Abstract
Trash Tiddas is a podcast about Blak—a reclaiming of Black from English as a colonising language, and used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—Millennial life and culture produced by First Nations digital content platform Awesome Black. In this article, the hosts Tully DeVries, Amy LF and Brooke Scobie speak with Madi Day about the cultural significance of Brooke Blurton’s season as Australia’s first Blachelorette—Blak, queer Bachelorette. The authors discuss Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence and absence in Australian reality TV, and the rigid behavioural standards imposed on Blak participants on reality TV dating shows. In doing so, we identify a pattern of refusal of colonial norms in alternative Blak millennial content and how humour is used by Blak women and queer millennials in the face of White propriety and colonial impositions on Blak love and lives.
Keywords
Trash Tiddas is a pop culture podcast hosted by First Nations owned and run digital content platform Awesome Black. It is hosted by Tully De Vries, Amy LF and Brooke Scobie—three self-described loose AF [as fuck] First Nations women (Awesome Black, n.d.) and co-authors on this article. The podcast is produced by Amy LF and edited by Brooke Scobie. The first season of Trash Tiddas focused on the Blachelorette—Season 7 of Bachelorette Australia but the first with both a Blak and queer Bachelorette. The word Blak is homage to Erub (a Torres Strait First Nation) and Mer (a Torres Strait First Nation) and K’ua K’ua (a First Nation, Cape York, Queensland) artist, Destiny Deacon’s reclamation of the word Black from English as colonising language to describe the complex way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people understand our shared histories while resisting racial discrimination and colonial categorisation (Munro, 2020).
However, the scope of the podcast rapidly widened to include all elements of Blak millennial life including regular anecdotes from the hosts’ own lives as Blak queer women. In this article, Madi, a Blak queer academic and Trash Tiddas listener, talks with Tully, Amy and Brooke about the boundaries of Blak queer representation and enjoyment of reality TV. The article began as a Zoom conversation between the four authors which was transcribed and edited with research assistance from Dylan Barnes. It was then circulated for further analysis and input from the authors. As discussed below, the Trash Tiddas podcast has a no-discourse rule—they do not engage unnecessary academic language or theory. We have not adhered to this in this piece. Although academic theory bookends the article, the bulk is conversational thus does not follow strict academic formatting. We have included subheadings for ease of navigation if you’d like to skip ahead to the yarn.
The core of the article is a conversation with many claims and statements that are specifically Blak humour—cheeky jokes and quips made by Blak people for one another in good spirit. For this reason, readers are advised that the article includes explicit language and jokes about farting, fucking, fighting, and bullying and other topics which are not always commensurable with Western sensibilities. Talking straight or speaking plainly and directly, and using expletives, is an important element of Aboriginal humour and Aboriginal English (Heiss, 2003). As Aboriginal media scholar Bronwyn Carlson (2016b) notes, our humour is a way of making sense of the world and pushing back against colonial paradigms. Here, we utilise humorous conversation with each other as a methodology to make sense of colonial limitations and reality TV, and to push back against White propriety and traditional academic conventions. Thus, it is important to read with this in mind. It is also important to note that some terms in Aboriginal English are used throughout and may have more than one meaning. Terms like Blakfella, for example, can be used as both inclusive and self-referential—it means both an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person and a fellow Blak person.
Tiddas is an Aboriginal English word that roughly translates to sister. Foundational Aboriginal feminist and historian, Jackie Huggins (2022), explains that Tidda is an “in” word (p. 2)—it is both an affectionate and inclusive term used among Blak people to claim women, femmes and effeminate people as community and kin. It is a political term with great significance to the history of Aboriginal feminism and activism (Huggins, 2022). Blak and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander are used throughout to describe the First Peoples of lands colonially named Australia. Queer is used here to describe any person who lives against or beyond White cisheteropatriarchal systems and sensibilities (Brown, 2022). Not all terms in this article can be explained in text and not everything can be translated for non-Indigenous readers, but, where possible, we have included explanation of terms and phrases, as well as popular culture references in brackets.
