Voice Over:

Please be aware if you’re Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, you should know that this episode contains the voices and names of deceased persons.

Amy Thomas:

First Nations in Australia have had extraordinary patience in the face of extraordinary denial. In the words of Yothu Yindi’s song Treaty, Aboriginal people have repeatedly seen promises can disappear, just like writing in the sand. This is the fourth episode of Black Stories Matter and I’m Amy Thomas, a researcher at UTS.

Amy Thomas:

In this podcast series, we’ve talked about how the media has repeatedly failed Aboriginal political aspirations. Without a doubt, we need structural change in mainstream media’s reporting of Aboriginal self determination. In this episode of Black Stories Matter we’re going to be hearing from leading Aboriginal journalists who face these barriers from inside these newsrooms. Kamilaroi woman Ella Archibald-Binge is the Indigenous Affairs reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

It was a massive shift from working at NITV with predominantly Aboriginal journalists and then to be the only one in the newsroom, it was a shake up. I just felt this weight and responsibility to get it right from the framing of the stories, to the delivery, to interactions with community. It would be beneficial to have someone that you can turn to when you’re by yourself in the newsroom and you’re writing it you just think, “I just wish I could have a second pair of eyes on this.”

Amy Thomas:

And Lorena Allam a descendant from the Gamilaraay and Yawalaraay nations is The Guardian’s award winning Indigenous Affairs editor.

Lorena Allam:

Yes, things have changed. Some things have improved, but it’s only because of the hard work, persistence and emotional labor of a small number of Aboriginal people who’ve managed to stick it out in big, unwelcoming, difficult, sometimes racist white institutions.

Amy Thomas:

Lorena also worked at the ABC for over 20 years.

Lorena Allam:

What needs to change and what has changed incrementally is the structure of places to accommodate Indigenous voices and to step back and say, “All right, well, you mob are the experts on this story or you know what you’re doing, we’re going to leave this to you.”

Amy Thomas:

But creating structural change takes work from everyone. It’s what needs to happen if the media is going to take Aboriginal self determination seriously. So how do we do it?

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

There’s no quick fixes. Here. It’s going to take courageous listening by non Indigenous Australians because these truths are painful and involve the righteous indignation of Aboriginal people.

Amy Thomas:

Dr . Anne Maree Payne is our final guest in this discussion. She’s a sessional academic and researcher in the School of Social and Political Sciences. And her research also covers how the understanding of Aboriginal history plays a part in achieving justice. Our guests have had front row seats to what’s gone wrong in Australian media reporting. In this conversation, they help us understand how Aboriginal perspectives were silenced and how media institutions could make things right.

Amy Thomas:

I will start by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on whose lands I live, work and learn. As I’m hosting this on behalf of the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Hub at UTS.

Amy Thomas:

I would also like to acknowledge the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people upon whose ancestral lands UTS stands. I’d also like to pay respect to elders past and present and acknowledge them as traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.

Amy Thomas:

Welcome to the seminar, we’re going to focus on the media’s relationship with Aboriginal concepts of self determination and sovereignty, what is changing and what can change to facilitate the urgent shifts that we need in how Aboriginal stories are told in the media. And this obviously comes at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement around the globe is breaking open a whole number of conversations about dominant white perspectives and leadership across society. And we’ve seen that reflected in discussions about the Australian media that we’ve explored over this series of our seminar. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker.

Amy Thomas:

Lorena Allam is from the Gamilaraay, Yawalaraay peoples of Northwest New South Wales. She grew up listening to stories of her family and cultural history and this love of stories and her fascination with storytellers led Lorena into journalism. Lorena has worked in the ABC has worked at the ABC for nearly 30 years before she took on her current role as Indigenous Affairs editor of The Guardian. So the Lorena developed one of the case studies in the book when she examined the media reporting around the 1988 Barunga Statement. So in 1988, the 200th anniversary of Arthur Philip’s seizure of land Aboriginal groups presented the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke with the Barunga Statement, which called for a treaty. So Lorena I’d like to ask you to speak now about your insights in that chapter on how the media understood and reported on the Barunga Statement and the notion of treaty or treaties, that sort of political melee that follow that you cover in your chapter, and what has and hasn’t changed since then, in your view.

Lorena Allam:

I live in work on the land of the Gadigal people whose sovereignty was never ceded and I pay my respects to their ancestors and elders and I pay my respects to my ancestors and elders of the Gamilaraay and Yawalaraay nations of far northwest New South Wales. So as Amy said, my case study involved looking at the media coverage of the Barunga statement in 1988, which I found was really a study of a erasure unfolding in real time. The Barunga statement was a really profound call for self determination, a call for land rights, for compensation, for dispossession, for the protection of sacred sites, for the return of human remains, and for all the human rights that are afforded to us by international law. It’s sought a national elected body, national land rights, a recognition of customary law and the negotiation of a treaty.

Lorena Allam:

It was a very sophisticated and powerful statement of sovereignty and aspiration. But I found in the study that within days of its release it had just become a source of conflict between the major political parties, the subject of a lot of opinion and misinterpretation and it was really minimised and misrepresented by opinion makers and by the media at the time. And Aboriginal voices were obliterated in the mainstream. But of course, Aboriginal media was alive and very well at the time and so presented an almost parallel view of that whole era. The context for Barunga was 1988, which was representing a potential turning point between First Nations in the Australian settler colonial state.

