A Crisis in Identity

Abstract

This article considers the interpretations of a ‘riot’ that took place between Aborigines and police in a small rural town, Brewarrina, in New South Wales in 1986. The ‘riot’ achieved widespread national coverage. My concern here will be to analyse the representations of the ‘riot’ in the newspapers, television and in the trial of the ‘rioters’ that followed. The analysis of the ‘riot’ seeks to consider the shifts and changes of social and political processes of the Australian state that perform such a critical part in the continual defining and redefining of Aboriginal identity. The Brewarrina ‘riot’ acted as a switch point, where both conservative and liberal polity contested the changing nature of Aboriginal autonomy and polity within the Australian state. The images from the ‘riot’ provided fertile grounds for the reworking and reassertion of a conservative polity in a period that had seen marked liberal political change within the limitations of legal-bureaucratic reforms of the welfare state.