Pasta and Pasodoble is changing the look of Australian television. It is the reality and talent shows that are introducing a multicultural look to our screens. As over three and a half million viewers sat down to watch the final of Masterchef between Adelaide artist Poh Ling Yeow and mum Julie Goodwin we were presented with a picture of an Asian family on screen more elaborate than most Australian dramas have been able to produce in years, and a mother so devoted to her family that cooking for other people was inconceivable.

As even Matt Preston was quoted as saying “It is much easier to connect with people that think like you, cook like you, then people who come from a strange TV universe where everyone looks like Chesty Bond or Pamela Anderson”. He is also quoted as saying that the casting agent for the program had told the judges that she had never cast three uglier people for a TV show. Considering the ratings juggernaut that the show has proven to be it seems a triumph of character over looks. If Preston, Mehigan and Colombaris can be described as “ugly” one shudders at the criteria for the average casting session in this country.

Here is where producers need to sit up and take note, at a time when the television industry is under siege from new technologies, the public identifies with people that behave and look like them. Is it any wonder that a whole generation of teenagers prefer to watch themselves on Youtube than what the commercial networks are offering?

After twenty-five years in acting I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to casting the majority of the Australian film and television industry can’t tell the difference between a Greek and an Italian. Our soap operas are often used as an example of our Anglo and homogenised film and television industry, the sad truth is that shows such as Neighbours and Home and Away are, more often than not, the scape goat for what is an endemic issue in our viewing culture, that fact that our television content falls short of representing the diversity of our population.

This makes it harder for a country still trying to define its national identity.
We are all encouraged to be “Australian” but the portrayal of our nation doesn’t reflect us all. An issue not purely confined to race but also gender, age, and sexual orientation. Like parents who tell their children that they are all loved equally yet the family album is full of photos of the first born. Adding to this politicians' use of the phrase “unaustralian” to describe anybody in disagreement with them and you have an even murkier picture of who we are. It still baffles me that few of the faces hosting travel shows look like they can speak another language yet we send them all over the globe.

We might think that turning our shows into a bag of liquorice all sorts of nationalities might be going too far and the idea would bring screams of “The politically correct have gone crazy!” but when we look at shows cast purely on talent, ability and charisma such as Idol, Masterchef and So You Think You Can Dance a full fan of backgrounds appears on our screens without too much fuss.

Casting decisions in Australia drama remain corporate choices, instead of artistic, and corporate decisions are, by their very nature, safe. It is when the net has to be cast wider to non-professional performers/contestants that real diversity occurs, not from a talent pool narrowed down by rejection of the odd, the ugly and the ethnic.
Reality television, albeit unwittingly, is placing diversity on centre stage and we, as the audience, are lapping it up without realising, the days of sidelining ethnic characters to peripheral, supporting roles are over.
Masterchef served up very little beefcake, instead we will remember characters like Poh, Geni, Tom, Andre and Colombaris not so much for their ethnic backgrounds but for their personalities, passions, struggles, tears, journeys and courage.
If anything Masterchef has proven that Australia would rather watch a rice and seafood paella than a table full of party pies. Executive producers start cooking your time starts now.

Wogspeak

Wogspeak

One rainy day in 1972 a bus pulled up outside the Enterprise Hostel and we were here. I was ten years old. The Palomareses moved here en masse, four brothers and their families and until the age of ten I lived in a completely Spanish world, even Nat King Cole sang in Spanish.

On arriving here we lived at a hostel in Melbourne's outer suburbs, and we went to the local school which was still struggling with the influx of new migrants. A group of four Spanish boys sitting at the back of the class, and twice a week, we would go to one hour of special English. The rest of the week we would spend talking to each other at the back of the class in a language vacuum, getting told off by the teacher at regular intervals. The fact was, that there was nothing else to do, because nothing made sense.

We moved to Carlton in inner Melbourne, and it was like a migrant paradise. In Carlton in the '70s we weren't even ethnic, we were the dominant culture, everybody was from somewhere else, or if they weren't they didn't speak louder and slower to be understood.