Lorena Allam:

So in January, thousands of Aboriginal people from all over the country came to Sydney to protest against the Bicentennial. The Treaty 88 campaign was launched and in June of that year at Barunga, which is on Jawoyncountry about 300 KS east of Katherine in the NT, the two big land councils gave the Prime Minister at the time Bob Hawke the Barunga statement an historic declaration of demands and aspirations that a lot of time and effort had been spent on its carefully worded statement. And of course, the imagery, the art that surrounded it, Bob Hawke co signed it, and set a deadline for a treaty as the end of 1990 and we all know that didn’t happen.

Lorena Allam:

The major obstacle was already within days, there was this strident and very dramatic opposition by the hard right of the Liberal Party. In particular, John Elliott, the President and then opposition leader John Howard. There was this thing called the Free Enterprise Association, members of which were graziers and cattlemen, mining executives and others. They took out a full page added in the Sydney Morning Herald to denounce the process of treaty making and to state facts like, Aborigines have more legal rights than other citizens. So it’s totally untrue, still untrue, but it was there that that kind of alternate fact narrative began to be formed and adopted by the hard right. And then a lot of that set the tone for conservative responses to our aspirations from ’98 onwards and began to appear in the media without interrogation and the things that we still hear today.

Lorena Allam:

So when I’m looking at the coverage of Barunga, analog era, there were three major newspapers the Oz, the Herald, The Daily Telegraph on the mirror we looked at the four day period immediately after Barunga was presented to Bob Hawke. Was only a very brief period, but the reportage moved really dramatically. We looked at who was quoted, how important the article was, how prominent it was in the news cycle, what elements that reflected about us whether we were given agency as fully rounded human beings or whether we were just stereotypes, and then it’s important to look at it in the context of the media landscape at the time. There was newspaper, there was print and there was radio and TV.

Lorena Allam:

The audiences of all of these were white and mainstream. Aboriginal people weren’t ever really considered or catered to as consumers of media. But there were a few Indigenous print outlets like the Land Rights News, which was produced and is still produced by the central northern land councils in the NT and Aboriginal Community radio was any is really strong. So Radio Redfern was broadcasting from Sydney during ’88 was a real beacon for everyone gathering protest and really helped kick off the careers of a generation of Aboriginal media makers. So Aboriginal media at that time occupied a very different space and served a very different but important purpose to present our voices to us.

Lorena Allam:

We were talking to ourselves in our languages about issues that mattered to us. And in a sense, they were really parallel media landscapes operating then in 1988. But it’s due to those Aboriginal media makers that the voices of that time survive the era because so few of them were in the mainstream. In terms of the Barunga coverage it shifted very quickly within days. To go from what were the interests and demands of those people gathered at Barunga to the impact on politics in Canberra. While photos weren’t really a part of our analysis, there was one on the front page of The Herald that really struck me because it shows Galarrwuy Yunupingu, then chair of the Northern Land Council. He’s painted in full ceremonial gear.

Lorena Allam:

And so he’s standing above Bob Hawke, who’s sitting cross legged on the ground, he’s handing him what the caption of the photo says is a bark painting. In fact, it’s the Barunga statement. And it’s just struck me as really symbolic of the kind of coverage that was made at the time, and that this hugely significant artefact, that Aboriginal people have spent a lot of time and effort and thought and care in creating. And it is kind of minimised in such a way that it’s a back painting when we know of course, that it was a statement of law, and that the whole exchange is framed as this sort of friendly exchange of art, which I thought was symbolic of the coverage of Aboriginal Affairs at the time and still is present in a lot of the coverage we see today.

Lorena Allam:

In that coverage of Aboriginal people we are the cultural and ceremonial people from the bush who may be even a bit naive or idealistic about our chances of effecting change. Or we are the angry radicals who are willing to engage with the enemies of the West, because part of the coverage at the time also was that Michael Mansell, and a group of people were heading to Libya to talk to Colonel Gaddafi and the media considered this scandalous. So in the end, we become a quite colourful backdrop for a political drama that goes on in Canberra, and Bob Hawke has become the target. So he’s raised expectations too high with this promise of a treaty. Nobody’s going to make it easy for him, including the media. And so the narrative is one of conflict rather than discourse. And very quickly, the issues come a fight between the right wing of the Liberal Party and Bob Hawke, and Barunga itself.

Lorena Allam:

The message of it, the meaning of it, the intention of it is very quickly sort of buried under this cut and thrust of daily politics in Canberra. And a lot of the opinion about it at the time is white politicians, white journalists, white opinion leaders who don’t go back to any of the original leadership. At the time no one is quoted at length, we become the Indigenous or the Aborigine we’re kind of silenced about something that is so fundamentally important to us as people and we very quickly have very little agency. But of course, Indigenous media is operating in a very different way. Firstly, we’re speaking to Aboriginal audiences and that conversation is very clearly one of a process of negotiation, the kind of resetting of the relationship with white Australia.

