For me,the absence of reflexive ABC support for Stan,and the pile-on from his critics,suggests that the media isn’t comfortable with journalists who come from outside the familiar tribes of Old or New Australia.
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It should be noted that Stan was attacked for saying the least controversial things about Australia’s settlement. In fact,the ABC could have spared him and the nation the agony of the past month if it had opened that segment of the coronation coverage with an acknowledgement that King Charles agreed with Stan some 35 years earlier. As historian Mark McKenna writes in the latest edition ofThe Monthly,the then Prince Charles “was the only speaker to confront Aboriginal dispossession,albeit implicitly and without apology” at the bicentenary celebration at the Sydney Opera House on January 26,1988.
My working-class upbringing was privileged compared with Stan’s. No Australian-born son or daughter of non-English-speaking migrants carries the burden of dispossession. But we share a history of alienation because the founding fathers of the Australian Commonwealth told us that this country belonged to the white man only.
Alfred Deakin,who drafted the legislation for the White Australia Policy as the attorney-general in Edmund Barton’s government,declared in 1901 that “the Aboriginal race has died out in the south and is dying fast in the north and west even where most gently treated”.
“Other races are to be excluded by legislation if they are tinted in any degree. The yellow,the brown and the copper-coloured are to be forbidden to land anywhere.”
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The next section of that often-quoted passage detailed the prejudices of the day against the Greeks and Italians who had been drawn to this continent by the West Australian gold rush of the 1890s. My “copper-coloured” ancestors were among that intake.
“Our Antipodean suspicion is directed at immigrants of the lower Latin type,” Deakin explained,“and is decidedly antagonistic towards newcomers from South-Eastern Europe.”
As the child of Greek migrants,I can pull apart Deakin’s first and second observations – even take the piss out of them – without the risk of a pile-on. I’m not sure First Australians enjoy the same freedom of fact-based expression in our culture.
I can’t help but log the criticisms and snide remarks that colleagues of a certain vintage direct towards Stan. It is almost always the older blokes in the media. No offence intended,mate. They believe they are reaffirming a great egalitarian tradition by bringing a tall poppy down to size. From my vantage point,there is unconscious bias,even envy,at play.
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Young,diverse journalists hear the echo of the White Australia Policy. Remember,more than half the population is either born overseas or the child of a migrant. In the duelling media centres of Sydney and Melbourne,two-thirds of the population are New Australians.
My worry is that New Australia won’t be in the mood to talk to Old Australia when cultural power eventually falls into its hands. Why would it bother if Old Australia continues to see national identity as a game of winner-takes-all?
If the media wants to help remove the national blind spots of race,it must think beyond the obvious remedy of bringing more New Australians to the reporting floor,and to management. It must elevate First Australians to positions of genuine equality as a matter of institutional survival,and trust them to tell our national stories on everyone’s behalf.
George Megalogenis is a journalist,political commentator and author.
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