Background
The name Trash Tiddas, the language and humour used in the podcast, and the language and humour we use in conversation in this article to discuss reality or trash TV communicate a kind of insider culture for Blak queer women and people. This is a culture staunchly opposed to gentility that runs counter to colonial limitations and impositions on Blak personhood and lives. It can be read as a type of refusal of White propriety or refusal of the terms of colonial acceptance, particularly, racialised, sexual and gendered boundaries which White settlers systematically impose upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across many educational, institutional and social sites. Carceral homes, known in so-called Australia as Native Institutes or Girls Homes and Boys Homes, are original sites of colonial policing and imposition.
White settlers removed Aboriginal children from their homes and communities to be enculturated in Europeans dress, language and behaviour, and to be re-educated in Christianity and White Christian values (Day, 2021). These practices continued into the 1970s and, in Girls Homes, in particular, White caretakers regularly and violently disciplined children towards heterosexual marriage, homemaker roles and submissive expressions of femininity that are most palatable to White men (Sullivan, 2017). There have always been practices of refusal to counter this, and resistance particularly to colonial boundaries of gendered and sexual behaviour has been led by Blak queer people (O’Sullivan, 2015). As an example of historical resistance, Wiradjuri (a First Nation, central New South Wales) scholar, Corrinne Sullivan (2017), has documented intimacy and comradery between inmates at Parramatta Girls Home, as well as riots in response to oppressive conditions at the site. Colonial scrutiny of Aboriginal people continues, particularly in institutions like schools where families and children are policed for their speech, dress and demeanour (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016). However, as Mohawk (an Indigenous people of southeastern Canada and northern New York State, USA) political scholar, Audra Simpson (2014), contends, wherever there is a structure of colonialism imposed there is also a structure of refusal.
Stereotypes about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as disorderly and disadvantaged and in need of colonial management, otherwise known as deficit discourses, are so pervasive in Australian society that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people combat these ideas even among and within us (Fforde et al., 2013). The result of this has been a search for “certainty in purity”, as Noongar (a First Nation, South-West Western Australia) scholar, Braden Hill (2014, p. 10), writes, or a kind of fundamentalism imposed on Aboriginal people that demands us to be untouched and culturally pristine despite the impacts of colonialism. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity is a highly contested and complex site, and settlers have sought many times, and in many ways, to define, represent and regulate it on our behalf (Carlson, 2016a).
For a long time, representations of Aboriginal people in Australian film and TV were largely pre-colonial or staged in the early years post-invasion (Langton, 2006). When Aboriginal women were represented on Australian TV from the 1970s, it was predominantly in soaps and drama, often in romantic or sexual relationships with White men (King, 2009). More recently, this has shifted thanks to the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander screenwriters and media professionals, as well as access to new technologies which enable Blak users to create their own content and distribute it online. However, on reality TV, it is still rare to see Blak women outside the bounds of the talent show format. One of the memorable exemptions to this was Family rules (Hart, 2017–2020)—a reality TV series about Daniella Rule, an Aboriginal mother, living in Perth with nine daughters, who were nicknamed the “Aussie Kardashians” (Behrendt, 2017, para. 1). Aside from news and docuseries, and beloved Bundjalung (a First Nation, northern coastal New South Wales and south-east Queensland) contestant Mindy Woods on MasterChef (Forster et al., 2012), representation of Blak queer women and people is scarce on Australian TV overall.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a site of notable contemporary Indigenous programming, including comedy series led by Blak millenials like Nakkiah Lui’s Black Comedy (2014–2020) and Enoch Mailangi’s All My Friends are Racist (2021). These series offer transgressive representations of Blak people that challenge racial, sexual and gendered boundaries, including the Tiddas of Black Comedy—two Blak queer characters who fall in love while competing for other sexual partners, a scenario that is reminiscent of reality TV dating shows. The Trash Tiddas podcast makes similar offerings, representing Blak love and life while also engaging in Blak queer readings of reality TV, also known as terrible television. African American cultural scholar, Therí A. Pickens (2015), argues that both the enjoyment and performance of Black women on reality TV is a challenge to respectability politics as well as the racial and gendered behavioural boundaries imposed on Black women in America.