Lorena Allam:

And it’s a long game, people aren’t talking about this as just a couple of days of argument in Canberra. This is a long term battle that people are fighting. Indigenous writers show a real understanding of constitutional law and the functions of government, people are debating which sections of the Constitution to amend and what form of language that amendment might take. There’s a strong historical understanding of the context of Barunga. The mainstream Michael Mansell was portrayed as this dangerous radical, but in Indigenous coverage at the time, there’s a really respectful debate among all parties about various approaches to progress, whether it’s the treaty 88 campaign, or the message of Barunga. Indigenous media is capable of presenting these sometimes competing ideas in a really eligible way. There are the sort of Ad Hominem attacks that you see in the kind of cut and thrust of Canberra journalism. And another thing, the key thing that struck me about it was that Land Rights News had been going for quite a while by then and it had a national circulation and subscription base, and it quiets the original leadership extensively.

Lorena Allam:

So it wouldn’t have been impossible for mainstream newspapers to find those public statements and reproduce them, it just seemed to me that the willingness or interest just wasn’t there. Barunga we know the significance of it now that the mainstream at the time within the space of a few days had just turned it into a political football and the more extreme views of the right began appearing that we still here today. And I think the effect of that diminishes Aboriginal self determination, obviously, but it also gives white Australia the opportunity to dismiss it as another argument in Canberra, about which they’re confused, and there’s definitely uninformed.

Lorena Allam:

So very few people understood what Barunga was, the media didn’t really take time to explain it. It just ends up being another drama of unresolved Indigenous affairs. And to consumers of the media it always seems that those matters are difficult and confusing and some sort of battleground when of course, the battleground is manufactured in Canberra is certainly wasn’t a battleground out at Barunga. At the same time, Indigenous narratives are quite reasonable and thoughtful. They’re concerned with explaining a unified message or a variety of messages to their constituents. One of the key differences between now and then is that the barrage of opinion we see in mainstream media now wasn’t there. So they weren’t any think pieces written. There was no historical context. There were no follow up questions. We were silenced very wholly, and the language was appalling.

Lorena Allam:

We were described as de tribelized, as scattered as doomed and voiceless, these are actual quotes from the coverage at the time. So it made me think about Yothu Yindi’s song Treaty where they sing about promises disappearing, like writing in the sand. And certainly 1988 was very much a perfect example of that in mainstream media. It took four days for the Barunga statement to just evaporate in the mainstream media, it stopped being of interest depressingly quickly.

Lorena Allam:

One of the significant changes from that era is that that Aboriginal media has grown stronger. We have so many journalists now working in the mainstream and in Aboriginal media, in television, radio, in newspapers and online. So I’m really heartened and proud to see that Aboriginal media has powered on regardless of the way the mainstream has really failed us consistently over the last several decades, and it really is an example of self determination because what could be more self determining than turning on a microphone and speaking, unfiltered before yourself to your mob in a way in a time and in around subjects that you decide are important?

Amy Thomas:

I think it’s so interesting to think about how the context of the Barunga statement and all the discussions about treaty making and self determination contained in it have to some extent reemerged in discussion today around the Uluru Statement or the state based treaty processes. But as you say, some of the media context has shifted quite a lot, not least the kind of growing number of Aboriginal journalists whose work is focusing on some of these themes. So that holds some potential to shift the discourse. But one of the key things that’s been advocated in the other Uluru Statement and elsewhere, and this is what our next guest and Anne Maree Payne will speak to is the concept of truth telling about our past in order to secure justice today.

Amy Thomas:

Dr. Anne Maree Payne is a sessional, academic and researcher in the School of Social and Political Sciences at UTS, where she teaches a range of subjects relating to gender, diversity, citizenship and sociology. So Anne Maree, your chapter in the book focuses on the discourse of practical reconciliation through the ’90s in the 2000s, the supposed rejection of symbolism by the political right and how that was kind of covered and reported in the media at the time. And much of your own work concerns how Aboriginal history is understood in the service of achieving justice. So I wanted to give you a chance to talk a bit more of that and share your thoughts on the connections between justice and treaty making and the idea of truth telling.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So it’s a real honor and privilege to be speaking with you here today. So I guess just a little bit of background about myself, who I am, where I come from. I’m a non Indigenous Australian, and I was born on the lands of the Wiradjuri people in Griffith in New South Wales. And I’m currently working here at UTS on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners and pay my respects to Indigenous elders past, present and emerging. So I’ve worked in the higher education sector in Australia, and in the UK for the past 30 years and most recently been working as a sessional academic here at UTS. And I was involved back in 1993 in developing UTS’s very first Aboriginal employment strategy, and I’ve had a long interest and involvement, working in collaboration with Aboriginal people on Aboriginal employment, education and reconciliation initiatives.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

