whiteing out - media culture

Volume 22Number3May 2000

Issue editor: Nicholas Garnham

243 Jane RoscoeDocumenting the Immigrant Nation: tensions andcontradictions in the representation of immigrantcommunities in a New Zealand television documentarysenes

263 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee and Goldie OsuriSilences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality inmaking news and making history

285 Elizabeth Fones-WolfPromoting a labor perspective in the American massmedia: unions and radio in the CIO era, 1936-56

309 Katja ValaskiviBeing a part of the family? Genre, gender andproduction in a Japanese TV drama

327 Tamara L FalicovArgentina's blockbuster movies and the politics ofculture under neoliberalism, 1989-98

Silences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality inmaking news and making history

Subhabrata Bobby BanerjeeSCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, RMIT UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE

Goldie OsuriDEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST, USA

Preface

We would like to start this article by pointing out our location as nonAboriginal academics working within a First World institution on issuesconcerned with colonial relations of power in Australia, The article itself isnot a study either of Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander peoples orcultures, but since it looks at some of the ongoing colonial conditionswhich indigenous peoples contend with, we would like to foreground ourinstitutional positionality, Academic institutions have historically been and,in many cases still are, complicit with colonial conditions by participatingin the knowledge/power nexus especially through representations of, or byspeaking for, Aboriginal peoples .. In this sense, while attempting to read thekinds of colonial discourses prevalent in the Australian public sphere, weacknowledge our position within these institutional modes even as ourwork (shaped by our own history and experience of racism and colonialismyet vastly differently from those of Aboriginal peoples) is situated in thedesire to engage with and participate in the transformation of colonialismSo while we continue to engage in uncovering what Akhil Gupta calls the'partiality of self-representations of the West' (1994: 165), we would alsolike to say that given the kind of project we are engaging in, we areaccountable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; inour case, this article has been produced in consultation with Dr Dianne

Media, Culture & Society © 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaksand 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 ofWollongong.

On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant shot up to 40 people at Port Arthur,Tasmania. During the week that followed, leading newspapers aroundAustralia framed the event as Australia's worst massacre. We will befocusing on the coverage of this news event through the medium of twomajor 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 questionsother than the ones asked by journalists in their so-called objective andimpartial coverage of this massacre Why, for instance, was this eventtermed the worst massacre in Australian history when the Australian nationseemed to have been founded on a history of massacres? Why did bothprint and television media limit themselves to a lO---40-year history ofmassacres in Australia? What were the discursive regimes that governedthe statements by the media as well as governmental leaders? Why weresome historical connections made and others ignored? Why did the debateconcerning the non-inclusion of Aboriginal massacres, conspicuouslyabsent from the public sphere or mainstream media channels, surface on anAboriginal studies Internet list server with the participation of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people? Were we having a knee-jerk reaction to thesignifier of the massacre that, read as an event of a peace-time postmodernspectacle, disperses a transformed chain of meanings irreducible to eitherlexical definitions or historical contexts? We will try to work through someof these questions in our subsequent discussion in light of the coverages bythe two above-mentioned newspapers ..

Introduction

Awareness and recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples all over theworld has increased in recent years .. The United Nations declaration on therights of Indigenous Nations recognizes the

urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights and characteristics ofIndigenous Nations, especially the right to lands, territories and resources, whichderive from each Nation's culture; aspects of which include spiritual traditions,histories and philosophies, as well as political, economic and social customs andstructures (United Nations, 1994: I)

Recognizing the genocide of indigenous peoples all over the world, the UNdeclaration affirms that indigenous people possess the 'right to exist inpeace and security as a distinct people and to be protected against any typeof 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 colonization However, such an acknowledgment has been subsequently setbackthrough current amendments (1998) to the Native Title Act of 1993 whichseverely limit the ways in which Native Title may be exercised or landclaims lodged (Bachelard, 1997) As another instance of this struggle, therefusal of the current Prime Minister, John Howard, to make an officialapology in response to the 1997 Human Rights Commission report,BI inging Them Home (a report on the stolen generations of Aboriginalchildren who were removed from their families between the 1930s and the1960s) was a disavowal of the role of governmental policies in theirimperative to eradicate Aboriginal communities and cultures This refusalresulted in a people's movement where many Australians participated in a'Sony Day' event in order to acknowledge what the Human Rights and EqualOpportunity Commission defined as an attempt at genocide

Similarly, the National Report (1991) of the Royal Commission intoAboriginal Deaths in Custody was set up to investigate the alarmingly highdeath rate of Aboriginal people while in custody. Among the many recommendations made by the Royal Commission there were a few that weremedia-related The Commission felt that many indigenous people throughout Australia were disappointed at their portrayal by the media and 'calledfor a better understanding of issues relating to the media treatment ofAboriginal affairs' (Hartley and McKee, 1996: 3) The Commission alsorecommended that media organizations should develop codes and policiesrelating to the presentation of Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander issuesIn the arena of film and television production, there have been severalguidelines developed by Aboriginal media personnel (Bostock, 1990; Makingthe Grade, 1996). So far, the development of these codes and policies,which are much needed and valuable, have helped in formulating an ethicsof media interaction with Aboriginal groups and communities although, asMeadows and Oldham (1991: 38) point out, 'codes of conduct or racerelations 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 realguiding effect' .

