In 2011 I wrote a post that was inspired by the Sociological Images blog [1]. After some delay here I’ve written another one. I plan to continue documenting such things.
Table of Contents
Playground
In 2011 I photographed a plaque at Flagstaff Gardens in Melbourne. It shows a picture of the playground in 1918 with segregated boys and girls sections. It’s interesting that the only difference between the two sections is that the boys have horizontal bars and a trapeze. Do they still have gender segregated playgrounds anywhere in Australia? If so what is the difference in the sections?
Aborigines
The Android game Paradise Island [2] has a feature where you are supposed to stop Aborigines from stealing, it plays on the old racist stereotypes about Aborigines which are used to hide the historical record that it’s always been white people stealing from the people that they colonise.
There is also another picture showing the grass skirts. Nowadays the vast majority of Aborigines don’t wear such clothing, the only time they do is when doing some sort of historical presentation for tourists.
I took those pictures in 2012, but apparently the game hasn’t changed much since then.
Lemonade
Is lemonade a drink or a flavour? Most people at the party where I took the above photo regard lemonade as a drink and found the phrase “Lemonade Flavoured Soft Drink” strange when it was pointed out to them. Incidentally the drink on the right tastes a bit like the US version of lemonade (which is quite different from the Australian version). For US readers, the convention in Australia is that “lemonade” has no flavor of lemons.
Not Sweet
In 2012 an apple cider company made a huge advertising campaign featuring people who might be gender queer, above is a picture of a bus stop poster and there were also TV ads. The adverts gave no information at all about what the drink might taste like apart from not being “as sweet as you think”. So it’s basically an advertising campaign with no substance other than a joke about people who don’t conform to gender norms.
Also it should be noted that some women naturally grow beards and have religious reasons for not shaving [3].
Episode 2 of the TV documentary series “Am I Normal” has an interesting interview of a woman with a beard.
Revolution
A violent political revolution is usually a bad thing, using such revolutions to advertise sugar drinks seems like a bad idea. But it seems particularly interesting to note the different attitudes to such things in various countries. In 2012 Schweppes in Australia ran a marketing campaign based on imagery related to a Communist revolution (the above photo was taken at Southern Cross station in Melbourne), I presume that Schweppes in the US didn’t run that campaign. I wonder whether global media will stop such things, presumably that campaign has the potential to do more harm in the US than good in Australia.
Racist Penis Size Joke at Southbank
The above advert was in a free newspaper at Southbank in 2012. Mini Movers thought that this advert was a good idea and so did the management of Southbank who approved the advert for their paper. Australia is so racist that people don’t even realise they are being racist.
Hey! You have some very interesting material here. It’s also worth noting that many Aboriginal people are not comfortable with the word ‘Aborigine’: http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/aboriginal.php
Thanks for the reference.
In this case it’s difficult to determine exactly what they mean in the game. Island resorts aren’t that popular in Australia (there is no longer a Club Med here) and I don’t think they ever were as popular as resorts in the Caribbean. When I played that game I never got the impression that it was based in Australia so I guess that they probably just used the word to refer to native people generically and didn’t care about the differences. In any case the pattern of colonists stealing most things that are worth anything and then accusing the native people of being thieves has been repeated almost everywhere.
I’ll keep that URL in mind next time I write about native people in this region.
I guess that someone could reasonably develop a game without specific regard to location set in a “tropical island”. But if race is brought into the game it would make sense to make it specific to one group – and to avoid being racist about it.
Yes, I get that this game is definitely not referring to a specific group – I think that in that case it’s usually more appropriate to refer to “indigenous people” or “Aboriginal people”. And thanks for taking the time to read the link and consider it!