And as Amy said, I completed my PhD a few years back exploring motherhood in the Stolen Generations. And one of the things I’m really interested in is how even within a human rights process, such as the Bringing Home Inquiry, certain truths can be omitted and certain voices can be silenced. And I think that’s one of the challenges that we’re going to have to face when we talk about truth telling in the Australian context. So I guess just as a little bit of background about some of the points I want to make about truth telling today, truth telling has emerged from restorative justice and it sort of came to the fore because traditional justice was seen to be giving primacy to perpetrators and the victims often faded into the background. And so truth telling was designed to really foreground the experiences of victims and to give them a role in justice processes.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So in the late 20th century, in what’s been described by some as an age of apology, truth telling sort of emerged in the field of transitional justice as an important component of resolving differences in post conflict situations. So during the 1990s a number of truth commissions were established around the world with the Bringing Home Inquiry being the main Australian example of this type of institutional truth seeking process. So right at the outset, I guess I want to acknowledge some important some constraints on the idea of truth. So in human rights discourse, truth is often seen as being closely linked to healing, but as I’ve seen in my own research about the Bringing Home Inquiry and as others have noted in international context such as speaking about the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, the link between truth and healing depends very much on the context in which you can speak your truth and also on how other people respond to the truth that you are telling.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So as we saw in Australia in the context of the Howard government’s response, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say lack of response to the bringing them home report in the 1990s, sometimes truth telling doesn’t lead to acknowledgement and healing, but in fact to denial and further traumatisation. And this was something that I saw in my analysis of practical reconciliation in our book on whether the media is failing Aboriginal political aspirations. So in the context of the Howard era, Aboriginal people were blamed for their disadvantage, as there was no recognition or acknowledgement of the role of colonisation, dispossession, systemic poverty caused by white laws and policies in creating the contemporary circumstances that Aboriginal communities face.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

I think this is why truth telling is so important that we have a full understanding of how the history is so present and relevant today. So there’s a bit of a concern amongst theorists in the field of transitional justice that truth can be a substitute for justice. So some of you may be familiar with the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated apartheid era political violence in South Africa. And it’s often referred to as sort of this paradigmatic truth commission that all other Truth Commission’s aspire towards. But if you actually look at what happened in the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission perpetrators received an amnesty in return for telling the truth about their role in the murder of anti apartheid campaigners.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So that meant that they couldn’t be prosecuted for their crimes and so Stan Cohen, has argued that we discover the truth about the past in order to achieve justice in the present. So what we’re looking for is truth and justice, not truth instead of justice which is what happened in the South African context. As I’m sure all of you are aware calls for truth telling emerged, or maybe it would be more accurate to say reemerged unanimously from the regional dialogues which were part of the consultation process leading to the Uluru Statement from The Heart. What’s interesting to me here is that the calls for truth telling emerged spontaneously from the grassroots if you like, they were not on the Referendum Council’s agenda for these consultations, because truth telling doesn’t involve or require constitutional change to take place.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So this wasn’t part of the of the Reconciliation Council’s agenda, but yet this came forward from every single regional dialogue. So one of the guiding principles that ended up informing the Aboriginal dialogues was that a reform option such as constitutional change, should only proceed if it tells the truth of history. So this was seen as vitally important to the Indigenous people participating in these regional dialogues. Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis have noted the truth telling has not been absent in the relationship between Indigenous and non Indigenous Australia. They point to colonial murder trials such as the Myall Creek massacre case, parliamentary inquiries into killings and massacres, more recent commissions of inquiries such as the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Bringing Them Home inquiry.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

Public acknowledgments of past wrongs by our political leaders, including Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Redfern speech and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, Native Title processes require historical proof of Aboriginal peoples continuous association with their country. There’s been academic historical accounts, reconciliation literature, films, television series, songs, dance, theater, the recording of oral history and the massacre map project a really significant initiative last year just to name a few of the forms truth telling has taken place. But despite this seeming plethora of truth telling that we’ve seen in Australia the process remains ad hoc, piecemeal and lacking an overall coherency at the national level.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

In terms of the Uluru Statement from The Heart, truth telling is seen as an essential aspect to help redefine the relationship between Indigenous Australians in the state and the Joint Committee on the constitutional recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples final report describes truth telling involving multiple dimensions as a foundational requirement for healing and reconciliation, a form of restorative justice, a process by which Indigenous people can share their culture and history with the broader community and build a wider understanding of the intergenerational trauma caused by past in justices and contemporary issues.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

The report noted contested history the fact that there’s going to be arguments about the truth should not be a barrier to truth telling. Instead, it argued truth telling should seek to provide an honest account of history from all perspectives. So I just want to note here that there’s a duality in the notion of truth telling in this report. It seemed to encompass the historically negative impact of colonisation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but it’s also seem to be a celebration of the wonderful, amazing culture that Aboriginal peoples have to quote from the report. So why is truth telling so important and why has it been such a consistent and central demand for Indigenous Australians?

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

Reconciliation Australia’s, reconciliation barometer recently identified that around one third of Australians are either unaware of or reject significant aspects of Australia’s colonial history, including frontier massacres and the forcible removal of Indigenous land and children. Despite decades of curriculum reform the most common reaction of non Indigenous students undertaking the Aboriginal history elective I teach is why didn’t we know? So is it that we don’t know or is it that we’ve forgotten? Are we averting our eyes? Do we not want to know some of these difficult truths? So we need to have recognition of the role played by the media and the education system in truth telling and truth telling needs to be led by Indigenous people, but it has to be inclusive so that all Australians can understand the truth and the complexity of our past.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

Okay, so this is a really important aspect. So we don’t know a lot while there’s been demands for truth telling we don’t know a lot about what forms or what truth telling mechanisms might take in the call for voice treaty and truth from the Uluru statement. What are the truth telling? What’s the Makarrata commission going to look like? So previous research has told us that not all Indigenous Australians may be ready to share their stories or their truths with the wider community. And Maori academic Linda Smith has highlighted that special measures may be required to minimise the trauma caused to Indigenous peoples by asking them to remember painful past histories. So this is a complex matter.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

Truth telling, of course, requires listening and an empathetic audience. And it’s been noted that deafness of the colonizers to Indigenous speakers is one of the necessary conditions of a colonized society. So Linda Smith also highlights as Lorena has mentioned, that sharing knowledge is a long term commitment. There’s no quick fixes here. It’s going to take courageous listening by non Indigenous Australians, because these truths are painful and involve the righteous indignation of Aboriginal people.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

So courageous listening requires empathy for the experiences you’re hearing, a willingness to admit that your previous understandings and perspectives may have been wrong or incorrect and an openness to change. So one of the key questions that I’d like to leave you with is how do we build empathetic listening amongst non Indigenous Australians so that we can truly hear the truths that First Nations people are offering and work towards a more just future?

