School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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Item‘Captain Cook was a S**t C**t’ or ‘a nation less divided’? Indigenous Sovereignty, Settler Common Sense and Australian Media( 2022)The Australian settler state's claim to political legitimacy relies on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty, alongside a constant renewal of possessive investments in the nation. However, the persistence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ sovereign relationships to the lands and waters across Australia continues to unsettle the dominant narrative of a singular, justified settler authority. This thesis investigates competing claims to Indigenous and settler sovereignties made in relation to Australia's national day, January 26, which marks the advent of forcible appropriation of Indigenous land by the British in 1788. The thesis employs a mixed-methods analysis of public discourse around January 26, as captured across 895 mainstream and independent media items and 25 instances of official communication from political figures, to explore how claims to sovereignty are embedded in discussions about history, time, identity and nationhood in Australia. Informed by a theoretical framework attuned to relationships between epistemology, race and representation, the thesis’ analysis reveals that settler claims to sovereignty and representations of Indigenous peoples’ political incapacity circulate discursively as taken-for-granted, common sense components of contemporary Australian nationalism. Despite Australia’s shift in self-representation from a white ethno-state to a liberal multicultural democracy over the past four decades, its existence continues to rely the suppression of unceded Indigenous sovereignty. Rather than engaging with the substance of Indigenous peoples’ political claims, liberal multiculturalist nationalism is oriented towards the development of a more inclusive form of settler coloniality through processes of recognition. Against this, a subset of Indigenous activists and commentators across both mainstream and independent media continue to challenge reductive representations of their resistance against nationalist celebrations on January 26 as being primarily about insufficient recognition by the state and settler polity. Maintaining a focus on the fundamental illegitimacy of the Australian settler state, these individuals articulate comprehensive but frequently sidelined political analyses of sovereignty, race and resistance against ongoing colonisation.