A rising force: how Blak media rewrote the script from its own ground

My eyes were opened to Blak media in the early 1990s when I first sighted a copy of the newly launched Koori Mail newspaper. I was captivated by the masthead, boldly, urgently, defiantly flying the colours of our flag: a war cry of resistance, presence, strength and kinship just laying there on the arm of the couch in our living room. I may have been dopey with adolescence, but I recognised the weight on that paper. This instrument was about us, but for us and obviously from us.

Jack Latimore has recently joined The Age as the masthead’s Indigenous affairs journalist.Credit: Jason South

Below the masthead, all the other elements of the front page spoke of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander matters too. It would have been one of the earliest editions of the newspaper. Instantaneously, I knew I wanted to write something for it. Almost three decades later I would, for a short time, proudly file stories as its Victorian correspondent. The Koori Mail remains in print – recently celebrating its 30th anniversary since launch in May 1991– and is eagerly received by Indigenous communities around Australia.

Until very recently, there existed two prevailing views from mainstream, white newsrooms about Aboriginal journalists and Aboriginal affairs stories. The first has been increasingly proven false, but remained all too common among white editors and journalists: the belief that Aboriginal journalists are incapable of reporting on Aboriginal affairs. Celebrated white journalists have shared this chestnut of racism with other white journalists in the past five years; I know because I was within earshot.

The second is that audiences are not interested in Aboriginal affairs. Again, over the past five to eight years, this has been proven false. As the global Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to the scope of structural racism within the world’s predominant institutions, audience appetite for anything related to Blak news and current affairs has increased well beyond the interest of minority groups. Look at the turnout for the BLM rallies across Australia in June and July 2020. Look at the annual turnout for the Invasion Day rallies over the past decade.

The rise of Blak media – or more specifically, Indigenous news media – in Australia over the past decade has been inspired and inspiring. Important new voices that were previously excluded by the mainstream have infiltrated the media ecology from the margins.

But while the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission aims to bring the truth of Indigenous people’s lives and histories to a wider public, for decades Blak media have been doing the work of telling the truth for anyone prepared to pick up a paper, turn the dial or log on.

More than 170 years before blogs and social media began to capture our attention, the Flinders Island Chronicle launched as the first known Aboriginal-produced newspaper. It was handwritten in English by three Aboriginal “clerks”: Walter George Arthur, Walter Juba Martin and a younger fella named Thomas Brune. The paper provided reportage of daily life for the Aboriginal detainees on the isolated Wybalenna “mission” on Flinders Island off the north-east coast of lutruwita-Tasmania.

Arthur, Martin and Brune worked under the mission’s commandant, the now notorious George Augustus Robinson. The Chronicle ran for about three years, until March 1839, when Robinson relocated to the Port Phillip Settlement on New Holland for an official appointment as “Chief Protector of Aborigines”. Robinson took 16 of the Wybalenna detainees with him across the strait to what would become Victoria, including Brune and Arthur.

Among them, too, was Tunnerminnerwait, the feared Tasmanian resistance fighter. Tunnerminnerwait later accompanied Robinson on a tour of the settlement’s Western District in 1841. The pair investigated the massacre of about 200 Gunditjmara people in the Portland Bay area, an event known as the Convincing Ground massacre. They sought and gathered testimony of witnesses to establish and record what had occurred between the locals and European whale hunters some years previously. This makes Tunnerminnerwait the first Black investigative journalist in Victoria.

The next significant period in Indigenous news media begins in 1924, with the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA). It was led by a Worimi fella named Fred Maynard and was the first politically organised Aboriginal group. It is also considered the origin of the Aboriginal self-determination movement. A big influence on the AAPA’s work was Marcus Garvey, the prominent leader of the international Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements.

The inaugural edition of the Abo Call, a newspaper produced by the Aborigines Progressive Association.

As Fred Maynard’s grandson John Maynard has written: “The AAPA saw, for the first time, Aborigines voicing their disapproval by holding street rallies, conducting meetings and conferences, utilising the power of the media through newspaper coverage, writing letters and petitions to government and King George V about the injustice and inequality forced upon Aboriginal people.”

