Introduction

Media in all their forms play a complex and central role in the contested politics of belonging. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sydney's western suburbs, which for decades have been framed as Sydney's ‘other’ and featured at the centre of national debates on immigration and refugees, so- called ethnic crime and gangs, the ‘war on terror’ and global Islamophobia. The role of mainstream media in racializing and ‘othering’ the diverse communities of western Sydney is well established (Powell 1993; Collins et al. 2000; Poynting et al. 2004). The emerging scholarship on community or citizens media, in contrast, demonstrates their significant role in the politics of belonging in western Sydney (Salazar 2010; Ho 2013; Dreher 2012; Vanni 2014; Lloyd 2013). In this chapter, I analyse these dynamics with a focus on the politics of listening in addition to the more common emphasis on the politics of voice. The listening approach seeks to extend the analysis of community media and belonging beyond the celebration of individual empowerment and community voice, to also ask questions of receptivity, recognition and response.

The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section introduces western Sydney and the highly contested and mediated politics of belonging. Sydney's western suburbs and the communities associated with key locales have long been subject to mainstream media stereotypes of culture- less Westies, ethnic crime and, more recently, home- grown terrorism. These persistent narratives serve to marginalize and exclude. The following section analyses how diverse communities in western Sydney develop and mobilize narratives of belonging via community and alternative media projects. In particular, I focus on listening strategies developed by the innovative new media community arts organization Information + Cultural Exchange (ICE) to generate forms of individual and community- level belonging. The third section analyses the evidence for listening at the macro or social level – including participants’ own perceptions of being heard, shifting perceptions of western Sydney and possibilities for belonging in the creative industries. Here, the evidence for listening in response to the voices enabled by projects for speaking up and talking back is more mixed. The brief concluding discussion highlights the significance of media for a highly uneven politics of belonging around western Sydney.

Introduction

For young people from refugee backgrounds living in Australia, belonging is a complex and contentious issue. As permanent residents or citizens of Australia, they can lay claim to their formal right to belong to the nation. However, they also routinely encounter others within Australia who reject their claims to belong, usually because they look or sound ‘different’ (Fozdar and Hartley 2014). At the same time, they have been forcibly displaced from their countries of birth and are unlikely to be able to return, yet they remain connected to the people and places they left behind. Young people use a range of increasingly common communication technologies to keep in touch and engage with political events as well as with friends and family dispersed across the world (Wilding 2012; Gifford and Wilding 2013). This is a group for whom belonging is not produced through a simple convergence of geographic place, social group, national identity and sense of self. Rather, they live in one place while sustaining connections to other places, involving them in a complex process of creating what are necessarily contingent conditions of belonging.

We designed the Home Lands project (2009–13, supported by an ARC Linkage Project grant) with a team of partners (City of Melbourne, Cultural Development Network, Centre for Multicultural Youth, APC.au) in order to explore these processes of belonging. The central hypothesis that underpinned the project's design was that young people from refugee backgrounds might have more positive settlement outcomes in Australia if they could be supported in their connections with ‘home’ outside of Australia. This approach explicitly challenges the prevailing assumptions underlying current models of successful settlement: that refugee settlement rests on building a newlife in a newcountry (DIAC 2008; UNHCR 2012). The assumptions underpinning that approach do not deny the importance of maintaining ethnic and cultural ties and identities. However, they tend to articulate such identities as an important resource during early settlement that helps individuals adjust by acting as ‘a bridge between the old and the new’ (DIAC 2012, 4). In this respect, the prevailing model emphasizes the importance of settlers building their futures primarily by establishing ties and belongings to their newsettlement country, simultaneously assuming a process of discarding the connections with past places of residence.

Introduction

This chapter provides a conceptual introduction to the central theme of this volume – the way media, politics and belonging intersect in the ethnoculturally diverse Australia of the early twenty- first century. I undertake an intersectional analysis of four conceptual triads: ‘belonging- identity- community’; ‘media- communication- representation’; ‘Australia- politics- discourse’ and ‘reality- construction- perception’. In this section, the chapter first introduces key features of the Australian context in relation to the book's central interest.

Modern Australia is a ‘settler nation’ that developed through successive, progressively more diverse waves of immigration, dislodging and dispossessing the Indigenous population in the process. From the very start in the late eighteenth century, the colonizers were ethnically diverse, contravening the ideal of white Britishness (Moreton- Robinson 2006).

