On Sunday morning, as I was on the tram headed into the Melbourne Invasion Day rally, I sarcastically tweeted that I was 'getting in early' (about one hour before the rally actually started) to announce that the Melbourne rally had approximately 200,000 attendees. I added that I was doing so to beat the media's 'racist underreporting' of the numbers. I then sat back and watched the escalating retweets in the hope that the mainstream media might see the dig and be challenged to do better.
It was mildly amusing to see some people take my tweet seriously and report those numbers onwards despite there being no way my tweet could have been taken as legitimate. I found myself having to correct the record more than once. As it turns out though, given the underreporting of numbers across this country, I could have easily sold that 200,000 people as the people who miraculously disappeared in media coverage.
I've written about this issue before but I have to wonder why, a year or so down the track, it's still a problem. At what point is the media going to realise that the Invasion Day rally — a protest that has been going on in some form or other since 1938 — is not going away and, indeed, is growing? Surely, by now, the media has worked out that the Invasion Day rallies have steadily grown in participation over a few years?
Given that they are now one of the most attended events happening on that day, it's in the media's interest to report them accurately. This participation growth would, for example, suggest a heightened public interest in the Indigenous rights movement. So given that, by which year can we expect some honesty in our media when it comes to the Aboriginal message?
I'm convinced that the media really don't want to report Invasion Day, as reminding the public to fear Indigenous people and our rights has been their practice for centuries now.
Take, for example, this coverage from Channel 9 covering the Melbourne rally. Not only did it underreport the rally size by a few tens of thousands, they sloppily labelled the rally as a rally to 'change the date' even though all protest information stated otherwise and has done for years. In addition, it made out that protesters in attendance were arrested. In actual fact, there never has been any threat of violence from the continuously peaceful Invasion Day attendees and the two people arrested in Melbourne were two serial pests from far right groups who'd gathered to harass the protesters.
Looking at all the coverage across the country for Invasion Day, the best I could find regarding an estimation of crowd size was 'tens of thousands' via multiple sources — so really, anything between 10,000 and 90,000 if you forget that 100,000 and beyond are also multiples of ten. I suppose it's better than the time I saw a media report on the rally a few years ago stating that there were 150 people at the rally when the real estimates were 50,000, but it's still not terribly honest.
"Do we want to be the type of country where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their allies feel the need to take to the streets for another 250 years, or are we after a healthier, more honest future?"
Coverage regarding the size of the rallies didn't improve across the country. In Brisbane, reports stated 500 when photographic evidence suggests it was at least ten times that number. In Sydney, 'tens of thousands' was the closest we could get to an accurate crowd estimate. The dedicated team at NITV ensured via their respectful reporting that our voices were heard, but we shouldn't have to rely on the Indigenous media to do the job properly.
At least these rallies were even reported on. In Newcastle, the best the community organisers of a rally could hope for was a Facebook post on their local ABC page. Even then, that post was promptly removed when it was decided that it was simply too much effort to moderate comments from racist trolls. It was as if this event which attracted around 2000 people never actually happened.
Why is this continual failure of the media to tell the story such a big deal to me? I think that at a time where we are fabricating circumnavigations to celebrate a white bloke who wrongfully claimed this was 'land belonging to no one' and then went on to other lands to rape, pillage and kidnap there (indeed, kidnapping a Hawaiian chief led to his death), it's important to ensure that the public is properly educated and informed.
In addition to this, 250 years is also quite a significant anniversary for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It's 250 since our lands were 'claimed' and the process of colonisation began. We could use that opportunity to mourn what we've lost via colonisation, educate others on our history and celebrate the fact that despite Australia's best efforts, we are still here.
Two hundred and fifty years is a good opportunity for Australia to look at itself. Do we want to be the type of country where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their allies feel the need to take to the streets for another 250 years, or are we after a healthier, more honest future? Until Australia deals with the legacy of 'terra nullius', Indigenous protesters will be there to remind the uniformed that it always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Celeste Liddle is a trade unionist, a freelance opinion writer and social commentator. She blogs at Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist.
Main image: Marchers at the Melbourne Invasion Day Rally. Photo by Tim Kroenert