Similarly, in so-called Australia, the widespread admonishment or enjoyment of reality TV speaks to the social and cultural investments held by both its critics and fans. As we discuss below, American reality formats provide possibilities for transgressing colonial behavioural boundaries and norms for Blak participants in some ways, and work to reinforce them in others. Blak media like Trash Tiddas and Black Comedy are able to engage and transgress racial, sexual and gendered boundaries because its creators, Blak women and queer people, are acutely aware of how they are imposed and proliferated, often through other forms of media. In this sense, the Trash Tiddas not only contribute to an emerging oeuvre of Blak millennial content, but they also engage in an evolving culture of situated commentary on American and Australian media that demands more transgressive, and often trashier, messier or less sanitised, content. This counters previously held assumptions about cultural imperialism, Aboriginal communities and American media,1 which imagined that TV was corrupting Indigenous peoples. One example of this is Tomlinson’s (2001) book on cultural imperialism, which begins with an image of Walpiri (a First Nation, Central Desert, Northern Territory) people watching TV outdoors and leads into a discussion of American and British imperialism.
Racial, sexual and gendered behavioural boundaries persist on the Bachelorette Australia, even in Season 7, where queer Noongar and Yamatji (a First Nation, Mid-West Western Australia) woman Brooke Blurton starred as the first Blachelorette. She is affectionately nicknamed and referred to henceforth by the Trash Tiddas as Blurto. Blurto is one of very few Aboriginal people to appear on an Australian reality TV dating show. As Brooke Scobie affirms below, the scarcity of Blak people as desirable contestants and suitors stinks of racism. Amy also points out that even when Blurto was the Bachelorette, she had to maintain rigid standards of behaviour and appearance. Tully duly notes there was only one Blak suitor on the show and only cisgender men and women were included as contestants. The majority of the women in the show were bisexual and femme-presenting, and most contestants were White.
Maintenance of colonial standards can be observed across reality TV series where Blak contestants are eliminated early. Erub, Sabai (a Torres Strait First Nation) and Yidinji (a First Nation, Far North Queensland) influencer Sari-Ella Thaiday was the first contestant eliminated on The Real Love Boat Australia (Culvenor et al., 2022). Thaiday received online support from fans, who criticised the show for “strategically targeting people of colour” and its social media accounts for deleting comments from Blak viewers responding to the elimination (Houston, 2022). Blak queer audiences were similarly outraged by the elimination of Biripi (a First Nation, Mid North Coast, New South Wales) and Worimi (a First Nation, Central Coast, New South Wales) drag queen, Jojo Zaho in the first ever episode of Drag Race Down Under (2021). Although Australia has a thriving Blak drag scene, it is rare to see Blak drag queens on TV because of the dominance of drag aesthetic standards popularised by American franchise, RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–). Even though its aesthetic is not inherently White, the show has been critiqued for embedding prevailing racial and colonial logics, including misappropriation and performance of Native American-ness (Upadhyay, 2019) which is otherwise erased on American reality TV (Glascock & Preston-Schreck, 2018). Indigenous creators make media in the face of these limitations, but also consume and make meaning of them. In the context of so-called Australia, Trash Tiddas responds to these challenges of representation and simultaneously speaks back to colonial racialised, gendered and sexual behavioural boundaries which demand propriety and perfection.
Conversation
So, why did you three make a podcast about reality TV?
Well, I don’t think we did start off wanting to do a podcast about reality TV. We started off wanting to do podcast about being chaotic Blak women, right?
Yeah, yeah. And shit that . . . we deal with? And because we think we’re pretty funny. So, we’re like—we should definitely have a podcast.
One of the early convos me and Brooke had was just like let’s be unapologetically trash, like just be filth and own it. Because I feel there’s this thing where people say, “No, I would never do that. I would never fart,” like fuck off man, you should be bullied.