Amy Thomas:

Thanks so much, Anne Maree think that really actually brought me back a little bit to what Tanja Dreher was discussing in our previous seminar around the idea of listening and part of what goes along with truth telling is not just these things existing so much as ways that non Indigenous Australians engage with processes of listening and then doing something with that listening. What kind of processes and people undertaking and responding to calls to actions. But I also think your point about the kind of long term patience that’s required of those engaging in these processes is something that our next panelist’s work speaks to.

Amy Thomas:

So Ella Archibald-Binge is a proud descendant of the Kamilaroi people of Northwest New South Wales. She began her journalism career in regional newspapers before spending around six years reporting for NITV and SBS, she is now the Indigenous Affairs reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, where she spearheads the Dalarinji project, which documents the lives of First Nations people, through a series of news features and multimedia with the support of the Judith Nielsen Institute. Ella, I’ve followed your work on Aboriginal justice most recently, and deaths in custody and I think it’s quite clear that you as a journalist are taking the time and the space to do the kind of long form reporting on these issues that we don’t often see very much focused on centering Aboriginal voices in stories that concern them.

Amy Thomas:

And I think this seems in contrast to what we often and what Stan Grant was saying when he spoke in one of our seminars, the drive towards crisis and conflict in the media. Your work perhaps is more in line with the concept of truth telling and patient exploration and explanation that Anne Maree outlined. I’d like it if you could share with us some of your methods as a journalist and the work that you’ve had to take and the challenges that you face in doing this in the media landscape.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

Yeah. Thanks Amy. Thanks for having me on. I’d just like to start by paying my respects to the Cammeraygal people on whose land I’ve been living and working for the last few months. As you said, I’m a descendant of the Kamilaroi people on my dad’s side. I’m from Northwest New South Wales. Almost a year ago, The Herald and The Age hired myself and a photographer, Rhett Wyman, who’s a Palawa man who actually grew up in Queensland like me, for a new project that was focused on documenting the lives of First Nations people.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So we had a pretty broad brief to start off with. It was funded by the Judith Nelson Institute, which gave us a really unique chance to do some traveling to get out remote and regional while we could, and to spend a decent amount of time in those communities which is something that is rare these days. So we kind of… From the outset, we sort of sat down and thought, “Okay, what do we want this project to do? What do we want it to look like?” And I think what we were really keen to do was to go a bit deeper on some of those recurring issues that we see pop up every year to provide some more context and to put a face to some of the statistics that we hear quite often.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So we came up with the Dalarinji Project.. It’s in the language of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and it means ours, yours and everyone’s. We thought that was fitting because we wanted to really highlight that all Australians should be celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. And by the same token, the issues affecting First Nations people should be something that all Australians are really invested in. I guess, in terms of our approach to storytelling it’s something that I really have drawn on the knowledge that I’ve picked up from NITV and I know that I wouldn’t be the journalist I am without that really valuable training that I got there.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So yeah, it’s been about six years, with NITV and SBS, and that gave me a really strong grounding. So I guess some of the things that we’re always really mindful of in the way we approach a story is prioritising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and speaking to a range of people. So you get commentators we’re going to pop up from time to time, but being really mindful of speaking to people who don’t get a lot of media attention, and particularly in those more regional areas, as well and also just the way that you frame stories from the outset. So the last thing that you want is to get into a community, stay there for a couple of days, and do a story that’s just exacerbate existing issues.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So we want it to be solutions driven. Every community has got local people that are working really hard to make positive change. So we really wanted to get those stories across and to provide the context around the history or the past policies, wherever that was appropriate to foster that understanding, as well and focus on why things are happening, not just what’s happening, but looking under the surface why these things happening. And as I touched on just spending as much time as you can a community because it’s really tricky to just rock up and expect someone to pour their heart out to you and why would they? So yeah, we really tried to spend as much time with people as we could.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So if I guess, I’ll go through a couple of examples of stories that we’ve done throughout the year. But one of the first things we looked at was January 26th. So we were really keen to bring a new perspective to this whole discussion around changing the date of Australia Day. So how we went about that we ended up going out to Moree. There’s a massacre side, just out of Moree in Northwest New South Wales. And a massacre actually occurred on January 26th in 1838, known as the Waterloo Creek massacre. So we went back to that site with some of the descendants of the people who would died there. And I think that story was really a microcosm of the whole issue because in the same park in Moree in the morning, they had the barbecue and the celebrations of Australia Day Citizenship ceremonies, then literally as they’re packing up the chairs from that event, this morning procession is coming through town, and they setting up this whole different event to commemorate the loss of their loved ones in this horrific way.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So I think it really highlighted why so many Aboriginal people don’t feel comfortable celebrating on that day and to see that story on the front page, I think it just really added something to the media coverage that comes up every time that year. So I guess in one of the next ones that we looked at was closing the gap. So again, we wanted to come at it from a sort of different angle, and look beyond those statistics. So Rhett and I went up to Lockhart River in Far North Queensland, very small, quite remote community and we wanted to really look at like, what does this strategy mean to people on the ground up there? And how has it achieved anything of these people’s lives? And there were a few challenges around that.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So initially, we’d been in conversations with the local mayor and he was really keen to show us around, but there was a bit of a mix up with the timings and the dates. So it happened that he actually was in Brissy for some other events that he absolutely couldn’t get out of. We ended up having kind of a really quick interview while he got off the plane and we were about to get on the plane. So that was amazing and a bit interesting for us because we were relying on him to be a bit of a guide for us. And understandably, for reasons that we’ve touched on in a lot of detail today there’s this huge mistrust in some of these communities especially for the mainstream media. So that’s definitely a difference I’ve noticed when you rock up in here from NITV the brand people recognise and you see really trust that Aboriginal media but rocking up and saying you’re from the Sydney Morning Herald in a place from the tip of Queensland, it’s just, it doesn’t carry the same weight.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So we had to really work to win the trust of that community and we were really lucky to have like, five whole days up there to kind of really spend some time with people just to sit with them, tell them what we’re all about, show them that we weren’t there to take advantage of them, because they had told us that there were instances in the past where mainstream news channels had flown in for a particular story that they were doing one story that was a quite positive uplifting piece, and then they’ve ended up misconstruing some of the comments they got on camera and using it for a whole other story. So it was things like that really, yeah, make it difficult to build that trust in in a short space of time to be able to tell that story in the right way.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

