Volume 22

Number3
May 2000
Issue editor: Nicholas Garnham
243 Jane Roscoe
Documenting the Immigrant Nation: tensions and
contradictions in the representation of immigrant
communities in a New Zealand television documentary
senes
263 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee and Goldie Osuri
Silences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality in
making news and making history
285 Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
Promoting a labor perspective in the American mass
media: unions and radio in the CIO era, 1936-56
309 Katja Valaskivi
Being a part of the family? Genre, gender and
production in a Japanese TV drama
327 Tamara L Falicov
Argentina's blockbuster movies and the politics of
culture under neoliberalism, 1989-98
Silences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality in
making news and making history
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, RMIT UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE
Goldie Osuri
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST, USA
Preface
We would like to start this article by pointing out our location as non-
Aboriginal academics working within a First World institution on issues
concerned with colonial relations of power in Australia, The article itself is
not a study either of Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander peoples or
cultures, but since it looks at some of the ongoing colonial conditions
which indigenous peoples contend with, we would like to foreground our
institutional positionality, Academic institutions have historically been and,
in many cases still are, complicit with colonial conditions by participating
in the knowledge/power nexus especially through representations of, or by
speaking for, Aboriginal peoples .. In this sense, while attempting to read the
kinds of colonial discourses prevalent in the Australian public sphere, we
acknowledge our position within these institutional modes even as our
work (shaped by our own history and experience of racism and colonialism
yet vastly differently from those of Aboriginal peoples) is situated in the
desire to engage with and participate in the transformation of colonialism
So while we continue to engage in uncovering what Akhil Gupta calls the
'partiality of self-representations of the West' (1994: 165), we would also
like to say that given the kind of project we are engaging in, we are
accountable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; in
our case, this article has been produced in consultation with Dr Dianne
Media, Culture & Society 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi), VoL 22: 263-284
[0163-4437(200005)22:3;263-284;012275]
264 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
Snow, Senior Lecturer at the Aboriginal Education Centre, University of
Wollongong.
On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant shot up to 40 people at Port Arthur,
Tasmania. During the week that followed, leading newspapers around
Australia framed the event as Australia's worst massacre. We will be
focusing on the coverage of this news event through the medium of two
major newspapers in the Sydney area, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)
and the Australian (Australia's national newspaper) .. While the event was,
of course, a tragic one, we were fortunately plagued by many questions
other than the ones asked by journalists in their so-called objective and
impartial coverage of this massacre Why, for instance, was this event
termed the worst massacre in Australian history when the Australian nation
seemed to have been founded on a history of massacres? Why did both
print and television media limit themselves to a lO---40-year history of
massacres in Australia? What were the discursive regimes that governed
the statements by the media as well as governmental leaders? Why were
some historical connections made and others ignored? Why did the debate
concerning the non-inclusion of Aboriginal massacres, conspicuously
absent from the public sphere or mainstream media channels, surface on an
Aboriginal studies Internet list server with the participation of both Aborigi-
nal and non-Aboriginal people? Were we having a knee-jerk reaction to the
signifier of the massacre that, read as an event of a peace-time postmodern
spectacle, disperses a transformed chain of meanings irreducible to either
lexical definitions or historical contexts? We will try to work through some
of these questions in our subsequent discussion in light of the coverages by
the two above-mentioned newspapers..
Introduction
Awareness and recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples all over the
world has increased in recent years .. The United Nations declaration on the
rights of Indigenous Nations recognizes the
urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights and characteristics of
Indigenous Nations, especially the right to lands, territories and resources, which
derive from each Nation's culture; aspects of which include spiritual traditions,
histories and philosophies, as well as political, economic and social customs and
structures (United Nations, 1994: I)
Recognizing the genocide of indigenous peoples all over the world, the UN
declaration affirms that indigenous people possess the 'right to exist in
peace and security as a distinct people and to be protected against any type
of genocide' ..
In Australia, the struggle against the many types of dispossession is art
ongoing one The 1992 landmark High Court case, Mabo vs the State oj
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Abonginalzty 265
Queel1lland, finally acknowledged that Native Title had survived coloniza-
tion However, such an acknowledgment has been subsequently setback
through current amendments (1998) to the Native Title Act of 1993 which
severely limit the ways in which Native Title may be exercised or land
claims lodged (Bachelard, 1997) As another instance of this struggle, the
refusal of the current Prime Minister, John Howard, to make an official
apology in response to the 1997 Human Rights Commission report,
BI inging Them Home (a report on the stolen generations of Aboriginal
children who were removed from their families between the 1930s and the
1960s) was a disavowal of the role of governmental policies in their
imperative to eradicate Aboriginal communities and cultures This refusal
resulted in a people's movement where many Australians participated in a
'Sony Day' event in order to acknowledge what the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission defined as an attempt at genocide
Similarly, the National Report (1991) of the Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was set up to investigate the alarmingly high
death rate of Aboriginal people while in custody. Among the many recom-
mendations made by the Royal Commission there were a few that were
media-related The Commission felt that many indigenous people through-
out Australia were disappointed at their portrayal by the media and 'called
for a better understanding of issues relating to the media treatment of
Aboriginal affairs' (Hartley and McKee, 1996: 3) The Commission also
recommended that media organizations should develop codes and policies
relating to the presentation of Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander issues
In the arena of film and television production, there have been several
guidelines developed by Aboriginal media personnel (Bostock, 1990; Making
the Grade, 1996). So far, the development of these codes and policies,
which are much needed and valuable, have helped in formulating an ethics
of media interaction with Aboriginal groups and communities although, as
Meadows and Oldham (1991: 38) point out, 'codes of conduct or race
relations guidelines bv themselves are not the answer - journalists simnlv
"""... . ". ,.}.L..t
don't abide by them - and are difficult to construct so as to have any real
guiding effect' .