Yeah, the stuff that’s trash. Especially because we’re Blakfellas—people expect us to have this super fucking high standard. We have to be the most political. We have to be the most above board. We have to be the calmest and the most interesting and spiritual. Sometimes we want to be filthy sluts that watch terrible television.
And talking about and participating in the trashiness of reality TV is a way to push back on those expectations?
I don’t actually watch a lot of reality TV. I think I used to watch more, and I probably watched a bit more like American than Australian reality TV as well. Whereas Brooke and Amy watch a bit more than me. Brooke’s the trash reality TV queen out of the three of us really.
Teen Mum, Tully, hey?
Yeah, we were hooked on it first. I aspired secretly to be a teen mum but I was like 18–19 when it came out. I missed the boat. Fuck, I’m old.
Then Blurto came on Bachelorette and it all aligned at the same time. We were all like, okay we want to do this. And she was Aboriginal, she was queer. You know, it just kind of worked that way. It made sense to do Trash Tiddas and talk about the Blachelorette.
I’d never watched the Bachelor or the Bachelorette. It’s not a franchise I’m interested in. And having watched it now, I continue to not be interested in it. And I think like—Amy you’d watched it before?
I’d watched like one or two seasons. I’d watched Season 1 of The Bachelorette.
We watched the American super trash version from a few years ago.
So, this time we got sucked in. We regretted it very soon after. The queer Blak representation sucked us, right? We thought, “this is going to be so fucking good. It’s gonna be so good” and it was horrific.
I mean, it was a piece of shit. Fuck, it was a horrible fucking show. They need to get rid of it. But like, we had this gorgeous fucking Aboriginal woman who’s gay as fuck on like primetime TV. Snoggin chicks and stuff. Like, I was here for it. You know, it was a shitshow but like, it was also amazing.
We’re at a better than nothing so like scenario right now in terms of Blak queer representation.
Yeah, absolutely.
Was Blurto the first Blakfella that you saw on reality TV or do you remember seeing someone before that?
Look, Ernie Dingo, just straight up. He was on Getaway [a documentary travel program that began airing on Channel 9 in Australia in the early 1990s] and that sort of stuff. Is that a reality show?
Lifestyle, yeah.
Yeah, it’s reality.
Telv Williams was on Married at First Sight Australia Season 5 aired in 2015, two years before the amendment of the Marriage Act 2017, but I refuse to watch that because when it came out, I was like, if straight people can get married to people they never even fucking met but like we can’t get married at all, absolutely fucking not. I just refuse. But he was on that. But yeah, even across like the world, internationally Indigenous people are just completely erased from representation—unless it’s something we’ve made ourselves or some fucking trauma porn. They don’t want us to just be normal and have a good time. On all these reality shows and stuff, we get the rawest deal. I was really only willing to watch that absolutely terrible show [the Bachelorette] with horrible producing, because of Blurto.
Taje was the only other Blakfella there with Blurto. She got no airtime.
Yeah, which was pretty shit for Blurto. I really don’t . . . I mean—love who you love and all that sort of stuff, but I feel like it was never set up to really be a thing for her because there was one Blak person. Like, she grew up in community. She works with mob—or did, you know before she was a cool influencer. But like, yeah, they had one other fucking Blak person. And then I think was it Ritu.
One other woman of colour.
Yeah! Only one other woman of colour. I mean, a couple of the boys were a bit brownish, but they were horrid.
Can’t have too many brown people on one show.
You gotta mayonnaise it up! I feel like that show was never set to find what she was looking for with having one fucking Blak person on there. I think she’s dating a Blak man at the moment. Someone she grew up with. I’m not sure that’s just what I see on the socials. But yeah, how’s that going to work when there was no representation for that part of what she might have been looking for?
What was it like seeing Blurto on there? A really good point that you made on the podcast was that there was only cis men and women and previously, Blurto had dated non-binary people too, right?
