Reassessing the Bunbury Bombing: Juxtaposition of Political and Media Narratives

Authors

  • Kate O'Donnell
  • Jacqui Ewart

Keywords:

Bunbury bombing, news media framing, environmental protest, terrorism

Abstract

This paper examines an Australian newspaper’s coverage of the bombing of an export port terminal in Bunbury, Western Australia on 19 July, 1976. We wanted to see how The West Australian newspaper framed the story, its precursor events, and the events that followed. We were particularly interested in whether the bombing was reported as an act of terrorism because the then Premier of Western Australia, Sir Charles Court, immediately decried it as “a gross act of terrorism.” We find the newspaper resisted the lure to apply this label, and couched the story in terms of serious criminality. However, it did so before the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing; an event the news media heralded as the “arrival” of terrorism in Australia. Also, this occurred before what could be argued the sensationalist and politicised reporting of terror-related events became normalised.

Author Biographies

  • Kate O'Donnell

    Dr Kate O'Donnell, BBus, MCCJ(Hons), PhD, is based at Griffith University. Her research interest is in critical infrastructure resilience and the policing of protest. She has enjoyed a career in the public sector spanning some thirty years that included practitioner-in-residence at Griffith University and senior roles in transport security and Ministerial liaison services.

  • Jacqui Ewart

    Dr Jacqui Ewart, BA, MA, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Journalism, Griffith University. She was a journalist and media manager for more than a decade and has worked as an academic for the past twenty years. Her research interests including media coverage of disasters and media representations of terrorism, focus on the costs of poor communication.

References

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Published

2023-02-03

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Research Articles

License

Authors retain copyright in their articles and grant SALUS the right of first publication. The work is simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and the journal, a link to the license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.

How to Cite

Reassessing the Bunbury Bombing: Juxtaposition of Political and Media Narratives. (2023). Salus Journal, 5(1), 27-47. https://journals.csu.domains/index.php/salusjournal/article/view/70