Racism and the news
We would like to start the discussion of racism and the news from a point
of intersection between approaches to news analyses and studies of racism
in the news Since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of studies on
the news in mass communications research.. Early anecdotal or sociological
accounts with a liberal tendency, especially in the US context, have tended
to urge the press to perform a critical role.' Other studies have approached
the genre of news in order to interrogate the implicit claim that the news,
266 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
print or audio-visual, is a representation of reality and have argued that
news media participate in the social construction of reality (Berger and
Luckmann, 1972; Epstein, 1975; Tuchman, 1978)
Much emphasis has also been placed in various approaches on the links
between media control, ownership, structures of news production and
dissemination of news Keith Windschutt1e (1985: 261-99) summarizes
these links in terms of five models: free market, where news production
operates within the dictates of a free market economy; manipulative, where
journalists chum out 'propaganda that suits the needs of their employers';
bureaucratic, where institutional organizations of spacetime dictate a routine
presentation of news; ideological consensus, where ruling ideologies shape
the production of news; and materialist, which emphasizes the commodity
aspect of news production
Other approaches, which Van Djik (1988) categorizes as microsocio.
logical, have focused on the product itself Here too, there are multiple
approaches to reading the news: content analysis, ideology and discourse
analysis, semiotica1 analysis, contextual factors and audience reading
strategies are some of the frameworks through which news is being studied
(Cohen and Young, 1981; Dahlgren and Sparks, 1992; Fowler et al., 1979;
Hall et al., 1980; Halloran et al., 1970; Hartley, 1981) Many of these
frameworks have employed the lenses of race, class and gender in con-
ducting these studies, hence the emphasis of such studies has been on an
analysis of the construction of deviance (Cohen and Young, 1981) or the
ideological dissemination of the status quo in industrial disputes (Glasgow
University Media Group, 1982), or racially categorized minority groups
constructed as a threat to civil order (Hall et al , 1978). Most of these
studies have traced patterns of linkages between representations of dis-
order, threat or violence and those who are constructed as posing a threat
to the dominant order.
In this scenario, ethnographies of audiences as readers do posit audiences
as active readers or producers of meaning, which may have important
implications for migrant and indigenous communities reading against the
grain of 'mainstream' media coverage An important contribution that
shifts the discourse from Marxist-driven frameworks which have conven-
tionally treated audiences as passive consumers, the audience ethnography
approach, however, remains limited since it does not focus on strategies of
changing the structures which govern the production and dissemination of
the news media (Roach, 1997: 59).
In categorizing the different models of reading the news, it is important
to point out that these approaches are complex and interdisciplinary; the
work on news analysis illustrates both the value of earlier studies and
the continuing need for a critical analysis and engagement with one of the
major mediators of information in the late 20th century..
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out /sboriginality 267
Situated in the context of racism, the above approaches to media
analyses have demonstrated the manner in which dominant framing of 'other'
cultural/political groups within national boundaries has been negative and
stereotypical and has functioned mainly to maintain the status quo by
portraying these groups as a threat to the dominant order (Meadows and
Oldham, 1991; Van Djik, 1988, 1991; Wilson and Gutierrez, 1985) In
the USA, for instance, many of these studies have been conducted on
portrayals of African Americans who face 'a scarcity of news stories that
challenge racial stereotypes' (Van Djik, 1991: 14)
A major study in Australia, Racism, Ethnicity and the Media (Jakubowicz,
1994) covers a broad range of issues in relation to racism and the media
including studies of different audience groups, news analysis, advertising,
interviews with media practitioners, and television progtammcs The
emphasis of this study was to point out the continuing monocultural
structuration of the Australian media despite the fact that the Special
Broadcasting Services (SBS) television channel was created to cater to
the needs of 'multicultural' audiences According to the study, such an
understanding of multiculturalism 'begins from an assumption of margin-
ality' but does not 'come to grips with the exclusion and control of cultural
differences' which continue to characterize the 'established Australian'
media (1994:13) .. And while SBS has been upheld as a model for multi-
cultural programming, some criticisms of its structures are aimed at the
'controlling influences of a news and current affairs agenda that is set by
representatives of the dominant Anglo culture' (1994: 162)
Furthermore, as some Aboriginal critics have pointed out, the inclusion
of Aboriginal issues under a multicultural agenda not only disavows, rather
insidiously, the priority of Australian Aboriginal communities as owners of
this continent but also the specificity of historical relations between
indigenous and settler communities (Dodson, 1996) Consequently, there is
continuing racism embedded in the ethics of non-Aboriginal coverage of
Thp npprl fAr thiC' cnpr,flr"1tu 1(' 1.':>'('0 -::.hrmt continuinz -tbo
... ...... "'"'""0"'......."' .......... ....:"'........... ""...." ---....... '" ...... """"..... .L>J.L ........... u ""'y....,V... .I..l.V.l-L.l ... ..:> UVVI.LL ,-,V.1..lI..)..I..1. .J..J..J.5 l.l.1v
polarized debate between indigenous and settler community relations for,
as Marcia Langton points out, there is a need for dialogue between
indigenous and migrant communities (Perera and Pugliese, 1998: 1).
