When we win, our culture wins' : community ascription and autonomy at the Deadlys

Awards for and by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and an atmosphere that felt like home – participants cherished the Deadlys because they were a context for the production of lived moments of Indigenous self-determination. And yet the program also positioned itself in relation to domains beyond Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia, in ways which were sometimes playful, sometimes knowing, and sometimes controversial. ‘Forget the Logies – It’s the Deadlys!’ read a 2003 ad in the Koori Mail, invoking those other famous Australian popular vote awards (Koori Mail, 27 August 2003, p. 39). Officials and others referred to the Deadlys via a range of descriptions which drew upon the prominence and easy legibility of this and other award programs: ‘our version of the Logies’, ‘the Black Oscars’.41 Organisers, moreover, were consistently attentive to opportunities to secure the interest of non-Indigenous media and publics, with the televised broadcast of the Deadlys on SBS (from 2003) particularly instrumental in improving the awards’ capacity to reach a national audience. Gavin Jones was explicit about the influence the Deadlys could have beyond Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, observing ‘we can be, and are, role models to all Australia’ (quoted in Keegan 2012). But cultural awards as a format have long been ‘intertwined with the apparatus of colonial indoctrination, and widely deployed to that end in schools and colleges’ (English 2005, p. 265) – an association which was decried in a letter to the Koori Mail that aligned the Deadlys with the ‘arbitrary judgments’ Indigenous people in Victoria have been subject to ‘by government and popular opinion since 1834’ (Brown 2010).