AustLit

'The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Country Hour radio programmes are produced regionally and promote specific understandings of rurality. This article presents an analysis that shows Indigenous people and issues are rarely sources or topics in Country Hour, and that stories about Indigenous land use are generally broadcast only if the land is used in a way that is seen as ‘productive’ through settler colonial eyes. It also argues the programme should include Indigenous voices and understandings of the land in imagining this space. It makes a theoretical contribution to media studies by extending on concepts of the ‘rural imaginary’ and ‘settler common sense’ to argue that the programme perpetuates a discourse that legitimates and valorises the use of ‘rural’ space for non-Indigenous people, concepts and activities. Indigenous people are noticeably absent and silent. Country Hour is therefore conceptualised as a media space that continues to transmit settler colonialism and its attendant myths.' (Introduction)

'This article examines the role of television in Australia’s 1967 referendum, which is widely believed to have given rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It presents an analysis of archival television footage to identify five stories that moved the nation: Australia’s shame, civil rights and global connections, admirable activists, ‘a fair go’ and consensus. It argues that television shaped the wider culture and opened a channel of communication that allowed Indigenous activists and everyday people to speak directly to non-Indigenous people and other First Nations people throughout the land for the first time. The referendum narrative that television did so much to craft and promote marks the shift from an older form of settler nationalism that simply excluded Indigenous people, to an ongoing project that seeks to recognise, respect and ‘reaccredit’ the nation-state through incorporation of Indigenous narratives. We conclude that whereas television is understood to have ‘united’ the nation in 1967, 50 years later seismic shifts in media and society have made the quest for further constitutional reform on Indigenous rights and recognition more sophisticated, diffuse, complex and challenging.' (Publication abstract)

'Despite the international evidence, the Northern Territory has discouraged bilingual programs in its schools, writes Lisa Waller. But there are early signs of another shift in attitude, in both Darwin and Canberra'