Racism and the news

We would like to start the discussion of racism and the news from a pointof intersection between approaches to news analyses and studies of racismin the news Since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of studies onthe news in mass communications research.. Early anecdotal or sociologicalaccounts with a liberal tendency, especially in the US context, have tendedto urge the press to perform a critical role.' Other studies have approachedthe genre of news in order to interrogate the implicit claim that the news,


print or audio-visual, is a representation of reality and have argued thatnews media participate in the social construction of reality (Berger andLuckmann, 1972; Epstein, 1975; Tuchman, 1978)

Much emphasis has also been placed in various approaches on the linksbetween media control, ownership, structures of news production anddissemination of news Keith Windschutt1e (1985: 261-99) summarizesthese links in terms of five models: free market, where news productionoperates within the dictates of a free market economy; manipulative, wherejournalists chum out 'propaganda that suits the needs of their employers';bureaucratic, where institutional organizations of spacetime dictate a routinepresentation of news; ideological consensus, where ruling ideologies shapethe production of news; and materialist, which emphasizes the commodityaspect of news production

Other approaches, which Van Djik (1988) categorizes as microsocio.logical, have focused on the product itself Here too, there are multipleapproaches to reading the news: content analysis, ideology and discourseanalysis, semiotica1 analysis, contextual factors and audience readingstrategies 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 theseframeworks have employed the lenses of race, class and gender in conducting these studies, hence the emphasis of such studies has been on ananalysis of the construction of deviance (Cohen and Young, 1981) or theideological dissemination of the status quo in industrial disputes (GlasgowUniversity Media Group, 1982), or racially categorized minority groupsconstructed as a threat to civil order (Hall et al , 1978). Most of thesestudies have traced patterns of linkages between representations of disorder, threat or violence and those who are constructed as posing a threatto the dominant order.

In this scenario, ethnographies of audiences as readers do posit audiencesas active readers or producers of meaning, which may have importantimplications for migrant and indigenous communities reading against thegrain of 'mainstream' media coverage An important contribution thatshifts the discourse from Marxist-driven frameworks which have conventionally treated audiences as passive consumers, the audience ethnographyapproach, however, remains limited since it does not focus on strategies ofchanging the structures which govern the production and dissemination ofthe news media (Roach, 1997: 59).

In categorizing the different models of reading the news, it is importantto point out that these approaches are complex and interdisciplinary; thework on news analysis illustrates both the value of earlier studies andthe continuing need for a critical analysis and engagement with one of themajor mediators of information in the late 20th century..

Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out /sboriginality 267

Situated in the context of racism, the above approaches to mediaanalyses have demonstrated the manner in which dominant framing of 'other'cultural/political groups within national boundaries has been negative andstereotypical and has functioned mainly to maintain the status quo byportraying these groups as a threat to the dominant order (Meadows andOldham, 1991; Van Djik, 1988, 1991; Wilson and Gutierrez, 1985) Inthe USA, for instance, many of these studies have been conducted onportrayals of African Americans who face 'a scarcity of news stories thatchallenge 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 mediaincluding studies of different audience groups, news analysis, advertising,interviews with media practitioners, and television progtammcs Theemphasis of this study was to point out the continuing monoculturalstructuration of the Australian media despite the fact that the SpecialBroadcasting Services (SBS) television channel was created to cater tothe needs of 'multicultural' audiences According to the study, such anunderstanding of multiculturalism 'begins from an assumption of marginality' but does not 'come to grips with the exclusion and control of culturaldifferences' which continue to characterize the 'established Australian'media (1994:13) .. And while SBS has been upheld as a model for multicultural programming, some criticisms of its structures are aimed at the'controlling influences of a news and current affairs agenda that is set byrepresentatives of the dominant Anglo culture' (1994: 162)

Furthermore, as some Aboriginal critics have pointed out, the inclusionof Aboriginal issues under a multicultural agenda not only disavows, ratherinsidiously, the priority of Australian Aboriginal communities as owners ofthis continent but also the specificity of historical relations betweenindigenous and settler communities (Dodson, 1996) Consequently, there iscontinuing racism embedded in the ethics of non-Aboriginal coverage of-inr11apnr\ll~ -i~~llP~ 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 ... ..:> .1.v~~ 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 betweenindigenous and migrant communities (Perera and Pugliese, 1998: 1).However, the distinct relationships between Aboriginal and Anglo-Celticsettler communities illustrate the need for a recognition and an analysis oftheir intertwined histories, a recognition that in the context of media studieshas been undertaken by many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics(Hartley and McKee, 1996; Jennet, 1983; Langton, 1993; Meadows andOldham, 1991; Pattel-Gray, 1998)

