Australia and the Eurovision Song Contest: A Historical Survey

This chapter provides a historical survey of the involvement of Australians in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) and how this has reflected the cultural and political history of Australia and Europe. The first section demonstrates that Australia’s history in the ESC goes back to the very beginnings of the contest in the late 1950s, when Australia’s cultural and political orientations were still overwhelmingly British. The second section discusses the Australian multiculturalist policy behind the development of the multilingual, public service broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), in the late 1970s. SBS began broadcasting the ESC in Australia in 1983 at a time when its content was mostly targeted at non-Anglophone European immigrant communities. The third section examines how the increase in immigration from Asian states to Australia from the 1970s has been reflected in the biographies of artists who have represented Australia in the ESC, as well as in SBS’s plans to establish a version of the ESC for Asia, making Australia a commercial and cultural bridge for the ESC between Europe and Asia.