Let’s Concentrate on Feasting
Robert Wood on Bluey
My friends, we’ll never carry off this plot to kill the prince.
Let’s concentrate on feasting.
Homer, The Odyssey
Without question, the seminal text of our times is Bluey. More than any other cultural product of the last ten years, Bluey binds together the imagined community, highlights the popularity of watch on demand, and reflects and generates the zeitgeist. Its popularity demonstrates this, but that does not account for its ubiquity at the level of discourse and commodity. Bluey is everywhere once you see it. Yet within that reality, we lack a critical consciousness of what Bluey actually means; failing to understand the semiotics of the scooter, the toothpaste, the plush toy in our daily lives let alone how we might unpack the actual animated show from which this stems. For a whole generation of children, their parents and carers, Bluey deserves to be read closely then, if only to help us know more about who we are right here and right now. That starts with acknowledging the suburban reality of where 87% of Australians actually live. Bluey if it lives anywhere lives in that heartland most of all.
The ABC-screened animation centres on the family life of four Blue Heelers who live in Queensland. It elevates their daily life to reflect on relationships, growth, and education. Topics include bin night, cricket, pizza delivery, imaginary games, school, bedrooms, garage sales, cubbies, and a range of other quotidian events. It is a text that examines our everyday living, our lifestyle rather than our class, our place rather than our race. This essay is the beginning of an attempt to understand the show and the phenomenon through an analysis of my favourite episode: ‘Curry Quest’ (series 3, episode 8). ‘Curry Quest’ is symptomatic of the series as a whole and also stands alone, and once we know what it does then we can look at the implications of Bluey for our politics at the moment.
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At its simplest, ’Curry Quest’ is about swapping meals with friends, but it negotiates this with reference to Homeric classical texts, including The Odyssey and The Iliad. The primary journey in ‘Curry Quest’ is undertaken by the father Bandit and his youngest daughter Bingo. They set off from home carrying a rogan josh and a Peshwari naan, with the intention of swapping it for a beef rendang cooked by their New Zealand border collie friends. Early on they meet Doreen, an elderly labrador neighbour waiting at the bus stop. Like a prophet of old, she warns them of a magpie in the park who has been swooping passers-by recently.
In a structural sense, this opening has a classical frame, yet its subject matter is uniquely local. The generational change has been the rise of home cooking by bourgeois fathers, especially with a broader Asian palette, hence the choice of dishes. Like this episode of Bluey, every father I know is the primary cook in their family home at the moment. It is a type of domestic labour where the gender stereotypes of old have somewhat broken down, and so this feels true most of all. Similarly, a magpie is, of course, the iconic bird we have, or rather, its status is so established that it is a familiar threat and obstacle to overcome in a suburban quest. When we meet the magpie, the shots are framed as a close-up and a long shot—a menacing beak and an action sequence showing a small friend of Bluey’s, the French bulldog Winston, being swooped. How this is presented recalls the cinematic conventions of horror as a genre, a kind of round-the-corner gothic in suburban miniature.
While Bandit and Bingo journey beyond the house’s walls, their mother Chilli teaches eldest daughter Bluey how to crochet. This recalls Penelope in The Odyssey weaving, unpicking and re-weaving the burial shroud of Laertes, and Helen and Andromache’s respective textile work in The Iliad at the onset and fulfilment of the Trojan War. The knitting here, just like in classical texts, suggests the passage of time through domestic labour, and the passing of knowledge between generations. The makers of the show signpost the Ancient Western tradition elsewhere, including in season one’s episode ‘Hospital’; while playing with his daughter, Bandit takes on the name ‘Telemachus’—the son of Homer’s Odysseus.