Aboriginal academic and activist, Marcia Langton's work, 'Well, I Heardit on the Radio and I Saw it on Television. .. ', for instance, is an importantchronicle which lists the establishment of various indigenous mediaorganizations and offers critical readings of the politics of Aboriginal


representations Pattel-Grays work is a collection of essays concerningindigenous media industries in Aoteatoroa, Australia and the Pacific 2

Michael Meadows (Meadows and Oldham, 1991) has situated his workwithin the demand for changing the structures of news-making especiallyas it thwarts Aboriginal political struggles, a view especially corroboratedby Rhoda Roberts, an SBS reporter and presenter who notes that 'bettercoverage' has been interpreted as 'positive stereotypes', which may be asimplistic approach (Jakubowicz, 1994: 163) Roberts posits that 'Aboriginalpeople must attain positions where they can decide how Aboriginal peopleand issues should be covered', and while this doesn't mean that only'Aboriginal journalists can cover Aboriginal issues', it is important 'that anAboriginal perspective is given so that misconceptions and myths aboutsuch issues can be avoided' (Jakubowicz, 1994: 163)

Roberts' words ring strongly in our analysis of the Port Arthur eventsince we read a connection which makes audible and/or visible the silenceor absence of the histories of indigenous peoples that are maintainedthrough a categorization which still reproduces a separation between thehistories of Anglo-Celtic and Aboriginal peoples. In this context, we arelooking at the manner in which indigenous and settler histories are managedprecisely in a disjunctive manner in order to maintain a unisonant Anglocentric national identity We will discuss these connections by focusing onthe narration by the Australian newsmedia of the Port Arthur massacre in1996

Massacres and massacres

For the past couple of years, the most memorable criminal event concerning 'the nation' of Australia has been the Port Arthur event. In fact, thememorability and the nationality of this event, when Martin Bryant gunneddown 35 people with a semi-automatic, has been successively marked as anevent of national importance for the last two years

The headline for SMH on 29 April 1996 boldly proclaimed the massacreat Port Arthur as 'Australia's worst mass murder: up to 40 dead ingunman's bloody rampage' .. The Australian had a similar headline that day:'33 slain in our worst massacre' (Montgomery, 1996). The stories thatfollowed the headlines were equally emphatic about this event as the worstmassacre in Australian history with some qualifications For instance, thelead-in to the cover story of SMH described the event as the 'worstmassacre by a single gunman in Australian history' .. The Australian did nothave any qualms about qualifications and boldly proclaimed in its openinglines that 'The Tasmanian massacre surpasses any other documented inAustralia's history, and is believed to be one of the worst mass shootingsof all time'

Banerjee & Osuri, Whiting out Aboriginality 269

If history entered the story, it was with reference to the history of PortArthur as a convict settlement Both newspapers contained references toTasmania's convict history. SMH ran another story on 29 April with aheadline saying 'Victims join ghosts from an Earthly Hell', thus makinga connection between Port Arthur's convicts and the massacre victims(Humphries, 1996: 2) In the article headlined 'Savagery erupts in afternoon of tenor', on 29 April, journalists from the Australian described thisevent as savagery returning to Port Arthur, 'one of the cruellest convictsettlements' (McNicholl et al., 1996: 3) Thus, the connections made by thenewspapers gave the Port Arthur massacre a historical reference in thecontext of the convict population rather than massacres of Aboriginalpeoples

Statements made by governmental figures followed the manner in whichnews reports talked about the event In the story 'Leaders Lament HorrificLoss', the Tasmanian Police Connnissioner said other massacres in Australian history would 'pale into insignificance' while the Federal Member ofParliament for Dennison (which includes Hobart) described the event as 'aloss of innocence' (Delvecchio, 1996: 3) The obvious implication here isthat no 'innocence' was lost in the massacre of Aboriginal peoples and thatthese 'innocent massacres' were somehow 'insignificant'

Only one story, on 2 May, which reported on the memorial ceremonyheld for the victims, mentioned massacres of Aboriginal peoples In a reference to electronic media interpreting the massacre as an end of Australianinnocence, the journalist made a lather brave but bland statement: 'Innocence might have died when the Aborigines were massacred in Tasmania,or when Constable Murray and his vigilante party shot dead about 70Aborigines around Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928' (Stephens,1996: 1). Other stories on 2 May reported on the one-minute silence heldacross the nation as a mark of respect for the 35 victims of the Port Arthurmassacre.Th~ 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 termsof the hype and sensationalism associated with the media What wasinteresting in connection with the Port Arthur event, however, was themanner in which mention of massacres of Aboriginal people were avoidedto an extent that only a brief reference was made within a news event thatwas covered for at least a few weeks. Massacres of Aboriginal people tookplace as late as the early 20th century but were not referred to in the annalsof massacres listed by the media .. The punitive Coniston massacre, forinstance, '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 raidslasting over a year and covering a wide area' (Horton, 1994: 218)3 Thequestion we began to ask then was whether the interpretation of the PortArthur event was racist, whether the coverage of the event masked a racial


division in recounting massacres or violent conflict in Australia Whilethe massacres of Aboriginal people were hardly mentioned, not onlywere massacres involving white Australians as victims readily mentioned,but the suffering of the victims seemed to be given a historical precedent inthe stories of tortured convicts since the establishment of the penal colonyin the early l800s