I think I spent about two hours in a regular class in Lee Street Primary School before being put in a permanent special English class. Miss Cianci was gorgeous and one of us. That is, she understood personally English as a second language. A Turkish boy, Abraham, sticks in my mind; he was ten, short cropped hair, and wore a suit. I clearly remember teaching him to count to 20 and three swear words I already knew. It was here that the accent would have developed in an environment where we learned English from other migrants.

If I was to put a time line on this I'd say that it took the best part of two years to finally think in English. I had learned my times table in Spanish and I was in my late 20s, and still doing multiplication in Spanish. Some things are learned in one language, and never shift. Here is one to test the bilinguals listening: at the count of three, recite your mobile number in your original language. Ready? One, two, three. Hard, isn't it?

Now these days as I talk to my cousins, and believe me there are enough for a substantial study, I notice a variety of accents that range from a broad Aussie accent to thick ethnic accents, depending on the age at arrival, and various experiences. But no-one in my family has the classic Spanish accent of, say, Antonio Banderas, or Julio Iglesias or heaven forbid, Manuel, from Fawlty Towers. The cousins that arrived here young, say before the age of two, tend to obviously have the broadest Aussie accent. The ones with the thickest accents tend to be the ones who arrived at an older age, say 14 and up, and have Spanish or Italian partners. A couple who have married Aussie blokes and moved further up north have lost their accents altogether.

By and large, what we have is a Melbourne migrant accent that in some studies has already been branded as Wogspeak. Growing up in the inner city in Melbourne, our neighbours consisted mainly of Greeks, Italians, some Turks and later, Lebanese. And rather than each having their own accent, it was an accent that blended all into one new Australian accent.

It is an accent developed by kids whose English is not corrected at home, simply because English is not spoken at home, so a new set of organic rules have developed in the structure of speech.

The 'er' sound at the end of words became an open 'ah' sound, and the upward end inflection became the way to end all sentences. As in whateva!

The 't' sounds, softened to a 'd', you say 'tomato', I say 'damadas'!

Sometimes it leads to the creation of new words like 'la marketta' for 'market' or 'il moppo' for the mop. These words become such common usage here that we assume they were part of our original language all along, and when used back in Spain or Italy or Greece, relatives would look at you not like if you are from another country, but another planet.

Learners of a second language begin by perceiving the sounds of the second language according to the sounds of their native language. Most second-generation migrants in Australia would have been surrounded by their parents' language until, say, creche. And these sounds are beginning to set around puberty, and make them almost impossible for an adult to lose the original accent when learning another language. That is, it's not what you pronounce when you learn a new language, but the sounds one is able to differentiate. I still find it hard to see the difference between 's' and 'z'. I had to break down the word sound by sound, before being able to pronounce 'sausages'.

What's your accent, and who were your friends during your adolescent years? What we have in ethnic Australians, then, is an accent set by learning two languages at the same time and an almost random choice of what sounds we keep and which ones we do without.

If I'm catching up with Greek friends, it's not long before we fall into a vocal shorthand, or nowadays, a vocal sms, of phrases, gestures and arm gesticulations. I remember at high school, Harry Sharples was so animated we would hold down his arms as a joke until he would scream, 'Let go mate, I can't talk like this'. Every now and then I still go to Lygon Street to catch up with a schoolfriend of mine, and after a couple of minutes we always fall back into wogspeak, a collection of 'you knows', 'dis and dats', where elaborate words fall away to a subliminal understanding of our own language. The strange thing is that this particular friend of mine, Brett, is not from a European background but has grown up with the accent and falls naturally into it. It wasn't until I went to university and found myself in the minority that I found the way that I spoke was different.

And it's not just an ethnic accent but also a class accent where us second generation migrants regardless of education and success, tend to stay close to their original neighbourhoods. The closeness of these groups goes a long way to solidifying wogspeak as an established accent.