Once they pass the magpie, Bandit and Bingo arrive to swap their food. The other father is watering the lawn while the mother practices her face-painting ahead of a local school fete. Their daughter Mackenzie plays nearby. While the dads talk off-screen like warriors of old, Bingo shares an emotional understanding with the mum, opening up about the quest she is on while the mother shares her apprehension about the fete. In this scene, Bingo becomes aware that her father will be going on a work trip for six weeks, or ‘six weekends’. And so the curry quest becomes the frame around a smaller quest that is actually longer in duration, and will be briefly represented later in the show through a series of elliptical scenes including a plane taking off, a dinner without the father, a school fête with face-paint, a video call, a plane returning. Many of these secondary quests are presented mid-shot, framed in a different way than the magpie scenes, more familiar, more domestic, a banal opposite of the terror felt by our heroes when swooped from afar or up close when squared at.
Before this sequence of the quest within the quest, however, Bandit and Bingo must once again negotiate the magpie. They do so with the help of face-paint whereby eyes and mouths are painted on the backs of their heads, which do, in fact, scare the magpie and protect them and their new curry. Through the face-paint—and like The Odyssey and The Iliad— the reader is taken behind the curtain to reflect on adornment, on how one dresses and readies oneself for battle, and this is lingered over as a kind of feminised work. Only the border collie mother and Bingo are shown doing this even as Bandit also gets painted up. The episode concludes with the secondary quest, undertaken by Bandit alone as he returns to hug Bingo at the airport while Bluey watches on with her newly completed knitted scarf, the textile finished like the show and the journey it depicts, in neat narrative alignment.
Throughout ‘Curry Quest’, mother Chilli narrates what a quest is, providing an insightful audio commentary in a literary theoretical sense. In this, she suggests the structure of how a hero overcomes a challenge, what motivates a character, and the nature of good and bad in a revelatory sense. It is, in one way, a narration that does the work of self-understanding with the heeler mother being a Homeric poet in the most basic narratorial sense.
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Bluey is a phenomenon because it resonates. In our house, we watch two of the seven-minute episodes every morning. Usually this is while my wife does my four-year old’s hair. Occasionally my sixteen-month old and I will stay for the opening credit sequence with him dancing in my lap. I imagine this scene is repeated in hundreds of thousands of households every day. Like other artefacts of mass culture, the politics of this are complex.
When it comes to gender, Bluey has been praised for its aspiration to equality. The father and mother certainly seem more progressive than the roles assigned in other shows. More often than not, fathers in children’s television are disengaged, idiotic and patronising, both to their kids and partners. By contrast, Bandit is engaged, smart and fun; a fully rounded character who is a daggy dad but cool somehow, one who is present and has a place in the home and the children’s lives. Indeed, of all the characters, it is Bandit that is the revelation. There is no precedence in animation, or maybe even television. Not Homer in The Simpsons, not Stan in American Dad, not Peter in Family Guy, not even Stu in Rugrats. If there is an origin point, it is a generation of male presenters on Play School, which finds a corollary in Mr Rogers a generation prior in America. I think Bandit’s originality at the level of new representation has resonated precisely because he is so recognisable. It is a typology for a contemporary generation.
In a word, Bandit is an ‘earnest larrikin’. The larrikin as an archetype comes to Australia via the West Midlands of the UK, where it fell into disuse, before being widely adopted in Melbourne in the 1860s. In colonial usage, it was often associated with violent youth, but over time it was sanitised though never completely. It does, of course, come with raced associations too, precisely a type of whiteness that is revered but unable to be transferred. There are no ‘Sudanese larrikins’, ‘Vietnamese larrikins’, ‘Arab larrikins’ as Dutton or Morrison would have it, just good blokes from the Shire who riot a little when they need to in Cronulla. We know the larrikin most of all by his rooting and his drinking, the most well-known one being former Prime Minister Bob Hawke whose reputation was forged on the twin anvils of his well-publicised affairs and his world record beer-skulling.