Yeah, was not a butch in sight.
Not a butch in sight!
Somebody throw me a dyke for fuck’s sake! I was really upset because I wanted to perv and look, I love a femme but yeah . . .
All the women were bi, all of them. One lesbian.
Yeah, which was pretty sad like the way that they had to still make it palatable for mainstream TV. We talked about it in one episode. I can’t remember who she goes on a date with, one of the girls and they have a big pash on a rooftop or something. It was awesome. But then at the same time, we’re like, would this happen if it was two gay dudes or two bi men on mainstream Australian TV?
And it was the girl that looks the most like her.
Jamie Lee, that’s right. It was a bit weird because it looks like they were maybe twins or sisters making out as well. Like whatever you’re into you’re into. Like, okay, no thanks. But yeah, it probably would not be as well received if it had of been, a fucking gay Blak man, let alone a bi Blak man.
Yeah, it made me angry.
It did make us angry, and I guess, sad. We were sad for Blurto a lot because she was in fucking shit situations. Yeah, but you know you’ve signed a contract and there’s a lot of money and shit involved, and you got to do these weird-ass fucking dates and shit.
Having watched like a lot of like shitty reality TV, I know about soft-scripting. I know about how these shows are produced. But like even with trash like Love Island [a reality dating game show that began in the UK in 2015 and has since been exported to several other countries]. They kind of just go: here’s some hot people, let’s see what happens. With this it was just so . . . they just put her in this position like: okay, here’s the storyline we want you to follow we’re hoping some of the bi women fuck the guys so we can have some drama. I was like where’s the actual romance? She didn’t talk to anyone. If they did have conversations, they got cut out.
Yeah, so then what’s the point in making it such a fuss about the first bi Blak Bachelorette? It was this big lead up and all of the shit that we expected to see in here didn’t get said. So again, just a tokenistic tick a box—okay, well, we’ve done the Aboriginal thing like we did it.
You did one Welcome to Country, wow.
There were a lot of previous seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette Australia. Blurto was also the first Blak contestant on Season 6 of Bachelor. Why do you think it took so long for us to see mob on a dating show or a first Blachelorette?
Because everybody’s so racist. They don’t want to see us. They want to pretend we don’t exist. They want to see us suffer. They don’t want to see us fall in love because us falling in love and us being happy reminds them of our humanity, their White guilt and the shit they do to our people. They don’t want to see that shit. Like, Brooke Blurton is very palatable. She’s beautiful. She’s skinny, she’s sporty.
She’s a youth worker. She came from a tough upbringing.
I would go on there and pretend to be palatable.
Same.
They set her up to be like: look at how hard Blurto’s life was, and look how good she is now. She doesn’t complain about shit. You don’t hear her talking about racism. She does. But in the lead up to and on the show she didn’t or wasn’t able to. The best part about reality TV, even though a lot of it is fluffed out, is the drama and the realness that comes with the unscripted bits. If Blurto’s actual life was included in the show, it would have been sick, and it would have pissed enough people off that they would have got really good ratings.
I felt like because she’s a Blak woman it seemed like there was more to be said about her growing up in the fucking foster system and it either wasn’t palatable for TV and they cut it—or it seemed like she stopped herself from saying stuff that she wanted to because she’s a Blak woman on television.
It’s cookie cutter. There could have been so much more reality, so much more nuance.
All these White people on these shows get to act out. How come Blurto didn’t get to be trashy?
You started Trash Tiddas because you wanted to see trash representation.
We’re allowed to be trash! I mean look at Abbie Chatfield. She’s a White former Bachelor contestant. She is now a successful reality television host in her own right. She fucking goes out there and loses her goddamn mind every 2 weeks. It’s amazing. It’s great. And you know what? She keeps getting more jobs. She’s on the god damn radio, and Blurto had to go there and be this perfect little princess. We wanted to see her get fucked up and make out with two people at once or get drunk and scissor someone.
I wanted her to come out of a room and do the walk of shame. I wanted something, man. Give me something juicy.
