have a quick look at the rabbit-proof fence and then run back to your monetary benefit loaded hell-hole, while the 508 minute version is subtitled "follow the rabbit-proof fence all the way to the hopey-changey denoument of the Australian original sin being expurgated by the election of the mulga-messiah".