But I’m really thankful that the community did trust us and we were able to get into a couple of the different agencies to get a good sense of what the closing the gap strategy had or hadn’t achieved. And in this case, it was… They… This is a community that’s been really proactive at identifying the problems and the solutions for a long time and generally haven’t had the government backing to bring those solutions to life in a sustainable way. So again, it was just great to see that on the front page of The Herald, they got great coverage in The Age as well. I think that it really humanised a story that can often just get bogged down in statistics and the political rhetoric that we hear year on year.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

And then just lastly, so obviously we have to talk about Black Lives Matter being a massive issue. It’s got a lot of coverage which has been great to see in for us again, we wanted to find examples of how this played out in everyday life for Aboriginal people. We got a lot of responses to some previous stories from the Northern Rivers area in New South Wales. So we headed up there, we spent a week again, just lucky to have the chance to spend that good amount of time in various communities up there. So we were looking at how those interactions play out between Aboriginal people in various aspects of the justice system. So looking at police, the court system and the prison system. And again, I think that just really put some faces to that to this issue. There’s been some great reporting around this, but I think it’s just been part of a whole heap of reporting that’s shown why this really is an issue here in Australia, and why people should be concerned about it and how long this has been going on. And we’ve seen similar movements before and yet, not a lot has changed. So that’s kind of a couple of stories that we’ve done.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

But I guess in terms of the overall challenges of bringing it all to life, I think that mistrust of media is when you come up against a little bit. And also for me personally, just transitioning from working at NITV with mostly Indigenous newsroom where you’ve got other Aboriginal journalists and editors sort of involved in framing stories and sort of different sets of eyes, having a look at those stories before they get published to being the only Aboriginal journo in the newsroom was a huge adjustment, particularly with all the stories that we’ve seen come up this year. So that’s been, I guess a real learning curve. And it’s just feeling a lot of responsibility to make sure that we get it right. Just making decisions about what the project was going to look like, what stories we’re going to cover. And I think there’s always things we can do better and I’m constantly critiquing my own work. But I think, overall, we’re pretty proud of what we’ve done in the last 10 odd months. I think this is the first time in quite a long time that The Herald and The Age have had a dedicated Indigenous round, let alone one led by an Indigenous reporter.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So I think this sort of coverage is probably a long time coming, but I think it’s really promising that we’re taking these proactive steps and that the stories have brought really great responses from the readers as well. And I just hope that we’ve shown the value of having that round and getting these stories across. And I just say that, I think a lot of Indigenous journalists today, we have a lot to those who’ve come before us who’ve paved the way as well as Indigenous media organisations like NITV that have been leading by example, from the very beginning and just providing such a great environment for young Aboriginal journalists to learn.

Amy Thomas:

Thank you so much Ella, and thank you to our various presenters today. One of the themes that we wanted to touch on today was the question of the future. It’s not a particularly positive moment in terms of thinking about the future. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, we’re in the midst of an economic crisis there’s been a ways of redundancies. It’s also a situation where the ownership of the media in Australia is highly concentrated. And so what… And I’ve asked this to journalists we have here today, Lorena and Ella, what do you think this means for Aboriginal justice and reporting for changing power structures in the profession and producing a more Aboriginal journalists but also more Aboriginal sort of producers, editors. What is the kind of current global picture broadly speaking I mean for the kind of work that needs to be done?