By the mid-1930s, the AAPA had become the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), and in 1938 began producing its own newspaper. The masthead – Abo Call: the Voice of the Aborigines – was edited by APA president Jack Patten and its reporting addressed the living conditions and other matters of interest to Aboriginal families and communities around the country.

Important Aboriginal publications, writers and journalists continued to produce journalism across the assimilation era from the 1940s to the 1960s – although some publications were sadly characteristic of the times. In his 1996 anthology For The Record: 160 years of Aboriginal Print Journalism, Michael Rose notes that publications such as The Westralian Aborigine, published by the Coolbaroo League, in the mid-1950s took an editorial line that “generally urged Aboriginal people to emulate a White, middle-class lifestyle”.

Yet throughout these years, as Brownlee Kirkpatrick and Marcia Langton have pointed out, community newsletters and annual reportsprovided news content by Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people, from the annual reports of the Victorian Aboriginal Group and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to Smoke Signals, published by the Melbourne-based Aborigines Advancement League.

Smoke Signals, a publication of the Aborigines Advancement League.

An explosion of voices

Blak media proliferated in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. In Victoria, The National Koorier was produced in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy by Bruce McGuinness and Lin Onus. Robbie Thorpe and others took over for later iterations of the paper, which became The Koorier. In Redfern in inner Sydney came Alchuringa, published from 1971-1972. Another notable was the monthly Koori bina – directly inspired by Abo Call – produced between 1977 and 1979 by the Black Women’s Action Group, which consisted of Naomi Mayers, Bobbi Sykes, Marcia Langton and John Newfong. (More on the late, great Newfong in a moment.)

Newsletters produced by the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service and the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service in Fitzroy were also important publications for their communities in the 1970s.

Elsewhere during this period, Black Action emerged out of Tasmania; Black News Service out of Brisbane; Smoke Signal (not to be confused with the earlier Smoke Signals) and later the Palm Islander in North Queensland; while the N.Q. Messagestick covered Cape York; and from the Top End came the Land Rights News.

There was also the lauded quarterly magazine Identity, produced for 11 years from 1971 with editors such as Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert and – again – John Newfong. After getting a start at the ABC in Brisbane, Newfong would go on to work for The Australian before ultimately deciding to commit himself to progressing Aboriginal self-determination from outside the establishment media.

The Sydney launch of Identity magazine. Left to right: Gary Foley, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorey and Norma Williams.Credit: Aboriginal History Archive, Victoria University

In 1972, he drew on his contacts within the Canberra press gallery to disseminate the demands of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy after being appointed its media spokesperson. He would have an influential hand throughout that decade in the development of the Aboriginal Arts Board, the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service and other Indigenous-led organisations. He would also have a hand in the emergence of Black community radio at a policy development level and behind the microphone.

One of the earliest Black community radio programs aired in Victoria on the ethnic community radio station 3ZZZ in 1970-71 and comprised a 15-minute weekly slot hosted by Bruce McGuinness and Gary Foley. Around the same time, Foley hosted his Koori Survival Show on 3CR.

Black radio programs and stations proliferated in the late 1970s and early ’80s. In Sydney there was Radio Skid Row, involving Nicola Joseph, Cheryl Rose and Tiga Bayles among others. It was followed by Radio Redfern in 1984. In Brisbane, Ross Watson had Murri Hour on 4ZZZ, as well as the Black Nation newspaper. Watson also had a hand in the political demonstrations against the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games as the coordinator for the Black Protest Committee. Elsewhere, there’s Freda Glynn, who in 1980 co-founded and directed the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA).

Freda Glynn, a key figure in the development of Indigenous television and the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association.

Participation in television broadcasting followed the launch in 1980 of the AUSSAT national Australian communications satellite. First there was Imparja Television in 1987, chaired by Glynn for 10 years after it launched. Then in 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody tabled its final report, with recommendations 205 to 208 recognising the significance of Indigenous representation in the media. Those recommendations were the starting point for the development of National Indigenous Television (NITV), launched in 2007 and currently sitting within the SBS suite of free-to-air channels.

