Black stories matter: the media, power and Aboriginal aspirations

Professor Heidi Norman and Dr Archie Thomas

Thanks for attending!

Thank you for tuning in to the third webinar of our 2022 series, Critical Public Conversations: Undoing Australia on 3rd June. This webinar titled ‘Black Stories Matter: The media, power, and Aboriginal aspirations’, featured Professor Heidi Norman and Dr Archie Thomas. In this collaborative lecture, Professor Norman and Dr Thomas shared the tools and resources they developed in their major study of how media covered Aboriginal political aspirations, to understand and analyse the discourses and narratives that shape our ways of knowing Indigenous-settler relations,

214 people tuned in live on zoom from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the US, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong and Canada. Feel free to re-watch and share the recording via the link above. Read on for key themes, as well as info on our next webinar on 3 August.

Themes raised

In their study (with Andrew Jakubowicz) of how media covered Aboriginal political aspirations across 45 years, Professor Norman and Dr Thomas identified three major media narratives:

White Mastery narrative

This narrative sees Aboriginality as a problem that is to be solved through assimilation. This means the adaptation of Aboriginal people to non-Aboriginal norms. It sees Aboriginal social issues as a result of Aboriginal failure to accept the superiority of White civilisation. Here, the resolution of colonisation is the complete validation of White interests, Aboriginal absorption, and the dissolution of distinct Aboriginality and Aboriginal political expression. The Aboriginal polity is thus ignored, or seen as an obstacle to White Mastery. It often appeals to overt racism to denigrate Aboriginal peoples and cultures.

Irreconciliation narrative

This narrative recognises continued Aboriginal survival, and the existence of Aboriginal people as peoples with distinct values and cultures. However, it subordinates Aboriginal standpoints that seek to challenge Australian sovereignty, seeing this as an impossible, ‘irreconciliable’ demand. It recognises the violence of Australian settlement and history, but it sees no enduring solution. It demands popular approval, through referenda or otherwise, for reforms such as constitutional recognition, and places the blame on the Australian populace at large for its lack of interest or refusal to recognise Aboriginal rights. While it is sympathetic to Aboriginal concerns, it creates an effect of hopelessness, and tends to promote procrastination on policy shift and change.

Subordination narrative

Like the Irreconciliation narrative, this narrative recognises continued Aboriginal survival, and the existence of Aboriginal people as peoples with distinct values and cultures. However, it seeks to reposition Aboriginal desire for self-determination and sovereignty into frames of disadvantage and deficit. It proposes that the socioeconomic uplift of Aboriginal people is the most pressing concern and overrides others. If addressing statistical inequality means the dissolution of the Aboriginal polity or its subordination to the wider body politic, this is justified in the interest of ‘closing the gap’. This narrative thus works to recognise injustice while at the same time shoehorning all Aboriginal concerns into a new future focused on relative sameness with the wider Australian populace. It erases any Aboriginal desires for self-determination and self-government. It can appeal to forms of ‘modern racism’ that question ‘cultural backwardness’. It can be seen as a backlash to the Irreconciliation narrative, and it ends up concluding the same thing as the White Mastery narrative.

Reference:

• Thomas, A., Jakubowicz, A., & Norman, H. (2019). Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? : 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments. In: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Undoing Australia

Critical Public Conversations webinar series 2022