I remember 27 November 1998 like it was yesterday. As torrential rain ripped through outer Erinsborough, Anne and Billy had sex for the first time, Joel got pinned under Pinhead’s vintage “ute” the Beast in a rapidly rising river, and Dr Karl tried to save the day with a cut-in-half water bottle and a length of black-plastic tubing.
Episode 3,220 of Neighbours – that year’s season finale – had our entire family glued to the screen. As Joel began to slip beneath the water and Karl cried out, “Oh God, please don’t let this happen”, just before the end credits rolled, I sprang from my seat and yelled: “WHAT?” We now had to endure the unbearably long summer holidays before finding out if Joel had met his watery end. (Spoiler alert: he was fine).
Flash forward to October 2014, and it’s an altogether sunnier day in Australia’s favourite fictional suburb. Cast and crew are midway through the show’s 30th anniversary filming schedule, and I am standing in Ramsay Street with Alan Fletcher (AKA local doctor Karl Kennedy). When I’m asked if I would like to hold the Ramsay Street sign, I jump up and down and clap my hands; in the eventual photo, I am holding the sign above my head like a wrestler who’s just won a championship. “Who am I?” I think. “Why is this happening? I haven’t watched Neighbours since Didge went to heaven in 2009.”
It was undeniable: I was falling under the Ramsay Street spell all over again. The more I thought about it, the more Neighbours memories returned to the forefront of my mind. That ripper of a finale; the misadventures of Stingray Timmins: streaker, drinker, dumpster driver, bone-marrow donor; dead from an aneurysm before the age of 20, his ashes scattered over his favourite skatepark; the outstandingly terrible “special effects” when Toadie and Dee’s car ploughed into a lake on their wedding day (a moment Ryan “Toadfish” Moloney and I roar with laughter about during the set visit). I remembered showing off at school when, in 1988, my mother had a Neighbours cameo as Jim Robinson and Beverly Marshall’s marriage celebrant, even though I was too young to be allowed to actually watch the show.
My story is not unique: whether our Ramsay Street memories are good, bad, or outwardly hostile, Neighbours is undeniably meshed with the Australian psyche. Indeed, when I looked into whether Australia’s pre-eminent cultural critic, Clive James, had written anything about Neighbours, I was instead directed to evidence of his walk-on role as a postman (Episode 2547, in 1996, if you are wondering).
In true soap-storyline fashion, it’s something of a red herring: James, in fact, reflected eloquently on Neighbours’ place in our landscape at last year’s Australia and New Zealand festival of literature and arts in London. The red-brick-bungalow Australia that show creator Reg Grundy captured was, in James’s words, the “desiderata that everybody in the world wanted”.
Despite growing up with Neighbours (I am two years older than the show), it wasn’t until I found myself standing on Ramsay Street that I understood what he meant. Of course, it’s only “Ramsay Street” when the gaffers swap over the street signs and roll in the cameras. Every other moment of the year, it’s plain old Pin Oak Court in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs. Pin Oak is like any other suburban street, except for the ever-vigilant security guards, a 24/7 fixture since hoodlums began to consider doing “dougheys” (doughnut-shaped burnouts) there a badge of honour.
The residents, whose identities are closely guarded by Neighbours’ production team, have to buy into the illusion the show sells, their houses and yards watched like hawks by the production designers for any un-Erinsborough alterations. Some years ago, an unexpected renovation by the owners of “No 22” gave the house’s facade a kicky, two-tone look. To match the “backyard” set to this rash act of DIY, the set designers were forced to source thousands of same-shaped house bricks, which were then hand-painted to match by the art department.
That “realness” – the red bricks and the living rooms, the endless afternoons at Lassiter’s – that made the show familiarly dull to Australians was the very thing international viewers connected with: James’s “desiderata” of a suburban idyll. To them, the quarter-acre blocks seemed palatial, and the sun always shone on Ramsay Street. As any Melburnian will tell you, that’s not so much pathetic fallacy as meteorological impossibility. The consensus of long-term cast members on the set is that Neighbours provided sunny respite for Britons during Thatcher’s reign. To Australians, however, Erinsborough didn’t seem sunny enough. Where Home and Away’s Summer Bay provided beach-bound fantasy, Neighbours gazed into the suburban abyss we teenagers were so desperate to escape. And as a branded “Australian” export, it felt to us about as authentic as Foster’s lager.
Culturally speaking, Erinsborough was as white as sliced bread. To young people growing up in multicultural Australia, this seemed odd; our schools were filled with children of diverse backgrounds, nothing like Erinsborough High’s carpet of beige. Take the 2011 national census, for example: 34.3% of Australians’ parents were both born overseas; in the greater Melbourne area, more than two languages were spoken in 32.4% of households.
In 2004, eight Melbourne film-makers imagined an alternate Ramsay Street in an art project called Neighbours (The Remix). One film, Over d-fence, was “an absurdist Aboriginal comedy” juxtaposing the horror of Australia’s colonial history with modern-day suburbia. “Neighbours is the ultimate expression of a particular fantasy of a ‘perfect’ Australian life,” curator Spiro Economopoulos said. “A life in which suburbia is always sunny, welcoming and, of course, white.”
Neighbours’ executive producer at the time, Ric Pellizzeri, responded to the project by saying: “We’re public property. We are a show about middle-class Australia. We represent a perception of what the country is in people’s minds and hearts, we are not reality television.” His words have only increased in irony over time, as reality TV has been one area in which representation on Australian screens has begun to resemble something approaching, well, reality.
Only the most dedicated 1950s throwbacks would agree that Neighbours reflected a “minds and hearts” image of Australia. The various Eurocentric immigration policies that fell under the White Australia policy umbrella were gradually dismantled until their complete demise in 1970. Erinsborough, on the other hand, took until 2011 to move into the era its viewers had been living in for three decades.
The arrival that year of the Kapoor family – of Indian and Sri Lankan heritage – was greeted with racist abuse of the “un-Australian” variety in the show’s online forums, despite the fact that Ajay Kapoor, a local councillor, and his wife Priya, principal of Erinsborough High, had been raised and educated in the fictional suburb. Then-executive producer Susan Bower said the Kapoors’ presence reflected a “more modern society”, adding: “We have been criticised heavily for being too white, and you are damned if you do and if you don’t. We would much rather be criticised for moving in this direction.”
A direction the producers only pursued for just over a year. When Bower was replaced as executive producer in 2013, Priya was killed in an explosion; her widower and daughter, Rani, moved to India, ostensibly to care for a sick relative. “It made no sense to me for Ajay and Rani to be sent back to India, considering that both characters were born, educated and raised in Australia,” said Sachin Joab, the actor who who played Ajay, at the time. “We were definitely written out, and it wasn’t of our own accord.”
Neighbours returned to business as usual, with only occasional interruptions of reality. Remy Hii, whose father is Chinese-Malaysian and whose mother is English, appeared as gay character Hudson Walsh during the 2013 and 14 seasons; and late last year Indigenous actor Meyne Wyatt made his first appearance as Nate Kinski. Clarifying the casting, a spokesman said: “Where we don’t need a specific ethnic background, our brief to agents is to put forward their best people and that was the case for this character.” It’s an admirable spin on the usual “best actor for the role” excuse employed to explain white-washed casting.
It’s difficult to grasp what the future holds for Neighbours. As the residents of Ramsay Street take their first uncertain steps into their fourth decade, I hope they finally leave that white-bread, red-brick desiderata behind in search of a more imperfect blend. Plus, you know, it wouldn’t hurt to see what Anne and Billy are up to these days. I’m just asking for a friend.
