ABSTRACT
The twentieth century inaugurated a new phase in journalism, a new chapter in the history of looking. The education of the population turned from democratization to domestication. The politics of participation and persuasion, of popular instruction and social drama, moved decisively into the realms of readership, and readers participated in the imaginary agora, the place of publicity, whenever they looked at the paper. Modern popular journalism, reckoning from the foundation of the picture press in the 1890s, located the public domain not in the practice of democratic politics, but in the personal bonds and domestic ties of the populace, as guided by the privatized media of popular instruction themselves. The heliographic news media have inherited from adversarial-universalist, community-building journalism the habit of categorizing Aboriginal people and their actions in this way: as 'foreign' to the community values and goals of Australian society, as 'they' in news stories, as 'outside' the community.
