Adjudication No. 515 (September 1991) [1991] APC 49

Adjudication No. 515 (September 1991)

The Australian Press Council has upheld part of a complaint by Aboriginal research consultant Judy Atkinson about the presentation of her views on a page of the Sydney Morning Herald largely devoted to an article containing controversial opinions and analysis about Aboriginal culture and history which she strongly contested.

Ms Atkinson's complaint related to a feature article, "BLACK VIOLENCE WHY WHITES SHOULDN'T FEEL SO GUILTY", reporting the views of white psychiatrist Dr Jock McLaren who spent three and a half years researching the subject in the Kimberley.

His central view, highlighted in the article, is that there was considerable violence in Aboriginal culture before European settlement.

He formed a conviction that white guilt is actually harming Aborigines because it is preventing them from taking charge of their own lives.

Mr Atkinson is briefly quoted in the main body of the article describing the considerable extent of rapes and beatings in Aboriginal communities. More extensive extracts from an earlier article of hers, which was published in the Aboriginal and Islander Health Worker Journal appeared in a boxed insert to the main article.

She complains that her writings on Aboriginal violence were used as if her views had been given in consultation and co-operation with the writer. They were not; in fact she specifically asked that her previously published work not be used in association with Dr McLaren's article.

Ms Atkinson complains that her "work was used in a way that appears to support a point of view that I do not agree with, namely Dr J. McLaren's ...". She says that she did not want any of her views published along with Dr McLaren's and that the extracts from her journal article in the boxed insert did not include the historical basis for her views.

In addition, the complainant says that the quotes used did not come from that part of her material which afforded the Aboriginal perspective on the major point of the article the underlying explanation for violence in the Aboriginal community.

The boxed section, claiming to put an Aboriginal point of view, included one paragraph noting that Aboriginal health workers dissented from Dr McLaren's hypothesis, but the selections from Ms Atkinson's writings did nothing more than confirm the high incidence of violence amongst Aborigines.

The articles were printed in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald, a section devoted to serious analysis of important issues.

The Sydney Morning Herald erred in not making clear that the quotes from Ms Atkinson were extracted from the article published earlier in the journal, and in not identifying that they were not specifically in reply to Dr McLaren's views.

She and an associate demanded that the Sydney Morning Herald not use her words alongside Dr McLaren's. However, the Sydney Morning Herald judged, rightly in the Press Council's view, that they were already in the public domain and that readers, especially those not conversant with the contentious nature of the issue addressed on the page, had a right to know that Dr McLaren's were not the only or even dominant views on the issue.

It is not possible for the Press Council to rule on other aspects of Ms Atkinson's complaint regarding conversations between the newspaper and herself prior to and following publication of the articles. There are no independent witnesses to the conversations, especially relating to a later letter by Ms Atkinson edited before publication by the Sydney Morning Herald.