The 1901 federation of British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia created the first new nation of the twentieth century. The considerable ethnocultural diversity of the nineteenth century was politically denounced and the ideal of a ‘white Australia’ pursued for the next 70 years (DIBP 2016). The enactment of the first major law of the Commonwealth parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act of December 1901, was primarily a reaction to the arrival of a significant number of Chinese during the Gold Rush. In the 1850s, the colonies of Victoria and South Australia introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration, prompted by the white miners’ resentment towards industrious Chinese on the goldfields (DIBP 2016). These restrictions were later repealed as the free movement of people was highly valued in the midnineteenth century (Bashford 2014), the period historian Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘age of capital’, ruled by what Germans called Manchesterismus – the ‘free trade orthodoxy of Victorian Britain’ (Hobsbawm 1996/ 1975: 303). However, the restrictions were reintroduced in all Australian colonies in the period 1870s – 1890s. The Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act 1901 continued and reinforced this race policy where ‘prohibited immigrants’ were all ‘non- Europeans’. According to Bashford (2014, 31–32), these restrictions were part of ‘great white walls’ protecting the Anglosphere (Australia, United States, New Zealand) from ‘contamination’ by ‘coloured races’.

Introduction: Feels Like Home?

In late 2015, Qantas released the second of its ‘Feels Like Home’ television advertising campaigns. This series of advertisements, aired extensively on Australian commercial television during its coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games, focused on a series of stories of members of a real- life family, the Shelpers, travelling to spend Christmas with their parents on the NSW coast. In the ads, each family member travels from a different location – one daughter from what is recognizably the Australian outback, another from Brisbane, a third from country Victoria and the youngest son orchestrates a surprise visit from New York, from where he is shown travelling home on business class. Each story, featuring a family member travelling to their parents’ home with Qantas, is accompanied by the Randy Newman song ‘Feels Like Home’ covered by young Australian singer Martha Marlow. The culmination of each advertisement shows the emotional scene of the whole family reunited for Christmas dinner, accompanied by the climax of the song's chorus in its final line:

This text replays what is a familiar and nostalgic scene for many Australians who travel home to share time with their families, and this sense of nostalgic familiarity is linked in each of the advertisements of Australian locations that are drawn together through its national family narrative. During the Olympics, this familiarity was interlinked with a sense of national pride evoked by the warm feelings the ads evoke, their linkage with an airline that is a national icon in its own right and the evocation of sporting patriotism. In this way, the ads directly appealed to and constructed a sense of national belonging – an image, or set of images, of homeliness constructed through synecdoche and personification, via which an individual family – the Shelpers – are signified as a nationalfamily. To understand this as a semiotic process, we must not only pay attention to what these advertisements depict, or what is presented, but also the relationship between what is present and what is absent in them.

Overview of the Project/Problem

It is well established within the research that both in Australia and internationally there have been significant problems with news media coverage of Muslims (Saeed 2003, 2007; Manning 2003; Nacos and Torres- Reyna 2003; Aly 2007; Manning 2006a, 2006b; Richardson 2001). Hussein Tahiri and Michele Grossman (2013) in their study of factors contributing to radicalization found that mainstream news media coverage of Muslims contributed to community tensions, social division and isolation. However, much less attention has been paid to ways in which the stereotypical and generalized reportage of Muslims can be addressed. There are three exceptions to this, including two reports and an edited handbook which tackled the issue from various perspectives. A report commissioned by the International Federation of Journalists entitled Getting the Facts Right: Reporting Ethnicity and Religion(Rupar 2012) identified the need for journalists to report factually and accurately, in particular on stories about acts of racism and intolerance, and when reporting stories that involve ethnic and religious groups. In addition, Verica Rupar (2012) identified that reports about tensions between communities should be covered sensitively, while avoiding negative stereotypical portrayals of members of religious groups. Importantly, they identified that news media reports about culturally and religious diverse groups should challenge those news sources who made intolerant remarks, and that journalists need to explore and challenge the assumptions that inspire such comments. The report called The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, non- Muslims and the UK media, produced by the Greater London Authority (Greater London Authority 2007), provided a series of professional style and conduct guides for journalists reporting on stories involving Muslims, while also suggesting that news media personnel should review their coverage of stories involving Muslims. That report also advised news organizations to hire journalists of Muslim heritage. In the United States, in a project funded by the US Social Science Research Council, Lawrence Pintak and Stephen Franklin (2013) produced an edited digital handbook, Islam for Journalists: A Primer on Covering Muslim Communities in America(Pintak and Franklin 2013). The edited compilation provided research and reporting techniques designed to facilitate more detailed and inclusive news media reportage of Muslims. The two reports and the handbook all emphasized the need for improved news media coverage of Muslims as well as the imperative for education and training for journalists covering such stories.

