A lost cause? Representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health in Australian newspapers

The media representation of health has come to be seen as an important element in our understanding of major public health issues. Using articles collected from three major Australian daily papers (The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Courier Mail published during the period 1988-1998), this paper presents an analysis of the common themes underlying the media portrayal of Indigenous health. The texts examined here are understood as reflecting a wider sociopolitical environment. Hence the dominant theme of failure and fatalism found within these texts can be seen as reflecting a conservative reading of Indigenous health in which ‘meddling’ government not only signifies the failure of the welfare state, but also focuses attention on the individual rather than a structural understanding of public health