However, the distinct relationships between Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic
settler communities illustrate the need for a recognition and an analysis of
their intertwined histories, a recognition that in the context of media studies
has been undertaken by many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics
(Hartley and McKee, 1996; Jennet, 1983; Langton, 1993; Meadows and
Oldham, 1991; Pattel-Gray, 1998)
Aboriginal academic and activist, Marcia Langton's work, 'Well, I Heard
it on the Radio and I Saw it on Television. .. ', for instance, is an important
chronicle which lists the establishment of various indigenous media
organizations and offers critical readings of the politics of Aboriginal
268 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
representations Pattel-Grays work is a collection of essays concerning
indigenous media industries in Aoteatoroa, Australia and the Pacific 2
Michael Meadows (Meadows and Oldham, 1991) has situated his work
within the demand for changing the structures of news-making especially
as it thwarts Aboriginal political struggles, a view especially corroborated
by Rhoda Roberts, an SBS reporter and presenter who notes that 'better
coverage' has been interpreted as 'positive stereotypes', which may be a
simplistic approach (Jakubowicz, 1994: 163) Roberts posits that 'Aboriginal
people must attain positions where they can decide how Aboriginal people
and issues should be covered', and while this doesn't mean that only
'Aboriginal journalists can cover Aboriginal issues', it is important 'that an
Aboriginal perspective is given so that misconceptions and myths about
such issues can be avoided' (Jakubowicz, 1994: 163)
Roberts' words ring strongly in our analysis of the Port Arthur event
since we read a connection which makes audible and/or visible the silence
or absence of the histories of indigenous peoples that are maintained
through a categorization which still reproduces a separation between the
histories of Anglo-Celtic and Aboriginal peoples. In this context, we are
looking at the manner in which indigenous and settler histories are managed
precisely in a disjunctive manner in order to maintain a unisonant Anglo-
centric national identity We will discuss these connections by focusing on
the narration by the Australian newsmedia of the Port Arthur massacre in
1996
Massacres and massacres
For the past couple of years, the most memorable criminal event concern-
ing 'the nation' of Australia has been the Port Arthur event. In fact, the
memorability and the nationality of this event, when Martin Bryant gunned
down 35 people with a semi-automatic, has been successively marked as an
event of national importance for the last two years
The headline for SMH on 29 April 1996 boldly proclaimed the massacre
at Port Arthur as 'Australia's worst mass murder: up to 40 dead in
gunman's bloody rampage' .. The Australian had a similar headline that day:
'33 slain in our worst massacre' (Montgomery, 1996). The stories that
followed the headlines were equally emphatic about this event as the worst
massacre in Australian history with some qualifications For instance, the
lead-in to the cover story of SMH described the event as the 'worst
massacre by a single gunman in Australian history' .. The Australian did not
have any qualms about qualifications and boldly proclaimed in its opening
lines that 'The Tasmanian massacre surpasses any other documented in
Australia's history, and is believed to be one of the worst mass shootings
of all time'
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aboriginality 269
If history entered the story, it was with reference to the history of Port
Arthur as a convict settlement Both newspapers contained references to
Tasmania's convict history. SMH ran another story on 29 April with a
headline saying 'Victims join ghosts from an Earthly Hell', thus making
a connection between Port Arthur's convicts and the massacre victims
(Humphries, 1996: 2) In the article headlined 'Savagery erupts in after-
noon of tenor', on 29 April, journalists from the Australian described this
event as savagery returning to Port Arthur, 'one of the cruellest convict
settlements' (McNicholl et al., 1996: 3) Thus, the connections made by the
newspapers gave the Port Arthur massacre a historical reference in the
context of the convict population rather than massacres of Aboriginal
peoples
Statements made by governmental figures followed the manner in which
news reports talked about the event In the story 'Leaders Lament Horrific
Loss', the Tasmanian Police Connnissioner said other massacres in Aus-
tralian history would 'pale into insignificance' while the Federal Member of
Parliament for Dennison (which includes Hobart) described the event as 'a
loss of innocence' (Delvecchio, 1996: 3) The obvious implication here is
that no 'innocence' was lost in the massacre of Aboriginal peoples and that
these 'innocent massacres' were somehow 'insignificant'
Only one story, on 2 May, which reported on the memorial ceremony
held for the victims, mentioned massacres of Aboriginal peoples In a refer-
ence to electronic media interpreting the massacre as an end of Australian
innocence, the journalist made a lather brave but bland statement: 'Inno-
cence might have died when the Aborigines were massacred in Tasmania,
or when Constable Murray and his vigilante party shot dead about 70
Aborigines around Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928' (Stephens,
1996: 1). Other stories on 2 May reported on the one-minute silence held
across the nation as a mark of respect for the 35 victims of the Port Arthur
massacre.
T h ~ emnhasis of the rOVP:T::HJP of thp rn nc car-re ac if it -rp<;::alh, H1Prp thp
_ .. _--' -'---r_---'-_'- _.- -_._-" _._ .. ---'.. 0 .... ~ - ~ ~ . ~ . ~ . ...... ...""u ...... """"-""-', .... '" ........... ... .." .......... ,J ....,.L"-' L-'-........