Yet, it is rather hard to theorize this erasure or the construction ofsilences around Aboriginal massacres in the public sphere unless it isgrounded in a particular kind of interrogation, that of its discursive unityor, as Michel Foucault puts it quite elegantly, 'according to what rules hasa particular statement been made', or even 'how is it that one particularstatement appeared rather than another?' (1972: 27) In the case of the POItArthur event, our question cannot be allegorical, a questioning of 'whatwas being said in what was being said' as Foucault describes the methodology of the history of thought. The description of discourse can only workin 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) itscorrelations 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 regimesunderpinning the interpretations or connections made with the specificevent, it opens up a politicized space where we may examine the implications of the construction of the Port Arthur massacre as the worst massacrein the context of Australian history and nationhood

In her article on library and indexing services such as the AustralianPublic Affairs Information Service (APAIS), which serve as gatekeepers ofinformation, Heather Moorcroft (1993) points to the kind of classificationsthat govern institutional archival language With an acknowledgment of the(progress' made with the entrance of words like invasion; genocide andmassacre in discourses about Australian history, Moorcroft (1993) outlineshow words such as dispossession, genocide and massacre have been absentas descriptors or subject headings in the APAlS thesaurus. Furthermore,articles on topics such as massacres in Aboriginal studies have, according to Moorcroft, 'bland subject headings' (1993: 29).. She demonstrateshow the Warrigal Creek massacre is listed under Victoria: History; andAborigines/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 asMental Illness; Homicide; Violence

The conditions of a statement such as the Port Arthur event as the worstmassacre in Australian history, then, are informed by an institutionalizeddisconnection which does not recognize massacres of Aboriginal people as


inhumane or violent events; rather, those massacres are relegated to thecategory of history; a history which, as the coverage of the Port Arthurmassacre illustrates, conveniently stays in the past It is important to Dotehere that this kind of categorizing has also enabled the likes of PaulineHanson as well as John Howard to argue that past atrocities belong to thepast' And, in asking why articles concerning the massacres of Aboriginalpeople are not assigned descriptors like 'Homicide' and 'Violence',Moorcroft's question seems to us to be a very pertinent one in terms ofassessing the reconciliation process between the indigenous and settlerpopulations of Australia 'All Australians need to understand this country'spast and the place of Aboriginal people in it', a discussion paper releasedby the Honorable Robert Tickner, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, inFebruary 1991 states, outlining the purpose of reconciliation (Moorcroft,1993: 27) .. But if an acknowledgment of that past hasn't happened yet, thenthe reconciliation process could be an improbability

By making visible a management of silences, Moorcroft (1993) unveilsthe recuning symptom in the narratives of Australian nationhood as it iswritten and rewritten from a contemporary colonialist perspective .. Thissymptom points like a compass to the moment of invasion (1788) and itslocation which is accorded the status of a foundational moment But themoment of writing the nation from this point in history necessarily invokesits double, that ghost narrative of the intimate, illegitimate, dispossessiverelationship between Anglo-Celtic and indigenous Australia (Bhabha,1990).. And, if Port Arthur was a test of national faith, as some journaliststermed it, wananting a minute of silence across the nation, it is thenation(ality) of its signification, more than anything else, that providesa window to the conditions of the statements made, their limits, thespecificity of their occurrence, grouping and their exclusions

Anne McClintock (1995: 374) suggests that, 'in our time, nationalcollectivity is experienced preeminently through spectacle' 5 In this case,the spectacle of national collectivity was and has been for the last twoyears predicated on the racialized, dispossessing exclusion of Aboriginalmassacres and lies at the centre of the construction of the Port Arthurmassacre as the worst in Australian history

Now, if there were allegations of racism brought against these respectable newspapers (they are not tabloids) on these counts, the response wouldbe outrage and hurt, Certainly some responses might mirror that of at leastone member of the Aboriginal studies listserver who called the comparisona case of juxtaposing apples and oranges, the case of comparing 'a latecolonial phenomenon and a postmodem [one]' (13 June 1996)6 Followingthis categorization of the event, most journalists would not see themselvesas racists in that racism in the public sphere is usually defined as advancinga racist policy or view But we would like to interrogate this categorization,


and in doing so, broaden the field of thinking about racism in the mediaand its role in the sustenance of racist discourses in the public sphere

