Pearls and Irritations

With just a few more stories farmers in the south of Israel would have been granted as much air time as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia put together.

The proposal to make a constitutional change affecting the nation’s relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—the Voice—went almost completely unreported on during hundreds of editions of the ABC’s midday Country Hour program and morning Regional Reports. During the three-week period before the Voice referendum and in the week afterwards, the state editions of Country Hour and the local Regional Reports aired over 1,300 stories across regional Australia, from Broome to Ballarat and from Cairns to Esperance. However, only two episodes of Country Hour—both in Western Australia—included stories on the Voice. No Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander speakers were reported putting forward the Yes case on these programs anywhere in Australia during this period. This level of reporting was consistent with previous findings.

Western Australia’s Country Hour was the only ABC Rural program that broadcast stories on the Voice in the four-week period of this study. One story dutifully reported a procession of four prominent speakers for the No case at the Pastoralists and Graziers Association’s annual convention, where Aboriginal activist Warren Mundine, a guest speaker for the No case pointed to the social standing and discursive power farmers acquire through agricultural production. A former governor of WA, Malcolm McCusker, also spoke. His reactionary, assimilationist views appeared to challenge not only the Voice proposal  but the basis of native title as well. The Country Hour reporter introduced and summed up McCusker’s speech: ‘it’s a myth that Aboriginal people don’t currently have a voice in parliament or in government around Australia and he thinks the majority of Aboriginal people aren’t in need of the sort of assistance that the Voice is claiming to offer’. The voices of lobby groups and industry associations and their governance matters were routinely reported on in the study period, but not the governance potential of the Voice.

The segregating-out of stories about the Voice to somewhere else in the ABC is a clear victory for the rural land-owning class, pointing to a healthy feedback loop between ABC program producers and politically powerful settler farmers. There are practices new and old being employed today by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, both locally and in wider economic systems—on homeland estates and settler properties, in rural towns and in the seas where people exercise continuing rights to contribute to their own sustenance, cultural maintenance and social wellbeing. They are rejected as not being ‘agricultural’ enough, and therefore not ‘rural’ enough—not assimilated enough—for inclusion in ABC Rural programs. Their absence perpetuates the terra nullius fallacy that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land use is neither rural nor regional, but exists as some other form of activity situated further down—or not even on—an imagined Darwinian hierarchy of rural land use.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s claims to land and their continuing uses of land conflict with settler farming practices. Protection of cultural places for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can include maintaining ecosystems and riverine systems for traditional use, yet in the four-week period studied, the great bulk of stories on the rural programs addressed only settler land uses, and only one story reported on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and water interests—specifically, an increase in Traditional Owner water allocations in Gippsland. Of over a thousand stories across Australia, only one reported on an Aboriginal ‘industry’.

Many stories pass the cut as ‘rural news’ even though their connection to Australian agricultural production is tenuous. So even as the Voice was ruled out as ‘rural news’, other stories abounded, supported by an array of arcane cultural messages and symbols: the pioneering fifth-generation farming family; the horse rider; the woman horse rider; bush races; woman in the bush; the struggling farmer, truck driver, fisher, Israeli farmer, Irish farmer and even ‘country singer’. A story about Israeli farmers which focused on how the Israel-Gaza war was ‘taking a terrible toll on agriculture in the south of Israel’ was re-broadcast five times across different programs and locations. With just a few more stories farmers in the south of Israel would have been granted as much air time as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia put together.

Rodeo news is rural news on Country Hour. A story emanating from the Northern Territory’s prison regime, desperate for good news stories about Aboriginal people, was broadcast across several states, but only seven other stories in total reported on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander matters in the four-week period examined.  The Alice Springs rodeo story made up about half of the total of thirteen stories with Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander content which were broadcast. That’s thirteen out of over thirteen hundred stories.

Listeners will hear of sales of pastoral stations, with comments from vendors, buyers, property agents and conservation groups boosting the property’s social licence. There will be no comments from Traditional Owners who have their own native title overlying the properties with complex layers of song lines that are of huge importance to group wellbeing. Their interest goes unrecorded.

The battle for control of regional discourse and the institutionalised suppression and segregation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence in the rural space bears comparison with ‘Jim Crow’ culture in America. The conservative farmer think-tank the Page Research Centre (‘we work closely with The Nationals’) has sponsored research that recommends controlling how the story of the rural is imagined and told even more tightly by ‘giving Regional Australia a separate but complimentary [sic] ABC Regional organisation, with its own Charter and infrastructure, dedication [sic] to serving Australia’s regions’.

Before any change can occur at the ABC, its political and organisational leadership, under pressure to steer an ever more conservative course, would do well to listen more closely to its rural programs with their reek of Jim Crow radio and consider whether they conform to the ABC charter. Is this the kind of ‘national campfire’ that the ABC’s new chair had in mind when he championed “the need to cherish and support our great public institutions…….to keep our enlightened, liberal-democratic society strong in the face of old and new threats. To provide the structures that can support reason, truth, freedom of speech, mutual understanding, culture, creativity, and national solidarity”?  Amongst the established corporation leadership there will be those with vested interests who are very comfortable with the existing, segregated view of the rural that is being produced daily.  The settler rural story has been thoroughly naturalised and has been privileging the big end of the city and country towns for a very long time, and any hint of change will be staunchly resisted.

Regardless of how the Voice referendum was reported on, it is long past time that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were represented by ABC Rural programs as a complex living culture with interests that extend beyond one-dimensional and politically unthreatening stories about ‘bush tucker’ or ‘training to be a rodeo rider’.

This article was first published in Arena Online April 18 2024.

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