Introduction

In mid- 2015 a television advertisement for Western Sydney University (WSU) entitled ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ (Morrison 2015) went viral on YouTube, and eponymous star Deng Adut received extensive media attention, with one article claiming, ‘This extraordinary and moving ad for an Australian university is like nothing you've ever seen before’ (Thomsen 2015). The focus of the advertisement and subsequent media coverage was Adut's trajectory from child soldier and refugee to successful Sydney lawyer (see Thomsen 2015; Mottram 2015; Dapin 2016). The advertisement resulted in Adut giving an Australia day address in Sydney the following year, and to date ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ has garnered over 2.5 million views. Two other ‘Unlimited’ advertisements featuring WSU alumni were released simultaneously with the same soundtrack. However, to date neither has had even a quarter of the views of ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’.

From one perspective, ‘Unlimited’ is simply a universal story of loss, courage and redemption: the advertisement is a reconstruction of aspects of Adut's life, which evokes a Hollywood tear- jerker in both narrative structure and production values. Discussing production choices in Reality Television (RTV), Laura Grindstaff (2002, 260) has commented on the influence of ‘journalistic notions of what constitutes a good story, a dramatic event, or a compelling performance’. ‘Unlimited’ delivers all of this in less than one and half minutes. However, given the government's treatment of asylum seekers and a lack of ethnic diversity on Australian screens, the popularity of ‘Unlimited’ may also be partly due to the novelty of a Sudanese Australian from a refugee background starring in an advertisement. While this was a first for Australian advertising, a prequel of sorts was the RTV show Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration(SBS 2014). In each episode of the six- part documentary series, participants, whose lifestyles and beliefs contradict each other's, spend 10 days living together. Immigrationfeatures Abraham Nouk, a Sudanese- born slam poet, and Nick Folke, a white, self- described ‘race realist’ who is opposed to African immigration to Australia.

Introduction

Media interventions aim to disrupt and reshape power relations between the media industry, including professional journalists, and other participants in society. The intervention that is the focus of this chapter, the AuSud media intervention, was designed to engage mainstream media and to influence the ways in which Sudanese Australian people are portrayed by the Australian media. As part of this process, the intervention's objective was to enable Sudanese Australians to put forward their own voice in the media and to provide them with a means of being heard. It sought to do this by training Sudanese Australians in journalism, by helping them to create a website through which to disseminate their journalistic work and by providing them with connections into Australian institutions such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Victoria Police. In addition, by recruiting journalists from established and mainstream media institutions to help realize these objectives, the intervention aimed to transform mainstream media journalists’ perceptions and stereotypes of the Sudanese Australian community.

The media intervention that is the focus of this chapter had two distinctive features. First, it aimed to provide professional journalistic training to members of a newly arrived community who were being harassed by institutions of power, notably the police, parliamentarians and the established media, in order to give them a voice. Second, it gave them direct links into those institutions that were doing them the most harm, the police and the media, to allow the community to be heard directly.

Within this context, this chapter asks two main questions: What were the defining features and outcomes of the AuSud media intervention, and what challenges did the intervention face? What are the lessons of the AuSud media intervention for other interventions? This chapter argues that the AuSud media intervention engaged successfully to some extent with questions of voice and listening, but that it faced profound challenges around ownership and sustainability. These outcomes reveal the importance of analysing media interventions as sites of power and as processes that unfold over time.

Introduction

This chapter examines how Australian newspapers and television news programmes represented Sudanese and South Sudanese peoples in Australia between 2007 and 2012. People from the former Sudan (including the current nations of Sudan and South Sudan), began coming to Australia in large numbers in 2000, most often as refugees through the Australian Humanitarian Programme. Through a longitudinal content analysis of print and television news items over a six- year period (2007–12), this chapter analyses how this group was represented in Australian news media. Our findings highlight an overwhelming preponderance of coverage focused on Sudanese Australians in the context of crime, whether framed as perpetrators or as victims. In considering the significance of this, we contextualize media coverage within what we discuss below as Australia's contemporary racial formation (cf. Omi and Winant 2015), and consider how crime and violence have been positioned as products of a problematic ethnic ‘otherness’ that stands as anathema to a pre- existing, and assumedly ‘white’, ‘way of life’. Such positioning, we ultimately argue, can be understood as an effective mechanism of ‘symbolic containment’ that serves to sustain and extend racial inequality. However, we begin outlining our theoretical approach to ‘race’ and racialization before turning to consider the broader sociopolitical context in which a growth in Australia's Sudanese population occurred, and in which Sudanese Australians became a focus of media attention.

