Each year dozens of communities across Australia hold festivals for thousands of participants.

These events ouze culture as Australians show off the song and dance of their heritages.

Food, theater, speeches from community leaders and competitions add to the colours of the festivals which are essentially self-contained powder-kegs of ethnic entertainment waiting to be shared to the wider communities.

However outside of newsbites these festivals are largely ignored by SBSTV despite offering cheap content from willing communities.

With a single camera and a talented presenter SBS could produce a series showcasing each of these festivals in condensed one or two hour formats.

Outside of the festivities these shows would give Australia’s ethnic broadcaster the perfect opportunity to understand and explore the life and struggles of ethnic communities as well as promote participation by the wider audience.

Interviews with local leaders in native language could be subtitled in English to also provide multi-language content on the cheap.

In Melbourne alone the following festivals happen each year:

• Antipodes Greek Festival
• Johnston Street Spanish Festival
• Melbourne French Festival
• Holland Festival of Melbourne
• Tesselaar Tulip Festival
• Buddha’s Day and Mutlicultural Festival
• Polish Festival
• Thai Culture and Food Festival
• Williamstown Macedonian Festival
• Turkish Pazar Festival
• African Music and Cultural Festival

11 episodes based on those festivals alone of cheap, meaningful content are available for SBSTV and it’s about time they followed up and recognised these community efforts!

A bit of context

Australia is a multicultural nation but even it’s multicultural broadcaster fails to support the nation’s fading diverse ethnic communities.

SBS radio does a wonderful job, day-time SBS Television broadcasts much loved news programs from around the world, but prime time SBS does not provide adequate multi-lingual programming.

The SBS board itself has faced criticism regarding their lack of diversity so as a participant of a non-English, non-Anglo community I thought I could offer my help to fix their Prime Time television problem in a series of short articles.