They never even got drunk on that show.
Imagine if Blurto was saying half the shit that Abbie Chatfield says on the reg.
Someone would try and kill her.
Blurto will be copping daily racial abuse where I’m sure Abby doesn’t.
That’s the difference. Abby Chatfield is a woman so she would get rape threats and that kind of thing. So would Blurto but Blurto is a Blak woman.
Not only. She cop threats and racial abuse and she is also subject to impossible standards of behaviour. Even on trash TV!
We can’t just even be people. That’s why we did a podcast, and we’re in control of it, because nobody would pay us money to do it because of the shit that comes out of our mouths. We’re creating a space where we’re allowed to be disgusting, silly, trashy, to have terrible sex stories, you know, like, nearly get married and break up on the podcast. We’re allowed to do that.
It’s important because also on the flip side, we’re all very successful at what we do.
We are Blak excellence, but it’s okay because we’re also fucking trash. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. You can be both and hold that space. It’s not like it’s this exclusionary thing of like, you’re either like one of those Aboriginal people or you’re Blak excellence.
It’s almost as if we’re whole human beings. Wow.
That’s crazy.
When you’re talking about that expectation for perfection or expectation for palatability—do you think that played into what happened on Drag Race [Down Under] Australia Season 1, and the way that Jojo Zaho got eliminated in the first episode?
I actually only watched RuPaul’s Drag Race for the first-time last year. My housemate was like, oh my god, you need to watch the Australian season, there’s an Aboriginal person. I was like, yass! I sat down and then they [Jojo] got eliminated. She got kicked straight off! And I was like, okay, cool so what the fuck is the point of me watching this show then? They love to like, dangle the carrot and it’s like, we’ve got an Aboriginal person oh my god, we’re so woke. But then, because you’re too poor or you’re just not White or whatever it is, you don’t get to continue on. People are diehard about RuPaul but they make so much money off people who dedicate their entire finances, their physical beings or like their holistic beings, and they’re exploited. Anyway, Jojo was good! She was better than some of the other dogs on that show!
This is my issue because many of us come from intergenerational trauma and poverty. We have the sickest fucking drag queens in this country like Blakfella drag queens who break every fucking boundary. And like, Jojo works at fucking Coles. How can she afford to compete? Where’s her sugar daddy? But she comes out and she fucking laid her soul there.
And her competitors—
—a White drag queen who was caught doing blackface, who did yellow face, who did Aboriginal fucking blackface and blacked a tooth out and sniffed petrol during a show. She got to stay on that show and Jojo Zaho didn’t because she didn’t have as much money. Jojo showed culture when she talked and she was beautiful. I’m very angry about it, and I love her very much. Heaps of our drag queens don’t have enough money to be on that show. We just get shit on every time. How are we supposed to fund it? With what?
Of course, we would struggle on these shows. That’s on top of everything else.
In these iterations of Drag Race, it’s so much about class and so much about race that we are never ever going to get ahead. Our drag queens like MadB, she’s older and has the best fucking drag and is absolutely loose and unhinged and is amazing. She’s never gonna get on Drag Race. She’s never gonna get that uplifting and that platforming that she needs because we are not, as whole people, palatable to the White audience.
You’re right. Many of our beloved performers like Nova Gina, and Aunty Crystal Love—they’re over 40 years old. These old Auntie’s still turn out.
Nana Miss Koori would wipe the fucking floor with these people.
She would. Say you could have any reality show with Blakfellas on it. What would you like to see?
I have two. The first one would be a Blak Love show. Not necessarily a dating show but exploring like all the different types of Blak love that we have. Have some hosts, go into community and observe love for someone who has for example, three mothers. All that sort of stuff as well as just love between Blak couples. That’s not shown enough anywhere, I don’t think. Then, the other one would be like the Bachelorette, like a Blak dating show, but with the Trash Tiddas as your hosts. Same format as Bachelorette, but like down by the river with a lot of pashing.
