Rob Sitch’s 2000 film ‘The Dish’ recounts the dramatized tale of Australian involvement in the broadcast of 1969’s Apollo 11 space mission, told through the lens of the small New South Wales town called Parkes. The citizenship is what you would expect to find at the time, a big bundle of Australian pride. Although it is central to the film’s message for the viewer to remember that the film is structured as a recreation of a late 60s-early 70s community, and that the culturally backwards moments are echoes of that time period – the Cold War.
You can’t discuss the space race without mentioning the Cold War as its socio-political backdrop – a time that glorified warfare and tolerated racism. Australia is historically one of the youngest nations, being discovered and colonized long after the other continents. When news of the First World War broke out there was a perception amongst the people that it was Australia’s chance to be ‘baptized by fire and christened an adult nation’ (The Mail (Adelaide SA: 1912-1954) 22 April 1933, p.1). The film draws attention to this ideology through a minor character named Keith, an army cadet stationed in the excessively peaceful town of Parkes. Early on in the first act he has an exchange with the mayor of Parkes that sees him saying he “hopes” he can partake in a war. This early interaction posits war as a desirable step in the young Australian man’s thirst for identity. The film also addresses the old paradigm of casual racism as a community-building event. It’s never made into a dramatic set-piece, but there are quite a few moments throughout the film where the characters will offhandedly talk down other cultures. In the beginning we see the band at the US Ambassador’s welcoming ceremony perform the Hawaii Five-O theme when asked to play the American Anthem. Around the midpoint the mayor of Parkes gossips to another towns-member to make fun of Al as a “cultural imperialist” for requesting something as decidedly American as pretzels. And in the second act someone cracks a joke about India being a third world country that can barely afford television. By keeping these moments out of the spotlight it makes them feel more genuine, and in this way it comments on how deep-seated and internalized Australia’s prior sense of national superiority was. This keys us into one of the most outdated aspects of Australia’s past identity – the embrace of racism.
From its colonial foundations Australia had been a nation built by trampling non-European cultures underfoot. In 1788 the British colonized Australia without regard for its existing indigenous inhabitants, and they were not recognized for citizenship until 1967. For 60 years in the 20th Century indigenous children were torn from their families in the Stolen Generations. From 1906 to 1975 Australia held an unwavering choke-hold on Papua New Guinea as a colonized resource for economic exploitation, all the while stunting the ability of their society to develop its own political consciousness, and the only reason they finally let go of PNG was due to effectively being strongarmed by the United Nations “Declaration of Independence for Colonised Nations”. Australia has a “national legacy of unutterable shame” steeped in its racism (Manne 2001).
On that note, I didn’t spot a single indigenous actor or culture represented in the film, though I’d like to believe this is an intentional recreation of the 1960s white bias rather than a simple result of Sitch’s neglect. In its early imperial days Australian politics were run under the “White Australia policy” which is exactly what you imagine it to be, it was the government of the time trying to quash any attempts at equality and instead maintain the white superiority status quo they’d inherited from the British Empire. The White Australia policy was not legally abolished until 1973, four years after the time this film is set in.
In the larger narrative, these many examples of old-world ideology set the stage of 1960s Parkes as a cultural relic. It establishes 1969 Australia as an inhabitant of the cold war era’s school of thought. International conflict and the exploitation of indigenous races, these are the furnace in which early Australia was tempered. These archaic philosophies of self-importance will then later be thematically contested in order to reveal the film’s message.
The Dish has much to say about the significance the space age held for the nation of Australia. As a coming-of-age film, the message it presents is one of a global era of unity, peace and equality. It frames the space age as the dawn of a new day where humans band together as united inhabitants of Earth rather than divided national groups. This is most strongly revealed in Cliff’s words near the turning point of the story, where he tells Mitch that “NASA is just a bigger bunch of us”. At the start the film illustrates to us that Australia is individualistic and outdated on the world stage, but by the end it shows the promise of a new national discourse. Because the moon walk was such a monumental event that transcended Australian borders, it prompts the formation of camaraderie
between the international community.
The film ties its historical genre directly into its narrative in the opening and ending scenes. The film is presented as a flashback sequence of the elderly Cliff who visits the Observatory during his retirement. The presence of a ‘future’ time period adds another layer of meaning to its message, as it directly hints the existence of ‘a better tomorrow’, a manifestation of its thematic core on what the space age symbolises. It tangibly illustrates to us that the events of the film were not just an isolated moment in time, but that they continue to be relevant in the present day. Exacerbating this point is the presence of a montage in the opening, collating a plethora of TV broadcasts on the Apollo mission. This montage combines with the preceding line that “the following is based on a true story” to position the viewer into receiving the film’s message as something relevant to their own reality, rather than just a fictional story.
Perhaps the easiest place to see this evolution take place is in the way Mitch approaches Al. Initially, he has a very tangible disdain for Al, constantly treating him with an air of disrespect and insubordination. This is revealed to be because of his national inferiority complex, where he believes that NASA was trying to let America steal the credit that Australia deserved for its role. However once he grasps the true planetary scale of their mission, he reconciles with Al because he realizes that it’s bigger than all of them.
This philosophy is represented in the costume design as well. Throughout the film, Al is primarily seen dressed in a sharp suit and formal attire. This stands in stark contrast to the other cast members who are seen clothed in thick woolen jumpers for a much more casual appearance. The only time he’s seen wearing a different outfit is during the conversation three quarters into the film when Mitch comes to apologise for his rude treatment of Al, speaking out about his insecurities that led him to act with hostility. In this scene Al is wearing a woolen jumper with no tie, similar to our other main characters. Through this encounter the two finally reconcile, and this is why Al’s outfit change is significant. Al reveals that he had never been looking down upon Mitch – that was just his own misconception. This more relaxed appearance presents the imagery of Al being just like the Australians, and embodies the central idea that NASA is just more of them.
Sitch has said that during the production of the film it was made to draw attention to the events of that time, and that it was neither a cultural cringe nor them “yearning for a yesteryear” (ABC 2000), it was simply reminiscence. And so the film closes out, with elderly Cliff gazing at the Dish but declining the offer to tour the premises, giving us a final reiteration that 1969’s Apollo 11 mission was merely one step in the journey, and that as time passes we must continue to move forwards with its legacy of global togetherness.
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