Australian
Screen

Clip description

Schoolgirl Ja’mie King (Chris Lilley) has discovered one of her 85 Sudanese World Vision sponsor children, Sonali (Nyathan Hoth Mai), has escaped to Australia and is in Villawood Detention Centre. Ja’mie and her friend Brianna (Emma Clapham) visit Sonali at Villawood.

Curator’s notes

Ja’mie and Phil Olivetti both provide an exaggerated study of vanity and self-serving behaviour. Ja’mie’s extreme self-assurance and sense of entitlement are matched only by her lack of awareness that there is any other way to behave. And it seems it’s only the audience who are really in on this – everybody in Ja’mie’s world believes her self-generated hype as well.

Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre is one of many around the country and government policies on refugees and ‘illegal immigrants’ have been a political flashpoint in the ‘90s and ‘00s (some comedic license has been taken with the situation: visitors would not have been allowed to use cameras, for instance). Here Lilley mines a cultural sore point for humour by combining it with a character that really doesn’t get it. Ja’mie’s behaviour, a comic combination of bald statements about things it might be more common to skirt around and unsubtle attempts at doublespeak, draws social and cultural undercurrents to the surface. Her self-styling as a humanitarian, in contrast with her obvious lack of empathy for Sonali and overt statements about her own looks and wealth, drip with an irony to which she is oblivious.

Ja’mie also appears in Lilley’s next series Summer Heights High (2007, see clip two).