Voice Over:

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

Professor Stan Grant:

The media is driven by two things. It’s driven by crisis and it’s driven by conflict.

Rachael Hocking:

We know that bad reporting can lead to bad policy, which can adversely affect the lives of first nations peoples in this country.

Lorena Allam:

Listening to the voices of Aboriginal people is work that white fellas need to do.

Rachael Hocking:

There’s so much assumption that goes on in mainstream media. And I don’t think that we should fall back on these old tenants of journalism. We have to remember that the rules of journalism in this country were written by old white men.

Lorena Allam:

They need to come and find us. They need to listen carefully and 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.

Catherine Liddle :

Indigenous media and Indigenous journalists are so critically important because the storyteller is always the most powerful person in the room.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Yaama, my name is Heidi Norman. I was born and grew up on the wooded plains of Western Sydney, where we lived along South Creek on the northwest flank. My mum, my grandmother, great grandmother, great, great grandmother and so on for thousands of generations were born to the grasslands plains country of Northwest, New South Wales. And that in part is what brings me to do the work that I do. I’m a Professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

Professor Heidi Norman:

In my job, I get to think about questions of power in relation to Aboriginal citizens, the state and settler society and Aboriginal land justice. This means I’m often thinking about how we encounter and face the history and the legacy of settler colonialism. Lately, it feels like there’s been an awakening in the world – an awakening about our shared responsibility to the land, water, and animals and to one another. And so I wanted to use this moment to talk to you because this is the beginning of a conversation that is long overdue.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Ever since Captain James Cook took possession of the continent known as Australia, the interest of settlers have dominated media coverage. And especially as they relate to Aboriginal views and voices, my colleagues and I analysed 45 years of print media reporting of Aboriginal initiatives for self-determination. And we found that the media has systematically and substantially failed if not undermined and denied Aboriginal aspirations for self-determination.

Professor Heidi Norman:

With a majority Aboriginal research team, we examined print media coverage of 11 landmark political moments,

Protestors at Aboriginal Embassy 20 July 1972:

[Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZxAU6r4JY]

Land rights! Land rights! Land rights!

Professor Heidi Norman:

starting with the Larrakia petition of 1972, a founding document for the national land rights movement, all the way up to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, a statement which for voice, treaty and truth telling about our history.

Professor Megan Davis reading the Uluru Statement from the Heart:

[Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zREKuT6GUqU]

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny, our children will flourish.

Professor Heidi Norman:

When looking at these moments, we asked, how did the press frame these stories and how have they reported the actions of Aboriginal activists, advocates, and communities? We found without a doubt a deficit discourse. A point of view that Indigenous people start from a place of failure. This narrative is damaging, it’s wrong and it needs to change.

Professor Heidi Norman:

A shift needs to be made by the media to create accurate and unbiased reporting about Aboriginal people with Aboriginal people. We know the way the media reports on Indigenous people can influence the way issues are seen and understood. And there’s no reason why the stories we read, hear or watch shouldn’t accurately reflect the sophistication of Aboriginal political activism. And so you might be wondering, how do we fix this?

Professor Heidi Norman:

For my colleagues and I, one of the answers to this big question was in the simple task of setting up the discussions you’re about to hear. We decided to bring together media researchers, historians, former policymakers and Aboriginal journalists whose work is disrupting the patterns of the past.

Professor Heidi Norman:

You’re listening to Black Stories Matter. This is the first of five conversations. Our first discussion took place on August 19 via an online seminar. We asked our guests this question, does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations?

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

My name is Davleena Ghosh I am an academic in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. My work has been on Indigenous displacement and oppression in the coal mining regions of India. I find the work of both Heidi and Stan absolutely reverting. My job is to introduce them though I don’t think they really need much introduction.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

So Professor Stan Grant is a television news and political journalist, a Wiradjuri man and the author of several bestselling non-fiction books. And he’s also a filmmaker. Stan has recently commenced at Charles Sturt University as the Vice Chancellor’s Chair of Australian Indigenous Belonging.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Heidi Norman, my colleague is a professor and a leading researcher in the field of Australian Aboriginal political history. Her research sits in the field of history, but draws most interestingly on the disciplines of anthropology, political economy, cultural studies and political theory, working at the intersection of all of these really important bodies of thought and knowledge.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Thanks Davleena. As you know, we’ll be bring a critical lens to how the media represents Aboriginal political aspirations. As we thought about the seminar series, one of the critical points at emerges is that Black Lives Matters, or as this we’ve kind of framed this slightly to think about Black Stories Matters, Black Lives Matters movement, which is in part a response to state sanctioned murderous violence in the US and then as that movement has floated across the globe with some local uptake and local reshaping, the position there is the role of the state in sanctioned violence.