In tracing the 'complexities of the ways in which race and racism areconstructed in the media', Stuart Hall (1981: 36) defines two kinds ofracism: overt racism where 'open and favorable coverage is given toarguments, positions and spokespersons who are in the business of elaborating an openly racist argument' and inferential racism where 'naturalizedrepresentations of events and situations relating to race which haveracist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestionedassumptions'. According to Hall (1981: 36), these 'naturalized representations enable racist statements to be formulated without ever bringing intoawareness the racist predicates on which the statements are grounded' .. Healso 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 exploitation and imperialism in which European races have stood in relation to thenative peoples of the colonized and exploited periphery' (Hall, 1981: 38)

We would like to extend Hall's elaboration on inferential racism to thePort Arthur context by making visible the unquestioned assumptions thatthe newspapers' statements were predicated on:

1 that the history of Australia is the history of Anglo-Celtic Australians oras Richard Broome quotes Isabel McBryde, 'the past is the possessionof those in power; the past belongs to the victor' (1994: 70);

2 that the histories of Aboriginal peoples are not a part of Australiannational history.

These premises underscore the kinds of statements that were made duringthe Port Arthur massacre and exemplify the ideological constraints oftalking about an event like the Port Arthur massacre This constraint, whichHall (1981: .31) defines as the 'formulation of intentions within discoursesthat are available about a given subject [in this case, massacres] governswhat statements are made and what statements are excluded'. And this hasbeen one way in which the media has sustained dominant institutionalmodes of forgetting.

Lest we forget or best we forget? Lapses of memory andmemories of lapses

Representation of the past can take many forms: narratives, monuments,commemoration, museums, coins, to name a few Monuments to theAustralian soldier, the iconographic 'digger', can be seen all over thecountry, 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 landrights and the Australian government's staunch refusal to apologize toAboriginal peoples for past injustices appear to suggest, as a newspapercartoon describes it, that 'best we forget' is a more appropriate directivewhen it comes to representing Aboriginal histories How society incorporates the past depends not only on institutional modes of rememberingbut also on modes of forgetting or, as Middleton and Edwards (1990: 1)write, 'remembering and forgetting are integral with social practices thatcarry with them, in important ways, a culturally evolved legacy of conductand invention, both material and social, central to the conduct of daily life' .

Thus, social or collective memory is integral in producing both thesociology of knowledge as well as history Studies in social memory havebeen conducted in a wide range of disciplines including history, anthropology, psychology, sociology and political science and a comprehensivediscussion of this work is beyond the scope of this article. Interestedreaders are invited to read reviews of the literature on social memory bywriters such as Glick and Robbins (1998), Le Goff (1992) and IrwinZarecka (1994) .. However, we will focus on a few themes of social memoryto demonstrate the erasures and slippages that characterize contemporarydominant representations of Aboriginal histories

History, in a Platonic sense, refers to reality, continuity and knowledgeand Nietzsche perceives the task of the genealogist as one which should'direct itself against reality, oppose history as a continuum, and opposehistory as knowledge' (Foucault, 1984: 79) Historiography is not an'objective' mode of representing a 'true' past - it is a product of relationsof knowledge and power, of domination and subordination and operates ina 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 'trutheffect' produced by the social and technical apparatus of the day, it is 'adiscourse based on conjunction, which fights against all the disjunctionsproduced by competition, labor, time, and death' (de Certeau, 1986: 205)The historiographic text does not display any traces of its production, iteven divorces itself from memory in its effort to present the 'truth' Thisseparation of memory from history is doubly insidious and the fact thathistory is often employed by memory in its service is overlooked (Olickand Robbins, 1998). It presents itself as an appropriate text in which toview 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, theFederal Court of Australia ruled in December 1998 that '''the tide ofhistory" had swept away any claims of the Yorta Yorta people to theirtraditional land' (Rintoul, 1998). In his statement of dismissal, JusticeHoward Olney ruled that the claimants 'had ceased to occupy their


traditional land in accordance with their traditional laws and customs' andthat 'native title rights and interests once lost are not capable of revival'(Rintoul, 1998: 11). The judgement highlights modes of institutionalforgetting in the representation of Aboriginal rights: the reason that theYorta Yorta people 'had ceased to occupy their traditional land' wasbecause they were removed from their land by white settlers and placed inmissions 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 DesMorgan, one of Yorta Yorta's principal claimants: 'Do you have to benaked 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 Idie and my children's spirit will follow me How can they deny ourexistence? I don't need a white judge to tell me who I am. I am YortaYorta' (Rintoul, 1998: 11).

The authority of institutional memory (in this case, of the legal systemand the media) in presenting the 'real' present as a representation of pastrealities arises from a narrative of power that is embedded in the discourseof the production of history. This discourse 'occults the social andtechnical apparatus of the professional institution that produces it' (deCerteau, 1986: 203) and the authorized reality that it produces is constitutedby slippages and erasures that are disguised by its organizing apparatus. Thus,stories about massacres and killings in contemporary Australia are not justexpressed but 'made' real by a representation of the past, a process thatinvolves a constant interplay of power relations in the legitimation of adiscourse that 'presents itself as the only representation of what ishappening or of what happened in the past' (de Certeau, 1986: 207)..