worst massacre ever experienced by Australians, was not unusual in terms
of the hype and sensationalism associated with the media What was
interesting in connection with the Port Arthur event, however, was the
manner in which mention of massacres of Aboriginal people were avoided
to an extent that only a brief reference was made within a news event that
was covered for at least a few weeks. Massacres of Aboriginal people took
place as late as the early 20th century but were not referred to in the annals
of massacres listed by the media.. The punitive Coniston massacre, for
instance, 'admitted to 17 deaths' as a starting figure. Later figures make it
'clear that a vast number of people were murdered in a series of raids
lasting over a year and covering a wide area' (Horton, 1994: 218)3 The
question we began to ask then was whether the interpretation of the Port
Arthur event was racist, whether the coverage of the event masked a racial
270 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
division in recounting massacres or violent conflict in Australia While
the massacres of Aboriginal people were hardly mentioned, not only
were massacres involving white Australians as victims readily mentioned,
but the suffering of the victims seemed to be given a historical precedent in
the stories of tortured convicts since the establishment of the penal colony
in the early l800s
Yet, it is rather hard to theorize this erasure or the construction of
silences around Aboriginal massacres in the public sphere unless it is
grounded in a particular kind of interrogation, that of its discursive unity
or, as Michel Foucault puts it quite elegantly, 'according to what rules has
a particular statement been made', or even 'how is it that one particular
statement appeared rather than another?' (1972: 27) In the case of the POIt
Arthur event, our question cannot be allegorical, a questioning of 'what
was being said in what was being said' as Foucault describes the method-
ology of the history of thought. The description of discourse can only work
in opposition to this method by:
grasp(ing) the statement in the exact specificity of its occunence; determin-
(ing) its conditions of existence, fix(ing) at least its limits, establish(ing) its
correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show(ing)
what other forms of statement it excludes (1972: 28)
Since this method of intenogation disturbs the classificatory regimes
underpinning the interpretations or connections made with the specific
event, it opens up a politicized space where we may examine the implica-
tions of the construction of the Port Arthur massacre as the worst massacre
in the context of Australian history and nationhood
In her article on library and indexing services such as the Australian
Public Affairs Information Service (APAIS), which serve as gatekeepers of
information, Heather Moorcroft (1993) points to the kind of classifications
that govern institutional archival language With an acknowledgment of the
(progress' made with the entrance of words like invasion; genocide and
massacre in discourses about Australian history, Moorcroft (1993) outlines
how words such as dispossession, genocide and massacre have been absent
as descriptors or subject headings in the APAlS thesaurus. Furthermore,
articles on topics such as massacres in Aboriginal studies have, accord-
ing to Moorcroft, 'bland subject headings' (1993: 29).. She demonstrates
how the Warrigal Creek massacre is listed under Victoria: History; and
Aborigines/the Myall Creek massacre under New South Wales: History;
Aborigines; Pioneer Settlement; and Racial Discrimination In contrast,
massacres of white Australians are classified under headings such as
Mental Illness; Homicide; Violence
The conditions of a statement such as the Port Arthur event as the worst
massacre in Australian history, then, are informed by an institutionalized
disconnection which does not recognize massacres of Aboriginal people as
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aboriginality 271
inhumane or violent events; rather, those massacres are relegated to the
category of history; a history which, as the coverage of the Port Arthur
massacre illustrates, conveniently stays in the past It is important to Dote
here that this kind of categorizing has also enabled the likes of Pauline
Hanson as well as John Howard to argue that past atrocities belong to the
past' And, in asking why articles concerning the massacres of Aboriginal
people are not assigned descriptors like 'Homicide' and 'Violence',
Moorcroft's question seems to us to be a very pertinent one in terms of
assessing the reconciliation process between the indigenous and settler
populations of Australia 'All Australians need to understand this country's
past and the place of Aboriginal people in it', a discussion paper released
by the Honorable Robert Tickner, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, in
February 1991 states, outlining the purpose of reconciliation (Moorcroft,
1993: 27).. But if an acknowledgment of that past hasn't happened yet, then
the reconciliation process could be an improbability
By making visible a management of silences, Moorcroft (1993) unveils
the recuning symptom in the narratives of Australian nationhood as it is
written and rewritten from a contemporary colonialist perspective.. This
symptom points like a compass to the moment of invasion (1788) and its
location which is accorded the status of a foundational moment But the
moment of writing the nation from this point in history necessarily invokes
its double, that ghost narrative of the intimate, illegitimate, dispossessive
relationship between Anglo-Celtic and indigenous Australia (Bhabha,
1990).. And, if Port Arthur was a test of national faith, as some journalists
termed it, wananting a minute of silence across the nation, it is the
nation(ality) of its signification, more than anything else, that provides
a window to the conditions of the statements made, their limits, the
specificity of their occurrence, grouping and their exclusions
Anne McClintock (1995: 374) suggests that, 'in our time, national
collectivity is experienced preeminently through spectacle' 5 In this case,
the spectacle of national collectivity was and has been for the last two
years predicated on the racialized, dispossessing exclusion of Aboriginal
massacres and lies at the centre of the construction of the Port Arthur
massacre as the worst in Australian history
Now, if there were allegations of racism brought against these respect-
able newspapers (they are not tabloids) on these counts, the response would
be outrage and hurt, Certainly some responses might mirror that of at least
one member of the Aboriginal studies listserver who called the comparison
a case of juxtaposing apples and oranges, the case of comparing 'a late
colonial phenomenon and a postmodem [one]' (13 June 1996)6 Following
this categorization of the event, most journalists would not see themselves
as racists in that racism in the public sphere is usually defined as advancing
a racist policy or view But we would like to interrogate this categorization,
272 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
and in doing so, broaden the field of thinking about racism in the media
and its role in the sustenance of racist discourses in the public sphere
In tracing the 'complexities of the ways in which race and racism are
constructed in the media', Stuart Hall (1981: 36) defines two kinds of
racism: overt racism where 'open and favorable coverage is given to
arguments, positions and spokespersons who are in the business of elaborat-
ing an openly racist argument' and inferential racism where 'naturalized
representations of events and situations relating to race which have
racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned
assumptions'. According to Hall (1981: 36), these 'naturalized representa-
tions enable racist statements to be formulated without ever bringing into
awareness the racist predicates on which the statements are grounded' .. He
also points out that, in terms of cultural archives, the British media have a
'rich vocabulary' and 'syntax of race' given that racism in Britain is
'grounded in the relations of slavery, colonial conquest, economic exploita-
tion and imperialism in which European races have stood in relation to the
native peoples of the colonized and exploited periphery' (Hall, 1981: 38)
We would like to extend Hall's elaboration on inferential racism to the
Port Arthur context by making visible the unquestioned assumptions that
the newspapers' statements were predicated on:
1 that the history of Australia is the history of Anglo-Celtic Australians or
as Richard Broome quotes Isabel McBryde, 'the past is the possession
of those in power; the past belongs to the victor' (1994: 70);
2 that the histories of Aboriginal peoples are not a part of Australian
national history.
