Thirty years of (in)visible disability in Australian television: Home and Away ’s experiments with representation and inclusion

Introduction

Disability is recognised as a key element in the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and representation in society, in which media plays an intriguing and crucial part (Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 2017; Goggin and Ellis, 2015). Apart from the foundational work of Katie Ellis (2015a, 2019), and a handful of other scholars internationally (Cumberbatch and Negrine, 1992; Longmore, 2016), there is little research on disability in television, and even less on television history – although, thankfully, important work is emerging (Barton, 2015; Brylla and Hughes, 2017).

Accordingly, in this article, we review and reflect upon the history of how disability has been involved in and potentially has shaped the imagining and production of Australian television, and its reception. In particular, we explore the development of disability representation through the case study of Australian soap opera, Home and Away – an enduring popular series, which has been on air for over 30 years.

We focus specifically on varieties of ‘invisible disability’, a complex and neglect area of social exclusion. So-called ‘invisible’ disabilities raise profound questions about the nature of bodies, identities and society. In brief, some disabilities are perceived to be highly visible (i.e. clearly signified), while other disabilities are not well understood and difficult to represent socially, culturally and politically (Davis, 2005). Mental illness is an interesting case in point of the politics and implication of these kinds of legibilities. The representation of mental illness has often been found to be limited and stereotypical in its portrayal on television (Holland, 2012, 2018). While significant attention has been paid to this challenge over many years, the representation of mental illness and other still less well acknowledged forms of psychosocial disability and other forms of cognitive difference has lagged (Fraser, 2018). As well as being an area of social inclusion in television and other forms of culture that needs addressing, such psychosocial and other ‘invisible’ disabilities offer us important insights into the nature and dynamics of exclusion, inclusion and power (Hirschmann, 2015). In the case of ‘invisible disabilities’, the observation made by Rebecca Mallett and Brett Mills (2015) in the editorial to the Journal of Popular Television’s special issue on ‘Disability and Television’, especially rings true – that the importance of attending to representations of disability in television is that it allows us to consider ‘how things could be, by making sense of how they are’ (p. 156).

In the article, then, we explore the development of disability representation through the case study of Australian soap opera, Home and Away. We analyse the visibility ascribed to different disabled bodies by comparing such earlier representations with more recent representations of mental illness on the programme. One key example we discuss is the changing nature of the representation of characters with mental illness and psychosocial impairments, such as schizophrenia and amnesia. A main character discussed is Joey Rainbow, the first character on Home and Away to be explicitly portrayed as having schizophrenia. This occurred in a storyline aired in 1999 that was developed by the series writers in collaboration with Barbara Hocking from the advocacy body SANE Australia. Charting the development of Home and Away over the intervening 20 years, we find very interesting changes evident in the representations of mental illness as well as ‘invisible’ disabilities, such as amnesia, featuring in the series.

In making sense of these analyses, we draw on the concept of economies of visibility, from race and gender studies, as a framework to consider how these visibilities reflect wider exclusions of disabled bodies in past and contemporary Australian television and international contexts – not least given the histories of transnational circulation of soap opera across the life of this iconic show.

Economies of visibility and histories of disabled bodies

To analyse Home and Away and disability in the place of Australian histories of television, we draw on ‘economies of visibility’ as an analytical lens. The term was coined by feminist media scholar Robyn Wiegman (1995) in her book American Anatomies, where she defines economies of visibility as ‘the epistemology of the visual that underlies both race and gender’ (p. 8). Wiegman traces the crystallizing of the body’s role as the locus of being to the rise of visual communication technologies – such as ‘cinema, television, and video’ (p. 41). Significantly, these technologies can produce social visibility for bodies of difference through the representation of these bodies, becoming ‘narrative commodities’ within such economies of visibility. The visual logics that underlie racialized and gender economies (Banet-Weiser, 2015) hold striking similarities to those that underlie disability, where the visual binary of disabled/able-bodied operates (cf. McRuer, 2006: 7–8). Over many years, the disabled body became defined by its exclusion from the ‘norm’ through corporeal deviance (Goggin et al., 2018).