Thus, history becomes presented as knowledge: the fact that thisknowledge is embedded in discourses of power is masked.. This 'endlesslyrepeated play of domination establishes marks of its power and engravesmemories on things and even within bodies' (Foucault, 1977: 150) and inthe legal sphere 'installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thusproceeds from domination to domination' (Foucault, 1977: 151) In thisphilosophy of history, as is clearly manifested by the Australian FederalCourt's judgement on the land claim mentioned earlier, alternative historiesare nullified by employing a 'logic of essences which establishes thepresent 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 withinthe dominant identity that is thus able to present a history that 'washedaway' Aboriginal rights to land Thus, as Foucault (1977: 219) states, 'thecommunication of knowledge functions as a double repression: in terms of


those it excludes from the process and in terms of the standard it imposeson 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 asmooth transition from a past (constructed in the present) to a futuredictated by the interests of 'progress' and 'modernity' .. In setting up theopposition between history and memory, Nora (1994: 286) declares that'history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is tosuppress and destroy it History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but toannihilate what has in reality taken place .. ' Such a project involves somedegree of reconstitution of the past and consequently, selective remembering,when it comes to positioning cunent events This then begs the question: whogets to decide on 'appropriate' sites of memory? Who decides what shouldbe remembered or what is worth remembering? This institutionalizationof memory, through commemorative ceremonies, museums and archivesinvolves locating and reframing sites of memories of the dominant culture ..Aboriginal sites of memory are not found in historical archives, and if theyare, they tend to be subsumed under Western categories of knowledgealthough several researchers have been reading them against the grain inorder to reconstruct alternative histories Archives and museums areimportant sites of memory for white Australian society in its progress to amodem nation because, as Nora (1994: 288) writes, 'legitimation by thepast, and therefore by history yields to legitimation by the future' Thesesites are being contested by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists andactivists.

Thus, sites of memory are also sites of legitimation, of power, Thisposition is no better exemplified than in the Australian Bicentennialcelebrations of 1988: the main 'celebration' involved the re-enactment ofthe arrival of Captain Cook and the First Fleet in 1788 at Botany Bay. Thistime the ships did not fly the Union Jack, but their sails were emblazonedwith more recent colonial symbols: the corporate logos of Coca Cola,Chase Corporation, Fuji Film, Mobil and other transnational firms The factthat the Aboriginal population had not much reason to celebrate theoccasion was another example of the historical amnesia that is characteristic of global colonialism (Castles et al., 1992). The Bicentennial 'celebrations' met with wide-ranging protests by Aboriginal peoples who saw themas a celebration of the violence of imperialism and colonialism

Historical memory as a site of power has been employed throughouttime to serve the interests of ruling classes or nation-states (Blight, 1994).This technology of power is evident in media portrayals of indigenousissues as well as legal battles over land rights. Indigenous peoples, whoseidentities are often determined by representations of the past that rely onWestern historiographies, have to 'prove' their indigeneity in order to beconsidered 'legitimate owners' of the land (Clifford, 1988) In an analysis


of the politics of authenticity, Clifford (1988) problematizes this search forauthenticity where minority groups are expected to re-enact their memoriesand recover their histories based on an alien paradigm of history andknowledge Willis (1994) interrogates this desire for authenticity by thedominant culture as another means of appropriation of cultural productsShe points out that 'the only culture that is not required to be authentic, toreplicate its past in its present, is the invisible, never stated, but allpowerful central void of the dominant culture' (1994: 183)

The slippage involved in the 'legal fiction' that constructs the modernnation-state is once again at work in media depictions of the Aboriginal'problem' - colonial dispossession and domination are forgotten as Aboriginal peoples are positioned as another of Australia's 'minority' group withinthe current programme of cultural pluralism (Morris, 1989).. This politics ofidentity is described by Monis (1989: 203) as

[whereby] a subjugated group is turned into an object of knowledge Withrespect to cultural pluralism, in the production of knowledge about minoritygroups, the state becomes the possessor and producer of the collective representations of transgencrational knowledge In effect, minority groups lose theright to speak for themselves as the production of their past, their history, isinvested in experts and authorities and mediated by institutions of the statesystem

Western forms of remembering thus tend to devalue or hierarchize otherforms and colonial discourses that have produced the binary oppositions oforal 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 isinextricably linked with the notion of an 'Australian nation' and thetransition to modernity. Representation of a modem nation invokes the pastto justify the present state of the nation as a legitimate boundary ofexistence In this process, Aboriginal epistemologies and ontologies areeither disallowed or subsumed into extant versions of nationalism> development and modernity (Banerjee, 2000)..