It is also an accent that has mellowed the Aussie accent. If a film about diggers was being cast today it would be hard to find young Aussie men with that accent of 60 years ago. In Melbourne it would seem that the mix has had more of an effect than in Sydney, where groups tend to stay closer to their neighbourhoods, characterised by the great divide of Sydney Harbour. Comedian Vince Sorrenti once said that growing up in Punchbowl he didn't see the Harbour Bridge until he was 18. Melburnians, though we still have pockets of one predominant nationality, tend to move around their city from one to the other with a lot more ease. Consequently I still hear the more Aussie twang in Sydney than I do in Melbourne. Sydney also has developed a wogspeak through its large Lebanese community, as shown in the TV show, Fat Pizza. Melbourne's wogspeak has been largely by the Greeks and Italians.

Also the Aussie accent has been toned down by mixed marriages. Where there is an ethnic accent and an Aussie accent in a household, the final voice would be a softening of the two.

I'm always surprised meeting second generation Spaniards, as usually it is not revealed until later in conversation, unlike meeting young Greeks, Italians or Lebanese. Spaniards tend to form smaller communities, which intermingle and marry into the main culture so that by the second generation they tend to be quite assimilated. Children's TV host, Monica Trapaga and her brother Ignatius Jones to 'out' just two.

Nowadays, though, I've kept my Spanish enough to work overseas. I always find it curious who reverts to their original language and who doesn't. My sister and I spent the first part of our lives completely in Spanish yet now, rarely if ever—actually we never speak in Spanish. Even when talking to my parents, we fall into that pattern that always looks so weird in films, of carrying a conversation in two different languages, my parents speaking in Spanish and we, my sister and I, answering back in English. With my own kids I truly find it hard to speak to them in Spanish at all, to the constant reminder from relatives that the kids should be learning Spanish. The only time that it comes out naturally is when I'm trampling around a messy house swearing, something which is now getting a bit embarrassing as they are at that stage of looking up the swearwords in the dictionary.

The truth of the matter is that when you are the only one in your house that speaks another language, you simply feel like you are talking to yourself, especially if you are comfortable enough in the new language.

Studies on wogspeak—yes it's been studied, dissected and classified—have found that instances tend to be more pronounced in second-generation Greek, Italian and Lebanese women, suggesting that culturally, these tend to be the groups that are restricted from mixing in groups other than their own. This was made popular by Acropolis Now and in particular, Effie, which in a way was the ethnic equivalent of Kath and Kim today, where the mainstream can relate to a sub-culture while standing apart from it. We all know that there is a bit of Kath and Kim in all of us, and sometimes we are just one g-string showing away from being them, just like ethnic audiences would admit to knowing someone like Effie. Yet most of were only a Kaluah and milk, and a slip of the hairspray-can away from being 'A rool embarrassments'.

Which brings me to the final example of wogspeak: the multiplying plurals. Comedian Gabriel Rossi talks about how he thought the shopping centres and clubs were naturally given plural names. 'Hey, are youse goings to Northlands, or Chadstones or Westfields; let's got for coffees and then go to the discos and then tomorrow we are going to the footies to see Collingwoods, and if it rains we can go to the movie'.

A few years ago I answered a phone call at a telethon. It was a very well-spoken chap who was wondering if I remembered him. His name was Abraham. Yes, the young Turkish boy who was a manager for a large whitegoods company. And he said, 'You taught me to count to 20, you bastard'. That was one of the swearwords I taught him. You know, he remembered the other two as well.

The ghosts of childhood past
First Person SINGULAR

Simon Palomares
THE last time I travelled through Springvale it wasn't as Asian as this. It was more ... Australian. Actually it was downright British. My memory turns the steering wheel and the car finds its way to the Enterprise Hostel. The car winds its way through a forest of new trees. I'm alone in the car but there is a little boy giving me directions. I'll never forget how to get there.

Gliding up to the driveway, the buildings jump out of my subconscious and place themselves one by one in front of me. Not a plate of glass is left intact and the sun glistens on the shards. Weeds pry the tiles apart and the old recreation hall, where Arturo, the boy from Puerto Rico, taught me to draw ships, has been burned out. The reception area is reminiscent of a Middle Eastern airport after a bomb blast.

