Abstract
This chapter provides a historical survey of the involvement of Australians in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) and how this has reflected the cultural and political history of Australia and Europe. The first section demonstrates that Australia’s history in the ESC goes back to the very beginnings of the contest in the late 1950s, when Australia’s cultural and political orientations were still overwhelmingly British. The second section discusses the Australian multiculturalist policy behind the development of the multilingual, public service broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), in the late 1970s. SBS began broadcasting the ESC in Australia in 1983 at a time when its content was mostly targeted at non-Anglophone European immigrant communities. The third section examines how the increase in immigration from Asian states to Australia from the 1970s has been reflected in the biographies of artists who have represented Australia in the ESC, as well as in SBS’s plans to establish a version of the ESC for Asia, making Australia a commercial and cultural bridge for the ESC between Europe and Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
This definition was originally based on that adopted by the International Telecommunication Union in 1932, by which the EBA is bounded “to the North and West by the natural limits of Europe, on the East by the meridian 40° East of Greenwich and on the South by the parallel of 30° North so as to include the Western part of the U.S.S.R. and the territories bordering the Mediterranean, with the exception of the parts of Arabia and Hedjaz included in this sector” (International Radiotelegraph Conference 1933: 12).
- 2.
Ancestry is, however, difficult to quantify as the 2016 census only allowed for up to two ancestries per person, and there are many Australians who are of a more mixed ancestry. The census also asked for countries of birth and the languages spoken at home.
- 3.
For an explanation of the differences between active and associate membership in the EBU, see Zeller (1999: 72–82).
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Vuletic, D. (2019). Australia and the Eurovision Song Contest: A Historical Survey. In: Hay, C., Carniel, J. (eds) Eurovision and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20058-9_2
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