Histories, regardless of perspectives, certainly have a concrete legacy incurrent relations of power in Australia and, as Bill Thorpe (1995: 36) putsit, the 'Australian State, Pastoral and Mining interests are direct andindirect beneficiaries of the enormous land theft which took place throughout 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 butsubject to the meaning it is given through action in the present' (Boyarin,1994: 71).

Ironically, Benjamin's phrase, 'homogeneous, empty time' has beenborrowed 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 thatBenjamin places deep within the utterance of the narrative of modernity'Bhabha also identifies how Anderson's unisonant time resonates withErnest Renans 'syntax of forgetting', a syntax that informs the grand 'Willto be a nation' in the pedagogical narrative of modernity, even thoughAnderson himself has offered a critique of Renan in Imagined Communities(1991) by showing how Renan's definition of the nation involves anobligation to forget Bhabha shows how the rhetoric of this 'obligation toforget' semiotically cuts across Renan's equivocal equivalence between thewill to nationhood and the supposed 'daily plebiscite' of the nation peoplewhich Renan prescribes as the basis of the will to nationhood In the samemanner, he posits that Anderson's 'meanwhile' in reference to nation timeis cut across by the ghostly simultaneity of a temporality of doubling andrepetition, part of a process associated with the 'repressions of a culturalunconscious' (Bhabha, 1990: 295)

However, while Renan and Anderson may be in the same discursivespace, as Bhabha states, our concern is not with pointing out the disjunctures of a nation community; in this context of aligning past storieswith present narrations of the nation, we are looking at the manner inwhich indigenous and Anglo histories are managed precisely in a disjunctive manner in order to maintain a unisonant Anglo-centric nationalidentity It may be useful here to recount Ian Anderson's 'perspective ontime'

In his essay on 'Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner', Aboriginal activist andresearcher Anderson (1993-4: 14) states that 'the experience of colonialismis to fragment and dismember To resist the colonial project is to reconnector make whole' This process of 'making whole' is different from BenedictAnderson's notions of 'simultaneity' or the 'meanwhile', terms whichRobert Paine distinguishes between: 'simultaneity', as the sense that othersare doing the same thing which is related to your own meaningfulexperience and 'meanwhile', as others are doing other things in the sametime that you are doing some things (Paine, 1992: 58) This kind ofsimultaneity or meanwhile rests on an ahistorical, disembodied chronotopeof the nation, one which disavows the kind of simultaneity that makesvisible the violence of colonial interrelations or the hierarchical management of differential identities with a given nation Yet, this 'making whole'is not placed in opposition to Bhabha's concept of the disjunct chronotopeof the narration of the nation enunciated from the location of culturaldifference and minority discourses .. Bhabha's site of writing the nation istheorized as a split between the pedagogical and the performative, whereany 'claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process ofsignification and discursive address' (Bhabha, 1990: 297) And, as we


propose in our reading of the narration of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996by the Australian newsmedia, such a crisis in the process of significationis surmounted precisely by the differential, dismembered treatment ofindigenous and Anglo histories

Re-reading, re-writing and re-presenting history againstthe grain

In reading the coverage of the Port Arthur event as a symptom of thesekinds of erasures, we were not alone .. While many indigenous people haverolled their eyes when they heard this event described as the worstmassacre, indigenous as well as non-indigenous people debated the issue ofAboriginal massacres and the silence around it in connection to the PortArthur event on the Aboriginal Studies listserver on the Internet Internetcommunication, of course, can be interactive as opposed to the one-waycommunications systems that structure the economies of print, radio ortelevision media. However, it is significant to mark the Internet debateprecisely because it reveals the instability of the sign of massacres as it wasmobilized by the Australian media. Many of the participants on thelistserver identified themselves 'racially' and their debate was an interesting one since it revealed diverse attitudes to the disruptive power ofinvoking massacres of Aboriginal people in the context of an event likePort Arthur. While one member of the list called the debate a tasteless anda useless exercise, others engaged with it in a more intellectual manner, Anon-Aboriginal participant wrote about hearing first-hand descriptions ofmassacres in the Northern Territories and berated those who only thoughtin terms of validating European written sources (14 May 1996) OneAboriginal participant pointed to the emphasis on healing for a tragedy likePort Arthur and noted: 'It would be good if the same rationale was to beextended by all Australians to Aboriginal people to ensure the healingprocess starts for us' (15 May 1996). Still another participant, who identifiedhimself as a Native American, noted the similarity of Indigenous Australianand Native American histories In the USA, he stated, 'there is a struggleto have 18 congressional medals of honor suspended These were presentedto soldiers for their valor and bravery in shooting down mercilessly oUIelders, women, children and babies in the Wounded Knee massacre' (15June 1996).