These premises underscore the kinds of statements that were made during
the Port Arthur massacre and exemplify the ideological constraints of
talking about an event like the Port Arthur massacre This constraint, which
Hall (1981: .31) defines as the 'formulation of intentions within discourses
that are available about a given subject [in this case, massacres] governs
what statements are made and what statements are excluded'. And this has
been one way in which the media has sustained dominant institutional
modes of forgetting.
Lest we forget or best we forget? Lapses of memory and
memories of lapses
Representation of the past can take many forms: narratives, monuments,
commemoration, museums, coins, to name a few Monuments to the
Australian soldier, the iconographic 'digger', can be seen all over the
country, generally accompanied by the grateful thanks of a nation in an
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting Ollt AbOliginalit)' 273
inscription that reads 'Lest We Forget' . Recent setbacks to Aboriginal land
rights and the Australian government's staunch refusal to apologize to
Aboriginal peoples for past injustices appear to suggest, as a newspaper
cartoon describes it, that 'best we forget' is a more appropriate directive
when it comes to representing Aboriginal histories How society incor-
porates the past depends not only on institutional modes of remembering
but also on modes of forgetting or, as Middleton and Edwards (1990: 1)
write, 'remembering and forgetting are integral with social practices that
carry with them, in important ways, a culturally evolved legacy of conduct
and invention, both material and social, central to the conduct of daily life' .
Thus, social or collective memory is integral in producing both the
sociology of knowledge as well as history Studies in social memory have
been conducted in a wide range of disciplines including history, anthro-
pology, psychology, sociology and political science and a comprehensive
discussion of this work is beyond the scope of this article. Interested
readers are invited to read reviews of the literature on social memory by
writers such as Glick and Robbins (1998), Le Goff (1992) and Irwin-
Zarecka (1994) .. However, we will focus on a few themes of social memory
to demonstrate the erasures and slippages that characterize contemporary
dominant representations of Aboriginal histories
History, in a Platonic sense, refers to reality, continuity and knowledge
and Nietzsche perceives the task of the genealogist as one which should
'direct itself against reality, oppose history as a continuum, and oppose
history as knowledge' (Foucault, 1984: 79) Historiography is not an
'objective' mode of representing a 'true' past - it is a product of relations
of knowledge and power, of domination and subordination and operates in
a space that is 'divided and hierarchical' (de Certeau, 1986) It is not the
'real' or 'truth' that is represented by historiography, rather it is a 'truth-
effect' produced by the social and technical apparatus of the day, it is 'a
discourse based on conjunction, which fights against all the disjunctions
produced by competition, labor, time, and death' (de Certeau, 1986: 205)
The historiographic text does not display any traces of its production, it
even divorces itself from memory in its effort to present the 'truth' This
separation of memory from history is doubly insidious and the fact that
history is often employed by memory in its service is overlooked (Olick
and Robbins, 1998). It presents itself as an appropriate text in which to
view the past, a text that is more 'objective' and 'true' than memory. And,
as has happened in several indigenous land rights cases all over the world,
'native' memories are positioned as 'nonhistorical'
For example, in a recent land claim made by the Yorta Yorta people, the
Federal Court of Australia ruled in December 1998 that '''the tide of
history" had swept away any claims of the Yorta Yorta people to their
traditional land' (Rintoul, 1998). In his statement of dismissal, Justice
Howard Olney ruled that the claimants 'had ceased to occupy their
274 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
traditional land in accordance with their traditional laws and customs' and
that 'native title rights and interests once lost are not capable of revival'
(Rintoul, 1998: 11). The judgement highlights modes of institutional
forgetting in the representation of Aboriginal rights: the reason that the
Yorta Yorta people 'had ceased to occupy their traditional land' was
because they were removed from their land by white settlers and placed in
missions and the fact that their 'traditions' (in this case, mainly language)
were not passed on was because in the missions, speaking 'native'
languages was a punishable offence.
The violence of this judgement is best summed up in the words of Des
Morgan, one of Yorta Yorta's principal claimants: 'Do you have to be
naked and dancing for them to recognize you as Aboriginal? My ancestors'
spirits still walk that land, the same as my spirit will walk the land when I
die and my children's spirit will follow me How can they deny our
existence? I don't need a white judge to tell me who I am. I am Yorta
Yorta' (Rintoul, 1998: 11).
The authority of institutional memory (in this case, of the legal system
and the media) in presenting the 'real' present as a representation of past
realities arises from a narrative of power that is embedded in the discourse
of the production of history. This discourse 'occults the social and
technical apparatus of the professional institution that produces it' (de
Certeau, 1986: 203) and the authorized reality that it produces is constituted
by slippages and erasures that are disguised by its organizing apparatus. Thus,
stories about massacres and killings in contemporary Australia are not just
expressed but 'made' real by a representation of the past, a process that
involves a constant interplay of power relations in the legitimation of a
discourse that 'presents itself as the only representation of what is
happening or of what happened in the past' (de Certeau, 1986: 207)..
