Australian property is theft: environmentalism and settler-colonialism in children’s television

This article revisits the environmentalism of children’s television of the 1990s and early 2000s. I focus on two examples representative of this era: Round the Twist and The Genie from Down Under and read them through the lens of Nicole Seymour’s ‘bad environmentalism’ (2018), which deploys humour, absurdity, excess, irreverence, and perversity to challenge the whiteness and heteronormativity of the mainstream environmentalist movement. Both programs demonstrate a productive eschewing of ‘good’ environmentalisms predicated on sentimental engagements with nature, instead offering strange, queer, messy and disturbing environmentalisms. This is valuable in expanding our understandings of what environmentalism should look and feel like. However, I question the extent to which these programs are able to undermine whiteness in the settler-colonial context of Australia. I do this through exposing an ambivalent politics of property. On the one hand, the bad environmentalists formulate resistance to large-scale developments that pose an environmental threat. On the other, the characters assert their right to a native ‘home’ and fabricate a deeper imprint of whiteness on the land. This means the bad environmentalism of these programs, while bold, promising, and worth reactivating in the present, is contained within a limiting structure of settler environmentalism.