First Contact: SBS program creates a frenzy on social media after viewers react to controversial show

Updated

The premiere of the controversial program First Contact on SBS on Tuesday night has prompted a social media frenzy.

The show takes six non-Indigenous people who have never had contact with Aboriginal Australians and places them in Indigenous communities for the first time.

Accompanied by Ray Martin, the group spend 28 days immersed in Aboriginal culture as cameras capture their reactions.

"Over the next 28 days you and I are going on an amazing journey around this country of ours," Martin told the group of participants.

"You are going to see it in a different light. You're going to get a sense of what it must be like to be an Aboriginal Australian. But let me tell you it's not going to be an easy journey.

"You're going to be shocked, you're going to be confronted.

"I think it's going to be a real emotional rollercoaster."

Sandy, a 41-year-old mortgage broker, told Martin at the beginning of the show that white people had better genes.

If they are spending dole cheques on booze, don't give them their dole cheques. When it comes to brains, white people have a better gene, a better make-up. Sandy, 41, mortgage broker.

"If they are spending dole cheques on booze, don't give them their dole cheques," she said.

"When it comes to brains, white people have a better gene, a better make-up.

"If you're out there and you're looking at f**king kangaroos jumping past and snakes and goannas, build a fire, how much more can you learn?

"If you think it's racist – I don't f**king care."

On her first night with Aboriginal hosts she said: "I'm not staying. I can't, I can't. I know what happens on those mattresses, and they all sleep on them with all their sweat and all their partying and all their boozing and their yahooing and I ain't sleeping on it. It's dirty."

Sandy quit the show halfway through.

Jasmine, a 33-year-old mother of four who receives welfare payments to help support her family, said she did not believe Aboriginal people should be entitled to more welfare than white Australians.

"Because they've got the actual title as an Aboriginal - that entitles them to more say like welfare, like housing, free housing, free loans, so they get a lot more," she said.

"I reckon the Aboriginal people get four times more than the amount we get."

On her first night with an Aboriginal family where her hosts put on a BBQ, Jasmine said: "I was thinking that traditional Aboriginal people would be eating like bugs... not like steak, and chops and salad and chicken."

Other contestants included supermarket worker Bo-Dene, 25, food nutrition student, Alice, 31, law enforcement officer, Trent, 28, and part-time photographer Marcus, 23.

The second episode in the three-part series airs on Wednesday night.

Topics: aboriginal, television, community-and-society, australia

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