Professor Heidi Norman:

And so we are pivoting this slightly because I think the Black Lives Matters movement has gained great traction, even though it’s been an identified issue. And there’s been an organisation for many decades in response to black deaths in custody say, but what the BLM movement in gaining traction now, highlights critical points about the racial, cultural, ethnic, social, and economic stratification in settler societies.

Professor Heidi Norman:

In our emphasis here and picking up the research that we’ve recently undertaken is to think about what the role of the media is in telling stories about Aboriginal political aspirations, and more broadly Aboriginal representation. The critical role of the media in enabling, or perhaps even limiting, how stories of the nation, stories of Aboriginal lives are understood, are spoken to policies, spoken to government and even spoken back to ourselves.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Through this series, we want to make an intervention. We want to put out some challenges to the media and indeed to policy officers and to all of us to think about, what are these stories? How can they be told differently?

Professor Heidi Norman:

The book came out earlier this year, the title is, Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations? And in this work we undertook a fairly clinical study of 45 years of newsprint media coverage of what we identified as 11 key moments. So we started in 1972 with the Larrakia petition in Darwin and the case studies that concluded with the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The methodology we brought to this, it was to look at 10 news print articles. So we can find our study to news print articles within the day before or the days after these particular moments. And what our thinking here was that we confined our study to print media because that allowed a consistent methodology across each of the case studies, we brought together a team of mostly Aboriginal scholars and we had advisors on board like Professor Andrew Jakubowicz who’s worked in the field of racism in the media over many decades. Some young scholars, practitioners, journalists working in the field.

Professor Heidi Norman:

This study was funded by the New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs. And the argument that they made in supporting this research is that their objective is to inform broader policy transformations. The policy transformation that Aboriginal Affairs in New South Wales have announced is to fundamentally change the relationship between the government and Aboriginal peoples from one that began as unilateral to one of bilateralism, or multilateralism.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Sounds a bit wordy, but we might also think about how this relationship between Aboriginal people and government is undergoing some transitional shift that takes a form in Victoria through a treaty. There’s treaty conversations unfolding in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Professor Heidi Norman:

That’s how this work fits within that broader agenda. It kind of has a subtle import if you like, and it’s thinking, if big change is set to be made, how is that change possible? And how are the stories that the media tell about Aboriginal political aspirations enabled or limited? And if there is big structural change to be made, how can we ensure the media is part of this story and able to comprehend this big change?

Professor Heidi Norman:

And part of our argument that we’ve developed in the work is that the media conveyed to the wider society narratives that explain the daily interactions between Aboriginal people and government. And while no wave of reportage can be said to be solely responsible for policy outcomes. The environment within which policy decisions are made and implemented is unavoidably influenced by media reportage. Therefore, these stories, discourses and narratives work to either constrain or facilitate the realisation of Aboriginal political aspirations.

Professor Heidi Norman:

What we argued in the work is that a sensitive appreciation of Aboriginal standpoints in agreement making is necessarily influenced by public discourses and deeper narratives about Aboriginal agency. These narratives are created, circulated and negotiated in great part through the mass media. And more recently through social media. What we found in this work and as journalist Jeff McMullen has flagged, a matrix of negativity and a deeply troubling fatalism, often characterises the discussion of Aboriginal political aspirations.

Professor Heidi Norman:

We’re saying that breaking through these boundaries requires a proactive consideration of how media reporting understands, interprets and communicates Aboriginal agency and self-determination back at Aboriginal people and outwardly to government and other stakeholders. As I mentioned, we brought together a team of people. We looked at 11 case studies. We had a very clinical approach that was shared across all of the case studies.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Out of these case studies, We found some pretty troubling media failures. And I think it’s likely that you might’ve anticipated that from the title. What we want to tease out is what these failings look like. And to tease out some key themes. And it’s not trying to do an expose or an interrogation of individual journalists. It’s about zooming out and thinking about the bigger narratives that inform the reporting of Aboriginal political aspiration.