Following Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2015) work on economies of visibility within a neoliberal context, we can interpret trends that suggest the heightened televisual representation of visible physical disability in recent years as a response, or supply, to the social demand for the greater representation of people with disability that began to gain traction in the 1980s. This demand has become increasingly strong in recent years due to disability advocacy and has extended beyond a media context into other contexts including social and legal contexts. Certain kinds of disabled bodies are strongly associated with and taken to represent people with disabilities, including when disability activists have leveraged the politics of visibility (see Fleischer and Zames, 2011). These new signifiers of disability – in terms of which bodies are visibly disabled (and such processes being linked to legitimation of some bodies) – are particularly valued in more recent neoliberal contexts that push for diversity due to what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2015) term ‘inclusionism’, noting that it often does not lead to structural change.

Across the Western television landscape, there has been strong calls for greater diversity of characters – evident in the various television reports dedicated to monitoring representation (e.g. the Seeing Ourselves 2016 report by Screen Australia or the Where We Are On TV report by GLAAD, the US media body formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) – that have encouraged inclusion of representation of people with disability. In this contemporary market that values difference, visible signifiers of disability can operate to remove signs of wider exclusion and respond to calls for diverse representation. These economies of visibility are highly influential in the social relations – and power fields of social exclusion or inclusion – of disability.

The limits and politics of this evolving situation were characterized by Katie Ellis (2008) as ‘disabling diversity’ in her pioneering 2008 study of disability in Australian cinema in the 1990s. Such critical discussions are especially important now at a later conjuncture when disability has become a ‘water cooler’ issue in the last decade or so, and services (such as disability care) advertised across a range of popular media, including a wide range of television programmes and formats (Ellis et al., forthcoming). Popular cultural forms and television, in particular, are extremely important sources of understanding disability.

So, we can see that in Australian television, for instance, there are many striking moments in disability representation and inclusion, including the career of the late Quentin Kenihan, actor, entertainer, and personality, who came to prominence via his childhood interviews with Mike Willesee, focussing on his experiences of living with a severe bone disease, who eventually had his own TV series on Network Ten; deaf actor, writer and industry executive, Sofya Gollan, who joined children’s programme Playschool in 1991; the celebrated 1996–1998 series, House Gang, in which a father and daughter move in with their three tenants, who happen to be people with intellectual disabilities; the popular British comedy and late night TV talk show, The Last Leg, originating in coverage of the 2012 Paralympics, hosted by the Australian comedian Adam Hill; singer Tim McCallum’s ‘blind audition’ for The Voice Australia, in 2015 (Ellis, 2015b); and the ABC documentary/reality TV series, Employable Me, which especially features young people with neurodiverse conditions such as autism and Tourette syndrome, searching for employment. One of the most recent instances occurs in satirical morning TV show, Get Krack!n, screened on ABC, which featured an episode on February 2019 entitled ‘International Day of People Living with a Disability Day’.

While a systematic history of Australian television and disability is a much awaited future project, a long-running high-rating television entertainment show, such as Home and Away, can provide a bellwether and ‘cultural probe’ for contemporary disability inclusion and diversity (Quinn, 2016) – especially given many of the facets of society, such as work, education, personhood, relationships, care and support, which are imagined via ideas of disability, especially in the current phase of neoliberal social ideas and policies (Couldry, 2010; Soldatic, 2018).

To shed a light on histories of disability in Australian television, we have chosen an example that troubles the binary between ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ – mental health and illness. Statistically, mental illness is the largest cause of impairment in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2008). Yet it is often not regarded as a disability, rather it is often ‘invisible’; that is, its signifiers and cultural codes are not associated with the meanings attributed to disability. However, there is now a large literature and body of clinical, psychological and community practice, as well as emergent media and cultural research, that acknowledges the strong links between mental health and disability (Brewer, 2018; Donaldson, 2018; Meadows et al., 2012; Rogers, 2014; Rubin, 2012). What is interesting for our purposes in exploring the histories of disability in Australian television is that mental illness and its representation has a relatively long history, with significant interventions and experiments by mental health and disability organizations, television producers and also media researchers (Pirkis, 2008). In particular, we draw on the pioneering work of Kate Holland (2012, 2018) in taking a disability perspective to mental health and media, as, in our case, we analyse mental health as a useful key to understanding the powerful stakes in disability and economies of visibility. The analysis that ensues draws from the findings of an honours thesis (see Mantilla, 2018), which examined the representation of characters with invisible disability and visible disability in every episode of Home and Away that aired in Australia during 2017. The thesis relied upon a rigorous qualitative content analysis of disability representation that followed every character per episode and traced the plots of each episode. The resulting data were displayed on timelines for each character.

