AustLit

'This paper addresses a previously unconsidered history-that of Aboriginal characters in Australian soap opera. Rejecting critical approaches that have obtained even into the 1990s, it refuses to judge these characters as 'good' or 'bad' manifestations ofindigeneity. Rather, using the idea that genre is a way of closing down interpretive possibilities, the paper looks at the manner in which generic expectations around soap opera produce particular valences for these representations of Aboriginality. It points to the many ways in which these indigenous characters are insistently constructed as liminal in soap opera's structural commu· nities-simultaneously inside and outside of the group. And it accords with Jakubowicz's (1994) suggestions about the ways in which Aboriginal people are positioned by wider social discourses' (Author's abstract).