Historicising David Attenborough’s nature: nation, continent, country and environment

ABSTRACT

Recognising his association with Australia over the course of decades, this essay explores how Sir David Attenborough’s programmes ‘remake’ Australian nature for global audiences. It examines not only Attenborough himself, but offers equal weight to the human and nonhuman world he brings to audiences. Offering an examination of ‘blue chip’ natural history programming and the two series that bookend Attenborough’s work as a presenter ‘in’ and ‘of’ Australia – Quest Under Capricorn (1963a, 1963b, 1963c and 1963d) and Life in Cold Blood (2008a, 2008b), it is attuned to historical and contemporary cultures of colonisation and how these are located within the values and practices of blue-chip natural history programming.

KEYWORDS:

• David Attenborough
• indigenous culture
• Australia
• natural history programming: wildlife television
• British broadcasting corporation
• environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Frances Bonner describes television presenters as ‘cultural intermediaries,’ drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term. This characterisation only works for Attenborough if it also addresses the crucial relationship that he enables across culture and the nonhuman natural world (Bonner 2011).

2. As Huggan notes, Attenborough was not only a presenter and producer, he was also a skilful mediator, linking different individuals and publics involved in a project. His particular brand of celebrity is partly due to this mediating role; he ‘came increasingly – sometimes exclusively – to be identified with the projects in which he featured, suggesting a cross-over between the reified roles of the media professional (Attenborough as TV producer) and the mediated celebrity (Attenborough as product of TV).’ (Huggan 2013, p. 31).

3. Derek Bousé’s definition of ‘Blue Chip’ film is the most well-known but is most suited to the American tradition of wildlife film, often associated with Disney. Nevertheless, it has some utility because it has informed the BBC model, as Richards describes, and proposes six criteria including, the depiction of mega fauna; visual splendour; dramatic narrative; the absence of history and politics; and the absence of people (Bousé 1998, p. 134).

4. Important work in this field includes See Armbruster (1998); Bousé (2000); Chris (2006); Cottle (2004); Cubitt (2005); Horak (2006); Mitman (1999); Mills (2015); Smaill (2016).

5. See Jeffries (2003); Gouyon (2019); Richards (2013); Richards (2013a).

6. See Huggan (2013) Huggan (2014), Bonner (2011), Bonner (2020) Gouyon (2019), Gouyon (2011); Wheatley (2016).

7. The notion of authenticity as an evaluative concept negotiated across the star, media and audiences was proposed by Richard Dyer in his 1979 theorisation of cinema stardom. While Attenborough does not align with a cinema paradigm necessarily, the general principle of authenticity is very germane to the development of Attenborough’s celebrity.

8. Attenborough, Life on Air, 166. Nevertheless, letters in the BBC archive from Attenborough to the Assistant Controller in 1962 show that Attenborough had been intending to undertake a conventional Zoo Quest expedition to Australia, aiming to export species of wildlife previously unseen in Europe. Plans changed when he was denied permission to export native animals. Following this he secured rare permission to enter parts of the Northern Territory (Melville Island and Groote Island especially) with film cameras. This was due to a contact he had in the Australian government, the government anthropologist.

9. Letter from Attenborough to the Assistant Controller of the BBC, dated 26 April 1962 BBC Archive.

10. The census cites a population of 85 but given Aboriginal people were not counted in the census at this time the number is likely to be higher.

11. Quest Under Capricorn, Episode 3, ‘Buffalo, Geese and Men,’ TV, BBC. 10 May 1963.

12. Quest Under Capricorn, ‘Episode 1 Desert Gods,’ TV, BBC. 26 April 1963.

13. In the period directly prior to 1963, when the series was broadcast, government polices ruled many of the life choices available to indigenous people, including the freedom of movement. It was only in 1962 that the federal government passed legislation (The Commonwealth Electoral Act) requiring states and territories to allow Aboriginal citizens the vote. Prior to this, in 1957, The Northern Territory government had deemed ‘full blood’ Aboriginal people to be ‘wards of the state,’ limiting their movement and governing their work and education choices. Many of the cattle stations, moreover, offered work conditions akin to indentured servitude and were sometimes unsafe, especially for women and massacres of indigenous peoples in remote areas had occurred within living memory. Given this, what Attenborough describes as ‘the pull of the land’ opens out onto many possible meanings, including refuge, maintenance of traditional practices and cultural sovereignty.

14. Quest Under Capricorn, ‘Episode 6 First Australians,’ TV, BBC. 31 May 1963.

15. Memo from the BBC Audience Research Department, dated 19 June 1963, BBC Archive.

16. Quest Under Capricorn, ‘Episode 2 Hermits of Borroloola,’ TV, BBC. May 3 1963.

17. While my central concern here is with Attenborough ‘in’ the Australian environment, Attenborough was on Australian television screens before his first embodied appearances on the continent. BBC wildlife content was shown on Australian television by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) as early as the 1950s, including episodes of Zoo Quest. Ben Dibley and Gay Hawkins describe how Zoo Quest and other BBC imports were important in ‘generating local audiences for wildlife content,’ with the ABC later establishing its own Natural History Unit focusing on Australian locations and animals. Ben Dibley and Gay Hawkins, ‘Making animals public: early wildlife television and the emergence of environmental nationalism on the ABC,’ Continuum 33, no.6 (2019), 7.

18. Since The Blue Planet’s, release in 2001 the ‘Planet’ cycle has eclipsed previous programme models in terms of audience reach and cost but Attenborough’s role in these series has been largely confined to that of narrator, select shots. In some markets, such as the USA, his narration has routinely been replaced by other celebrities.

