Australia Nearly Wins a European Contest

MAY 15 2016 · 12:00

Dami Im · "Sound of Silence" · Australia · 2016 Placement: 2nd · Language: English · Composers: Anthony Egizii, David Musumeci · Venue: Globe Arena · Host: Stockholm, Sweden · Type: upset · Broadcast: HD On the night of 14 May 2016 at Stockholm's Globe Arena, a Korean-Australian singer stood alone on a small white plinth, as though suspended in space, and made the best case Australia had ever made for belonging. Dami Im — already a reality-TV star at home — sang 'Sound of Silence' in the voice of someone using the instrument at about sixty per cent of its capacity and still overpowering the room. The staging was deliberately minimal: a single figure, a descending pillar of light, a widescreen of stars. It looked European in the Scandinavian sense — clean, cold, unsentimental. By the time she hit the bridge the broadcast's camera cuts had slowed, as if the director was himself briefly persuaded. When the split-scoring came in — 2016 was the first year the jury and televote totals were revealed separately — Dami Im topped the jury vote with a large margin. Then the televote arrived. Ukraine's Jamala took the public across twenty-six countries, and Australia, which had led for most of the announcement, slipped into second. It was the highest finish any non-European country had ever achieved at Eurovision, and the closest any Asia-Pacific entrant has come since. Australia had been invited as a one-off guest in 2015. After Stockholm, no one talked seriously about disinviting them again. Context Australia's Eurovision participation began as a 60th-anniversary novelty in 2015, pitched by SBS, the Australian public broadcaster that had obsessively aired the contest since 1983. Expectations were that 2015 would be the end. But 2016 marked Australia's first year as a full participant with the right to compete across multiple years, and 'Sound of Silence' was chosen through an internal selection by SBS rather than a public final. The 2016 contest was also the year the EBU rolled out split jury-televote scoring — a structural change originally designed to increase suspense and reduce televote blocs, which in Stockholm produced the first genuinely cinematic vote reveal the contest had ever televised. Jamala's '1944' sat on the Ukrainian-Russian front line of that year's politics; Australia's ballad sat comfortably outside it. Legacy Dami Im's second place remains Australia's best Eurovision result. 'Sound of Silence' became the country's most-streamed Eurovision track and defined the SBS-era Australian template: high-craft ballads, Australian-Asian vocal leads, staging-forward productions. The split-scoring reveal that decided the night has since become Eurovision's standard voting format, and is often credited to 2016 for making televote reveals appointment television. Australia's continued participation after 2016 stopped being controversial and settled into routine. Mythology Many remember Dami Im as having 'lost' — she did not; she finished second with the highest-ever Australian score. People also misremember that the jury alone decided the vote; in fact, 2016 was the first year the jury and televote were split on broadcast, making Dami's lead and Jamala's late surge the structural template for every vote reveal since.