Bandit, by contrast, has been neutered. He still has mates (‘Stumpfest’ s.2, e.6), likes a beer (‘Whale Watching’ s.3,e.22), romances his wife (‘Smoochy Kiss’, s.3, e.35), plays rugby (‘The Decider’ s.3,e.37), and knows how to BBQ (‘BBQ’ s.1,e.7). At a fundamental level however, Bandit’s libido is controlled and, if anything, he has replaced questionable sexual misadventure and low-key alcoholism for emotional labour with his children. He actually participates in the world of his kids and knows how to have a laugh that is not at the cost of anyone else. This is what makes him earnest. This includes dancing (‘Dance Mode’, s.2,e.1), birthday parties (‘Duck Cake’, s.2,e.43; ‘Pass the Parcel’ s.3,e.13), imaginary games (‘Daddy Robot’ s.1,e.4), and the park (‘Turtleboy’, s.3,e.30). Often he looks after Bluey and Bingo by himself, or invents activities and listens to them in an emotional sense (‘Daddy Putdown’, s.1,e.51). This is entirely unremarkable and not to be lauded, but it is new in television. As Bandit himself says of the swooping magpie: ‘he’s just trying to be a good dad.’
Bandit’s good-humoured and good-natured quality relies on a fundamental sense of fairness, a characteristic as mythologised in Australia as freedom is in America. That might be where Bandit does the work of pushing the show forward. He is always fair, and is an emotional centre where the reprimands are gentle and the apologies heartfelt. Yet it is not simply hagiographic. He stuffs up often and tries to do better. At times, he is lazy, reluctant, and angry as he exclaims his catch-cry of ‘biscuits’. Sometimes, Bandit is just plain bad at parenting, such as ‘The Pool’ (s.1,e22) where he forgets sunscreen, hats, snacks while going to the pool at his absent brother’s house. It is up to the mother Chilli to rescue him, to act as heroic saviour in the face of his impatient enthusiasm. These faults are indicative of a broader honesty in the show, a representational fairness held up by Bandit as a character as well. If anything, the writers make him more believable and more loveable as an earnest larrikin who is willing to have a go. That fundamentally good characteristic of fairness and effort comes through in all the microinteractions of the show, precisely because the folk politics of Bluey speak up to the mass of people that are our fellows. And, for all that, Bandit has been an able father since the birth of the girls if not before (‘Baby Race’, s.2, e.49). One of the most frequently recurring visual motifs features him horizontal and drooling from exhaustion. He lies down on floors, couches, hammocks, grass, beds, everywhere he can. In my experience, this dogged, in- the-bone, tiredness is the single truest thing about parenting young children. And so, Bandit’s calling card could be every parent’s, not only every father’s, and if you are not exhausted by it you are not doing it right. That it also rings true to his blue heeler identity seems a boon. Bandit’s role might not be the best we can aspire to when it comes to egalitarianism, but nonetheless represents a vast improvement on earlier models and most of his contemporaries, an attempt at fairness in gender relations, a recognition that domestic life takes effort.
It is this gendered reality that has caused the most scorn from the far right. Direct critique of Bluey has come in the form of Chip Chilla, which looks and sounds like Bluey, but is actually from Trumpian corners in the United States, the kinds of people who are offended by a mother like Chilli teaching her daughter to throw (‘Stickbird’, s.3, ep.41). In Chip Chilla, gender norms are re-asserted in a misogynistic way, especially when it comes to paid and domestic labour. Only the mother and daughter cook. More often than not, the father reads a paper at the table. It is a far cry from Bluey’s progressive softness let alone its beef rendang. It entirely lacks the good-hearted humour of an earnest larrikin like Bandit and the father remains entirely reprehensible. What they both share, however, is a suburban setting.
Bluey is a resolutely suburban show. All the lifestyle hallmarks are there—detached family home, big green backyard, SUV in the driveway, sport on television, trips to the park, craft beers, green and red bin, holidays elsewhere, and so on. People recognise this because it is so pervasive. And that is where the politics become a little thornier, a little more speculative. It makes me wonder what Bluey—and by implication the nation—thinks about suburbia as the banal expression of occupation. What does it mean for the suburbs to be our type of contemporary settler colonialism?
