It is the voice of ‘Rural Nullius’ in a Jim Crow Country Hour

With just a few additional stories, the farmers of southern Israel would have received as much airtime as all of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations combined.

The proposal to amend the constitution affecting the country’s relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – the Voice – was almost entirely absent from hundreds of editions of the ABC’s midday Country Hour and morning Regional Reports. In the three weeks before the referendum on the Voice and the week after, the country’s Country Hour and local Regional Reports broadcast over 1,300 items across Australia, from Broome to Ballarat and Cairns to Esperance. However, only two episodes of the Country Hour – both in Western Australia – included items on the Voice. No Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander speakers were reported in these programs anywhere in Australia during this period to be supporting the Yes vote. This reporting was consistent with previous findings.

The Country Hour in Western Australia was the only ABC rural program to broadcast reports on the Voice during the four-week study period. One report dutifully covered a procession of four prominent No Case campaign speakers at the Pastoralists and Graziers Association annual meeting, where Aboriginal activist Warren Mundine, a guest speaker for the No Case campaign, pointed out the social position and discursive power that farmers gain through agricultural production. Former Governor of Western Australia Malcolm McCusker also spoke. His reactionary, assimilationist views seemed to challenge not only the Voice’s proposal but the very basis of Native Title. The Country Hour reporter introduced McCusker’s speech and summarised it as follows: “It is a myth that Aboriginal people do not currently have a voice in Parliament or Government across Australia and he believes that the majority of Aboriginal people do not need the kind of support that the Voice supposedly provides.” The voices of lobby groups and industry associations and their governance issues were regularly reported on during the period under review, but not the governance potential of the Voice.

The spin-off of Voice stories into other areas of the ABC is a clear victory for the rural landowning class and suggests a healthy feedback loop between ABC program producers and politically powerful settler farmers. There are new and old practices being used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today both locally and in wider economic systems – on homeland and settler estates, in rural towns and across the seas, where people continue to exercise the right to contribute to their own livelihoods, cultural preservation and social wellbeing. They are rejected because they are not ‘rural’ enough and therefore not ‘rural’ enough – not assimilated enough – to be included in ABC Rural programs. Their absence perpetuates the terra nullius fallacy that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land use is neither rural nor regional, but exists as another form of activity located lower down – or not even on – an imagined Darwinian hierarchy of rural land use.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land claims and their continued use of the land conflict with settler agricultural practices. Protecting cultural sites for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples may include preserving ecosystems and river systems for traditional use, yet over the four-week period studied, the vast majority of rural program reports addressed settler land use only, and only one report reported on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and water interests – specifically an increase in water allocations for traditional owners in Gippsland. Of over a thousand reports across Australia, only one reported on an Aboriginal “industry”.

Many stories will pass as “rural news” despite having little connection to Australian agricultural production. Even if The Voice was not considered “rural news”, there were plenty of other stories, underpinned by a range of arcane cultural messages and symbols: the fifth-generation pioneer farming family; the horseman; the horsewoman; bush racing; the woman in the bush; the struggling farmer, truck driver, fisherman, Israeli farmer, Irish farmer and even the “country singer”. A story about Israeli farmers, about how the war between Israel and Gaza is “putting a terrible strain on agriculture in southern Israel”, was repeated five times on different programs and in different locations. With just a few extra stories, the farmers of southern Israel would have received as much airtime as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia combined.

Rodeo news is rural news on the Country Hour. A story about the Northern Territory prison regime desperate for good news about Aboriginal people was broadcast in several states, but overall only seven other stories reported on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues during the four-week period studied. The Alice Springs rodeo story made up about half of the total thirteen stories with Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander content that were broadcast. That’s thirteen stories out of over thirteen hundred.

Listeners will hear of sales of rangeland stations, with comments from sellers, buyers, real estate agents and conservation groups that reinforce the social acceptability of the property. Comments from traditional owners, who hold their own land rights and cover the properties with complex layers of song lines that are hugely important to the well-being of the group, will not be heard. Their interest will not be recorded.

The struggle to control regional discourse and the institutionalised oppression and segregation of rural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is comparable to the ‘Jim Crow’ culture in America. The conservative think tank Page Research Centre (“we work closely with the Nationals”) has sponsored a study that recommends even greater control over the way rural history is imagined and told by “giving regional Australia a separate but complementary ABC regional organisation with its own charter and infrastructure dedicated to serving the regions of Australia”.

Before any change can happen at ABC, the political and organizational leadership, under pressure to take an ever more conservative course, would do well to listen more closely to rural programs that smack of Jim Crow and consider whether they are compatible with the ABC Charter. Is this the kind of “national bonfire” the new ABC chief had in mind when he called for “the need to cherish and support our great public institutions…to keep our enlightened, liberal democratic society strong in the face of threats old and new. To provide the structures that can support reason, truth, freedom of speech, mutual understanding, culture, creativity and national solidarity”? Among the established corporate leadership, there will be those with vested interests who are very comfortable with the existing, segregated view of the rural that is produced daily. The rural settler story has been thoroughly naturalized and has favored the wealthy classes of cities and rural communities for a very long time, and any hint of change will be met with staunch opposition.

Regardless of how the Voice referendum was covered, it is high time that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were portrayed in ABC Rural programming as a complex, living culture whose interests go beyond one-dimensional and politically safe stories about “bush tucker” or “training to be a rodeo rider”.

This article was first published on April 18, 2024 in Arena Online.