NITV Indigenous TV goes free-to-air tomorrow and makes global history

By Ruth Skilbeck

Australia's first free-to-air Indigenous public broadcasting TV channel is starting up tomorrow, following the Federal Government's 2012 budget announcement to transfer funding from National Indigenous Television (NITV) to SBS to develop  a new national digital free-to-air channel dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content.

Tomorrow,  the 12th December 2012, will witness a highly significant moment in the history of intercultural communication and media in Australia- and internationally. For the first time ever, National Indigenous Television, NITV, broadcasting content made and produced by Indigenous Australians,  will be available free-to-air across Australia. This also represents an important milestone in the international Indigenous global networks- as free to air shows broadcast on the NITV will be accessible via the world wide web and so this marks the expansion of Indigenous public broadcasting networks around the world.

The move to establish the new public broadcaster follows the Federal Government's 2012 budget announcement to transfer funding from National Indigenous Television (NITV) to SBS to develop a new, national digital free-to-air channel dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content. The NITV mission is to maintain editorial responsibility over the delivery of the channel. And it vows "to continue to utilise the talents of Indigenous writers, directors and journalists to produce content covering a number of genres, from music to health, sport, news, current affairs, culture and children's programs."

Why this is so important is to do with the politics and everyday meanings of representation - in mass communication and in the processes of decolonisation around the world in the digital age.
An approach to the philosophical problems of representation was outlined, in 1993, by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton in her influential essay, named after a line in a Yothu Yindi song,  'Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television...'  published by the Australian Film Commission "on the politics and aesthetics of film-making by and about Aboriginal people and things". Marcia Langton wrote about the problems of othering that occur when lives and experiences are represented by people who have not directly had those experiences themselves.

"Representational and aesthetic statements of Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal people transform the Aboriginal reality. They are accounts. It is in these representations that Aboriginal as subject becomes, under the white gaze imagining the Aboriginal, the object." (Langton 1993: 40)


Of course in Australia the issues are vexed by the  historical obsession with racial purity- whether this is applied to "Aboriginal" or non-Aboriginal. This has seen over a century's preoccupation in official policies with blood measurements, percentages of racial DNA, and all sorts of tedious and pseudo-scientific measures that are far removed from a humane encounter with a person and their intrinsic worth.
To any who have experienced the ruptures of adoption and not knowing who their family is in terms of "blood lines" this becomes all the more of a potential mine field in the context of colonialism and its after-math. And for many, who were affected by policies of "assimilation, it is now impossible to trace their "genetic" families as the official records do not exist- and were destroyed.

One of the pioneers of Indigenous Television in Australia Pat Eatock, academic and activist, who established Perleeka Aboriginal Television in 1992 which she managed until its demise in 1996, was criticised  last year by Australian newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt who cast aspersion on her Aboriginal heritage as he said that- in his perception-  her skin was "too white"; she took him to court and won her case. This is still the kind of eugenicist approach that lingers in public debate.

 Up until now, in free-to-air public broadcasting in Australia, the TV stations that have produced Indigenous content, most notably SBS, have done so as part of a multi-cultural strategy. This has seen the broadcasting of programs such as Living Black,  which has showcased the annual Deadly Awards for Aboriginal talent and creativity, and has gained wide audiences for Indigenous programs.

The advent of free to air NITV - hosted on SBS-  has been a  significant advance in the historical development of Indigenous media and communication in Australia.

Tomorrow's broadcasting starts at 12.00 midday with a live-to air two-hour Heart of Our Nation broadcast from Uluru, in the centre of Australia. This will be followed at 2pm by a current affairs program on the historical development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander media in Australia- a one hour broadcast of Living Black, with presenter Karla Grant, who since 2002 has hosted and developed  SBS's award winning Indigenous current affairs program.


NITV will begin broadcasting in Australia  from 12pm  on 12 December 2012 on SBS4.