Local Indonesians in The Sydney Morning Herald

This paper reports the representation of the local Indonesians in The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), one of the mainstream newspapers in Australia. Part of a bigger study, this paper focuses on three available soft-news articles about Indonesia published in 2009. The purpose is to see how a newspaper perceives and represents the people of another country for the consumption of its readers. The data were analyzed through news actor, news action, and author evaluation frameworks. Within the scope of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study concludes that SMH seemed to have a rather sympathetic view towards these Indonesians and along the way criticized the government for their poor living conditions. The choice of certain Indonesians as the locals suggested the relativity and limitation of any representation. Keywords: Indonesia-Australia relations, news actor, news action, author evaluation, media representation, The Sydney Morning Heral