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Abstract

Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Television is unique as a specifi cally multicultural public broadcaster. The manner in which SBS addresses and recognizes different modes of community is also distinctive. As a national broadcaster, SBS Television observes the uniformity of a nationally defined community through reflecting the interests of a dominant culture and audience. However, formations of community that are not as static or reified will also recognize themselves as communities through the way they respond to the address of SBS as a narrowcast television service. This article will examine not only the history and changing role of SBS Television within the shifting topography of Australian multiculturalism but also the differing notions of community that are rehearsed across SBS programming practices. It will then turn to the individual documentary texts in the Hybrid Life series to explore how community and collective identity can be narrated at the localized level of the subject.

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Narrating Community: Multiculturalism and Australia's SBS Television

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