First Contact review: precious moments and epiphanies in reality TV that just might prove its worth

Six Australians have their first encounters with Indigenous Australia and push the red-hot buttons of race and fear and envy

Paul Daley

Racism stems from ignorance.

And ignorance has many complexions. It can be naive. It can be willful.

Ray Martin, host of First Contact – a reality television show that has demanded national attention by pushing the red-hot buttons of race, welfare envy and fear of other that are defiantly extant in our country’s fabric – reckons white Australians aren’t racist.

“I don’t think we’re racist … I honestly don’t think we’re racist in white Australia,” he said during a TV interview to promote First Contact, which aired on SBS over three nights this week.

I like and respect Martin – as a journalist and a man who has done much to try to improve Indigenous lives. But I disagree.

In this country the past is inextricably tied to the present when it comes to racism against Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, just as the past instructs so many lingering social and economic disadvantages that remain a shameful scourge of Indigenous Australia.

Racism began when whites started exploring and occupying this land. Whites killed the blacks, eventually in many tens of thousands, to get the land. Proof is there in thousands of archive boxes in British and Australian cultural institutions. When you read accounts by colonial settlers and British soldiers and governors it is unambiguously clear what happened.

Murder became more widespread as killers convinced themselves the natives were sub-human – or sub-white human at any rate. The anthropologists sought (fallacious) proof of this through the skulls of massacred blacks, subjecting them to the discredited voodoo science of phrenology. Indigenous Australians were considered part of this land’s flora and fauna – not its citizenry – for a shamefully long period.

Racism is at the historical core of the Indigenous post-colonial plight. Stereotypes, ignorant and wilfully gained, pervade.

The cast of First Contact with Ray Martin. Photograph: Mark Rogers/Blackfella Films

Which brings me back to First Contact, the “immersive journey through Aboriginal Australia” by six non-Indigenous people. From the outset I was reminded of the absurd pledges that politicians occasionally make to spend a week or so living on the dole to “experience” what the long-term unemployed do.

A reality TV show of this nature was always going to be partly characterised by the innate tokenism of getting fly-in fly-out participants to experience anything much of life as an Indigenous Australian might.

As one of the contestants, Sandy – certainly the most interesting because she was probably the most racist – demonstrated, the six journeyers could check out any time they liked. Most of those they visited, however, could never leave.

“God gave black people rhythm and soul. They can dance and sing and all are hot while they dance, but when it comes to brains, white people have better brains,” Sandy declared early on. We might have been talking to the 18th- and 19th-century phrenologists.

And someone might have called “bullshit” on Sandy here. If only for the sakes of the (plenty of) Australians who aren’t racist but have had little or nothing to do with Indigenous Australians (six in 10 of us, apparently) and who were already screaming at their sets and tweeting.

Martin apparently tried to convince Sandy to stay. It’s a pity he failed because she abandoned the show just as a spark of something – cultural awareness, sympathy, compassion? – glimmered in eyes set beneath meticulously pencilled brows, after she’d sacrificed a lock of hair so a noted, impoverished, Arnhem Land artist might use it as a paintbrush.

It was a precious human and, yes, TV moment (and we shouldn’t forget that in the end this was television) that megaphoned “transformation to come”. And the trick of First Contact was always going to be the metamorphosis at least some of the six journeyers would have to undergo to make the proposition worthwhile.

There were other precious moments. Moments that, if they reached the eyes of enough Sandys out there, might have led to, well, if not quite an awakening then maybe some penny dropping. And if that’s the case then First Contact has proven its worth.

One such moment came early when a young mixed-ancestry woman, having made tea for her reality TV visitors, chose a superb analogy to illustrate the inane, welfare envy-driven white Australian obsession with definitions of Indigeneity. “Aboriginality is a bit like tea. You can add milk and sugar but it’s still tea,” she said with perfect, laconic delivery.

First Contact delivered other flashes of insight: into why the show’s tourists can leave but the real life players can’t – because of familial and cultural responsibility; the emotional torment stemming from forced child removal; sentencing anomalies and black imprisonment rates; the python-crush of alcohol in some communities.

The inevitable “grog” story of First Contact came in the final episode, from Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia where the women have asserted control. This is a powerful story of non-paternal social reform, doubtless chosen by the producer Rachel Perkins for that very reason. It was also the place where Bo-dene and Jasmine – both of whom had experienced significant family dysfunction – had epiphanies.

Producers Perkins – the creator a few years ago of the justifiably laudedFirst Australians – and Darren Dale superbly illustrated the anomaly confronting even supposedly progressive thought about “Indigenous culture”. Is Indigenous culture something to be preserved in life – or just in museum collections? If the answer is “in life”, what are the prosaic social implications of that?

In First Contact the question took shape as a turtle was ceremonially butchered.

Hours of television could be made on each such issue, of course. And I’d have liked some exploration of others, like the controversial welfare management imposed on some communities and the vexing moral questions posed by the 2007 Northern Territory intervention.

But this was, after all, fast-paced reality TV, not conventional social documentary.

In an interview with the Australian, Perkins said of the show: “We are interested in the idea of a TV show being a conversation starter across the country. After making First Australians, which was really successful but did have a relatively small reach — even though [it rated] well for SBS — we thought, how can we really engage with an audience about Indigenous subjects in a wider commercial way?”

I asked Jon Altman, who has spent a professional lifetime researching Indigenous economic and policy issues, for his reactions.

“I think people would have learnt a lot more if embedded in a place for a week or two rather than in a diversity for short bursts – there was no time to build real social relations that are fundamental to Indigenous people,” said Altman, emeritus professor at the Australian National University’s centre for Aboriginal and economic policy research. “But then at least we got to see the diversity of circumstances.”

Altman, quoted in John Pilger’s film Utopia as saying the crisis in Indigenous Australia warranted an international aid-style response, said while Australians do have a bad reputation as tourists: “I did not realise that they would also do this at home with different first Australians.

“Aboriginal people are so open and including – I am just amazed by how rude people were intentionally or unintentionally to poverty-stricken people. Indigenous people are quiet and teach by showing and doing, white Australians are brash and noisy and struggle with silence – they want easy answers to deeply complex questions with much ugly history.”

There it is again – history. It’s impossible to consider Indigenous Australia’s present or future without delving into past ugliness. For there, deeply embedded, are the roots of anti-Indigenous racism.

Social media have erupted in the wake of First Contact – another testimony to just how clever this was as television – and many people have made valuable contributions with personal stories of awakenings to Indigenous Australia. I just hope the right people read them.

Long may the conversation continue.