Professor Heidi Norman:

So it’s not about picking off journalists or even in thinking about the ideological agenda that particular mastheads pursue, although that cannot be separated out from our discussion. So this isn’t a sort of got you moment. What we want to do is think about what are these narratives and how have they been reproduced over this 45 year period?

Professor Heidi Norman:

So we’ve got three key questions that we asked. We asked how does the media understand and represent Aboriginal agency? To what extent has the Australian media failed in communicating the aspirations of the Aboriginal polity? And in what ways have they succeeded?

Professor Heidi Norman:

So broadly speaking, we found that inadequate representation of Aboriginal aspirations has made achieving those aspirations more difficult. So if we consider over our 11 case study, starting with the Larrakia petition that really put national land rights on the political agenda through to the Uluru Statement, how is it that these moments keep appearing? These moments of intervention coinciding with different anniversaries, how is it that Aboriginal political aspirations cycled through on a fairly regular basis without feeling like there is ever any progress or adequate response to those claims?

Professor Heidi Norman:

And so our suggestion here is that one issue is, the way the media reports on the aspirations. I’m just going to walk through very briefly some of our key findings, the predominant finding refers to the narrative. We found over the 45 years and these 11 case studies, you would expect that over the 45 years there will be a shift and that there will be an improvement in reportage. So, that wasn’t the case.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The media speaks to a white audience and adopts a white standpoint. The Aboriginal policy has largely been ignored or misunderstood by mainstream media, negative discourses about Aboriginal behaviour are repeated over the time period. There’s no clear progress towards better reporting of Aboriginal agency over the 45 years. There are three clear narratives that emerge. In fact, four that I’ll elaborate in a moment. And we refer to these narratives as white mastery, irreconciliation, subordination, and treaty or sovereignty narratives.

Professor Heidi Norman:

And another observation finding is that the Aboriginal policy has increased its engagement with the media. So over the 45 years, we found none of the 90 articles that we looked at were authored by an Aboriginal journalists. There were a few opinion pieces certainly in the last 20 years of Aboriginal journalists covering Aboriginal stories. We found to our knowledge, no coverage.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Now let me just elaborate these three narratives just briefly. When we refer to white mastery, the narrative, there is – and pardon the crudeness of this account. It’s a story of, from a white perspective that says we won, you lost. That is the end of the story. There is no more negotiation to take place.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The second is irreconciliation. This is a narrative that comes from, perhaps the Fairfax masthead, and it really flags a positive account of Aboriginal aspirations, but there is no resolution of how Aboriginal worlds will be addressed. So there are positive stories about Aboriginal lives, but there is no sense of progressing Aboriginal political aspirations.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The third is a subordination narrative. This subordination narrative really emerges in the 2000s. It’s a story that Aboriginal aspirations can exist and can be tolerated so long as they flag a subordination to the sovereignty of the state. And so the subordination narrative was also apparent in the Uluru statement, for example.

Professor Heidi Norman:

And the final, the sovereignty nationhood narrative, you can see that appears once. And ironically, that sovereignty or nationhood narrative came about in 1979. And it was in response to the media coverage of the Aboriginal treaty committee. And the Aboriginal treaty committee was a group of concerned European Australians who were advocating Aboriginal rights. And so that is the only example where we see the media adequately reporting on Aboriginal political aspirations and sovereignty and nationhood.

Professor Heidi Norman:

So we’ve identified that there is more work to be done amongst media professionals to improve their practices, for Aboriginal communities to test media truth-telling and for others seeking to understand how Aboriginal desires have been responded to by the media.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Thank you Heidi, that’s a lot of really, really important issues that need to be discussed. Stan, could you respond to those points that Heidi raised in her summary of that work? I think there’s an issue here regarding the way in which media is controlled either by say a fairly conservative government or by corporations and how one can actually make change within that format, which is quite restrictive. And it would be very interesting to hear your thoughts on that.

Professor Stan Grant:

Yeah. Thank you, Devleena. Thank you so much for that Heidi as well. And I want to pay my respects to the Gadigal people as well on whose land we are meeting and all Eora people whose land I live on in Sydney. I think first of all, when you approach something like this, it’s always useful to try to define your terms when we’re talking about Aboriginal aspirations and we can be guilty sometimes of assuming a homogeneity or a uniformity to Aboriginal aspirations when in fact, Aboriginal peoples and Aboriginal political aspirations run the full gamut from disengaged apathetic to very engaged and forward leaningand wanting to advocate for particular change.

