Kerrie Foxwell-Norton

Saving the Great Barrier Reef from disaster, media then and now

The Great Barrier Reef is the most recognizable of the Australian properties on United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage List. At the time of its inscription in 1981, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature noted that ‘… if only one coral reef site in the world were to be chosen for the World Heritage List, the Great Barrier Reef is the site to be chosen’. The listing followed the ‘Save the Reef’ campaign, which ran through the 1960s and 1970s and highlighted threats from rapid industrialization and a nation riding a resources boom. Nevertheless, in recent years, the Reef has teetered on being named a ‘World Heritage Site in Danger’, with similar economic conditions driving its deterioration. This article juxtaposes recent media activism to protect the Reef against the earlier campaign in order to compare and better understand how these campaigns engaged publics and policy makers by representing and communicating threats, and concludes by considering their capacity to influence long-term conservation policy.

Land, Listening and Voice: Investigating community and Media Representations of the Queensland struggle for land rights and equality

For the most part, the story of the Australian Indigenous land rights struggle has been told by the Australian media – media that have attracted consistent criticism for their portrayal of Indigenous Australians. On the other hand, Australia boasts a vibrant and accomplished Indigenous media sector that has also told the land rights story from a different perspective, albeit to a much smaller audience. The authors are currently a part of a research team seeking to provide a critical analysis of historical and contemporary representations of the land rights movement and the broader struggle for indigenous rights and equality in Queensland. The project seeks to challenge the prevailing dialogue by focusing on the perspectives of people who have been (and still are) involved in the land rights movement. Prioritising and exploring such alternative perspectives will not only present the opportunity to reconsider the role of media representations, but will also enable an Indigenous ‘take’ on them to emerge. This article presents our approach and rationale, discussing the methodological possibilities and challenges of research with Indigenous communities, which ultimately seeks to redress media imbalance and injustice by a retelling that elevates Indigenous voices, stories and pictures.

The Great Barrier Reef: News media, policy and the politics of protection:

Since the 1970s, the Reef has been a site where Australian environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy seeking to ‘balance’ human activity through ‘ecologically sustainable development’. The article examines the parallel and intersecting processes of modern environmental policy and news media practice in the context of the Reef to unveil how Australias news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef. Through two key conservation moments – the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger – the article examines the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection from early conservation campaigns to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of global environmental crisis. We identify how ecologically sustainable development discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments.