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AfterEllen.com Down Under: Lesbian representation over the years on “Shortland Street”

Ruth Callander is a New Zealander living and writing in Melbourne. She hopes to cover stories from both sides of the ditch. Tweet tips about the things you want to hear about to @RuthCallander.

“You’ll never guess what’s been happening in triage. Apparently everyone’s a lesbian!” – Shortland Street Receptionist, 2011

There’s this thing that happens at my house on week nights when my housemate Sarah comes home from work.

Sarah: Oh it’s 6:30, Neighbours is on!

Me: Ergh, Neighbours. Back in New Zealand, where everything is awesome, Shortland Street is way cooler and better in every way than Neighbours.

Sarah: Shh, it’s starting!

[Silence for approximately 45 seconds.]

Me:  Pfft, you call that drama? This one time, on Shortland Street, Donna and Rangi continued to have an affair even after they found out they were half-brother and sister; it was amazing! Oh, or this other time, a truck crashed into the hospital reception and killed approximately half the cast in one go. It was such a magical Christmas special.  

Sarah:  Why don’t you back to your own soap opera, where you belong?

Trans-Tasman relations aside, I genuinely miss the seven o’clock ritual viewing of my birth nation’s soap. It’s not just the melodrama, ridiculous chain car-crashes and violent serial murders that occur each and every time the actors’ contracts come up for renewal. What really warms the cockles of my heart is the fact that every night at 7 p.m. on weeknights, households up and down the country settle in to watch long-running, central gay characters live out the exact same storylines as everybody else. Whether it’s falling in love, having sex, giving birth, dealing with family problems, being cheated on, or getting murdered and left in the freezer of your local family restaurant, gay characters and straight characters on Shortland Street are treated in exactly the same way.

The show is set in the fictional Auckland suburb of Ferndale and is based around the lives of the staff and patients at Shortland Street Hospital. The soap first aired on New Zealand television screens in 1992, making it the country’s longest running drama and currently one of its highest rated. The significance of the show to New Zealand culture could probably be summed up by the fact that previous guest stars have included not one, but two Prime Ministers of the country (Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark). The show also screens in the UK, Ireland and Australia. In 1993, during the second season of the show the first gay male characters were introduced, and in series three (1994), Shortland Street had its first lesbian storyline including the first of many onscreen lesbian kisses. But that’s not all.  

Here are just a few of the things I’ve seen on Shortland Street over the years:

– Six different combinations of lesbian couples kissing

– A gay man going down on another man in bed

– Five entirely separate ‘coming out to your family’ stories

– One lesbian civil union

– An out asexual character

– At least two bisexual main characters (one male, one female) whose relationships with men and women have been treated equally by the writers

– Actors who generally fairly accurately reflect the cultural and ethnic background of the New Zealand population, including numerous main characters who were of Maori, Pacific Island and Asian descent.

– Te Reo Maori regularly spoken between characters, without subtitles.

– Seventeen-million ridiculous over-the-top deaths, every possible combination of hospital storeroom hook-ups and enough rare medical disorders to put House to shame.

All of these are reasons why no matter how ridiculous the writing, how wooden the acting and how recycled the storylines are, I will always love Shortland Street, completely without shame for the rest of my days (and why Sarah will always hate me every day at Neighbours o’clock).  The soap opera I grew up watching portrayed frank storylines provoking national discussion about abortion, rape, alcoholism, prostitution, mental illness, addiction and incest, and on the other hand positively celebrated people from a wide range of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds as well as a full variety of sexual orientations; I wouldn’t have swapped it for the white-washed world of Neighbours for anything.

Picture yourself in 1994. Oh right, fine, you were busy being toilet-trained, learning to eat solids, or getting yourself born back then to pay much attention to television, so picture me in 1994 instead. I’m thirteen years old, my teeth are a little too big for my face, and we’re right in the middle of third form art class when someone says, “Oh my god, did you see Shortland Street last night? There were lesbians kissing on it!” and my little pre-gay self awoke, whispering insistently to me, “Imagine if they invented this thing called the Internet and then someone else created another thing called YouTube. I’d be all over that business with the fan vids right now.” 

Only, the Internet wasn’t invented yet and so I had to run back to the television and wait with bated breath for a little bit more local lesbian action. I remember that day with incredible clarity. Still Life of Pumpkin lay forgotten and my art career was over, but at least now I knew that lesbians existed and some of them even lived in New Zealand!  

This is what I missed out on:

Annie Flynn (Rebecca Hobbs) is a hot nurse that the long-running character Chris Warner (he’s still there today, in fact) has a crush on, but it turns out she’s immune to his charms because she’s a great big lesbian homosexual!  Instead she falls for Dr. Warner’s other love interest, Meredith Flemming (Stephanie Wilkin), and goes on to kiss her on-screen before the two of them run away together to that hotbed of lesbian sin, Dunedin.

While this story arc was relatively brief and played out in a way that if you were cynical (like me) you’d suspect was all about the viewer titillation, the next storyline was a lot more emotionally invested.  During the 1999 lead-up to her wedding to boyfriend Al Dubrovsky, popular character Nurse Caroline Buxton (Tandi Wright) became increasingly drawn to her new friend, Dr. Laura Hall (Larissa Matheson).