19. Life in Cold Blood, ‘Episode 5 Armoured Giants,’ TV, BBC. 3 March 2008.

20. The films of Fredric Wiseman are a classic example of the observational mode in which, without narration, shots and scenes are cut together in ways that craft infer meaning, such as cause and effect.

21. I draw in the work of Yanni Loukissas who expands on this in his book length study: Loukissas, All data are local: Thinking critically in a data-driven society (2019).

22. As Libby Robin notes, ‘good science,’ is still concerned with an ‘emphasis on “improving” flora and fauna known to be economically useful in the short term, rather than on understanding indigenous species irrespective of their long term economic and ecological potential’ (1997, p. 73).

23. ‘Feral’ is a term that describes alien species that have been introduced to serve as domestic animals but have become have become undomesticated or ‘wild’ and often had impact on the broader ecology.

24. Theoretically, there are multiple ways of defining alien species. Charles Warren states: ‘native species are those which have auto-colonized an area since a selected time in the past, and alien species are those which have been introduced by humans, intentionally or otherwise’ Warren, ‘Perspectives on the “alien versus native” species debate: a critique of concepts, language and practice,’ Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 4 (2007), 428. In Australia biodiversity change with regard to native species (especially extinction) is frequently measured from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788, despite the fact that prior to this the activity of indigenous populations also had impact on biodiversity. Nevertheless, the pace and scale of anthropogenic ecological change increased sharply since European contact. In terms of the decline and extinction of native species, the predation of feral species has had more impact on some Australian bioregions than climate change and its effects.

25. See, in particular, Armbruster or Wheatley.

26. As Huggan notes, Life on Earth at times even departs from Darwin to promote ‘an orderly view of creation, that disregards discontinuity, contingency and chance.’ Huggan, ‘Attenborough’s natural,’ 179.

27. Notably, ecology as a formalised discipline is relatively new, especially as a field that includes the interdependence of earth systems. It was formalised as a science in the early 1950s with Eugene and Howard Odum publishing Fundamentals of Ecology, the first and only textbook in the field for about ten years. Among other things, the Odums explored how one natural system can interact with another.

28. Journalist George Monbiot is well known for his negative appraisal of Attenborough and the BBC – as recently as 2018 he accused him of ‘knowingly creating a false impression of the world’ citing Attenborough’s role in BBC productions that underplay human impact and fail to identify the forces that have driven environmental crisis. Monbiot, ‘David Attenborough has betrayed the living world he loves,’ The Guardian, 7 November 2020. [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/07/david-attenborough-world-environment-bbc-films].

29. Scholars have firmly established the manner and rationale by which the blue chip mode has offered a presentation of ‘deep nature,’ a version of nature that is impossibly insulated from human impacts and sociality. As Simon Cottle asserts that the ‘failure to produce programmes informed by environmental and political issues relates to the shelf-life, and hence longevity, of these programmes as a commodity, as well at their potential international appeal.’ Cottle, ‘Producing,’ 96-97. See Bousé (Wildlife), Armbruster (‘Creating’), and Richards (‘Greening’) for further discussion of this point.

30. For example, in the wake of the broadcast of Planet Earth II, Neil Genzlinger takes aim at not only the explicit omission of environmental degradation, but also Attenborough’s style of narration: ‘Nature photography has rarely been as spectacular as it is in Planet Earth II, yet at the same time the reverent, nonjudgmental approach embodied by David Attenborough seems too dispassionate for the cultural and environmental moment, at least to an American audience.’ Specifically tied to Attenborough’s persona, Genzlinger’s characterisation is a new iteration of disquiet about Attenborough’s role in the environmental complicity of the blue chip mode (2017). Genzlinger, ‘Not Enough Snakes in Your Nightmares? See Planet Earth II,’ The New York Times, 17 February 2017. [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/arts/television/not-enough-snakes-in-your-nightmares-see-planet-earth-ii.html?mcubz=3].

31. See Richards for compelling discussion of Attenborough’s rationale for standing back from environmental advocacy in blue chip programmes, which, as she notes, ‘stems in part from the wildlife genres presentation of uncontroversial science.’ Richards, ‘Greening,’ 173.

32. See Hutton and Connors for discussion about this moment. Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, History of the Australian environment movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

33. Warde, Robin and Sörlin chart the development of ‘the environment’ as an idea in the post war period. Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin The Environment: A History of the Idea (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

34. See Heise (2008).

35. The three-part series, The Great Barrier Reef (2015), is a co-production with the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and an interesting example that offers a clearer indication of his interest in conservation science and technology. While it uses sophisticated natural history cinematography in parts, formally it is more aligned with television documentary (as can be seen by its use of interviews, re-enactments and data visualisation) than the landmark style that has been so successful for the BBC. The Great Barrier Reef is not central to my discussion because My interest is in Attenborough’s work in the landmark style and its predecessor, Zoo Quest, as signally a particular kind of television.

36. State of the Planet (2000) was the first series written and presented by Attenborough to provide an unequivocal critique of anthropogenic environmental impacts. Its aesthetics are more conventional documentary than blue chip style. Frozen Planet (2011), a blue chip series narrated by Attenborough featured an episode that dealt with climate change which was offered as an optional extra in some markets (Richards (2013a, pp. 183-184). By 2019 the blue chip mode had been transformed with Attenborough narrating Our Planet (2019) for Netflix, and Seven Worlds, One Planet (2019) for BBC Earth.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP190101178). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Belinda Smaill

Belinda Smaill, is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. Her current research explores nonfiction and documentary screen culture, animals and the environment. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016) and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013). She is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council funded project, Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television.