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Clip description
In vox pops a local man (John Harrison) and a Russian (Michael Veitch, with voice-over by John Alsop) tell us what they think of Australia. Two men at the pub (Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro) complain about Asian immigration.
Curator’s notes
Although The D-Generation is sketch-based, often multiple segments within an episode return to the same situation or storyline. This gives each episode a shape of sorts and an impact beyond individual sketches, allowing for running gags and escalating humour.
Pretend vox pops about Australia are peppered throughout this episode. They come from a parade of stereotypes, both local and international, including yobbos, lawn bowls players, an Italian wrestler and a dour Scottish woman. Another is the Russian at the end of this clip, whose cliched appearance (fur hat, exaggerated eyebrows, deadpan expression, all filmed in front of a barbed-wire fence) is as funny as what he says. His comments about plumbing are part of a running joke throughout the episode (see also clip one). This absurdity plays out against digs at the darker side of Australian nationalism, in particular regarding race relations and the politics of immigration.
Immigration has been a long-standing flashpoint in Australian politics and in the media. Sitch and Cilauro’s old men satirise popular anxieties of the time about the level of Asian immigration, voiced elsewhere in the public sphere by figures such as historian Geoffrey Blainey and then opposition leader (later prime minister) John Howard.
Looking further back, Attorney-General Alfred Deakin’s concerns about potential Japanese immigrants in 1901 have an eerie similarity to this sketch, though they were not intended as comedy:
It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.
This was part of a speech Deakin made to federal parliament on 12 September 1901 entitled ‘The Commonwealth of Australia shall mean a white Australia’. It supported the proposed Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (later passed), part of an approach to immigration commonly known as the ‘White Australia Policy’. In 1903 Deakin became Australia’s second prime minister.
