My alarm goes off at 4.50 a.m. Groggily, I rise and dress myself warmly against the late autumn chill. As the kettle boils, I turn on both the television and my laptop. āGood morning, Australia!ā I tweet , punctuating my greeting with emojis of a steaming cup and a croissant, and the hashtags #Eurovision and #SBSEurovision . I receive a handful of likes that let me know others around Australia and the rest of the world are online. As I settle under my nest of blankets on the couch, tea in hand, the cat jostling with computer for space on my lap, the strains of āTe Deumā float from my television.
For the past four years, this has become the annual ritual of the Australian fan of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). Prior to 2015 , when Australia transitioned from mere audience to competing participant in the contest, the Australian telecast of the events, from the semi-finals to the grand final, were broadcast on delay so that viewers watched during a more convenient evening time slot. Now, as viewers of a participant country, Australians are eligible to vote in their semi-final round and the grand final. As the time difference between Australia and most (western and central) European zones is between seven and nine hours, the live telecast of Eurovision occurs at 5 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time; viewers on the west coast of Australia must rise at 3 a.m.
Over half a million Australian viewers made this early start in 2017 alone, with twice as many viewing the delayed broadcast in the eveningāalthough it must be acknowledged that many of these evening viewers will be watching it for the second time that day (Knox 2017). Viewer numbers have decreased after a peak of 4.2 million total for all three finals shows in 2015 , when Australians were dazzledāand perhaps bemusedāby the novelty of being invited to participate in Eurovision for the firstāand, we believed then, the onlyātime in the contestās history. In 2018 , the total viewership for all three finals, including both morning and evening broadcasts, was just over one million. The decrease in numbers should not be read as a decline in the contestās popularity in Australia. Rather, the difference is the shedding of the casual viewers to reveal the stalwart, dedicated audience and, at the core of this, the true fans who are dedicated to all things Eurovision more than that one week in May.
This is the story of those fans and the broader audience of the Eurovision Song Contest in Australia, the very people who have to contend with the question I have sought to answer in this book: why do Australians love the Eurovision Song Contest? After all, many do not hesitate to point out, it is a European song contest and Australia, despite its colonial history and its mass European migrations, particularly after the Second World War, is not part of Europe . Isnāt it in the Asia-Pacific? Protestations became more vehement when Australia officially joined the competition. As Graham Norton , the BBC ās commentator for Eurovision, famously opined, āI know some countries arenāt technically in Europe but, come onāAustralia is on the other side of worldā¦Iāve got nothing against Australia. I just think it is kind of stupidā (quoted in Wooton 2016).
Other criticisms Australian fans must contend with are less geopolitical, and more cultural. While Eurovisionās reputation for kitsch and camp spectacle is a draw card for many, for others it is a source of derision. Furthermore, European pop music in general is often seen as inferior to the offerings from the dominant pop music industry in the United States , despite the prominence of Swedish songwriters and producers in many major pop hits over the past twenty years and other notable musical incursions from Europe . Eurovision songs in particular (with some convenient exceptions) are viewed by sceptics to be not the best Europe has to offer but, rather, the worst: misguided novelty acts that ape outdated trends in American pop music . After all, if the music was so good, would it not break into the global market organically? Australiaās own pop music scene is vibrant but its global hits are relatively rare, perhaps diluted by the sheer mass of product available in the global music market (Ferreira and Waldfogel 2013). There are, of course, historical exceptions, such as the so-called āprincess of popā Kylie Minogue , who has been Madonna-like in her ability to reinvent herself and carve out a long career (Minogue first entered the scene in the 1980s and released her most recent album in 2018) and pop-rock crossover sensation INXS. More recent successes include artists like Gotye , Troye Sivan, and Iggy Azalea , although the latterās career in the US has been criticised for its use of cultural appropriation (Eberhardt and Freeman 2015). Overwhelmingly the local music scene has been dominated historically by variations of rock music and āindieā or āalternativeā stylings, with local hip hop and dance music rising in popularity since the 2000s . Here, pop is defined as music that is accessible, āproduced commercially, for profit, as a matter of enterprise not artā (Frith 2011, 94). Pop music as a genre is, in this context, often viewed as something āforeignā that Australians consume as an import rather than something that Australia manufactures itself. Furthermore, in a manifestation of the Australian cultural cringe (Phillips 1950), local pop offerings can be perceived as inferior, lacking the polished production values of the American industry , unless they also find success outside of the Australian market. Much European pop , particularly from non-English speaking countries, is also seen in this light, which can in turn affect how Australians approach the Eurovision Song Contest.
This anxiety about being on the margins of global pop music culture mirrors other forms of marginalisation associated with the contest. Eurovisionās great popularity with fans from LGBTIQA communities around the world, including Australia, is both a boon and a bane. On the one hand, it offers a strong market ready for new pop music , and in return has become a de facto international pride festival, about which fan and industry perspectives can be ambivalent. On the other hand, this association has been the source of political tensions between conservative and liberal participating states, which has important economic, political, cultural, and social ramifications. Turkey , for example, has not participated in Eurovision since 2014. In addition to concerns about participation costs, the voting system, the inequity of the āBig 5 ā system, and other significant regional politics (Vuletic 2018; Times of Israel 2018), officials from Turkish broadcaster TRT have criticised representations of queerness at the contest as inappropriate for family programming (Reuters 2018). While the EBU have stated that TRT and Turkey would be welcome in the contest again, its statement equally emphasised diversity and inclusivity as core values of the contest. These principles were put into practice in 2018 when the EBU terminated its partnership with Chinese broadcaster MangoTV after it censored, amongst other things, the Irish performance for its depiction of same-sex relationships and any rainbow flags visible in the crowd (EBU 2018).1
By participating in Eurovision, Australia is now participating in an international conversation around various economic, political, cultural, and social issues that are articulated in various ways through the administration and production of the Eurovision Song Contest. Its audience is also part of a transnational corpus made up of a range of local and international communities, bound by a shared interest and connected via the multitudinous nodes of social media networks. When I tweet āGood morning, Australiaā, my use of the #SBSEurovision and #Eurovision hashtags signals my desire to connect to both local and global fans and viewers (acknowledging that the two subject positions may not necessarily align in the personal identification of some individuals). The text of my tweet highlights both my spatial and temporal distance from Europe and proximity to fellow Australians (who, given the sheer magnitude of the Australian continent, may also be quite distant but nevertheless bound in t...