Clarissa Bye: ABC’s elitist hit-job on Bluey TV show sparks backlash from irate fans
Academic hit-job on popular kids TV cartoon show Bluey highlights how out of touch our ivory tower lecturers can be, writes Clarissa Bye.
NSW
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The ABC has done a hit-job on the beloved Australian children’s cartoon Bluey – and it’s a perfect illustration of the perils of anti-male, anti-Australian woke drivel.
The show has been acclaimed everywhere, has won awards around the world, and has garnered millions of fans since airing in 2018.
But now two academics have decided to take apart the innocent children’s show on the basis of its supposed issues with masculinity and the fact the doggie is a bit of a larrikin, which turns out to be problematic.
“Is he a loveable larrikin, or just a bad dad?” they ask.
But donning the woke lens of faddish academic ideology has backfired, with legions of fans so outraged the ABC nationally republished the piece from The Conversation, it was forced to switch off comments on its social media after being inundated.
One comment read: “the stench of wokeness is overwhelming,” which summed up the views of many fans; with even diehard ABC types complaining that “this may be the first ABC article I completely disagree with” and “I’m a supporter of the ABC but it has lost its mind on gender issues”.
It sure has. But the woke ideology that it’s based on has almost completely taken over all our universities, who are now busy indoctrinating the next hapless generation.
The most ridiculous claim of this “analysis” article – and there are many – is that the canine dad character Bandit is a bully.
This free character assessment is based on him opening up his daughter’s ice block early and “repeatedly” licking the frozen sweet in front of her.
Obviously these ivory tower lecturers from the University of Southern Queensland have never seen my border collie Cosmo sneak up on children and steal treats from their hands, all the while smiling innocently.
The authors also reveal their blinkered gender ideology.
“Bandit is also surprisingly conservative when it comes to gender values,” they write.
Yep. The dog apparently doesn’t like putting on women’s makeup. How quaint!
“When he reluctantly submits to wearing make-up, he is subsequently mocked by his mates for doing so. He censors himself from engaging in full imaginative play when under the gaze of other men.”
Ah, the old “toxic masculinity” trope. That has morphed from the original objection around aggression and violence by thugs to a general distaste of qualities associated with men, such as having mates, stoicism, strength and heroism.
And the cure being touted is … for men to try on dresses, or high heels, or makeup. Or paint their fingernails bright red – as is currently being done to some rather unfortunate Sydney school boys under the guise of “reinventing masculinity” workshops.
The ABC article also claims there’s a “darker side” to this “conservative” doggie, and he shows how it’s “difficult to overstate the cultural power of larrikin ideology in Australia”.
It’s difficult to overstate how ridiculous those statements are.
They’ve snuck the word “ideology” into something quintessentially Australian. Recognising the history and qualities of what a larrikin is, does not in itself constitute an ideology. Left-wing wokism is an ideology.
The authors have to cite our great history of inventing fabulous anti-authoritarian and mischief-makers in series like Dad and Dave, Kingswood Country and The Castle to explain the idea of the larrikin. They should have thrown in Dawn Fraser, Shane Warne, Errol Flynn and Mick Dundee.
Even the dog’s name Bandit allegedly “conjures up the small-time crime of bushrangers” and the authors question why the doggie is praised for his parenting prowess when the mother Chilli is more in the background.
“Bandit never strays far from the reductive stereotype of the Australian larrikin: the likeable roguish male stuck between childhood and adulthood whose disrespect of authority and rough-and-ready masculinity reflects Australia’s emotional attachment to the working-class underdog.”
Another point neglected here is that all fictional characters have flaws, otherwise they would be perfect cardboard cut out characters and there would be no plot or drama to portray. That’s the nature of storytelling. How to overcome our flaws.
And finally they say the “universal veneration of Bandit is perplexing.”
That’s because the elite’s view of Australian culture is always being surprised when others don’t share this view.
University of Wollongong academic Professor Greg Melleuish has put a thoughtful submission into a parliamentary inquiry into Australian nationhood – arguing the value of our culture has been denigrated by the elites for a long time now.
He says this has also resulted in a matching decline in our universities of teaching our own literature, history and politics.
He has some very interesting ideas. Basically, that academics have adopted an internationalist outlook and have incorporated the old cultural cringe idea, from the English imperialists, that Australia has a worthless culture. This manifests in distaste for Australian popular culture.
Perhaps the new Albanese Government might like to kickstart a new campaign to redirect our universities to focus more seriously on our own history and culture, and not just offer up “reductive stereotypes” – or simplistic and superficial takes – on our heritage.
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