One foot steps out of the car, the door stays open and the engine is running as my eyes drag me out. The perspective of the buildings is wrong, everything is too low. I crouch down to the height I was that day and the rush of memories knocks me to the ground.

The airbrakes squeal, the bus comes to a halt. We step down on to the wide reception area, out of the rain. My sister and I, new gabardines, holding hands. My mother and father are standing nearby, unable to take in all the new sights fast enough. It is 24 May 1972. In two days I'll be 10 years old and this is Australia. The four of us, two suitcases and a trunk, our whole world. Our whole world.

My sister's eyes look out from under her hood, the resemblance to my five-year-old son who is now the same age as she was then, is astounding. My father is the same age I am now. My mother looks around, "What next?" A cleaning lady walks past, looks at my sister and says "Hola! Hablas espanol?" My parents' faces light up and for a brief moment the fear - yes fear, that's what it was - leaves them.

The doors are locked, and through the broken glass and the weeds and the tall grass lies the basketball court and the walkway that leads to our room, Red B 13.

The cafeteria is a cavern of lino and debris. The smells of newly discovered dishes are gone but I'm still there holding up my tray, mutely pointing at different meals, signing to the lady behind the counter. Tea and water, as much as you could drink. I know Corn Flakes are poured in a bowl with milk because on the plane the air hostess showed me how to eat them when she saw me taking them out of the little box like potato chips.

At the far end of the hall the word "wogs" has been graffitied on the wall, and I smile at the irony of the word in my own life. I imagine the young kid spraying it on the bricks, and the faces of ghosts looking up from their trays watching the word form. W. Perplexity. O. Spoons float in mid air. G. Heads tilt. S. I think: "We left a long time ago; found lives, destinies. You, young man, are still here." The hiss of the spray can stops and the young man stands to admire his masterpiece, but the ghosts have gone back to their meals.

The word "cheese" is laying on the floor in the foyer. Cheese was number two and it used to sit up on the board under ham, number one; curried egg was number five. We used to line up here before school to pick up our school lunches. The system was simple in English. Five brown paper bags with two columns printed on them. One column for the number of sandwiches, one column for the corresponding number of the 10 choices of filling on the board.

The system was never translated and, more often than not, we collected empty lunch bags which the lunch lady quickly filled with spare sandwiches while she explained the system once again in English.

The word cheese is on the floor, written in stick-on letters on a perspex strip, but that's not the board I remember. On the wall now is a face sheet of card with the ten fillings written in Texta. It seems they had to replace it a few times.

The covered walkways lead to the different wings. Green, Red and Yellow. The colors have changed but the little boy is already halfway down what used to be the red block, and I arrive at the bottom of the stairs, down the second floor corridor to the room. Red B 13. Regardless of the new number on the door, it's this room, no question about it. One small bedroom to the left, one to the right, a toilet, a hand-basin.

The cupboards and the desk were fitted to the wall in the small living room and were made to last; they're still here but it was a bigger living room, I'm sure it was. The desk where my father put his typewriter, our first purchase in the new country. A typewriter?

The mattresses, one in the small bedroom, are not supporting each other against the wall in the living room. My mother and sister fell asleep on one of them that first afternoon while I went exploring and my father went searching. They awoke the next morning. How many people had spent their first night on those mattresses? How many had laid awake that first night wondering what they had done, what now? Staring up at a blank ceiling.

The view from the window remains the same, if a little tattered: gravelled driveways that haven't felt the weight of cars for some time and have gone flabby. The trees block the view now as they did then, offering little information about what lies beyond them. The hostel is empty, physically and spiritually. It was holding back for a pause in life. Existence had just ended or was about to begin. It supplied food, shelter and human contact filtered by a foreign language.

I'm back in the car, in the driveway where the bus pulled up that day. I don't know why the hostel has been left to ruin or if there are plans for its future. As the car pulls out to the West Road I thank it; I know I'll never see it again. The little boy is gone, no longer in the seat next to me, in his place is a perspex strip with the word "cheese" on it.