I love that. I have two as well. First—Blakfellas My Kitchen Rules [an Australian competitive cooking game show which aired from 2003 to 2017]. Also, I would love for them to do a Blakfella version of Wife Swap which was a British reality TV series where usually heterosexual nuclear families swap wives and mothers.
I would fucking die.
It doesn’t have to be a wife; it could be a husband or partner. I just think there’d be heaps good piss takes, so I just think it would be the funniest shit ever to watch.
Dumb dying dog swap [Aboriginal English meaning a no-good, useless or incompetent man or partner]
It could even be single people like me. I put my hand up, I go in, I’ll play that part for a while and then wifey can go on a holiday to the beach. And I’ll be like are you kidding me? Absolutely fucking not.
This is why she wants to leave you!
Just fucking give it to them.
I want peak trash. Remember the queer season of Are You the One? (2018) [an American dating game show which had an all queer cast in Season 7]. I want that remade with Blakfellas. There needs to be like a really problematic toxic trans masculine person who initiates multiple orgies which is what happens in Season 7, if you’ve not watched it.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, everyone is like, gender? Whatever. Sexuality? Who cares. We all want to scissor, let’s do it. At the same time, they’re trying to actually find out who they like. I want that but Blak and gay. I also want a traditional reality show like Tampa Baes (2021) [an American reality series that follows a group of lesbians who live in Tampa, Florida], which uses the original reality show format following toxic people around.
Jersey Shore! (2009–2012) [an American reality series which follows a group of twenty-somethings who first meet while living in a shared house in New Jersey].
Yes! I remember watching that at my mates house like, are they fucking under those sheets? On TV?!
I want to see that, but I want it to be Blak. If I’m going to be watching and participating in drama and softcore porn on my television, I’d really like it to be gay and Blak as a rule, but any reality show could be remade and made Blak and be better.
What about Indian Matchmaker? But—
Aunty Matchmaker!
She’ll flog you if you get it wrong.
You go there, and they have to do the whole family tree.
You both go and sit down and it’s like “right, who’s your grandma? Go.”
Yeah! And you have Aunty help us Stolen mob, and she says, okay this is what we know so we need to keep you away from this one. You can ask her those questions and she can hook us up with the right Blakfellas [There are still many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people impacted by colonial government policies which facilitate child removal and placement with non-Indigenous families (Carlson, 2016a). This significantly interferes with people’s well-being and identities as well as their knowledge of their families, communities and lineages (Turnball-Roberts, 2023)].
Oh my god, this is my show.
No more cousin-fucking. Honestly, it’s been done. God, that’s iconic. I have a partner and I’d even go on that show just for the Aunties.
See? Why rely on bullshit White executives in the colony to make shows that are good for us with representation that’s good for us. That’s why we do the podcast. Right now, we’re rewatching 90s Australian TV shows and we review it from a Blak perspective. So, we’re creating Blak media by talking about these White shows. There’s no White person producing us for overseeing us. We are watching and talking about them.
At the same time, we have a “no discourse” rule. Trash Tiddas is something to consume when you don’t want to fucking be woke about it. You just want to listen to something and be like, oh my god, that’s hilarious. What a dick head.
Sometimes we do a short like, oh yeah I’m just gonna talk about this for a minute. We do our little bit and we’re like, but that’s that now. That’s done. We’re not having fucking 20-min discussion. We’re not pulling it apart.
Or we rip shit into it. We’ll just be like, that’s racist and just have a bitch because that’s how we talk among ourselves when we’re having intra-community conversations. There are certain things obviously because our show could be consumed by White people that we don’t say but if something’s racist or sexist, we’ll just say it is. I don’t need to fucking explain it to you because we agree with each other. Or Amy will just tell me that I’m fucked.
What we say is the truth. We are the authority on what is true and what is not. So, if you don’t agree with us then get the fuck out.
Get in the dumpster.
It’s a dictatorship.
It’s a Tidda-tatorship.