Thus, history becomes presented as knowledge: the fact that this
knowledge is embedded in discourses of power is masked.. This 'endlessly
repeated play of domination establishes marks of its power and engraves
memories on things and even within bodies' (Foucault, 1977: 150) and in
the legal sphere 'installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus
proceeds from domination to domination' (Foucault, 1977: 151) In this
philosophy of history, as is clearly manifested by the Australian Federal
Court's judgement on the land claim mentioned earlier, alternative histories
are nullified by employing a 'logic of essences which establishes the
present in memory' (thus, the use of archival data to establish settlement)
as well as establishing the present as a 'knowledge of the future' (Foucault,
1977: 176).. The content of the past, present and future is preserved within
the dominant identity that is thus able to present a history that 'washed
away' Aboriginal rights to land Thus, as Foucault (1977: 219) states, 'the
communication of knowledge functions as a double repression: in terms of
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aboriginality 275
those it excludes from the process and in terms of the standard it imposes
on those receiving the knowledge'.
This organization of the past involves locating and relocating what Nora
(1994) calls lieux de memoire or sites of memory These sites ensure a
smooth transition from a past (constructed in the present) to a future
dictated by the interests of 'progress' and 'modernity' .. In setting up the
opposition between history and memory, Nora (1994: 286) declares that
'history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to
suppress and destroy it History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but to
annihilate what has in reality taken place.. ' Such a project involves some
degree of reconstitution of the past and consequently, selective remembering,
when it comes to positioning cunent events This then begs the question: who
gets to decide on 'appropriate' sites of memory? Who decides what should
be remembered or what is worth remembering? This institutionalization
of memory, through commemorative ceremonies, museums and archives
involves locating and reframing sites of memories of the dominant culture..
Aboriginal sites of memory are not found in historical archives, and if they
are, they tend to be subsumed under Western categories of knowledge
although several researchers have been reading them against the grain in
order to reconstruct alternative histories Archives and museums are
important sites of memory for white Australian society in its progress to a
modem nation because, as Nora (1994: 288) writes, 'legitimation by the
past, and therefore by history yields to legitimation by the future' These
sites are being contested by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists and
activists.
Thus, sites of memory are also sites of legitimation, of power, This
position is no better exemplified than in the Australian Bicentennial
celebrations of 1988: the main 'celebration' involved the re-enactment of
the arrival of Captain Cook and the First Fleet in 1788 at Botany Bay. This
time the ships did not fly the Union Jack, but their sails were emblazoned
with more recent colonial symbols: the corporate logos of Coca Cola,
Chase Corporation, Fuji Film, Mobil and other transnational firms The fact
that the Aboriginal population had not much reason to celebrate the
occasion was another example of the historical amnesia that is character-
istic of global colonialism (Castles et al., 1992). The Bicentennial 'celebra-
tions' met with wide-ranging protests by Aboriginal peoples who saw them
as a celebration of the violence of imperialism and colonialism
Historical memory as a site of power has been employed throughout
time to serve the interests of ruling classes or nation-states (Blight, 1994).
This technology of power is evident in media portrayals of indigenous
issues as well as legal battles over land rights. Indigenous peoples, whose
identities are often determined by representations of the past that rely on
Western historiographies, have to 'prove' their indigeneity in order to be
considered 'legitimate owners' of the land (Clifford, 1988) In an analysis
276 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
of the politics of authenticity, Clifford (1988) problematizes this search for
authenticity where minority groups are expected to re-enact their memories
and recover their histories based on an alien paradigm of history and
knowledge Willis (1994) interrogates this desire for authenticity by the
dominant culture as another means of appropriation of cultural products
She points out that 'the only culture that is not required to be authentic, to
replicate its past in its present, is the invisible, never stated, but all-
powerful central void of the dominant culture' (1994: 183)
The slippage involved in the 'legal fiction' that constructs the modern
nation-state is once again at work in media depictions of the Aboriginal
'problem' - colonial dispossession and domination are forgotten as Aborigi-
nal peoples are positioned as another of Australia's 'minority' group within
the current programme of cultural pluralism (Morris, 1989).. This politics of
identity is described by Monis (1989: 203) as
[whereby] a subjugated group is turned into an object of knowledge With
respect to cultural pluralism, in the production of knowledge about minority
groups, the state becomes the possessor and producer of the collective rep-
resentations of transgencrational knowledge In effect, minority groups lose the
right to speak for themselves as the production of their past, their history, is
invested in experts and authorities and mediated by institutions of the state
system
Western forms of remembering thus tend to devalue or hierarchize other
forms and colonial discourses that have produced the binary oppositions of
oral versus written histories, privilege the latter over the former Memories,
therefore, are 'wholly distinct from their representation' (Lash and Uny,
1994: 239) Remembering and forgetting in the Australian context is
inextricably linked with the notion of an 'Australian nation' and the
transition to modernity. Representation of a modem nation invokes the past
to justify the present state of the nation as a legitimate boundary of
existence In this process, Aboriginal epistemologies and ontologies are
either disallowed or subsumed into extant versions of nationalism> develop-
ment and modernity (Banerjee, 2000)..
Histories, regardless of perspectives, certainly have a concrete legacy in
current relations of power in Australia and, as Bill Thorpe (1995: 36) puts
it, the 'Australian State, Pastoral and Mining interests are direct and
indirect beneficiaries of the enormous land theft which took place through-
out colonial Australia' Furthermore, 'History', as Walter Benjamin (1969:
261) puts it, 'is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous,
empty time, but time filled with the presence of the now' In this sense,
Benjamin's articulation of the past is 'as a political field not past but
subject to the meaning it is given through action in the present' (Boyarin,
1994: 71).
