Having woken (barely) from my exhausted state after work last night, my numb mind drifted towards the Film Vic website to see if anything exciting had been recently posted. Accidentally, my mouse hovered over the Audiences link which lead me to view the Resources page. It was here I uncovered a treasure trove of information related to the relationship between Australian audiences and Australian film. Clicking on the first link, I discovered the results of a recent survey conducted in 2010 "AUSTRALIAN FEATURE FILMS, FICTIONAL TELEVISION AND DOCUMENTARIES: The results from our
Roy Morgan Research."
Scanning through the document, there were a number of key statistics which I found not just interesting, but also slightly worrying. The first positive sign was that it does seem that Australians are watching traditional formats of television and film, with the report stating that of the 660 participants within the survey, "66% of people stated that they watched feature films at least monthly and fictional television at least weekly." When weighted for the size of the Australian population, this number becomes inflated to 11,838,000 Australians. WOW. So there's a potential there for the Australian film industry to prosper at least (compared to previous thought where the belief was that there just was no audience at all for film and TV and we would instead have to appeal to a different online audience)
Not surprisingly, the report states that "about a fifth of regular viewers do not watch any Australian television programmes or Australian documentaries (20% and 18% respectively), yet only 8% of regular viewers do not watch any Australian feature films." Whilst these figures aren't tremendously worrying, we do need to take into account that that figure represents approximately 2,500,000 Australians, Australians who go to the movies. Add on the remainder of the population who DON'T go to the movies or watching television regularly and you have a much bigger proportion of the population who are not engaging with our Australian content than those who are.
The final interesting point of the survey, and something I have been harping on about recently, was found in the observations part of the document. Here, the writers state how "The results of Roy Morgan’s research also bring into question the importance of content origin to viewing choices. It appears that Australian audiences may have less knowledge of, or be less concerned with, content origin. Also, Australian audiences seem to have a far broader definition of what is “Australian” content than the screen industry itself."
I'm finding more and more these days that a move for the industry towards more co-productions between Australian and other international filming industries is the only way our industry is going to survive. The bottom line is Australia is just in capable of returning the investments placed into film and as a result of this, the stigma surrounding Australian film production is constricting the practice before its even begun. Australian's have just never been big movie fans. America defined this term and it's use in popular culture I believe is what drives their industry. Australians lack this "fandom" associated with film. We are far more interested in other hobbies and it is these activities that we place more of our energies into. Therefore, if more Australian productions teamed up with American or English investors, and lost the Australian label, I feel that whilst this would be a sad omission of origin, the Australian film industry would ultimately discover more success.
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