Lorena Allam:

The thing that jumps out at me is that Aboriginal people are incredibly resilient and resourceful and so the world is in a global pandemic, and Australia is in a recession, but our mob just keep powering on. Because this is life, we go without all the time, we are the bottom of every socio economic indicator and we survive, we thrive, we have a resilience and a capacity to celebrate our joy and our resilience in the face of hardship. I’ve heard some of my mob say, “Oh, welcome to the club things are tough. Yeah, they’re tough.” We know how tough things can be so in that climate episode aboriginal people are generally very well equipped to struggle and to withstand setbacks. In terms of the future of the media, I was listening to Ella talk about the projects that she had managed to get across the line at the Sydney Morning Herald, which hasn’t had an Indigenous journalist for decades.

Lorena Allam:

Well, we are in this moment, where there’s a lot of attention on justice issues for our mob and Black Lives Matter. And we’re also seeing really a blossoming of Indigenous media. And I’m not just talking about people in the mainstream like her or I, I’m talking about Indigenous journalists more broadly and people who want to forge a new path. They don’t want to work for the national broadcaster or a that mainstream news outlet who want to be independent of all of those things and trying to find a model for doing that, so that Aboriginal voices are heard. I think it’s important to say that whether you work for the mainstream or not it’s not a binary matter, we’re all in the end working towards the same goal which is to provide for the progress of Indigenous people and for Indigenous rights.

Lorena Allam:

When you fight a bush fight and fight on one front, you fight on several. And I think that the analogy, I’d like to leave people with that we are all in this together, so to speak. Every form of Aboriginal media is working together to raise awareness. One more thing I’ll say, though, is that listening to the voices of Aboriginal people is work that white fellas need to do. They need to come and find us. They need to listen carefully and to stop talking for long enough to understand that when you say things like, “Why weren’t we told?” You were told, you have been told, we’re telling you, we’ve been telling you for decades, I think the time has come for that discourse to shift and people to stop asking that question. Get informed, because there are plenty of us out here now telling stories that they need to hear.

Amy Thomas:

Thanks for that. And a question again, for the two of you, because I think that does correspond with the kind of theme that we’ve heard over the course of the seminars is the kind of growth in a whole number of different platforms that’s perhaps made the sort of more flagship media potentially less influential than it was. And one of the other things we’ve been sort of fleshing out is what might be some essential principles for journalists engaging with Aboriginal stories, is it essential for Aboriginal journalists to cover Aboriginal stories, but if non Indigenous journalists are engaged in this reporting, what might be some kind of essential principles for them to take forward?

Ella Archibald-Binge:

Making sure you’re talking to a wide range of people not just going to the same people for comment every time. Doing your wide research. I mean, it’s good to ask questions, but it’s also good if you’ve done your research as much as you can before you ask questions of other Indigenous journals and sort of share the workload a little bit. And I think just evaluating your own work all the time, to think, “Am I centering Aboriginal voices in his story? Have I had enough of a mix of people, including solutions not just kind of piling on to a problem for the sake of a good story or a good headline and including that extra context, whether it’s historical or just looking at the why rather than what is happening?”

Amy Thomas:

Thanks for that. Anne Maree we have a question here in the q&a around what change you might expect to see in community attitudes that could be brought about by changes in the school curricula and teaching. There does seem to be a wide interest by teachers in introducing Aboriginal perspectives into various areas of teaching, as well as some significant visual acknowledgment of Aboriginal culture in schools.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

It’s really difficult. I’m by nature I’m a very optimistic person and I always like to think that the future is going to be better. But I think Heidi made an also made an interesting comment in the chat about maybe some of the barriers to truth are structural barriers, and they’re not easily fixed and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to address them. So research by one of my colleagues here at UTS Anna Clark has identified that there’s a lot of resistance amongst both teachers and students to learning about Aboriginal history. It’s seen as too difficult and challenging, makes people uncomfortable. And a lot of the stories that I hear from students is that in primary school people learn about the Dreamtime and make a didgeridoo out of toilet rolls. And in high school, they watched the Rabbit Proof Fence, and that there’s not a lot more than that going on in a lot of places.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

And obviously, there are some major exceptions to that some I’m not wanting to over generalise. But whilst I’d like to think that there’s change happening in 2012, I was part of a national study on the extent to which human rights related topics were embedded in the Australian school curriculum and what we found back in 2012, is that largely the opportunities for students to learn about things like Aboriginal history or human rights were in senior subjects and elective subjects. So they weren’t integrated into the curriculum in a way that all students were exposed to this information in a systemic way.

Dr Anne Maree Payne:

I know there’s some amazing teachers out there who do their utmost to bring Indigenous content and Indigenous perspectives into the education system, but I do think there’s some real structural problems with the curriculum, some barriers that remain. Obviously, we need more Indigenous teachers, we need to work harder on involving Indigenous communities in our schools. And I think that more of that happening will lead to more change.

Amy Thomas:

Thanks for that Anne Maree. Yeah, I think it speaks to something we’ve been talking about throughout the seminars, which is the extent to which we can grapple with structural problems, but to what extent from the inside or the outside, can you shift or not shift and the kind of experiences of people engaging in that process. On that point, we have a question from Amy McGuire, who herself would fit into the category of one of the excellent Aboriginal journalists. She has a question for Ella. She says, what are some of the challenges or differences for you in reporting from a mainstream newsroom to that if you’re experiencing Indigenous media?

