AustLit

'For too long Australia's media has failed to communicate Aboriginal political aspirations. This unique study of key Aboriginal initiatives seeking self-determination and justice reveals a history of media procrastination and denial.

A team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers examine 45 years of media responses to these initiatives, from the 1972 Larrakia petition to the Queen seeking land rights and treaties, to the desire for recognition expressed in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. This analysis exposes how the media frames stories, develops discourses, and supports deeper historical narratives that corrode and undermine the intent and urgency of Aboriginal aspirations, through approaches ranging from sympathetic stalling to patronising parodies.

This book can be used by media professionals to improve their practices, by Aboriginal communities to test media truth-telling and by anyone seeking to understand how Aboriginal desires and hopes have been expressed, and represented, in recent Australian political history.'

'Bridging historical scholarship and Aboriginal oral tradition, this innovative book tells the story of the Gugu Badhun people of the Valley of Lagoons in North Queensland. It provides new insights into Aboriginal–European interactions, and new understandings of how Aboriginal people sustained their identities and exercised agency.

'It lays bare violence and oppression, but also recognises the inter-racial cooperation and friendships which were equally part of Gugu Badhun experience. It tells of a people whose options were limited by state power and public racism but who remained proud and undaunted, making their own decisions for their collective and individual benefit.

'Much of the story is told in the words of Gugu Badhun people themselves. Interviews are interspersed with commentary and analysis by the four authors, one of whom, Yvonne Cadet-James, is herself a Gugu Badhun elder.

'This collaborative approach has produced a timely book for an Australia in which notions of Indigenous autonomy and self-determination are being re-imagined and re-configured.' (Publication summary)