Ironically, Benjamin's phrase, 'homogeneous, empty time' has been
borrowed by Anderson to describe the time of the modern nation, while
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aborigtnalitv 277
Benjamin used this phrase in the context of a critique of the concept of the
'historical progress of mankind' (Benjamin, 1969: 261). Or, as Bhabha
(1990: 311) puts it, Anderson 'fails to read that profound ambivalence that
Benjamin places deep within the utterance of the narrative of modernity'
Bhabha also identifies how Anderson's unisonant time resonates with
Ernest Renans 'syntax of forgetting', a syntax that informs the grand 'Will
to be a nation' in the pedagogical narrative of modernity, even though
Anderson himself has offered a critique of Renan in Imagined Communities
(1991) by showing how Renan's definition of the nation involves an
obligation to forget Bhabha shows how the rhetoric of this 'obligation to
forget' semiotically cuts across Renan's equivocal equivalence between the
will to nationhood and the supposed 'daily plebiscite' of the nation people
which Renan prescribes as the basis of the will to nationhood In the same
manner, he posits that Anderson's 'meanwhile' in reference to nation time
is cut across by the ghostly simultaneity of a temporality of doubling and
repetition, part of a process associated with the 'repressions of a cultural
unconscious' (Bhabha, 1990: 295)
However, while Renan and Anderson may be in the same discursive
space, as Bhabha states, our concern is not with pointing out the dis-
junctures of a nation community; in this context of aligning past stories
with present narrations of the nation, we are looking at the manner in
which indigenous and Anglo histories are managed precisely in a dis-
junctive manner in order to maintain a unisonant Anglo-centric national
identity It may be useful here to recount Ian Anderson's 'perspective on
time'
In his essay on 'Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner', Aboriginal activist and
researcher Anderson (1993-4: 14) states that 'the experience of colonialism
is to fragment and dismember To resist the colonial project is to reconnect
or make whole' This process of 'making whole' is different from Benedict
Anderson's notions of 'simultaneity' or the 'meanwhile', terms which
Robert Paine distinguishes between: 'simultaneity', as the sense that others
are doing the same thing which is related to your own meaningful
experience and 'meanwhile', as others are doing other things in the same
time that you are doing some things (Paine, 1992: 58) This kind of
simultaneity or meanwhile rests on an ahistorical, disembodied chronotope
of the nation, one which disavows the kind of simultaneity that makes
visible the violence of colonial interrelations or the hierarchical manage-
ment of differential identities with a given nation Yet, this 'making whole'
is not placed in opposition to Bhabha's concept of the disjunct chronotope
of the narration of the nation enunciated from the location of cultural
difference and minority discourses.. Bhabha's site of writing the nation is
theorized as a split between the pedagogical and the performative, where
any 'claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of
signification and discursive address' (Bhabha, 1990: 297) And, as we
278 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
propose in our reading of the narration of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996
by the Australian newsmedia, such a crisis in the process of signification
is surmounted precisely by the differential, dismembered treatment of
indigenous and Anglo histories
Re-reading, re-writing and re-presenting history against
the grain
In reading the coverage of the Port Arthur event as a symptom of these
kinds of erasures, we were not alone .. While many indigenous people have
rolled their eyes when they heard this event described as the worst
massacre, indigenous as well as non-indigenous people debated the issue of
Aboriginal massacres and the silence around it in connection to the Port
Arthur event on the Aboriginal Studies listserver on the Internet Internet
communication, of course, can be interactive as opposed to the one-way
communications systems that structure the economies of print, radio or
television media. However, it is significant to mark the Internet debate
precisely because it reveals the instability of the sign of massacres as it was
mobilized by the Australian media. Many of the participants on the
listserver identified themselves 'racially' and their debate was an inter-
esting one since it revealed diverse attitudes to the disruptive power of
invoking massacres of Aboriginal people in the context of an event like
Port Arthur. While one member of the list called the debate a tasteless and
a useless exercise, others engaged with it in a more intellectual manner, A
non-Aboriginal participant wrote about hearing first-hand descriptions of
massacres in the Northern Territories and berated those who only thought
in terms of validating European written sources (14 May 1996) One
Aboriginal participant pointed to the emphasis on healing for a tragedy like
Port Arthur and noted: 'It would be good if the same rationale was to be
extended by all Australians to Aboriginal people to ensure the healing
process starts for us' (15 May 1996). Still another participant, who identified
himself as a Native American, noted the similarity of Indigenous Australian
and Native American histories In the USA, he stated, 'there is a struggle
to have 18 congressional medals of honor suspended These were presented
to soldiers for their valor and bravery in shooting down mercilessly oUI
elders, women, children and babies in the Wounded Knee massacre' (15
June 1996).
Recounting another kind of struggle, an Aboriginal participant referred
to the Pinjarra massacre site where, in 1834, Aboriginal men, women and
children were massacred. The number of Aboriginal people killed ranged
anywhere from 30 to 300 (19 June 96) Jim Duffield's (1998) Internet
report on the massacre, entitled 'Best we Forget' (an ironic reference to the
number of Retired Servicemen's League monuments which are constructed
I
I
I
,)
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aboriginalu 279
under the banner 'Lest we Forget') comments on the fact that the 'genosite'
by the Murray river was unmarked and called for its commemoration
While it was heartening to note that the issue was articulated on the
listserver, the struggle to represent Australian histories from an indigenous
location in mainstream communications has been an ongoing one. Stephen
Muecke (1997) traces the importance of screening programmes on tele-
vision which offer an interconnected version of Aboriginal and Anglo-
Celtic histories In an attempt to address the notion that feelings of guilt are
being imposed on the Anglo-Celtic population about past atrocities, an idea
mobilized by John Howard in his refusal to apologize to Indigenous
Australians, Muecke (1997) suggests that guilt is not the feeling being
proposed by Aboriginal communities In an article in the Australian
Financial Review, he states that 'Sorrow, honor, and a place in history are
what is being called for' (11 April 1997) He further posits that 'Death is at
the heart of the formation of the nation', and 'Aborigines have long
occupied a place of psychic denial in Australian national consciousness'
And this is, Muecke argues, what 'the Black Deaths in Custody Commis-
sion came to work on at a symbolic level' .
