'You mob listen': Intercultural exchange and indigenous media in Northern Australia

This dissertation explores questions raised by the success and social consequences of Aboriginal media production in Northern Australia. In particular, it investigates the interaction of Indigenous expressive practice, an increasing privatization of Australian cultural production, and the intercultural relationships and institutional economy that such cultural production entails. I discuss the mutual imbrication of governmental power, intra-Aboriginal social relationships, and expressive practice.; Beginning in the 1980s, Aboriginal Australians found in electronic media a means to transform the terms of their engagement with a broader Australian polity. In the same moment, under the rubric of self-determination, representatives of the state also sought to refigure a governmental category of 'aboriginality' as a socially valued identity and to empower its bearers through legislative extensions of state power. This bridging of intercultural social space has had radical implications for the character of contemporary Indigenous social life. Over the past decades, state-driven approaches to self-determination have come to be understood as failures, and the privatization of Indigenous governance has emerged as the hegemonic response to the perception that policies of self-determination have failed. This dissertation explores the consequences of this contemporary transformation for intercultural social relationships.; First I discuss the related but distinct histories of media production in both urban and remote communities across Northern Australia. Here I foreground the emergence of an 'entrepreneurial' approach to cultural development and Aboriginal autonomy. I then turn to the expressive forms that such media organizations foster. This includes attention to the ways in which radio stations have formed networks across remote Australia, and to sociolinguistic aspects of intra-Aboriginal relationships. I conclude by placing Indigenous media in broader intercultural context and discuss the centrality of exchange in the emergent articulation of Indigenous cultural practices with Australian cultural policy and the political economy of Indigenous cultural production. Together, these approaches offer an account of Indigenous media that balances governmental instruments with local forms of collective agency and social practice. This reframes Aboriginal media as the practice of making and maintaining intercultural social relationships.