Abstract
This chapter aims to contribute to the broader study of Australia’s participation in Eurovision as a multicultural nation and exporter of world-class entertainment to the rest of the globe, including Europe and its immediate neighbourhood. It presents findings from a survey of ethnic community preferences in Australia, focussing on three Balkan communities: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The survey’s results offer a novel insight into how political and cultural memory influences individual and/or group preferences relating to Eurovision. They are compared to information obtained from interviews with current executive producers of SBS programmes (the national broadcaster) for those communities, who are involved in the creation and dissemination of Eurovision-related content and are intimately familiar with their specific community’s preferences relating to popular culture generally. This chapter analyses perceptions presented about Eurovision through the lenses of diaspora politics, whilst providing commentary on the Balkan musical genre that has also influenced preferences of one of Australia’s largest post-war ethnic communities from Europe.
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Notes
- 1.
The five blocs include the Balkans for the countries of former Yugoslavia and Albania; Eastern for former USSR countries, Romania, Hungary and Poland; Nordic for Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland; Eastern Mediterranean for Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Bulgaria, Turkey; and Western for other countries (Dekker 2007: 55).
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- 3.
A good historical survey of former Yugoslavia’s communities in Australia, and their major differences such as divisions into different clubs and societies and political separation into pro- and anti-communist factions, is provided by historian James Jupp in his seminal edited volume The Australian People (2001).
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That year was particularly sensitive for Serbia’s relationship with the European Union as the two parties were in the middle of negotiating a draft association agreement for Serbia.
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One powerful demonstration of the anti-Russian sentiment has been a chosen Georgian national song entitled “We Don’t Wanna Put In’ in 2009, which the EBU disqualified, as the Georgian national broadcaster refused to change the lyrics of the song. Its content was deemed to be too political and aimed against the Russian leader, with Moscow hosting Eurovision that year (Holmwood 2009). Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008 following a series of cross-border crises (Markovic 2008).
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Markovic Khaze, N. (2019). Eurovisions from Down Under: Multicultural Community Preferences and the National Broadcaster, SBS. In: Hay, C., Carniel, J. (eds) Eurovision and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20058-9_8
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