For too long Australia's media has failed to communicate First Nations political aspirations. This unique study of key Indigenous initiatives seeking self-determination and justice reveals a history of media procrastination and denial. A team of Indigenous researchers examine 45 years of media responses to First Nations initiatives, from the 1972 Larrakia petition to the Queen seeking land rights and treaties, to the desire for recognition expressed in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. The analysis exposes how the media frames stories, develops discourses, and supports deeper historical narratives that corrode and undermine the intent and urgency of Indigenous aspirations, through approaches ranging from sympathetic stalling to patronising parodies. This book will be useful to media professionals to improve their practices, to First Nations communities seeking to test media truth-telling, and by anyone seeking to understand how Indigenous desires and hopes have been expressed, and represented, in recent Australian political history.
About the Author: Andrew Jakubowicz is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and worked as a consultant researcher on this report. Since the early 1970s he has been involved in action research and race relations, and has been centrally involved in the development of materialist theories of cultural diversity. He has published widely on ethnic diversity issues, disability and media studies in the academic and popular press, and has published numerous books. Amy Thomas is an academic in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, where she was also a 2018 Shopfront Community Research Fellow. Her PhD research focuses on ideas of self-determination and assimilation in Indigenous bilingual schooling. For an essay on this topic, she won the Northern Territory Literary Award in 2018. She has published in academic and popular press, including Sexualities, History Australia, Crikey, Overland Literary Journal, The Lifted Brow, and New Matilda. Along with her colleagues she was awarded the UTS Vice-Chancellor's learning futures award for team teaching in 2018. Heidi Norman is a descendant of the Gomeroi people in north-western NSW. She researchers and publishes in the areas of NSW Aboriginal history and politics with a particular focus on land and its management and the Aboriginal administrative domain. Her Aboriginal Land rights in NSW study is a critical account of the interface between the Government's construction of Aboriginal interests in land and the emerging governance of those land and interests by Aboriginal citizens through their land councils.