Professor Stan Grant:

So I think that’s also part of some of the difficulties with the media, is even representing what is the diversity of Indigenous viewpoints and the diversity of Indigenous peoples. And then to define the media in this case, as Heidi pointed out, we focus very much on print media and that allowed for a uniform methodology in being able to apply that lens to these stories and try to track that over a period of time. I think that was really useful.

Professor Stan Grant:

And when we talk about media of course, it’s a much more cluttered and congested landscape today. And social media has certainly changed the nature of the flow of information and put the capacity to engage in that space into the hands of people, through Facebook and Twitter other ways of being able to engage directly and bypassing the more standard conservative legacy media.

Professor Stan Grant:

And then of course there is the media’s role itself. And the assumption that the media is failing Aboriginal aspirations assumes that the media is there to represent Aboriginal aspirations or to advocate for Aboriginal aspirations. And that certainly hasn’t been my experience. In fact, you could broaden that and say, does the media advocate, or as a media failing political aspirations of Australians in general?

Professor Stan Grant:

The media is really driven by two things. It’s driven by crisis and it’s driven by conflict. You can be graduating 200 Indigenous students from university today and that might be to be an Aboriginal protest involving 50 people and the protest will be on television. So the media is driven to crisis. The media is driven to conflict. The media doesn’t see its role in being there to advocate for represent any political aspirations, let alone Aboriginal political aspirations. And then of course there is a diversity of Aboriginal political aspirations as well to factor into that.

Professor Stan Grant:

Broadly, I would say you’ve been really correct in identifying where those broad themes are and certainly irreconciliation. That idea that there may be of lip service to Aboriginal people’s aspirations for self-determination, for more political representation, but a failure to actually achieve that and understanding of Aboriginal suffering or Aboriginal injustice or disadvantage but a failure to connect that to broader political aspirations. I think that’s an overwhelming trend.

Professor Stan Grant:

The white mastery narrative, again, that’s really prevalent I think, and it’s probably a reflection of a broader attitude you may find politically in Australia. We certainly saw that around Mabo, but we saw that a little bit with the Uluru Statement from the Heart. There was a political decision made that Indigenous aspirations for greater representation within Australia’s constitution was somehow an attack on Australian liberalism.

Professor Stan Grant:

Australian liberalism being defined as being something that is a British inheritance that is a neutral political space that no other group can have rights that other people in the country can’t have. It’s a very narrow framing of liberalism. It’s a very misleading framing of liberalism. It is a white European triumphalist framing of liberalism. And in this case, if it was applied to not the whole idea of Uluru Statement and an Aboriginal voice, the constitution of the agenda.

Professor Stan Grant:

So look, I think you’ve really identified some of the problems, The broad narratives. You’ve identified the areas where Aboriginal peoples at political aspirations are frustrated by a media that doesn’t see that as its role or is driven to crisis and conflict. It’s about creating more division than it is about actually illuminating issues.

Professor Stan Grant:

And you’ve identified, I think, a real friction in how those aspirations can be better portrayed how we can achieve a greater aspirations for political representation and justice with a media landscape that is still overwhelmingly, as we saw with the Media Diversity Australia report just yesterday, overwhelmingly white European Anglo, and not particularly engaged with these issues or have a mind to be introspective about how they represent these issues.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

That was really interesting. I mean, I come to it from the plight of Indigenous people in India. And what strikes me is that, the way in which media works in India is also extremely similar because the media landscape is similar. So you have the government owned media, which if the government is benign, may present some Indigenous points of view. And the corporate media represents a kind of corporate point of view. And certainly in India, as in Australia, where there is a large amount of land and especially resource extraction, Indigenous points of view get completely obliterated really. And not even delighted. They get obliterated.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

What’s often struck me. And we’ve talked about this with Heidi often is that there are global issues here. And we, some ways need to build a kind of global movement because our strength has to be in our numbers, in our solidarities and so on.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

And historically as well. If you look at the way in which the British took over land in India in the late 1790s, I mean, you look at the terra nullius judgment. You’re actually sort of amazed by the similarities in those processes. The British colonised India, they colonised Australia, various other places and their archives of colonisation actually circulate in the colonies. And that’s a really important way of making those global connections.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

I would also be interested in thinking about some of the questions first that we can go to. And then maybe I can ask a couple of questions. So this is a question for Stan, how can there be a change in expanding editorial viewpoints in all media? And a question which is related to it, I think, was a disparity of views identified between how the public media reports on Aboriginal issues compared to the corporate media? Stan, would you have a response to those two related questions?

