TV

Britain’s Culture Secretary Wants Netflix To Remind People ‘The Crown’ Is Fiction

Case in point, the "Terra Nullius" episode.

by Merryana Salem  30 November 2020

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Season 4 of everyone’s favourite Wikipedia page dramatisation is causing waves once again, as Britain’s Culture Secretary called for Netflix to include a disclaimer that The Crown is fictional.

Britain’s Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden said that The Crown is a “beautifully produced work of fiction” and, “should be very clear at the beginning it is just that”. Dowden apparently fears, ” a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,” and Twitter was not having it.

While Mr Dowden’s lack of faith in viewers’ ability to tell the difference between a documentary and period drama is hilarious, I do think Mr Dowden has a point about The Crown‘s potentially inaccurate representations of history, and how potentially irresponsible it can be.

Let’s take a look at Season 4’s Australia-set episode, ‘Terra Nullius’, its representation of the 1988 Royal tour, the absence of Aboriginal people, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

For starters, none of the episode was filmed in Australia, but in Malaga in Spain. The Crown‘s production team passes off  Spain as Australia’s iconic landscape pretty well. Not to mention the VFX used to create the Opera House and Uluru are pretty impressive.

Netflix was sure to point out on Twitter that no one in the episode actually climbed Uluru, and that climbing it is no longer allowed. The production team even included archival footage of Reggie Uluru, an Elder with ties to the Pitjantjatjara Anangu and Mutitjulu nations, and a key activist in the fight for banning climbing of the sacred site.


This is all commendable, but as a Wonnarua woman, I felt The Crown‘s acknowledgement of Aboriginal people started and stopped with this inclusion of archival footage, and donation to the Mutitjulu community. Especially, in light of the episode’s title and what is actually in, or rather WHO isn’t in the episode.

‘Terra Nullius’ is rife with inaccuracies regarding Bob Hawke, and the exclusion of Aboriginal people. Despite their near-total absence in the episode, when Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited Australia, they did in fact visit with Aboriginal people and communities.

Most notably, they visited Darwin’s Museum of Arts and Science and the 1988 Aboriginal Pharmacopoeia Project. There, they were met with six Aboriginal people from local communities and viewed Aboriginal art and artefacts in the museum.

Omitting the leg of the Royals’ 1988 tour which held their most notable interactions with Aboriginal people, and titling the episode after the doctrine the British Empire utilised to genocide Aboriginal people is, in the very least, deeply neglectful.

The episode also features recreations of interviews with Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. Specifically, an interview he gave in 1988 about the Royals visiting and Australia’s possible future as a republic. As Four Corner‘s Twitter page pointed out, The Crown‘s recreation of this interview gets the date, location and even dialogue of the interview incorrect.

Also, in 1988 when Charles and Diana visited, Hawke became the first prime minister to promise a treaty with Aboriginal people after he co-signed the Barunga statement. When he died in 2019, he was fondly remembered for his efforts by many Aboriginal elders for his allyship to Aboriginal communities.

To have an episode of a historical drama set during this specific period of Hawke’s reign as Prime Minister and neglect to mention his relationship to Aboriginal people, or Aboriginal people at all, is again, irresponsible, at best. To have a scene in which he disputes Terra Nullius without mentioning the Aboriginal people is, at best, a fiction.

If you had told me yesterday, my staunchly anti-royalist self would spend my Monday morning agreeing with Britain’s culture secretary’s opinions on The Crown, I might have laughed in your face.

The Crown should have a disclaimer that it is fiction, but not for the sake of the Royals as Mr Dowden believes — for the sake of transparency about whose version of history is being presented, and acknowledging what and who didn’t make the cut.