Introduction

In mid- 2015 a television advertisement for Western Sydney University (WSU) entitled ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ (Morrison 2015) went viral on YouTube, and eponymous star Deng Adut received extensive media attention, with one article claiming, ‘This extraordinary and moving ad for an Australian university is like nothing you've ever seen before’ (Thomsen 2015). The focus of the advertisement and subsequent media coverage was Adut's trajectory from child soldier and refugee to successful Sydney lawyer (see Thomsen 2015; Mottram 2015; Dapin 2016). The advertisement resulted in Adut giving an Australia day address in Sydney the following year, and to date ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ has garnered over 2.5 million views. Two other ‘Unlimited’ advertisements featuring WSU alumni were released simultaneously with the same soundtrack. However, to date neither has had even a quarter of the views of ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’.

From one perspective, ‘Unlimited’ is simply a universal story of loss, courage and redemption: the advertisement is a reconstruction of aspects of Adut's life, which evokes a Hollywood tear- jerker in both narrative structure and production values. Discussing production choices in Reality Television (RTV), Laura Grindstaff (2002, 260) has commented on the influence of ‘journalistic notions of what constitutes a good story, a dramatic event, or a compelling performance’. ‘Unlimited’ delivers all of this in less than one and half minutes. However, given the government's treatment of asylum seekers and a lack of ethnic diversity on Australian screens, the popularity of ‘Unlimited’ may also be partly due to the novelty of a Sudanese Australian from a refugee background starring in an advertisement. While this was a first for Australian advertising, a prequel of sorts was the RTV show Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration(SBS 2014). In each episode of the six- part documentary series, participants, whose lifestyles and beliefs contradict each other's, spend 10 days living together. Immigrationfeatures Abraham Nouk, a Sudanese- born slam poet, and Nick Folke, a white, self- described ‘race realist’ who is opposed to African immigration to Australia.