From other-representation to self-representation: exploring identity and activism in historical news media writing

Abstract

This study addresses a significant gap in our understanding of self-representation in historical news media reporting. It focusses on one significant historical publication: the first nationally distributed Indigenous Australian newspaper written and edited by First Nations people – The Australian Abo Call: The Voice of the Aborigines (hereafter The AAC). The AAC was published in six editions in 1938, the year of the 150th anniversary of invasion of the continent now known as Australia. The corpus consists of all (non-fiction) articles from all six editions of this newspaper, which was founded, edited and largely written by Yorta Yorta man J.T. (Jack) Patten. As such, the study offers a synchronic ‘snapshot’ of a particular moment in Australian history. The study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to explore the linguistic construction of self-representation – how First Nations people write about themselves and the communities they represent. I proceed from inductively identifying group-based identity labels to categorising these labels in terms of their positionality in relation to ‘self’ and ‘other’. Using concordances, the study also qualitatively examines these identity labels through transitivity analysis. The results suggest that The AAC was a site of political awakening directed at both Indigenous and white Australians, calling on the former to mobilise, on the latter to listen, and on both to act. The analysis also shows that this activism sits very much within the dominant Western/Colonial frame, reflecting the historical settler-colonial context of the period in which this newspaper was published. The study has broader implications for corpus-assisted discourse analysis, by indicating the insights we gain by shifting our gaze away from ‘other’-representation in mainstream newspapers towards ‘self’-representation in community-led publications.