Reflections
Even with a no-discourse rule, the Trash Tiddas offer incisive analyses of both American and Australian reality TV, and colonial society at large. Talking straight and making space for conversations that are not sanitised by White propriety is an integral component of this. It is evident that White propriety is inherently racialised, sexual and gendered in its nature. The Trash Tiddas describe it as both an expectation and an intervention both on-screen and off. As Brooke notes, above, Aboriginal people aren’t allowed to be trashy—“We have to be the most above board. We have to be the calmest and the most interesting and spiritual.” Underlying these expectations is, of course, control. There is an ever-present threat. When Blak queer women and people do not adhere to White propriety, we experience retaliation from settlers including state-sanctioned violence and criminalisation. There is significant empirical evidence of this. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are the fastest growing incarcerated group in so-called Australia (Wahlquist, 2017). This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander transgender women who are likely to be sent to men’s prisons (Wilson et al., 2017).
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander queer and transgender people are one of the most targeted groups in terms of assault, harassment, abuse and gendered violence in so-called Australia (Day et al., 2023). There are countless numbers of unsolved Missing, or as Amy McQuire (2022) more accurately asserts, Disappeared Persons cases involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and transgender people across the country. When the Trash Tiddas point out that Blurto had a lot to lose as the Blachelorette, they are not only talking about economic consequences. Tully’s estimation that Blurto could be copping daily racial abuse and threats, and Amy’s assertion that Blurto could be killed simply for acting loose in the public eye has plenty behind it. Blak queer women and people are still relentlessly disciplined by White settlers towards colonial expectations and boundaries of behaviour, even on reality TV. Yet, we continue to push these boundaries, and, in the case of Trash Tiddas, outright refuse them.
Despite frustration with the limitations imposed by producers on Season 7 of Bachelorette Australia, there is still deep admiration and understanding for Blurto as a Blak queer woman participating in a largely White and heterosexual franchise. Our conversation is also further evidence for avid engagement with reality TV from Blak queer audiences, and for support and care for Blak queer participants like Blurto and Jojo Zaho. In a settler society that “doesn’t want to see us” or “don’t want us to exist”, as Brooke puts it, it is a meaningful act to participate in localised global franchises like the Bachelorette Australia or Drag Race Down Under. Particularly, when the terms of participation are so rigid and White participants are not held to same standard of behaviour. It is also a meaningful act of refusal to produce media that criticises these limitations and represents Blak life and love which transgresses racialised, gendered and sexual boundaries. Being funny, loose and trashy is another way to push these boundaries, and or to refuse them altogether and to make more space for Blak queer people to be their whole selves, farts and all. There is a clear desire for more transgressive and complex content from Australian media, and particularly reality TV. We’ve offered some suggestions.
In the meantime, we are grateful to live in a period of Blak renaissance where Blak creators are doing more and better than White Australian media ever has to represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as whole and funny and imperfect. It is brilliant to be part of an insider culture where farting, fucking and fighting in public is sometimes allowed, and it is simply necessary to challenge White propriety. Especially, when its terms of acceptance are to assimilate or be eliminated, from reality TV or from the world. In spite of this, Blak queer women and people continue to live as we prefer, and sometimes, that involves wanting to watch other people like us act out and be toxic. Sometimes, it means being trashy in our own right.
Footnotes
Authors’ note
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article.
Glossary
Biripi a First Nation, Mid North Coast, New South Wales
Bundjalung a First Nation, northern coastal New South Wales and south-east Queensland
Erub a Torres Strait First Nation
K’ua K’ua a First Nation, Cape York, Queensland
Mer a Torres Strait First Nation
Mohawk an Indigenous people of southeastern Canada and northern New York State, USA
Noongar a First Nation, South-West Western Australia
Sabai a Torres Strait First Nation
Walpiri a First Nation, Central Desert, Northern Territory
Wiradjuri a First Nation, central New South Wales
Worimi a First Nation, Central Coast, New South Wales
Yamatji a First Nation, Mid-West Western Australia
Yidinji a First Nation, Far North Queensland