From Lord Mountbatten to Bobby Sands: the treatment of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Melbourne's newspapers

© 2016 Patrick GardinerThe thesis identifies the absence of any research on Australia’s media coverage on ‘the Troubles,’ a significant and prolonged event in Irish and British history, and also to the history of many Irish Australians. This thesis aims to examine Melbourne newspapers to compare differences and similarities between American and Australian reactions. Melbourne was chosen as a case study because the Australian press, between 1979 and 1981, was mostly structured around city-state newspapers; the only national papers in existence were The Australian and The Financial Review. Rodney Tiffen (1989) argues that in terms of ‘professional leadership, size and political impact’ it was the Melbourne and Sydney newspapers, which held the most influence. Initially this thesis aimed to cover both Melbourne and Sydney newspapers. Research, however, found that newspapers owned by the same company, but targeted at different city audiences, published the same or similar articles. This was especially prominent when covering foreign news. The Melbourne press throughout the time period studied included all the major Australian press owners of the period: News Ltd, Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, John Fairfax Ltd and David Syme and Co. Melbourne’s newspaper environment had the benefit of possessing an evening paper, The Herald, the morning broadsheet and tabloid of The Age and The Sun News Pictorial respectively, and the national paper, The Australian, providing a range of different newspaper formats in the Australian press industry. What will be under examination are the boundaries of what the press can and cannot manage to know. Newspapers are relevant to this kind of inquiry because of their diverse and comparatively brief accounts of the day’s news. When trying to explain the complexities of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, news articles cannot avoid becoming decontextualised and partial. The accuracy of reporting will be influenced by the sources which journalists had interacted with, or had access to