Racial Formation and ‘Racialization’

The question of how to understand race, ‘racialization’ and racism represents a highly contested ground, in which theoretical debates have been influenced by, and have reciprocally informed, public and policy discussion. In drawing on the model of ‘racial formation’, our discussion is informed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant's (2015) contention that, although the idea of ‘racial types’ as a theoretical basis for categorization is today widely discredited, race nevertheless persists as a significant discursive basis of a politics of belonging that intersects with, but is irreducible to, other modes of identity categorization (inter alia, class, gender, age, sexuality, religion, nationality and ethnicity).

Introduction

Dominant categories of speech and of thought define the economically successful and the politically powerful as meritorious, and the unsuccessful and politically deviant as mentally or morally inadequate. For the same reason, policies that serve the interests of the influential come to be categorised as routine and equitable outcomes of duly established governmental processes. (Edelman 2013, 39)

Language is a fundamental communication modality through which we make sense of our world, defining who we are, who we are not, whilst explaining why these differences exist. This chapter draws on a body of critical discursive analytic work (Hanson- Easey and Augoustinos, 2010, 2012; Hanson- Easey, Augoustinos and Moloney, 2014) examining how language, or ‘discourse’, socially constructs cultural identities and differences between Anglo- Celtic and other non- indigenous Australians, and Sudanese Australians who have been represented as ‘Others’. I hope to illustrate how speakers manage the complex rhetorical issues implicated in formulating complaints against ‘visibly different’ (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2007) humanitarian refugees – these interactional issues are closely wrapped up with the ideological business of differentiating social groups along cultural and racialized lines. The study of ideology in talk, and at the broader analytic level, collective discourse(Fairclough, 2001; Foucault, 1980), is used here to interrogate how language structures and rationalizes social hierarchies and justifies controversial refugee policies, rendering them fair, reasonable and even essentialto protecting the social status quo.

The tranche of research that informs this chapter on the language of othering employs a social constructionist epistemology (Burr, 2015) and, more specifically, the analytic framework of discourse analysis (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002; Wetherell, 1998). Very generally, social constructionism holds that social identities, entities or events cannot be made meaningful without first being represented though communication and social interaction (Burr, 2015; Parker, 1998). Human beings are understood to interpret events and entities by drawing on discourses – particular ways of talking about and understanding the world. Discourses are closely related to the political and social conditions in which they operate and are embedded. At the core of social constructionism is the idea that discourse is constitutive: it constructs realities and is constitutive of social life – it builds (represents) what we know about things, processes, social identities and relations (Wetherell, 2001).

Introduction

When a newly arrived immigrant group runs afoul of the major institutions in their adopted country, it becomes acutely difficult to develop a sense of belonging. This was the fate of Sudanese refugees who were settled in Melbourne in the first decade of the twenty- first century. They ran afoul of a police force that discriminated against them on the grounds of race and that led to media coverage which stereotyped them as associated with crime and violence (Nolan, Farquharson, Politoff, and Marjoribanks 2011). In turn, this created a climate of public opinion which the minister for immigration was able to exploit by pandering to right- wing fears of the ‘Other’ in an election campaign notable for its racist virulence. In these ways, the institutions of police, media and parliament showed themselves prejudiced. Fortunately, the institution of the judiciary proved to be a bulwark against this prejudice, leading to a measure of justice for some of those on the receiving end of harsh and unjust treatment, particularly by the police.

This chapter tells this story. It discusses the media coverage and the relationship between the media and the police, details the police misconduct and subsequent judicial proceedings, and touches on political opportunism. We argue that negative media discourses and discriminatory police conduct used racial stereotypes to target African Australians for imagined proclivities towards criminality. The extra policing experienced by African Australians and the media attention they receive provide politicians with the opportunity to single out African migrants for political purposes. We conclude by detailing how, despite experiencing systematic barriers to their integration into Australian society, through persistence, resilience and mobilization of the law, Sudanese peoples have achieved some success in their struggles to belong in Australia. We start with a discussion of media use of police sources that present and reinforce negative stereotypes of African migrants.

Policing the ‘Cronullas’: Media Coverage, Racist Discourse and Practice

The media perform a crucial role in shaping how different groups in society are seen by the society as a whole, which in turn can influence attitudes towards them, affect their civil rights, influence government policy towards them and may influence how individual members of those groups fare in everyday relationships with the wider society (Cottle 2000).