Professor Stan Grant:

Yeah, I’ve probably answered the first one. Heidi might be better in terms of answering what the methodology was and how it was applied in this case to these territories in this report. But in terms of how you bring about that change, well, part of it is changing the nature of power structures I think of the media, as we saw with the Media Diversity Australia report, where every single news director, head of news at all of the major networks in Australia are white Australian men.

Professor Stan Grant:

When you have a situation at the ABC for instance, where the head of news is white, the supervising producers and executive producers, almost every single program are white. Every foreign correspondent is white. The host of The Drum of 730 of Q&A of insiders, are white. You could just go on and on and on.

Professor Stan Grant:

There is clearly a failure there and not to let out a public broadcaster as opposed to our commercial broadcasters. Commercial broadcasters is their money. They can do what they like I suppose, but in the public broadcaster where you have a higher expectation that they would be open to that greater level of diversity and introspection about where they’re failing and how they’re failing. I think there’s been a stubbornness to embrace any sort of reform or to introduce more diversity, particularly into the power structures. They’re 20, 30 years behind the rest of the world.

Professor Stan Grant:

I worked for CNN for many years and it was an extraordinarily diverse organization, senior roles occupied by people from a whole range of different backgrounds. And we all brought that to the editorial process. We all brought our life experiences. We all brought out political opinions and attitudes, and it all went into the mix that it made for a more dynamic, a more vibrant, a more interesting editorial discussion that I think was reflected more broadly on the types of stories we did and how we approach doing those stories.

Professor Stan Grant:

There is a uniformity here still driven by a European hegemony that dominates the editorial process. It dominates the editorial decision-making. How stories are done, who does them, how they’re represented. And I think particularly when you find with Indigenous stories and you’re dealing with people who’ve had limited or no experience directly with Indigenous people who haven’t really turned their minds to trying to understand the issues at play when you’re reporting on Indigenous people in Australia, then clearly if there is just not the depth of knowledge, understanding or commitment to improving or increasing that knowledge and understanding.

Professor Stan Grant:

And it leads to poor coverage. That’s what it leads to. It leads to less interesting coverage. Now, I think if I look at outside of the public broadcaster and then commercial television in Australia, coverage of Indigenous issues is non-existent. It’s driven purely by crisis or conflict. There’ll be a coverage on an Australia Day march, or if there was a Black Lives Matter protest, that’d be focusing on who got arrested or was there any violence or what was, were being broken rather than the substance of the issues that people are protesting about?

Professor Stan Grant:

If you look at print, I would say that The Australian as must head, has probably engaged more significantly in this space. It’s certainly devoted in my sort of experience. And anecdotally as a reader, devoted more column inches to the coverage of Indigenous issues. I think it’s probably elevated the coverage of Indigenous policy to a level that it approaches the coverage of others aspects of government policy. But there is undoubtedly at a place like The Australian, a particular framework. And framework is that, you know, anything that sits outside of what they see as being Australian liberal democratic values, as they define them, is seen as being something that is illegitimate.

Professor Stan Grant:

So while there may be broad coverage, it doesn’t necessarily lead to more illumination. It may in fact, lead to hardening attitudes or to reinforcing stereotype, or to a sense that Aboriginal aspirations, political aspirations for things like sovereignty, recognition are seen as being illegitimate or even hostile to Australian liberal democracy.

Professor Stan Grant:

So it’s very difficult. It’s difficult, philosophically. It’s difficult editorially. It’s difficult in terms of resources. It’s very difficult in terms of personnel to try to get coverage of something with any depth or meaning, particularly an issue that presents an existential crisis to Australia and Australia’s sense of legitimacy. An issue that is so important, it is very difficult to get depth to that coverage when the people who are driving that coverage have so little experience or inclination or a worldview that sees Aboriginal people and Aboriginal aspirations as being either illegitimate or hostile or sitting outside the broad scope of what they see as being representing Australia and Australian values.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Thanks Stan, I think that’s very useful. Heidi, I think there’s a question here, which is quite interesting. Could you speak to the definition of media or different modes of media circulation? In particular, do you have a sense of how the diaspora media, ethnic media has reported on Aboriginal political aspirations over time? And how the international media has reported these aspirations and how do they compare?