Early representation of disability in Home and Away: mental health in the 1990s

First aired in 1988, Home and Away has managed to maintain its popularity for over 30 years. The show has prospered by continuing its relatively simple premise of exploring the lives of the residents of the fictional Australian beachside town of Summer Bay, where ‘it’s always summer’ (Sunday Night, 2018). Today, Home and Away continues to boast high media visibility, due to its relatively high national and international viewership (Sunday Night, 2018). The programme’s high viewership on catch-up television service, 7Plus (2019), has even led to the online release of select episodes dating back as far as 1988. In recent years, the soap has started to overturn its notorious reputation for its lack of diversity (see Hawthorne, 1995: 2; Screen Australia, 2016: 10) and has received commendation (e.g. Houghton, 2018). Most notably, Australian soaps Home and Away and Neighbours were credited for their high inclusion of characters with disability from 2011 to 2015, with their representations together amounting to 77% of all main characters with a disability across Australian television drama (Screen Australia, 2016: 15).

Home and Away’s representational progress is perhaps unsurprising, as it echoes wider trends of slowly increasing disability representation across Australian television history (Screen Australia, 2016). However, the programme’s history of disability inclusion raises questions about whether visibly and invisibly disabled bodies have received equal narrative representational treatment; how these representations have evolved throughout the programme’s 30-year history; and indeed what the logics of exclusion, inclusion and representation might be (viz. not a narrative of straightforward progress).

We begin by examining a storyline that first aired in 1999 in which series regular Joey Rainbow developed schizophrenia during his final year of high school. According to the show’s publicity, it was ‘the first time a character on Home and Away has had a mental illness’ (Home and Away, 2000). ¹ The narrative depicted how the straight-A student’s schizophrenia gradually manifested through symptoms such as hearing voices in his head and instances of unpredictable behaviour. The storyline, which unfolded over 3 months of the show screening, was developed by the series writers in collaboration with Barbara Hocking from the advocacy body SANE Australia – receiving praise from several news outlets (e.g. Gallagher, 1999) for its accurate portrayal of schizophrenia.

Home and Away had already aired storylines featuring main characters who had physical disability, such as the 1995 storyline where the much beloved Angel Parrish was hit by a car and left paralysed in a wheelchair, only to miraculously recover on her wedding day. The earlier inclusion of such characters is by no means suggestive of richer representations of visible disability. As Wiegman (1995) explains, bodies that are considered narrative commodity are often granted ‘integration without equality, [and] representation without power’ (p. 41). Instead, the apparent 10-year exclusion of characters with mental illness on the popular soap may be suggestive of the soap’s tendency to reinforce the visual binary of disabled/able-bodied – something which Joey’s storyline challenges.

The lack of exploration of mental illness on Home and Away in its early years can be interpreted as a symptom of the relative political invisibility of, strong stigma associated with and lack of knowledge of mental illness in early 1990s Australia (Richmond and Savy, 2005). This was partially remedied by introduction of the landmark National Mental Health Strategy (NMHS) in 1992. The NMHS pushed for the deinstitutionalisation of mental health services, introduced unprecedented discourses of citizenship and human rights in the context of mental illness (Richmond and Savy, 2005: 218, 223; Senate Select Committee on Mental Health, 2006) and, among other things, called for ‘reducing stigma by increasing the visibility of sufferers of mental illness’ (Richmond and Savy, 2005: 215). Joey’s storyline on Home and Away roughly coincided with the commencement of the strategy’s Second National Mental Health plan – involving measures such as SANE Australia’s Schizophrenia Community Awareness Campaign (Gallagher, 1999; Taylor, 1999).

