Sacred swamped as profane reigns: Catalysing Indigenous voice through reflexive articulation of place

Abstract

From 2017 to 2019, I wrote several news stories about an Indigenous woman’s struggle, with others, in Western Australia’s oldest European settlement of Albany to maintain a ban on water skiing at a culturally significant swamp by the banks of which her mother was born. Until my stories were published, news reports had focused on the needs of skiers. The headline of my first story, ‘The sacred and profane’, invoked Bourdieu’s conception of social space as a field constructed by tensions between holders of unequal levels of cultural and economic capital. This is consistent with Massey’s observations of places as contested social constructs. Both theories are complementary frameworks from which to interrogate and inform journalistic practice. This article shows how critically reflexive articulation of place, through journalism, enabled Indigenous voices to be heard in a regional city that had been ground zero for colonialism in Australia’s largest state by area.