While Laura was initially planned to be Caroline’s bridesmaid, Al was eventually left at the altar as the two women fell for each other instead. Caroline and Laura’s relationship was portrayed as highly romantic and included passionate onscreen kisses as well as a post-coital scene of the two cuddling in bed, wearing nothing but sheets. The story alas, did not end well, with Caroline eventually falling pregnant to her (totally lame) bad boy ex-boyfriend Greg Feeney and making the decision to move away with him.  And Laura? Yeah, she died.  

I won’t lie to you: I spat tacks about that decision. I threw my toys and vowed never to put my trust in Shortland Street writers ever again. Killing off the lesbians or returning them to men was one thing, but when you also know that at any given moment they could just up and send your favourite gay characters to Dunedin of all places, the trust just dies. (Sorry Dunedin! I’m sure you’re perfectly lovely, but my sister lives there and she once met one of her girlfriends because that was the girl her current girlfriend had cheated on her with, which pretty much describes how small the scene is there. Am I right?)

2004 – 2010

However, in 2004 Shortland Street did something unprecedented. They introduced a lesbian character and they kept her, front and centre, through good times and bad times, in sickness and health, for the next seven years. Show me another soap opera, from anywhere in the world that has done that? Anna Julienne played character Maia Jeffries, who moved to Ferndale from a stint in Australia, to take up the position of charge nurse at Shortland Street Hospital.  

Arriving along with her was her partner Jay Copeland (Jaime Passier-Armstrong) who was initially planned to be a temporary character on the show for three months, but due to the massive upswell of support for the two characters amongst the viewers, Passier-Armstrong’s contract was renewed and Jay Copeland also became a central character for the next three years. During their time onscreen together, the couple were subject to all the typical soap opera storylines: they broke up, were reunited, argued, cheated, kissed, planned babies, went to bed together, and their big romantic civil union was screened on New Zealand television on Valentine’s Day 2006.  

Jay cheated – with a man – and yes, Maia got artificially inseminated, with sperm from a dude who had feelings for her, and yes after they broke up Jay was murdered by a serial killer and the viewers mourned and raged. But this, after all, is Shortland Street. It’s truly what happens to everyone and lesbianism does not exempt you.  

Maia continued on as a main character for the next four years, first kissing straight character Brooke Freeman (Beth Allen), then falling for a new nurse, Nicole Miller (Sally Martin).  Nicole and Maia’s relationship was quite sweetly portrayed, and during Nicole’s coming out story arc, caused accidental offence to the city of Tauranga, when her character made an off-hand remark about her hometown being homophobic. Such is the influence of Shortland Street that Tauranga’s tourism board immediately felt the need to put out a press statement that Tauranga was in fact, extremely welcoming to gay people, while TV3 News interviewed various members of the local community absolutely enraged at the insinuation that they might not welcome any and all TV lesbians with their arms open wide, thank you very much.

2011

In 2011, Maia cheated on Nicole with a new female doctor, Jennifer Mason (Sarah Wiseman), prior to her final exit this year. Nicole has continued on as a main character and is currently involved in a relationship with a man. However her character is still referred to as bisexual and she’s in good company; one of the very first gay male characters – Jonathan McKenna – has returned to the show after 15 years, causing huge outrage initially as he was rewritten as bisexual and dating a woman. His current storyline however, revolves around his attraction to a younger man. There is no need to panic you guys! This after all, is Shortland Street, where things turn on the flip of a coin, over and over again and that is precisely why we love it.  

While the presence of queer characters on Shortland Street waxes and wanes, to my mind the show is still er, streets ahead of most soap operas across the globe, if for nothing more than the sheer number of queer male and female characters and the depth and centrality of their storylines. What strikes me is that if you’re a young queer woman in New Zealand, then ever since the early nineties there have been visible lesbian characters on the country’s most ubiquitous television drama; whether you’re of the Annie/Meredith, Caroline/Laura or Maia/Jay generation, there’s been someone there who reflects you. And that very simple fact saves lives.  

This show is watched by school kids, their grandparents and by whole families after dinner, every week night at seven. It’s about a million miles from perfect and the storylines are usually entirely divorced from reality, but it constantly highlights to the nation that queer people are everywhere – falling in love, murdering people and having their sister’s partner’s children – just like everybody else.  

Does anyone else remember when Carla killed Bernie, actually with a candlestick? When Rachel got drunk and called good Christian character Rebecca a slut even though she was dead and they were at her funeral? When Rachel was hit by lightning and it gave her temporary brain damage so she thought Nick was attractive, until she got zapped again by a faulty light switch and it cured her just in time before she slept with him? Did anyone else watch Lord of the Rings and say, out loud, in the movie theatre, Hey look, there’s Lionel, owner of the muffin cart?

Please share your favourite ridiculous Shortland Street moments and bask in your glorious Nuw Zullundness with me. You’re not in Guatemala now Dr. Ropata! Yeah, I miss you Shorters.

Thank you to AfterEllen.com reader Aquila whose blog and catch-up tips helped form this article.

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