We would like to point out that the ritualistic placing of death at the
heart of the formation of the nation has been consistently a mascu1inist
project displayed in the icons of the war memorial or calendric markers
which are often gendered and racialized Marking Aboriginal massacres as
sacred in national memory, while they are already a part of the histories of
Aboriginal communities, would not only begin that healing process for all
Australians and rewrite contemporary nanatives of Australian nationhood
from an indigenous location, but also begin to address the exclusions of
masculinist narratives of the nation
Conclusion and future directions
Re-writing and re-reading narratives involve producing an 'effective'
history, in the sense that it 'introduces discontinuity into our very being -
as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and
sets it against itself' (Foucault, 1977: 154) An effective history questions
knowledge production and affirms the position of knowledge as per-
spective.. It also unmasks the power relations behind knowledge production
and, as Blight (1994: 52) asserts, 'how groups remember and contend in
the marketplaces of power and culture for hegemony is perhaps the central
problem in the study of historical memory' .. As Jim Remedio (1998: 8),
Chairperson of the National Indigenous Media Association of Australia,
declares, 'Aboriginal people know their history. It is burnt into our conscious-
ness, from generations of oral histories told to us by Elders' The task is to
280 Media, Culture & Society 22(3)
disseminate these narratives in the mainstream media and set up resistant
readings of dominant histories.
Resistant readings of histories also involve some degree of counter-
perception since perception is implanted in history. Images of the English
fleet landing in Australia might evoke feelings of pride in Anglo-Australians;
these same images evoke feelings of dispossession and injustice among
Aboriginal peoples It is the production of counter-histories and counter-
memories that can provide the basis for a counter-perception of images and
narratives in the popular press.. As Shohat and Starn (1994: 354) write,
'resistant readings, for their part, depend on a certain cultural or political
preparation that "primes" the spectator to read critically'. Thus, Jim
Duffield's (1998) call for a commemoration of the Pinjarra massacre
genosite works at this level of calling attention to a colonialist landscape
And, oUI intention in writing this article is to mark such modes of for-
getting so that recent work on recommendations to mainstream media, which
involves cross-cultural training for journalists or increased Aboriginal par-
ticipation, takes into account the many ways in which colonial narratives are
rewritten in contemporary news events.. With this focus, oUI reading of the
Port Arthur event demonstrates the need as well as the enormity of the task
of articulating Aboriginal histories in the context of everyday narratives of
Australian nationhood
We would like to end by echoing the words of Jim Remedio (1998: 8):
I am reminded by history, that doors were not always open to Indigenous
People in media These doors were opened as a result of fierce determination
and will of Aboriginal and TOIles Strait Islander people, many of them not with
us today, but all of them with a common goal in mind - to gain the same access
and equity to mass media afforded other community groups, to allow us to tell
OUI stories, in our own way, as they happened, and as they are happening today
Notes
I. See Van Djik (1988: 5-7) News al Discourse for an overviewof such studies
2 In Australia, there are several local indigenous media organizations which
have existed prior to forming a network within the umbrella of the National
Indigenous Media Association of Australia. Conceived in the late 1980s, NIMAA
was formally recognized on 23 March 1993 These various organizations, some
funded through government and some like the Central Australian Aboriginal Media
Association which are financially strong corporations, have been responsible for a
wide range of media productions including a series of programmes in indigenous
languages, some powerful documentaries and films
3 For a discussion of the extent of these massacres, see Elder (1988)
4 Pauline Hanson, a member of the Australian Parliament (1996-8) and founder/
leader of the One Nation Party, frequently circulates notions that Australians
should not have to pay for the 'past' deeds of their ancestors, thus disavowing the
Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out AbO! iginality 281
continual colonial conditions that Aboriginal Australians have to contend with.
Likewise, the current Australian Prime Minister, John Howard echoes that rhetoric
5. Anne McClintock posits her theory of experiencing the collectivity of the
nation as spectacle against what she sees as Benedict Anderson's elitist reading of
the imagined collectivity of the modem nation through the medium of the
newspaper
6 We have not identified the participants on the listserver because we do not
wish to name them in this article
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Bobby Banerjee is Associate Professor at the School of Management, RMIT
University, Melbourne, Australia His research interests are indigenous
ecology, sustainable development and corporate environmentalism. He has
published over 30 articles in journals, conference proceedings and book
chapters. His work has appeared in Journal of Advertising, Journal ofBusi-
ness Research, Journal of Environmental Education, Advances in Consumer
Research, Organization & Environment and Management Learning
Goldie Osuri is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, University
of Massachusetts at Amherst This article was written while she was Visit-
ing Research Fellow at the Department of Communications and Cultural
Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia Her research interests are
centred around issues of colonialism and racism with a focus on news
media, film studies arrd criticial cultural theory.. She has presented several
papers at international conferences and published a book chapter on the
films of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene
Both authors contributed equally to this article and names appear in alpha-
betical order ..
Address: Please send all correspondence to Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee,
School of Management, RMIT University, Level 16, 239 Bourke Street,
Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia [email: apache@rmitedu.. au]