If you had a career that began in Melbourne and went on to span a multimillion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster and a billion-dollar genre franchise, you’d expect the Australian media to be lining up at your doorstep.

Not so for James Wan, the hotshot Malaysian-Australian director behind the cult horror brand Saw – a franchise which grew to global domination over the course of a decade and seven sequels.

His first step into the superhero genre, 2018’s Aquaman, became DC’s highest-grossing film ever. But back at home, Australian media don’t seem to be considering him within the league of famous, “true blue” Aussie directors that make headlines, such as Baz Luhrmann, Peter Weir and George Miller.

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This mainstream media erasure of Australian people of colour isn’t a new phenomenon, but it recently inspired a well-shared Facebook post from a Sydney-based actor who asked, “Why isn’t Aussie mainstream media profiling and celebrating Aussies of colour doing great things in showbiz around the world?”

In the wake of the post and the discussion it generated, Junkee profiled James Wan, digging into Wan’s Australian identity and how it has shaped his films. (“In the US, discussions around representation [have] been going on for a while, so it makes sense that the US is quicker at embracing diversity,” he said.) The New York Times, meanwhile, published a piece about the Asian-Australians looking to Hollywood to escape the comparatively white sphere of Australia’s entertainment industry.

Each article had a similar through-line: Australia’s screen industries aren’t giving people of colour the opportunities they need to flourish at home.

But the recent coverage was a Band-Aid over another structural issue: even if these people become successful abroad, Australia doesn’t seem to claim them.

‘Our’ Pang and ‘our’ Viswanathan

A 2018 study by UCLA found a growing and direct correlation between top-grossing films and diverse casts, with the most racially and ethnically homogenous casts in the study performing poorest on average at the box office. And with the commercial success of Jon M Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians – a film featuring the first all-Asian cast from a major studio in 25 years, including Australians Chris Pang, Remi Hii and Ronny Chieng – the conversation around diversity seems to be changing.

But gaps in Australian media coverage of its talent suggests otherwise. These omissions include newcomers like Pang, Hii and Chieng as well as Keiynan Lonsdale (Love Simon, CW’s The Flash), Natasha Liu Bordizzo (The Greatest Showman, Hotel Mumbai) and Jordan Rodrigues (Lady Bird, The Fosters). They also include established Hollywood players like Wan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘With the commercial success of Crazy Rich Asians, the conversation around diversity seems to be changing.’ Photograph: Sanja Bucko/PR Company Handout

So why doesn’t the media want to celebrate these actors’ Australianness? The media regularly, proudly crowns “our” Cate, “our” Baz and “our” Nicole (who, for the record, was born in Hawaii). Is it another symptom of our under-resourced outlets? Is it because their audiences tend not to identify non-white immigrant Australians as our “own”? Or is it the fault of primarily white media institutions that overlook them, consciously or otherwise?

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The reality is Australia is diverse. The 2016 census found that for the first time more Australians born overseas come from Asia than Europe. By neglecting Asian-Australian stories, the Australian media may not just be failing any ethical obligations for diversity; they may – like Hollywood – be missing out on a huge potential audience, too.

Of course Cate, Baz and Nicole get all the attention: by now, they’re world-class celebrities. But how do you make a celebrity? It involves an investment by Australia and its media in talent when it becomes successful abroad.

Margot Robbie’s small but breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a prime example of not just how a star can be made, but of the Australian media’s priorities. Publications followed Robbie closely, selling her as the traditional “blonde bombshell” starlet by drawing on the sex and nudity in the film. But the narrative fed into the idea that you need to be conventionally attractive, and white, if you want to be crowned Australia’s next “golden girl”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Geraldine Viswanathan, a cast member in Hala, poses at the premiere of the film at the 2019 Sundance film festival. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

It seems difficult to see that same phrase applied to Indian-Swiss, Australian-born Geraldine Viswanathan – deemed a “breakout star” in the John Cena comedy Blockers, but who was mostly profiled only by regional Australian news outlets.

The radio silence stretches on, despite the fact that at age 23, Viswanathan has already added to her CV the TV show Miracle Workers (with Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi), the upcoming feature Bad Education (co-starring with Hugh Jackman) and the Sundance hit Hala.

If we are starting to shift the way we talk about diversity, and if the film industry is starting to recognise it profits from better on-screen representation, it’s essential our mainstream media gives space to Australian people of colour creatives to let them break that ground.

Exposure is important not just for audiences who have a whitewashed understanding of Australia, but for those who, like me, don’t fit that mould. Watching #AsianAugust take the US by storm last year with the triple-threat release of Searching, All The Boys I Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians, made me feel seen by the film industry for the first time. Second-generation immigrants were finally being represented in a way that showed our lives to be as multifaceted, complicated and riveting as the white culture that often dominates us.

So let’s start talking about the Viswanathans, the Wans, the Bodizzos, the Pangs. Give them the platform to become the new Blanchetts, Luhrmanns, Kidmans.

They deserve it, as do we: the Smiths, Williamses, Patels, Nguyens and Zhous.