Internationally, there was a groundswell of mental illness anti-stigma initiatives – such as the World Psychiatric Association’s 1996 Global Programme against Stigma and Discrimination Because of Schizophrenia in the 1990s (Arboleda-Flórez and Sartorius, 2008: 137), typically revolving around the promotion of anti-stigma and normalizing discourses.

Such discourses are particularly evident in Joey’s storyline. A key moment here is when the locals at Summer Bay become aware of Joey’s schizophrenia diagnosis in the show. ² From this point onwards, stereotypes associated with schizophrenia begin to be strongly challenged. For instance, in the main storyline, there is an incident where Joey tries to suffocate his foster parent Irene Roberts. Soon after, Irene is shown framing Joey in a humanizing light, as opposed to the stereotypical and demeaning characterization of a character with mental illness as crazy or dangerous (Barnes, 1992), by reassuring him that it was not his fault: ‘You listen to me . . . You were sick, now you’re getting some help’. Similar discourses also permeate the mundane ‘filler scenes’ (Sergi and Dodds, 2003: 81), with locals constantly shown challenging stereotypes of people with schizophrenia as dangerous and violent.

Although Joey’s storyline cannot be explored in much further depth due to limited access to the earlier years of Home and Away, we begin to gain a sense of how the political context influenced a growingly rich and complex exploration of mental illness. Interesting parallels emerge between Joey’s storyline, which poses a challenge to the disabled/able-bodied visual binary, and the political context where the mentally ill body becomes more visible and legitimate as a disabled body in Australian social policy and society.

However, Home and Away’s choice to explore schizophrenia can be read as sharing a critique of NMHS during its second stage for not providing equal visibility to all mentally ill bodies (e.g. instead focussing on ‘serious mental illness’ which tended to be ‘psychotic mental illnesses’ (Senate Select Committee on Mental Health, 2006: 18), such as schizophrenia). In this sense, although Joey’s inclusion on Home and Away can be read as a response to the demand for more visibility of serious mental illness, it is perhaps also simultaneously representative of the political exclusion of what was considered less serious mental illness. Thus, we find that the binary figuration of disabled/able-bodied is challenged in the storyline within the constraints set by the wider political context and larger power relations of social inclusion.

Home and Away’s next two decades: changes in disability visibility c. 2000–2019

Since 1999, Home and Away has featured a considerable number of characters with mental illness and different kinds of psychosocial disabilities. Notable among these is the character of Robbo introduced in 2017. Initially depicted as a mysterious man with no memory of his past life, shortly after arriving at Summer Bay, he is brought to the hospital, diagnosed with post-traumatic amnesia, and temporarily named Robbo. It is not until a later episode, aired in early 2018, however, that he is informed of his identity as Ryan Shaw – a federal police officer who went undercover as underworld crime lord Beckett Reid (episode 6860).

As in Joey’s storyline discussed above, it is also illuminating to look to discourses of policy (Banet-Weiser, 2015) to better understand the visibility assigned to the mentally ill body. What is striking is the stark difference in the changes to political visibility (and inclusion) of mental illness in the disability sector in 2017–2018 compared with the earlier period of Joey’s storyline. Key to the changes was the emergence of Australia’s national disability support scheme, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) (Needham and Dickinson, 2018: 732). Despite its in principle inclusive definition of disability, the NDIS scheme has been accused of catering for certain disabilities better than others – with less visible disabilities, such as psychosocial disabilities, not faring so well (Knaus, 2018). Various studies and reports, such as Mind the Gap report (2018), have flagged multiple issues with the way the scheme addresses mental illness, psychosocial disabilities and other less visible disabilities (Smith-Merry et al., 2018: 19). The NDIS’ tendency to favour particular kinds of disability – typically correlated with those who are regarded as more ‘visible’ – is more problematic for mental illness’ visibility and its association with disability.

Returning to our discussion of Home and Away, what is striking is that there are no less than five storylines exploring mental illness across the show’s 2017 season. ³ Taking up Robbo’s storyline, introduced above, we can see significant differences in the narrative treatment of mental illness in contemporary storylines which play a very interesting social and political function.

