Oprah is coming to Australia with three hundred of her fans, courtesy of John Travolta’s private jet. I only found out about this last week (which makes me tragically out of touch with current events, rather than, y’know, someone who has no interest in reading or watching anything that considers this newsworthy) because Ballarat, my hometown, really, really wants her to take a detour after she leaves Mel-Born, forsaking the self-explanatory Great Ocean Road in favour of popping by and going on a gold mine tour. Well, the council want her to, anyway, because they think it’ll be good for tourism and boost the town’s image.
The big problem here is that, while Ballarat is a tourist spot, it’s a heritage tourist spot, catering to 1) People who are interested in the history of Australian gold mining, and 2) American film producers who don’t want to build 19th century gold rush town sets (Most recently Ghost Rider). The less-big problem is that, apart from people who work in tourism and publicity, literally nobody in Australia cares about celebrities having visited their hometowns. This cultural gulf is regularly demonstrated whenever an American celebrity appears on an Australian talk show, announces “My flight landed in SYDNEY today” and is visibly shaken by the awkward silence which follows in lieu of wild applause.
Ah, yes, cultural gulfs. Almost exactly a year ago, the embalmed corpse of popular variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday arose from its tomb to revenge itself upon a world that dared to treat celebrities as people whose job it is to entertain an audience, rather than an untouchable showbiz aristocracy whom the audience has the privilege of watching fumble around and laugh at their own jokes. It did this by repeating every single mistake that got it axed in the first place, including booking a black and white minstrel act. As a tribute to Michael Jackson, who had recently died. Everyone involved defended the act as some kind of legitimate impression, even though the people involved talked like Amos & Andy, dressed as indistinguishable golliwogs, the guy playing Michael had white facepaint and the choreography was worse than our year six musical. Hey Hey was then renewed and is, at the time of writing, still on air. This isn’t precisely why I don’t have a television anymore, but it certainly didn’t help.
The outcry was… muted, at least in the mainstream media, on the basis that ‘Australians aren’t racist’ (even though Sydney was overrun by honest-to-God race riots less than five years ago, and I live in an area where Indian migrants have been the victims of “curry bashings” directly outside the building I live in), because they don’t personally see the problem with minstrel shows. It’s the same attitude that kept the BBC running The Black and White Minstrel Show until 1978, and why nobody cares about the specialty golliwog store on the way to the train station; American minstrel culture is, well, American, and in an Anglo context it’s very easy for the images to lose their connection to real suffering, violence and exploitation and become abstract oddness. I’ve read people defend The Black and White Minstrel Show on the basis that the minstrels “may as well have been purple” because it was a platform for showbiz musical numbers rather than skits about slavery. This is an accurate description of the program’s content – you can watch a bit here, although obviously it’s understandable if you don’t want to – but they weren’t purple, or green, or orange, they were specifically dark brown with exaggerated lips, eyes and fuzzy wigs because those features carried specific racial connotations. Failure – or, more likely, unwillingness – to understand the implications of the image doesn’t alter those implications, and failure to grasp why minstrelsy isn’t harmless fun by two thousand and nine is willful, pig-headed ignorance.
(Traditionally, this is where some idiot decides to jump in and whine about people being “offended”. Racism, or any other -ism, is not bad because it offends people, it’s bad because it degrades and dehumanises people, and this has real consequences. Returning to the 2005 Sydney race riots, whether or not the Lebanese Muslim community were offended by the white community stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers is irrelevant next to the fact that, by stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers, the white community were able to justify forming mobs and using physical violence to try and force anyone vaguely swarthy out of “their” country. It’s infuriating to hear these things discussed as if they’re a purely academic debate about whether or not we’re too politically correct, when in reality it’s people trying to deal with something that’s real, immediate and dangerous)
What does this have to do with Oprah? Well, there’s a recreated gold rush mining town called Sovereign Hill that think they can tip the balance and lure Oprah to Ballarat by sending her a video about how awesome they are. Being a recreated gold rush town, most of the activities there involve mud, mines and horse shit, which is fun (well, apart from the last one) if you’re in the mood to get covered in dirt and told off by cockney policemen for not being a proper lady, but is unlikely to appeal to, y’know, Oprah. Similarly, the chance that you might find a gold nugget by panning in the creek is hardly an incentive for someone who could comfortably buy most of the country.
Also, they wrote her a song.
Here are the lyrics for the audible parts, transcribed by me.
Down on the Sovereign Hill they’re talkin’
’bout a special lady comin’ to town
A world-famous star will be walkin’
Up the street of the 1850′s town
Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side
Perhaps she could go on a mine tour
Maybe try her luck down the creek
I’m sure she’d love to take a coach ride
They run all day and all week
Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side
We’ve not had a star this famous
Since the Queen herself came to town
Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side
Firstly, Fred Durst? I’m sorry for that time I made fun of you for rhyming “bitch” with “bitch”.
Secondly, while the lyrics were clearly written in a hurry – I hope, anyway, because the thought of someone spending time on them is genuinely depressing – the music wasn’t. It’s from a song called “Nellie was a Lady”.
“Nellie was a Lady” was a minstrel song.
It was made famous by these people, The Christy Minstrels:

Here is a sample of the original lyrics:
Down on de Mississippi floating,
Long time I trabble on de way,
All night de cottonwood a toting,
Sing for my true lub all de day.
Nelly was a lady,
Last night she died,
Toll de bell for lubly Nell,
My dark Virginny bride.
[the rest]
Now, by minstrel song standards, it’s not that bad. It’s got pathos and nobody says “mammy”.
It’s still a minstrel song.
Out of a pool of Christ knows how many 1850′s folk ballads, they chose to adapt a minstrel song. For Oprah.
People think it’s a good idea to greet the most famous and influential black woman on the planet by writing new lyrics to a minstrel song about a ‘dark Virginny bride’, offering to take her ‘back to 1850′ and Photoshopping her into a wanted poster.
D’ya get the feeling we haven’t worked through all our issues yet?



