written by Carly Bray
The findings of the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, published more than 30 years ago, noted widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream media representation of First Nations people among these communities. In the years since then, First Nations groups have developed a range of reporting guidelines which outline preferred and dispreferred ways of referring to and describing First Nations people(s).[1] This is important because the language we use has the potential to frame collective understandings and shape public opinion on an issue or group of people.
Motivated by these resources and the dearth of academic (linguistic) research analysing language practices in reporting on these matters, I examined the linguistic construction of discourses in a purpose-built corpus of Australian newspaper articles about Aboriginal peoples and issues. I first used Wordsmith (Scott, 2016) to generate a list of 72 collocates (co-occurring words) of the search term (node) Aboriginal.[2] I then categorised each collocate, as shown in Table 1 (based on qualitative analysis of concordance lines):
Among the most interesting results was a set of collocates which suggested a discourse of cooperation. Previous research (originating largely in media and journalism studies) identified widespread negativity and stereotyping in coverage of Indigenous matters, so an ostensibly positive discourse was a surprising finding and one worth investigating further.
The process of analysing the concordance lines to establish a discourse of cooperation involved confirming that the cooperation being discussed did involve the nearby Aboriginal referent. This was true for the majority of concordance lines for all collocates. The concordance lines for the four nominal collocates, partnerships, division, consultation and relationship (Figures 1-4) show us that, overwhelmingly, Aboriginal people(s) are constructed as cooperating with governments and related agencies. Instances of partnerships refer to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships portfolio (Figure 1).
Cooperation with police is registered in instances of division (Figure 2, lines 1-3, 5-7), consultation (Figure 3, line 4) and relationship (Figure 4, lines 1 and 2). Other governmental actors include the foster care system (consultation: Figure 3,lines 1-3), governments generally (relationship: Figure 4, line 6) and federal parliament in relation to appointing an Indigenous Voice (consultation: Figure 3, lines 5-6).
The remaining collocates, with and between, raise a somewhat different question. In collocation analyses which utilise the statistical test applied here (MI score), prepositional results are relatively rare because the MI score tends to privilege low-frequency content words. The appearance of these terms in the collocate list therefore suggests that they are particularly meaningful for some reason. Here I focus on establishing why this is, just in relation to with.
The collocate with is the most frequent in the cooperation discourse, totalling 72 instances. Rather than analyse all lines, I chose the most frequent syntagmatic structure for further analysis—that is, where with occurs to the left of Aboriginal so that the Aboriginal referent is the complement of with, e.g. ‘with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities’. This structure was also found to most reliably encode some kind of cooperative relationship. The 34 relevant concordance lines are shown in Figure 5; lines have been sorted 1, 2 and 3 places to the left.
Many of the cooperative events here again involve government bodies and are described in terms similar to those already seen, i.e., as consultation, partnership and relationship. Other lines describe ‘intense dialogue’, ‘working closely’, development ‘in concert with’, ‘negotiating’, building ‘mutual respect’ and so on. Importantly, each of these verbal groups describes an event in which both participants have agency. What is marked, however, is that in all lines the Aboriginal participant is demoted away from the grammatical role of Subject into a prepositional phrase. Additionally, in the excluded concordance lines, no instances were identified of an Aboriginal actor being encoded as Subject, or of a governmental participant being demoted in this way.
We know from previous research that First Nations issues are often reported in political terms (Due & Riggs, 2011; Mesikämmen, 2013) which no doubt contributes to the tendency seen here for governments to be positioned as subjects. Nonetheless, whether this particular linguistic practice of grammatical demotion of First Nations participants promotes ‘mutually respectful and genuine two-way relationships of shared significance’ (RA, n.d.: 3) as the guidelines recommend—or instead reinforces the disempowerment of an already marginalised group—could be more rigorously interrogated. A simple coordination construction, such as ‘Jackie Trad and Aboriginal organisation, Olkola Corporation, met to discuss mining bans on its land’ (c.f. line 5), presents just one alternative.
This analysis has interesting implications for examination of agency relations, both in corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis where prepositions have at times tended to be disregarded. In a media context where racialised discourses are perhaps less overtly negative than they once were, prepositional resources present one possible locus of more subtle but nonetheless persistent discursive disempowerment and marginalisation.
Full details of this research are available in my recently published article, ‘Cooperation and demotion: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Aboriginal people(s) in Australian print news‘.
References
Due, C. and Riggs, D. W. (2011). Representations of Indigenous Australians in the mainstream news media. Post Pressed.
Mesikämmen, E. (2013). Whose Voice? Presence of Indigenous Australians in Mainstream Media Coverage of the Northern Territory Intervention. Asia Pacific Media Educator 23(1), 23-42.
Scott, M. (2016). WordSmith Tools Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software, version 7, https://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/
[1] See, for example:
Media Diversity Australia, in partnership with National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and with the support of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2018). Reporting on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and Issues: An introductory resource for the media. Retrieved from https://www.mediadiversityaustralia.org/indigenous/
Reconciliation Australia. (n.d.). RAP good practice guide. Retrieved from the Reconciliation Australia website: https://www.reconciliation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/language-guide.pdf
Roberts, Z., Carlson, B., O’Sullivan, S., Day, M., Rey, J., Kennedy, T., Bakic, T., & Farrell, A. (2021). A guide to writing and speaking about Indigenous People in Australia. Macquarie University, Australia. https://doi.org/10.25949/5TFK-5113
[2] Collocation analysis parameters: window of 5L-5R, MI-score minimum threshold of 3, log likelihood minimum of p=0.05, and minimum collocation frequency of 5.