‘A dog, if you point at something, will only look at your finger’: travelling television

Abstract

This paper introduces, and considers how best to write about, a genre of Australian television programming that I call ‘travelling television’, a genre that stretches from (before) the Leyland Brothers to Steve Irwin, and from Australian Walkabout (1958) to Bush Tucker Man (1988–1990) and beyond. The long history of this genre makes it a useful form through which to ask some very basic questions about broadcast television. I do that here by taking up some suggestions about the changing nature of television by the novelist and essayist, David Foster Wallace, focusing in particular on questions of representation, referentiality and ontology that, in the end, may offer a useful contribution to television scholarship from offshore.

Notes

^1. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council DP0879596. I am deeply grateful to Therese Davis for both her invitation to the conference and her comments on this essay, and to the editors of this issue for their forbearance.

^2. It feels very odd to be mentioning children in the series when, as I am revising this essay, Harris is on trial for 12 counts on indecent assault against four girls aged between 7 and 19 years of age.

^3. I also think that some aspects of the travel that underpin Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures are shaped by the Working Dog series A River Somewhere (1997–1998) also written by Tom Gleisner

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Notes on contributors

Chris Healy

Chris Healy is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include From the Ruins of Colonialism (1997), South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture (co-edited, 2006), Forgetting Aborigines (2008) and Assembling Culture (co-edited, 2011).