Abstract
In January 2018, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister told Sydney radio listeners that ‘people are scared to go out to restaurants of a night time’ (cited in Hunter and Preiss, 2018). The source of this fear was African gangs, painted by headlines as an apparent threat to the safety of ordinary (read: middle-class, white, heterosexual) Australians.
Dutton’s remarks reverberated in my head as I read Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging. This edited collection traverses issues invoked by that now-infamous gaffe: race and racism in Australian culture, the power of the media to reinforce and challenge hurtful stereotypes, the question of who ‘belongs’ in a particular culture – and who does not.
The text is divided into three parts. Part I opens with chapter 1, in which the editors explain the volume’s key terms. These include ‘belonging’, which ‘refers to a feeling, or set of feelings, of being at home’ (p. 4); a feeling of being comfortable and secure (p. 5). Not all groups are encouraged to feel as though they ‘belong’ in a particular environment. As the editors put it, ‘the construction of particular feelings of belonging relies not only on its inclusions but also on its structuring exclusions’ (p. 5). Dutton’s radio commentary is one example of how African Australian community members have been made to feel excluded from the Anglo mainstream.
Thus, as its title suggests, this collection explores the role that the Australian media has played in constructing ideas of national belonging. In chapter 2, Val Colic-Peisker investigates how ‘media, politics and belonging intersect in the ethnoculturally diverse Australia of the twenty-first century’ (p. 19). In chapter 3, Tanja Dreher argues that a ‘politics of listening’ is crucial in transforming the ‘uneven politics of belonging’ at work in Sydney’s western suburbs (p. 55). As Dreher reminds us, Sydney’s west has long been ‘framed as the marginalized and racialized “other” to Sydney’s glamorous beaches and harbour’ (p. 54).
Part II concentrates on media coverage of Sudanese Australians, and the implications that such coverage has for these individuals and their sense of belonging. Scott Hanson-Easey analyses the ways in which Sudanese migrants have been ‘othered’ by the language used on talkback radio. Karen Farquharson and David Nolan explore how the media has linked Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians with violence and criminality. Denis Muller, Farquharson and Nolan investigate the relationship between the racial profiling of these migrants and the hostile media coverage that they have received. Paolo Bilbrough interrogates media narratives about the ‘exemplary heroic Sudanese Australian’ (p. 122). This figure is deeply problematic; as Bilbrough argues, the heroic Sudanese Australian must possess extraordinary ‘levels of resilience and transcend hardship to prove that they are not a burden to the state’ (p. 133).
Part III explores ways in which the media can be used to dispel racist stereotypes, and promote the voices of migrant, cultural and religious groups. Jacqui Ewart and Mark Pearson discuss the Reporting Islam project, which ‘has focused on developing user-friendly and readily accessible multimedia resources underpinned by research-based evidence to help journalists more thoughtfully report stories about Islam and Muslims’ (p. 142). Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford report on the Home Lands project (2009–13). This project allowed young people from refugee backgrounds to use media to bring together ‘here and there, past and present, into a more unified’ space of belonging (p. 172).
The book concludes with Timothy Marjoribanks, Denis Muller and Michael Gawenda’s study of the ‘AuSud intervention’. This intervention sought to provide journalistic training to members of the Sudanese Australian community, and to provide them with links to the media and the police force (p. 177). The authors assess the benefits and challenges of this most ambitious project.
Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging is well-structured, and the contributors write with considerable clarity. The chapters make for thoroughly absorbing reading, even if some of them cover understandably distressing material. Each contributor carefully explains the methodological framework that they draw on, and cites appropriate examples to buttress their points. All authors draw on a rich body of theoretical work, including existing studies of belonging and race in Australia.
The contributors themselves come from a number of academic disciplines, including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and journalism studies. This interdisciplinarity benefits the volume immensely. Any study of the contemporary mediasphere must be holistic; that is, media texts and organisations cannot be studied in isolation from other aspects of a given society or cultural context.
Additionally, a holistic study of the contemporary mediasphere can benefit from collaborations between academic researchers and workers from ‘industry’ (including the media industry). Such collaborations can lead to innovative and intellectually rigorous real-world outcomes. This point is borne out by several of the projects under discussion in this volume. For example, the Home Lands project entailed a collaboration between academics, local government and non-governmental organisations.
No edited collection on a topic as broad as belonging and the media could hope to address every relevant argument or issue. For instance, more could have been said in this volume about social media. Colic-Peisker acknowledges that social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public attitudes and political agendas (pp. 26–7). Yet there isn’t really the sense of how social media could help cultivate a sense of national belonging or exclusion for different groups. There is a wealth of material that researchers could draw on to explore this issue.
Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging is a welcome contribution to studies of the contemporary Australian mediasphere. The volume will also be a valuable resource for those researching how media platforms can reinforce and dismantle popular understandings of what it means to ‘belong’ in a particular national context.