The commission also recommended that First Nations media organisations should be properly funded “in recognition of the importance of their function”, and that all media organisations needed to do better in presenting Aboriginal issues and educating their newsrooms to create “better under-standings, on all sides, of issues relating to media treatment of Aboriginal Affairs”.

The surge of Blak media activity over the past 30 years has also seen a raft of community media organisations established to address local needs in regional and remote areas. Today the peak body, First Nations Media Australia, advocates for more than 100 remote Indigenous broadcasting services, eight remote Indigenous media organisations and 28 urban and regional First Nations radio services. Some of these organisations have recently developed partnerships with NITV.

The work of the ABC in improving Indigenous representation in the news should also be applauded. Over the past 20 years a strong contingent of
Indigenous journalists have emerged along the national broadcaster’s Indigenous employment pathways. Then there’s former ABC journalist Lorena Allam, who has collected three successive WalkleyAwards for her journalism with The Guardian in recent years. And I can’t mention Walkley Awards without mentioning veteran broadcast journalist Stan Grant.

Then there’s industry legends such as Dot West, who has worked at regional, state and federal levels to strengthen Blak media through funding, policy and training, often while working as a broadcaster, producer and writer herself. And Black luminaries such as Gavin Jones, who established Deadly Vibe, In Vibe and The Deadlys.

Away from the limelight and big media, a vital stream in the Blak media ecology sprang up in the late 2000s and early 2010s when Blackfullas started adopting Web 2.0 technologies such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

From around 2012, Aboriginal political commentators such as Kelly Briggs and Celeste Liddle were producing edgy Blak commentary and attracting large fan bases. Soon the size of their audience and the quality of their work demanded the attention of the “legacy media”. By then, other Indigenous rights campaigners had joined them in producing online content. In the same year, Leesa Watego created the Deadly Bloggers community site to aggregate and “signal-boost” the work of about 80 Blak writers.

Amy McQuire, one of a group of Blak writers who would find a growing audience through online platforms.

“The ability for us to create spaces for our own voices using these online platforms was the key starting point,” Liddle said. “[The] Guardian and Fairfax ... knew that if they were smart about it, they could recruit these sorts of voices which had been ignored before, but generated some online pull because they were seen as alternatives.”

As this was happening, another important Blak journalist was writing for the National Indigenous Times and soon afterwards editing the NSW Aboriginal Land Council’s publication, Tracker. Amy McQuire’s journalism would “cross over” to larger, mainstream audiences too.

There was at this time also the Twitter account @IndigenousX, created in 2012. The @IndigenousX concept would evolve into a successful Aboriginal-owned and produced website and consultancy service.

Each year the interest in Blak media grows exponentially. As a former daily editor for IndigenousX, I watched the reader base climb rapidly between 2016 and 2018. Working for NITV, I observed the extraordinary reach and engagement with the digital content we produced.

IndigenousX founder Luke Pearson says that endeavour is still a work in progress: “All the dominoes didn’t tip over at the same time. I can say with confidence that IndigenousX was a significant part of the shifting landscape and that [its] collaboration with The Guardian was one of the first major positive changes in that media landscape.”

First Nations Media Australia chief executive Dennis Stokes points out that while the pioneers in Indigenous news media have been overlooked by other media and, consequently, the broader Australian public, we haven't been doing it for them.

“The disappointing thing about the lack of focus on First Nations media historically is it sidelines the truth of our communities ... We’re here to serve our communities and make sure people have the information they need delivered in a way they can access, relate to, and understand. Our media is our voice,” he says.

“Over the last few years we’re noticing a shift in people being more open to listen and learn about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and culture ... Our media and our journalism is getting better and stronger all the time and we’ve got access to audiences and through social media and online platforms to draw global attention to our stories. So the technology has changed and awareness to diversity in newsrooms is changing at the same time.”

As Gary Foley told a 50,000-strong crowd recently, standing on the back of a flatbed truck: “What has changed, standing out here and looking at all of you mob, is that large numbers of ordinary Australians are out here with us.”