ORCID Profile
0000-0002-1613-5925
Current Organisations
Murdoch University
,
Edith Cowan University - Mount Lawley Campus
,
University of Technology Sydney
,
University of South Australia
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Publications
FRONTLINE: Place-makers of the mind: Symbolic reconstruction of an inner city park
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 31-12-2016
Abstract: In 2016, a specialist unit of study that teaches university journalism students how to report in partnership with Indigenous community organisations extended its story range to an exclusive news feature produced in collaboration with members of the wider Nyoongar community of Perth, Western Australia. The story asked and answered the question of what happened to a stalled proposal to co-badge a major inner city park with a Nyoongar name. In conceiving the story, and producing it with assistance from our students, we intervened to achieve clarity on a local government decision where due process had not been followed. With the help of Nyoongar sources, we sought to explain the cultural importance of the park, and raise awareness of the decolonising potential of Indigenous place names. The story is appended after an exegesis that melds sense of place theory with Bourdieusian field theory to situate the story and its producers in social space.
Reporting Black Lives Matters: Deaths in custody journalism in Australia
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 30-11-2020
Abstract: George Floyd’s death at the knee of USA police sparked protests and renewed reporting of Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia. As the 30th anniversary of the release of the final report of the Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody approaches, it is timely to update Wendy Bacon’s 2005 research on deaths in custody journalism. While most deaths in custody continue to pass in judicial and media silence, this article, written from a white journalism academic’s perspective, includes instances of in-depth reporting since 2005, journalism that meets the Royal Commission’s observation that journalism can contribute to justice for Aboriginal people when it places deaths in custody in their social and moral contexts. It also includes mini-case study of the news coverage of Mr Ward’s 2008 death, which demonstrates the relationship between governmental or judicial processes and announcements and patterns of coverage. It also notes the effect that First Nations journalists are having on the prevalence, perspectives and depth of deaths in custody journalism. Information and resources are provided for journalists and journalism students to more effectively report Indigenous deaths in custody, include Indigenous voices in their stories, and to better understand trauma and take care of themselves, their sources and their communities
Analysis, aftermath, legitimacy and transformation
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
Sam Carmody, a massacre and a family reckoning
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
Journalism Practice and Critical Reflexivity
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
FRONTLINE: Journalism practice and critical reflexivity: A death in custody interview
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 31-05-2014
Abstract: Critical reflexivity is a relatively recent strand in journalism studies. It has its advocates, but there are few models. This article offers one possible model, of one moment of practice: an interview with the mother-in-law of an Australian Indigenous woman who died an avoidable death in prison. The critically reflexive approach taken in this research accommodates the in idual, social, objective and subjective elements in a practice, and uses the tools provided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Donald Schön’s work on reflective practice and the reflective practitioner. Together, these approaches provide different but complementary conceptual, analytical, practice-based and narrative tools for making journalism practice, and journalists in the practice, an object of study. Critical reflexivity, by adding an inside perspective, is a valid method by which to add to the range of journalism studies that examine journalism from the outside. Such research allows for an inter-weaving of context, self, relationships, others, theory, history, facts, values and experiences, expanding and enriching our understanding of journalism practice and its place in society.Caption: Figure 1: 'The girl in Cell 4' article opening page of HQ, March/April 1997.
Why the where matters: A sense of place imperative for teaching better Indigenous affairs reporting
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 31-10-2015
Abstract: Much Indigenous affairs journalism in the Western Australian state capital of Perth reproduces colonial discourse and perpetuates racist stereotypes of Aboriginal people. Against this background the traditional custodians of Perth, the Noongar people, have struggled to find a media voice. Meanwhile, observers in several countries have critiqued a shift from journalism about specific places toward journalism concerned with no place in particular. Spurred by globalisation, this shift has de-emphasised the ‘where?’ question in the ‘what, where, who, why, how and when?’ template of journalistic investigation. Reporting from a project in which journalism students collaborated with Noongar community organisations, we argue that an understanding of Indigenous Australians’ profound connection to place can inform journalists about the underlying character of places about which they report. We suggest that working with Indigenous people can transform the way journalists conceptualise their careers, and help secure a sense of place for Indigenous people in the media. Finally, collaborating with Indigenous people can teach journalists to view their professional practices through a sense of place lens, re-emphasising the ‘where?’ question in its application to both geographic place and the realm of a journalist’s imagination.
Service Learning in an Urban Aboriginal Community: “Real Aborigines Don’t Just Live in the Bush”
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2016
Review: Searching for the truth of book-length journalism
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 31-10-2015
Abstract: Mason, Bonita. (2015). Searching for the truth of book-length journalism. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 200-203. Review of Telling True Stories: Navigating the challenges of writing narrative non-fiction, by Matthew Ricketson. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014. 282pp. ISBN 978-1-742379-35-7Australian journalism academic and practitioner Matthew Ricketson’s new book opens with two quotes: one from South African writer Nadine Gordimer on the enduring presence of ‘beauty’ in the quest for truth the other from US comparative literature professor Peter Brooks on the impossibility of separating our own humanity and imaginations from what we write. Gordimer has also written elsewhere of the writer’s responsibility, as a social being, to take part in their world through their writing—to become ‘more than a writer’ (1985, p. 141). The kind of writing Ricketson seeks to define, and describes, analyses and advocates in this book (much of which is also investigative), comes closest to meeting these roles and responsibilities for the non-fiction writer.
Finding Common Ground: Combining Participatory Action Research and Critical Service-Learning to Guide and Manage Projects with Aboriginal Communities
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2016
Reshaping the Field from the Outside in: Aboriginal People and Student Journalists Working Together
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 17-10-2017
‘The Girl in Cell 4’: Securing Social Inclusion through a Journalist-Source Collaboration
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2012
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1214200118
Abstract: Aboriginal people who die in custody face two forms of exclusion: one evident in their disproportionately high imprisonment rates the other in their traditional lack of voice in the media. This latter exclusion comes about through journalistic practices that privilege authoritative sources and emphasise distance. Janet Beetson was one of fourteen Aboriginal people to die in custody in 1994, a record year for Aboriginal prison deaths. At the time, her death went largely unremarked in the mainstream media. ‘The Girl in Cell 4’ was published in 1997 about these 1994 events. It was not breaking news: its aim was to tell in detail the story of the last week of Janet Beetson's life through an investigation of what led to her avoidable death. This article charts the critical importance of Janet Beetson's family members in bringing the story to public attention in a way that honoured their loved one and called to account the systems that allowed her to die. This journalist–source collaboration challenges orthodox ideas about arm's length reporting, and indicates that such collaboration can provide for social inclusion.
Journalism practice and critical reflexivity—an introduction
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
REVIEW: Intervention in Aboriginal communities examined
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Library
Date: 17-07-2018
Abstract: ‘And there’ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on policies impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007, edited by Elisabeth Baehr and Barbara Schmidt-Haberk . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 354 pp. ISBN 9781443898638 ‘THE PAST is now with us it never went away.’ The 2007 Intervention into the lives of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory was a low point in the relationship between the Australian government and Indigenous people. As one of the Aboriginal authors in No Dancing, Warraimay historian Victoria Grieves puts it, the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), as the Intervention was officially known, ‘leaves no doubt about the relationship of Aboriginal people to the settler colonial state’ (p. 89).
On reciprocal journalism—a conclusion
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
Observations, lessons, application—habitus, practice and power
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
Analysis and aftermath
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
“It's almost like the truth is just right there”
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-05-2023
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
No related grants have been discovered for Bonita Mason.