The Age’s coverage of Jacinta Price’s press club speech erased a strong black woman for dissenting

The Age’s decision to illustrate Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s National Press Club speech with a photo of three white politicians pushed a dissenting black woman to the back of the bus.

An Aboriginal woman of note arrives for a major engagement in Canberra. Instead of the impressive venue used previously for similar events, however, she is shown to a much smaller room.

Nevertheless, the young woman speaks at the engagement, as had been arranged. A photographer is there. He takes many excellent, expressive shots of the woman as she delivers her speech and answers questions from the crowd.

But the photograph his newspaper runs the next day on its front page doesn’t show the Aboriginal woman.

Instead the newspaper’s selected image – from probably hundreds of options – primarily depicts three white dignitaries in the front row of the audience.

Price addressing the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

The preferred image was obviously taken when the photographer’s back was to the venue’s stage.

For that matter, it was shot even before the invited Aboriginal speaker had appeared.

Not the photographer’s fault, of course. As mentioned above, he’d likely have submitted hundreds of pictures.

But that was the one his editors picked. In a front-page story about an Aboriginal woman speaking in Canberra, the Aboriginal woman herself was rendered invisible – only appearing several pages deep in that edition of the paper.

All of this sounds very 1950s or 1960s, when even Aboriginal public figures – such as they were – generally existed at the media’s margins.

Some connection with prominent white figures often helped. A 1968 picture of Lionel Rose mock-sparring with Elvis Presley is, outside of Australia at least, possibly the most famous image ever taken of the great Aboriginal boxer.

But here’s the thing. That story about an Aboriginal woman speaking in a small room and being cut from the front page didn’t happen in the 1950s or 1960s.

It happened just last week – to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who on Thursday delivered one of the most significant National Press Club speeches of the past 50 years.

How The Age chose to illustrate Price’s memorable address.

The significance wasn’t diminished at all by the fact Price was prevented from speaking in the Press Club’s main hall – closed, as Press Club director and Sydney Morning Herald political correspondent David Crowe explained, due to “renovations we’re doing downstairs”.

It didn’t matter. If anything, the power of Price’s words was magnified by her dinky surroundings, which gave her an opportunity in her opening remarks to turn a potential negative into a charming positive.

“I actually appreciate,” she told her crowd, “the intimacy of the room.”

But Melbourne’s Age newspaper didn’t quite see things in such a sunny way.

The Age is very much in the Yes camp on the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Price is a powerful proponent of the No case.

This may explain why The Age declined to put Price’s picture on the front page, instead running an audience photograph with the caption: “Coalition MPs Barnaby Joyce, Michaelia Cash and Bridget McKenzie at the National Press Club.”

As for Price herself, she was shoved away to page four or so.

The Age has had its own Rosa Parks moment. Picture: Paul Warner

Consider the historical aspect here. In assembling this front page, nobody at The Age apparently recalled another occasion, nearly 70 years ago now, when a black woman was moved backwards so as to make room for white folk.

It was a big deal at the time. A suggestion to our Age friends: look up “Rosa Parks”, “1955” and the “Montgomery Alabama bus boycott”.

Read about it, learn about it and you’ll never move a dissenting black woman to the back of a bus, a building or a once-celebrated Melbourne paper’s rubbish news section ever again. Guaranteed.

Returning to Canberra and the events of last week, Price next offered a friendly rejoinder to master of ceremonies Crowe’s introduction: “Just a correction. Colin is my husband, not my partner. Just for the record.”

Right there is one of the most potent declarations of values you’ll see, and it took just 14 simple words.

Thereafter followed a speech that was the opposite in every way to recent public announcements from the Yes camp’s Marcia Langton.

Although characterised by a rattled Yes media as negative and dangerous, Price was actually optimistic and defiant. She spoke with the strength and confidence of someone who has endured, but not been defeated.

She took aim at tomorrow’s fixable concerns rather than continuing a class conflict that should have been buried in 1883 with Karl Marx.

And she was properly funny, which always deeply wounds the left.

So hurt them some more. Watch the speech or watch it again. Send it around. Bring joy to the land.