ABSTRACT

Slow television has emerged as an intriguing cultural phenomenon over the last decade, but it has not yet been considered in an Australian context. Many slow TV productions around the world draw on elements of national identity and history to engage viewers. In this article, we examine the advent of slow TV in Australia, focusing on two recent slow TV programs that garnered a large Australian viewership—The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey (2018) and The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train Journey (2018)—to examine the ways in which slow TV’s conventions have been adopted and reworked to address distinctively Australian anxieties about landscape, isolation and ownership. We interrogate the ways in which Australian slow TV invokes key iconographies and mythologies of Australia’s pre- and postcolonial history and landscape to present a revisionist Australian history in which the Australian landscape and its enduring anxieties are rendered tame and resolvable. Finally, we argue that while Australian slow TV highlights frequently overlooked elements of Australia’s multicultural history, it also coopts and reinforces enduring narratives about Australia’s sublime but “potentially devouring and overwhelming” landscape that have been inscribed in the cultural imagination since colonisation.

抽象的

在过去的十年中，慢速电视已成为一种令人着迷的文化现象，但尚未在澳大利亚的背景下加以考虑。世界各地许多慢速电视制作都利用民族身份和历史的元素来吸引观众。在本文中，我们考察了慢速电视在澳大利亚的出现，重点介绍了最近获得了澳大利亚大量观众欢迎的慢速电视节目- 《加恩：澳大利亚最大的火车之旅》（2018年）和《印度太平洋：澳大利亚最长的火车之旅》（2018年）—考察慢速电视的惯例已被采用和改编的方式，以解决澳大利亚人对风景，孤立和所有权的独特焦虑。我们审视澳大利亚慢速电视援引澳大利亚前后殖民历史和景观的主要肖像和神话的方式，以呈现修正主义的澳大利亚历史，在该历史中，澳大利亚的景观及其持久的忧虑得到了驯服和解决。最后，我们认为，尽管澳大利亚慢速电视节目突显了澳大利亚多元文化历史上经常被忽视的元素，但它也融合并强化了关于澳大利亚崇高但“潜在吞噬和压倒一切”景观的持久叙述，这些叙述自殖民以来就已被铭记在文化想象中。