Recounting another kind of struggle, an Aboriginal participant referredto the Pinjarra massacre site where, in 1834, Aboriginal men, women andchildren were massacred. The number of Aboriginal people killed rangedanywhere from 30 to 300 (19 June 96) Jim Duffield's (1998) Internetreport on the massacre, entitled 'Best we Forget' (an ironic reference to thenumber of Retired Servicemen's League monuments which are constructed

I

II,)

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 thelistserver, the struggle to represent Australian histories from an indigenouslocation in mainstream communications has been an ongoing one. StephenMuecke (1997) traces the importance of screening programmes on television which offer an interconnected version of Aboriginal and AngloCeltic histories In an attempt to address the notion that feelings of guilt arebeing imposed on the Anglo-Celtic population about past atrocities, an ideamobilized by John Howard in his refusal to apologize to IndigenousAustralians, Muecke (1997) suggests that guilt is not the feeling beingproposed by Aboriginal communities In an article in the AustralianFinancial Review, he states that 'Sorrow, honor, and a place in history arewhat is being called for' (11 April 1997) He further posits that 'Death is atthe heart of the formation of the nation', and 'Aborigines have longoccupied a place of psychic denial in Australian national consciousness'And this is, Muecke argues, what 'the Black Deaths in Custody Commission came to work on at a symbolic level' .

We would like to point out that the ritualistic placing of death at theheart of the formation of the nation has been consistently a mascu1inistproject displayed in the icons of the war memorial or calendric markerswhich are often gendered and racialized Marking Aboriginal massacres assacred in national memory, while they are already a part of the histories ofAboriginal communities, would not only begin that healing process for allAustralians and rewrite contemporary nanatives of Australian nationhoodfrom an indigenous location, but also begin to address the exclusions ofmasculinist 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 andsets it against itself' (Foucault, 1977: 154) An effective history questionsknowledge production and affirms the position of knowledge as perspective .. It also unmasks the power relations behind knowledge productionand, as Blight (1994: 52) asserts, 'how groups remember and contend inthe marketplaces of power and culture for hegemony is perhaps the centralproblem 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 consciousness, from generations of oral histories told to us by Elders' The task is to


disseminate these narratives in the mainstream media and set up resistantreadings of dominant histories.

Resistant readings of histories also involve some degree of counterperception since perception is implanted in history. Images of the Englishfleet landing in Australia might evoke feelings of pride in Anglo-Australians;these same images evoke feelings of dispossession and injustice amongAboriginal peoples It is the production of counter-histories and countermemories that can provide the basis for a counter-perception of images andnarratives in the popular press .. As Shohat and Starn (1994: 354) write,'resistant readings, for their part, depend on a certain cultural or politicalpreparation that "primes" the spectator to read critically'. Thus, JimDuffield's (1998) call for a commemoration of the Pinjarra massacregenosite works at this level of calling attention to a colonialist landscapeAnd, oUI intention in writing this article is to mark such modes of forgetting so that recent work on recommendations to mainstream media, whichinvolves cross-cultural training for journalists or increased Aboriginal participation, takes into account the many ways in which colonial narratives arerewritten in contemporary news events .. With this focus, oUI reading of thePort Arthur event demonstrates the need as well as the enormity of the taskof articulating Aboriginal histories in the context of everyday narratives ofAustralian 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 IndigenousPeople in media These doors were opened as a result of fierce determinationand will of Aboriginal and TOIles Strait Islander people, many of them not withus today, but all of them with a common goal in mind - to gain the same accessand equity to mass media afforded other community groups, to allow us to tellOUI 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 overview of such studies2 In Australia, there are several local indigenous media organizations which

have existed prior to forming a network within the umbrella of the NationalIndigenous Media Association of Australia. Conceived in the late 1980s, NIMAAwas formally recognized on 23 March 1993 These various organizations, somefunded through government and some like the Central Australian Aboriginal MediaAssociation which are financially strong corporations, have been responsible for awide range of media productions including a series of programmes in indigenouslanguages, 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 Australiansshould 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 thenation as spectacle against what she sees as Benedict Anderson's elitist reading ofthe imagined collectivity of the modem nation through the medium of thenewspaper

6 We have not identified the participants on the listserver because we do notwish to name them in this article

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Bobby Banerjee is Associate Professor at the School of Management, RMITUniversity, Melbourne, Australia His research interests are indigenousecology, sustainable development and corporate environmentalism. He haspublished over 30 articles in journals, conference proceedings and bookchapters. His work has appeared in Journal ofAdvertising, Journal ofBusiness Research, Journal ofEnvironmental Education, Advances in ConsumerResearch, Organization & Environment and Management Learning

Goldie Osuri is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Universityof Massachusetts at Amherst This article was written while she was Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Communications and CulturalStudies, University of Wollongong, Australia Her research interests arecentred around issues of colonialism and racism with a focus on newsmedia, film studies arrd criticial cultural theory .. She has presented severalpapers at international conferences and published a book chapter on thefilms of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene

Both authors contributed equally to this article and names appear in alphabetical 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]

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