Professor Heidi Norman:

That’s a good question. I think someone should dedicate their PhD to that project.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Yes, I thought that was a PhD topic there.

Professor Heidi Norman:

What I can say without sort of getting too off topic for this work, we can find our study. So those 10 articles per case study to print media and in Australia. And what we did find is that, outside of those 10 mainstream print media articles, that coverage inside of the Koori Mail this is Aboriginal community controlled fortnightly paper, the ABC, even IndigenousX and other social media forums, the coverage of issues was really different to how those same stories were reported on in the mainstream media.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The narratives were identified in the mainstream media are picked up in very different ways outside of the mainstream print news media, and even the ABC coverage on the ABC, ABC online, really different. I can’t comment a lot about ethnic media or international media, but I really think it would be make for a fascinating study. Looking at these particular case studies, it was Tribune. Other sources, even the Northern Territory news, Illawarra news, some other Canberra times. And they actually, even at times, had really different coverage to what we saw in the Herald and the Murdoch papers like the Australian and the Daily Telegraph, Financial Review, other papers.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

And it just a small point because I can actually literally say that having followed the media in India, the only time I’ve really seen Aboriginal aspirations come to the fold is with the Adani case. And that’s because Adani is an Indian corporation. So all of a sudden there’s a certain amount of interest in what’s happening and what’s going on and so on.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

But beyond that, no, because media is actually about power, who has the power to listen? Listen, as in listen to make a difference. Not just listen, just because somebody is talking.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Okay, more questions. Maybe Stan you can go first. I read yesterday regarding poor media employment representation or diversity compared to white Anglo-Celtic domination that we hire who applies. That is suggesting that say, Aboriginal people are not applying for media jobs.

Professor Stan Grant:

That’s probably a reflection of how welcome people of diverse backgrounds, not just talking about Indigenous people, that people of diverse backgrounds may feel that they may feel in applying for these positions that, they’re unlikely to be successful, or they’re likely to go into an environment that they may find unwelcoming or even hostile.

Professor Stan Grant:

So that may be a factor. They might be a deterrence right at the start from people who just simply don’t want to engage with that. It’s a lazy argument because if you want to find people, if you want to encourage people to apply, then you will. It’s a self perpetuating thing in Australia. White news bosses executives are interviewing white candidates and appointing white candidates.

Professor Stan Grant:

Beyond that, there has been a failure to nurture and develop the careers of people with a non-white background. I first worked for the ABC more than 30 years ago. I was fortunate I think that I came into the organisation outside of what was seen as an Aboriginal identified trainee program. I’d already studied and I’d already completed a journalism cadetship in a commercial media first, the Canberra Times and later at Macquarie radio.

Professor Stan Grant:

So I came into the ABC having earned my stripes, if you like. And I saw other Indigenous people who came into the organization through identified Aboriginal trainee ship programs or cadetship programs, and there was no commitment beyond ticking the box and getting those numbers. There was no commitment to developing their careers in the same way the careers of their contemporaries, their peers.

Professor Stan Grant:

And as a result, young Aboriginal potential journalists clearly grew frustrated and drifted away from the profession. Some of them very notable in other walks of life today in politics and also in acting because they chose to pursue other careers because they didn’t see that they were going to get the career development and opportunities in journalism.

Professor Stan Grant:

So the ABC is as an example, has been bringing Indigenous people into the organisation for over 30 years. And it was only about 18 months ago, two years ago that the first Indigenous person at the ABC Bridget Brennan was appointed as a foreign correspondent. I’d been a foreign correspondent for the Seven network 20 years before that. And I chose to leave the ABC and pursue a career elsewhere.

Professor Stan Grant:

I went to work for CNN and again, a diverse organization where what I was, and my particular identity or racial or ethnic background was not going to be an impediment to my career success. It was driven by, by other factors. Your competence, your excellence, and so on.

