‘As parents congregated at parties’: Responsibility and blame in media representations of violence and school closure in an Indigenous community

Abstract

This article considers the discourses of responsibility and blame emerging from newspaper reportage of a crisis in the remote Indigenous community of Aurukun in Northern Queensland, Australia. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the sociology of racism and add to the existing body of scholarship on the ways in which deracialised discourse media discourse can nevertheless be racist. The month of May 2016 saw violence perpetrated by young people against the teachers and principal of the community's only school. Teachers were evacuated to the regional city of Cairns in on the 10th due to violence in the community and fears for their safety. They returned on the 18th, only to be evacuated again on 25 May. These events form the focus of the reportage analysed in this article. The way in which three primary groups of playersparents, teachers, and police-are portrayed in mainstream print media is analysed in order to ascertain how responsibility and blame are apportioned in relation to these events.

Cooperation and demotion: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Aboriginal people(s) in Australian print news

“…It appears this is equally true when a broad cross-section of reporting is analysed. Interactions with the police are a regular feature of coverage of Aboriginal people(s) and matters (Bacon, 2005; Budarick, 2011; Carden, 2017; Goodall, 1993) and this seems to be supported by the collocates officers and police under the Law Enforcement sub-discourse. However, their concordances (shown in Figures 2 and 3) reveal that most instances refer to members of the police force who are themselves Aboriginal.…”

“…Dysfunctionality discourses arise when failure is ascribed to groups or whole communities. In reporting on events in the remote, Far North Queensland community of Aurukun in which a school was closed due to student violence and teachers were evacuated from the community, ‘The discourse of community breakdown permeates the dataset’ (Carden, 2017: 596). In coverage of protests in Palm Island (located off the east coast of North Queensland) in 2004, Due and Riggs (2011) similarly observe that the community was represented as ‘dysfunctional and “devoid of social obligation”’ (p. 82).…”

“…Additionally, with the exception of a small number of early articles (Bullimore, 1999; Meadows et al, 1997), each study tends to focus on a particular event (e.g. the inner-city Redfern protests (Budarick, 2011), Palm Island protests (Selby, 1999) or Aurukun school evacuation (Carden, 2017)) or theme (e.g. health (Brough, 1999), native title (Meadows, 2000) or Aboriginal political agency (Thomas et al, 2019)).…”

An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman

“…2 The remaining articles focused on previously under-researched populations in rural research, such as vulnerable parents with housing issues (Reupert et al, 2015), Myannmar refugees (Hughes, 2018) and older gay men living with HIV (Gardiner, 2018). Studies of rural Australia engaging with race were confined to an ethnography of black–white relations in Bourke by Cowlishaw (2006) and a media analysis of depictions of Aurukun by Carden (2017: 604).…”

What newspapers tell us about teacher-on-learner violence in South African schools

“…Times and USA Today report on school crime and violence,Kupchik and Bracy (2009, p. 136) have found that "news stories stoke readers' fears by providing a heightened sense of the threat of school violence, without a broader context for understanding how rare it is" Carden's (2017,. found that newspaper articles often gave sanction to stereotypes and assumptions.…”