Australian accents on screen: Yeah-nah or nah-yeah? - The Big Smoke (2024)

Apparently Aussies hate hearing Australian accents in film and media. Is it just cultural cringe, or does it “speak” to a broader issue?

Do Aussie accents make you cringe?

Performances of Australian accents in films and TV shows have ranged from the praiseworthy (think Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker, Dev Patel in Lion, or Liev Schreiber in Mental) to the cringeworthy (think Quentin Tarantino in Django! Unchained or Robert Downey Jr in Natural Born Killers). Historically, it was remarked that Australians experienced “cultural cringe” in relation to Australian accents and their use in public arenas – a “recurring if not permanent crisis of self-esteem” as linguist Scott Kiesling put it in 2011.

However, commentary has shifted away from this notion of cultural cringe in recent years, and it seems that our collective distaste for Australian accents on-screen may rest largely, or indeed solely, with portrayals by non-Australian performers. Discussing interviews with young Melburnians in her book Folklinguistics and Social Meaning in Australian English, linguist Cara Penry Williams notes that “it is common to hear people complain about the type of accents heard in Australian characters in film and television produced overseas […], perhaps recognising what is most distinctive for representation is often a poor match to everyday experience.”

Author and commentator Julia Baird sums it up bluntly:

“What Americans – and to a lesser extent, the British – fail to recognise is that as much as they mock us, they are almost constitutionally incapable of imitating the Australian accent, no matter how often they repeat “G’day, mate!” Even the great Meryl Streep failed to capture it when she portrayed Lindy Chamberlain in the 1988 movie “Evil Angels”, about a woman whose baby is killed in the Australian outback. The line remains famous for its melodrama – “The dingo’s got my bay-bee!” – but in Australia it’s also famous as a reminder that even Hollywood’s greatest stars cannot master our way of speaking.”

Why do authentic Australian accents matter?

Authentic and representative portrayals of Australian accents are important: the performance industry and the media that we consume play a key role in creating and reinforcing social stereotypes that are associated with ways of speaking. Two key linguistic concepts are relevant here:

indexicality: where certain speech features or accents convey elements of our socialidentities, whether consciously or subconsciously – for example, using a long “ah” sound in words like dance, plant, example can indicate to listeners that you grew up in Adelaide, but also can indirectly link to social notions of feminine speech or higher social status;

enregisterment: where speaking styles become publicly cemented as representing particular social personas – think of Paul Hogan’s ockerisms being associated with “true-blue” Australianness and characteristics of the “larrikin”.

This all ties in with what researcher Lydia Hayes calls the “dialectal meme”, or “the perceived cultural identity features that are triggered by hearing [an accent]”. In a way, how we hear an accent becomes a representative “meme” of the people who speak that accent.

So how does this relate to performed Aussie accents?

The linguist Nikolas Coupland has noted that “mass media are the main contemporary means of constructing and consuming ‘difference’.” If we think about entertainment markets that are predominantly English-language markets, such as the United States or the UK, Australia’s own market is arguably smaller, and it’s plausible to think that Australian voices in performance form part of that “difference” within the international space (although, the tour de force that is Bluey appears to be making in-roads for Australian accents).

In her book, Penry Williams argues that our identity issues may partly stem “from a tension between media-generated representations of ‘Australianness’, in striving for market uniqueness, and everyday experiences.” In essence, international portrayals of Australian voices tend to highlight a stereotyped “rural Australian” sound (think again of Paul Hogan, or Steve Irwin), which may not be reflected in many Australians’ accent realities.

So if we, as social beings, associate particular accents with certain personas or characteristics, and media such as TV and film play a large role in our exposure to different ways of speaking (and therefore to our perception of these personas or characteristics), we can see why it’s necessary that those representations – indeed, representations of any accent – are acceptable. So then why are Australian accents on screen not always…that good? If we have costume designers, set designers, lighting and sound technicians, production designers, location scouts, producers, directors, stunt performers, hair and makeup artists, foley artists – surely someone is in charge of accents? That’s where the dialect coach comes in.

Enter the dialect coach

It’s probably important at this stage to explain what it is a dialect coach does. As linguist and dialect coach Brendan Gunn states, “[dialect] coaches are employed to teach an accurate reflection of a speech system, which is not exaggerated and is part of a convincing character background.” Part of their role, Gunn asserts, is to identify the community of the accent that a performer needs to learn (i.e., “who speaks like this”), and then analyse the sociolinguistic structures underpinning that community’s ways of speaking (i.e., “how do they speak”).

Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that complete accuracy in a target accent is not the overarching goal here: instead, a key consideration is clarity or naturalness for the audience. Linguist Dominic Watt similarly argues that the qualities of sounding natural and sounding authentic are not interchangeable, and instead it may be better to “focus on maintaining the illusion of ‘naturalness’ at the expense of complete accuracy.”

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Gunn nevertheless argues that character voices and accents in performances should be grounded in an understanding of the linguistic reality of how such characters might speak, not based on stereotype (one of the aims of some of my own research with Australian English). And yet, as renowned dialect coach Leith McPherson notes, dialect coaches are frequently one of the last members of the crew to be hired, and often given only little time to work on accents with the cast. It’s perhaps not unexpected, then, that the accents may not always be as believable as audiences (and indeed actors) might like.

Moving forward: Let’s broaden what counts as “Australian”

And is it all just to do with non-Australian actors? Could there also be something about how Australian actors are trained? This is the question voice and dialect coach Amy Hume sought to address in a 2021 journal article, as she noticed that mainstream and “cultivated” Australian accents were both implicitly and explicitly encouraged within the drama schools she has worked in, with an inverse explicit or implicit discouragement of “broad” accents of students from rural backgrounds. It could be that a push toward “standard” Australian accents in actor training, with a contrasting portrayal in wider media of Australian accents as stereotypically rural, Anglo, and/or “working-class”, may arguably skirt the reality of accent nuance among Australian speakers.

Indeed, the interviewees in Penry Williams’s book link their conceptions of “self” with being perceived as average or unmarked – the kind of normie vibe that Kate Winslet has been widely praised for in her performances of Australian characters in Holy Smoke! and The Dressmaker.

On the whole, however, there is a growing call for representation of a more diverse range of Australian voices on our screens. Amy Hume notes in her article that the Australian theatre industry has shown a push toward showcasing Australian characters using ways of speaking associated with various ethnocultural communities, as well as performances that celebrate First Nations voices and languages. On screen, such diversity is both welcome and yet still growing. Celebrated linguist John C Wells noted way back in 1982 that “the closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions” of accent differences. Perhaps we can continue, as Australian audiences and industry members, to advocate for, to promote, and to celebrate different Australian accents and voices in the media we create and consume.

Australian accents on screen: Yeah-nah or nah-yeah? - The Big Smoke (2024)
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