When we think of settler colonialism, we have to think of the material forms it takes. We have to think of its objective reality. And that means the suburbs. I say this especially with an awareness of the repeatedly successful fear-mongering from local right-wing figures when it comes to First Nations empowerment. It recalls that threat—they’ll take your backyard. This was a threat used during the recent referendum to deny First Nations people a Voice; a threat used during Mabo to deny First Nations’ land rights as advocated by the High Court; a threat used during the days of self-determination to deny First Nations people private property as well. I think it is a threat that works because it cuts so deep, a potent type of denialism.
In suburbia, private property is not only the dream, but the truism. A person’s home is their castle, where a castle has seemingly been hard fought for. A castle, like a family, is everything to the ordinary person, everything to a father like Bandit, and represents a type of sovereignty challenged by the ongoing presence of pre-colonial and pre-suburban ways of living. A lot of people simply want to concrete over a truth-telling past. The valence of this, at an intersection of both race and class, is what makes Bluey’s politics harder to understand. The Heelers live in a bourgeois world after all, but money and class are assumptions we make rather than need to articulate.
I do not think this quietude about settlement invalidates the show. It does not torpedo Bluey’s relevance or importance, or even its progressiveness. It helps explain its appeal precisely because it cannot articulate the unconscious amnesia in which the show itself lives. In that way, it is a true representation of a truthfulness that is itself grounded in falsehood. There are slippages where the nation state and hence the settler colony become explicit, like in ‘Cricket’ (s. 3, e. 47) which represents a soldier-father shown at an unnamed warfront where scenes are intercut with his son as the latter journeys to be an international cricketer. This episode ties sport to the armed forces most obviously. It makes it clear what the sacrifices are for, but it is jingoistic and does not do justice to the best traditions of larrikin irreverence and pacifist neutrality. The tone is too sentimental, a little nostalgic, a saccharine ANZAC-ification of both the army and cricket, and in that way the problems are aesthetic as well as ideological. It undoubtedly hit a chord though; Nick Miller claimed the episode ‘left Australians in tears’ in The Guardian; and on the fifth anniversary of the show in November 2023, it was voted the number one episode of all time. 'Curry Quest' meanwhile was a humble number 45, out of a possible 151. By comparison, the absence of thinking through First Nations issues, and maybe even history in general, makes one wonder if we have dirempted suburbia from the past, from settlement, from ongoing legacies of colonialism, as a whole, and what progress in this space might look like too.
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Bluey is best when it focuses on the small matters of daily life, the moments that are minor yet profound, common human experiences sprinkled with contemporary realities, episodes like the Homeric ‘Curry Quest’ in its reference to the greats that have stood the test of time. Thankfully then, Bluey has a seed of socialist realism to it—relevant and understandable to ordinary families; typical in representing scenes of everyday life; realistic in expressing who we are at a domestic level; and supporting an honest understanding of family relationships, including tensions about emotional and daily labour. And in the recognition that this minor key is the true arena of Bluey’s excellence, there is work to do, a type that has already been done by more marginalised people whose very personhood is political, whose definition of fairness includes telling the truth about our amnesias.
That does not mean the articulation of identity, nor a request for Bluey to become more activist or explicit, but it does mean we need to keep elevating the consciousness of lifestyle. Lifestyle does not have to build on a foundation of colonialiam, and equally, it does not have to lead back to the trauma of the past. They are in dialogue about what was here and what has been built, a lifestyle that is more than commodities, more than what is bought and sold, as if only the economy mattered to who we are.
We see this in ‘Curry Quest’ after all. What resonates in this episode, what should not be lost by ordinary viewers, is that it is a food being given and received. It is a gift economy of debit and credit, of faith exchanged between mates, and in that way, there is a profound nourishment to what is represented. A simple sense that life is what we make of it when we share what we have always known—that to be with others is better than to be without them, no matter your home, no matter if you once were alone.
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Works Cited
✷ Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, (New York: Norton, 2018).
✷ Homer, The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson, (New York: Norton, 2023).
✷ Bluey (ABC iView, 2018-2023).
Robert Wood lives on Whadjuk Boodjar. He is interested in non-violent direct action, parenting, and education. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean and is a Director at the Centre for Stories.