Dingo media? R v Chamberlain as model for an Australian media event

Abstract

Dingo Media examines the development of media events using as a case study one of Australia’s most widely known criminal investigations, the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain at “Ayers Rock”. Considering the case as a blueprint for the way mass media events develop and evolve in the late capitalist era, this thesis suggests that the event marks a turning point in negotiation of the public sphere and Australian national identity. Using an original model, I trace from the 1980s five phases through which news stories pass in their evolution as modern media events by comparing the Chamberlain saga to contemporary cases involving “controversial” women, Schapelle Corby, Joanne Lees and Pauline Hanson. The first phase examines the emerging practice of news workers focusing on personalities rather than events; the second phase analyses both the formation of counter-publics protesting the conviction, and the development of a dialogic connection between media and publics; the third phase investigates the rise of a modern celebrity industry promoting “ordinary” individuals into subjects of media discourse; the fourth phase considers the process of mythic production surrounding the Chamberlain case as related to processes of nation-building in the late 1980s; finally, the fifth phase critiques the prevalent view that, through continual retelling, the event has suffered a loss of meaning. Axiomatic to this study will be the politics of representation, how the media records, organises and mythologises information, as well as the interaction between texts and audiences.