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Performing poverty: if you live in the ''Zoo'', you learn to play to the audience.

Article Excerpt
In the zoo

In 1994, the coordinator of a job program in Mount Druitt developed a support group for long-term unemployed adults. The organisation that helped fund the project asked if he would mind showing the results of his efforts. As he told me about what happened, his wife, a local teacher, joined in:

Paul: So, we had a visit. The visit was from a private girls' school, thirty of them, and they had a walking tour of the centre, you know, 'Come and see unemployed life in Mount Druitt'. It was terrible. I've got grown men and women, as well as young kids, and it must have made them feel so low to have these two groups of girls traipsing through and asking 'Tell me why you're here', 'Why are you unemployed?', you know.

Ella: Why were they there?

Paul: It was part of their social studies unit, to give them an idea of what unemployment looked like.

Ella: That's like the zoo, isn't it?

Paul: I was disgusted.

I have no doubt that the schoolgirls were serious and interested in what people had to say. But that hardly seems the point. What disgusted Paul and Ella, and might disgust others, was unemployed people being put on display.

Performing poverty and explaining your behaviour are hardly new features of life in the 'badlands'. I was aware that workers and residents were mostly hardened to the continuing demands of the stage. For workers, there were always new managers to educate or new staff to 'break ill' at what were then called the Department of Social Security (DSS) and the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). For residents, there were public meetings or community consultations, new social workers--'You have to sniff them out, have a bit of a laugh, see what they say, you know'--and new community project teams, or new researchers like me. If anything, residents were less troubled by the performance of disadvantage than workers. They prided themselves on their ability to discomfit outsiders and took a good deal of enjoyment in stories of 'mean streets':

People at work, some of them have had the silver spoon in their mouth all their life. They reckon they wouldn't even get out of the car if they came over here.

They think we've all got knives or something. Just one big riot, that's our Bidwill.

Look poor

In a 1977 story about the Olsen Place Gang published in the Melbourne Herald, the reporter realised the pleasure her characters took in bravado: Ray and Wayne, the two boys she interviewed, 'recognise the responsibility to "perform" to the admiring crowd'. Unemployed they might have been, but Ray and Wayne were articulate enough to provide a few good lines. Yet she didn't grasp, or perhaps didn't convey, the fact that she and the Melbourne readers for whom she was writing were part of the crowd too. If you live in the 'zoo' you learn to play to the audience. Criticisms of poverty news and poverty knowledge tend to emphasise deficient policies or inaccurate public understandings. It is just as important, however, to...

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