“Indian Ocean News”: Indian Challenges To Australian Racialised Media

Abstract

Two events involving Indians in Australia have grabbed news headlines at different times. One was the 1945 campaign supporting Indonesian Independence in which Indian seamen – known then in Australia as “lascars” – played a high profile role for which they have seldom been acknowledged. The more recent has been the 2009 series of violent attacks on Indian students in Australia, which have aroused major news coverage and public debate in Australia and India. How might “news” media reflect better the potential of both these stories to tell transnational “Indian Ocean news” in which more than one narrative is heard? How, in fact, might they reflect the qualities of the Indian Ocean itself in fostering circulation and dialogue? To contribute to this wider question, this article explores two issues. Firstly, do cultural stereotypes persist over time and, if so, is it because news media re-create and re-circulate them in changing circumstances? Secondly, how does “access” to “making news” come about: whose voices are heard and how are “news” stories identified and told? In the light of what appears to be the simple perpetuation of old stereotypes into the 2009 stories, this paper examines both newspaper and documentary filmic representations of the 1945 campaign. It argues that the outcomes in each case involved selective, rather than wholesale, use of stereotypes. Moreover, each was the result of interaction and often contestation between the participants and the recorders of news – the “sources” and the “producers” – rather than complete dominance by Australian reporters or Western filmmakers over how the stories were told. The paper identifies the more effective of the 1945 strategies used by Indian actors and points to the ways such stories might be read as “Indian Ocean news” which makes visible not only each side of the story but the interactions themselves. This is no longer just a possible future scenario – digital media and internet communication mean that today’s stories are being read and watched almost simultaneously around the world by very different audiences. So working out what “Indian Ocean news” might be is now a matter of urgency.