It’s a tradition of mine to undertake my own “media watch” experiment following the annual Invasion Day rallies. For absolute decades it has been noted that the continual negative reporting of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, our fights and our political movements, fuel negative public perceptions of us leading to racism and bullying, as well as lower self-esteem and mental health outcomes in our own communities.
Certainly, Invasion Day reporting has followed this trend. As noted in some of my previous work, media have not only consistently underreported the numbers attending the Invasion Day rally therefore diminishing what is a large and growing movement, they have also repeatedly highlighted the apparent threat of violence while noting the large police presence at the rallies, allegedly to “control” these threats.
One year a media outlet stated that there were 150 participants at the rally when the numbers were closer to five thousand. Not a single rally I have been to has been anything but peaceful and the only exception to this has been incidents where police have failed to intercept extreme right actors (now noted to be taking up 40 per cent ASIO’s anti-terrorism resources) who’ve entered rallies to cause havoc. Each time this has happened, marshals and/or participants have moved swiftly to contain these aggressors.
Then there are the truly ridiculous and racist extremes — talking heads who continuously state rally participants don’t care about the “real issues” in Aboriginal communities such as violence, alcohol and drug dependency and unemployment. They proceed to talk with unearned authority about “remote areas”, which despite them claiming participants don’t care, they themselves only ever talk about people who live in these areas in theoretical and ethereal ways. It’s been of constant amusement (in that gallows humour sense) that they additionally appear to know nothing of the rally organisers across the country and the fact that these staunch people also tend to work in the very areas these media “pundits” claim rally participants are not interested in.
Anyway, the point is that I have seen it all and when I looked at this year’s reporting, I was expecting more of the same. I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Taking Melbourne’s reporting as a starting point, most reports featured details of the lengths the rally went to around COVID restrictions and safety precautions. Many featured interviews with speakers and rally participants talking about why they were there, and most