Professor Stan Grant:

So in terms of encouraging people into the organisation and changing until there is a real commitment and structural change, until the people making the decisions are not going to be looking in the mirror when they hire someone, and not going to be looking for people to reflect who they are, or reflect their worldview, there is not going to be change. And we’ll have the lazy excuses that they just don’t apply, or they’re not interested in these careers, or when in fact people often feel as if they’re not going to be welcome, or they’re not going to have the type of career advancement that they may find in other walks of life. So we’re 20 or 30 years behind where the rest of the world is on this. And it’s an inexcusable situation.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

I agree. I think we have time for just one more question. And this one I will give first to Heidi. Though Stan, please come in if you feel you have something to add. It says, is a critical debate whether Indigenous sovereignty deserves recognition versus the post-race idea that all Australian citizens are equal and we should be colorblind?

Professor Heidi Norman:

I’ll pick that question or the sort of identified occasion of attention, if you like in relation to the media coverage of the Uluru Statement from The Heart. So it’s a chapter. So I’m just looking at a couple of pages of on the study. And again, keeping in mind that the purpose of this work is to think about how the media covered this event, how the media covered this as one example of Aboriginal political aspirations.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Before the Uluru Statement from the Heart was read out, it was delivered to the people. So all of the other case studies we’ve looked at many of them, petitions and other moments are delivered to politicians. So the Larrakia petition was to the crown, to the princess.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The Uluru statement was delivered to the people, which is a really significant shift in our political strategy. Before the statement was read to the people, The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, he sounded a note of caution. He’s already anticipating that Aboriginal people will put forward proposals for constitutional recognition that will have no chance of success. And therefore for practical reasons appeared do it. And then he goes on to say that constitutional recognition is a quote bad in principle because it would create two classes of citizens. He goes on to rattle against the failings of liberalism, to counter the campaign of identity politics.

Professor Heidi Norman:

So this is an ideological position if you like that The Australian fairly relentlessly pursuits. And Aboriginal affairs is a real battleground for this issue to play out. That’s sort of what that question is going to.

Professor Heidi Norman:

But moving on, and this is a bit truncated, when the Uluru other restatement was read to the people in a way I would argue it’s second guessed and navigated around that kind of critique that The Australian already has got fired up in the cannon to roll out.

Professor Heidi Norman:

And what the Uluru Statement from the Heart did, was it avoided all of the language about recognition. It spoke about the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty as being complimentary to, or side-by-side the sovereignty of the state. So it already positions those Aboriginal aspirations as are contained in that statement as subordinate or at the least, running parallel to the sovereignty of the state.

Professor Heidi Norman:

So I would argue that there was some absolute political strategy genius in how the Uluru Statement was framed the kind of political aspirations, how they were communicated to the public and how they were shaped and framed.

Professor Heidi Norman:

The other thing I want to encourage us to think about is that, the convention was held in a locale that was relatively isolatable. And so journalists were there reporting from within Aboriginal worlds. So the journalist possibly for the first time that I can think of other than say being at the New South Wales Aboriginal rugby league knockout, we’re part of Aboriginal worlds. And therefore we’re imagining a world even just for a few days that were from an Aboriginal standpoint. And I think the reporting of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, from the journalists who were there at that camp is really different because of that.

Professor Heidi Norman:

And I think there was also some really careful staging around the events. So for example, it coincided with the anniversary of the 1967 referendum. It was delivered with enormous ceremony. So there was a really careful orchestrating of that political aspiration and that as a political moment, that forced a different kind of reporting.

Professor Heidi Norman:

So to go to that tension, I think what we also saw, and this is one of our findings from the study, is that there is also a really careful engagement by Aboriginal political actors to deal with the media, with the full knowledge of the limitations of how the media reports Aboriginal political aspirations.

Professor Stan Grant:

And if I could just add to what Heidi said there. I agree with that. There was a strategic approach to trying to address these issues in a way that tried to negate that reporting, that views these things as being immediately somehow legitimate or outside of Australia liberalism. And it still failed. It still met resistance at the media and the political level.

Professor Stan Grant:

In retrospect, you may argue that it’s actually done some damage because in trying to reach that compromise, in trying to negate those issues, the bar is being lowered even further. Where left is there for Indigenous people to compromise when an inherently compromised statement, a statement that was designed to try to speak directly to the people and avoid this type of ideological cul-de-sac has still failed?

Professor Stan Grant:

And I think it goes to something that’s probably encapsulates both the media and our politics. It’s not so much a failure of the media to represent Aboriginal political aspirations. It is a failure of Australia and the idea of Australia and how Australia views political liberalism. And that it is a white mastery liberalism. It is a European triumphalist liberalism.