In particular, whereas Joey’s storyline has been credited for its accurate depiction of his gradual development of schizophrenia and its exploration of schizophrenia’s ‘prodromal symptoms, acute episode, residual symptoms’ (Penn et al., 2005: 542), Robbo’s storyline has not received the same reception by news media for its portrayal of amnesia. One factor at play here is that Robbo’s storyline focusses less on the accurate portrayal of amnesia and more on the dramatization of who Robbo is as a character. In short, Robbo’s amnesia falls into the soap genre’s tendency to use disability as a clichéd or stereotypical narrative device to drive drama (Screen Australia, 2016: 15) – what the American disability theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2001) famously dubbed disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’. Given that increased use of drama within soap storylines has often been a strategy to drive audience viewership by soap writers, the increased focus on dramatization hints at the increased economic pressure (Sergi and Dodds, 2003) on soap production caused by the changes in the Australian mediascape since 1999. In particular, media fragmentation has placed increased financial strain on locally produced programmes, something acknowledged by scriptwriter Dan Bennett’s in the form of an increased commercial imperative on Home and Away (Back to the Bay, 2017).

The increased influence of economic pressures may also feed into the politics of celebrity and economies of visibility of bodies. For instance, Robbo has been noted for his striking physical similarity to beloved 2015 character Daryl ‘Brax’ Braxton, with both characters having been described as ‘bad boy heart-throbs’ by the media (Rutherford, 2017). In the case of Brax’s character, this was credited for a rapid increase in the soap’s audience during a period of struggling viewership and financial instability for the soap (Back to the Bay, 2017). That Robbo also shares the perceived attractiveness and celebrity pull of Brax might be read as the soap widening aesthetic conceptualisations of the disabled body – and breaking with television’s tradition of presenting characters with mental illness as having ‘visible differences of appearance and behavior that demarcate a symbolic boundary between “us” and “them”’ (Cross, 2004: 199).

Such complexities in the evolving representation of disabilities and its place in economies of visibilities sit alongside the perpetuation of problematic stereotypes (Mallett, 2009). In the other characters represented with mental illness in Home and Away in 2017 programming, we see that a majority of these narratives show the character with mental illness as crazy and dangerous. Despite the calls for diversity in television representation having been prominent in Australian and UK contexts, both markets where the programme retains strong viewership, there are grounds here for suspecting ‘inclusionism’ still reigns. While less radical than Joey’s 1999 storyline’s Robbo’s narrative nearly two decades later may offer some hope. Overall, it would seem that mental illness representation parallels the broader trends of increased disability representation that have emerged in the last two decades not just within Home and Away but also across broader Australian television history – contributing to a slow and uneven cultural and social change.

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to chart the changing representation of disability in Australian television via a comparison of two different moments in a show very much associated with the national imaginary, Home and Away.

As we have highlighted, there have been evident changes in the demand for the visibility of the mentally ill body and other kinds of bodies and identities associated with psychosocial conditions, shaped by the context of changing discourses, structures and power relations of Australian disability and society. Although mental illness continues to struggle with its association with disability and its political visibility within the disability sector, we find that this struggle is reflected in Home and Away through the way the disabled/able-bodied binary is challenged and reinforced in different ways. Whereas, within Joey’s storyline, mental illness exclusion was reflected through media and political visibility. In Robbo’s contemporary storyline, we instead find that although political and media visibility is seemingly granted, in the NDIS and Home and Away, sometimes invisibly disabled bodies are given ‘integration without equality, representation without power’ (Wiegman, 1995: 41). Thus, economies of visibility offers insight into how television representations continue to problematize our inclusion of mental illness and other psychosocial conditions under the category of disability.

Our inquiry here is only one limited exploration of the histories of television and social inclusion in relation to disability. There is a very substantial research, policy, television industry, production and screen culture agenda ahead – not least, given the dramatic changes in the past 20 years, associated with the introduction of digital television, catch-up television, varieties of Internet and mobile television and the emergence of streaming television. There is little known about many aspects of disability and Australian television – from the employment, participation, ownership, governance and other roles of people with disabilities across television ‘behind the screen’, through the representation of disability ‘on screen’, to the social function of television in relation to disability in the wider culture and society. Untangling the histories of disability as integral to revisionist work in Australian and international television histories will be a foundational and illuminating first step.