Ella Archibald-Binge:

Yeah. Thanks, Amy. Yeah, and if I model my work on Amy’s work, I have so much respect for Amy’s work. Look, it was a massive shift, to be honest. Couple of things, I suppose, as I touched on before just you literally, working with predominantly Aboriginal journalists, and then to be the only one in the newsroom. Yeah, it was just a difference. It was a shake up and I guess, the biggest thing was, I just felt this weight of responsibility to get it right from the framing of the stories to the delivery to the interactions with community. We’ve adopted, okay, but it would be beneficial to probably have some sort of mentoring arrangement so that you have someone that you can turn to when you’re by yourself in the newsroom and you’re reading it, you just think I just wished I have a second pair of eyes on this to just double check a few things that there’s some sensitive material or you’re just a bit unsure.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

So that’s been something that I’m constantly grappling with. The trust thing was another one, just having to work a little bit harder sometimes, usually, when you’re outside the major cities to just establish who you are and what you’re all about. To do that, especially when I was working around Northwest New South Wales you do use your family credentials and your family name because people can place you they know who you are, and they sort of know what you’re about, but that comes with a whole other set of responsibilities. A and you don’t want to use that. So just managing all those things.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

On the flip side, like another totally different aspect is, it was really interesting to see how much more government people are willing to work with you and to give you the heads up on things that you just had to work so hard at NITV to get people to respond sometimes even just in to see the legitimacy of the work you’re doing. So that was kind of like, “Oh, this is nice, but it would have been great if we had this kind of relationship as an option with NITV.” So that was kind of another interesting point. And maybe just the other one that can be a bit tricky probably in any newsroom is some of those stories that come through from the news desk might not be necessarily how you’d like to approach a story, but I’ll have to say that it’s been really great at The Herald I have the news desk and senior leadership has been really willing to listen to my feedback.

Ella Archibald-Binge:

If I’m saying, “Well, that’s not quite the angle. I don’t think that’s the way to go. How about we do it this way?” And they’ve been really responsive to that thankfully, I think if you hadn’t leadership, and the editor, especially at The Herald, Lisa Davies has been really great from the start. So I think if without that it would be really, really challenging if you were having some issues with that side of it. Yeah, overall, it’s been great, but it’s definitely a challenge and I would encourage people to have a bit of a support network if you’re doing that.

Amy Thomas:

All right, thanks for that. And thanks for sticking out in that news room and producing the the way that you have done. Lorena a question for you, which actually, flows on from this, I think which it’s a similar question, but it’s asking how you think it’s changed for you over the past sort of 20 to 30 years having been working in media, have non Indigenous journalists that you’ve worked with and editors and so on, have they changed and improved their practice?

Lorena Allam:

Yes and no. I have not worked for commercial media so I can only speak as someone who spent many decades at the public broadcaster and as a fixer for overseas media. Yes, things have changed. Things have improved, but it’s only because of the hard work, persistence and emotional labour of a small number of Aboriginal people who have managed to stick it out in big, unwelcoming, difficult, sometimes racist white institutions. So it’s some, yeah, there’s change, but it’s because those people have put their careers on the line or have stood out where there’s often a big power imbalance or hard for change to happen, even if it’s just basic changes to pronunciation or descriptors that media use, like the term Aboriginal leader, which still just refuses to die. But it’s a term that we find problematic.

Lorena Allam:

So that’s just a really simple example. Things improve when there’s a diversity of Indigenous voices and opinions at all levels of the system. It isn’t just about having a good editor or changing individuals mind, although that’s really, really important. What needs to change and what has changed incrementally is the structure of places to accommodate Indigenous voices and to step back and say, “All right you mob are the experts on this story, or you know what you’re doing, we’re going to leave this to you.” So whenever it talks about trust in Indigenous communities, which is often not non existent, because of the actions of our predecessors when you go to a community you have to re develop trust, but also you have to build trust in an organisation so that they will let you do your job. That was really hard work, it takes years to prove yourself and often as my dad used to say, you have to be twice as good to be seen as equal.

Lorena Allam:

And that’s certainly been the case for Aboriginal journalists over time, it’s really heartening to see how many different voices there are in the media now in many different media outlets, young journos working across the spectrum which is fantastic. The borders between places are porous. So say Ella was talking about, she’s working at The Herald, now she’s going to the ABC, I’d love to see more of that happens. So our mob can have careers in the media that aren’t dependent on their capacity to cover Indigenous affairs so that they can do whatever they want to do, and that our voices are taken seriously. And that there’s this suspension of the notion that bias creeps in when an Indigenous reporter covers an Indigenous story.

Lorena Allam:

It’s all based on this assumption that the white media do the right thing and that that coverage is correct. That’s the way to cover news and if you step outside, that it’s somehow suspect. We have to get past that. I think it’s happening slowly through the work of people like Ella and Amy and NITV. We’re slowly chipping away at the fourth wall.

Voice Over:

Black Stories Matter is a UTS podcast made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research. The production team live on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose lands were never ceded.

Voice Over:

This audio seminar series is based on the book ‘Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations’ by Amy Thomas, Heidi Norman and Andrew Jakubowicz. You can buy a copy from any good book store, or order it online at the AIATSIS shop – just go to shop.aiatsis.gov.au The book is published by Aboriginal Studies Press at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The Black Stories Matter podcast was made with support of Aboriginal Affairs New South Wales as part of a strategy to improve the dynamics between Aboriginal people and governments.