Professor Stan Grant:

The idea that you can declare that anything that establishes two categories of Australians is just unbelievably blind to the history of this country, where there have always been subcategories of Australians that Indigenous people’s history is being excluded and segregated and having them much more contingent idea of citizenship than other Australians.

Professor Stan Grant:

It’s also blind to the fact that we now have within our legal and political structures via the Mabo case, native title, a range of other policy areas an acknowledgement that there are enduring rights that Indigenous people have that sit within our political liberalism and the sky hasn’t fallen. In fact, you could argue that for all of those innovations, that they’ve probably found Aboriginal people more than they’ve actually diminished the liberal state.

Professor Stan Grant:

So it’s a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of the potential of Australian liberalism. It’s a one size fits all liberalism that does not work with a pluralistic world and a world in which people of different backgrounds are making ethical claims on the state that should be compatible without liberalism.

Professor Stan Grant:

And once again, it sends Aboriginal people back to the drawing board to come back with another compromise as the process is underway now in the face of this obstinate refusal to accept Aboriginal claims for rightful political representation and recognition to accept those claims as being somehow consistent with Australian liberalism. It’s a failure of liberalism and a failure of imagination at a national level. And that I think we see reflected in this media coverage that ultimately fails to eliminate or to enlarge the conversation that we have around getting beyond this ideological roadblock.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

There is here a real distance between worldviews. I mean, the idea of post-enlightenment philosophy that there is one possible way in which the world can function, which is the kind of European philosophical way, and that we have nothing to learn from other life worlds, other knowledges, in the face of massive climate change in the face of pandemics, in the face of the various failures of capitalism.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

I think that in itself is absolutely just dumbfounding. The refusal to acknowledge that huge portions of the globe may have other ways of living, not perfect ways of living. Not ways of living or life worlds that can’t be criticised, but different ways of thinking about society themselves, the world, the environment.

Professor Stan Grant:

If I could just come into there, you’re making a really good point. These people who are meant to be the great defenders of liberalism are actually failing their own creed because this idea that political liberalism ended with John Stuart Mills and John Locke, that it ended in 17th, 18th century, enlightenment thinkers is blind to all of the innovative work around political liberalism from 20th century thinkers John Rawls and others who’ve been large. The idea of what political liberalism is. So it’s a failure of their own creed to the detriment of us. And I would also argue to the detriment of the country.

Professor Devleena Ghosh:

Detrimental is one of the things Franz Fanon said, is that colonialism makes both sides of the equation sick. I think that is really true. And maybe that’s a bit of a depressing, but a good way to end this with my absolutely sincere thanks to the both of you.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Thanks for listening to the first episode of, Black Stories Matter. These conversations are important and we want to keep having them with you. We hope that by opening up this dialogue, we can assist anyone to understand how Aboriginal desires and hopes have been misrepresented in our history.

Professor Heidi Norman:

We want to aid media professionals to improve their practices and help Aboriginal communities to test media accuracy and truth telling. Let’s start a new narrative about Aboriginal people with Aboriginal people because Black Stories Matter.

Professor Heidi Norman:

Next time on Black Stories Matter, we’ll be tackling patronising parodies and delving a little deeper into the history of Aboriginal politics in the media.

Catherine Liddle :

We know that our journalists are some of the most competitive, creative, talented people in the country, and they have this incredible ability to look beyond what is there. And yet it becomes hard when you come to Aboriginal stories. People don’t really know how to look outside the box. How do you challenge perspectives? And how do you look for the biggest story?

Professor Heidi Norman:

To do this, we’ll be speaking with Robert Tickner, former Commonwealth minister for Aboriginal Affairs from 1990 to 1996. Arrernte/Luritja woman Catherine Liddle from central Australia and CEO of First Nations Media. And Jason Adler. A Yuin man from the New South Wales, south coast and former Head of New South Wales, Aboriginal Affairs. As well, Emeritus Professor Andrew Jakubowicz will be chairing the chat. I hope you can join us. I’m Heidi Norman. And thanks for listening.

Voice Over:

Black Stories Matter is a UTS podcast made by impact studios at the University of Technology Sydney and 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 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 bookstore or order it online at the Aiatsis shop. Just go to shop.aiatsis. That’s A-I-A-T-S-I-S.gov.au.

Voice Over:

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 the support of Aboriginal Affairs, new South Wales, as part of a strategy to improve the dynamics between Aboriginal people and governments.