![]() Admittedly it did a better job than most twentieth century Doctor Who at giving work to actors who weren’t white. In trying to answer such questions we might note that Four to Doomsday doesn’t limit its questionable representations of race to Kurkutji and Tegan. How then are we to interpret this state of affairs? Should we read the scene as a naïve attempt to engage with Tegan’s antipodean origins? As a commendable acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians’ sovereign occupation of the Australian continent since time immemorial? A tongue-in-cheek fantasy that wryly highlights white Australians’ ignorance of the peoples their ancestors dispossessed? Is it racist? An innocent mistake? Or just lazy writing? Not just Kukurtji and Tegan Perhaps this is merciful, given the rest, but it also further silences a dispossessed people.) The TARDIS successfully translates the words of Bigon from Ancient Greece, and Lin Futu from Ancient China – some fans have conjectured that Kurkutji’s language is just too old or too complex, but I don’t think anyone takes that explanation seriously. (Incidentally, the Mayan characters in the story don’t speak at all. Perhaps most frustratingly, as lots and lots of people have commented, the scene is also inconsistent with Doctor Who’s own science fiction lore, because the TARDIS should translate the conversation into a common tongue. Her objections caused the production team to change Kukurtji’s dialogue from generic ‘Aboriginal’ (god only knows what that script looked like) to a real language – they consulted the BBC language unit, who chose Tiwi. Janet Fielding, herself an Australian, explains on the DVD commentary that she raised some of these problems when filming the serial. (Corrections welcome – it’s about time someone on the interwebs transcribed this conversation accurately.) Bloody sillyįor these reasons, the conversation as represented in Four to Doomsday is nigh impossible, and Tegan’s shrugging explanation ridiculous. My transcription as it stands is still probably wrong in places even though I tried hard and was helped by Jenny Lee’s wonderful Tiwi-English Interactive Dictionary and C. As a non-Indigenous Australian trying only to transcribe the conversation for this review, I struggled for many hours even once I knew it was Tiwi. Perhaps in recognition of this, Terrance Dicks’ novelization of Terence Dudley’s script corrects the line to “You speak his language?”Īnd most strikingly, the vast majority of non-Indigenous Australians don’t speak a word of any Aboriginal languages, let alone fluent sentences. This is historically typical of the way Europeans and white Australians have presumed Australian Indigenous cultures are homogeneous. The Doctor calling Kurkutji’s tongue a ‘dialect’ is a diminution of the language to the status of ‘regional variant’, denying its distinctiveness and that of the Indigenous nation it is associated with. ![]() Lots of people have commented on this too. In addition – as anyone who has read a word of Shakespeare knows – languages evolve through time, particularly through 35,000 years of it. But Tegan almost certainly wouldn’t have known it, since Tiwi is spoken on Bathurst and Melville Islands, off the north coast of Darwin – about two and a half thousand kilometres from her home town of Brisbane as the crow flies. Other fans have often commented on this.Īs it happens, the language is Tiwi – I know that thanks to Janet Fielding’s commentary on the BBC DVD release of the serial. Each language is linked to a small region of the Australian landmass, so the likelihood of Tegan even knowing which language Kurkutji was speaking is very low. The important thingsįirst, there are hundreds of Indigenous Australian languages, so describing any merely as ‘Australian’ is plain wrong. The representation of Australians both Indigenous and non-Indigenous betrays the Doctor Who production crew’s ignorance of – or lack of concern for – several important things. ![]() There are few Australians who wouldn’t laugh, cringe or weep at this scene, and it has incurred the wrath of many a blogger. ![]() Tegan: Well he’s an Australian Aborigine. In it Tegan, the Doctor’s white Australian companion of the era, holds a fluent conversation with a man from an unspecified Indigenous Australian nation, from a time 35,000 years before the present: It’s the scene from 1982’s Four to Doomsday that may be the most infamously awful race-related moment in the history of Doctor Who. ![]() Taking the latter perspective, I’d like to smash the proverbial bubbly on this blog with a critical revisitation of something many Doctor Who fans are familiar with. Doctor Who and Race the book encompasses celebrations as well as criticisms of Doctor Who’s engagement with elements of race. ![]()
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